Four weeks passed. I was about to resign myself to not hearing from Charles Wersing, a top New York literary agent, when I checked my inbox one afternoon. “Good to hear from you,” he wrote, and apologized for taking a month to get back to me. He complimented me on my...
Iguana Green went traipsing thru the undergrowth, the stub of a burned-out cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth and a bottle of Jack tied to her tail. It had been a difficult week in the verdant jungles of Southern Brazil. Just a few weeks prior she’d been...
Once upon a time there were "record stores" where one could look through bins of new and used albums, often organized alphabetically by musician/band and type of music, allowing listeners and viewers to troll though specific musical histories. Today, many people...
In "Monsoon Season," her first ever New York solo show, on view at Charles Moffett, Natalie Strait presents new paintings of women that explore climate change, gender, queer culture and the experience of being a woman today. The women in Strait’s paintings are all...
In a planet crowded with polarizing paradigms, is it possible to contribute aesthetically to larger conversations about culture and existence? Life by Design, a group show currently at the Gresham Gallery at San Bernardino Valley College (SBVC), masterfully...
Rambunctious Rojo, or simply, “Big Red” as she is known in more conspicuous circles, has taken to the open road in search of LOVE – not just any old love, but the kind of love that electrifies the blood – brooding, elliptical, soaring, wild and unbidden. Rambunctious...
When I first encountered Tim Youd, he was sitting at a metal table outside an art gallery in Chinatown, tap-tap-tapping away on a portable typewriter, just minding his own business. Most of the crowd didn’t pay him much mind either. Earlier that summer, Youd found...
Perhaps you remember me… No, that wasn’t right. It was senseless to open a letter of entreaty by suggesting that I was forgettable, especially when I knew only too well that the party in question would remember me. Hello Charlie, it’s your old friend here… No, that...
Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the...
Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely...
Brave New World: A Graphic Novel Adapted and Illustrated by Fred Fordham 234 pages Harper Collins Original Text © 1932, 1946 by Aldous Huxley Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t!...
Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a...
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social...
Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George...
The progress of his career has been a methodical march; carefully scripted, stubbornly stage-managed, and precisely choreographed—each subsequent exhibition enhancing the shudder of an already disconcerting thrum. The result of such a steady and painstaking pace has...
The Cheech Is Here While many museums are opening exhibitions long delayed by COVID, one is unveiling a completely renovated building with a new focus. That would be the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, or The Cheech, in Riverside. Part of the...
The record prices set at the Spring auctions in New York, such as the sale of Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, that sold for $195 million, diverted attention from the shocking announcement for the city to deregulate its multi-billion dollar auction...
Months back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We can do whatever we want again, including wonder why we choose to do...
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