The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach calls itself, “The only museum in the United States exclusively dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American art.” Yet its permanent collection is comprised largely of works from Mexico, with exhibitions often featuring art from that country. Idurre Alonso, curator there since 2002, talks about the “aestheticism” of contemporary Mexican art...
Throughout his 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman returns over and over to a single passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is...
In the 20th century there has long been a long tradition of artists extending their visions beyond the studio walls to encompass a wider range of ideas and modes of thinking, wherein artists like Wallace Berman with his magazine Semina in the ’60s, or much later in the mid-’90s, Daniel Joseph Martinez with the nonprofit space Deep River, could extend their minds in idiosyncratic ways toward a...
Meeting Marycarmen Arroyo Macias in MexiCali was a fortuitous event; she lent me her camera in a pinch to photograph potential performance locations for the MexiCali Biennial 13, in which we were both included. When I asked about her work for the show, she told me the museum was concerned about her plan to install raw meat in the gallery, for fear it would attract rodents and insects. It wasn’t...
Geographical border zones figure prominently in the work of Julio César Morales, particularly those separating the U.S., where he lives, from Mexico, where he was born. In “Undocumented Interventions,” an ongoing series of watercolor and ink drawings, Morales presents a surrealist view of clandestine border crossings, in which piñatas shaped like Barney and SpongeBob Square Pants conceal the...
These new paintings by Jessie Makinson are absolutely wild. From large-scale soiree tableaux to small-gathering social vignettes and intimate, symbolism-rich character portraits, her singular swirl of posh post-male society is both feral and fancy, cheeky and courtly,...
A painting requires nothing more than a painter. Everything else is malleable. Once a painter has been established, that which they create are paintings no matter the form. Michael Henry Hayden is – as he has been throughout his long career – a painter. But in the...
“The Grief I Have Caused You” is Devendra Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Nicodim is hosting the exhibition in their upstairs gallery, which surveys work made during the lockdown and beyond. The past year has been one of great suffering and...
The atmosphere is quiet and still, the lighting theatrical and in a sequence of different colored rooms, case after display case filled with ceramic vessel-like forms resting at the bottom of brightly lit aquariums exude immobility, enlivened only by fish darting...
In the 1950s-60s, Jasper Johns created two works – Flag (1954-55) and Target (1961) – which both carved his place in the art historical canon and established a new conceptual framework for art. These encaustic versions of instantly recognizable icons (an American Flag...