Articles

Spiritual Healing
Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits

As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of portraits of people, living or dead, who are the chosen beneficiaries of his healing efforts. For a recent exhibition at Charlie...

Africa Around Town
“Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz

by Bianca Collins

The Getty Villa’s exhibition, “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” offers a stunning display of jewelry and items of personal adornment excavated from burials of royalty and aristocratic individuals from a region that spans what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Almost 3000 years of ancient history are presented in exquisite examples of metalwork in silver, bronze and mostly gold,...

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

by Donnell Alexander

“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...

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Reviews

Chris Eckert
Long Beach Museum of Art

Incessant texts and social-media alerts are inescapable facets of contemporary life, and artist Chris Eckert attempts to make sense of this glut of seemingly endless data. Eckert has successfully melded backgrounds in the fields of mechanical engineering and...

Chiffon Thomas
Michael Kohn Gallery

A church is a grand gesture to the community it serves and sustains. At its best it’s a hub, as well as a display of worship, tradition, sacrament and humility. A chapel by contrast is a modest little space—distinguished from the former by its size more than anything...

Uta Barth
1301PE

As part of her career-spanning 2022–23 survey, “Peripheral Vision” at the Getty, and in honor of the museum’s 20th anniversary, the German-American photographer Uta Barth presented an expansive commission entitled “…from dawn to dusk” (2022). Twice a month for a year,...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Everything But the Kitchen Sink
La Luz De Jesus

California amusement parks like Disneyland are multi-layered entertainment fantasies, offering created environments for escapism and joy-filled distraction. These tourist sites entice visitors with adventurous rides, performances and tantalizing food. Similarly,...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Covey Gong and Monique Mouton
Bel Ami

The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Christopher Culver
Michael Benevento

If—in the next couple days—you are keen on communing privately with melancholic beauty (or “tough joy,” as the artist might have it), visit Christopher Culver’s latest suite of charcoal and pastel drawings on paper at Michael Benevento Gallery. Never mind the...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Alice Wang
Vincent Price Art Museum

In his journals from his first expeditions in the Sierra Mountains, John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” The interconnectedness of our world stretches beyond our innate abilities and into...

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...

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