Articles
An Artist Answers Questions with Danny Fox
Top 3 beers? Okay, without a doubt—Guinness. And because I’m in LA, I’m going to say Pacifico. And a can of Stella. Top 3 songs? Dirty Old Town by the Pogues. Sara by Bob Dylan. Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen. Top 3 dead painters? Alfred Wallis. Vincent, of course. Norman Hines. How do you like your eggs? I like them (two or three free-range chicken eggs) boiled for six minutes, peeled, rolled in sea salt and black pepper. This is good. Give us an art world horror story? Young painter attempts self-portrait, however, upon completion realises he has only painted his father, again. What is the most beautiful thing in the world? To be...
Art Damaged Expansion of the Critic
Race Place
Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a biennal is a worthwhile form for an exhibition, I won’t attempt to answer that question here. But even after taking into account the awkwardness of the curatorial premise, Made in L.A.’s most recent iteration, Acts of Living, left me particularly disappointed. Organized by curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez with support from Ashton Cooper, the show’s curatorial thesis...
Capturing The Castle LA’s Coolest Apartment Gallery Leaves the Living Room
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure why art specifically captivated him, although collecting does run in the family: “My father has been into classic cars since he was a young kid pumping gas at the station on Fairfax on Sunset,” said Wertheimer: “As a kid I would hang out at his and...
An Indigenous Gaze Towards The Future Wendy Red Star Recontextualizes Native Culture in Outer Space
Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience. In her series Thunder Up Above, included in Future...
