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...
Sean Tejaratchi is a taxonomic guerrilla and semiotic hoarder. His social media phenomenon (and book) Liartown generated a tsunami of WTF memes, that have been described as “layered, multivalent detournees of the entire gamut of visual culture from the last century and a half,” and have rightly garnered him a modicum of hybrid literary/graphic design/comedic/web culture celebrity. But...
The holiday spirit was everywhere in the LA art scene this past weekend, from gallery openings to open studios to fun fundraisers. At Torrance Art Museum, a lively and excitingly interactive opening for Adjacent Adjacent in the main gallery drew a robust crowd. While artist Molly Schulman wound up her motorized hands to dance through the gallery, artist Dakota Noot glittered in gold before his...
"The most important thing to me was exposure to people who are making things, to other artists,” says Doug Aitken of his education at ArtCenter College of Design. Last Saturday he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from his alma mater, honored along with three other alumni in a ceremony in Oculus Hall of The Broad, followed by a celebratory dinner at the posh Otium next door. Aitken (BFA...
Nestled on the ground floor of an academic building on Pitzer College’s campus, the Lenzner Family Art Gallery is easy to miss. Its layout is as humble and curiouser still: an L-shaped room is flanked by two alcoves too small to be rooms and too large to be closets; the ceiling feels low, and the perpetual whir of air conditioning permeates the space (“It’s always on,” says Chris Michno, the...
Enrique Martínez Celaya is embarking on a new journey, and we are faithfully following in his wake. The masterful Cuban-American painter had his first solo exhibition in LA since 2015, “The Tears of Things,” at Kohn Gallery this September. The artist took full advantage of the gallery’s sweeping ceilings, working in his preferred large scale to create a body of work that reveals the nature of...
jill moniz has been a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and is now principal of her own downtown gallery, Quotidian. She curated the current exhibition “LA Blacksmith” at CAAM. I understand that you have a PhD in cultural anthropology—how and when did you become interested in art? My mother was a curator, so I grew up in museums, art studios and around conversations about...
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,...
We tend to prize a certain class of “master” drawing above and beyond the no less essential sketches or more mechanical work; and we could probably put most if not all of the drawings in “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”—a compact but gorgeous...
Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to...