Articles
With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts...
Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius....
Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An...
Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated...
Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with...
Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed...
Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works,...
One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary,...
The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most...
It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an...
In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop...
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New...
“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As...
It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in...
When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain,...
Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an...
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of...
Entering a room of portraits by Amir H. Fallah, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t see their faces: the figures are cloaked. In one, the subject sits draped in a richly patterned blue-and-purple shawl, cradling what looks like a gilded African head in its...