Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art. One way to...
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 Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance By Ross King 496 pages Atlantic Monthly Press “All evil is born from ignorance. Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” —Vespasiano da Bisticci...
Joey Forsyte knows that “The only cure for grief is action.” Her beloved mother died shortly before Hilary Clinton lost the election for president. Overwhelmed by grief and loss, Forsyte was transformed into “a different person,” a person who—like her holocaust...
The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything. —John Constable In the sky we had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, and the motion of color. —Sonia Delaunay Edwin Vasquez captures the colors of light in the night sky....
I met Julian Bermudez at his gallery, Bermudez Projects, a spare, light-filled space in the Cypress Park area of Northeast Los Angeles. Bermudez was attired in art-world black and sported a thin, pointed mustache. He was bright, energetic and articulate. He started...
A pair of pastel-hued bikini underpants are draped across the wall. Riddled with tiny holes, the thong-thin back resembles the mesh of fishnet hose. A large lavender moth orchid hovers over the genital area, recalling the poetic similarities between labia and the...
Los Angeles artist Diane Williams engages such historical hierarchies as male/female, human/animal, and self/other in works that focus on her identity as a non-binary immigrant woman. Born in the Philippines in 1973, Williams (nee Diane Doreen Briones) came to this...
The term “Valley Girl” was introduced to popular culture in the early 1980s via a record by Frank Zappa and a film starring Nicolas Cage. It referred to young women from the San Fernando Valley who were portrayed as “ditzy,” “airheaded,” and committed to conspicuous...
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen...
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands....
A large and remarkably diverse crowd filled the Brand Library & Art Center on Saturday, November 18, for "ONE YEAR of Living Dangerously: Political Art Comes of Age in L.A.," an exhibition curated by artists Joey Forsyte, Lawrence Gipe and Alexander Kritselis, in...
On Saturday afternoon, the Millard Sheets Art Center at the Fairplex in Pomona hosted dialogue between UCLA art historian Charlene Villasenor Black and exhibiting artist Judithe Hernandez. The current show "One Path Two Journeys" is a PST LA/LA offering, pairing...
An austere flat horizon is blanketed by intensely blue sky and bracketed by the remnants of an orange window frame, its rectilinear quiet slyly evoking Rothko. Gauzy clouds, piled atop a low mountain, are seen Magritte-like, through a thick wooden square—maybe a...
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, now includes 30-plus national pavilion spaces in the Giardini area, a mindboggling abundance of ancillary exhibitions (including especially the group show in the warehouse-like Arsenale), as well as a plethora of performance art,...
Los Angeles has lost one of its most important and influential artists: Rachel Rosenthal. A pioneer of avant-garde theater and performance art, Rosenthal inspired several generations of actors, artists and activists. She was also a good friend and spiritual mother to...
Our clothes are, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, more than “vain trifles” serving “to merely keep us warm.” Instead, as Woolf asserts, “They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Art that turns our attention to our clothes illuminates how we see each...
JANE CHAFIN owns and operates Offramp Gallery with life partner Chaz Alexander out of their historic home in Pasadena, California. ARTILLERY: You grew up in West Virginia as a descendent of the feuding Hatfield family and your grandfather was an infamous union-busting...