Articles

ART THAT TRANSPORTS
Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations

The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Having...

Village Mindset
Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice

by Alexia Lewis

It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an organization such as Art + Practice, which has directly contributed to positive and long-term impact in the majority Black community...

Extra Flavor
Desert X Breathes New Life

by Catherine Yang

In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop that the 2023 iteration of Desert X, a young and ambitious biennial, blossoms across the sun-kissed Fantasyland of Palm Springs. ...

Commerce and Culture
Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities

by William Moreno

Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New York City and currently residing in Northern California, he began his professional career as a photojournalist working for...

Unknown Landscapes
Jessica Taylor Bellamy Explores the Wetlands

by Lauren Guilford

“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As we descend the muddy hillside draped in bright yellow wildflowers, we share a moment of childhood nostalgia, recalling wild mustard...

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Reviews

Piper Bangs
at Megan Mulrooney Gallery

Juicy larvae play amongst feral grasses. Slugs laze on velvety pillows of tufted lichen. Cornucopias of ripened fruits germinate in tendrilled verdant habitats. I can’t help but delight in Piper Bangs’ paintings, resonating with my love of dirt and belief in the magic...

PEER REVIEW
Kelly Wall on Ellen Schafer

Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...

Markus Lüpertz & Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Michael Werner

There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early...

Bernard Cooper
Gattopardo

If you’ve read any of Bernard Cooper’s books, you know about the care with which he constructs his sentences, how he gives each detail its own breathing room. (If not, Maps to Anywhere [1990] and his 2006 memoir The Bill from My Father are especially recommended.)...

Kyungmi Shin
Craft Contemporary

In The Head in the Tiger’s Mouth (2021), the first composition in Kyungmi Shin’s kaleidoscopic exhibition, my eyes immediately landed on the luminous collection of swirls and stripes suggesting the calligraphic form of a tiger before catching on the colorful tableau...

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