Dear Reader, It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain...
From the Editor
Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection Getting Together, Apart
The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness,...
8-bridges Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond
Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save...
Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around Sculptures for a Digital Age
Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space. Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable...
Safety First Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions
What sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants...
Architecture Must Be “Beautiful” According to Trump Art Brief
Former President Donald Trump left office in disgrace, having incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021, the day Joe Biden was to be certified by Congress as the winner of the 2020 election. Trump made a speech to his crowd of MAGA misfits promising, in the style of...
Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity Decoder
So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would...
Shoptalk Art fairs and COVID, Desert X
Art Fairs Aren't Giving Up Delays, delays, and more delays. Last year Art Basel rather optimistically thought it would proceed with its Miami edition in December. That was finally cancelled when they came to their senses. I think there were online viewing rooms and...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Scene from Frieze LA, Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, 2020
PROVENANCE The City of Tomorrow, Today
In a 1953 photograph for a spread in LIFE magazine on LA County’s city of Lakewood, a bird’s-eye view looks down onto a newly paved suburban street. The street is lined with moving trucks as far as the eye can see as family after family busily unpack their belongings....
BUNKER VISION Size Matters
The pandemic has brought many issues to the fore, including health care, basic income and housing. Further down the list (but inspiring outsize passion) is how we consume movies. After nearly a year without much production and very few theaters allowed to remain open,...
ASK BABS ART CONSCIOUS
Dear Babs, Desert X is putting their show on in the Coachella Valley this spring, after art-washing the murderous Saudi Arabian regime with a big outdoor show over there. In case you missed it, Saudi leader MBS had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed and...
Obituaries Liz Young; Helen Rae; Van Arno
An Appreciation: Liz Young (1958–2020) LA artist Liz Young passed away in December. I’ve been going to Los Angeles art openings as far back as the late ’80s—and Liz Young was always there. Then one day I was at the Y where I swim downtown, and there she was again. I...
CODE ORANGE Winner and Finalists for March-April 2021
Congratulations to our winner Melissa Moore and our finalists. Moore's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the March/April online issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our...
Black Art: In the Absence of Light Film Review of HBO documentary
Black Art: In the Absence of Light, is a most timely and info-packed HBO documentary, briskly propelled by terrific interviews with artists, curators and educators. It opens by introducing us to a landmark exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” that opened...
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres Charlie James Gallery
“The Bronx Comes to LA” features artworks from the larger body of work set up in Bronx storefronts by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, dating from 1990 to 2020. The life casting process for making the figures is fairly complicated, but even more importantly, requires...
Poems "All the Paper in My Life" by Eve Wood; "Holding Pattern" by John Tottenham
All the Paper in My Life By Eve Wood We are born into paper— Our lives bookended in signatures, A certificate To prove you exist And another to prove you Do not, each day teeming With permits, credentials For entry and forms to depart, Passports, agendas, Records of...
Fu Site Kylin Gallery
“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately...