Articles

Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection
Seeing Eye to Eye

Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, 2021 Ed. Elle Shushan; essays by Graham C. Boettcher, Stephen Lloyd, and Elle Shushan. Photography by Nik Layman. 280 pages Giles Ltd. Lover’s Eyes, a new catalog on eye miniatures, lets us peer at one of the most extensive private collections of these weird and wonderful 18th- and 19th-century works—most of which stare right back. Eye...

First Person
Manifesting the Pygmalion Parable

by Liz Goldner

I met Mark Chamberlain in March 2003, a few days after the onset of the Iraq War. I visited a gallery in Laguna Beach to write a review of his recent work chronicling the potential horrors of that war. Mark had been mounting politically charged installations for decades. I also learned that he made his living as a fine-art photographer, and that he often brought environmental perspectives into...

NoLab By Richard Roth
WHODUNIT?

by Jody Zellen

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...

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Reviews

OUTSIDE LA: Emily Ginsburg
SE Cooper Contemporary

They are dense forms, knots of entwined ropes and masses of clay, approximately the size of one of the larger internal organs. This suite of recent ceramic sculptures by Emily Ginsburg is presented on clusters of columnar plinths of corrugated cardboard that would be...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Jessie Homer French
Various Small Fires

“January in the last extant stable society.” Joan Didion, “In Hollywood” (1973) — included in The White Album (1979) “You can get there from here,” was something like the thought rippling just beneath my immediate observations, coming upon several Jessie Homer...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Matthew Gallagher
Moskowitz Bayse

One half of Moskowitz Bayse’s gallery is dedicated to “Impossible Apprentice,” a sublime inaugural solo presentation by Matthew Gallagher composed of intensely delicate and labored drawings made by fusing drafting film onto a molten wax surface. From a seemingly...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio
Museum of Contemporary Art

The Museum of Contemporary Art returns with its “Focus Series” featuring the first solo show of LA-based artist, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio” showcases some of Aparicio’s previous work of rubber castings and amber installations, while...

NIKOLAS SOREN GOODICH
Gallery 169

Especially in an era of infinite variability, the mirror motif can get pretty tired pretty fast, whether as a means of solving abstract compositional problems or finding meaning in figurative relationships. In his latest series of mounted, translucent, usually backlit...

PEER REVIEW
Ishi Glinsky on Kristopher Raos

A standout artist in 2023’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, Ishi Glinsky often plays with scale in his sculptures, paintings and drawings that reflect the customs of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fusing the past with the present, Glinsky examines pieces from his...

Teddy Sandoval
Vincent Price Art Museum

The Vincent Price Art Museum has mounted an ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of a little-known slice of Los Angeles art history. “Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art,” curated by Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, sheds light on the...

Kenwyn Crichlow
Diane Rosenstein Gallery

With his first solo show in California, the Trinidadian painter Kenwyn Crichlow makes a memorable debut, displaying dynamic, reflective abstractions that engulf the viewer in a spectrum of sensations. Born in Trinidad and Tobago when it was still a British colony,...

Hanna Hur
Kristina Kite Gallery

Like the checkerboard floor of the gallery in which they are displayed, the two largest works in Hanna Hur’s exhibition, “Two Angels,” are gridded and divided down the middle. However, unlike the somewhat haphazardly arranged gray, black and white tiles at Kristina...

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...

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