Fame There are some people who can barely be tolerated in person but are beloved as fictional characters. One reads about them in a book or watches them on a screen, and one feels special because one recognizes their beauty. But when one meets them in person, one...
Dear Reader, I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: This, after 18 years, is my last editor’s letter. What an incredible journey it has been. Here’s the good news: Artillery will still carry on! More on that later. I started this magazine with...
The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), is continuing a legacy of Black-led art spaces in South Los Angeles. Co-founded by multi-hyphenate artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz and noé olivas, it...
The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to establish the city, bureaucrats and businessmen fought to colonize this humble waterway. They tore it away from Indigenous people, encased it in concrete, then rerouted it...
As a kid, Lucia Monge often gazed at birds through her grandfather’s binoculars, taking in the wonders of nature at an early age. Sometimes the birds looked so extraordinary and colorful that she pondered: Could they be real? Or were they something from a fairy tale?...
A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris. But she has always given special attention to the music of the...
Centuries before Leonardo da Vinci lived and worked in Italy, a Persian astronomer, physician, geographer and writer was conducting research into the nature of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283) wrote and illustrated The Wonders of...
The tedium of a particular self-consciousness ascribed to Generation Z was on full display in The Death of a Star, a performance and self-proclaimed “reality show,” directed by Jasmine Johnson, which had a sold-out four-day run at New Theater Hollywood (NTH) this...
Here’s something different: I am going to talk about the Olympics that were opening in Paris as I wrote this column. Especially exciting were the athletes floating down the Seine in a series of boats—so improbable, but so original, and so picturesque against the...
Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...
There are few places on this earth where I have stood and felt humbled, in awe of the grandeur of human achievement, where art and architecture intentionally merge with consideration of form and function—and where sexy-ass aesthetics rule the day. These sites are what...
One of the places where art and science can interact as a powerful force is in outsider art. This is especially true when the outsider’s goal is motivated by a belief that what they are doing is scientific. Self-educated artists are often likely to follow their own...
Liam Young is an Australian-born speculative architect and world-builder who constructs digital models of potential futures. With a background in architecture, his designs are grounded in plausible science and technology. Young’s Planet City envisions a future where...
Dear Babs, Our daughter is starting a BFA program at a small, prestigious art college this fall. What are some things we can do to support her during her first semester? —Striving to Support in Seattle Dear Striving, When I was in college, my dad would mail me...
Licking Time There’s a fortune to be made thinking about licking the bare upper thigh of historical figures. The way the first person gave up all hope echoes in everyone everywhere forever. Wearing animal print, and writing poems one can get close to the world licking...
There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early...
If you’ve read any of Bernard Cooper’s books, you know about the care with which he constructs his sentences, how he gives each detail its own breathing room. (If not, Maps to Anywhere [1990] and his 2006 memoir The Bill from My Father are especially recommended.)...