In Laguna Art Museum’s 10 years of mounting its annual Art & Nature installations, a consistent theme has been the preservation of our planet. In this year’s version, the museum celebrates the beauty of nature while artfully addressing environmentalism and...
OUTSIDE LA: Art & Nature
GALLERY ROUNDS: William Kentridge The Broad
The first word that comes to mind to describe "In Praise of Shadows" is ‘immense’. This may be what is expected from an artist’s thirty-year retrospective, but William Kentridge is not just any artist. The South African artist is prolific, and this show captures the...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Maria Maea Murmurs Gallery
In her inaugural solo exhibition “All in Time” at Murmurs Gallery, sculptor and sound artist Maria Maea braids palm fronds, milkweed, rebar, chicken wire and—most importantly—radical community. One can hardly even call the show “solo,” although it deserves the same...
OUTSIDE LA: Giuseppe Penone Philadelphia Museum of Art
In the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot, a square of green grass houses a dark bronze tree trunk. The leafless branches expand out from the top of the trunk and amidst those branches another tree of a silvery color is nestled upside down. The cluster of...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part IX In the Region of Pure Art
Jim Brooklinen’s rapturous response to reading my novel in its entirety had exceeded my wildest hopes. Not only had the veteran New York literary man hailed it as “the finest new work of sustained prose I’ve read in a very long time,” and expressed a genuine desire to...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Nancy Holt Sprüth Magers
Most folks mainly (or only) know Nancy Holt from Sun Tunnels—her 1973-76 land art installation laying large concrete pipes along a certain axis keyed to the seasonal solar arc, thus activating the rural place in which you stand, while igniting a soaring connection...
Remarks on Color: Perspicacious Periwinkle December's Hue
Perspicacious Periwinkle is an avid reader of The Tarot, having once predicted the sudden death of the world’s oldest rhinoceros in Zambia, and a cataclysmic wind event that no one witnessed off the Cape of Good Hope. It is safe to say that PP as she calls herself on...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Luciana Abait
Luciana Abait’s survey exhibition “On the Verge” features twenty works of various mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, video installation and an augmented reality. Each work is a wondrous landscape both magical and tragic. The magic comes from the...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VIII Laying a False Trail Across the Visceral Ether
Nobody is reading this. No sooner have I started to write a sentence than I’m plunged into bitterness and despair. Sitting down to write has become too great a test of my moral and spiritual strength: I am immediately mystified as to why it is so difficult to get my...
Outside LA: Lily Stockman Charles Moffett
Luminous, pastel colors abound in new paintings from Lily Stockman’s solo show “The Tilting Chair” at Charles Moffett in New York. Overall minimalist in style, Stockman’s abstract works are full of circles, ovals and petals resembling the plants and flowers referenced...
Bubbly Show Solaire Culture Exhibition
The holiday season is upon us, so give yourself a treat and drop by the Veuve Clicquot exhibition “Solaire Culture” in Beverly Hills (through Nov 20). It's a fun and fascinating exhibition which gives us a glimpse into the life of Madame Clicquot, as well as how 10...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Spirit of the Land The Doyle
"Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame" fortifies the work of activists—including the show’s curators, Checko Salgado, Kim Garrison Means and Mikayla Whitmore—who catalyzed the introduction of a congressional bill this year that would designate Avi Kwa Ame...
OUTSIDE LA: Will Rawls Adams & Ollman
Will Rawls’ solo exhibition, "Amphigory," at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR binds a weightless density to a lexicon of its own creation. Multi-panel installations of black & white abstract prints on paper line the three walls of the gallery space, as well as...
Our Bodies, Our Business More Fodder for Michele Pred in a Post-Roe Era
Oakland-based Swedish-American artist Michele Pred achieved notoriety in the early 2000s for her conceptual sculptural installations of items like Swiss Army knives and manicure scissors confiscated by airport security. Pred’s witty and dramatic work, with a strong...
Moon Raker Michelle Stuart's Conversation With Time
Monumentality is not the point of Michelle Stuart’s work. “Connection” doesn’t exactly sum it up either, although it’s always there. Transit or transition would be closer to it—although it would have to be understood within a post-Einsteinian view of the universe and...
Fire and Water The Beautiful Tragedies of Calida Rawles
In 2004 Calida Rawles moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she found an art scene brimming with life. Trained as an artist, she longed to become part of that world, and asked herself whether she would become a collector or a painter. She decided to give herself the...
Decorum and Decay Watching Astra Huimeng Wang Watching You
On a sweltering September afternoon, I visited artist Astra Huimeng Wang as she was in the final stages prepping for her first solo show of paintings at Make Room LA. Her studio is nestled above a discount clothing store in LA’s Fashion District, where crowded shop...
Keeping the Animal Alive Chasing the Ephemeral with Samuelle Richardson
Samuelle Richardson is a sculptural textile artist who began her career as a painter. Her painting itself evolved from studies in anatomy, for which she made 3D skeletal models. But by chance—or fate, when her painting studio became unavailable 10 years ago—she...