"Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame" fortifies the work of activists—including the show’s curators, Checko Salgado, Kim Garrison Means and Mikayla Whitmore—who catalyzed the introduction of a congressional bill this year that would designate Avi Kwa Ame...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Spirit of the Land
GALLERY ROUNDS: Shirley Tse The Magic Hour
Two works by Shirley Tse, originally exhibited indoors, are remixed under the spell of wild elements in The Magic Hour's current iteration time going backward and forward. Founded in 2018 in Twentynine Palms, California by Alice Wang and Ben Tong, The Magic Hour has...
Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU
When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles...
Engaging a New Normal: LA Artists on Vulnerability and Resistance Interviews with Kim Abeles, gloria galvez, Ara Oshagan, and more
In ever-mounting reports on the interlocked pandemics of COVID-19 and structural oppression, two words cyclically resound: “vulnerable” and “resist.” While the virus causes us to consider our own immune system’s vulnerability or resistance to it, it also creates or...
United States of Prison
Nestled on the ground floor of an academic building on Pitzer College’s campus, the Lenzner Family Art Gallery is easy to miss. Its layout is as humble and curiouser still: an L-shaped room is flanked by two alcoves too small to be rooms and too large to be closets;...
Blurring the Border
In concurrent exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza resist political declarations of border wall funding emergencies that reflect converging agendas and legacies of colonialism, nationalism, racism and capitalism....
Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art & Astronomy
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with...
LACE: : Take My Money / Take My Body
“Take My Money / Take My Body” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is Narei Choi and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia’s conceptually ambitious curatorial debut as a collaborators. As contemporary Korean pop music was expressly manufactured to generate the global fanaticism...
Kim Abeles on Very Solid Ground
Having participated in multiple shows each year over her nearly 40-year career, Kim Abeles challenged herself to consider ˌterə ˈfɜːmə (terra firma) at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College as possibly her last solo exhibition. “Terra firma means...
Jud Fine and Barbara McCarren
Jud Fine and Barbara McCarren’s And/Or show at the University Art Museum, Cal State University Long Beach channels us toward Keats’ notion of negative capability, or a fertile surrender to paradox and uncertainty, by way of two colliding currents. One induces...
DISASTER EVOKES CREATIVITY
When an extraordinary windstorm on November 30, 2011 in the San Gabriel Valley decimated the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, artists helped replenish its 235 felled trees by auctioning works they created from them. Box Collective, a group of...
Upending Absurdity
When the Long Beach City College Art Gallery invited Cheri Gaulke to show “Peep Totter Fly” alongside Michael Arata’s “Texas Style Beauty Contest—Miss M,” she initially recoiled. “I wasn’t quite sure where he was coming from,” she remarked in regard to Arata’s...