In 1969, the Black Panther Party began its Free Breakfast for Children Program in Oakland, CA, providing healthy meals to hungry school kids in disenfranchized black neighborhoods. It quickly grew into a nationwide program and proved so successful that then FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared it, “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it...
In concurrent exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza resist political declarations of border wall funding emergencies that reflect converging agendas and legacies of colonialism, nationalism, racism and capitalism. While a nation can, under these agendas, survive on and abhor the same migrant bodies of color at once—embracing their underpaid...
Imagine you check your mailbox to find a neatly folded copy of The New York Times waiting for you, its headline reading, “Herr Hitler’s Nazis Hear an Echo of World Opinion.” Wait. What? A double-take ensues as you encounter Susan Silton’s most recent work of art. As part of a trilogy of artworks created in response to the political realities in America since 2016, this singular piece creates and...
How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, now at the Broad in Los Angeles, interrogate the...
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with the mysticism of Jung’s collective unconscious. While created separately by five artists and three artist teams over the course of...
If the art world is a microcosm of our society at large, then the performance stage presents a unique opportunity for artists to write or rewrite reality as they would prefer it to be. It’s undeniable that women continue to face a host of gender-specific difficulties, both in society and in art, whether it’s lack of representation, repression of agency, or objectification—not to mention such...
Right from the start, “Zoe Leonard: Survey,” a career-spanning exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, establishes the artist’s role as an art-world renegade and provocateur. Now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary site, the installation begins with a pairing of photography and sculpture in a narrow gallery where Leonard’s photographs made through airplane windows...
I rarely get out to galleries these days and often resort to Instagram for my visual fix. Like the internet itself, it’s a seemingly endless rabbit hole of memes, food porn, actual porn and hopeless narcissism. But occasionally some strange and inexplicable gems scroll on through, just waiting to be unpicked. Last year a friend shared a video by a user going by the handle of @mcdazzler. In it, a...
Los Angeles artist Diane Williams engages such historical hierarchies as male/female, human/animal, and self/other in works that focus on her identity as a non-binary immigrant woman. Born in the Philippines in 1973, Williams (nee Diane Doreen Briones) came to this country as a young teen. She attended high school and college here, graduating from Cal State Long Beach in 2013. Since that time,...
This year, the veteran LA gallery ltd los angeles marked the start of its 10th season. In some ways, the gallery’s program looks more like that of a nonprofit than a commercial gallery. They don’t represent artists, per se. Instead of having a roster of 12 to 20 artists who rotate solo exhibitions, with a few group shows sprinkled in between, ltd los angeles works with a broad range of artists,...
Hard-edge painting has rarely been so romantic—or had such an enchanting soundtrack. Visual and musical artist Amadour’s exhibition of breezy architectural abstractions, "Echolocation" (even the name evokes a merger of sound and space), explores the recurring motif of...
Phillip K Smith III makes works that glow. His individual pieces and his installations share a kinship with California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, as they are primarily about light and the nuances of shifting colors of...
Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade...
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants...
Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around...
It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant...
Using a swirl of varied mediums, “Re•Iterate” is a fiery, highly textural exhibition curated by Lorraine Heitzman and featuring works by Heitzman, Raghubir Kintisch and Monica Wyatt. The viewer’s eye darts between textures, colors and patterns, finding a focus both in...
A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children...
Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his...
At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually...