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From the Editor September-October, 2021; Volume 16, issue 1
Dear Reader, Happy Birthday to Artillery for turning 15 this year! And to celebrate this milestone we are covering how the world is going to hell! The climate crisis is our September theme and it wasn’t an impromptu decision or stop-the-presses situation because of...
CODE ORANGE September-October 2021 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Erik Olson and our finalists. Erik's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the September/October online and print edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how...
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...
Poems "Dostoevsky Takes a Selfie" By Clint Margrave; "Take It Easy" By John Tottenham
Dostoevsky Takes a Selfie By Clint Margrave I’m not surprised to find him in the underground, but I am surprised to find him in L.A. He sits across from me on the metro in shorts and tennis shoes, taking a selfie. I want to ask him what he’s doing here. Too...
COMICS Concerned Creative Artists Against Climate Change
R.I.P. Chuck Close Remembering the great self-portraitist
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....
DOUG CHRISMAS ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH EMBEZZLEMENT
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...
From the Editor July-August, 2021; Volume 15, issue 6
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...
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....
CODE ORANGE July-August 2021 Winner & Finalists
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...
COMICS Art Book Publisher
William T. Wiley (1937–2021) Paying tribute to an influential artist
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...
From the Editor May-June, 2021; Volume 15, issue 5
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...
Shoptalk LA Museum Update, Digital Art Happenings, In Memory: Simone Gad
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...
Books: Jona Frank and John Divola SoCal Photographers Cover It All
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...
Book Review: Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II By Elizabeth Rodini ABJECT OBJECT
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...
Poems
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...
