All good crits are alike; each miserable crit is miserable in its own way. Isn’t that the way it goes? We asked a few reliable Southern California university faculty to recommend recent MFA grad students for contributions to our Back to School issue on their critique experiences. We weren’t able to include every school, but here are a few to share with you. As you’ll see, a common denominator is...
Each April, galleries in Portland, OR, exhibit photography in recognition of Photo Month. As one might expect from a small art scene, the exhibitions are locally important but seem nostalgic, derivative or touristic to outsiders. The two notable exceptions are Coleen Plumb at Blue Sky, and David Hillard at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Plumb pushes photography’s taxonomical quality, presenting...
In the perennial discussion of which of the several distinguished art schools in Los Angeles is the best, the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California has always been a contender. Until now. This year the Roski School, with its late-model studios and its dozen-odd full and associate professors and as many more lecturers and adjunct professors, will minister to a...
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the...
This summer we’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to time travel, and see the work of two artists, generations apart but both deeply moved by a need to reflect on the history of racial discrimination in this country. Through their work and careers, we see how times have changed, yet also how underlying dynamics have remained the same, sadly. A survey of the work of Noah Purifoy, “Noah...
“As the World Turns” is an apt title for Leigh Salgado’s fourth solo exhibition at Launch Gallery. Many of the graceful works are circular, globe-like. A lush world of beauty that also evokes ideas of the circular nature of life: our annual passage around the sun, and...
My first review for Artillery Magazine – almost two years ago now – was for my favorite museum in southern California, The Norton Simon. I recently went back and reread that article, and I found that my own writing was, to be kind, academic. Dry as a bone, really....
Wild, wonderful and wistful—this survey of Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary is long overdue in this town, where she has rarely been shown. “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is a trippy series of multimedia installations with videos and immersive projections...
The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s...
LA-based multimedia artist Michael C. McMillen is known for his immersive, meticulous, set-like installations that make you feel like you’re trespassing on all-too-familiar scenes from the recent past. Life-like props and details, some fabricated and some found––a...