Articles

Photographers of Democracy: Part Two
Elections by Jeff Jacobson, Callie Shell, David Burnett, and more.

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” –H.L. Mencken At no time in history is the character of a nation brought into more vivid relief than during elections. And no medium illuminates its current moral complexion - warts and all – with more affect and clarity than photography, the visual language of...

High Anxiety: A Conversation with Karen Finley

by Ezrha Jean Black

I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma. Our “live” conversation has been going on since 2015, around the time of her The Jackie Look performances in LA and the companion...

Alex Anderson: Just Like Gold
Just Like Gold

by Scarlet Cheng

It takes a lot of guts to title your solo show “Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains,” and then it takes a lot of talent to pull off a show with that loaded marquee. Alex Anderson managed to do just that at Gavlak gallery this summer, in a show (March 14–July 11) featuring ceramic sculpture that reached exquisite levels of refined form but also delivered the punch of timely content....

Marie Thibeault: Views of the Harbor

by Liz Goldner

When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near her home. While the underpinnings of her work suggest eco-destruction amidst the natural environment, her completed paintings...

Joanna Beray Ingco
Swallowed and Surrounded

by Zak Smith

We’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging effects on the art world than what we’ll be able to read on the scrubbed surfaces of monographs and profiles. To help with the effort to take stock of the wider picture, I talked to an emerging...

Chaédria LaBouvier
How Museums Can Do Better

by Bianca Collins

Chaédria LaBouvier is the Guggenheim’s first Black curator, first Black woman to curate a Guggenheim exhibition, first Black author of a Guggenheim catalog, first curator of Cuban descent and, at age 33, the youngest independent curator to organize an exhibition in the lauded fine-art mecca. Her blockbuster 2019 exhibition for the Guggenheim, "Defacement: The Untold Story,” was centered around a...

Todd Gray
Diary in Fragments

by Max King Cap

Guggenheim Fellow and native Angeleno Todd Gray is a visual artist whose work is in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While mostly photo-based he also presents performance works; that is how we first met and collaborated. We recently spoke over the phone for a couple of hours, talking about food and his career, in no particular order. AUGUST 2020: The...

Stephen Berkman
19th-Century Renaissance Man

by Bill Smith

As a maker of books, I met artist, photographer, director and historian Stephen Berkman in the “before time,” when fonts and spelling and public exhibitions of artwork seemed of import. Berkman, you see, was coordinating "Predicting the Past, Zohar Studios: The Lost Years," a show of mostly large-format, glass-plate photography for The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and also producing an...

Gary Simmons
The Perfection of Erasure

by Jody Zellen

I first met Gary Simmons in the early 1990s when he was a student at CalArts. At the time I was working for Richard Telles (who eventually opened his own LA gallery) at Roy Boyd Gallery in Santa Monica, and helped to facilitate Simmons’ debut exhibition there. The works presented in that and subsequent exhibitions were centered around issues of education and race. Even early on in his career, he...

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokno
Dominating Minds with Art

by Luca Celada

We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in September. Some of the tracks have been inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests: “I’m here to support them and help amplify...

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Reviews

PEER REVIEW
Matthew Rosenquist on Pat Phillips

Raised in and around Washington DC, with two degrees in painting, Matthew Rosenquist now makes sculptures, albeit with some paint applied. How did that happen? I ask him. After grad school in the South, he took an entry-level job at the Smithsonian with duties that...

“Nonmemory”
Hauser & Wirth

“Nonmemory,” for the artist Mike Kelley, was something akin to his notorious usage of the “uncanny,” a theory borrowed from Freud wherein repressed memories emerge into disturbing feelings. In nonmemory, however, what has been forgotten stays so, and recollection is...

Deana Lawson
David Kordansky Gallery

While Deana Lawson is known for her individual, staged photographs depicting African-Americans communities in interior and exterior environs, she also conceptualizes the entirety of her presentations, which often include casual snapshots displayed as collages. In...

Steve McQueen
Marian Goodman Los Angeles

Steve McQueen combines his filmmaker’s sense of scale, drama and cinematic history with his artist’s sensibility in Sunshine State (2022), a work of visceral impact and pointed message that is also rich in nuance, symbolism, connection, contradiction and emotion....

Kim Jones
The Box

The opening for Kim Jones’ exhibition had a kind of homecoming spirit, reflected in its title, “Walking Home.” Several of Jones’ first post-graduate performance pieces in the 1970s were marathon “walks” between various landmarks in Los Angeles, performed in the...

Duke Riley
Charlie James Gallery

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” remarked the poet who gave us The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot. The observation supports the standard explanation for the failings of our species to adequately address the climate crisis, the scope and scale of which are too...

Abel Guzmán
la BEAST Gallery

Religious parochial dogma is often fraught with pedagogical conflicts in the spheres of doctrine, institutional curricula and, unsurprisingly—queer identity. Overlay these ideologies with Mexican-American cultural norms and concomitant conventions of masculinity, and...

Sun Woo
Make Room

In “Swamps and Ashes,” Sun Woo reflects on the contemporary desires and fears borne from our increasing interaction with and use of commodified technologies. Evoking visceral feelings against the backdrop of fantastical virtual environments, her paintings create a...

Alvaro Ilizarbe
Gallery Sade Los Angeles

Psychedelic experience has some distinct qualities. One may experience hallucinations of shifting yet repetitive imagery. Random objects become supercharged with symbolic meaning. Reality dissolves into the purely visual. Time itself is revealed as an abstract...

Converge 45: Art and Politics Along Portland’s Parallel

The Converge 45 biennial initiative exists to forge a regional, national, and international artistic discourse, and to intentionally center certain aspects of those conversations within the Pacific Northwest arts ecosystem. Showcasing some 50 local, national, and...

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