While contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang often grab international headlines with their projects and exhibitions, there are very few women among them. Lin Tianmiao is one of the few. That is very much due to the strength of her work, the...
In case you didn’t notice, Hello Kitty invaded Los Angeles in November. If you were anywhere near Little Tokyo, you could scarcely escape the impression that not only that neighborhood, but half the population of LA’s downtown and east side had been initiated into the...
During the summer of 2012, artists Eddie Rehm and Kenneth Ian Husband were enjoying something of a personal Golden Age in their tiny shared studio in Patchogue, a working class town on Long Island, New York. The studio itself was little more than a shed in the yard of...
From the beginning, the plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art building have been a private collaboration between Director Michael Govan and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. This latest chapter in the quest for a new building for the county museum began at a preview I attended in the LACMA auditorium for the exhibition The Presence of the Past on June 3, 2013. More than a preview, it was a show of its own for a project that had advanced without public review, all the way to finalizing the mass, the shape and the exterior circulation of an apparently unconventional new building.
Ry Rocklen saved oyster shells, along with some rocks, then tried to unload them one day at a garage sale. “I didn’t sell a thing,“ he told me in an interview, about his boyhood collecting obsession. Decades later, he is still drawn to treasuring odd stuff: discarded...
Bodies are complicated. Choosing to work with the body as an artistic material complicates its complications. The resulting nest, where taisha paggett settles in to practice, can be thick and sticky. Paggett has grappled with the ways identity and environment are...
Is fashion the medium of the moment? I’m not talking about haute couture or luxury ready-to-wear fashion design. Since the ascendance of Conceptualism, the means of fabrication have been more or less beside the point in fine art; and so it would be here. This isn’t...
“I’m a hypocrite,” Linda Vallejo says, referring to her latest series “Make ’Em All Mexican.” “I grew up on Fred Flintstone and Frank Sinatra. I’m all American.” She adds, “I think we are all hypocrites in one way or another. We all have our prejudices and judge each...
Ross Rudel’s art has haunted my consciousness for a few years now. Encountering occasional works of his in group shows throughout Los Angeles, I would find myself consistently drawn in and hypnotized by what felt like a quiet, faraway presence filled with hidden potency. The LA–based artist’s sculptures and performances, carefully crafted and often employing found objects, exude deep mystery and deep purpose. Why does this work—sometimes so slight and minimal as to be barely noticeable in the gallery—have so much resonance? Where does this strange energy come from?
“There is no one authentic way to present Asian art and culture,” according to Christina Yu Yu, who was recently appointed as director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. “Once you take a piece of art and place it in a case with a spotlight,” she explains, “you remove it from its original context.” Yu well understands the importance of context. Born in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, she came to the United States as a student and trained in Asian art history here in the West. It was while in the U.S. that she began to appreciate the art of her own culture. “Sometimes it takes distance” she admits, “to learn about where you are really from.” Her point of view, both Eastern and Western, as well as her academic and professional background place her in a unique position to lead a museum of Asian art in the greater Los Angeles area, where, despite a growing population of transplanted Asians like herself, the art of the East is not widely appreciated.
When I arrive at Night Gallery to meet gallerists Mieke Marple and Davida Nemeroff, behind the front desk are champagne bottles and other artifacts leftover from “Sexy Beast,” the Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA) benefit/art auction. The event, which took place...
Elizabeth Turk transforms huge blocks of marble into refined sculptures, pieces that display classical beauty and technical virtuosity. Observing the graceful artist at work in her studio in a Santa Ana marble yard—wearing ear protectors, safety glasses and padded...
When Kai Loebach emigrated to Los Angeles 27 years ago, after a brief vacation during which he was blown away by the friendliness of the people and the “visual orgasm” of a clean-as-new supermarket in the San Fernando Valley, he knew no one, had no place to stay and...
Once a city on the margins of the art world, Hong Kong now sits center stage, boasting the world’s third-largest art market. A wealth of galleries, museums and art centers can be found on either side of Victoria Harbor, which separates the commercial center, Hong Kong...
If you have been in any number of major cities this summer across the U.S., you might have seen a billboard with the hashtag caption #ArtEveryWhere alongside a reproduction of a famous work of art. According to the tagline on the #ArtEveryWhereUS website, this is “A...
One artist who is returning to his roots after spending the last several years working on massive projects is sculptor Charles Long. For his next major exhibition “Up Land,” at his gallery Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Long is embracing his personal style of hands-on...
The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and...
Up-and-coming Los Angeles-based artist Christian Tedeschi describes his former boss, Nancy Rubins as “a tornado—so much energy.” The 40-year-old assistant professor and head of sculpture at Cal State Northridge recalls his experience as a studio assistant with a...
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