In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at...
Ana Serrano Shifts her Latino Neighborhoods
Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft...
Guadalajara artist Jose Dávila moves around LA
When I heard the title of Jose Dávila’s recent book, Daylight Found Me with No Answer, it sounded familiar. During the years I was living in Guadalajara, I frequently talked with Dávila and other mutual friends at endless parties that lasted until dawn. But I hadn’t...
The courageous photography of Laura Aguilar
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
PST: LA/LA Artillery Recommendations
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an...
Galerías en LA/LA
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm:...
RECONNOITER
Dr. Lourdes I. Ramos was recently appointed as President and CEO of the Museum of Latin American Art in May. Previously, she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico for 12 years. She is the first Latina to hold the position...
The Netherlands
Holland has an illustrious past and rich history in art, from golden age painters Rembrandt and Vermeer through modernist legends van Gogh, Mondrian and the de Stijl group, Cobra Dutch artists and expatriate Willem de Kooning, to enigmatic Conceptualist Bas Jan Ader,...
Conceptual Museum: Cesar Cornejo
Cesar Cornejo sees artists as outsiders. They confront things that other people won’t—or can’t—see, the Peruvian-born artist told me in an interview in May, three days after the opening of “Building As Ever,” OCMA’s 2017 California-Pacific Triennial. His site-specific...
South of the Border Down Tijuana Way
Tijuana’s most famous contribution to art is the painting of zonkeys: combining donkeys with zebras so the pale Equus would stand out in black-and-white photographs. This is a paraphrased version of what I’m told when I mention I’m heading to Baja for cultural...
Off the Beaten Path in Barcelona
I landed in Barcelona a little sweaty, slightly hung over, and very much lost. Much to my surprise, the discount tickets I purchased for $350 round-trip included three meals, unlimited snacks, and all-you-can-drink beverages (including alcohol). By the end of the...
Living Larger: Lauren Greenfield
In the earliest days of his unlikely, unfortunate campaign for president, billionaire Donald Trump declared in 2015: “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” adding special emphasis on the last word, delivering the bad news like a judge slamming down a gavel. As in many...
Summer of Love Redux
When I moved to San Francisco to begin college nearly a decade ago, the refrain from Scott McKenzie’s 1967 hippie anthem “San Francisco” rang through my ears, beckoning me to the city by the bay with dreams of “flowers in my hair,” but I quickly learned that much had...
Reykjavík in LA
The Reykjavík Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall presents an opportunity to experience a site-specific installation by Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir and a film by fellow Icelander Xárene Eskandar. The Festival brings up a larger question of cultural...
Now More Than Always
When Hannah Black wrote in her open letter to the Whitney Biennial curators “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” she did more than bolster a national debate...
Warhol Icon Happening
It feels like last summer was a long time ago. What with a year filled with electoral rage politics, acquitted police shootings of black people, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Wall, the reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy, the U.S. Departments of...
Marisa Merz: The Sky is a Great Space
There’s a scene in Paul Greengrass’s 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum when former CIA operative Jason Bourne/Matt Damon kills a Moroccan man named “Desh” using a book, what appear to be shampoo bottles, and a towel. The death match goes down in a Tangier apartment, and...
Pussy Riot Goes Hawaiian, Part 2
Click Here for Part 1. Art Star and painter Masami Teraoka conceived of a collaboration with Russian performance collective Pussy Riot. These words document their performance in Hawaii. THE NINTH WAVE The marketing of The Tempest was limited to an events...