Dear Reader, I’m an artist, who has quit making art. It’s been over a decade since I last shot a video or painted. Yes, I miss the hell out of it, but I’d rather give it up if I can’t give it my all. That was the decision I made when I started this magazine 11 years...
Dear Reader, The new year is a time to look forward, but in this issue we also take stock. Staff writer Ezrha Jean Black does so with her popular (and for obvious reasons, not so popular) Top Ten LA shows of 2017. Ezrha works hard to be fair-minded yet critical, with...
Dear Reader, In this issue we go beyond LA to interview three artists who live and work outside the country. British performance artist/musician Cosey Fanni Tutti talks with columnist Zak Smith about her new book and life as a band member. Skot Armstrong interviews...
This past August I decided to brave the coastal traffic to make a visit to the Lux Art Institute near San Diego. I was on deadline and woke up with a cold, but I had been notified that mega-artist and LA expat Jorge Pardo was scheduled to speak as his...
Dear Reader, This new Fall art season takes off with a bang in Southern California, as the Getty’s second installment of Pacific Standard Time (PST) gets under way all over Los Angeles. PST: LA/LA spotlights Latin American art and Latino art. Once we started digging...
Dear Reader, “Write what you know”: this famous advice from fellow Missourian Mark Twain has always resonated with me. I apply it to my writing and I relied on it when I used to make art. The quote was delivered by many a professor and mentor in my past. It made...
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Utah. She is co-curator (with Glenn Phillips, curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute) for the PST LA/LA exhibition of “Video Art In Latin...
Dear Readers, When I heard that Chris Kraus’ feminist cult book, I Love Dick, was being made into a TV series, I couldn’t actually believe it. My first reaction was: How? How could someone come up with a television script of that book? The main “action” in the book is...
“Get off Bonnie Brae!” Chris Kraus shouts from the car speakerphone when I resort to calling her for directions. I’m lost in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood that borders downtown Los Angeles, looking for the writer/critic’s house. I wasn’t sure if Kraus raised her...
I forgot to eat! My stomach grumbled as I mentioned to my friend that I hoped there might be some food at the opening of Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth” exhibit at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. Entering the building complex—not unlike a...
Dear Readers In our last issue, which came out in January, I wrote about Trump becoming our president and the effect this potentially disastrous turn of events might have upon the art world... or not. In any case, in my last sentence I said that we would not be...
Dear Readers Happy New Year! Last October I was invited to moderate a panel titled: “Is Art our Last Safe Place?” The general topic was whether art could be healing in times of war, poverty, starvation, overpopulation ...you know, all that stuff that just keeps...
Dear Readers It’s our Miami issue, meaning this issue goes to Miami. It really doesn’t have anything to do with Miami or the fairs. But it is an issue we designed, content-wise, by what we thought Miami fairgoers might like to read. This year we made it our Interview...
The grassy plains of southern Missouri came into view as the plane prepared to land in Springfield, a small city on the edge of the Ozarks. I grew up in a much smaller town not far from there. Springfield was the big city where Mom took us to buy new school clothes....
Get your Sexy Beast on, and don’t forget to bring your checkbook. The fundraiser art auction for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles is happening again, and again at the fabulous Ace Hotel Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. I understand there are still some tickets left.As...
Dear Readers It’s our birthday! We’re 10 years old this September. I’ve been writing this letter for 10 years—it’s almost unbelievable to me. A decade is always something to pay attention to, I think. A relationship of any kind seems like an accomplishment after 10...
Thirty-seven years ago Lydia Takeshita and her college students formed what would become the LA Artcore Center, presently located in Japan Town in downtown Los Angeles, and later added the Brewery Annex location in Lincoln Heights. Takeshita is the founder, executive...
Dear Readers This is our summer issue, an issue that has become the one I’m not sure matters. It’s summer! Who cares about work? Who cares about art? Whatever it is you’re doing, you just want to get it over with, and get the hell out.It’s ingrained in us. The...