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...
Popular music is increasingly a topic of exhibition in the museum and gallery world but I’ve found its presentation can be either overwhelming or underwhelming. After all, how can the curator condense an experience so visceral like performance—an act itself at once singular and communicative—into a walk through display of objects? The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles has managed to do...
Last Sunday, instead of curling up to watch an episode of Orange is the New Black and calling it a night, I headed to Venice Beach where art collectors Mike and Diane Silver had opened their gorgeous canal-front home for “Nude Survey Two,” where the established Plein Air painter Alex Schaefer would be exhibiting a new series of works as well as painting from two female models on the spot....
How often have you found yourself saying, “I would bring my business here, if only they had more generic, mall-safe, focus-group chosen art on the walls?” Surrounded by more museums, galleries, and out-of-work MFAs than in any other city, these SoCal establishments have decided against partnerships that could create unique site-specific works, and have instead trusted the curatorial choices of...
There are many versions of “space” in the art world, from the high gloss of a pristine museum exhibition to the cozy confines of a pop-up gallery hosted in a rented living room. Somewhere in between, catering to the general public but sustained by the upper echelon of the art audience, stand the nonprofit art spaces. Nonprofit art spaces are an established practice in New York and some of the...
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...
Sean Raspet’s debut at VSF-LA is both an invitation to critically examine anthropogenic climate change—and how we are all implicated—and a series of proposed bio- and geo-engineering solutions for ameliorating the effects of the escalating climate crisis. Raspet’s...
While technically strictly paintings, a new suite of large-scale portraits by YoYo Lander involve extensive collage—crucially, collage executed not from spliced photographs or culled ephemera, but from an endless trove of her own watercolor washes on paper. While in a...
A full moon hangs demurely in the upper left of Serena Potter’s painting Nighttiming (2019) like a wheel of Babybel cheese. Beneath it, on the crest of a forested hill, a scene of lunar revelry: a man and woman in office attire, and another woman in striped pajamas...
Historically, art and politics have often been intertwined. In Dada, Futurism and Russian Constructivism, as well as in some Conceptual art practices and works by individual artists such as Sister Corita Kent, text and image have emblazoned artworks with calls to...