Dear Reader, This issue is a fave of mine. I’ve always loved crafts, especially as a youngster. I taught myself how to sew and embroider, and I made a hooked-rug wall-hanging in my high school art class. I was by far the youngest member of a quilting bee. I even...
Even with the growing inclusion of textile art in textbooks, surveys and biennials, one doesn’t normally think of weaving as a cutting-edge contemporary art medium. Diedrick Brackens is out to change that. A breakout star of the 2018 Hammer “Made in L.A.” biennial,...
For Melissa Joseph, all things relate to edges. Her practice exists on several of them: painting, felting, craft, utility, art … the list continues. She works in a unique dry-felting medium to create imagery based on her own photography and that of her family. While...
For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog...
Multidisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Ahree Lee started her career focused on video work. In 2001, she took on her first major long-term project employing the repetitive and somewhat pedestrian habit of taking a daily selfie. The resulting images were transformed...
When you talk about utilitarian art, the elephant in the room is always fashion. As fashion houses expand to encompass lifestyle brands, most art with a utilitarian function might fall into the fashion category. It is not uncommon to see museum retrospectives now for...
Lisa Schiff, among the top ranks of New York art advisors, who faces multiple lawsuits by clients and art dealers, put her company, SFA Advisory (with another office in London), into bankruptcy in May. Schiff, 53, who counted the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio among her...
There are moments in history, moments in which the tide can turn based on the will and actions of few. We are currently in one of those moments regarding the acceptance of NFTs in the mainstream art world. As best-selling author Malcom Gladwell would describe far...
Raised in and around Washington DC, with two degrees in painting, Matthew Rosenquist now makes sculptures, albeit with some paint applied. How did that happen? I ask him. After grad school in the South, he took an entry-level job at the Smithsonian with duties that...
Made in L.A. 2023 The Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” just opened (through Dec. 31), and it is now clearly THE art biennial of SoCal. It’s also the best one yet, I think. This year’s theme, “Acts of Living,” allows for a diverse range of work from 39 artists while giving the...
Dear Babs, I’m sick of the BS-way people in the art world talk so that most of us can’t understand them. Why can’t they just be okay with calling stuff beautiful and cool? Has the art world always been like this? Is it just to be exclusive, or is there a point I’m...
free country your voice on the phone in the dream is disinterested I miss you I say It’s a free country a moth falls through the door drunk on light the same one that flies out of my wallet how have I never seen him I think coming home —Evan Laffer STILL THE SAME...
“Nonmemory,” for the artist Mike Kelley, was something akin to his notorious usage of the “uncanny,” a theory borrowed from Freud wherein repressed memories emerge into disturbing feelings. In nonmemory, however, what has been forgotten stays so, and recollection is...
While Deana Lawson is known for her individual, staged photographs depicting African-Americans communities in interior and exterior environs, she also conceptualizes the entirety of her presentations, which often include casual snapshots displayed as collages. In...
Steve McQueen combines his filmmaker’s sense of scale, drama and cinematic history with his artist’s sensibility in Sunshine State (2022), a work of visceral impact and pointed message that is also rich in nuance, symbolism, connection, contradiction and emotion....
The opening for Kim Jones’ exhibition had a kind of homecoming spirit, reflected in its title, “Walking Home.” Several of Jones’ first post-graduate performance pieces in the 1970s were marathon “walks” between various landmarks in Los Angeles, performed in the...
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” remarked the poet who gave us The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot. The observation supports the standard explanation for the failings of our species to adequately address the climate crisis, the scope and scale of which are too...
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