Dear Reader, I had the unexpected pleasure of spending four hours at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum with my 93-year-old mother-in-law recently. Not that visiting the Fogg is unusual—we’ve done it for years, practically every summer. But this time we spent four hours...
Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it...
The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a...
Constance Mallinson’s career has spanned the many vicissitudes of the art world, from Minimalism to Pattern and Decoration, through to postmodern conceptual strategies. More recently, she has created a form of realistic painting that draws from Modernist Abstraction...
Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions...
On a blessedly moderate summer Sunday, I am driving over to Trulee Hall’s studio in the industrial backside of LA to participate in the filming of her newest project, Ladies’ Lair Lake, by getting nude and air-brushed green from head to toe. This project will be the...
MOCA Madness Good news, the art world is revving up! We have art fairs taking place In Real Life, galleries setting regular opening hours and museums flinging open their doors. Of course, we’re not completely out of the COVID woods—many venues require proof of vax...
One of the most memorable events at MOCA occurred when Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploded gunpowder from an exterior wall of the Geffen Contemporary just after sunset, setting off blinding and spectacular explosions before a huge crowd unprepared for such...
Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy...
If you are interviewing somebody who gets interviewed a lot, and they compliment you on the quality of your questions, you are probably doing something right. This happened on multiple occasions to Delphine Seyrig during her 1981 documentary Be Pretty and Shut Up!...
Dear Babs, My longtime friend recently started painting and selling his art online. We live in different cities, and it’s been hard to meet because of the pandemic, but he’s having me over soon, and I know he’s going to want my thoughts about his art. The problem is I...
March 2nd, 2021 I step off but don’t move. The bus pulls away in a roar. I remove my mask. The air I breathe feels like bliss. I stand on the muddy sidewalk looking up at the sky. If I were a man of faith now would be the time to start speaking in tongues....
Wild, wonderful and wistful—this survey of Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary is long overdue in this town, where she has rarely been shown. “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is a trippy series of multimedia installations with videos and immersive projections...
The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s...
LA-based multimedia artist Michael C. McMillen is known for his immersive, meticulous, set-like installations that make you feel like you’re trespassing on all-too-familiar scenes from the recent past. Life-like props and details, some fabricated and some found––a...
Sean Raspet’s debut at VSF-LA is both an invitation to critically examine anthropogenic climate change—and how we are all implicated—and a series of proposed bio- and geo-engineering solutions for ameliorating the effects of the escalating climate crisis. Raspet’s...
While technically strictly paintings, a new suite of large-scale portraits by YoYo Lander involve extensive collage—crucially, collage executed not from spliced photographs or culled ephemera, but from an endless trove of her own watercolor washes on paper. While in a...
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