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Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023

Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down
An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023

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...

All That Glitters The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta

All That Glitters
The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta

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...

Brilliant Veils Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries

Brilliant Veils
Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries

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...

On the Nose Helen Chung Talks Anatomy

On the Nose
Helen Chung Talks Anatomy

The afternoon we agree to meet for a quick Q&A over drinks, Helen Chung arrives at the restaurant slightly late (though not much later than me)—fittingly enough, from a commissioned portrait sitting. Engaged by the process, conversation and the resulting portrait...

Frames Within Frames The Photography of Grant Mudford

Frames Within Frames
The Photography of Grant Mudford

Grant Mudford is a photographer with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1944, he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Since the 1980s he has functioned as a...

Spiritual Healing Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits

Spiritual Healing
Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits

As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of...

Africa Around Town “Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz

Africa Around Town
“Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz

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...

Amplifier of Black Art Nothing Random with Chance the Rapper's Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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