Francesco X. Siqueiros is an artist/printmaker, founder of El Nopal Press, publishing fine-art limited-edition prints since 1990 in downtown Los Angeles. The focus of El Nopal Press is to underscore the heterogeneous nature of culture and to acknowledge its borders...
It’s a commonplace of the current cultural moment that we have trouble tearing ourselves away from our screens. (Some of us anyway; and for some of us that screen is basically an extension of our desk.) But actually I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. ...
We don’t call it ‘AWOL’ for nothing, you know. So while you (and my editors) were all HOWLing for my updates last week – and oh yes, we did have a few – the local art world news was eclipsed by the Los Angeles Review of Books’ publication of Joseph Giovannini’s...
I might have called it Sit Through This (which, I assure the reader, would have encompassed the best the show had to offer). The 60th Anniversary Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (not the 50th, mind you; the 50th + 10), took place last night at the fabulous Ace...
[Part I of this post appeared yesterday, following the preceding evening’s Third Los Angeles forum at Occidental College. I continue where I left off – as LACMA’s Director, Michael Govan left the stage to the evening’s host, the forum’s principal organizer, and Los...
And so the Govan/Zumthor/LACMA PR juggernaut thunders on, steamrolling over those skeptical eyes looking over their shoulders from near and far, critics and other local scolds (and possibly its immediate neighbors), to say nothing of its own Board of Trustees, the...
By the time I had discovered Eloise (there is only one, you know), I was already well on my way to becoming Eloise – if I wasn’t already. By that time, I had already begun moving away from children’s books and into actual literature. My older brother had already...
Do you ever wonder what happened to the Occupy moment? We can’t really call it a movement because it had no coherent program, plan or organization, no well defined or articulated policy (or revolutionary) objectives; and its only concrete target was a somewhat...
Having followed Gabriel Kahane’s songwriting career for some time, I was primed for a terrific show this past Saturday evening at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. Kahane has the dual gift of an innate musical talent and extraordinary musicianship wedded to a peerless gift for...
JANE CHAFIN owns and operates Offramp Gallery with life partner Chaz Alexander out of their historic home in Pasadena, California. ARTILLERY: You grew up in West Virginia as a descendent of the feuding Hatfield family and your grandfather was an infamous union-busting...
It is a basic human impulse to make things: the basic and poignant idea of surrounding oneself with plenitude, making it harder for death to penetrate. Connecting the great arc of maker and collector/consumer, no one is spared this inevitability. It is crucial that we...
Inge Reist is the director of the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection, New York. She plays additional roles as chief of research collections, which includes the Frick photo archive, and choosing...
Dear Babs, I’m an art student about to graduate with a BFA in photography at one of the best art schools in the Los Angeles area. Is it okay to work in a commercial photography field while showing artwork in galleries? Besides presenting two separate portfolios/series...
Narrative art is art that holds a story in it. It is as old as a simple clay bowl that holds life-giving water. The narrative art that most effected me, at a tender age and for the rest of my life, were the pictures by Kay Nielsen that I saw in my fairy tale book,...
» Now that binge-watching is officially a thing, it’s getting easier to convince people to sample Jacques Rivette. A three-hour film by Rivette is considered average to short. His longest film (Out: One) runs over 12 hours. The length of his films is more than a...
Every once in a while (on those rare occasions when we’re away from our favorite gun clubs, firing ranges and ammunition shops), I’ll run into one of our ARTILLERY family and friends and s/he’ll ask me what I’ve been up to. It can be awkward—especially if I’ve just...
There’s always a bit of suspense walking into an exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s work. At this point in the artist’s career, we may have certain expectations about what we will see, which are not infrequently satisfied (i.e., brilliantly finished, reflective surfaces,...
As I may have mentioned before, collage—in spite of lip service to artists from Picasso/Braque to Hannah Hoch to Rauschenberg to Elliott Hundley—remains under-acknowledged as the central formal and conceptual engine of modernist and postmodern art over the last 100...
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