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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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