Articles

NoLab By Richard Roth
WHODUNIT?

NoLab By Richard Roth 232 pages Owl Canyon Press Being a voracious reader of contemporary fiction with a particular interest in mystery novels, thrillers and mysteries about artists and art thefts, I was excited to happen upon Richard Roth’s novel NoLab (2019) earlier this year. NoLab recounts the story of two artists hired to search for the collective, NoLab, that has mysteriously disappeared....

Suitcase Joe and the State of Homeless Photography
Sidewalk Champions

by Lara Jo Regan

Sidewalk Champions By Suitcase Joe Burn Barrel Press In the wake of the unprecedented court decree issued in April by a federal judge ordering the city of Los Angeles to provide shelter for the 4,600 souls currently living in downtown skid row by this October, the work of photographer Suitcase Joe could not be more timely. His recently released book, Sidewalk Champions (Burn Barrel Press), will...

In The Spotlight: Paul R. Williams
Two books on the Architect

by Scarlet Cheng

Master Architects of Southern California 1920–1940 by Marc Appleton, Stephen Gee and Bret Parsons 208 pages Angel City Press Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View by Janna Ireland 224 pages Angel City Press When Paul Revere Williams died in 1980 at the age of 85, he left behind one of the most remarkable legacies in Los Angeles architecture. He not only designed...

POST YORK
Story and Art by James Romberger

by Glenn Harcourt

Post York Story and Art by James Romberger with additional material by Crosby Romberger 112 pages Dark Horse Comics/Berger Books “They somehow set fire to what was left of the East Side.” —POST YORK, p.86. The city had been ceded to climate change. It was drowned, abandoned, gone wild, given over to the feral young: a hostile, black-and-white environment, prone to violence but still...

Provenance: ASCO’s Public Interventions in 1970s Los Angeles
Writing on the Walls

by Kelly Rappleye

The artistic legacies of Mexican Muralism remain imprinted on LA’s urban landscape, in faded residues on cracked concrete structures and sometimes peeking out from peeling layers of whitewash anti-graffiti paint. Throughout the 1970s, many artists in Southern California’s Chicano Art Movement claimed the medium of the wall as public pulpit. These murals took up the pedagogical aims of Mexican...

The NFT Craze
Art Brief

by Stephen J. Goldberg Esq.

The digital artist known as Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million in cyptocurrency at Christie’s auction in March, 2021. The media treated this grotesque sale as if it revolutionized the art world, but if we separate reality from the hysterical hype, it clearly has not. An NFT stands for a “non-fungible token”—probably the most ridiculous acronym ever invented by digital geeks. An NFT is nothing...

The Wende Museum
Valuing the Valueless

by Tucker Neel

In the midst of the Revolution of 1917, fiery Bolshevik Leon Trotsky warned members of the Menshevik party that their moderate methods in the revolutionary world would relegate them to history’s “dustbin.” In an ironic appropriation six decades later, Ronald Reagan declared that Marxism and Leninism were destined for the “ash heap” of history. These two historical figures were, of course,...

Moving Forward with Women’s Center for Creative Work
GRACE AND GRIT

by Alexia Lewis

To incarnate is to become embodied in form, and form follows function. From the outset of the year 2020, leadership at the Women’s Center for Creative Work began the task of expanding its physical form because they had had the good fortune of having outgrown their existing space. Born out of a series of successful “site-specific feminist dinner parties” in the Los Angeles area, the wishes of the...

Secret Garden: David Horvitz
Exploring the Balance Between Private and Public

by Kate Caruso

I met David Horvitz three years ago when he hand-delivered me an edamame plant he had been offering to his community via social media. Now, three years later, we meet again to conduct this interview in the garden he has been building. The garden in question is a previously vacant lot in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, near the Underground Museum and his studio. The lot,...

A Conversation with Emily Barker
Make it New

by Julie Schulte

Emily Barker (who uses they/them pronouns) is an artist and disability activist living in Los Angeles. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have given talks at prestigious institutions including the Royal Academy of Art and UCLA. Barker adamantly refuses the low quality of life a disabled person is expected to endure and, although critical of the systems...

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Reviews

Fred Wilson
Pace Gallery

Over the past three decades, Fred Wilson has frequently exhibited objects in unexpected juxtapositions as a means for examining things in a new light. For his groundbreaking 1992 installation, “Mining the Museum,” he selected racially biased items from the collection...

Rosemary Mayer
Hannah Hoffman; Marc Selwyn Fine Art

The act of writing is a process of appropriations. Words predate the user, who then borrows and deploys them. With each new text, these tools of communication are shuffled to embody another of their possible sequencings, attempting to connect the writer to their...

Richard Mensah
Band of Vices

When writer and poet Peter J. Harris wrote in his poem Only Wine (2004): Blessed be the laughter of lovers for it separates the edges of the future / bless me with your laughter, Blessed be the music of lovers for it spices the taste of all creation / bless me with...

Keith Sonnier
parrasch heijnen

Post-minimalist Keith Sonnier, who passed in 2020, was too prominent a figure to fall into the shadows, as have so many of his contemporaries. But given his striking originality, restless inventiveness and impact upon a broad range of peers and younger artists,...

Vishal Jugdeo
Commonwealth and Council

Two men are talking in a car, as low green fields stream past the windows. “This used to all be fruit trees but the new owner tore them up,” says the driver. “And he planted rice?” the other man incredulously asks. The first man doesn’t answer but shakes his head in...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Fin Simonetti
Matthew Brown

Suspending the administrative and bodily powers of fences and safety cones, Fin Simonetti's sculpture exhibition, "Hardening," at Matthew Brown quizzes viewers to ponder, "Am I safe, am I scared, or am I in love?" Perhaps it's a bit of all three. The gallery features...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Claudia Keep
Parker Gallery

As with many works of contemporary art, Claudia Keep’s compact paintings first entered my field of vision on social media, where her imagery retains its appeal, even as her textured, varicolored and economical brushstrokes are flattened out. Keep often makes blunt...

PERFORMANCE: X’ene’s Witness
Justen LeRoy's Contemporary Opera

As our rushing descent into global environmental catastrophe continues, we are inundated with images of our planet's suffering. We’ve all seen the snapshots—a man up to his neck in water pushing children on a downed satellite dish during the 2022 flooding of...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Ann Weber
Wönzimer Gallery

Spectacular and sinuous, Ann Weber’s large-scale sculptures create a mythic world, one that viewers step within and explore as if moving through a strange and lovely forest of anthropomorphic shapes. Created entirely from cardboard strips, the sculptures are woven...

GALLERY ROUNDS: “A Space Between Us”
Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art

Global pandemics democratize pain, suffering and loss. Therefore, who does one turn to when inquiring about world-reshaping events that impact the interpersonal and economic fabric of society? The answer is artists as they function as visual ethnographic historians....

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