Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show Come On at the RADAR Queerfail Festival, she imagined trying to seduce a prospective lover by sticking out her butt and singing...
In his 2011 book Normal Life, law professor and trans-activist Dean Spade writes of the wide-ranging goals of trans-resistance, a political awakening that fights against such manifold systems of domination that its practitioners cannot focus unilaterally on sex, gender, race, class, disability, or queerness, but must take as their object the liberation of all subjected people: “[This resistance]...
Ten. It’s our number for this issue as we enter our 10th year of publication. So we thought it would be fun to put together a batch of Top Ten Lists for the greater Los Angeles art world. Our contributors came up with categories and compiled lists of what they considered tops. While lists can be fun, they can also be fraught with problems: Why wasn’t so-and-so listed? Who cares about that? WTF?...
The downtown Los Angeles arts district has been evolving, somewhat in tandem with adjacent downtown districts, since at least the 1980s. There was a stabilizing shift at the turn of the century when SCI-Arc took over the old Santa Fe rail depot east of Alameda and began renovating it into studio, classroom and related facilities. A natural anchor and boundary for the northwest end of the...
With its third installment at the Hammer Museum, “Made in L.A.” has settled into its brand as a well-researched survey of current trends and practices in regional art. But there is never a “settling in” as far as expectations for a biennial, which raises the bar not only for curators and the artists involved, but also for those who experience it. Aiming to review the show, I spent one afternoon...
The title of Farley Aguilar’s exhibition “Phantom Limb” refers to the corporeal sensation of a limb that has been severed from the body–memories scratch and ache, haunted by the historical traumas of slavery that manifest in transgenerational pain and psychic...
Having opened after an entire year’s delay even as the COVID-19 pandemic entered its third year, the fifth iteration of MoMA PS1’s signature major survey of art in New York City, titled "Greater New York 2021," finds the curatorial team of in-house Curator Ruba Katrib...
Consider the rhythm of poetry, the speaking voice and the eye moving across the page, the mathematics of strict iambic and hendecasyllabic verse pressed into the service of unruly love and nature. The pace and structure of power of three is eternal, the optical...
A series of precious objects rendered in oil paint requires your intimate proximity. Tiny tactile paintings of levitating furs, beaded coin purses, costume jewelry and sequin fabrics depict trompe-l'oeil images of feminine objects commonly associated with glam,...
Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Billie Holiday's iconic song “Strange Fruit” serves as a haunting metaphor for racial violence, evoking the historical and ongoing pain of Black Americans. The song was originally written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 in the form of an...