One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary,...
CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL
ART BRIEF Art World Roiled By AI "Parasites"
The US Copyright Office issued a landmark ruling in February that users of AI-generative programs may not apply for copyright registration of the resultant images. Additionally, the company that owns the AI-image-generative program Midjourney was sued in federal court...
BUNKER VISION Watching the Hits
Twenty years before MTV aired its first music video, people were making short films of bands and singers performing their hits. The ones from France featured A-list acts and production values. Italy gave us the best film documentation of Screaming Lord Sutch. The...
THE DIGITAL Isn't Art WNDR-ful
In a world that moves at the speed of quantum computing, filled with seemingly endless digital distractions, an afternoon at the art museum may feel like the perfect reprieve: Old Master paintings and silenced phones. Totally kidding! You are not unplugging that...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Lake Hollywood Park
SHOPTALK: LA Art News Coachella and New York
Coachella's Flower Power It’s summer, and time to take a breath after the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since last fall. The art world has ramped back up—new exhibitions and new galleries (Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, the second for François Ghebaly) have opened. We...
ASK BABS Do The Right Thing
Dear Babs, My friend recently inherited some African and Native American masks from her uncle and is concerned with talk in the news about demands for museums to return items to their indigenous owners/countries of origin. She doesn’t think the masks are looted and...
POEMS "Apple," "Jackson Pollock," "The Tao," and "Unrealized"
Apple Every day an anxious man appears in my apple and offers me a Magritte. Jackson Pollock Sometimes the Americans form a circle around something awful that has happened. Sometimes it is a painting. The Tao It’s easy to have no path and no plans, but it isn’t very...
COMICS AL Jaffee FOLD-IN!
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Frank Bowling Hauser & Wirth
Titled “Landscape,” this exhibition of Frank Bowling’s recent vibrant and expansive paintings highlights the artist’s long-standing experimentation with material and process. Reminiscent of his “Map Paintings” from the late 1960s and early ’70s, the landscapes feature...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age Los Angeles County Museum of Art
With Artificial Intelligence, or AI, on everyone's mind, it seems pertinent to go back in time to 1952 and think about a pre-digital world, a time before the personal computer, cell phones and social media. The exhibition "Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age,...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Rosie Lee Tompkins GGLA
Displaying four vibrant quilts from the late 1970s and early ’80s, this show of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ work invites the viewer to consider both the front and back of the textiles, with three of them hanging from the ceiling. Intricate and tactile, the quilts incorporate...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Karla Klarin Vielmetter Los Angeles
A native of the San Fernando Valley, painter Karla Klarin has long been interested in the Los Angeles cityscape. She depicts the city's sprawl as an abstraction, and she fills her scenes with different colors that extend across her compositions. In her early paintings...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: “For the Sake of Dancing in the Street” Oxy Arts
As this country has regressed in women’s rights and the right to abortion, and as the women in Iran are still fighting for freedom and equality, this group exhibition—titled after a lyric in Shervin Hadjipour’s song about the Iranian uprisings after the murder of...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Deborah McDuff Williams The Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties
In Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005), Dr. Joy DeGruy writes “Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Juliana Halpert and Parker Ito Bel Ami
Occupying both spaces of Bel Ami, one brightly lit and the other black like a darkroom, this duo show of artists Juliana Halpert and Parker Ito is a celebration of image-making, whether that process is through painting, photography or scanning art catalogs....
No Stupid Questions "Follow the Leader" and "Is This Art?" at The Electric Lodge
Los Angeles-based filmmakers John Cannizzaro, and New York-based Stuart Fordyce, presented two short films on May 18th at The Electric Lodge in Venice. Both films, one an experimental work composed of found footage and the other a documentary short, explore the...
GALLERY ROUNDS: JEFFREY VALLANCE Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
The long, unlikely, and utterly genuine friendship between two artists—conceptualist cross-platform tragicomedian Jeffrey Vallance, and painter of wildly popular cottage-core idylls Thomas Kinkade—is commemorated in "Kinkadian La-Z-Boy Room," a new exhibition by...