In the past two years two art museums endowed by Los Angeles billionaires have opened. Eli Broad opened The Broad museum in 2015 and the owners of Guess Jeans, the Marciano Brothers, opened the Marciano Art Foundation in May of this year. While this is a huge boost to...
“Regrettably, the provocative nature of your content is likely unsuitable for our audience at this time.” It may shock you to discover that artists still get told this. It may shock you to discover that—in the fine arts, in Los Angeles, California, in 2017—shock still...
Avant-garde artistic movements have a funny way of morphing into the mainstream—witness the fridge-magnet ubiquity of Impressionist paintings, or the integral role of appropriated samples in contemporary pop music. Perhaps the least-known but most influential of these...
Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...
With all of the recent hysteria about immigration, it seemed like a good time to explore the original American immigrants. There is quite a rich history of movies about settlers (a word that is still used in some parts of the world) doing battle with people who were...
I GET NO KICK FROM CHAMPAGNE Dear Babs, Recently I was invited to a private art preview and cocktail party, co-hosted by a prestigious Los Angeles gallery and art museum. The event was in the desert, so most likely attendees would be traveling at least two hours from...
PST & NEW ART PRESS OK, Stalwarts, here comes... ARTMAGEDDON 3! That is, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, with some 70 arts organizations participating, plus about the same number of commercial galleries mounting theme-related shows. The marathon officially gets...
Dr. Lourdes I. Ramos was recently appointed as President and CEO of the Museum of Latin American Art in May. Previously, she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico for 12 years. She is the first Latina to hold the position...
Gary Panter wears many hats—visionary punk cartoonist, Emmy-award winning designer for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, psychedelic lightshow revivalist, cutting-edge graphic designer, experimental musician, candlestick maker. Having dazzled the comic art world with his elaborate...
Lynda Burdick is Artillery’s staff photographer. On her frequent visits to art openings, she often encounters dogs as well as gallerygoers. Rosamund Felsen of the eponymous gallery has been quoted as saying that dogs are usually better behaved than the children who...
Sometimes legislation in Sacramento is rushed through with unintended consequences, an unfortunate example being a newly expanded law posing problems for art dealers. This 2016 amendment to California Civil Code Section 1739.7 was intended to broaden a law that...
Let me be honest with you, New York, I can start a Wednesday all about a museum visit on Friday but by Thursday evening the empty glasses, subway transfers and texts will have stacked up and in the anxious back-brain, an idea will begin to pool and shift and the...
Life happens fast. Yesterday’s dystopian fiction is today’s reality. American history now includes a woman in the 21st century being arrested and found guilty by a jury for laughing at somebody. Most places that have an awareness of despots also have some pearls of...
I Love A Man in a Uniform Dear Babs, Why is it that with all the focus on hip, cutting-edge contemporary art displayed in modern museums and galleries, the security guards dress like they are working at the May Company in the ’70s? The women dress like men and the...
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...
It’s Too Hot Not to Cool Down, 2017
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