It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in...
You know the photo. Times Square. 1945. V-Day. A male sailor hugging and kissing a female nurse in fervent joy over the end of World War II. An immense sculpture of the kiss seen ‘round the world, Unconditional Surrender, would later settle in Sarasota, Florida. In...
Leaving my converted-garage AirBnb near Little Havana, I was charmed to find the walkway was blocked by wheat posters and spray cans. It was 9 a.m. on the second day of Art Basel Miami Beach and artist Fiest was putting the finishing sprays on a series of his RIP LOVE...
LACMA’s “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art,” (through Sept. 9) starts with a gallery devoted to Siamak Filizadeh’s digital print series "Underground." This modern-day retelling of the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (r....
In September 2017, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline “Four must-see art shows that speak to the anxiety triggered by Trump’s DACA reversal.” In November, HuffPo posted “A Guide To The Anti-Trump Art You Can See In New York Right Now.” In January 2018, one of the...
Alys Beach is a 158-acre community along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, on Florida’s panhandle coast. Each of the 107 chalk-white homes and condos evoke Bermuda, Antigua, Guatemala. Residents can choose from a book of approved architects. The streets are silent....
Tijuana’s most famous contribution to art is the painting of zonkeys: combining donkeys with zebras so the pale Equus would stand out in black-and-white photographs. This is a paraphrased version of what I’m told when I mention I’m heading to Baja for cultural...
Mar is sitting in his Marina Del Rey studio, wearing a pair of ripped, paint-splattered jeans. Behind him is the largest piece featured in his upcoming solo exhibition at Art Angels: a 6x6-foot color-wheel whirlpool. Mar points directly across from him to a painting...
It used to be about the art. It used to be that seeing (and being told to step back from) a Picasso was enough. But, once again, millennials have ruined it for everyone. Simply admiring a statue is as anathema as simply watching a movie without simultaneously texting,...
Melbourne street artist Ms Saffaa painted and wheat-postered a wall with a Muslim feminist protest mural. The collage of Saudi artists and activists shared the space with pink Arabic reading: “radical Muslim.” It took over 80 hours to complete—and one night for...
In a post-truth world, what are the value of words? Intuition beats brags of sexual assault. 140-character tweets trump columns of The New York Times reporting. It was something evident at the first debate, prefigured by Fox News pundits, and understood by every...
If MOCA’s "Art in the Streets" (2011) exhibition was Disneyland, Jeff Hamilton Studios’ "Street Art Fair" was… not the Vegas Strip… Downtown Vegas? Fremont Street? Whereas the Museum of Contemporary Art’s graffiti and urban art extravaganza felt controlled and safe...
1. BeccaBecca Midwood embraces the sometimes lost connection between children drawing on walls and urban artists doing the same. Signed in lower case—becca—her wheat-poster/chalk creations seem the work of a street-art child prodigy.2. NeverResponsible for the Venice...
1. Diane von Furstenberg: Journey of a Dress LACMA (Winter 2014)The exhibition version of the “promoted article”—adjacent to LACMA, advertised on the museum’s site, but conceived of, and paid for privately, by the fashion designer herself. 2. Gagosian’s Winter...
Artillery contributor Josh Herman interviews Robert Berman at his eponymous gallery about art and politics. Berman's art focuses on making sure Donald J. Trump doesn't get elected—a worthy cause—and includes other political works by artists such as Robbie Conal, Ed...
Jeremy Couillard says that the pleasure of working with virtual reality (VR) is that he can move away from “a deceitful world I deeply wish did not exist. I need to create an alternative to that universe so I don’t go insane.” A video and installation artist, and...
Urban art is the great equalizer. With the rise of spray-painting and wheatpostering, the public is no longer forced to visit museums and see what rich white males call art. But one of the few mediums urban art cannot annex is sculpture; like museums, the field is...
Step off the Metro line at Crenshaw and Martin Luther King in 2019, and the first thing you’ll be greeted by is the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, a gray monolith of Macy’s, Sears and Wal-Mart. But look further south down Crenshaw, and you’ll notice an afro rising like...
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