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,...
“Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoigne Workshop” is a photography exhibition on view at the Getty Museum that chronicles the history of an extraordinary partnership of Black photographers. Founded in 1972 by Louis Draper, the Kamoigne Workshop was a...
For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking...
The very model for a great photographer in the post-World War II era was Henri Cartier-Bresson, a cosmopolitan heir to a fortune who was a co-founder of the photographic cooperative Magnum and traveled the world taking photographs with his hand-held Leica camera. His...
Almost all of Chuck Close’s paintings were based on photographs he took himself. In the mid-1980s, when I was a curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I contacted Close with the first museum proposal he had had to do an exhibition of the photographs....
Jona Frank’s new book, Cherry Hill, came out this spring almost simultaneously, but coincidentally, at the same time as another book, Terminus, by another SoCal photographer, John Divola. The coincidence is as fortunate as it is fortuitous because their subjects and...
I got to know James Welling over a decade ago when he invited me to teach a graduate seminar in the history of photography at UCLA’s Broad School of the Arts, where he was the director of the photography program. His own photography was a mystery to me then, as it...
Among the amateur photographers of our time are some rare daguerreotype buffs who still practice this 19th-century form of portraiture, which creates a unique image on a photosensitized metal plate. Back in the 1990s, two such buffs were shrewd enough to realize that...
The day I sat down to write this opinion piece, I was moved to do so by a feature in The New York Times that both irritated and alarmed me. “Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust” the headline read, and the text informed me that the Louvre, our...
Having been a curator of photography in a museum myself, I know that when a new department head is appointed at an institution with a long-standing collection, he or she has to make a statement with an exhibition exploring that collection in a way no one has before....
Two weeks after the exhibition “Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge” opened last fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New Yorker magazine published a piece by Dana Goodyear titled “The Ends of the Earth: Thomas Joshua Cooper risks his life to...
Picking up Highway 62 on the outer edges of Palm Springs takes you up to the high desert in which you drive through endless urban scar tissue a block deep on either side of the road, until you get to Andrea Zittel’s 50-acre spread. Leaving the highway you ascend on a...
Right from the start, “Zoe Leonard: Survey,” a career-spanning exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, establishes the artist’s role as an art-world renegade and provocateur. Now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary site, the installation...
Last year, even as LACMA Director Michael Govan was in the midst of storing the collection off site so that demolition of older buildings could make way for the newly designed museum, he took the time to curate an exhibition featuring Pictures Generation artist...
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, who has had exhibitions at two LA museums this spring—the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—Cindy Sherman is a difficult subject because the work is so well known already. The exhibition at The Broad museum does...
As soon as I entered the recent exhibition “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), things took a turn for the worse. Or anyway, I did. Because it was the last day of the “New Photography” show that MoMA does every two years,...
The only quibble I might have with the Getty's excellent show, "Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography," would be that its title is too literal-minded. A show as exciting as this one is might have had a more adventurous title – say, "Back to the Future," or...
An interview with Paris Photo LA’s new director, Florence Bourgeois, and the new artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, was the first thing on my agenda for the fair this year. I wanted to get from Bourgeois and Wiesner a sense of what changes or innovations they hope...
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