It is difficult not to be taken with Ludovica Gioscia’s exhibition “Arturo And The Vertical Sea.” Upon entry, viewers confront three free-standing wooden structures akin to unfinished walls that criss-cross two gallery spaces at different angles, dividing them into...
Amanda Wall’s debut solo show, “JUICY” at The Cabin entices us into the intimate gallery. The exhibition space, which is in fact a small cottage-like structure in the backyard of artist and collector Danny First’s residence, immediately evokes a sense of casual...
Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids...
Central Valley ceramicist David Hicks doesn’t have a big footprint in Los Angeles. To see his work, you have to drive out to a hospital in Sylmar: a sun-parched, semi-rustic neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Los Angeles. There, above the lobby welcome desk, once...
Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a...
These new paintings by Jessie Makinson are absolutely wild. From large-scale soiree tableaux to small-gathering social vignettes and intimate, symbolism-rich character portraits, her singular swirl of posh post-male society is both feral and fancy, cheeky and courtly,...
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Dear Reader, I was going to start this letter with a Happy New Year! I should, right? It will be 2021 when this January/February issue comes out. We will have brought in the New Year, albeit with less fanfare than usual—it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that...
If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The...
In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft...
I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social...
Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national...
The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual...
SoCal’s Museums Museums have been shut down (again), which doesn’t effect the city of Los Angeles too much as museums weren’t reopened except for a very short week or so. Neither LACMA nor the Hammer ever reopened after mid-March shutdowns and, alas, the...
I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line...
In last issue’s column I discussed the influence of the Woke movement in shaking up stodgy art museums to diversify their staff and fill gaps in their collections caused by decades of turning a blind eye to artwork made by minorities and women. Sure enough, a backlash...
Artists can make the invisible become visible, but that doesn’t mean they have to. Photographers in particular find it necessary to provide visual confirmation of a chosen moment; in the case of some Pulitzer Prize winners, their captured image has become the official...