Is your current exhibition open to the public by appointment? And does it matter who the “public” is, i.e., only prospective buyers, art critics, art curators? We switched to appointment only as a precaution before the shutdown announcement. Now the Bendix Building - and LA for that matter - just closed completely until April 1st. As a result, I can’t even enter the building by myself, let...
William J. Simmons, art historian and Special Projects curator of the Felix L.A. art fair. EMILY WELLS: Your curatorial practice seems to be steeped in your background in queer and feminist art history. How do you see these two as informing each other? WILLIAM J. SIMMONS: It is an oft-forgotten fact that feminist and anti-racist activism informed, enabled even, queerness and queer art history....
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth is one of LA’s talented mid-career artists whose work steadily and forcefully moves to the foreground of our consciousness with its thoughtful and compassionate investigations of her emotional life. Her striking paintings, self-referential videos and narrative documentary projects of intergenerational relationships have garnered her a 2020 C.O.L.A. Individual Artist...
The other day Larry Johnson had an idea. He thought we should organize something for John. His plan was to have an artist thing. Dealers could come if they wanted to, but he suggested we not go overboard. It was a simple plan, but I, for whatever reason, started to dream up a lot of stupid art-world complications. Larry, who isn’t into making things complicated, corrected me. He said, “Meg, it’s...
The former Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park has always been an object of fascination—an imposing landmark designed in the modernist style by Millard Sheets in the 1960s, it displays mysterious Masonic symbols etched onto its walls. After the Masons ceased using it in the mid-’90s, the building served as an underground party venue, until the billionaire Guess Jeans owners, the...
Sylvia Fein’s exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum (#275 in their MATRIX series running Nov 13, 2019–March 1, 2020) gave us the rare opportunity to see the work of an artist who has forged her own path for over 75 years. The exhibition is a concise, thrilling selection which celebrates Fein’s 100th birthday, with the most recent painting dating from last year. Fein first found her artistic...
For the traveler in Japan with a day near Okayama to spare, Naoshima Island’s Art House Project is well worth the journey. Since the late 1990s, contemporary artists and architects from Japan and elsewhere have taken over a number of structures, all located within about a seven-minute walk from one another, and completely transformed them. These sites are interwoven into the everyday pathways...
Having been a curator of photography in a museum myself, I know that when a new department head is appointed at an institution with a long-standing collection, he or she has to make a statement with an exhibition exploring that collection in a way no one has before. That challenge has been met adroitly by Jim Ganz, who assumed the position of Senior Curator of Photographs at the Getty Museum in...
Several weeks of cold rain and angry trade winds broke. At last, the balmy warm weather had been restored to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The glorious outdoors beckoned, but many chose to fill the Doris Duke Theater of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Art star Mark Bradford was in town. The affection was well deserved. The day before, Bradford had spent much time with each art grad student at the...
Over the 25 years of the LA Art Show, Executive Director Kim Martindale has seen fairs come and go in Los Angeles, lost in the quicksand of art market trends. The past two years, however, have seen several new fairs establish themselves in LA – from small satellite shows to the international juggernaut of Frieze. February yielded seven art fairs in two weeks, a continuous visual feast that...
Painting is, quite possibly, my least favorite visual medium. I’m not being disdainful, far from it—it’s simply that I gravitate toward mediums that are more immersive. That said, I was curious to see Paul Paiement’s recent exhibition, “Nexus,” as he created many of...
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Dawoud Bey has used his camera to document his surroundings, looking closely at people as well as the places they live. Interested in the natural, social and political landscape, Bey has made multiple series that trace a...
With Artificial Intelligence, or AI, on everyone's mind, it seems pertinent to go back in time to 1952 and think about a pre-digital world, a time before the personal computer, cell phones and social media. The exhibition "Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age,...
Martine Syms’ solo exhibition, “Loser Back Home,” is an epic, multidimensional collage of material and media. It's a labyrinthine of various avatars and personal significations spanning video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, forming a...
A native of the San Fernando Valley, painter Karla Klarin has long been interested in the Los Angeles cityscape. She depicts the city's sprawl as an abstraction, and she fills her scenes with different colors that extend across her compositions. In her early paintings...
In Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005), Dr. Joy DeGruy writes “Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and...
Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings of cascading, roaming bodies feel as if they washed up on the shores of my mind like sedimentary particles— suspended and unsettled bits of matter that float and sink. Memories behave like mollusks, secreting trails of life, fading traces...
Los Angeles-based filmmakers John Cannizzaro, and New York-based Stuart Fordyce, presented two short films on May 18th at The Electric Lodge in Venice. Both films, one an experimental work composed of found footage and the other a documentary short, explore the...
The long, unlikely, and utterly genuine friendship between two artists—conceptualist cross-platform tragicomedian Jeffrey Vallance, and painter of wildly popular cottage-core idylls Thomas Kinkade—is commemorated in "Kinkadian La-Z-Boy Room," a new exhibition by...
Memories appear shaky and cinderous, meteoric contusions of being and becoming, volcanic rumblings of the self, perpetually oozing and calcifying. Artist Reggie Burrows Hodges imagines psychic realms knotted and stretched by the spirals of space and time—warped and...