The Getty Villa’s exhibition, “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” offers a stunning display of jewelry and items of personal adornment excavated from burials of royalty and aristocratic individuals from a region that spans what is today southern Egypt and northern...
Africa Around Town
Amplifier of Black Art Nothing Random with Chance the Rapper's Course
“We outside!” Chance the Rapper exclaims into his microphone. The sky is near black at maybe seven minutes after 8 p.m. in Downtown Los Angeles. Third weeknight of October. Chance had been and would be again, soon, rhyming his way through a song. The Chicago MC had...
From Lagos with Love The Far-Reaching Vision of Adenrele Sonariwo
The sun is rising over my home in Northeast Los Angeles as I call gallerist and curator Adenrele Sonariwo on Zoom. She answers me from her office in the bustling West African city of Lagos, Nigeria, where her day is already in full swing, crescendoing toward the...
Reframing A Ritual Allana Clarke Wrestles New Meaning into Hair Bonding Glue
I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show,...
Re-Imagining an Impossible Future Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part IX In the Region of Pure Art
Jim Brooklinen’s rapturous response to reading my novel in its entirety had exceeded my wildest hopes. Not only had the veteran New York literary man hailed it as “the finest new work of sustained prose I’ve read in a very long time,” and expressed a genuine desire to...
The Life (and Death) of an Artist Helen Molesworth's true crimeification of Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta's work is as much about life as it is about death. Attuned to the sacred bond between bodies and land, Mendieta regarded nature as a sensitive and emotive force entangled in culture and politics—a messy assemblage of energies and ideologies embedded in...
Birds of a Feather: An Interview with Artists Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner: Moulting at LA Tate Gallery, Los Angeles
At the beginning of the pandemic, April 2020, LA artists Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner bumped into each other, waiting in line to get into Trader Joe’s. There, they decided to start working on a project together which would involve painting on each other’s...
Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 3 New Art Dealers Alliance Fair, MOCA North Miami, and Pérez Art Museum
For my final full day here in Miami, I headed across Biscayne Bay to Downtown Miami, an area home to several arts institutions, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami. After experiencing the traffic of last year’s Art Week, I was determined to minimize bridge crossings...
Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 2 Untitled Art and The Bass Museum
After spending most of the day yesterday inside the convention center to visit Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), for day two I enjoyed the second most important part of Miami Art Week: the beach. Along with the crowds of New Yorkers who fly down to South Florida,...
Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 1 Art Basel Miami Beach
Artillery is back in Florida for another round of Miami Art Week. As always, the days will be packed with fairs, exhibitions, parties, and events that showcase the biggest names in modern and contemporary art alongside emerging artists and rising stars of the...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VIII Laying a False Trail Across the Visceral Ether
Nobody is reading this. No sooner have I started to write a sentence than I’m plunged into bitterness and despair. Sitting down to write has become too great a test of my moral and spiritual strength: I am immediately mystified as to why it is so difficult to get my...
Our Bodies, Our Business More Fodder for Michele Pred in a Post-Roe Era
Oakland-based Swedish-American artist Michele Pred achieved notoriety in the early 2000s for her conceptual sculptural installations of items like Swiss Army knives and manicure scissors confiscated by airport security. Pred’s witty and dramatic work, with a strong...
Moon Raker Michelle Stuart's Conversation With Time
Monumentality is not the point of Michelle Stuart’s work. “Connection” doesn’t exactly sum it up either, although it’s always there. Transit or transition would be closer to it—although it would have to be understood within a post-Einsteinian view of the universe and...
Fire and Water The Beautiful Tragedies of Calida Rawles
In 2004 Calida Rawles moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she found an art scene brimming with life. Trained as an artist, she longed to become part of that world, and asked herself whether she would become a collector or a painter. She decided to give herself the...
Decorum and Decay Watching Astra Huimeng Wang Watching You
On a sweltering September afternoon, I visited artist Astra Huimeng Wang as she was in the final stages prepping for her first solo show of paintings at Make Room LA. Her studio is nestled above a discount clothing store in LA’s Fashion District, where crowded shop...
Keeping the Animal Alive Chasing the Ephemeral with Samuelle Richardson
Samuelle Richardson is a sculptural textile artist who began her career as a painter. Her painting itself evolved from studies in anatomy, for which she made 3D skeletal models. But by chance—or fate, when her painting studio became unavailable 10 years ago—she...
More Women Six Profiles
We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical...