Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a...
Capturing The Castle LA’s Coolest Apartment Gallery Leaves the Living Room
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional...
An Indigenous Gaze Towards The Future Wendy Red Star Recontextualizes Native Culture in Outer Space
Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums...
My Favorite Cézanne The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right...
The Suburbs Are Dead? Brad Eberhard Makes Noise with Alto Beta
“Well, there were many creatures in the cave. And some of them had their problems, but all of them, they were my friends....You don’t meet friends like this every day, so I’m staying in the cave.” —Wounded Lion, “Creatures in the Cave” I first met Brad Eberhard...
Excavating Natural History Mark Dion Explores the Sticky Wonders and Legacy of the La Brea Tar Pits
As an urban kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I adored the American Museum of Natural History. The low-lit museum seemed like a palace of wonders to me. In its inner chambers the glowing dioramas of exotic animals in their native habitats appeared like...
Linda Vallejo A New Exhibition at parrasch heijnen Showcases Five Decades of the Artist’s Work
Linda Vallejo’s career-spanning exhibition at parrasch heijen is a homecoming of sorts. The gallery is ensconced in the center of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district, where she was born, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Sears Building — an area where Vallejo spent...
The Appropriated Strike Back Is the Idea of What and Who Is Appropriatable Changing?
While many of the contemporary art world’s basic assumptions have been challenged in recent years, one that has remained remarkably constant since at least the 1960s is the collective verdict on appropriation: It’s fine! Andy did it, so it must be—and too many...
BUNKER VISION Beyond Hollywood
One of the most reported trends in the migration from LA to more affordable places involves people who work in Hollywood. While a certain number of these stories focus on moving to places that give tax breaks to film productions, the human-interest beat focuses its...
SHOP TALK: LA ART NEWS Fall in Los Angeles
Fall is finally here, after a heat-addled summer in SoCal. I hope we don’t have any more of those 100-degree temps, because some of us don’t have central air, and it was brutal throughout August and September. On those hottest days I told myself, autumn is coming....
ASK BABS
Dear Babs: I’m an artist who uses industrial materials like spray paint, epoxy and fiberglass in my oil paintings. I use a respirator and my studio has decent ventilation, but I know it’s not the best. Recently, my doctor raised concerns about potential long-term...
Larry Johnson/curated by Larry Johnson at Reena Spaulings/ O-Town House
In two exhibitions spanning galleries some twenty-minutes apart depending on traffic, Larry Johnson presents his own work alongside that of two other gay artists of a certain age and a certain generation, who lived through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early...
Aria Dean at Château Shatto
In her still-young career, Aria Dean has shown a remarkable knack for giving the institution exactly what it wants: shrewd work that stings the nerve of the moment without quite stabbing it. In activating the virtual as a conduit for Black radical thought, Dean’s...
Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art at Wonzimer Gallery
This show at Wonzimer Gallery, organized by contributing artist Marcie Begleiter, is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a work that constitutes a parallel exhibition to the show she curated. The Voynich is a mysterious codex from around the year 1410 by an unknown...
Duncan Hannah at The Journal Gallery
In the early years of cinema, actors were treated as crew members working the conveyor belt of industrialized studio systems. But by the silent-film era of the 1910s, the star system had begun to take hold, with close-ups articulating a visual language of desire...
The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison] Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires
Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s...
Cai Guo-Qiang and cAI™ at the Los Angeles Coliseum
At dusk on September fifteenth, nearly 5,000 spectators gathered on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum to view WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, a monumental daytime fireworks display by Cai Guo-Qiang* and his custom artificial intelligence model cAI™....
Nate Lowman at David Zwirner
I’ll admit that before attending a press walkthrough for Nate Lowman’s “Parking” at David Zwirner a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with Lowman’s oeuvre. The paintings first appeared to me thumbnail-size, attached to my iPhone invitation. I noted glowing, riparian...