There’s no better way to procrastinate with your new pandemic dog than by bringing them to the dog park. And in Los Angeles, there is no shortage of beautiful locations to sweat under the merciless desert sun. One such haunt is the Silver Lake dog park, which abuts...
The Silver Lake Reds
Shoptalk: LA Art News Fair reports and Compound Long Beach
Felix Fair Report In some ways the fairs and openings that packed the last week in July were a turning point for Los Angeles. It was the first such convergence since February 2020, with the pandemic shutdown following quickly in March. Would people actually show up...
ASK BABS LABELS FOR ARTISTS
Dear Babs, Certain grants, contests, programs, and such ask me to define myself as an “emerging” or “established” artist. How does one decide which label fits? —Dick in Del Mar Dear Dick, Other fields have terms for newbies. Professional baseball players—and cops—are...
Reconnoiter: Patricia Watts
Patricia Watts is the founder and curator of ecoartspace. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Tewa people. ARTILLERY: What was the crucial purpose in founding ecoartspace? PATRICIA WATTS: When I came up with the concept for...
Remarks on Color: Subterranean Smog September's Hue
Subterranean Smog is not one color or another, but a sickening miasma of grays, browns and a lingering smoky orange. Drawn from the bowels of the earth, SS identifies with the antihero -- Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, Alex from a Clockwork...
Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (at OUTFEST Los Angeles) Making a creative life at the culture’s edge – Jump, Darling (Big Island Productions/2645850 Ontario/LevelFILM) - directed by Phil Connell
Identity evolution, struggles and troubled transitions are familiar themes and storylines in Outfest fare, and Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (the U.S. release of which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic) fits neatly if slightly awkwardly into this category. What’s...
Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon August's Hue
Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last...
Susan Silton: WE at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles WE WILL BE SEEING IT DIFFERENTLY—ALWAYS: SUSAN SILTON’S MORPHOLOGY OF IMAGE AND WORD
“What are we looking at?” You hear that (usually rhetorical) question a lot in art galleries and design houses – also in accounting firms, screening rooms, at construction sites, and (really) business meetings of any kind – frequently spoken with some impatience. ...
Shoptalk Return of Art Fairs, Painting is "In," and What The New Normal Looks Like
The New Normal We thought the world would end in fire, or possibly in ice. And now we know it can end with a virus. As a child growing up in Taiwan and then later in the US during the Cold War, I often imagined—and literally dreamed—how the world would end....
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME By John Tottenham
Tinnitus hissed through the music, the laughter, the static. It wasn’t crowded in there, but it was loud. Two women at the bar, a few feet away, were engaged in a conversation that consisted of whooping and screeching at the top of their lungs in response to every...
The Art World After ELI BROAD Art Brief
Billionaire Eli Broad, who passed away in April at 87, was a giant of philanthropy not just in the art world but also in education, medicine and science. He was among the top handful of cultural benefactors in Los Angeles...
Decoder: What The People Want Interview with an anonymous member of the public
Kacie is The Public. More specifically, she said it would be fair to describe her as “A woman who doesn’t closely follow the contemporary art scene but might go to a show this summer”. ARTILLERY: Are you excited about going to see art now that the lockdown has ended?...
SIGHTS UNSCENE The Reader, Los Angeles, circa 1990
Provenance: ASCO’s Public Interventions in 1970s Los Angeles Writing on the Walls
The artistic legacies of Mexican Muralism remain imprinted on LA’s urban landscape, in faded residues on cracked concrete structures and sometimes peeking out from peeling layers of whitewash anti-graffiti paint. Throughout the 1970s, many artists in Southern...
Burn, Baby, Burn! Bunker Vision
There is nothing new about burning books. There is a recorded instance in the Hebrew scriptures of a scroll, dictated by a prophet, being burned 2700 years ago. Any place that had a written language has also probably had instances of burning whatever the words were...
OFF THE WALL: Art in the Bike Lane
Los Angeles is a city best seen at 30 miles per hour, when its squalor and splendor even out to create a neutral grandeur; it’s at the slower speeds that our angels’ dereliction becomes evident. Pedestrians know this and that’s why nobody walks in LA—like the Missing...
Reconnoiter: Kimberly Brooks Interview with the artist
The acorn never falls too far. At age 12, an enterprising artist stood in front of White on White, the Kazimir Malevich painting at MoMA NY. She tugged on her father’s sleeve and asked the surgeon, “What does it mean?” His answer inspired Kimberly Shlain Brooks toward...
Remarks on Color: Eponymous Black July's Hue
Eponymous Black is a stout, surly fellow with bad breath and a death drive that rivals Ophelia. His only friends are the pigeons in Central Park, and even they have their reservations, as often he’s deliberately stingy with the dissemination of the most coveted heels...