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...
The uprisings and protests over the death of George Floyd erupted in Los Angeles not unlike its legendary wildfires. The flare-ups were largely spontaneous and unpredictable, some small and contained, others massive and out-of-control. Yet all were fueled with an undeniable burning passion against police brutality and racial injustice. Unlike the Rodney King riots of 1992, fewer structures were...
Set on a six-acre site overlooking downtown Montgomery and, most significantly, the Alabama State Capitol, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in April 2018, is dedicated to the over 4,400 known victims of racial terrorism who were murdered by lynching in the years following Reconstruction up until 1950. The memorial goes further however, also addressing the humiliation of...
A good white American friend can be hard to find, so I appreciate and cherish mine. It’s June 2020, a month that will probably go down in history as one of the most pivotal, enraging, disgusting, hypocritical, amazing months in American history. And one by one, these friends text or call me. Not seeking justification and reassurance from me that they’re not racist, thank God—I’ve chosen my...
Los Angeles–based photographer Brandy Eve Allen has responded uniquely to the isolation of the COVID social distancing period with a new series of portraits, shot from the street, of isolators in their homes. The subjects of the photos, who Allen found on Nextdoor around the Silver Lake, Echo Park and Los Feliz areas of Los Angeles, elicit an emotional response, encompassing both a longing...
Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been an artist simultaneously ahead of her time and very much a product of the present moment. From her revolutionary Breathing Machines in the early 1960s—the first sculpture works which incorporated sound—to her most recent video installation, Shadow Stalker, which investigates the use of the surveillance software PredPol, Hershman Leeson has been at the very...
When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy. He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them. Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits demand attention with a quiet yet confrontational gaze. He talks a lot about empowerment, which is registered in the stately and regal...
Hidden in a quiet Mid-City tract is a Los Angeles art institution. Not that you’d know it if you didn’t slow down and really look for the five-lot compound on this quiet residential street. Otherwise you could easily miss the sign: “St. Elmo Village,” half hidden by the lush shrubbery. And yet “The Village” is certainly an institution by virtue of its 51 years as a community arts center. A...
During these last three months art galleries have been tripping over themselves to create virtual viewing rooms and walkthroughs, and to join collective ventures in online selling such as GALLERYPLATFORM.LA and FAIR (from New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA). Meanwhile, Saatchi Art has already been an online marketplace for art since 2010. Although you won’t find a Banksy or Yayoi Kusama among the...
Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and memoiristic reflections on colors, permanent collections, and craft. Thanks for sheltering with Artillery, and we hope to see you at...
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...
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...
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...
In much of her work, New York–based photographer Joni Sternbach experiments with historical photographic processes, specifically tintypes, direct positive images created on thin pieces of metal. Tintypes were popular in late-19th-century photography studios since the...
“Pura Mentira,” the title of Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s exhibition, is a statement on people’s propensity for multiplicity. Using textiles as her medium, Capron merges the figures in her pieces together, their bodies often winding together to create...
Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Linda Arreola’s “Abstract Wanderings From the LA Borderlands: 2020–2023” comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings, some in multi-panel formats with varying scales, can scarcely be contained...
Ken Taylor Reynaga’s exhibition, “A Mano,” features a wide array of paintings and ceramics that speak to the personal and shared experience of cultural duality, and interrogate the belief that being multicultural places one in an identity limbo. Using his own...
In these bright, gestural paintings, Laura Larraz explores ranging depictions of femininity, from notions of purity and domesticity to the idea of witches. At first glance, her paintings have a clear sense of humor; in Beware of Holy Whore, two pink cherubs hover over...
“Lush” and “riveting” are words that best describe Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s exhibition “The Work of Radiance” at The Fowler Museum. Constant creates astonishingly beautiful mosaics out of fabric and beads, leaning on skills she developed as a young girl...
After three years of experiencing artwork, exhibitions, podcasts, and news reports related to Covid-19, it seemed there could be nothing left to consume that is new, inspiring or even interesting. Enter Susan Chen. In a surprisingly refreshing and engaging solo show,...