Articles
Unknown Landscapes Jessica Taylor Bellamy Explores the Wetlands
“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As we descend the muddy hillside draped in bright yellow wildflowers, we share a moment of childhood nostalgia, recalling wild mustard flowers that flourished vividly in our memory. Looking down at the soles of my sneakers, already caked with dirt, I feel a sense of wonder, enchanted by the green, dewy world before me, as if I were 10 years old, my clammy hand nestled tightly in...
Of Murals and Mullahs The Revolutionary Graffiti of Iran
It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in custody, she was murdered. Mahsa’s grandfather wrote those words on her gravestone. #MahsaAmini did become a rallying cry, igniting worldwide protests on behalf of “Woman. Life. Freedom”—“Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.” Protestors in Iran took to the streets—and continue to do so—despite lethal crackdowns, sexual assaults and poisonings. Women removed their hijabs and cut their hair. At the...
“Britt Ransom: Arise and Seek” at Pitzer College Art Galleries
When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain, but Ransom dug into her family archives to find a photograph suitable for reference. In “Arise and Seek,” Ransom amplifies her ancestors’ role in the civil rights movement, commemorating their activism with architectural forms, sculptures, photographs and ephemera. On the second floor of the gallery, a large timeline stretches across the mezzanine, thoroughly detailing the...
Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023
Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an irresistible hook: Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The Torrance Art Museum will be opening an exhibition of Zak’s recent work—An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings—on March 25th, to run through May 6, 2023. Before I get into that, I have an embarrassing confession: I’ve never finished Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. This is...
All That Glitters The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of optimism and possibility. That singular ability to capture transitory moments and ephemeral character is the essence of portraiture, the subject perpetually reanimated. Portraiture raises notions of conditional identity and, even when not flattering or mimetically precise, is curiously alluring. It has been a fixture in non-Western art for millennia, along with the belief that a...