Articles

Amplifier of Black Art
Nothing Random with Chance the Rapper's Course

“We outside!” Chance the Rapper exclaims into his microphone. The sky is near black at maybe seven minutes after 8 p.m. in Downtown Los Angeles. Third weeknight of October. Chance had been and would be again, soon, rhyming his way through a song. The Chicago MC had been in the midst of vocalizing about his heart and his God and the shifting tides of life. Chano—as more ardent fans might call...

From Lagos with Love
The Far-Reaching Vision of Adenrele Sonariwo

by Donasia Tillery

The sun is rising over my home in Northeast Los Angeles as I call gallerist and curator Adenrele Sonariwo on Zoom. She answers me from her office in the bustling West African city of Lagos, Nigeria, where her day is already in full swing, crescendoing toward the familiar buzz of a workday afternoon. Dressed in a classic black blouse, she fills the frame of my screen with a steady and warm...

Reframing A Ritual
Allana Clarke Wrestles New Meaning into Hair Bonding Glue

by Annabel Keenan

I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show, the Trinidadian-American artist had already made a name for herself with videos, performance, photography and text-based works...

Re-Imagining an Impossible Future
Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia

by Renee Reizman

One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through an open pit, illuminating a subterranean realm. There are thin, precise incisions along the collage, which are then mended with...

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part IX
In the Region of Pure Art

by John Tottenham

Jim Brooklinen’s rapturous response to reading my novel in its entirety had exceeded my wildest hopes. Not only had the veteran New York literary man hailed it as “the finest new work of sustained prose I’ve read in a very long time,” and expressed a genuine desire to attach himself to its inception, he had also confidently stated that it would have received an equally fervent endorsement from...

The Life (and Death) of an Artist
Helen Molesworth's true crimeification of Ana Mendieta

by Lauren Guilford

Ana Mendieta's work is as much about life as it is about death. Attuned to the sacred bond between bodies and land, Mendieta regarded nature as a sensitive and emotive force entangled in culture and politics—a messy assemblage of energies and ideologies embedded in life and soil, crossing borders and spanning timelines. These forces can be traced in earth's geological terrain and detected in its...

Birds of a Feather: An Interview with Artists Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner
Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner: Moulting at LA Tate Gallery, Los Angeles

by Julie Adler

At the beginning of the pandemic, April 2020, LA artists Katy Crowe and Margarete Hahner bumped into each other, waiting in line to get into Trader Joe’s. There, they decided to start working on a project together which would involve painting on each other’s paintings. While some people got busy fumigating all their groceries, baking bread, learning how to play piano or binging Netflix, these...

Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 3
New Art Dealers Alliance Fair, MOCA North Miami, and Pérez Art Museum

by Annabel Keenan

For my final full day here in Miami, I headed across Biscayne Bay to Downtown Miami, an area home to several arts institutions, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami. After experiencing the traffic of last year’s Art Week, I was determined to minimize bridge crossings and decided to pack in as many Downtown, Wynwood, and Design District events as possible. This was a great decision, as it took...

Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 2
Untitled Art and The Bass Museum

by Annabel Keenan

After spending most of the day yesterday inside the convention center to visit Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), for day two I enjoyed the second most important part of Miami Art Week: the beach. Along with the crowds of New Yorkers who fly down to South Florida, I've been starved of warm weather and sunshine. Thankfully, Miami doesn’t disappoint and the fairs and cultural institutions wisely...

Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 1
Art Basel Miami Beach

by Annabel Keenan

Artillery is back in Florida for another round of Miami Art Week. As always, the days will be packed with fairs, exhibitions, parties, and events that showcase the biggest names in modern and contemporary art alongside emerging artists and rising stars of the industry. Throughout the week, I’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes details of some of the many activities going on from Miami Beach to...

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Reviews

PICK OF THE WEEK: Matthew Barney
Regen Projects

Somewhere between warfare and entertainment, sports as a spectacle is deeply rooted in the ways modern societies organize, present and consume events and expectations. Pacing through "SECONDARY: commencement," there is a sense of nostalgia that belongs to a media...

OUTSIDE LA: Margot Samel New York
“Thank you, I’m rested now. I’ll have the lobster today, thank you”

Two galleries have teamed up to co-present the group exhibition, “Thank you, I’m rested now. I’ll have the lobster today, thank you,” borrowing its title from Karen Kilimnik’s 2016 collage of a Siamese cat poised on a Rococo-style bed. Margot Samel from New York and...

OUTSIDE LA: Junior Art Exhibition
Laguna Beach Festival of Arts

One of the most popular shows at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts is the “Junior Art Exhibition,” featuring 400 art pieces by 200 Orange County students from kindergarten through grade 12. The show reveals the vast variety of artistic influences that students draw...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Francisco de Goya
Norton Simon Museum

To see the work of Francisco de Goya in present-day Los Angeles is disturbingly pertinent, echoing the turbulent anxieties of our time with a wickedly sadistic smile. “Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker” at the Norton Simon Museum marks the first comprehensive...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Bruce Richards
Sea View

For naïve or semi-initiated Los Angeles art-goers such as myself, a visit to “Soundings,” Sea View’s summer exhibition, might elicit two questions. Who is Bruce Richards? And why does the show’s concurrence with the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Los Angeles County...

PICK OF THE WEEK: “Bruts”
David Kordansky Gallery

In this group exhibition of 15 artists, Rashid Johnson splendidly arranges ablaze and brooding drawings, paintings and sculptures into a pristine playlist. From Huma Bhabha’s uneasy cork, wood and cardboard ancient being and Bill Traylor’s acutely simple and lyrical...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Gretchen Bender
Sprüth Magers

In 1987, Cindy Sherman interviewed Gretchen Bender for BOMB Magazine, discussing the influence of her work on mass media. Bender denied the relationship between the two and instead described media as a ‘cannibalistic river without a conscience,’ invoking the image of...

PEER REVIEW
Tom Knechtel on Thomas Antell

Tom Knechtel, a Los Angeles–based artist who shows with PPOW in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art here in LA—where his exhibition, “The Hare in the Studio,” just ended in June—is known for his intricate paintings and drawings, often depicting himself, animals and...

Claire Chambless
Carlye Packer

Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and...

Nick Angelo
Sebastian Gladstone

A big pharma scion funded the Tolkien exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art to normalize drug dependency by suggesting its correlation to Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the One Ring. Or, hear me out, Whiskey Pete’s casino operates a mind-control project...

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