Articles
CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary
One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary, titled “Wayfinding,” offers vision and agility to spare. Although the theme is rather broadly drawn—referring to clay’s origins in land and water and embracing issues of cultivation, migration and sustainability—the works revel in their florid diversity, overflowing with effusive vitality. Forging various factual and fictional connections between human culture and the natural world,...
ART THAT TRANSPORTS Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations
The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Having lived in cities with extensive light rail systems (Washington, DC, Tokyo, Hong Kong), I love good public transportation. They are not only an efficient and affordable means of transportation in spread-out cities, they are also places for meeting and...
Village Mindset Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice
It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an organization such as Art + Practice, which has directly contributed to positive and long-term impact in the majority Black community in Leimert Park, since its founding in 2014. Art + Practice’s partnership with First Place for Youth is providing support to anywhere from 85 to 100 transition-age foster youth at any given time. Their collaborations with institutions such as the...
Extra Flavor Desert X Breathes New Life
In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop that the 2023 iteration of Desert X, a young and ambitious biennial, blossoms across the sun-kissed Fantasyland of Palm Springs. Departing bright and early for the press preview day on March 3, I made the two-hour drive east from Los Angeles to the Desert X hub at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club to enjoy refreshments under the sun and hear opening remarks from this year’s...
Commerce and Culture Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New York City and currently residing in Northern California, he began his professional career as a photojournalist working for publications such as Rolling Stone, Time, The Village Voice and Fortune, photographing the likes of Patti Smith, the Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Liberace and many political figures. In 2007, he shifted his lens to capture the more circumscribed realm of...
