Three weeks ago I was visiting LACMA for their landmark exhibition “Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying,” featuring a Ming dynasty painter at the Resnick. Afterwards I came out to look for the plinth where a new Yoshitomo Nara sculpture would be going—the largest he’s ever made—in time for his first major exhibition on the West Coast set to open April 5. Walking through BP Plaza, I saw...
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? Our current exhibitions are closed to the public as required under the COVID-19 lockdown but we do have more content about our current exhibitions on the webpage where you can see walkthrough videos, a checklist of works in the show in...
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...
Linda Arreola has been quite busy as her nearly sold-out show of new abstract paintings at Avenue 50 Studio Gallery attests. Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, the exhibition comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings—some in...
Over the course of a single day, a man saws a house in half. A silent and extremely filmic flickering of light and shadow, hand-held shake, spliced establishing and detail shots, and occasional shirtless cameos by the artist and his assistant, filthy with house-innard...
The people depicted in Ally Rae Peeples’ exhibition “Crowd Surfing” resemble how they might see themselves while on hallucinogens or in a house of mirrors, where bodies become distorted, facial expressions are exaggerated, and distinctions between figure and ground...
Incorporating sound, painting and sculpture into his work, Santipreecha addresses political histories and climates from a range of places through his methodical, layered process—an engulfing triptych responds to the war in Ukraine, a cement painting probes the history...
An avowed pacifist and activist, Pedro Reyes is known for his sculptures that subvert the potential violence of guns by transforming them into shovels for planting trees or musical instruments played in performance. In his current exhibition of recent sculptures and...
One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary,...
History tells us that the highly refined, discreet object imbued with emotional resonance is an artistic choice largely made during a bygone era when the likes of such artists as Johannes Vermeer stood before a blank canvas, choosing to illuminate the specificity of...
In Malian-American artist Penda Diakité’s transformational paintings and collages, every element is much more than what it seems. From her impossibly detail-rich photocollage to her unique technique of hand-engraving surfaces—and the historical cosmology of her...
A viewer unfamiliar with Blair Saxon-Hill’s previous work might be inclined toward certain assumptions about the foundations and precedents for her style and approach to her subjects—figurative, abstracted or quasi-symbolic—or even what her subjects might actually be....
Bryan Ida’s recent paintings of nature and its animal inhabitants examine the perilous plight of both in the face of increasing threats to the planet. With forests continuing to be torn down by industrial enterprises and climates becoming increasingly erratic, the...