Articles

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

“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...

THE GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN LOS ANGELES
Photographs by Lara Jo Regan

by Lara Jo Regan

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...

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

by Sarah Sargent

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...

In Conversation: Kesha Bruce
Step One to Afrofuture

by Alexia Lewis

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...

Brandy Eve Allen: Connection in Isolation

by Leanna Robinson

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...

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Reviews

GALLERY ROUNDS: Allen Ginsberg
Fahey/Klein Gallery

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg often carried a camera with him so that he could memorialize his friendships in a photographic diary. From 1953-63, he spontaneously recorded times spent with an intimate entourage that included literary figures Jack Kerouac, William S....

PICK OF THE WEEK: “The Inexpressible is Contained”
Sea View

Who has not asked oneself at some time or another: Should I disappear into the abyss or should I emerge and be seen? It’s a concern that is, at times, about recognizability and addressability, and if we are ready to situate our bodies which contain the raw materials...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Vivian Suter
Gaga & Reena Spaulings LA

At "Tintin Nina Disco," Vivian Suter’s exhibition at Gaga & Reena Spaulings, I not only learned that changes were a part of her paintings, but that I should be ready to accommodate them. Walking through her show, I began to understand this was a peculiar trait to...

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...

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