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....
There are indeed ghost towns, despite the well-known edict by Daniel Burnham. Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing. While there remain among us visionary...
You consider yourself an influencer. A few thousand Instagram followers agree. Photos of your cocktails, your midcentury furniture, your body moving through museums, through notable cities, sitting in international airports. It’s February, and @you are landing back in your adopted home for the Frieze Los Angeles art fair. “No one builds a legacy by standing still,” says RIMOWA, the manufacturer...
The University Art Museum (UAM) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) recently hosted artist lauren woods’ (lower case intentional, per the artist) project, American Monument 25/2018, an ongoing intermedia monument to Black lives taken by police brutality. Through most of the Fall 2018 semester controversy surrounding the work disrupted the campus, but you wouldn’t know it walking...
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...
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...
When Kehinde Wiley had the honor of being selected to paint a portrait of former President Barak Obama, it marked a historic moment as he became the first African American to paint an official US presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery....