This past August I decided to brave the coastal traffic to make a visit to the Lux Art Institute near San Diego. I was on deadline and woke up with a cold, but I had been notified that mega-artist and LA expat Jorge Pardo was scheduled to speak as his artist-in-residency time was winding down. I had encountered Pardo a year before, at his new home base in Merida, Mexico, when he had graciously...
You find out about Cosey Fanni Tutti’s various bodies of work by rumor or implication—did you know that someone once did this? Did you know it was the same woman who did that? Cosey started out as a little girl named Christine Newby, in Hull, in the U.K., in 1951. She became a major force in COUM Transmissions, an experimental performance collective that moved in the same circles as Anish...
Vaginal Davis is one of the better examples of somebody who mixes life with art. Her activities include performing, curating, composing, painting and writing. From the late 1970s to early aughts she manifested a series of bands, performances, publications, clubs and videos that made her an underground legend. In 2005 she joined the artist diaspora in Berlin, as rampant gentrification started to...
Half the population of Los Angeles is now Latino, but its signature industry, the film business, fails to include a significant number of Latinos in feature films or deal with stories that may be especially relevant to their lives. This fall the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences makes an effort to look at the problem—and also to celebrate some of those who have pioneered Chicano and...
Apocryphal notions, like northern superiority and European “discovery” of land already populated, pervade the Western Hemisphere. Even before Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, our so-named New World has been a locus for European fantasy projection. Currently on view at UCR ARTSblock, “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” showcases the work of artists employing science fiction...
What do we have when those closest and dearest to us pass away and what do we do with the things that were once theirs? Richard Turner's installation Air Becomes Breath, 2017, takes that question on and has turned the clothing of his recently deceased wife, Sylvia, into the central element of his show. He has made these uninhabited garments into the hinge around which his installation literally...
Karen Finley’s The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery unfolds similarly to a dream that makes complete logical sense when experiencing it, but is difficult to piece together the linear structure upon waking. The one-woman show lasts for an hour and a half (no intermission) and I was impressed by the endurance and vitality of the sometimes-panting, sometimes-yelling, always passionate Finley. The...
I have had the opportunity to visit the Venice Biennale on numerous occasions. In reflecting, I realize that what makes one trip stand out over another is the totality of the experience and not the specificity of the art. How can one not love Venice? Navigating criss-crossing bridges and canals to find an installation that completely takes over and transforms an ancient palace is always one of...
In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at least happens in that context. But if art serves as a metaphorical megaphone, she uses it to broadcast loudly, aiming to erase the...
Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft and Folk Art Museum will include her sculptures Cartonlandia (2007) and Chalino (2008); additionally, several of Serrano’s smaller...
“Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoigne Workshop” is a photography exhibition on view at the Getty Museum that chronicles the history of an extraordinary partnership of Black photographers. Founded in 1972 by Louis Draper, the Kamoigne Workshop was a...
This edition of Pope.L’s thinning theatrics presents a series of immaculate white shacks, their size of a two-holer, containing a carpeted bench, where viewers may test the limitations of their endurance. An unsuspecting and luckless couple may sit together in one of...
In 2011, Melanie Willhide experienced the theft of her computer and back-up drives. Once these items were recovered, she discovered her files had been corrupted. Rather than abort the project she was working on, she embraced the glitches now embedded in her images and...
In his current exhibition, the artist’s fifth at this gallery, Adam Parker Smith employs classical sculptural forms in a fresh new way, featuring six large sculptures, approximately 35-feet or one cubit diameter. Working in white Carrara marble on a stone pedestal,...
In his current show, “The Adult Light,” Sergej Jensen seems intent upon demonstrating his capacity for conventional, gestural painting (and for that matter, chromatics), as well as the subtle auto-constructions of stitched and collaged fabrics and pigments he is...
Since 1985, Theodore Svenningsen has been working sporadically on “Primitive Structures,” an ongoing series of paintings, mostly black and white, that are seductive at surface level, yet purposefully unsettling upon closer inspection. When viewing the 12 works from...
The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose...
“Alternate Realities” at the Norton Simon Museum presents the work of four California painters from the mid-20th century: John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and Emerson Woelffer. These artists formed part of the California version of Abstract...
Works on paper by Russell Crotty are a mix of travel journals, celestial cartography, landscape sketches, stream of consciousness narration, auric cross-hatched impressionism, and sculptural installation. Their palette is that of desert and the night; their imagery of...
Artist, feminist, environmentalist—these themes elegantly converge in her exhibition “Bound Angel” which examines, with perverse pleasure, the darker cultural implications of mass production, the fight for gender equality, and the mounting ecological crisis....