Articles
Art Damaged
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...
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...
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,...
My Favorite Cézanne The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right now. I can hear it too: But Western painters had never thought about light that way before! The way they deconstructed figures and...
Reviews
Barbara Carrasco at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles
The Queen of Los Angeles will not allow her history to be erased, and neither will Barbara Carrasco’s 1981 mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective. Censored swiftly after its completion by the commissioners, the mural collected dust in storage for decades and is...
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz at Highways Performance Space
Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz defied time and space with her sci-fi thriller disguised as a dance, “Rain Glass Vortex.” In the performance, Cruz wrestled with her dance partners: her walker, Pluto, and her leg braces. She moved her arms and core in jerky, robotic movements....
Prima Sakuntabhai at The Fulcrum Press
This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...
Duelling Reviews: Joseph Beuys at The Broad
The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...
Olivia Mole at Gattopardo
The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...