Articles
Peacock Blue wishes to clarify once and for all that her name has little to do with vegetable matter and even less with genitalia, yet imagine going through life mistaken either for soup or a pecker! Such is the fate of Peacock Blue, who’s spent a lifetime in the jest...
When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles...
“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….” “I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way...
If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The...
In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft...
I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social...
Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national...
The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual...
If a structure could imitate warmth and humanity, linking the innate wonder of nature to one’s need to inhibit it, Casa Orgánica by architect Javier Senosiain is it. Built in 1984 in Naucalpan, Mexico, Casa Orgánica was the first...
“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” –H.L. Mencken At no time in history is the character of a nation brought into more vivid relief than during elections. And no medium...
I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma....
It takes a lot of guts to title your solo show “Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains,” and then it takes a lot of talent to pull off a show with that loaded marquee. Alex Anderson managed to do just that at Gavlak gallery this summer, in a show (March 14–July...
When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near...
Chaédria LaBouvier is the Guggenheim’s first Black curator, first Black woman to curate a Guggenheim exhibition, first Black author of a Guggenheim catalog, first curator of Cuban descent and, at age 33, the youngest independent curator to organize an exhibition in...
Guggenheim Fellow and native Angeleno Todd Gray is a visual artist whose work is in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While mostly photo-based he also presents performance works; that is how we first met and collaborated. We...
As a maker of books, I met artist, photographer, director and historian Stephen Berkman in the “before time,” when fonts and spelling and public exhibitions of artwork seemed of import. Berkman, you see, was coordinating "Predicting the Past, Zohar Studios: The Lost...
I first met Gary Simmons in the early 1990s when he was a student at CalArts. At the time I was working for Richard Telles (who eventually opened his own LA gallery) at Roy Boyd Gallery in Santa Monica, and helped to facilitate Simmons’ debut exhibition there. The...
We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in...
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