Small municipal museums are hard pressed to coordinate their programming into coherent wholes; if a local museum doesn’t fill its walls with a single exhibition, its variety of shows comprise confusing, sometimes clangorous gallimaufries. Lancaster’s MOAH has devised...
Americans who know Cuba only through movies (God-father 2, Before Night Falls) and familiarity with a few star Cuban artists (Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta) are guilty of the oxymoron of mainland insularity, a product of Cold War tensions that arose in 1959 with the...
Throughout our evolution we’ve been afraid of the dark. As creatures primarily endowed with encephalic gifts, we aren’t well-equipped to vie with nocturnal animals, full of tooth and claw and with more finely attuned senses. They make quick work of us when we don’t...
In 2040Jaus Gallery Joe Biel, Stack 4 (Dave)It’s good to know artists are constantly thinking, cogitating, peeling the proverbial cultural onion, to transform our human experience into a charged and luminous imaginative landscape. Such is the case at Jaus Gallery this...
Carlson Hattonat Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College Carlson Hatton, Random Neurons Firing, 2014Carlson Hatton’s immense and powerful exhibition of mostly mixed media drawings on view at the Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College is both fantastical and...
Daniel Joseph Martinezat Roberts & Tilton Daniel Joseph Martinez, If I Wanted To, 2013Daniel Joseph Martinez has gone mad, once again—beautifully and seemingly irrevocably insane. And yet, as Shakespeare himself once proclaimed “to say we end the heartache and the...
Morgan Fisherat China Art Objects Rejoice! Color field painting is far from dead, and in fact can be seen thriving in its natural habitat no less in Morgan Fisher’s fourth exhibition at China Art Objects. I must admit I usually go in for more narrative, metaphoric...
Reverb at Torrance Art Museum Max Presneill once told me that all rock stars secretly want to be painters and all painters would really rather “get the led out,” and judging from The Torrance Art Museum’s current exhibit, "Reverb," I think I’d have to agree. Bringing...
Essie Zimm, The Stag with One Eye, 2013 Platforms & Paint at The Gabba Gallery The famous and sometimes infamous painter Joan Mitchell had a particular pet peeve about being called a “Lady Painter.” “So what if the painter happens to be female, why make a big deal...
Miyoshi Barosh: Feel Better at Luis De Jesus Imagine a bunch of felines on acid, driving through downtown Los Angeles in a supped up Caddy sipping martinis, purring to Lady GaGa and you’ve acquired just a taste of Miyoshi Barosh’s fantastical and scathing...
Joshua Aster: Innerverse at Edward Cella Gallery The title of Joshua Aster’s elegant and masterful show, Innerverse, at Edward Cella Gallery expresses both the complexity and lyricism that is at the heart of Aster’s artistic practice. These paintings, all oil on...
B.A.T. (Bon à Tirer | Good to Go) at Offramp Gallery Offramp Gallery delivers another strongly engaging and most definitely feminist tour de force that showcases prints by women artists and El Nopal press. The lineup includes artists like Carolyn Castano and Linda...
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” at New York’s New Museum is the artist’s first major exhibition in the U.S. in over 25 years. A legendary provocateur, Burden has challenged traditional concepts of art through his galvanizing performance pieces and later...
Any time an artist can invoke Michelangelo and Steve Ditko in the same work, he deserves considerable respect. At least that is the feeling one gets from the impressive show of work by Jim Shaw recently on view at Blum & Poe. As expected, Shaw’s work is erudite...
Karen Carson has a tremendous sense of humor, as is evidenced in her most recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen. Having chosen farming equipment—most prominently, tractors—as her subject matter, Carson revels in the sheer monumentality and vibrant colors of these...
“People from the village,” said David Hockney recently in The Smithsonian, “come up and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’” How did Hockney...
Lesley Vance’s work may at first read like Diebenkorn in miniature, but her solo show quotes midcentury abstraction in a distinctly Reagan-era palette; little messages from the 1960s retold in twilight Cold War parlance. The gallery walls nearly swallow her small...
When not sure what to say or write, one might fill space with “x x x,” “blank blank blank” or “. . .” Petra Cortright titles her recent exhibition with all three—“x x x blank blank blank . . . ”—alluding to casual causality and ideas that will be completed...
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