Dear Reader, Reading wasn’t a top priority in our family; I don’t think I was ever read to as a child. It wasn’t as if literature was banned in our house, but the walls weren’t exactly lined with bookshelves. The preschool in our tiny town was held at the local...
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 US Copyright Office issued a landmark ruling in February that users of AI-generative programs may not apply for copyright registration of the resultant images. Additionally, the company that owns the AI-image-generative program Midjourney was sued in federal court...
In a world that moves at the speed of quantum computing, filled with seemingly endless digital distractions, an afternoon at the art museum may feel like the perfect reprieve: Old Master paintings and silenced phones. Totally kidding! You are not unplugging that...
Coachella's Flower Power It’s summer, and time to take a breath after the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since last fall. The art world has ramped back up—new exhibitions and new galleries (Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, the second for François Ghebaly) have opened. We...
Dear Babs, My friend recently inherited some African and Native American masks from her uncle and is concerned with talk in the news about demands for museums to return items to their indigenous owners/countries of origin. She doesn’t think the masks are looted and...
Apple Every day an anxious man appears in my apple and offers me a Magritte. Jackson Pollock Sometimes the Americans form a circle around something awful that has happened. Sometimes it is a painting. The Tao It’s easy to have no path and no plans, but it isn’t very...
History tells us that the highly refined, discreet object imbued with emotional resonance is an artistic choice largely made during a bygone era when the likes of such artists as Johannes Vermeer stood before a blank canvas, choosing to illuminate the specificity of...
In Malian-American artist Penda Diakité’s transformational paintings and collages, every element is much more than what it seems. From her impossibly detail-rich photocollage to her unique technique of hand-engraving surfaces—and the historical cosmology of her...
A viewer unfamiliar with Blair Saxon-Hill’s previous work might be inclined toward certain assumptions about the foundations and precedents for her style and approach to her subjects—figurative, abstracted or quasi-symbolic—or even what her subjects might actually be....
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