While Americans condemn Mexican lawlessness, much illegal drug trade south of the border is driven by U.S. demand. In his PST: LA/LA show titled "Artempatía" (Empathy Art), Mexico City artist Emiliano Gironella Parra imports a sampling of the horrors we usually only...
Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez
County fairs usually aren't noted for their art; but this year's is an exception, with Millard Sheets Art Center hosting a fine PST LA/LA exhibition, "Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez: One Path Two Journeys." Hernández and Valdez were, respectively, members of...
Nick Lowe
Straddling all sorts of categories, Nick Lowe's pictures are defined by their byzantine intermediacy between stretched canvases and works on paper, paintings and drawings, fanciful dreamscapes and pedestrian scenes. Lowe possesses an uncanny knack for agglomerating...
Hot Time, Summer in the City
Group shows are like parties: overarching themes can help ensure memorable experiences; but sometimes the most engaging are those where unexpected connections form fortuitously among diverse invitees, rather than being engineered. "Hot Time, Summer in the City"...
Julia Haft-Candell
In timeless spirit and simple form, Julia Haft-Candell's ceramic sculptures recall the mystical austerity of primeval petroglyphs, carved totems and cave paintings. Yet their painted embellishments and surface textures are unmistakably modern, evoking graphic novel...
Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s...
Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture
As noted in an Artillery Pick quite recently, portraiture is the oldest form of ‘identity art’, and moreover, representation itself. It is ‘naming’ in the largest sense – placing, identifying, classifying, narrating, and implicitly conceptualizing, though without...
80/50 Quiet Storm
We read history for perspective on advancing and collapsing civilizations and their impacts on planetary life and (hopefully) an understanding of historical cycles and a sense of where we might all be headed (besides other planets). Art exhibitions, historical and...
Over the Rainbow
The title of the show is as ironic as it is aspirational. Most of us find ourselves in a place far more culturally fractured than we imagined less than a year ago, and pressing forward into an ever-more dystopian reality. Which is why it is as important as ever to...
The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts
Not more than a year ago, I was writing about a show at LACMA with a transcendental dimension – not merely transcending its materials, approach and style, but whose visionary qualities might potentially carry the dedicated viewer to a place of transcendence. Only a...
Jim Shaw: The Wig Museum
Are you one of those people who have difficulty making clear-cut distinctions between your night(or day)mares and the actuality of your everyday life? (I am – especially when I’m running a fever.) Jim Shaw not only gets you; he’s created a sacred space for your...
Edgar Arceneaux – Until, Until, Until…
The subject of appearances and disappearances is not new to Edgar Arceneaux – in fact it might be considered a through-line in his work over the years. But Arceneaux is always acutely conscious of the sea-changes of time and history and the chain of causality...
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Kerry James Marshall’s current retrospective at MoCA is less a ‘Pick-of-the-Week’ than a Must of the Year. Regardless of the particulars of each individual’s experience, it is a show that compels serious reevaluation of the historical canon of Western painting (and...
Cindy Bernard – Things Change, Things Stay the Same
Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
Material As Metaphor and Betye Saar
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...
Enoc Perez – Embassies
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
Concrete Island – Venus Over Los Angeles
Not long ago, I recommended a show, entitled, Concrete Islands (plural), which, although it didn’t exactly shy from the allusion to J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of contemporary urban life, was more specifically inspired by Marcel Broodthaers and the concrete...
Liz Young – Of Blood and Dirt
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...