Food allures our ocular faculties as much as it gratifies our alimentary and salivary organs. We devour visual stimuli with our eyes just as we ingest edibles through our mouths. It thus seems felicitous that the word “taste” applies to aesthetic predilections as well as culinary concoctions. Art is cultural sustenance, food for thought. “You are what you eat”: No wonder victuals have served as...
June is LGBT+ Pride month, and it also marks the month of the third annual Los Angeles-based Queer Biennial, founded and curated by Ruben Esparza, which opened on June 1, titled “What if Utopia?" I have to admit that I am disappointed by this queer biennial, unlike the prior year’s that I praised for its inventiveness and intriguing images and performances—even as it reckoned with the heavy...
It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up at the rear of the room, seemingly appropriated from some magic hour we’re bound not to see on that particular day. As I move...
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen challenges the dualist thought that dominates so much of our public discourse: the fraught oppositions of fixed cultural...
When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her own mother was here. He ended up leaving on his own, riding away on his prized Moto Guzzi V11 EV motorcycle. It was a painful split,...
Los Angeles–based artist April Bey fuses her fine arts education with a background in design to create rule-based hybrid works that intertwine a host of materials such as caulking, resin and wood along with low quality sewing needles, thread and Hitarget wax fabric, produced in China and specifically marketed to impoverished black women. In her new series, “Afrofuturist Womanism,” Bey gives us...
On the evening of June 25, 2016, a group of gorgeous mutants rushed out of The Broad museum and began loving themselves and each other on South Grand Avenue. This band of performers, known collectively as Mutant Salon, is run by the LA-based visionary artist Young Joon Kwak. The collective had assembled at the beginning of the evening inside the Broad’s tiny Oculus Hall, as a part of the summer...
The wave of women coming forward with accounts of sexual harassment and assault has swept the art world like the Santa Ana winds in a California brush fire, and all I have to say is “Finally.” Historically, women have served as objects of sexual desire within the context of art, and a blind eye has been turned to their exploitation by powerful men. Still, just because women are coming forth with...
Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds has made a practice of illuminating Native-American life against dominant culture erasure. In his recent LA-area exhibitions at Garis & Hahn and the Pitzer College Galleries, he focused on activism and history. You tell stories of, and advocate for, indigenous peoples. How does increased urbanization affect this? For indigenous tribal citizens, I...
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus of modern life, but his 12-year-old ward Akira (Koyu Rankin)) bravely flies there in a small plane to retrieve his own dog, Spots...
"Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame" fortifies the work of activists—including the show’s curators, Checko Salgado, Kim Garrison Means and Mikayla Whitmore—who catalyzed the introduction of a congressional bill this year that would designate Avi Kwa Ame...
Will Rawls’ solo exhibition, "Amphigory," at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR binds a weightless density to a lexicon of its own creation. Multi-panel installations of black & white abstract prints on paper line the three walls of the gallery space, as well as...
Dancer turned artist Madeline Hollander is best known for performance works that explore the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art. She has begun to show her pieces in galleries and museums, creating large-scale,...
Three movement artists—Maria Gillespie, Nguyên Nguyên and Kevin Williamson—are grandly projected on as many walls but revealed in divergent locations. The panoramic videos depicting the bodily trials of these artists in demanding landscapes envelop the 2800...
I’ve always imagined Angela Dufresne as an essentially cinematic artist whose high-concept films end up expressed as series of painted works on canvas. It’s as if she went directly from film school to a major film production in trouble, where the executives have...
The lighting is low. The furniture and wallpaper appear disheveled. It soon becomes clear that everything is dilapidated; floor cushions are deformed, lumpy and discolored. The couch is disproportionate. It faces a scarred wall where instead of a fireplace there is a...
Kristine Schomaker began “Perceive Me” as a personal project, a collection of unique works in disparate mediums, each piece revealing Schomaker herself. Her vision of the exhibition, however, has changed since she began the project in 2018. What began as a personal...
Box office superhero origin stories and their sequels—from Sam Rami’s Spider-man (2002), Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008)—have grossed millions of dollars from the repeat viewings of fans who hunger to know the real story: how...
Like his multifaceted painting, drawing and storytelling universe, Trenton Doyle Hancock is many things—but he’s no vegan. The autobiographical, fantastical, art historical, comic-book world of his invention — the Moundverse — is inhabited by a variety of characters...
Although raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, Sharon Ellis mistrusts organized religion. Rather than participate in church observances, she expresses her spiritual self by painting visionary psychedelic landscapes, a now common genre that she helped legitimize in...