Okay…so…we get notes. We get feedback. We hear the gossip, the suggestions of angry whispering from one corner or another. First of all– there’s more, there always is; and I’m happy to acknowledge and eager to share it all—or at least as much as I can get down...
Creating large-scale figurative watercolor works is somewhat unique in contemporary Los Angeles art. Lena Moross is an exception, painting evocative portraits and full figures in this format. “Forgive and Forget” is a beautiful numbered series of 13 works using a...
Thirteen modestly-sized paintings comprise Chicago based artist Brad Stumpf's exhibition Shadow Plays. The paintings are beautiful, personal and intimate. Formally, Stumpf combines thickly applied paint that defines spaces—walls, desks and objects—with more sparsely...
“We outside!” Chance the Rapper exclaims into his microphone. The sky is near black at maybe seven minutes after 8 p.m. in Downtown Los Angeles. Third weeknight of October. Chance had been and would be again, soon, rhyming his way through a song. The Chicago MC had...
The sun is rising over my home in Northeast Los Angeles as I call gallerist and curator Adenrele Sonariwo on Zoom. She answers me from her office in the bustling West African city of Lagos, Nigeria, where her day is already in full swing, crescendoing toward the...
I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show,...
The dolls we grew up playing with weren’t just dolls—they were alter egos, surrogate friends and family, and sometimes even symbolic forces of the universe. In this beautifully designed book, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues, we get a chance to look at Saar’s special...
Hello, Good-Bye: New Year for Hammer Museum Was 2022 a blur? It feels like it went by very quickly, too quickly, as we transitioned into the New Normal. People have returned to indoor dining, theaters are open and museums and art fairs are back—though some museums...
Jeffrey Vallance holds a unique position in the LA art world. A contemporary of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al, his work has had a comparable impact locally and internationally, while not transitioning to the industrial fabrication mode demanded by the...
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through...
A bomb explodes in one of the Met’s galleries leaving 13-year-old Theo motherless in the harrowing opening of Donna Tartt’s 2013 bestselling novel, The Goldfinch. In the wake of the explosion, caused by an apparent terrorist attack, a mysterious survivor prompts Theo...
I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear...
Alt Coins, Bear Market, Crypto Winter, Down Bad, Expected Returns, FTX Fraud, Government Oversight, Hacked ($477M), Insolvent, JPEGs, KYC, Liquidity Gone, Margin Trading; I could easily go through the whole alphabet alluding to the current crypto market conditions,...
One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of...
Thrift stores are potentially the end of the line for any object on sale therein; after that, it’s either ref-use or reuse. Consequently, there’s a poignancy to the purchase of any artwork from a thrift store, whether by an ironic hipster being or a sincere abuelita....
Dear Babs, One of my greatest music heroes recently started painting. So when a local gallery showed his art in a pop-up show, I was excited to go. But his paintings are really not good. He’s had a very long career as a musician and always puts a ton of effort into...
No One Loves Me Like You Do A soft and rotten moment of loving you hits the pavement like seasonal fruit gone overripe. Skipping to the part where you leave a cigarette burning in my ashtray, I take out eyes swollen by another’s prying that pass through the mouth and...
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