We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical...
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AI “Artist” Declares Victory Art Brief
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived whether we like it or not and now it has come to the art world. That should not really be much of a shock. It’s now five years since AlphaGo defeated the best Go players in the world. Writers have auto-complete...
The Lobby, In Context Decoder
From the outside, the hotel lobby appeared to have (or be?) a gift shop—and an audaciously hip one. It said “porn” in awfully big letters, especially for a hotel lobby. I investigated. It didn’t have a gift shop, it was just a lobby, but it was a very fancy lobby....
Superchief’s Super Party The Digital
After parking on an ominous street, dodging detritus on the sidewalk and being ushered through the door by an equally ominous bouncer—we enter a sprawling fog-filled industrial space just south of DTLA. Loud music plays, neon flashes and the walls are literally...
Ottinger for Anglophones Bunker Vision
One of the things that always made the French New Wave cinema special was that one of the leading figures, Agnes Varda, was a woman. American underground cinema had Maya Deren. But based on what one could find available in the United States with English subtitles, the...
OFF THE WALL LA River Confidential
In the 1970s, The East Los Streetscapers promoted the idea that graffiti muralism was part of the struggle to claim urban space. This concept was shared by the Los Angeles Fine Art Squad, a group of artists also taking art to the street using murals. This activist...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Protests Post-Roe
ASK BABS Re-Entering the Art World
Dear Babs, What advice might you give to an older artist who would like to return to making art after a two-decade hiatus? I experienced a dead-end art career in my mid-40s, showing in copious group shows and occasional college gallery solo shows. I want to return to...
SHOPTALK: LA Art News OCMA Redefined, Museum Highlights and Art Fairs and Anniversaries
OCMA Redefined with its New Space What a roller coaster we’ve been on these last three years.Hard to believe how the world shut down in March 2020, and now California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announces that our State of Emergency will be over next Feb. 28. The museums...
POEMS "Foreign Language Film" and "Reality (Slight Return)"
Foreign Language Film I dream of two strangers having sex. There’s a song on in the background, it’s not in English, I don’t know what language it is. This was the night after the night I cried into my wine at a fried chicken restaurant. It’s never the person, it’s...
COMICS This Eyeball Earth! feat. Margaret Keane and Walter Keane
Remarks on Color: Insouciant Indigo November's Hue
Insouciant Indigo doesn’t care. In other words, he simply does not give a rat’s ass about anything or anybody. A lifetime of ever darkening dreams has laid him low once and for all. To add insult to injury he’s never been popular with the ladies, being mostly...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Picasso Ingres: Face to Face Norton Simon Museum
The Norton Simon Museum exhibition opening on October 20 featured just two paintings: Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’ Madame Moitessier (1856) and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book (1932). The latter is a response to the former and, though made seventy-six years apart,...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VII Sex, Drugs and Bad Writing
I hadn’t sent the novel out in a while. In fact, I hadn’t sent it out in months. What was the point? Even if they loved it, they didn’t want it. At this point I was too dispirited to send the work out or describe the ensuing demoralization. But I needed to send it out...
GALLERY ROUNDS: June Edmonds Riverside Art Museum
The spirograph galaxy of Rhythmic Inquisitions, an exhibition of works by June Edmonds at the Riverside Art Museum, unmercifully hypnotizes. Expanding boundaries, this 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient injects Aretha Franklin’s Respect (1967) into Abstract...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Abe Odedina Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Abe Odedina’s “You Give Me Fever” embodies the spirit of a universal human emotion: desire. In his Los Angeles solo debut on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, the architect-turned-painter considers desire with a kaleidoscopic gaze, depicting deep-seated longings for...
OUTSIDE LA: THESE THINGS ARE CONNECTED The Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky
Just across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati is The Carnegie, a former library in Covington, Kentucky constructed in 1904 one of over 2,500 worldwide funded by Andrew Carnegie. Now a theater and exhibition space, the center serves the local and surrounding...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VI An Old White Male, Inconveniently Still Alive
Why even catalog these grievances? I just wanted to get a book published. The documentation of this tedious process wasn’t something that could hold much interest for the average reader, whoever that was, or any reader, if there were any left. I had wrongly assumed...