When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy. He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them. Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits...
The Power of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
St. Elmo Village Thrives Today A Safe Space
Hidden in a quiet Mid-City tract is a Los Angeles art institution. Not that you’d know it if you didn’t slow down and really look for the five-lot compound on this quiet residential street. Otherwise you could easily miss the sign: “St. Elmo Village,” half hidden by...
HOPPING ONLINE Virtual Viewing has its Virtues
During these last three months art galleries have been tripping over themselves to create virtual viewing rooms and walkthroughs, and to join collective ventures in online selling such as GALLERYPLATFORM.LA and FAIR (from New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA). Meanwhile,...
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Seafoam Green
Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and...
LA’s Strange Still Beauty Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill Tool Around the Empty Streets
Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill are two very different artists, both working in the photographic medium during Los Angeles’ great exile inward from the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus. Their recording of this time is both surreal and sublime; capturing these frozen...
Building Bridges with Julian Bermudez
I met Julian Bermudez at his gallery, Bermudez Projects, a spare, light-filled space in the Cypress Park area of Northeast Los Angeles. Bermudez was attired in art-world black and sported a thin, pointed mustache. He was bright, energetic and articulate. He started...
The Met Loses $100 Million! A Mere Pittance
The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported on March 12th that, as a result of closing until July due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they would take up to a $100 million loss and are considering the furlough or layoff of many of its staff members. This, for many in...
Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram, 1955–59
No wonder your president has to be an actor. He's gotta look good on television. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. Back to the Future, 1985 It stands triumphantly—a voracious junkyard goat surmounting a catafalque of the written word, a bier of...
The Online Life: Photos to Cringe By
The day I sat down to write this opinion piece, I was moved to do so by a feature in The New York Times that both irritated and alarmed me. “Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust” the headline read, and the text informed me that the Louvre, our...
SHOPTALK
Pomp & Zoom Spring usually heralds a spate of art-school grad ceremonies and shows—the equivalent of debutante balls for young artists and designers trained at our august art schools. This year with shelter-at-home and social-distancing mandates in place, there...
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Oxblood
Red is a color that should never be messed with, diluted, bastardized, cross-pollinated or otherwise appropriated, which calls into question the reason the color oxblood exists at all. If you cut open the belly of an ox, would the seepage of viscera reveal this...
Movements: Battles and Solidarity
On the weekend before everything locked down in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to catch the exhibition "To View a Plastic Flower" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and to hear one of the featured artists, Vietnamese American artist T. Kim-Trang Tran,...
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia
Editor's Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and...
SHOPTALK April 2020 Edition
Three weeks ago I was visiting LACMA for their landmark exhibition “Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying,” featuring a Ming dynasty painter at the Resnick. Afterwards I came out to look for the plinth where a new Yoshitomo Nara sculpture would be going—the...
Quarantine Q&A: Susanne Vielmetter
Is your current exhibition open to the public by appointment? And does it matter who the “public” is, i.e. only prospective buyers, art critics, art curators? Our current exhibitions are closed to the public as required under the COVID-19 lockdown but we do...
Quarantine Q&A: Sean Meredith of Track 16
Is your current exhibition open to the public by appointment? And does it matter who the “public” is, i.e., only prospective buyers, art critics, art curators? We switched to appointment only as a precaution before the shutdown announcement. Now the Bendix Building -...
Felix Fair Report with William J. Simmons
William J. Simmons, art historian and Special Projects curator of the Felix L.A. art fair. EMILY WELLS: Your curatorial practice seems to be steeped in your background in queer and feminist art history. How do you see these two as informing each other? WILLIAM J....
Studio Visit with Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth is one of LA’s talented mid-career artists whose work steadily and forcefully moves to the foreground of our consciousness with its thoughtful and compassionate investigations of her emotional life. Her striking paintings, self-referential videos...