In swirls of citrus yellow and lipstick red, a neon sign just inside the entrance proclaimed: My Body My Choice, Her Body Her Choice. The words of protest—framed by recycled cardboard to echo the font’s curvaceous forms—seemed to flash a prescient warning the day the...
Andrea Bowers
Pussy-Hat Creator Jayna Zweiman’s Visionary Activism
Ushering in the new era of Trump, a sea of pink at the 2017 Women’s March became the first undeniable sign of mass resistance. A resounding response to “grab ’em by the pussy” and other far-flung insults that characterized the presidential election. For a while, the...
Sandra de la Loza’s bookish, spirited activism
In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at...
LABOR OF LOVE: Made in L.A.
With its third installment at the Hammer Museum, “Made in L.A.” has settled into its brand as a well-researched survey of current trends and practices in regional art. But there is never a “settling in” as far as expectations for a biennial, which raises the bar not...
George Legrady
Light affects perception in ways typically taken for granted: the ability to see and function; moods; sense of time. In lenticular photographs from the series “Day & Night” and “Frolic” (all works 2015), George Legrady recontextualizes family snapshots to blend...
Amelia Jones: The Politics of Identity
Considering the degree to which historians live in the past, Amelia Jones may not be what you’d expect. Confronting cultural biases relating to the politics of identity, she seems as much social activist as art historian.Via art history, Jones speaks out against the...
Space Invasion
Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable...
Ry Rocklen’s Quotidian Bling
Ry Rocklen saved oyster shells, along with some rocks, then tried to unload them one day at a garage sale. “I didn’t sell a thing,“ he told me in an interview, about his boyhood collecting obsession. Decades later, he is still drawn to treasuring odd stuff: discarded...
I HEART EVERYTHING
Find it in Everything is a slight hardcover book, newly published by Little Brown and Company, featuring Facebook-style photographs by Drew Barrymore. You can find it on Amazon or even at the MOCA bookstore in LA. According to the back cover, Barrymore is now “a...
Tripping the Light Fantastic
James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into...
Jim Skuldt
During a studio visit, Jim Skuldt points out that milk crates around the world don’t come in a single standard size and shape, as one might have thought. He points to a few of his that are filled and stacked beneath a large desk and loaded onto roadie carts that came...
Amanda Ross-Ho
WHETHER ONE THINKS OF AMANDA ROSS-HO AS A SCULPTOR, A photographer, or more broadly, a conceptual artist, it is clear that she applies a deliberate approach to exploring and controlling a passion for "stuff." Through inventive modes of display—of objects and images...
LAURA LONDON
Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks...