Dear Reader, As I’ve been saying since the dawn of Artillery (16 years ago now): LA is the most vibrant art city in the country. This isn’t exactly a revelation, so why focus on LA—yet again—in this current issue? Because we felt it was worth revisiting the subject in...
Dear Reader, My late husband was a historical biographer with four published books; three of them were written during our marriage. It was an eye-opener to live with someone who writes for a living. For one thing, it seemed like he did a lot of nothing. He would...
When I first encountered Tim Youd, he was sitting at a metal table outside an art gallery in Chinatown, tap-tap-tapping away on a portable typewriter, just minding his own business. Most of the crowd didn’t pay him much mind either. Earlier that summer, Youd found...
Dear Reader, This issue is about art being made outside of Los Angeles and New York. If art is being made and shown at reputable galleries in those cities, it has the stamp of approval: Collectors can feel safe that their taste is superb and their investments are...
Dear Reader, I had the unexpected pleasure of spending four hours at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum with my 93-year-old mother-in-law recently. Not that visiting the Fogg is unusual—we’ve done it for years, practically every summer. But this time we spent four hours...
Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it...
Dear Reader, Happy Birthday to Artillery for turning 15 this year! And to celebrate this milestone we are covering how the world is going to hell! The climate crisis is our September theme and it wasn’t an impromptu decision or stop-the-presses situation because of...
Dear Reader, It is inexcusable to not be well read, mainly because it’s so easy to fix. Just read more! But who has time? Only recently, when a friend asked what book I was reading, I had to admit that all I’d been reading was art copy. He found that unacceptable and...
Dear Reader, Spring is in the air, skies are blue, daffodils are blooming and the art galleries are opening up. Makes you want to paint or write poetry or string along happy clichés! Yes, the world—at least here in Los Angeles—seems to be emerging from a long dark...
Dear Reader, It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain...
Dear Reader, I was going to start this letter with a Happy New Year! I should, right? It will be 2021 when this January/February issue comes out. We will have brought in the New Year, albeit with less fanfare than usual—it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that...
Dear Reader, As I write this, the election is little more than a week away. It is possible we still might not know who the next president will be when this November/December issue hits the streets. We will either be celebrating or crying. The already surreal fact that...
Dear Reader, It was unanimously decided that the theme for our September issue would be Democracy. There was no question about it: September is the Fall issue, the grand opening of the art season and more importantly, it’s two months before THE election. We weren’t...
Dear Reader, You may have noticed there was no May/June print edition of Artillery. Due to COVID-19, funds were low and galleries were shuttered, so we did an online-only issue. But we are back now with a Summer print edition, and we owe it all to a GoFundMe campaign...
Are you still changing exhibitions as you would if open and are the exhibitions virtual-only now? How’s that going? We continue to have our exhibitions onsite and our new one, HERland, will open on August 22. Our online initiative through the MOLAA en Casa program...
Dear Reader, Black artists have always mattered to Artillery. While we are always interested in representing all races within our pages, we are also aware that we can do more. Everyone can, and the recent protests all over the world are demanding that. As a...
Dear Reader, Our weekly newsletter has been addressing our shelter-in-place current status and with that I just want to chime in with most of our like-minded readers; we stand in solidarity with the present justified civil unrest. No one is proud of our country now,...
Dear Reader, The sun is sinking slowly outside my window as I sit at my desk with my trusty old cur by my side. I can feel the cool evening breeze and the quietude is almost alarming. This is a milestone for Artillery’s 13 years in publication: We put all our content...