Tarry Nights at LACMA It’s summer, but the traffic is as bad as ever, and the art world continues to percolate. Yours Truly recently came upon an evening concert at LACMA which was jam-packed from the stage at BP Plaza to where the museum conjoins with La Brea...
Ceramics is real-world alchemy, where a material mined from the earth is magically transformed by human ingenuity. I love the fact that the result can be rough and reveal the grit and minerals embedded in clay, or it can be highly refined as a smooth white porcelain...
In a short drive into the countryside of Maryland, about half an hour outside Washington, DC, is an exceptional private museum sited on 230 rolling acres, with buildings and outdoor sculpture thoughtfully tucked into the landscape. The Glenstone is the brainchild of...
The malaise of our times is encapsulated and iterated over and over in this year’s Venice Biennale—whether racial conflict, gender redefinition, women’s rights, immigration, environmental threats, or any combination thereof. One begins to wonder, as one wanders...
Artificial Intelligence Gets Uppity The future is closer than we think. Yours Truly has been binge-watching the series Humans on Amazon Prime, which has a remarkable cast playing “Synths,” or Synthetics, in a future-world where AI androids take over the menial and...
NEW FAIRS IN TOWN, PART 2 I don’t know about you, but Yours Truly is still recovering from our robust art fair season, when for one weekend in February we had five fairs bubbling up around the city. Seeing wonderful work was bliss, driving through traffic in the rain...
The Joshua Treenial returns this weekend, April 12-14, with a new slate of artists who look at the desert -- its people, its environment, and its off-the-grid spirit in “Paradise::Parallax.” One never knows what to expect at this home-grown desert art expo – anything...
Photo LA & LA Art Show Our eyeballs may fall out, there’s so very much to see with this cornucopia of art fairs in SoCal this winter. It started with Photo LA (Jan. 31–Feb. 3) returning after a year-hiatus and leaving the cramped Reef/LA Mart downtown for the...
Outsider artists, or untrained artists, have been variously labeled Primitive, Naïve, Visionary and Self-Taught. One of the things I like most about such artists is their distinct and fully-imagined worldview, a consciousness that exists without being overly precious...
Jane Brucker’s work has often revolved around memory and how it resides in objects, especially objects that have been worn or used by people we have known. Incorporating notions of ephemerality and decay, her work has a poignancy that touches on our sense of loss. ...
LA ARTS DISTRICT SANS ARTISTS LA, LA, our art scene is changing so rapidly. On a recent visit to the Arts District for a preview at Hauser & Wirth, I was struck by how tidy the neighborhood is looking these days. When that gallery opened two-and-a-half years ago,...
Stacen Berg, senior director at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, joined the gallery in 2011. Founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, the gallery now boasts branches in multiple cities, including London, Hong Kong and New York. When...
AI WEIWEI IN LA We haven’t seen much of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in these parts since LACMA presented his installation “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Head” in 2012. This fall he returned with a well-orchestrated splash—with three high-profile exhibitions opening in LA, all...
Who said being an artist was easy? Today Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known as the top-selling woman artist in the world, but it’s hard to believe how many difficulties she had to overcome before she got to where she is now. Or perhaps, not so hard to...
“Made in L.A.” has finally hits its stride—this fourth edition feels fresh with discoveries, both of artists you may know and many you may not. It features 32 artists, from emerging ones with promising talent to the exciting re-emergence of an artist who fell from the...
JUDY CHICAGO IN PASADENA “If men had babies, there would be thousands of images of the crowning,” Judy Chicago said in the early 1980s. The crowning is the moment the baby’s head begins to emerge from the birth canal. During a packed talk at the Women’s City Club of...
PST AFTERMATH “An investment in the arts is an investment in our future,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti in conjunction with the release of a report on the economic benefits of PST: LA/LA. The initiative “attracted millions of visitors, supported thousands of good-paying...
Windows often appear in art, sometimes as framing devices, sometimes as apertures to other worlds. In her new photographic series “The In Between,” Alexandra Hedison has come upon a way to do both, using ready-made vignettes. While exploring the streets of Paris, a...
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