Summer festivities abound in the warmer weather. There’s New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, and Cinespia Cemetery Screenings at LA’s own Hollywood Forever. Museums are no exceptions putting on events. LACMA used to host summer jazz fests. The Hammer hosts dance parties. In the last few years, The Broad took advantage of this beach-season custom. From...
The Moon landing’s 50th anniversary can’t be avoided. Waxing at full, it feels like the last gasp. The defining moment for some in the baby boom generation, what does the Apollo 11 landing obscure? The moon shadow cast by one artist’s timely work points the way. Richard Clar, an environmental artist based in Northern California and Paris who works exclusively in the environment of space, has...
There’s something undeniably seductive about Andreas Mühe’s spare, yet sumptuous photographs. A superb technician and gifted storyteller, Mühe uses both formal and narrative elements with concentrated, yet restrained intensity to create images of arresting beauty and drama that will haunt you long after you look away. Mühe’s Mischpoche (from the Yiddish “mishpokhe”, meaning tribe or clan) on...
A wise person once said that if you want to catch people’s attention, speak softly. The curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, seem to have taken this advice to heart, assembling a show that doesn’t hit you over the head with gimmick or excess. Yet, it’s deeply engaged with social and political issues—as art in the age of Trump must be—and also deeply engaging....
In a short drive into the countryside of Maryland, about half an hour outside Washington, DC, is an exceptional private museum sited on 230 rolling acres, with buildings and outdoor sculpture thoughtfully tucked into the landscape. The Glenstone is the brainchild of Emily Wei and Mitch Rales. He began collecting in 1990, and she was a former director of Gladstone Gallery in NYC; they married in...
I had wanted to see the Guggenheim Bilbao since it first opened. Ed Moses and I had once met up, completely by accident, in London. He had flown in from San Francisco and I from Los Angeles, arriving within the same hour. Ed invited me to stay with him, saying he had plenty of room. That night we joined Allen Jones at The Bohemian Club for dinner. Amazing fun. Ed and I had both come for a...
The malaise of our times is encapsulated and iterated over and over in this year’s Venice Biennale—whether racial conflict, gender redefinition, women’s rights, immigration, environmental threats, or any combination thereof. One begins to wonder, as one wanders through this sprawling extravaganza, whether there has ever been a more troubled era. The answer of course is yes, but the difference is...
On a narrow one-way street in San Miguel Chapultepec, it’s impossible to miss the disparate wood-paneled exterior of Kurimanzutto. Surrounded by modernist apartment buildings in a rich palette of burnt sienna, robin’s-egg blue and royal yellow, the gallery’s presence is pronounced—much like how it is positioned within the vibrant art scene of Mexico City. Kurimanzutto is one of the most...
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend a night in a gallery or a small museum, and wished you could walk down a motel hallway and see original murals on your way to the ice machine instead of prints that could have—and possibly did—come from a Walmart catalog, then staying in an art hotel is the perfect option. Art hotels exist in exotic locales from Paris to Israel, but there...
“I paint almost every day,” says Rich Untermann, owner of the Spanish Garden Inn in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara. “When I like a painting, I frame it, and hang it someplace in the hotel. I shift them around until they feel comfortable—it is in a constant shuffle.” Over the years, Untermann’s paintings have filled up most of the hangable places in the hotel’s public spaces and 24 rooms....
Keegan Monaghan's paintings feel like the moldy nooks and crannies of a house or a well-worn shoe, rendered in epic and compact proportions. Their compositions shiver with an eerie affection akin to the apparitional creaking of my old, poorly insulated apartment. The...
Augustina Wang's fantastical world evokes a style of magical realism that is uniquely hers, embracing the immersive aspects of fantasy that function as a means of escapism, allowing more playful, nuanced, and expansive notions of identity to flourish. The femmes that...
Geophysical reality and machine dreams meld together to often mesmerizing effect in Refik Anadol’s revelatory exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. The show is at once an ode to the elemental forces shaping the earth’s outdoor spaces (and the human mind’s internal ones) and...
Vessels are shadowy shapeshifters—morphic geological bodies that contain ancient and imaginative geometries. A strange uncanniness is embedded in Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramic vessels, evoking fossils and corporeal architecture. The sheen of some of their glazed surfaces...
The 1960s Black Arts Movement ignited an important cultural event among its participants. Visual artists addressed themes of Black pride, self-determination, and culture. Preceding it was the Harlem Renaissance (1920–29) with aesthetic architect, Alain Locke, the...
Njideka Akunyili Crosby's portraits feel static on the walls of the Huntington Library. Thomas Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy" painting in the adjacent room suddenly feels stagnant and deflated. The Nigerian-born and Los Angeles-based artist's large-scale collages...
Linked by their common use of embroidery, the 13 artists featured in Craft Contemporary's exhibition "Strings of Desire" bring the beautiful intricacy of thread to life. It is imperative to see these works in person to appreciate the effect of threads, yarns and...
Taking its name from The Chick's 1999 song "Goodbye Earl," Bambou Gili's solo Night Gallery exhibition is a beautiful, yet ominous, exploration of the power and potential of womanhood and female friendship. The exhibition loosely follows the song—the story of Mary...
Robert Russell is a Los Angeles painter whose conceptually based process often begins with an internet search. Be it for other people named Robert Russell, artist's monographs, tea cups, or for his current exhibition, Allach porcelain figurines, Russell culls online...
Richly colored, blossoming pseudo-portraits comprise Vanessa Prager's solo exhibition titled "Portraits" at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Each painting depicts a bloom of vibrant flowers sprouting from the necks of the (assumedly) human subjects. Prager's works are a nod...