As noted in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about African American History (1996) by Jeffrey Stewart, Althea Gibson received her first tennis racket in 1940, being barely a teenager. She was not only the first African American to win a women’s singles at Wimbledon;...
In a world where robots gauge workers' bathroom breaks, attending to one's basic needs is seen as an indulgence. Current buzz around "self-care," a notion often shrouded in a mystical feel-good aura as though it were elusive as a rainbow, attests the dysfunctionality...
Via distortion and exaggeration, Christina Quarles strips figures to their essence, exposing aspects of the human condition in the raw. Recalling Francis Bacon with a more hopeful, feminine twist, the large-scale paintings in Quarles' Regen Projects show, "But I Woke...
Different memories within each of our lives are associated with some space and with distinct details that carry the narrative of any specific occurrence. In Augusta Wood’s second solo exhibit at DENK, “The Shape of My Head,” the environment becomes the storyteller of...
How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the...
While the underlying engineering of Tim Hawkinson’s artworks appears to be of an extraordinarily complex order, the raw materials with which they are made, taken from everyday objects that are typically discarded after the substance in them is extracted, structure a...
“The aim of the dreamer…is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world… But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” This quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country is on the wall of...
“Many years ago,” Maggie Nelson writes in her memoir, The Argonauts, “[the poet Anne] Carson gave a lecture ...at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in ...” Nelson writes that she “fastened” to the idea, which she...
Featuring over 60 works on paper and seven films, “Sara Kathryn Arledge: Serene for the Moment” discloses the brilliance of one singular artist who never should have been forgotten. This enthralling retrospective begins with a room of early drawings, archives and a...
Three immersive films from Africa about political and cultural resistance use tropes of the Imaginary from Fanon to Lacan to challenge inherited postcolonial mindsets. Kudzanai Chiurai presents a gorgeous, disorienting series of seven tableaux dramatizing the agony of...
Sometimes there is that rare and ineffable dialogue between artists that resists being quantified or easily understood. It’s like snow or the first time you fall in love. It works for no apparent reason, and is wonderful to behold. The current exhibition “Flora &...
A lot happens in the room at the Lowell Ryan group show Color Out of Space, so much that it seeps into more than one dimension. In large-scale mixed-media paintings and sculptures that take the very idea of mixed media to new places, five artists address not only...
Oli Epp is a young London-based artist whose humorous paintings depict contemporary pop culture and our abject relationship to technology and commerce. The brashly colored works are populated by airbrushed blobs that become quasi-human forms sporting sunglasses or 3D...
A single black scrawl—Young—hovers over painting after painting. It may cover the side of a building or a truck—and indeed the artist hung his work on the outside of abandoned buildings, as an uneasy compromise between an exhibition and graffiti. It may float just out...
Morgan Mandalay's paintings of tainted jungle paradises are radiant with color and lush verdure, yet they bloom with inklings of mortality. Dead fishes hang amid the umbrage of burning orchards where cadaverous human arms emerge from lurid thickets. Figs and oranges...
If the wallet of your heart is running low, then Gabby Rosenberg’s “Night Pockets” provides enough spare change for your paradigm to spend. Rosenberg’s exhibition at Steve Turner LA embodies the identity narrative seeping with the primal desire for interpersonal...
Fantasy and reality encroach upon each another in "Works on Paper 1967-1995" by Ken Price (1935-2012) at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. Twenty-eight deceptively straightforward pictures draw you into nuanced realms where familiarity gives way to strangeness. In Price's...
The title of Chris Trueman's show, "After(image)," betokens the fleeting vivid impressions his paintings convey. Hovering between abstraction and representation, each of his nine vibrant works currently on view at Edward Cella embodies a wide array of marks,...
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