Articles

Book Review: A Measured Coolness
Building + Becoming by Amir Zaki

Building + Becoming By Amir Zaki 272 pages X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press The works of Amir Zaki subtly subverts analog photography’s long-held truth claims. His photography, surveyed in the newly published artist book Building + Becoming, addresses the artist’s digital manipulation and, setting aside the medium’s presumed objectivity and fidelity to representation, invites the question,...

Book Review: Heartfelt Moments
Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin

by Annabel Keenan

Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely than would a painting or drawing. It is also possible to create a literary portrait. Embracing this multiplicity of the word, author...

Book Review: Criminal Culture
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li

by Anne Wallentine

Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a high-stakes heist. Grace D. Li’s, Portrait of a Thief, manages to be both portrait and landscape—a portrait of college students on the...

Book Review: Burden of Dreams
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden

by Catherine Yang

Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social commentator who approached artmaking with both childlike wonder and fearless abandon. His now-legendary performance-art pieces from the...

Book Review: Ballerina Looks Back in Style
Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley

by Barbara Morris

Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George Balanchine at 17, and she performed with them for 10 years, until a hip injury cut her career short. With her prolonged devotion to...

FORT WORTH, TEXAS: Hector A. Ramirez
SENSE AND NONSENSE

by Frances Colpitt

I was thoroughly bewildered when I first saw Hector A. Ramirez’ work as a member of his MFA committee at Texas Christian University in 2017. He handed me Carpet Shoes, a worn pair of men’s brown leather shoes with rectangles of yellowish carpet glued to their soles such that their footprints would be made by the carpet’s fibers. This simple juxtaposition of two familiar objects creates an...

CHICAGO: Paola Cabal
THE WORK OF ATTENTION

by Steven Carrelli

It is 3:02 p.m. on February 26, and we are looking intently at the north wall of Paola Cabal’s studio while the Midwestern afternoon light streams in through her unobstructed west windows. Cabal is rapidly leafing through a Benjamin Moore paint-chip book, holding the color chips up to a patch of sunlight on her wall to identify the color she might use to replicate the light. “There it is:...

KANSAS CITY, MO: Linda Lighton
PSYCHO CERAMICS

by Elisabeth Kirsch

With their blend of surreal retro glamor, sociopolitical and personal commentary, Linda Lighton’s ceramic sculptures command a double take. This veteran artist can make clay do just about anything, and her art has unabashed palpable appeal. But Lighton is also fearless when combining the sensuousness of her materials with controversial subject matter, whether she’s taking aim at environmental...

RICHMOND, VA: Diego Sanchez
VISUAL INFORMATION

by Sarah Sargent

“One of the things I teach my kids is to be playful in their approach,” says painter and teacher Diego Sanchez. This freedom to experiment takes the pressure off and opens up the work in unexpected directions. It’s an attitude that has served Sanchez well in his own practice. Sanchez lives and works around Richmond, Virginia, a city with a vibrant art scene. His story is not just about becoming...

LINCOLN, NE: Santiago Cal
POLITICS ON PAPER

by Jonathan Orozco

Santiago Cal is a humble man with a demeanor that challenges traditional Western conceptions of artistic genius. His subtlety and humility are visible in his works, which are usually small or medium-sized carvings of fragile children. His visual narratives don’t hit you over the head. Cal lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, a long way—culturally and geographically—from his country of origin, Belize....

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Reviews

Brad Kronz
Gaylord Apartments

For his untitled exhibition at Gaylord Apartments, Brad Kronz created what looked like a kind of deinstallation—the last few items left in an apartment before moving out, things you don’t know whether to leave or to stack on top of an already packed car: an auxiliary...

Nora Turato
Sprüth Magers

“Self is source. Self is pure positive energy. Self is worthy. Self is full of vitality. Self is healthy. Self is eager about life. Self is amazing.” One might imagine this incantation spoken in a low, meditative tone, as though by uttering the words with enough...

Se Oh
Stroll Garden

As a Korean-born queer person who was adopted at nine months by a conservative white Christian family in the Tennessee Bible Belt, Se Oh struggled for years with the trauma of rejection, including from their adoptive parents who believed that homosexuals don’t make it...

Zizipho Poswa
Southern Guild

Zizipho Poswa’s monumental ceramic and bronze sculptures hold court like an enclave of demigods. While not figurative per se, they are anthropomorphic in the way all ceramic vessels are: All are additionally crowned with towering, ornate objects that radiate...

Marianne Wex
Tanya Leighton

Long before it was called out as a public nuisance, the phenomenon of manspreading was exhaustively, perhaps definitively, documented by the German feminist artist Marianne Wex (1937–2020) in a wide-ranging collection of images titled “Let’s Take Back Our Space”...

Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman
The Pit

Don’t be fooled by the name: The Pit in Atwater Village is a snake-free, gleaming, new 13,000 square-foot space, zippy with colorful work. After the first two galleries, there was a huge room devoted to “Cognitive Surge: Coach Stage,” a striking, memorable show of...

Marc Camille Chaimowicz
Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA

An escapist, fantasizing indulgence reverberated throughout Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s solo exhibition “Emma Dreaming of California.” Just as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—from which Chaimowicz extracted his protagonist, recontextualizing Emma Bovary within...

Judithe Hernández
Cheech Marin Center

At the retrospective “Judithe Hernández: Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival,” mounted by The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, the full spectrum of an artistic career of more than 50 years was on view. Beyond...

GALLERY ROUND: Pat Steir
Hauser & Wirth

The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition “Painted Rain” at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and...

Stephen Seemayer: Dark Side of Paradise
Bermudez Projects

The precarious balance of society and nature, and man’s place within the magnetism of both is the central theme of Stephen Seemayer’s “Dark Side of Paradise” at Bermudez Projects. The collection of 26 paintings and nine studies are an ode to the shadow self and the...

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