What is a colorist painter? In the 19th century, the painter and critic Eugène Fromentin assessed that the work of colorist artists engage hues that are “rare, tender, or powerful, but resolutely [achieved by] a man skillful in feeling distinctions, or in rendering...
Carmina Escobar is an extreme vocalist with an active teaching practice. Born in Mexico and based in Los Angeles, Escobar investigates emotions, states of alienation, and the possibilities of interpersonal connection through voice performances that challenge our...
The collage-paintings of Anne Austin Pearce are unabashedly beautiful. Born, raised and educated in Lawrence, Kansas, Pearce was associate professor of art at Missouri's Rockhurst University until this year, when she assumed an associate professorship of studio art at...
Los Angeles-based artist Mary Corse is known as one of the few women involved in the 1960s and 1970s West Coast Light and Space Movement, but in her later incarnations, she should also be known for creating a bridge between the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock and...
Summer festivities abound in the warmer weather. There’s New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, and Cinespia Cemetery Screenings at LA’s own Hollywood Forever. Museums are no exceptions putting on events. LACMA used to host summer...
“Many years ago,” Maggie Nelson writes in her memoir, The Argonauts, “[the poet Anne] Carson gave a lecture ...at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in ...” Nelson writes that she “fastened” to the idea, which she...
When we withdraw from other people out of choice, we call the result privacy. When someone forces us into seclusion, it’s kidnapping. The artist Carolina Maki Kitagawa’s new show at Eastside International Los Angeles, “Story’s End No. 1 // Continúa El Cuento Nº....
In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement...
When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper? On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part...
On Thursday, May 24, the Broad Museum was infiltrated by a coven of four Latinx she-monsters wearing wigs on their faces, jeans tossed around their shoulders, and topless fake-hair onesies. In the Broad’s foyer, they appeared in the midst of a luxuriously-dressed LA...
On the evening of June 25, 2016, a group of gorgeous mutants rushed out of The Broad museum and began loving themselves and each other on South Grand Avenue. This band of performers, known collectively as Mutant Salon, is run by the LA-based visionary artist Young...
At Alias Books East, in Atwater Village, hangs an unfinished piece of sky. The artist and musician Matt Fishbeck made it by scrabbling a piece of denim-colored stick of oil pastel onto a board. The painting hovers on Alias Books East’s west-facing “art wall” next to...
In ancient days of strife and warfare, a death squad of bird-women used the strategies of sound and seduction to destroy their enemies. Homer gave the Sirens a starring role in book 12 of The Odyssey, where they attempt to divert Odysseus from his returning home to...
On Thursday evening, when performance artist Astrid Hadad began telling a glitter-bombed, sombrero-wearing rubber chicken that everything would be okay, I remembered that there was still good in the world. The day’s news had been completely crappy, and I had ridden...
There’s a picture that photographer Virginia Liberatore took of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna in 1983. The two stars, who were dating at the time, had arrived at a party in full regalia—fedoras, big watches, leather jackets. In the image, Madonna resembles...
Artists and curators Ron Athey and James Spooner know that Los Angeles has become the art world omphalos and so decided to convert last Saturday’s Broad Happening into a 21st century Oracle of Delphi. Hosted in alignment with the Broad’s current multimedia show...
Have you ever been at a party, laughing convulsively while draining your second glass of prosecco, and then suddenly, with a cold, horrified shiver, thought—wait, oh no, someday I’m going to be dead? That’s what the work of Takashi Murakami is like. Murakami, the...
It feels like last summer was a long time ago. What with a year filled with electoral rage politics, acquitted police shootings of black people, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Wall, the reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy, the U.S. Departments of...
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