Articles

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

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...

Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine
Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

by William J. Simmons

Part I: Lana Del Rey Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or deconstruction or enjoyment or critique can all slide seamlessly and without conversation into fraudulence or a sort of frivolous game. This is...

Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection
Getting Together, Apart

by Kelly Rappleye

The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness, collaboration, participation and community abound across the VCL, which describes itself as “a series of creative experiments in remote...

8-bridges
Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond

by Barbara Morris

Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save the date for a panel discussion featuring the directors of three cutting-edge Bay Area arts venues: Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the...

Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around
Sculptures for a Digital Age

by Daniel Austin Warren

Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space. Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable public-accessing of cyberspace. Taking it a stretch further, the Slumpie (as the artist herself claims) envisions “a practical solution to the...

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Reviews

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...

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...

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