Articles

In Conversation: Kesha Bruce
Step One to Afrofuture

A good white American friend can be hard to find, so I appreciate and cherish mine. It’s June 2020, a month that will probably go down in history as one of the most pivotal, enraging, disgusting, hypocritical, amazing months in American history. And one by one, these friends text or call me. Not seeking justification and reassurance from me that they’re not racist, thank God—I’ve chosen my...

Brandy Eve Allen: Connection in Isolation

by Leanna Robinson

Los Angeles–based photographer Brandy Eve Allen has responded uniquely to the isolation of the COVID social distancing period with a new series of portraits, shot from the street, of isolators in their homes. The subjects of the photos, who Allen found on Nextdoor around the Silver Lake, Echo Park and Los Feliz areas of Los Angeles, elicit an emotional response, encompassing both a longing...

Lynn Hershman Leeson
Political and Hopeful

by Cole Sweetwood

Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been an artist simultaneously ahead of her time and very much a product of the present moment. From her revolutionary Breathing Machines in the early 1960s—the first sculpture works which incorporated sound—to her most recent video installation, Shadow Stalker, which investigates the use of the surveillance software PredPol, Hershman Leeson has been at the very...

The Power of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
Proverbial Portraiture

by Kate Caruso

When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy. He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them. Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits demand attention with a quiet yet confrontational gaze. He talks a lot about empowerment, which is registered in the stately and regal...

St. Elmo Village Thrives Today
A Safe Space

by Luca Celada

Hidden in a quiet Mid-City tract is a Los Angeles art institution. Not that you’d know it if you didn’t slow down and really look for the five-lot compound on this quiet residential street. Otherwise you could easily miss the sign: “St. Elmo Village,” half hidden by the lush shrubbery. And yet “The Village” is certainly an institution by virtue of its 51 years as a community arts center. A...

HOPPING ONLINE
Virtual Viewing has its Virtues

by Scarlet Cheng

During these last three months art galleries have been tripping over themselves to create virtual viewing rooms and walkthroughs, and to join collective ventures in online selling such as GALLERYPLATFORM.LA and FAIR (from New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA). Meanwhile, Saatchi Art has already been an online marketplace for art since 2010. Although you won’t find a Banksy or Yayoi Kusama among the...

SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Seafoam Green

by Eve Wood

Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and memoiristic reflections on colors, permanent collections, and craft. Thanks for sheltering with Artillery, and we hope to see you at...

LA’s Strange Still Beauty
Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill Tool Around the Empty Streets

by Genie Davis

Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill are two very different artists, both working in the photographic medium during Los Angeles’ great exile inward from the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus. Their recording of this time is both surreal and sublime; capturing these frozen moments of stillness and making them sing songs of sadness, resilience and stark beauty. Shaping color images rife with a loneliness...

Building Bridges with Julian Bermudez

by Betty Ann Brown

I met Julian Bermudez at his gallery, Bermudez Projects, a spare, light-filled space in the Cypress Park area of Northeast Los Angeles. Bermudez was attired in art-world black and sported a thin, pointed mustache. He was bright, energetic and articulate. He started out by explaining, "I am a curator who believes in art and the artists who make it. I believe their art has the power to shape the...

The Met Loses $100 Million! A Mere Pittance

by Cole Sweetwood

The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported on March 12th that, as a result of closing until July due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they would take up to a $100 million loss and are considering the furlough or layoff of many of its staff members. This, for many in the art community, was the first major sign of the crisis that has befallen us. As of April 13th, the vast majority of museums in...

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Reviews

Will Thornton
Nicodim Annex, Los Angeles

There are dark recesses of art that draw us into something we may think we want no part of: images that weave the repulsive into skeins of elegance that we do not fully understand because the understanding resides only within the artist, if anywhere. The effect is...

Brian Cooper
Rory Devine Fine Art

Transforming the gallery into a performance space for his installation “Things Thinking,” Brian Cooper constructs an environment for contemplating the ideas of cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, whose theories posit that our perceptions of the world are mental...

Faith Ringgold
Jeffrey Deitch

Maya Angelou’s words You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise speak to Faith Ringgold’s origins—as a college student in the 1940s, she was told by her professor that she...

Joni Sternbach
Von Lintel Gallery

In much of her work, New York–based photographer Joni Sternbach experiments with historical photographic processes, specifically tintypes, direct positive images created on thin pieces of metal. Tintypes were popular in late-19th-century photography studios since the...

Maria A. Guzmán Capron
Shulamit Nazarian

“Pura Mentira,” the title of Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s exhibition, is a statement on people’s propensity for multiplicity. Using textiles as her medium, Capron merges the figures in her pieces together, their bodies often winding together to create...

Linda Arreola
Avenue 50 Studio

Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Linda Arreola’s “Abstract Wanderings From the LA Borderlands: 2020–2023” comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings, some in multi-panel formats with varying scales, can scarcely be contained...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Ken Taylor Reynaga
at The Mistake Room

Ken Taylor Reynaga’s exhibition, “A Mano,” features a wide array of paintings and ceramics that speak to the personal and shared experience of cultural duality, and interrogate the belief that being multicultural places one in an identity limbo. Using his own...

PUBLISHER’S EYE: Laura Larraz
Chris Sharp

In these bright, gestural paintings, Laura Larraz explores ranging depictions of femininity, from notions of purity and domesticity to the idea of witches. At first glance, her paintings have a clear sense of humor; in Beware of Holy Whore, two pink cherubs hover over...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Myrlande Constant
The Fowler Museum at UCLA

“Lush” and “riveting” are words that best describe Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s exhibition “The Work of Radiance” at The Fowler Museum. Constant creates astonishingly beautiful mosaics out of fabric and beads, leaning on skills she developed as a young girl...

OUTSIDE LA: Susan Chen
Rachel Uffner Gallery

After three years of experiencing artwork, exhibitions, podcasts, and news reports related to Covid-19, it seemed there could be nothing left to consume that is new, inspiring or even interesting. Enter Susan Chen. In a surprisingly refreshing and engaging solo show,...

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