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...
More than a re-imagining of the Michael Jackson story, Julien Nitzberg’s play, For the Love of a Glove, serves as a point of departure for a wildly surreal take on an already bizarre life, from the troubled entertainer’s repressed childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the shady realm of Neverland. Among other things, the madly inventive production depicts Jackson as the pawn in an inter-planetary...
“Have you noticed, that people are still having sex? All the denouncement, had absolutely no effect.” —LaTour, “People Are Still Having Sex,” 1991 After a long conversation with my Lyft driver about the cult he’d just joined, I walked into “The Pleasure Principle” at Maccarone Gallery—a show sponsored by Pornhub. First, E.V. Day’s sculpture Saarinen’s Mother: a saddle-shaped, deep-sea thing,...
Toni Bentley danced with New York City Ballet for 10 years under George Balanchine and is the author of five books that include The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, about an obsessive love affair that introduced her to sodomy, rendering the physics, paradoxes and transcendence of the act a revelation. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair among...
Monica Majoli, an artist and professor of art in painting and graduate studies at UC Irvine, whose work explores sexuality and intimacy, is interviewed by art historian, Ph.D. Candidate and Provost Fellow in the Humanities at USC, William J. Simmons. WS: I’ve been really interested lately in queer nostalgia—a term that, I’ve found, some artists find grating. I do not mean nostalgia in a...
A pair of pastel-hued bikini underpants are draped across the wall. Riddled with tiny holes, the thong-thin back resembles the mesh of fishnet hose. A large lavender moth orchid hovers over the genital area, recalling the poetic similarities between labia and the petals or “lips” of the flower. The patterned panties embody the teasing shuttle between revealing and obscuring that is the substance...
Meeting the Los Angeles–and Mexico City–based sculptor, songwriter and curator, Janet Levy, was a gift from one of the many “ifs” of life. Our serendipitous encounter occurred at one of my favorite cafes when I couldn’t help but notice a woman at the adjacent table, lavishly adorned with an ornate necklace, who exuded an air of eccentric confidence. It wasn’t long before we were talking and I...
The paintings in John Currin’s show at Dallas Contemporary, a non-collecting warehouse museum, widely induced a queasy, unsettling tension. A common response to the artist’s work, the visceral repulsion and simultaneous attraction result from an unresolvable friction between the paintings’ typically dreadful subject matter and the sensuous, masterful (a word I use advisedly) paint handling. One...
There are plenty of deserts around the world. As President Trump memorably said when he abruptly pulled American troops out of Syria as a favor to the Turkish president Erdogan: “There’s a lot of sand there.” So why is it that Desert X, the organization that has put on two well-regarded biennial shows in the desert of the Coachella Valley, decided to agree to a special installation in the Saudi...
I learned yesterday—along with most of the Los Angeles art world –that John Baldessari had died. (He had actually died Thursday, but the word filtered out only this week-end.) Long before I knew him or what he represented (not only in Los Angeles, but the world), and long before I wrote about fine arts in Los Angeles, I would see him frequently at art gallery openings. (I always had many...
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...
Amalia Galdona Broche and Demetri Broxton’s recent Los Angeles debuts at Patricia Sweetow Gallery are nothing less than startling, sensorial revelations. Moving through the exhibition of these intimately personal works, it’s hard to catch one’s breath. Both bodies of...
In an unlikely art venue—a stall of a Chinatown shopping mall—Mexican American multidisciplinary artist Nao Bustamante has opened their solo exhibition, “Brown Disco,” with OCD Chinatown. The show is the latest in the rising star's repertoire of experimental...
The subject of each photograph in George Porcari's exhibition "Things: A Story" is a narrative that is constructed from the relationship between what appears on the cover of a book and the objects Porcari has placed around. Shot with natural light in Porcari's Los...
The month of May in New York is nothing short of a combined marathon-sprint for the art industry. Fairs are popping up all over Manhattan, auctions are yielding conspicuous displays of excess wealth and galleries are staging buzzworthy exhibitions to attract the...
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, Chicano Movement Leader, founder of the Crusade for Justice, and Poet once wrote: I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín. The odds are great, But my spirit is strong, My faith unbreakable, My blood is pure....
When I first met Max Hooper Schneider in 2015, he wore neon-colored costume jewlery up and down both of his ears. During that time, Max frequented Claire’s (the fast-fashion jewlery retailer) at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica where he was sure to get an...
When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain,...