Artillery Magazine

Byline: Scarlet Cheng

  • SHOP TALK: LA ART NEWS Fall in Los Angeles

    SHOP TALK: LA ART NEWS
    Fall in Los Angeles

    Fall is finally here, after a heat-addled summer in SoCal. I hope we don’t have any more of those 100-degree temps, because some of us don’t have central air, and it was brutal throughout August and September. On those hottest days I told myself, autumn is coming. I’ve always loved that line in The Great Gatsby — “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

    Fall is also when the art season gets a restart, and we had an electrifying one with the Getty-sponsored PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Lots of new exhibitions opened — there are over 70 slated for fall and spring, with most of the major ones opening in September. I had a couple of marathon weeks visiting many of the major shows, and here are a few of the extraordinary ones.

    First off, For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability (until February 2, 2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla is a remarkably compelling and even moving exhibition despite its morbid premise. The exhibition attempts “to narrate the history of recent art, going back to the 1960s, through the lens of illness and disability,” said Jill Dawsey, senior curator at the museum, during a walkthrough. “Since the pandemic, all of us are more aware that what we share is our bodily vulnerability, our mortality.” Yes, indeed. In “For Dear Life,” we travel through time from the AIDs crisis to the COVID epidemic, with other disabilities in between. Yes, we all get sick, and we all get old, and some of us have hereditary health issues to contend with. How artists can deal with those impairments through creative expression is a wonderment.

    Take the choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer. Once when she was recovering from surgery, she filmed her hand in midair, experimenting with how it might be as expressive as her body.

    The show opens with a black-and-white still from Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) that launched her filmmaking practice. The exhibition goes from Laura Aguilar to Liz Young and Constantina Zavitsanos. I was especially happy to see Young’s work included. For years I would see her at openings in a wheelchair, an active participant in the art scene. A group show at Track 16 once featured one of Young’s sculptures — a whimsical flying machine to which she could strap herself. La Jolla Museum presents her compellingly poetic The Birth/Death Chair with Rawhide Shoes, Bones, and Organs (1993) — a chair but more than a chair, for at its base lie the pair of shoes of someone who might have been sitting there. One shoe is attached to a chain from which spring various bones and organs, the hardware and software of our mortal being.

    While you’re down south, head to Balboa Park and the exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art and the Mingei International. At the former, Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World (until Jan. 5, 2025) includes over 200 works. The exhibition took as a springboard the 13th century book by scholar Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283), The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence, and features illustrated manuscripts, astronomical instruments, paintings and even contemporary art by Sherin Guirguis, Timo Nasseri, and others.

    A short walk away at the Mingei is Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo (until March 16, 2025), which
    presents the history of indigo, a plant found the world over that  produces a deep blue dye after rather elaborate processing. Some 180 objects from 30 countries are included, from Japanese kimonos to Levi jeans. Contemporary artists also use the material, sometimes to address indigo’s colonial history.

    Luminex Redux

    October 5th was a magical evening at Luminex — the outdoor art fest taking place after hours in the South District of DTLA, in its third and perhaps strongest iteration. Much of it was large-scale video projections on the sides of buildings and along an alley, and I loved how it drew people to the city streets at night. Kudos to the organizers!

    Nao Bustamante recreated her “Brown Disco” with a large mirror ball spinning in the middle of the room of an industrial space, with a delirium of images projected onto and reflected from the ball. Bustamante paced around the ball, turning it with her hand. I love how her work is often low-tech, even while using bits of tech. JOJO ABOT danced before her video in her luminescent robes—some of the footage was from Africa—with an arcane sign projected on the ground, in “Re.Member.” The other artists were Refik Anadol, Alice Bucknell, Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz, Carole Kim, Alan Nakagawa, Sarah Rara and LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists). Kudos to the artists!

    An End and Beginning at The Hammer

    It’s hard to believe Ann Philbin is leaving the Hammer after a most remarkable 25 years as director. She took the place from a sleepy university museum to a leading hub of contemporary art with an international reputation. I still remember when she brought a retrospective of the then under-recognized Lee Bontecou to Los Angeles, and it was a stunner, so raw and powerful that we wondered where this artist had been. The “Made in L.A.” biennial started under Philbin’s watch, and it has been as important for rediscoveries—Magdalena Suarez and Michael Frimkess among others—as for new discoveries. Then there was the two-decade-long building project, which expanded exhibition space and reconfigured the entry to make it look less like an office building and more like a museum. The Hammer is an essential part of what makes Los Angeles the art capital it is.

    Philbin steps down in November, and Zoë Ryan will take over in January 2025. Since 2020 Ryan has been director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has overseen a lauded slate of exhibitions and expanded public engagement. She already has the experience of working at a museum linked to a university, and that should come in handy. Before that she was chair and curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. “The Hammer Museum is one of the most exciting museums in the country,” Ryan has said. “Ann Philbin has had an extraordinary impact in making the Hammer an internationally influential institution. I am thrilled and honored to lead this museum and be a part of the vibrant creative communities of Los Angeles.”

    All the best, Ann, on your next adventure — you can’t retire yet!

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Olympics Paris 2024: Art, Fashion & Camp

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Olympics Paris 2024: Art, Fashion & Camp

    Here’s something different: I am going to talk about the Olympics that were opening in Paris as I wrote this column. Especially exciting were the athletes floating down the Seine in a series of boats—so improbable, but so original, and so picturesque against the bridges and the banks of the freshly cleaned river.

    A magnificent spectacle accompanied the boat parade—a relay of people bringing the Olympic torch across Paris, from underground tunnels to rooftops, to light the flame. They managed to get in so much art and design, so much history—moving from the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Palais, the Louvre and the Tuileries with dancers, singers, acrobats and the ghost of Marie Antoinette. The torch bearer at the Louvre found the Mona Lisa missing. There was lots of humor and quite a bit of camp, especially in a scene of colorful characters seated at a long table, which served as a runway for some over-the-top fashion.

    The next day, the news was full of outrage against an alleged parody of da Vinci’s The Last Supper—the pileup included French clergy and politicians and some Americans on the right. The US House Speaker, Mike Johnson, declared, “Last night’s mockery of the Last Supper was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” Who knows where this warped notion began? I never once thought of The Last Supper while watching the opening ceremony. Presiding over the festivities was a full-bodied woman with a radiant crown—no Jesus, no ritual drinking or eating, no backstory of betrayal. However, the conservative right invents make-believe insults in order to continue the culture wars. Thomas Jolly, the ceremony’s artistic director, explained “The idea was to have a pagan celebration connected to the gods of Olympus.”

    So, what will Los Angeles do when the Olympics open here in 2028? Granted, we do not have the long history and scenic wonders of Paris. Here, we will be using existing facilities, such as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was used in the 1932 and 1984 Olympics in LA.

    The arts have long been a part of the Olympics, in their own competitions during the early years from 1912 to 1948. The Los Angeles 1984 Olympics offered the Olympic Arts Festival. Paris 2024 has an arts and culture program, the Cultural Olympiad. In June, Hollywood producer and arts supporter Maria Arena Bell was named Chair of the LA28 Cultural Olympiad, and I cannot wait to see what her team comes up with.

    LA28 will also be using some new arena venues, such as those in the revitalized Hollywood Park. I have just been to openings for two more venues—Cosm Los Angeles, a new immersive venture, and Intuit Dome, the new home of the LA Clippers, which commissioned seven pieces of public art from our own SoCal artists. Six are completed—I was especially impressed by Jennifer Steinkamp’s pivot to lighting design—the Dome covered by hundreds of diamond-shaped panels with embedded LEDs not only changing color but making patterns that “move” across the surface

     

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Three Major Shows and Other Fronts

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Three Major Shows and Other Fronts

    Three Major Shows: Starring Black Women Artists

    Right now in Los Angeles, we have the gift of important shows of three major contemporary Black women artists. Try to see them all, as this fortuitous alignment of stars may not happen again, at least not anytime soon. There’s Simone Leigh at LACMA and the California African American Museum, a shared survey show till January 20, 2025; Zanele Muholi at Southern Guild till August 30 and Mickalene Thomas at the Broad till September 29. All three use the Black female image—in celebration, in sisterhood, in joy and sometimes sorrow—and always in ways that make us pay attention.

    “Simone Leigh” is a two-decade survey of Leigh’s work in ceramic, bronze, video and installation. It’s a traveling exhibition organized by the ICA Boston, and Los Angeles is lucky enough to be one of the stops (although I rather wish it had all been at a single venue to concentrate the experience). Her sculptures are powerful, elegant and enigmatic, often larger-than-life representations of Black women. They tend to be iconic, with Black facial features, but the eyes are missing.

    Also covering about two decades of artistic output is “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” an internationally touring exhibition of 90-some works that burst in a swirl of color and imagery. Thomas’ works are exuberant and joyful celebrations of the lives of Black women, including mixed-media painting, collage, installation and photography. They reference and incorporate magazines, advertising and books pivotal to the Black female experience—such as Jet magazine and text by bell hooks—calling for love and healing toward collective liberation.

    The biggest surprise for me was the artist I knew only through a few photographs appearing in articles, the South African artist Zanele Muholi. The current show at Southern Guild, a South African gallery that recently built an outpost in Melrose Hill, opened my eyes to her star quality as an artist with, both an elevated vision of what art can express and deep knowledge of how to work with materials.

    Muholi is especially famous for photographic auto-portraits, in the manner of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. However, while those two were pioneers in the field, Muholi has surpassed them in the eloquence and depth of her vision—perhaps because she has had to struggle so much harder to become a recognized artist: Muholi was born a woman and exists as a queer person in a strongly male-dominated society.

    A heroic bust on a pedestal and a large black-and-white blowup greet the visitor upon entry. The next gallery holds several highlights, including a series of photographs in which she integrated a found object or objects into her wardrobe—be it swim goggles or Instamatic cameras strung around her like necklaces. In these images she plays with the exoticism projected onto nonwhite women, then subverts that notion with the use of everyday objects as bodily adornments.

    “Race politics is central to my work,” Muholi says during a walkthrough of the show. And gender politics, too, she adds. This walkthrough is with a younger audience, including students, and I was impressed that she asked them questions, too. Clearly she loves the public conversation about art as much as the private art-making.

    In the corner of the room is the show-stopping Umphathi (The One Who Carries) (2023), a giant version of the female reproductive organs in polished bronze, suspended in midair by wire. It’s an interpretation, a particularly beautiful and poetic one, with the fallopian tubes curling around like two arms towards ovaries, their hands—yes, she made the ends of the tubes into hands—gently reaching towards them. “This is where we all come from,” she says, indicating that it’s something important for us to remember.

     

     

    Rebecca Campbell, Hollywood is a sign, 2023. © Rebecca Campbell. Courtesy of L.A. Louver.

    On Other Fronts

    At the end of May, David Zwirner opened his third building in Los Angeles—a ground-up construction designed by Selldorf Architects, led by Annabelle Selldorf. The three buildings on Western Avenue are adjacent, and the first two were existing ones that have been renovated. The new building has over 15,000 square feet of sleek exhibition space—the size of a small museum—and is currently hosting a 30th-anniversary exhibition featuring their roster of artists. And what a list it is! In one room alone were works by groundbreaking artists Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa,
    Gordon Matta-Clark and Richard Serra, who is represented by a drawing—and who recently left us. 

    Rebecca Campbell reaffirms that she is one of our best realist painters in her latest show at L.A. Louver, “Young Americans” (through July 20). On the far wall of the main gallery is a series of 15 portraits of young people—those perched on the edge of adolescence and teendom. Campbell is adept at using turquoise and reds in her underpainting and her outlines, creating a vibrating quality to their faces. These portraits are especially arresting for their tenderness, perhaps reflective of her feelings towards her children (who appear in three of them) and their friends. She conjures a vivid sense of how lovely it is to be on the precipice of so much promise.

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Frieze LA, Spring/Break, Gana Art LA's Quiet Opening

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Frieze LA, Spring/Break, Gana Art LA’s Quiet Opening

    I don’t know about you, but I’m still recovering from Frieze LA (Feb. 29–March 3), and the art week that was. In addition to the main event, there were many gallery openings and events, and also the Felix and Spring/ Break art fairs. At Frieze there were fewer galleries this year—about 95 versus last year’s 120—all packed into one big custom-built tent at Santa Monica Airport. Last year, most of the galleries were in the big tent, with a selection down the hill at Barker Hangar. Ironically, last year I heard complaints from gallerists relegated to the latter location, but Anthony Meier told me this year, “We did quite well after all, so we were happy.”

    After attending the Thursday preview, I returned Saturday afternoon for some people-watching. Art fairs have become part of weekend entertainment, and Frieze drew an enthusiastic crowd, despite its high-priced admission. The aisles were jammed with friends on the hunt for new artists, young parents with toddlers in strollers and couples on dates. Kudos to the galleries that had one-person and thematic exhibitions; they really stuck in my mind.

    Let’s take The Pit, with its walls painted in pleasing pastels, the back one dotted with white squiggles and shapes, which were ceramic pieces by Allison Schulnik that tell of the faceoff between two creatures outside her desert home, south of Joshua Tree. For an hour she watched as a snake and a cottontail rabbit confronted one another. “At first I was afraid for the bunny. I thought he’d be killed,” she told me. “Then I realized that the rabbit was the aggressor, sometimes moving in to nip at the snake.” The snake lunged forward, which made the rabbit jump and run away. This
    drama was depicted in several pieces on the wall: the snake lurching forward, the rabbit falling back into a curl. “Fortunately, they both came out alive,” Schulnik reported.

    Los Angeles–based Gary Tyler won the 2024 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize, an honor saluting an artist who has “made a significant impact on society with their work.” He had a solo project at Frieze LA and received a $25,000 award. Tyler learned quilting during his 42-year incarceration, and he has used the medium to tell stories about his time in prison and the people he met. With quilting, he has said, “I had found my calling.”

    Board game Storm the Capital by Z Behl + Walker Behl + Tavet Gillson at Spring/Break. Photo by Ezrha Jean Black.

    For a break, I went to Spring/Break in Culver City—and found it refreshingly creative and friendly. Spring/Break has entered its fifth year in Los Angeles with some 90 exhibitors. Twelve years ago, Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori launched the fair in New York as a fun alternative to the mainstream art-fair scene. They drew independent curators, artists without major gallery representation, or a combination of both. In Los Angeles this year, at least one stand was organized by two artists—Alonsa Guevara and James Razko, who curated each other’s work.

    When Kelly and Gori started the Los Angeles fair, they were downtown. However, they always wanted to be arranged and geographically close to Frieze, which moved from Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica. So Culver City seemed to be a good location this time, especially, as Gori points out, with an arts district nearby.

    Inside the red brick building the fair occupied, there were walls dividing exhibitors, but hardly a plain vanilla cube was to be found. “We discourage white walls unless there’s a purpose for it,” Gori said. “These spaces come with their own character.” The exhibitors try to exhibit some personality, as well. They paint their walls different colors or give them a special treatment. They provide comfortable seating and linger in the aisles to chat and invite visitors in. Claire Foussard gave her walls a cement coating, and Yiwei Gallery painted trompe l’oeil Doric columns to frame its space. Others created installations—Z Behl + Walker Behl + Tavet Gillson built an immersive, 3D version of their board game, Storm the Capitol: THE “BIG” EDITION, a darkly comic look at the insurrection on January 6 in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, Hicham Oudghiri set up a tent that people could enter and sit in.

    Foussard also featured two very intriguing artists. Angelica Yudasto created ethereal drawings floating in layers of kiln-formed glass, while Jiwon Rhie made a slapping machine mounted on an outside wall—a kinetic sculpture of a padded hand that swings around to smack you in the face. It was her way of venting the rejection she felt from various institutions after moving to the United States. At one point, Rhie bent over to demonstrate, putting her cheek in line with the hand. She smiled when I look concerned, and assured me, “It’s very gentle.”

    Installation by Chiharu Shiota.

    On Seward just north of Santa Monica Boulevard is a new gallery that quietly opened last year—new to us, but the first American branch of one of Korea’s leading galleries, Gana Art. They opened an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota the weekend before Frieze, titled “In Circles.” Last year Shiota created that sensational installation using interconnected red string which engulfed the lobby of the Hammer Museum, one of the best transformations of that space. It felt like the inside of a magical spider’s lair. The gallery is housed in two small buildings, one featuring Shiota’s smaller works in display cases and on panel, the other a room-sized version of her installation work, based on three gigantic hoops. It was a wonder to walk throughout the exhibition.

    The artist is now based in Berlin, but she paid a visit for the opening of her Gana exhibition in LA. In person, Shiota is quite modest and soft-spoken. She told me that as a child in Japan, she had seen the works of Dalí in the Sunday newspaper, and then became interested in art. She began drawing all the time: “It’s like my secret world, my own world.” To this day her art feels like a secret world: one we feel privileged to visit.

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Welcome, Year of the Dragon

    It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them.

    For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce Lee fans, the dragon is the most powerful creature in the Chinese zodiac, and the only mythological one. (Lee’s Chinese name is “Little Dragon.”) The dragon, or one of the myriad dragons in the mytho-verse, is said to control water in its various forms—rivers and lakes and even the clouds. By this logic, some dragon has been conjuring up the “atmospheric river” that’s deluging California, which gives you a sense of how powerful dragons are.

    Back to art. At the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, 10 artists are included in “Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese-American Artists” (up through April 21). There are videos, ­photography and installations by Patty Chang, Candice Lin, Ken Lum, Simon Leung and others. At the Hammer Museum, South ­Korean artists who worked in the post-Korean War period are featured in “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” (up through May 12). These artists took on such (then) avant-garde forms as assemblage, installation, happenings and new technologies.

    In early February, I caught Yoshie Sakai’s delightful immersive exhibition, “Grandma Entertainment Franchise,” before it closed at the Vincent Price Art Museum. It was a goofy funhouse dedicated to her own obaa-chan, her grandmother who came to live with her family when she was nine, plus mashups of pop culture and consumerism. The exhibition melded three installations Sakai produced throughout the past three years: Grandma Day Spa, Grandma Nightclub and Grandma Amusement Park. Quite impressive, with a merry-go-round, a faux bar, and in the corner a couple of bathroom stalls plastered with signs and outfitted with headphones.

    Most impressive of all was how Sakai taught herself to play her grandmother and act out skits in the videos. She even danced a rendition of the old movie classic Singin’ in the Rain. I could see that the exhibition made visitors nostalgic for their own grandmas, or maybe wish they had a more fun and caring grandma. (And, yes, I belong in that category!) Some nice merch was for sale—­notebooks and cards, and even a colorful plush-doll version of obaa-chan.

    Congratulations to Artillery columnist Skot Armstrong’s ongoing art project, Science Holiday, which turns 50 this year. He is currently featured in the show, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” at the Brooklyn Museum, where some of the earliest Science Holiday publications are on display through March 31.

    Kangja, Kiss Me, 1967–2001.

    Anat Ebgi has proved to be one of the most successful of our independent galleries—I remember when the gallerist Ebgi started in a tiny space in Chinatown a dozen years ago, at a gallery called The Company. She then opened her own gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. Since then, she’s settled into two LA spaces—one on Wilshire and the other on Fountain.

    My recent visit to the Fountain space discovered a very crowded, very lively opening for Chilean-born, New York–based artist Alejandro Cardenas. His surrealist paintings of alien creatures, like praying mantises in various urban settings, are both humorous and creepy. Is he saying something about the post-apocalyptic world? So many artists are looking to the future with gloom. Or maybe he likes insects? This led me to ponder the popular notion that should the H-bomb fall, cockroaches will survive. A cursory internet search reveals, sadly, that cockroaches too are vulnerable to radiation.

    Most new galleries shutter in a year or two, but Ebgi has managed to survive and thrive. It hasn’t been easy. “It’s much harder to sell art here than people think,” she said to me that evening. Ebgi manages to do art fairs as well, and shortly after I spoke to her, she flew to New York to open a new gallery in a prime location—5,000 square feet in Tribeca, right on Broadway.

    Galleries are still moving into LA, despite inflated rents. Rele Gallery, which specializes in work by African artists (its other branch is in Lagos, Nigeria), has moved to a larger space on Western Avenue, to an area now known as “Melrose Hill,” where you’ll find David Zwirner down the street. Also there’s the new Fernberger Gallery, opened by Emma Fernberger, who has moved from New York and previously a ­director of Bortolami.

    The Pit moved to a 13,000-square-foot space in ­Atwater Village, which opened February 24 with a group show of 50 artists, plus a “dual retrospective” of Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman. They’ll also sell publications, zines and merch, and the parking lot will occasionally be used for performances, talks and other events. And it’s the gallery’s 10th anniversary—kudos to founders and artists Adam D. Miller and ­Devon Oder! And last but not least, Tierra Del Sol Gallery has left Chinatown for greener pastures in West Hollywood. Director Paige Wery is a very happy camper with her new, much larger space right across from Plummer Park on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS L.A. Fairs in the New Year, The Artful Lunacy of Luna Luna, Over at the Huntington, Movies and Endings

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    L.A. Fairs in the New Year, The Artful Lunacy of Luna Luna, Over at the Huntington, Movies and Endings

    L.A. FAIRS IN THE NEW YEAR

    The fairs are coming again, and the leader of the pack is, of course, Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 29–March 3, 2024), returning once more to the Santa Monica Airport. There will be more than 95 exhibitors, with about half from the greater LA area. This time it’s all under one big roof—last year there were two, with the hip cool galleries in the big tent on the hilltop, and the rather neglected ones in the Barker Hangar at the bottom of the hill. The former was constantly jammed with visitors, while the latter, which housed the “historical” galleries and the emerging ones … not so much.

    Fortunately, Frieze management listened to the attendees’ complaints, and architect Kulapat Yantrasast and his WHY studio expanded the size of the big tent. One hopes that management does something about the confusing parking—last year people were taken back to the wrong lot and wandered about for an hour before they could find the right one. Also, there was a crying need for more food options, as long lines swamped the few providers.

    “We look forward to welcoming galleries from around the globe (including leading art spaces across Asia, Africa, Europe and South America), from Korea to Mexico, Japan to Germany,” said Christine Messineo, fair director of Frieze in the Americas, “alongside a strong core of exhibitors from across California.”

    Other shows in February include the LA Art Show, which now takes place on a different week, Feb. 14–18, again at the Convention Center in DTLA. Felix is returning to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, starting a day earlier than Frieze on Feb. 28, but also running through March 3.

    A carousel designed by Keith Haring, Luna Luna.

    THE ARTFUL LUNACY OF LUNA LUNA

    Now for something fun and different. Long ago in 1987 an Austrian actor/artist named André Heller realized a longtime dream to create “an art amusement park.” He signed up more than 30 international artists to help design rides, pavilions and signage, and two of them, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, even traveled to Europe to work on their pieces: a merry-go-round and a chair-swing ride, respectively. That summer Luna Luna was launched in Hamburg, Germany, with contributions from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, David Hockney and Rebecca Horn. Nearly a quarter of a million visitors checked in.

    Sadly, despite the park’s success, Heller lost his funding. At the end of summer, the project closed and went straight into storage—for more than three decades.

    Two years ago, the lot was sold to a conglomerate headed by DreamCrew—an entertainment business founded by rap superstar Drake and producer Adel “Future” Nur—and has been undergoing extensive restoration. By this writing is published, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” should be open at the Ace Mission Studios in Boyle Heights—with about half the historic attractions on exhibit. Most are solely for viewing purposes, as the rides are too fragile and too valuable to be ridden. Among the attractions will be Hockney’s enchanted forest, Dalí’s geodesic dome (mirrored on the inside), Scharf’s chair-swing ride and Delaunay’s painterly abstractions on an archway. You may wonder how Delaunay’s work is here since she passed away in 1979; Heller had met with her earlier and got permission to use some of her work.

    Nicely interspersed throughout are old photographs and didactic material about Luna Luna, the project, and its artists. There will also be performers circulating about, and of course, food and souvenirs for purchase. Don’t miss Heller’s wedding chapel, where you can marry whomever, even whatever, you wish

    Betye Saar with Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023, © 2023 Betye Saar, photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

    OVER AT THE HUNTINGTON

    Betye Saar is a national treasure, still vital and creating artwork at 97. Recently the Huntington commissioned her to create a room-sized installation for its American galleries, and in November it was unveiled as Drifting Toward Twilight (on view through Nov. 30, 2025), with a vintage canoe floating across a “river” of branches and twigs retrieved from the Huntington grounds. She used to visit the grounds as a child, with her mother and aunt, “who were both avid gardeners,” she explained during the preview. “I wanted to do an installation that somehow integrated materials from this area.” Seated in the canoe are five “figures”—the three in the middle are birdcages perched on wooden chairs, and the two on either end are posts topped with antlers.

    While Saar needs a little help getting around these days, her mind is still sharp as a tack. In the gallery she quickly saw that she wanted more branches and plant material underneath the boat to give it the sense of it floating through water or ether. She picked up some branches from a pile on the side and walked around the canoe, filling in the thinner areas. There’s a light that emanates from beneath, and Saar didn’t want viewers to see the source. “It should look more mysterious,” she said

    Mr. Chow.

    MOVIES AND ENDINGS

    Many people would like to be artists—and why not? In popular culture they’re seen as successful outsiders who live large and outlandishly. Plugging into the fantasy is the HBO documentary aka MR. CHOW, about the colorful Michael Chow of the titular restaurant and now painting fame. The movie traces his life from son of a renowned opera singer in China to art student in London to starting a chain of upscale Chinese restaurants. From the ’60s through the ’80s, Chow lived life in the fast lane. He was married to Grace Coddington briefly, and then to Tina Chow, and traded meals at his restaurant for art by regulars such as Basquiat. These days he wants to be known as an artist as he’s shown—flinging paint and hammering on giant canvases in his giant studio in an LA warehouse.

    Then there’s Anselm, a feature-length homage to the legendary Anselm Kiefer by director Wim Wenders. Like many, I was impressed by Kiefer’s extraordinary painting/multi-media “Exodus” series, on display last year at the former Marciano museum under the auspices of Gagosian. Wenders’ Pina is one of my favorite dance films of all time, so I was naturally drawn to seeing his doc, even in 3D, which is really not my
    favorite format since it makes me nauseated.

    Kiefer has a studio in the south of France—not just a warehouse but warehouses with acres and acres. His work is monumental, requiring monumental spaces to work in. This is a fascinating peek into his life as an artist. However, I felt Wenders was a bit too worshipful, and wondered if his subject is as dour and ponderous as this doc makes him out to be.

    Finally, X-TRA magazine, most recently published quarterly, is folding as announced on Instagram. Founded in 1997 by two artists, Ellen Birrell and Stephen Berens, it covered a wide gamut of the arts including the visual arts, dance and fiction. The fall 2023 issue included a conversation between Shirley Tse and Alice Wang. Alas, another LA-based arts publication bites the dust. But what a great run!

  • Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023 Fantasy Takes the Lead

    Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023
    Fantasy Takes the Lead

    What a year for feature films this has been, both rich and strange. Indeed, fantasy seemed to have taken the lead, as we emerge from the fever of the COVID epidemic and try to find the new normal. These were not the usual escapist fantasies, but fantasies that spoke to our current, more conscious and more precarious state of being. Below are my personal choices for the best, in alphabetic order—films that combined elevation and inspiring form and content.  While I selected these without consideration of director, there are many veteran auteurs among them—from long established ones such as Hayao Miyazaki and Martin Scorsese to relative newbie Greta Gerwig. Only one film, Past Lives, is made by a first-time director, Celine Song, and a most promising one.

     

    Asteroid City, Directed by Wes Anderson

    In the mid-1950s, photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) brings his precocious son Woodrow and three younger daughters to the Junior Stargazer’s convention taking place in the southwest desert. They stay in a motel soon to be populated by other parents and children, including a potential love interest in the form of glamorous Midge (Scarlett Johansson), set against the backdrop of extraterrestrial and UFO sightings and atomic testing in that era. Typical of an Anderson film (he also co-wrote the script), the set and the mise en scène are as absorbing as the plot, and the pastel color scenes are hypnotic.

     

    Barbie, Directed by Greta Gerwig

    Barbie manages to deftly straddle satire and salute to the “It” doll of the late 1950s.  Margot Robbie plays the sweet airhead, living in her own pink bubble-licious Barbie Land, until some existential questions pop into her pretty head. She journeys to the Real World to get answers with Ken (Ryan Gosling), a stowaway in her pink convertible. The sexism and patriarchy she encounters is a shock to her system, and she is transformed. This is one of the most delightful and clever films of the year, weaving a hilarious feminist counter-narrative to Barbie, the icon.

     

    The Boy and the Heron, Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

    The great Japanese animator Miyazaki returns, with a story about a boy, Mahito, who goes to live with his father and new wife (who also happens to be his aunt, his mother’s sister) in the countryside during World War II.  Mahito is grieving the death of his mother, who perished in a ghastly hospital fire, and he’s led by a strange heron to a tower in the forest she might possibly be living in.  As in his previous films (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away), Miyazaki reveals to us how the world of the spirit is ever part of ours.

     

    The Color Purple, Directed by Blitz Bazawule

    What a knockout of a film—the singing, the dancing, the sorrow and the joy we are taken through. A musical about oppression and racism in the post-Civil War South?  Somehow it works in this story of Celie (Fantasia Barrino), who is separated from her beloved sister Nellie (Halle Bailey), and gets married off to a man who treats her like a slave. There are many wonderful performances, with the standouts Bailey and Taraji P. Henson, who plays singer “Shug” Avery.  Shug is an electrifying catalyst, bringing glamour to rural life and helping Celie get a sense of her own self-worth.  Both actresses have charismatic presence and gorgeous voices, and the choreography by Fatima Robin is stellar.

     

    The Holdovers, Directed by Alexander Payne

    Set at an elite boys school during the Vietnam War, this dramatic comedy begins in cynicism and ends in an act of altruism that reflects Payne’s own idealism about teachers and the need to do the right thing—even if it involves lying. A demanding classics teacher (Paul Giamatti) is demoted to spending the winter holidays with students who don’t have anywhere else to go. In the end the holdovers are the teacher, a smart alecky preppy (Dominic Sessa), and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), in which they end up bonding over their unfortunate lot and hidden griefs.

     

    Killers of the Flower Moon, Directed by Martin Scorsese

    Based on the true story of how greedy white men tried to take over the oil fortune of the Osage tribe in the early 1900s—by hook or by crook and by murder—this film shows auteur Scorsese at the apex of his directing powers.  Fresh from a stint in World War I, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Oklahoma to live with his calculating uncle (Robert De Niro), who coaches him to marry Mollie (Lily Gladstone) for her family’s oil rights. The story unravels like a mystery, with suspicious death upon suspicious death, until finally the precursor of the FBI come to investigate.

     

    The Little Mermaid, Directed by Rob Marshall

    Yes, it’s groundbreaking that the lead Ariel is played by Halle Bailey, a gifted young Black actress and singer, but this movie is on my list because she gives a deeply moving performance as the wide-eyed and rebellious little mermaid who wants to know more, much more, about the world above. The invention of her undersea world is also inspired, and the interlace of live action and CG effects is enchanting. As you may recall, in the original Hans Christian Andersen tale, Ariel makes an unfortunate bargain with a witch to live on land, but here she gets a proactive, happy ending—Yay!

     

     

    Past Lives, Directed by Celine Song

    This slow, wistful movie features a 30-something Korean American woman, Nora (Greta Lee), whose emotional world gets thrown when a childhood crush resurfaces. That boy, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), stayed behind in South Korea, while her family immigrated to Canada. Twelve years later they have a rekindling of their special connection via the internet, but she eventually marries another writer (John Magaro) and settles down in New York. One day Hae Sung decides to come visit, and Nora asks herself what might have been.

     

    Poor Things, Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

    Director Yorgos Lanthimos tends to go way way way over the top in his films, and in this rewrite of the Frankenstein story, a young suicide (Emma Stone) is “reanimated” as Bella Baxter. In a surgery done by a very rich and somewhat mad Victorian scientist (Willem Dafoe), her brain was replaced by that of the baby she was carrying, and yes, things continue in this weird and perverse way until the end. Bella is basically a walking id, saying and doing what pops into her head. While Lanthimos devolves to conventional prurience in inventing her fate (she becomes a prostitute, natch), he does highlight how men want to control women. Also, the sets are stunning—a brilliant mix of Victorian, Art Nouveau and Steampunk by production designers Shona Heath and James Price.

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Made in L.A. 2023 and So Long, Annie

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Made in L.A. 2023 and So Long, Annie

    Made in L.A. 2023

    The Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” just opened (through Dec. 31), and it is now clearly THE art biennial of SoCal. It’s also the best one yet, I think. This year’s theme, “Acts of Living,” allows for a diverse range of work from 39 artists while giving the show some unity. Actually, more unity than usual—I came away feeling that I had really seen a whole exhibition, not just pieces of one.

    The show has been adeptly curated by Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez. “Acts of Living” is taken from noted artist Noah Purifoy: “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.”

    One work that most eloquently encapsulates this idea is Dominique Moody’s N.O.M.A.D., a tiny house parked on the street behind the museum. It sits on wheels and features a welcoming porch and round windows which are repurposed washing-machine doors. Moody herself is there much of the time, welcoming visitors and explaining the features of the 150-square-foot dwelling with a cot in one corner and custom-built and found objects throughout. An old photograph of her parents and family appears in a silhouette of a bird in an assemblage piece.

    Ann Philbin. Photo: Mark Hanauer.

    SO LONG, ANNIE

    Shortly after the opening of “Made in L.A.,” the Hammer announced that the indefatigable Ann Philbin will be stepping down as director in November 2024—after 25 years of exceptional leadership that has transformed the museum into a must-see in Los Angeles. When she took over in 1999, arriving from the Drawing Center in New York City, the Hammer was a rather sleepy outpost attached to UCLA. Now it is recognized as a leading, world-class contemporary art museum. Philbin oversaw the presentation of remarkable shows such as Lee Bontecou’s retrospective and
    “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980,” and also the major expansion and overhaul that culminated this March, designed by Michael Maltzan. The museum added 40,000 square feet of space, including a dedicated gallery for exhibitions of works on paper organized by the Grunwald Center (yes, part of the Hammer!).

    On the evening of the “Made in L.A.” opening, Philbin hung out in the galleries—clearly delighted with the show and talking to artists and well-
    wishers alike. Now I realize she might have been lingering to enjoy her last biennial as museum  director. When she saw me, she called my attention to nearby artists. I was quite taken with the molded-clay wall plaques and sculpture of Akinsanya Kambon; Philbin strongly urged me to talk to him—“his backstory is really amazing,” she noted. And it was. Kambon had been in the armed services during the Vietnam War, then joined the Black Panthers when he returned to the US. His work incorporates West African and African American narratives—there are scenes of colonial and racial oppression, as well as the bonds of family and community.

    Thank you, Annie, for championing art and artists, and for creating the space to help them thrive and be seen by a wider audience.

    Judy Chicago, Rainbow Pickett, 1965/2021. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

    NEW YORK REPORT, PLUS BLUM SANS POE

    On other fronts in LA, Blum & Poe will be no more—henceforth, it will be known as BLUM. Founding partner Jeff Poe will be stepping down from running one of our leading galleries that now has outposts in New York and Tokyo. Next spring, for their 30th anniversary, they’re opening a new and larger New York space at 9 White Street. That space will be launched with a survey of Japanese art from the 1960s to present, co-curated by Tim Blum and Mika Yoshitake.

    Yours Truly was in New York in early October and there were so many shows I wanted to see. It’s interesting how California artists are recognized now. Ruth Asawa and Henry Taylor both had exhibitions at the Whitney, plus there was a major retrospective of Ed Ruscha, full of very familiar work, at the Museum of Modern Art. I found Ruscha’s early work the most compelling because I hadn’t seen much of it. The show will be coming to our very own LACMA in April 2024.

    The New Museum presented New York’s first museum survey of Judy Chicago, who started her career in California—getting both her BA and MA from UCLA in the heady ’60s. Along with Rita Koi and Miriam Schapiro, she started the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College and then
    CalArts, and later organized the team that made the landmark installation piece, The Dinner Party, which features table settings for 39 accomplished women from the past that we should all know. “Judy Chicago: Herstory” (through Jan. 14, 2024) includes her early works in Geometric Abstraction, preparatory works for The Dinner Party, as well as her other major series. The surprise addition to all of this is “The City of Ladies” on the 4th floor, which presents works of other women who have influenced and inspired Chicago—art and archival material from the likes of Hilma af Klint, Artemisia Gentileschi, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo and Virginia Woolf.

    I made it to a handful of galleries—had hoped for more, but getting around in a city jammed with tourists and increasing traffic took time. One of the shows I most wanted to see was Tetsuya Ishida at Gagosian in Chelsea, which features his meticulous paintings. In his works, a young man looking quite like the artist is repeatedly placed in nightmarish conditions—in one, his gigantic body is trapped inside a school building, his head and fingers sticking out; in another, a row of “salarymen” in suits are fed at a lunch counter via electric extruders dangling from the ceiling, held in place by impassive waiters.

    These are critiques of a regimented and depersonalized society that values conformity not individualism; technology aids and abets the process. The background is modern Japan, but when I look at these paintings of isolation and dehumanization, I can’t help thinking we are headed down the same path, sadly. The Japanese artist only had a decade of output; he died tragically at a train crossing when he was only 31. Two decades ago, I happened to see his work in Japan for an art fair and met him. Though we could only communicate through his limited English and my limited Japanese, I could sense his feverish dedication to art, to his vision of the world. I’ve never forgotten the work—or the artist.

     

  • Metro Art THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY

    Metro Art
    THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY

    Visiting the three new Downtown LA  Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and to show people outside what is inside, and vice versa. It creates a certain built-in welcome to pedestrians, both those planning to hop aboard a train as well as those who haven’t yet.

    Clare Rojas’s, Harmony, Little Tokyo/Arts District Station – A/E Line.

    The new Little Tokyo/Arts District Station is a wonderful example of transforming something functional into something beautiful, even joyful. The glass panels enclosing the entry deck bear a whimsical design by Clare Rojas. The Bay-area artist is known for her colorful, graphic style, often in a story-telling vein but also in more abstract patterns, as at this station. Here she paired tall curved, sail-like shapes with rectangular blocks that suggest skyscrapers; along the top runs a series of circles which look like the waxing and waning of the moon. The work is called Harmony; a gentle reminder of how we live in the city, but also in time—a time counted out by heavenly spheres.

    Meanwhile, at the next station, Historic Broadway, the noted LA artist Andrea Bowers uses letters in different sizes and colors to spell out two phrases, which appear both in English and Spanish. These are two phrases often heard in public rallies in the ’60s, “The people united will never be divided” (El pueblo unido jamás será vencido) and “By independence we mean the right to self-determination, self-government and freedom.” Bowers has said about this work, “I seek to reflect the diverse communities that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and their rights.”

    The phrases run across several panels and are divided by brackets, so a passerby might randomly pick up a word or two like “freedom” or “libertad.” They would have to pause to read the whole phrase, which is what an artist hopes for, right?—a moment of concentrated attention and, hopefully, reflection on what the work might mean.

    Ann Hamilton’s, under-over-under, at Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Station.

    Ann Hamilton is a well-known conceptual and performance artist based in Columbus, Ohio, and her appetite for public art was whetted when she did a mosaic for a subway station in New York City. After learning about the Metro Art program, and submitting her qualifications for consideration for public art opportunities in the LA transit system, she was selected for a commission at the new Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill Station, specifically for the elevator banks. Six elevators go from the lower level to the street level of the station, which is sandwiched between a view of DTLA buildings and a plaza with The Broad museum and Otium restaurant—nearby is MOCA, as well as Disney Hall and the Music Center complex.

    “For me the challenge was can we take something like vinyl and give it the fineness of something hand-drawn,” Hamilton said during a phone interview. Her project, under-over-under, put together ideas of urban intersections with weaving, and she began to draw by hand parallel lines that were like threads of cloth; she reminded me that in her early days she worked with textiles. The drawn lines were translated onto blue vinyl overlays, which were applied to the glass walls of the elevators and of the exteriors. “As the shaft of the elevator travels up and down, you’re literally weaving the pattern,” she added.

    I mentioned that I felt a certain calming sensation as the lines crossed—maybe it was the lull of being in motion, maybe it was the blue. “That was partly was my intention,” Hamilton admitted. “How does it wrap you, you’re now inside the cloth. It’s like the feeling of that as much as the image.” 

    Many more infrastructure projects are on the horizon. To learn more about opportunities with Metro Art, visit metro.net/art and click on Art Opportunities.

  • SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Coachella and New York

    SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS
    Coachella and New York

    Melrose Hill or Bust

    We now have critical culture-mass in the area of Western Avenue between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard: half a dozen galleries have settled in, to be joined by LAXART any time now (the latter was supposed to have opened last year). This area has been dubbed “Melrose Hill” in some announcements, although Melrose Hill is actually elsewhere. That aside, the biggest boy on the block is David Zwirner from New York, with two adjoining buildings and a third under construction. The inaugural show in the north building was strategic and well-timed—“Coming Back to See Through, Again,” Njideka Akunyili Crosby in her first show with Zwirner. She’s one of LA’s most gifted artists, and her large works on paper are wonderfully layered—both narratively and literally—with patches of photo transfer juxtaposed with painting.

    “I’m Nigerian, I’m American; you can be both,” she said in a recent New York Times interview: “I think places are richer for having difference.” In one painting, Still You Bloom in the Land of No Gardens, a mother staring directly out from the picture plane lovingly holds her young daughter in a backyard, while beautiful green fronds and vines swirl up and around them. Another, New Haven (Enugu) in New Haven (CT), is an interior still life, the left half taken up by a closet full of colorful clothing, while our eye is drawn to a small table on the right with its teapot, plant and a framed photograph of a young girl in a white dress. These are portraits of intimacy and tenderness, while the interlaced photo-collages reference a wider world; they are taken from her own archives and from Nigerian magazines.

    Jean-Michel Basquiat in LA, photo by Brad Branson.

    Grand Avenue’s Art Stars

    Another hotbed of art is currently on Grand Avenue in DTLA—remember, you can now get there by the Metro and not worry about the exorbitantly priced parking. There’s the stunning Keith Haring show at the Broad, “Keith Haring: Art is For Everybody” (up through Oct. 8). There’s the very smart look at art in LA before the building of Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–’80s” at MoCA Grand (up through March 10, 2024). Then there’s the “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” immersive (up through Oct. 15) in the building across from Disney Hall. For art aficionados the latter is quite worthwhile, as it includes around 200 drawings and paintings from Basquiat’s short but meteoric career. Some are displayed in replicated rooms including his studio, where his work covers the floor and walls. Another section recreates his childhood home, with the living room on one side and dining room on the other. It’s very ’60s middle-class Brooklyn. Basquiat was born into a well-off family, although he had to deal with his parents’ separation and his mother’s mental illness, and became a rebel, taking drugs and quitting school.

    Much of the art is hung like a regular exhibition, according to chronology and themes in his art. These are accompanied by pithy, well-written text panels. This loving tribute to an artist who died far too young—it’s still shocking to think he died at 27—was curated by his two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux. So naturally it feels personal—very different from what one usually sees at a museum.

    These immersives are not cheap—admission prices for the Basquiat show range from $28 to $35. Museum prices have been creeping up too, but here in LA the trend has been toward free admission. That includes the Hammer, MoCA and The Broad (although the Keith Haring show requires a special ticket which costs $22 for adults). You can even get into LACMA for free on weekdays after 3 p.m. if you are an LA County resident—something I only found out this year.

    Still from Barbie.

    Barbie vs. Oppie

    At the cinema it’s been the summer of Barbenheimer, so it would be amiss not to opine on the two movies that opened the same weekend and have throngs streaming back into theaters. In case you have been living under a rock or in deep isolation, Barbie, directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, is based on the ultra-skinny, femmy doll that girls have been playing with since the late 1950s. Oppenheimer, directed and written by Christopher Nolan, is about physicist Robert Oppenheimer who assumed a god-like aura when he became “father of the atomic bomb” in 1945, but was subsequently brought down during the Red Scare of the next decade.

    Let me just say, Barbie is the winner. Not only because it’s a blockbuster hit, bringing in over a billion dollars, Barbie is also one of the funniest and most inventive films you will see this year—and the most political—playing on our notions of the Barbiedom (whether you love it or hate it), hyper-consumption and patriarchy.

    Margot Robbie plays a pitch-perfect stereotypical Barbie in Barbieland, a confectionary fantasy with lots of pink and lots of feel-good. Until one day during a pool party, with 100 of her closest friends, she begins to have thoughts of death and the Real World. To repair the rift in the fantasy-reality continuum, she travels to the Real World—with Ken (Ryan Gosling) as a stowaway—where men look at her lustfully, as an object, while Ken finds himself admired just for being a white guy. Insert a visit to Mattel headquarters, an LA high school and Santa Monica Beach, and Barbie gets an education she brings back to Barbieland. So does Ken, who finds patriarchy very appealing indeed.

    I just went to see Barbie again out in the burbs, and it was packed on a Tuesday night, despite running at what looks like three
    theaters in the multiplex. There were lots of girls and women, of course, but there were also lots of men, who also laughed heartily at the jokes about patriarchy. We’ve learned something about toxic masculinity this past decade, and Barbie so very cleverly plays on how ridiculous, even crippling, our traditional definitions of male and female behavior can make us.

     

  • New Art in the Metro System

    New Art in the Metro System

    With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro Art, the transportation agency’s public art program, required a public engagement component for every project, and the artists found different ways to make those connections meaningful.

    Mark Steven Greenfield’s Red Car Requiem at Historic Broadway Station pays homage to the Red Cars, the nickname for the Pacific Electric Railway system, which was an extensive mass transit system that ran throughout Southern California in the last century. In the 1920s it was the largest electric railway system in the world, covering over 1000 miles of track.

    The artist himself has memories of the Red Car. “My father was in the service, and we were out of town quite a bit,” said Greenfield. “Once when we came back, the Red Car was gone. Overnight it disappeared.” This project is his way of recalling a system that provided mass transportation to millions of Angelenos, as Metro is doing today. “I’m a student of history, to me history is really important,” he added.

    Mark Steven Greenfield, Red Car Requiem (detail), at Historic Broadway Station

    He did his community outreach by preparing a survey sent out by the Cal State LA Alumni Association, culminating in a Zoom discussion, and now Metro has an archive of personal memories of the Red Car. His final design was abstract. “I wanted to convey the energy behind the Red Car—the vibration, sound, movement,” he asserted. The image is of a series of fragmented rosettes or wheels in red, orange and yellow, with pieces spinning off of them which runs steady on the concourse level, the longest continuous piece Metro Art has ever commissioned—148 feet long and 10 feet high. The work is a tour de force of mosaics composed of millions of tiny, hand-cut pieces of glass, and produced in Cuernavaca, Mexico, over a six-month period.

    Audrey Chan’s design borrowed directly from her public engagement: for Will Power Allegory she interviewed many people connected to the area where her work is located, the Little Tokyo/Arts District station. During one Nisei Week, she held a workshop at The Japanese American Community & Cultural Center to discuss historical images and her project.

    Audrey Chan’s, “Will Power Allegory,” at Little Tokyo/Arts District Station

    Will Power Allegory includes 14 panels on the platform level of the station, each featuring people or a public gathering, such as the traditional Japanese Obon Festival, which happens in Little Tokyo every year, or a Gabrielino-Tongva ceremonial dance or a group of protestors. These large, brightly hued panels are made of porcelain enamel steel, translated into the durable material by an artwork fabrication company in Tumwater, Washington, that creates museum-quality work.

    “It’s loosely thematic, I wanted there to be a lot of fluidity between different time periods, and people,” Chan said. “There are communities overlapping in various areas. I needed it to work as a whole piece, but then, also, as individual compositions.” Only one panel includes a central portrait, portraying Biddy Mason, the African American woman who was born a slave but became a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist in early Los Angeles.

    Along the bottom of most panels is a procession of smaller figures of various cultures and dress. “That’s a way for the people in the station to connect to the artwork,” said Chan, “because everyone in the station is walking in some direction.”

    Many more infrastructure projects are on the horizon. To learn more about opportunities with Metro Art, visit metro.net/art and click on Art Opportunities.

  • THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION Documentaries Trumped by Biopics

    THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION
    Documentaries Trumped by Biopics

    Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been rediscovered.

    One would be Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a visionary Swedish artist now credited as being one of the first abstract painters, predating Kandinsky and Mondrian. Her life has been imagined into the biopic Hilma, directed by veteran director Lasse Hallström, with his daughter Tora Hallström playing the young Hilma, and his wife Lena Olin playing the older Hilma. If that sounds like trouble, you’d be half-right.

    Af Kling trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm and painted her share of portraits and landscapes to make a living, all the while enduring male contempt, as the movie reveals. But she had a higher calling, a mystical one. “I want to study the world,” her character says in the film, “and see how things are connected.” Eventually she heeded her inner voice and joined four other women to form a group called “The Five,” to worship and seance together. In her 40s, she began making very large geometric paintings, believing them to be channeled and meant for the “Temple.” Toward the end of her life, she believed these works to be ahead of their time—which indeed they were—and had them put away in storage. That’s how the story goes, and Hallström follows the convention. What’s sad but definitely true is that in Klint’s time these works were rarely shown in public.

    This artist seems a perfect subject for a biopic, with her revolutionary art and her proto-feminist leanings. Unfortunately, this film portrays her as a petulant teenager, with a circle of giggling and girlish female friends. It’s so sad to see her story trivialized, and her lovers treated more as utilitarian than heartfelt—one of them is quite wealthy, so her purse helps pay for af Klint’s expenses and many dinners out. The next one appears to be her housekeeper. With the director’s daughter cast as the title character, all the other characters got severely underwritten. On the other hand, the brief appearances of the soulful Lena Olin made me wish she had far more screen time.

    Still from the biopic “Hilma” (2022), ©Juno Films.

    For those of us who were charmed by the unexpected twists and turns of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), her new film, Showing Up, is quite a disappointment. Protagonist Lizzy is a ceramic artist, played by Michelle Williams with dreary listlessness. She has a boring admin job at an arts-and-crafts college in Portland, Oregon, and is preparing for her own solo show at a local gallery. Meanwhile, she has no hot water, and her landlady is too busy to deal with it because she’s also an artist—having two shows opening soon. Lizzy’s family, naturally, is also dysfunctional.  

    Lizzy’s parents are divorced, and her mother runs the department in which Lizzy works; her father is a narcissist, and her brother is on the spectrum. It’s not clear why Lizzy takes it upon herself to try to fix everything, especially when she’s so unhappy about doing it and seems to be running out of time to prep for her show.

    This is a slow film, and one particularly long scene of Lizzy shaping a clay figure with her fingers feels like a documentary insert. Perhaps one on-target message the film gets across is that the life of an artist isn’t all fun and openings; a lot of it may be a grind. However, most artists I know get a lot more pleasure out of their work than Lizzy does.

    The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons captures an artist’s life in an informed and captivating way. Directors Judd Tully and Harold Crooks skillfully intercut archival footage with interviews with friends and colleagues (Betye Saar, Suzanne Jackson, Henry Taylor, Lorna Simpson), and even a few with the publicity-shy artist himself. 

    We see the remarkable range of Hammons’ work, and the originality of his thinking. Many of us know Hammons for his body prints, in which he applied his own oiled body to large sheets of paper, then added charcoal or other pigment. Initiated in 1968 and continuing for about a decade, these were very much about Black identity and its social suppression. But this film shows us he did so much more in the way of sculpture and performance art, once setting up a blanket on the streets of New York in 1983 to sell snowballs, and calling it Bliz-aard Ball Sale. Some sections of the doc are also illustrated with animation, a style that looks like torn paper—and it works.  

  • SHOPTALK: LA Art News Coachella and New York

    SHOPTALK: LA Art News
    Coachella and New York

    Coachella’s Flower Power

    It’s summer, and time to take a breath after the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since last fall. The art world has ramped back up—new exhibitions and new galleries (Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, the second for François Ghebaly) have opened. We also had our spate of art fairs earlier this year, with Frieze LA almost doubling its size, in terms of both its gallery roster and its new venue, the Barker Hangar. The main tent (there were two) was constantly jammed, and parking was at a premium; the rumor mill buzzes they may be looking for a new location for 2024.

    For this issue, I’ll focus on two things—one, an interview with artist Maggie West during the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in April, and two, a trip to New York in May. Yes, THAT festival, which I had a chance to attend for the first time. It sold out the first weekend, with some 125,000 people in attendance; I went the second weekend and found it extremely crowded. West’s was one of four new art installations commissioned this year—along with Kumkum Fernando, Vincent Leroy and Güvenç Özel—plus several holdover presentations from previous fests.

    West’s “Eden” is an expansion of her regular practice in which she takes time-lapse videos of flowers and plants, following their blooms and slight movements. In post-production, she combines and manipulates the images, often erasing the background so the subjects appear to be floating in space. The details of these plant forms were projected onto larger-than-life extruded sculptures in the shape of flowers and fronds, some up to 60 feet tall.  The work provided a lyrical, striking reminder of nature in the very man-made setting of a vast contemporary music festival.  

    “During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time gardening,” said West. “Obviously, I had a lot of free time—I was so stressed out.  A lot of galleries, a lot of things went under, so for me I started gardening as a way to cope with that, and I got really into time-lapse photography.” Not surprisingly, her recent body of work reflects her fascination for flowers and plants. She added, “There’s a sense of hope and renewal when you see things grow and change and bloom.”

    One also notices a lot more detail when images are enlarged, as was the case at Coachella, where people could walk up to and between the sculptural pieces. “A lot of my work involves a recontextualization of subjects by using colored lighting,” West said. “It gives you a new perspective; it makes you take a second look at it.”

    The Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey, The Met, 2023.

    Summer in New York

    In the second half of May, I took my first trip to New York in four or five years. The beat of the city is back, with bars and restaurants filled to the brim, and the Met packed with long lines for two blockbuster shows (Karl Lagerfeld and van Gogh). The Roof Garden Commission featured a Lauren Halsey installation, a series of sculptures that recreates ancient Egyptian columns and statuary with African faces and African-American graffiti on block walls made to look like walls of ancient tombs. I also passed through the Cecily Brown show. She has never been one of my faves, but I like these recent paintings, with her confident handling of very drippy paint that feels extraordinarily playful and luxuriant.  

    One afternoon I spent wandering Chelsea, where galleries are so densely packed you can easily drop into a dozen over a few hours. At David Zwirner was Yayoi Kusama’s “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers” (up through July 21) which included painting and epic sculpture—one room was filled with three large undulating screens covered with polka dots, as if her pumpkins had unfurled; another room contained a couple of her gigantic psychedelic flower sculptures. Unfortunately, to enter the new Infinity Mirror, there was a line down the block, so I skipped that.

    Interviewing Kusama in Japan over 20 years ago was one of the most riveting professional moments of my life—she was semi-lucid, although her memory was selective, recalling, for example, how frugal her onetime boyfriend Joseph Cornell was.  They once went out to dinner with another couple and she recollected that he “decided that the four of us would share one dish between us.” She recounted all this with her deadpan face, but there was a certain humor in the way she told the story—breathlessly, with hardly a pause, as if she were rushing to get the story out.

    Kusama became known for her net paintings in which she knit together a series of wavy lines across the canvas, creating a “net” effect. These were largely monochromatic, with occasional introduction of other background colors, such as yellow. In contrast, her recent paintings are a riot of color, and quite brilliant arrangements of lozenges, fat lines and human faces. It’s her gift that they somehow work together.

    One of the delights of Chelsea is coming upon the unexpected treasures. For me there were two discoveries. One was Kelly Akashi’s “Infinite Bodies” at Tanya Bonakdar—a truly sublime grouping of sculpture and installation, some pieces displayed on rammed-earth pedestals in a very spare space. The pieces featured parts of her body: a slim torso, dangling legs and hands, along with bronze, glass and found objects.

    The other discovery was Colombian photographer Ruby Rumié at the Nohra Haime Gallery, in the exhibition “Us, 172 Years Later.” There were two portrait series here, both of Colombians with their favorite foods; one close-up and the other full-length. The way Rumié has arranged the foods, such as peppers, cherimoya and blue crab, is both whimsical and strangely beautiful—many of them are worn as headgear. Then there are the faces of her subjects—old, young, male, female—faces that have remarkable character and directness, grounded in dignity and a powerful sense of identity. The background has been taken from 19th-century colonial-era prints, which to me suggests the history behind each person. It’s also a way to visually flatten the background and let us focus on the faces and personal attributes.  

    I especially love the way the artist depicts herself. In one enlargement (C-prints mounted on aluminum), she’s walking barefoot wearing a long, off-white cloak with matching trousers and carrying a big bundle of bananas. She’s holding them up against her face so that you can’t see her features. This tells me she’s a chronicler—that her face is not important, but her story is.  I really look forward to seeing much more from her. 

    Ruby Rumié, “Us, 172 Years Later,” 2022.

  • ART THAT TRANSPORTS Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations

    ART THAT TRANSPORTS
    Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations

    The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail.  I’m also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station.

    Having lived in cities with extensive light rail systems (Washington, DC, Tokyo, Hong Kong), I love good public transportation. They are not only an efficient and affordable means of transportation in spread-out cities, they are also places for meeting and gathering, dissemination of information, and public art.  The art provides pauses and markers of time and space, offering doses of visual delight, kernels of thought and reminders of local and regional culture and history.   In this latter role, they can help elevate civic life and community.

    The three new stations will feature eight site-responsive art installations commissioned by Metro and include a number of well-known artists from Southern California, as well as Ann Hamilton, the noted installation/performance artist based in Columbus, Ohio.  To learn more about Metro Art, I spoke with Zipporah Yamamoto,  senior director of special projects in the Metro Art program.  She explains that 40 years ago the Board of Metro’s predecessor agency decided on a “percent for art” program; a program which sets aside a portion of construction costs for transit capital projects, to be used for public art.

    “Under construction view (detail) of Clarence Williams’, “Migrations,” at Historic Broadway Station.

    “We try to make that half percent go as far as possible,” says Yamamoto.  “We do that by getting involved early on in the project, and look at the project and how it’s evolving, and how we can work closely with the architects and the design team to get the most impact for riders.”  In 2014 there was a call to artists to apply to get qualified for consideration.  Then a panel of art professionals reviewed those qualified and ranked them according to a set rubric; the most highly ranked were invited to submit proposals for specific stations.  At this point materials would be identified by Metro  Art staff—materials like glass, porcelain enamel steel and mosaic which would withstand the wear and tear of exposure.   “All of the artists who were finalists were also paid to develop those proposals, and to make a presentation to the panel,” says Yamamoto.  “We don’t ask artists to develop proposals for things for free.”

    Under construction view (detail) of Andrea Bowers’s, “The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program,” La Causa),” at Historic Broadway Station

    After a proposal was approved, artists would go into a more detailed design and development phase, with more time to get to know the community and geography.  Artists Audrey Chan and Pearl C. Hsiung conducted outreach and workshop programs; Mark Steven Greenfield worked with the California State University, Los Angeles  Alumni Association to send out a survey about the Red Car, an earlier light rail system that served the region that would be the subject of his project.

    The results have been vibrant and varied.  The Little Tokyo/Arts District station will feature Clare Rojas’ Harmony with its abstracted landscape and Audrey Chan’s Will Power Allegory made up of 14 panels with colorful vignettes of people from the Arts District, Skid Row, Bronzeville and Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe.  The Historic Broadway station will feature Andrea Bowers’ “The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program,” La Causa),” Mark Steven Greenfield’s Red Car Requiem and Clarence Williams’ Migrations.  The  Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill station will feature Ann Hamilton’s over-under-over with a pattern inside and outside an elevator tower, Pearl C. Hsiung’s 60-foot tall glass mosaic,  High Prismatic and Mungo Thomson’s Negative Space (STScI-2015-02).

    Under construction view of Mark Steven Greenfield’s, “Red Car Requiem,” at Historic Broadway Station

    Don’t forget the fun places you can go with the Connector—Little Tokyo boasts a slew of Japanese restaurants and shops—be sure to check out the Japanese sweets shop Fugetsu-do and popular ramen restaurants on First Street; the Japanese American National Museum, next to MOCA Geffen, is across from the metro stop and award-winning East West Players has its theater nearby.  The Arts District with its art galleries, including mega-gallery Hauser  & Wirth, are within walking distance.   Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill station will let you out steps from The Broad museum and Disney Concert Hall, with the Music Center and its three theaters only a couple blocks away.

    Many more infrastructure projects are on the horizon. To learn more about opportunities with Metro Art, visit metro.net/art and click on Art Opportunities.

  • SHOPTALK: LA Art News Hammer, NY Galleries

    SHOPTALK: LA Art News
    Hammer, NY Galleries

    Hammering is Done

    The Hammer Museum has been transformed, and it’s happened so gradually over the past two decades that we barely noticed it. Sometimes one section would be closed off, sometimes another, and every so often a new section would be unveiled. There’s the bridge that crosses the central courtyard, the revived restaurant, the spiffy gift shop and last year the dedicated space for works on paper, which is a jewel box of a gallery—literally, a box within a box to look at smaller works in an intimate space. Right now it’s featuring a wonderful retrospective of Bridget Riley’s drawings.

    On March 26, the Hammer opened its completely renovated home, with several new exhibitions thrown in. “We altered every square inch of this museum,” says Director Ann Philbin. Kudos to Philbin, who had the vision to remake this building and this museum, bringing an obscure university museum into citywide and nationwide prominence. She’s also had the determination to raise the money—and to see it all through. 

    The building has never felt more of a whole, and the beautifully spun web of red twine that engulfs the entrance is a sweeping welcome which was made by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, with the help from UCLA students. Altogether, 40,000 square feet of new space has been added, and the museum now spans the entire block along Wilshire Boulevard, with Michael Maltzan acting as the lead architect throughout. 

    There’s so much to say, but let’s take a look at the two corners on Wilshire. They’ve moved their main entrance to the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, although you have to approach it from the side, up a ramp from Wilshire and towards the corner. Meanwhile that corner has now become a small, raised platform to wait for your friends or take a moment to pause. It’s a great way to transition into the museum, and in a chat with Maltzan, I learned that they had that move in mind. 

    The other corner now has a small outdoor patio, currently occupied by Sanford Biggers’ gigantic and rather mysterious bronze sculpture, Oracle, based on an ancient statue of Zeus, but this one with an African American head. Inside is a new media installation, Particulates, a spectacular laser-light work by Rita McBride.

    Desert X 2023 installation view, Lauren Bon, The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of the artist and Desert X.

    Desert X

    It’s been a particularly good year for Desert X in the Coachella Valley, with a new sensibility added by guest curator Diana Campbell. Campbell is the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation in Bangladesh and the chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit. She grew up in Southern California and used to vacation with her family in the Coachella Valley, though now she is based in Bangladesh. While I don’t believe you have to be from the area to appreciate it, it’s no accident that two of my favorite installations this time around were also by artists who have spent time in the desert: Lauren Bon and Gerald Clarke, two of the 12 artists featured in this fourth edition of Desert X.

    Bon’s piece, The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart, takes place in an abandoned motel on the north end of Palm Springs, where it can only be seen in the evening when night falls. A steel-mesh sculpture modeled after the heart of the blue whale slowly rises out of the murky waters in a swimming pool lit by a single underwater light. The water has been trucked from the polluted Salton Sea—Bon suggests whales used to be in these parts. Someone is hand-cranking a pulley to lift the sculpture out, then they slowly let it drift downwards, as the crackling of static gets louder and louder.

    Not far away, in a stretch of land by a community center,
    Gerald Clarke has created a gameboard you can walk on, Immersion, with a maze pattern based on basketry of the Cahuilla community of Indians. In this one you advance by correctly answering questions about Native Americans. The goal, he says, is to get to the center of the maze-like layout. “I hired two scholars of Native American history and culture to create the questions,” he says, “and then I went over them.”

    Gajin Fujita’s exhibition “True Colors” at L.A. Louver. Courtesy of L.A. Louver.

    Comings and Goings

    They’re still coming! Yet more new galleries keep popping up. Only recently did I finally visit the three Nino Mier galleries on Santa Monica Boulevard—smallish spaces showing paintings and ceramics. It’s an interesting strategy, to grab small available storefronts and treat them as you would different spaces in a big gallery. They are very close together, so you can walk from one to another.

    Earlier this year Sean Kelly Gallery opened up its first outside-of–New York branch on North Highland. It seems the trend to take old buildings and renovate, sometimes even add to them, making sure you have an outdoor space for parking and for receptions, as needed. Lisson, which just opened in mid-April, was able to celebrate with such a space—the parking lot was used for a very lively reception with bar and grill. Their show of Carmen Herrera is a standout—the longtime adherent to geometric abstraction died last year at 106.

    Next up are openings of new spaces by James Fuentes, Marian Goodman and David Zwirner. The latter has put off their LA opening so many times, I’ve stopped trying to chase down that news—but they’re opening with a show by Njideka Akunyili
    Crosby. Her painting at the Hammer’s current group show is one of the most memorable, and she has a mini show at the Huntington.

    Last but definitely not least, I have to add that one of the best solo shows up is at our own homegrown L.A. Louver—
    Gajin Fujita’s “True Colors.” He’s a master of meticulously crafted and beautiful paintings which mash up Japanese woodblock and LA street-art aesthetics. There are samurais and geishas swimming amidst graffiti tagging, and also a very moving portrait of his sweetly smiling mother, with a small elephant in the background, as she slips into old age.

  • SHOPTALK: LA Art News

    SHOPTALK: LA Art News

    Arrival: Santa Monica Airport, FRIEZE LA

    Is there such a thing as too much art? My eyeballs think so, as they began to glaze over Saturday afternoon while browsing the art fare at the Felix art fair at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was Day Four of my marathon. 

    In February we had quite a week of art, including the opening of at least four art fairs, and many many art exhibitions and art events.  First, I’ll address the Big One. Frieze LA (Feb. 16–19) has migrated to the Santa Monica Airport, after starting at the Paramount lot for two years, then moving to Beverly Hills last year. A section with younger galleries and galleries showing “historic work” was in the Barker Hangar; the larger, more glam, part was in a white tent on a hill running along Centinela. It was something of a walk—I did it on my first visit—but fortunately by Thursday they had frequent shuttles running between, which gave you a chance to see some of the special art projects. Still, it was nothing like what the Paramount backlot offered in terms of unusual spaces—there were some wonderful installations and performances then. Now there’s less of that while everyone hurries to see the galleries. After all, there were over 120 of them, more than ever before—some major New York and European dealers like Paula Cooper, Lisson, Thaddaeus Ropac and David Zwirner among them;  35,000 visitors passed through Frieze’s gates. 

    Major sales were reported, I’ll just mention a few here but the sums are rather staggering. Hauser & Wirth did especially well, selling  Mark Bradford’s painting Shall Rest in Honor There (2023) for $3.5 million, Henry Taylor’s painting Untitled (2022) for $450,000, and a Luchita Hurtado painting for $225,000.  Several galleries with booths featuring single artists sold out completely—David Kordansky Gallery sold out of paintings by Chase Hall, Gagosian sold out of paintings and works on paper by Rick Lowe, Victoria Miro sold all 18 paintings by Doron Langberg.  Prices still tend to be secretive, though, as in the announcement that Pace sold “a significant Agnes Martin painting for an undisclosed sum.”

    The Santa Monica Airport has been the site of many a previous art fair, so it was surprising how jammed up parking was into and out of the fair, partly because a huge former parking lot was carved out for ride share. We do need ride share, but the space could have been allocated better. And yes, they charged $35 for parking, which quickly sold out. Frieze hasn’t committed to another year at the airport, so let’s see where it lands next year.

    Felix, Number Two

    On Saturday afternoon our homegrown art fair Felix (Feb. 15–19) was thronged with visitors. I made my way through those located around poolside, and the sound of people laughing and splashing in the pool was soundtrack. The first things striking my tired eyes—a pile of aliens with long snaky bodies by Sylvie Fleury and Esben Weile Kjær, blown-up floaties lying in the patio assigned to Andersen’s of Copenhagen. “They were meant for the swimming pool,” explained gallery Director Lene Renner. “Here, let me show you the photos.” They were delightful shots of these creatures swimming around in her cell phone. Hotel management insisted they be removed, alas.

    Another standout was the hallway gallery of Adam Cohen, “A Hug from the Art World,” which featured miniature sculpted figures by Jeffrey Dalessandro. The artist repurposed them from toy action figures. These weren’t just anybody, of course, they were of art-world luminaries—gallerists, collectors and even a few artists. Included were Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Beth Rudin DeWoody and Yayoi Kusama. The work was priced at $3000 per, $5500 for paired figures, and a bit extra for those with props—the Damien Hirst stood beside a shark in a tank. A number had already been sold by the time I arrived—many to the subjects themselves. Sadly, I did not find myself among them. (Not that I would have purchased it, mind you.)

    There were other fairs around town, including the long-running L.A. Art Show at the Convention Center and Spring Break at Skylight in Culver City. Bergamot Station joined in with a day-long celebration on Saturday, Feb.18, and art friends said it was so jammed that they couldn’t get into the lot. There were openings, drinks and a special emphasis on photography at several galleries.

    Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Prince Anthony Hall, 2020, oil on linen, 96 x 72 in., courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA, photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

    Roberts Projects Revisited

    Between fairs I visited the impressive new location of Roberts Projects on La Brea—just a few blocks above Wilshire. Completely renovated, this building has lofty ceilings and roomy gallery spaces, the largest currently filled with an inaugural show by Kehinde Wiley, “Colorful Realm” (through April 8). Each large oval painting in this show features a Black man or woman in a classical pose from European painting, except they are wearing contemporary street clothing and sneakers. The subjects are set against backgrounds of meticulously painted flowers, leaves and vines that echo Edo-period paintings—Edo being the period in Japan when the mercantile class and its tastes flourished. The painting is exquisite, and the cultural interweaving inspired, making this one of LA’s best current shows. While going through Frieze, I couldn’t help but notice the number of works which, similarly, feature quite consciously posed Black men, held in like dignity and grace.

    Nao Bustamante @Grave Gallery, photo by Scarlet Cheng.

    Grave Gallery

    Nao Bustamante is one our art treasures. Her work in video and performance is often exaggerated and campy, but comments on serious issues of violence, gender and even life and death.  When I read about the opening of her Grave Gallery, on the site of her own cemetery plot, I knew I had to go, despite being bleary-eyed. It’s located at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery off Melrose, where many other great and good (and not so good) celebrities have found their way, including director Cecil B. DeMille, actress Judy Garland, singer Yma Sumac. 

     Bustamante has long been fascinated—even obsessed—with death since she was eight, when her godmother and two daughters died in a car accident. In January she bought a plot at Hollywood Forever. “I finally decided that the only way I was going to handle it was to make it an art project,” she explained. For the performance she donned a huge black cloak topped with a metal pail, and spoke through a vintage metal megaphone that mediums of the past would have used. She called out, banged the pail with a stick, spoke to the dead, and eventually made her way to her own plot—followed by about 60 attendees. Bustamante got quite emotional thinking about those who have passed on. “There’s been so much death, there’s been so much life,” she said, before shouting, “Where’s the damn champagne?!” And then toasted us all.