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...
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...
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...
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...