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