A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme reflects the biases of its creator and subsequent co-creator. Memes in their analog form were first identified in 1976 by the...
A couple of months ago I took short trips to Phoenix and Denver for a change of scenery, to indulge in culture, and to see the rebranding of Sheraton hotels. Denver is a surprisingly interesting city, and we stayed in the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, which is very well located near the main street of Denver, 16th Street, with its free streetcar, and near the Capitol with its famous...
Calliope Pavlides engineers her compositions like a to-do list, an Easter egg hunt, or survival kit. Her works on paper for an upcoming exhibition at Harkawik in New York City exist as impossible still lifes and contrary landscapes. In the wake of a global pandemic, a climate crisis and personal micro-dramas, the Greek-born artist must “place everything on the table” and assess the damages. She...
Land has been a constant throughout history. We bring to land our personal experiences, and land in turn acts as a witness to the people and events that come and go. For artist Allison Janae Hamilton, land is her most enduring subject. She describes land as a participant in and reflection of histories from the beautiful to the traumatic. Her works are haunting and inspiring, unnerving and...
“Art is a universal language,” Hung Viet Nguyen says. “And when I came here as an immigrant, my English language was not that great. My strength was in painting. I slowly convinced people that my art is my language.” Nguyen came to the US from Vietnam in 1982, with a background in biology and a lifelong passion for art. After making the move, he decided to make art his livelihood as well. A...
Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of Oakland-based artist and curator Leila Weefur, how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, “Prey†Play.” Presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, both in San Francisco, one is at Minnesota Street Project, as part of their California Black...
I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows that had intrigued me enough to write, review, recommend, it was clear there were more than 20 of them. There are a number of...
What a year, and what a year for films—many of them delayed in production or distribution due to COVID, but roaring back as the theaters reopened. Below is my list of top theatrically released films of 2021; films I have had a chance to see thus far. I’m struck by how many were directed by women—a group which usually represents less than 10% of directors in the top 250 grossing films in the US,...
Cucumber is so much more than a tea-time British delicacy, served on white bread with loads of butter, yet Americans cringe at the thought! Cringing Cucumber, as she is known in the States, decided to open a specialty shop in the heart of Manhattan, serving all manner of crustless delights, aka sandwiches, including fig and pepper, baked wasp with Madagascar honey, watercress and mustard,...
Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show. Roberts, unflinching,...
The Marilyn Nance exhibition at Roberts Projects beautifully demonstrates the phenomenon known as six degrees of separation—the idea that all people are six or fewer connections away from each other. Nance was 21 when she was chosen to be the United States’ official...
Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture. In Wrought:...
Carolyn Castaño's “Otros Seres” (Other Beings) exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery is an exhilarating eyeful of stealth environmental disaster. Castaño, of Colombian-American heritage, is well-known for her early extravagant and provocative Garden Heads...
Feathers, fur, gills, horns, tails (spiked and scaled), claws, talons, hooves, and forked tongues are some of the characteristics that adorn Evangeline AdaLioryn's strange amalgamations. The locust of the exhibition, "Her Labyrinth," presents an assemblage of...
Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing , written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson iterates the definition of resilience by stating: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught...
Blood is unsightly in the flesh. Witnessing a bleeding person, one might turn away—or worse, be overcome with nausea and faint. For a substance essential to our functioning, to life itself, its image provokes extreme distress. If we were to trust our physiological...
Appearing as if they are on the verge of moving, Yuji Ueda’s ceramic vessels are complex, layered and their own abstracted compositions, both planned through his methodical process yet a surprise from the firing process. Based in Shigaraki, Japan—a place famous for...
In “Biel Lieb,” Olivia van Kuiken’s inaugural exhibition at Château Shatto, oil paintings of untamed, bold color and mark-making swing between styles of ink wash, graphic novel, pixel and gestures on the verge of becoming scripture, spellbinding the gallery. Fuchsia,...
Literati yet to meet Brittany Menjivar can now do so through her hardcopy publishing debut, a slender prose/poetry collection titled parasocialite. As a cheeky culture correspondent (a Salvadorian born in the DMV) and founder of Car Crash Collective (a late-night lit...
Will Hutnick’s practice resists easy categorization. While largely using the language of abstraction, his mixed media paintings also borrow elements of glitch art with seemingly disjointed imagery that is somehow both static and in motion as patterns, shapes, and...