Admirers of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro’s (1923-2015) work may be surprised to learn that this influential woman who founded the Feminist Art program at CalArts with artist Judy Chicago and helped organize Womanhouse (1972), an installation project with over 25...
So often is the label Surrealism tacked onto fantasy art that, in descriptions of contemporary work, it's become practically synonymous with utopian scenes or lowbrow. Kelly McLane's loose dystopic pictures are the opposite of such reductionistic definitions; yet she...
In her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Winnipeg-based artist Wanda Koop investigates the idea of dislocation. This dislocation is reflected in the exhibition title, In Absentia, and results from the fact that Koop’s paintings of New York City where actually created...
In a corridor just inside Ghebaly Gallery, a faded sign, barely legible for its low contrast, reads "Déjà Vu." This isn't merely a placard bearing the title of Sayre Gomez' show; it's an integral painting whose dual function niftily preludes the awaiting parade of...
USC Fisher Museum's "James hd Brown: Life and Work in Mexico" is one of the few PST: LA/LA shows devoted to a SoCal-born expatriate. Born in Glendale in 1951, Brown settled in Oaxaca in 1995 after having lived in Europe and New York. This exhibition is ingrained with...
It’s often said that the victor writes the history, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that men, and society in general, have been victorious in writing an exclusionary narrative after ignoring women for centuries. Art history books, museums and other established...
The singularly remarkable thing about Ken Gonzales-Day’s re-creation of his breakthrough 1993-96 photographic project, “Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River,” is the infinitely expansive temporal envelope it seems to occupy. This is more than...
Much like the Jorge Luis Borges book after which it is named, the 18th Street Arts Center’s PST: LA/LA exhibition addresses history and its delineations, whether entirely or partially fictitious, in order to question the role of master narratives in general, and...
“The Collective Memory of the Worst Place to Live in the World Today If You Are Not White” is a small but nicely arranged exhibition comprised of Alejandro Cartagena’s current and previous work, contrasting Santa Barbara, California with Monterrey, Mexico. The main...
Densely fretted and motion activated and crying out for every metaphorical use of the word string from art to design, music to physics, three new bodies of work by Brian Wills expand and deepen his relationship to his material muse—colored thread. A star in the...
Mark Steven Greenfield’s works explore the complexities of the African American experience, speaking to personal as well as universal themes. While earlier works explored stereotypes characterized by black cartoon characters and Blackface minstrels, in his current...
“Revolution and Ritual,” while very narrowly focused on three Mexican women photographers, seeks to address in broad strokes changes in ideas about Mexican identity through the work of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero, whose careers together span...
Kinetic Art, like so many postwar movements, arose simultaneously in several disparate corners of the world, coalesced in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and derived from prewar tendencies whose revolutionary aesthetics and idealistic spirit seemed appropriate to a...
Brazilian artist Valeska Soares’ mid-career survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, her first solo museum exhibit in the western United States, seamlessly expresses the ephemeral qualities of love and longing, in harmony with and opposition to the weighted—and...
“Memories of Underdevelopment” is a sweeping exhibition composed of 400 objects from more than 50 artists from eight countries throughout Latin America. It shares its title with the 1968 movie directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about the Cuban revolution and associated...
Right as you cross the threshold into Ahrong Kim’s show “Internal Voice” at the Clay Studio, you’re met by five pairs of eyes set into brightly colored teapots resting at eye level on plinths jutting from the wall. The eyes, embedded into fragmented faces, exposed...
Van Hanos' paintings parodizing partisan preposterousness would be utterly comical if they didn't so mordantly reflect our circusy cultural reality. Cynically dubbed "Late American Paintings," his current show at Chateau Shatto concentrates social discord, political...
In a letter to a fellow Argentine artist living in Paris, León Ferrari wrote, “We produce culture for our ideological enemies, and they gobble everything up, the pretty paintings and the protest paintings alike.” That is the continuing crisis for art that is built...