Almost all of Chuck Close’s paintings were based on photographs he took himself. In the mid-1980s, when I was a curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I contacted Close with the first museum proposal he had had to do an exhibition of the photographs....
Art dealer Douglas Chrismas, the former long-time owner of LA’s storied Ace Gallery, was arrested July 27, 2021 and charged with embezzling $260,000 from Ace Gallery’s bankruptcy estate. Chrismas pleaded not guilty and was released on $50,000 bond. He was spotted by a...
Dear Reader, It is inexcusable to not be well read, mainly because it’s so easy to fix. Just read more! But who has time? Only recently, when a friend asked what book I was reading, I had to admit that all I’d been reading was art copy. He found that unacceptable and...
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....
Congratulations to our winner Kevin McCollister and our finalists. Kevin's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the July/August online and print edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how...
Influential Northern California artist William T. Wiley passed away on April 25 in Greenbrae, CA. His combination of irreverence and spirituality so keenly reflected the spirit of our times, where we don't know quite what to believe, but would all like to believe in...
Dear Reader, Spring is in the air, skies are blue, daffodils are blooming and the art galleries are opening up. Makes you want to paint or write poetry or string along happy clichés! Yes, the world—at least here in Los Angeles—seems to be emerging from a long dark...
Digital Art Happening In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night...
Jona Frank’s new book, Cherry Hill, came out this spring almost simultaneously, but coincidentally, at the same time as another book, Terminus, by another SoCal photographer, John Divola. The coincidence is as fortunate as it is fortuitous because their subjects and...
Elizabeth Rodini’s Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (2020) landed on my radar through meeting Rodini last year at the American Academy in Rome, where she is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. Rodini’s recent object biography investigates a number of...
I Could Have Written That By John Tottenham Like you, I am tired of my own voice, these incessant I’s and me’s. But what’s the alternative? I don’t have the audacity to employ another he or she or We. Nothing could be worse, psycholinguistically, than that sententious...
Congratulations to our winner Eric Axene and our finalists. Eric's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the May/June online and print edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our...
As one of Britain’s most prolific documentarians, Mike Dibb has directed dozens of filmic portraits of people and places from the 1960s to the present. Through conversations with artists and public intellectuals (David Hockney, Edward Said, and Salvador Dalí),...
Dear Reader, It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain...
Art Fairs Aren't Giving Up Delays, delays, and more delays. Last year Art Basel rather optimistically thought it would proceed with its Miami edition in December. That was finally cancelled when they came to their senses. I think there were online viewing rooms and...
An Appreciation: Liz Young (1958–2020) LA artist Liz Young passed away in December. I’ve been going to Los Angeles art openings as far back as the late ’80s—and Liz Young was always there. Then one day I was at the Y where I swim downtown, and there she was again. I...
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