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...
features
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...
John Baldessari (1931–2020)
The other day Larry Johnson had an idea. He thought we should organize something for John. His plan was to have an artist thing. Dealers could come if they wanted to, but he suggested we not go overboard. It was a simple plan, but I, for whatever reason, started to...
An Art Tomb on Wilshire?
The former Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park has always been an object of fascination—an imposing landmark designed in the modernist style by Millard Sheets in the 1960s, it displays mysterious Masonic symbols etched onto its walls. After the Masons...
Sylvia Fein at Berkeley Art Museum
Sylvia Fein’s exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum (#275 in their MATRIX series running Nov 13, 2019–March 1, 2020) gave us the rare opportunity to see the work of an artist who has forged her own path for over 75 years. The exhibition is a concise, thrilling...
The Art Houses of Naoshima Island
For the traveler in Japan with a day near Okayama to spare, Naoshima Island’s Art House Project is well worth the journey. Since the late 1990s, contemporary artists and architects from Japan and elsewhere have taken over a number of structures, all located within...
The Getty’s “Unseen” Photographs
Having been a curator of photography in a museum myself, I know that when a new department head is appointed at an institution with a long-standing collection, he or she has to make a statement with an exhibition exploring that collection in a way no one has before....
The Sweet and Sunny of Mark Bradford
Several weeks of cold rain and angry trade winds broke. At last, the balmy warm weather had been restored to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The glorious outdoors beckoned, but many chose to fill the Doris Duke Theater of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Art star Mark...
LA’s Art Week: Flash in the Pan or Seismic Shift?
Over the 25 years of the LA Art Show, Executive Director Kim Martindale has seen fairs come and go in Los Angeles, lost in the quicksand of art market trends. The past two years, however, have seen several new fairs establish themselves in LA – from small satellite...
