The artistic legacies of Mexican Muralism remain imprinted on LA’s urban landscape, in faded residues on cracked concrete structures and sometimes peeking out from peeling layers of whitewash anti-graffiti paint. Throughout the 1970s, many artists in Southern...
What makes some spaces private and others public, if not rituals? In Los Angeles, a complex series of rituals reify our belief in private property. Property deeds, for instance, give physical form to a political notion; signing a deed a symbolic ritual that shapes...
The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness,...
The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual...
Tucked between two of the quaint brick and wooden structures comprising the colonial phantasmagoria that is LA’s Olvera Street, is a rooftop mural painted by the famed Mexican activist, Marxist organizer and painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros. The passion project of...
Last Thursday night I braved the fiercely blustering wind and joined the trickle of funky-fresh San Francisco locals snaking through the industrial Dogpatch neighborhood, to land at Minnesota Street Project (MSP), a set of warehouses tucked under the 280 Freeway which...
Emily Fromm’s solo exhibition currently on display at 111 Minna Gallery, “No Vacancy,” is the painter’s comic-book style depiction of bustling corners of San Francisco. The exhibition shows over 40 works from the California native painter who studied at San Francisco...
When I moved to San Francisco to begin college nearly a decade ago, the refrain from Scott McKenzie’s 1967 hippie anthem “San Francisco” rang through my ears, beckoning me to the city by the bay with dreams of “flowers in my hair,” but I quickly learned that much had...
A small crowd gathers around the entrance to Fouladi Projects gallery at Market and Guerrero in San Francisco. A doorman with a long list in his hand gives me the uneasy fear that I won’t be allowed into the opening, on account of the über-hip celebrity inside. But I...