Articles

Frederick Douglass’ Stunning Portrait
Leaving His Image Behind

Among the amateur photographers of our time are some rare daguerreotype buffs who still practice this 19th-century form of portraiture, which creates a unique image on a photosensitized metal plate. Back in the 1990s, two such buffs were shrewd enough to realize that an auction house specializing in gun sales didn’t know what they had when they listed as a miscellaneous item a box of odds and...

Kimberly Morris
Give Me Some Art With Hair

by Genie Davis

Kimberly Morris creates work that is intensely visceral. She makes art about subjects intrinsically rooted in American culture, yet entirely personal. As an interdisciplinary artist, she has worked with a wide range of mediums over the years, including painting, video, photography and sculpture. In her recent sculptural work, hair is one of the most used materials. “I tend to work with whatever...

Ari Salka: On Bodies (Be)held
Trans Rights are Under Siege; This Artist Resists

by Julie Schulte

Ari Salka is a trans, non-binary artist based in LA. Their ecstatic paintings and drawings—primarily self-portraits of their body—move in a liminal fantasy space brimming with queer angels and ghosts; a buoyant space where their present and former selves, can meet: recognizing, adoring, embracing and saying farewell. Embracing the ever-changing self, embracing with equal measure the limitations,...

Ramekon O’Arwisters
Fabric and Ceramics Fits His World

by Barbara Morris

Growing up as a queer Black child in the Jim Crow era South, Ramekon O’Arwisters and his family had many barriers to overcome. His grandmother, recognizing that the young boy was “a bit of a hot mess,” one day called him over and invited him to work with her on her quilt. While already carefully planned out, by allowing him to break the pattern with fabric and thread, she validated his choices...

Forrest Kirk
“It Doesn’t Always Have to be Didactic”

by Shana Nys Dambrot

“Art is on the frontlines of social change, challenging people’s core beliefs,” says artist Forrest Kirk, “and this is where I live in my work.” An exhibition of nine new paintings exploring the raised fist motif in his richly textured, chromatically charged expressionist style had just opened at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery when we spoke—a show that had already been scheduled for November but was...

Photographers of Democracy: Part 1
Mark Peterson and David Butow

by Lara Jo Regan

“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something the nation must be doing.” – Archibald MacLeish Few contemporary American photographers have covered the endless living, breathing spectacle of democracy with more dedication and distinction than Mark Peterson and David Butow. Often working on commission for magazines who encourage more interpretive...

Joey Forsyte
Our Vote is our Power

by Betty Ann Brown

Joey Forsyte knows that “The only cure for grief is action.” Her beloved mother died shortly before Hilary Clinton lost the election for president. Overwhelmed by grief and loss, Forsyte was transformed into “a different person,” a person who—like her holocaust survivor parents—was committed to political action. She attended the January 2017 Women’s March in Washington D.C. and her new...

Kehinde Wiley Celebrates Black Identity
Integrity 101

by Eve Wood

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “integrity” as a “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values, and the quality or state of being complete and undivided.” Integrity is not a learned value, and is not culturally determined, but derives from a strong sense of self, and trust in one’s own imagination and intuition and the knowledge that we are, as the dictionary...

Berlin’s Bundestag
What Does it Mean for a Building to be ‘To the People?’

by Max King Cap

After German reunification the remains of the famously incinerated Reichstag were first Norman Fosterized, then draped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and finally repurposed as the Bundestag—the lower legislative body of German government roughly equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives. Across its Greek Revival entablature, above the Corinthian columns but below its figured pediment is...

SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Shit Brown

by Eve Wood

Why does brown always get the short end of the stick? If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. It’s not fair – earthy, practical, pragmatic brown is so much more than the leavings of a last meal. Brown is the color of the earth, your Sunday school shoes, your mother’s perfect hair. Some people would kill for a brown seersucker suit, and brown is the color of good strong...

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Reviews

GALLERY ROUNDS: “Foundations”
at Carlye Packer

Passing through the doors of Carlye Packer brings you face-to-face with Nancy Pelosi. Dressed in a bright blue blazer, mask tight across her face and her right hand grasped around a gavel she has thrust in the air, Pelosi—or rather her likeness—is set center within...

OUTSIDE LA: Einar and Jamex de La Torre
Koplin Del Rio

The whimsy is uncontrollable and seemingly pours out of the front windows of Koplin Del Rio Gallery in the SODO arts district in Seattle. The work is unmistakable and anyone that knows knows. The de la Torre’s brothers (Einar and Jamex) have for decades been a staple...

The Complex Stuff is the Best
Keith Haring at The Broad

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...

PEER REVIEW
Fin Simonetti on Ambera Wellmann

A stone sculptor and stained-glass artist (among many other things), Fin Simonetti approaches demanding classical mediums with cultural critique and tender ambiguity. The New York–based Canadian artist has become known for her stone carvings of canine body parts—such...

“Solid Projections”
Larder

Diving into the past to ground contemporary viewers in the ever-advancing here and now, the four artists in “Solid Projections” present a grouping of dubious memory objects—newly-minted souvenirs of moments alluded to rather than experienced. Beth Collar, Coleman...

Molly Segal
Track 16 Gallery

Like many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of...

Mònica Subidé
Nino Mier Gallery

New portraits and still lifes by Mònica Subidé channel the aesthetic of circa-1906 Paris and Barcelona with such organic authenticity that they could credibly pass for recently discovered works by an unknown genius of that era’s avant-garde—yet they are imbued with an...

Will Thornton
Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles

There are dark recesses of art that draw us into something we may think we want no part of: images that weave the repulsive into skeins of elegance that we do not fully understand because the understanding resides only within the artist, if anywhere. The effect is...

Brian Cooper
Rory Devine Fine Art

Transforming the gallery into a performance space for his installation “Things Thinking,” Brian Cooper constructs an environment for contemplating the ideas of cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, whose theories posit that our perceptions of the world are mental...

Faith Ringgold
Jeffrey Deitch

Maya Angelou’s words You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise speak to Faith Ringgold’s origins—as a college student in the 1940s, she was told by her professor that she...

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