Dear Reader, As a kid, I didn’t get to do much traveling. The family trips we took were always by car to visit relatives, somehow miraculously fitting seven of us into a big two-toned Oldsmobile. My dad used to roll down the window, just a sliver, to blow out the...
The 2024 Whitney Biennial—“Even Better Than the Real Thing”—features artworks, films and performances by 71 artists and collectives. Within the show’s title is an obvious allusion to AI, but the Whitney suggests that it also raises the possibility of other ideas of...
In March, an invitation to view ceramic work by New York–based artist Patrice Renee Washington brought me to Richmond, Virginia, for the very first time. A midsize Southern city often referred to being as far north as one can get until one is in the North, Richmond’s...
This year’s 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, takes an in-depth look at the work of more than 300 artists and collectives who have experienced exile and colonialism. Pedrosa’s thoughtful...
Millard Sheets’ glass mural Pleasures Along the Beach (1969) adorns the façade of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Its brightly colored California scene, portraying sunbathers, birds and sailboats, beckons visitors to the newly...
When Roger Corman recently shuffled off this mortal coil, the reactions on social media were emotional and varied. As the obituaries appeared, it seemed that everybody had a unique story about him to share. He was one of the first Hollywood power brokers to hire women...
Have you ever started a journey, traveling a great distance through countless notable destinations, only to decide one day to completely reverse course? This column started out as many do, a haphazard scroll through Instagram looking at art, upcoming exhibitions,...
Tom Knechtel, a Los Angeles–based artist who shows with PPOW in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art here in LA—where his exhibition, “The Hare in the Studio,” just ended in June—is known for his intricate paintings and drawings, often depicting himself, animals and...
Three Major Shows: Starring Black Women Artists Right now in Los Angeles, we have the gift of important shows of three major contemporary Black women artists. Try to see them all, as this fortuitous alignment of stars may not happen again, at least not anytime soon....
Chas Smith, who died on May 13th, was a complicated, gorgeous assemblage of contradictions, the sort of bundle that is usually described as “larger than life.” But that phrase misses the nuances that made Chas a sought-after collaborator with artists and composers,...
Dear Babs, I’m a young artist with an MFA from a decent Midwestern university, and I want to become more aware and part of the international artistic milieu. From social media, it seems like most of the influential people in the art world spend a ton of time...
Receipt Bus stops are one full breath apart Is why men drink in them. Their poor slow hearts, Their poor slow blood. Leant on elbows on knees they Hawk up galaxies. The car becomes a well when you Cry there. 24h carpark. —Without my Marrow and the wind blows I’m a...
Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and...
A big pharma scion funded the Tolkien exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art to normalize drug dependency by suggesting its correlation to Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the One Ring. Or, hear me out, Whiskey Pete’s casino operates a mind-control project...
The sprinklers of Pace Gallery’s immaculate lawn activated as I entered its courtyard for “Alicja Kwade & Agnes Martin: Space Between the Lines.” One of them was installed only a few inches from Kwade’s Jo’s Snow (Group 2) (2023), a forlorn patch of cast white...
Images of violence are so prevalent in today’s media landscape that news commentators now prompt us to look away, while social-media clips of police misconduct or war-ravaged bodies are shared and reposted, implying that we might take voyeuristic pleasure in viewing...
On a murky day in May, the art cognoscenti made their way to a preview of gallerist David Zwirner’s newest addition to his burgeoning enclave in Los Angeles. Among the city’s unremitting attempts at reinvention, Melrose Hill—a longstanding, dense and vibrant...
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