Articles

Fire and Water
The Beautiful Tragedies of Calida Rawles

In 2004 Calida Rawles moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she found an art scene brimming with life. Trained as an artist, she longed to become part of that world, and asked herself whether she would become a collector or a painter. She decided to give herself the chance to be a painter and made an agreement with her husband that she would take a year to find her way, without any...

Decorum and Decay
Watching Astra Huimeng Wang Watching You

by Julie Schulte

On a sweltering September afternoon, I visited artist Astra Huimeng Wang as she was in the final stages prepping for her first solo show of paintings at Make Room LA. Her studio is nestled above a discount clothing store in LA’s Fashion District, where crowded shop windows are filled with children’s pajamas that double as Disney costumes. I paused before an outdoor rack of candy-colored tulle...

Keeping the Animal Alive
Chasing the Ephemeral with Samuelle Richardson

by Genie Davis

Samuelle Richardson is a sculptural textile artist who began her career as a painter. Her painting itself evolved from studies in anatomy, for which she made 3D skeletal models. But by chance—or fate, when her painting studio became unavailable 10 years ago—she switched to her current technique in sculpture. “You might say that my work has come full circle,” she says. While her fabric sculptures...

More Women
Six Profiles

by Allison Strauss, Betty Ann Brown, Donasia Tillery, Jody Zellen, Lauren Guilford, Shana Nys Dambrot

We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical poetics used to describe Los Angeles are evoked in the work of Gala Porras-Kim, each bubbling with alternatives ripe for excavation....

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VII
Sex, Drugs and Bad Writing

by John Tottenham

I hadn’t sent the novel out in a while. In fact, I hadn’t sent it out in months. What was the point? Even if they loved it, they didn’t want it. At this point I was too dispirited to send the work out or describe the ensuing demoralization. But I needed to send it out in order to have some fresh rejection to write about. Otherwise I had nothing to say, and with these exaggerations and...

OUTSIDE LA: Nicole Eisenman
Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

by Shana Nys Dambrot

It’s one thing to engage in a discourse about the influence of art historical movements on contemporary painters, and another still to analyze a particular artist’s specific set of influences, such as Nicole Eisenman’s robust relationship with the European Impressionists at the advance of the 20th century. But leave it to an art museum in Arles to organize an extensive embodiment of this...

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part V
A Tiresome Outpouring of Fribbling Expatiations

by John Tottenham

I don’t know how to create the impression of time passing. But it passed, weeks passed by, during which nothing much happened. The sense of futility engendered by these dealings with the literary establishment hung over other potential undertakings. There didn’t seem to be much justification for this ongoing expenditure of waste, otherwise known as literary endeavor. More than four years were...

Art Writer/Author Frances Colpitt Dies
(1952–2022)

by Michael Delgado

Frances Colpitt, renowned art historian, author, curator, feature writer and contributing editor for Art in America for over 20 years; teacher and mentor, died in her Fort Worth, TX, home September 12, 2022. Colpitt, who recently retired from her position as the Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History, Texan Christian University School of Art was working on a third book about minimalism and...

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part IV
Wasted Words

by John Tottenham

One sends out this precious, all too precious, closely guarded work to complete strangers: they might initially take an interest, but after being presented with the entire manuscript, they can’t be bothered to get back to you at all, not even with a brief cordial rejection note. It makes one doubt the quality of the work. I started to re-read the work that has been the cause of all this...

Beautyful Migrations
The Diaspora According to Njideka Akunyili Crosby

by Annabel Keenan

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is having quite the year. Her figurative paintings are on the walls of esteemed museums and institutions across the country, often featuring portraits of herself, friends and family. Akunyili Crosby’s unique style consists of painted, drawn and collaged elements that she blends with a distinctive photo-transfer technique. She uses imagery sourced from magazines, catalogs...

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Reviews

Nick Angelo
Sebastian Gladstone

A big pharma scion funded the Tolkien exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art to normalize drug dependency by suggesting its correlation to Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the One Ring. Or, hear me out, Whiskey Pete’s casino operates a mind-control project...

Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin
Pace Gallery

The sprinklers of Pace Gallery’s immaculate lawn activated as I entered its courtyard for “Alicja Kwade & Agnes Martin: Space Between the Lines.” One of them was installed only a few inches from Kwade’s Jo’s Snow (Group 2) (2023), a forlorn patch of cast white...

Melanie Pullen
William Turner Gallery

Images of violence are so prevalent in today’s media landscape that news commentators now prompt us to look away, while social-media clips of police misconduct or war-ravaged bodies are shared and reposted, implying that we might take voyeuristic pleasure in viewing...

30th Anniversary Group Show
David Zwirner

On a murky day in May, the art cognoscenti made their way to a preview of gallerist David Zwirner’s newest addition to his burgeoning enclave in Los Angeles. Among the city’s unremitting attempts at reinvention, Melrose Hill—a longstanding, dense and vibrant...

Coco Young
Night Gallery

Melancholy rendered in pools of soft, golden sunlight. Love and loss braided into fields of wildflowers. In the press release for “Passage,” Coco Young’s first solo show at Night Gallery, curator Martha Kirszenbaum compares the exhibition to Agnès Varda’s lush New...

pascALEjandro
Blum

The nonagenarian artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known as a filmmaker, while his wife, the 40-something Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, works as a painter, photographer and designer. Together, they operate under the name pascALEjandro, fusing their names as well as...

Simone Leigh
LACMA and CAAM

Simone Leigh’s presence at the 2022 Venice Biennale was monumental: Her sculptural contributions to the main exhibition garnered a Golden Lion, while her solo show for the US national pavilion generated headlines around the world and lines around the block. In the...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Winfred Rembert
Hauser & Wirth

A life lived in the midst of harrowing times of chain gangs, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws in the Deep South is the bullseye of Winfred Rembert’s exhibition, “Hard Times.” In hand-carved and debossed painted leather, the late Rembert creates striking patterns from...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Tony Cragg
Marian Goodman Gallery

One of the most durable traditions in Modernism, organic form sculpture emerged in the first part of the 20th century in the work of Constantine Brancusi, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti and others. Particularly associated with Surrealism, the organic form was a kind of...

OUTSIDE LA: Rochelle Botello
Bakersfield Museum of Art

“Free Fall,” Rochelle Botello’s solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, affords an incredibly rich and evocative visual experience. Botello’s organic and sometimes strangely discomfiting sculptures suggest an amalgam of associations; looking at these works,...

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