Articles
Seeing Detroit Through Fresh Eyes Taylor Renee Aldridge Returns to her Hometown to Head Modern Ancient Brown Foundation
Recently I had the opportunity to visit Detroit for the first time in my life. What a magnificently diverse city bustling with bars and restaurants on every corner in the downtown area, with one of the top encyclopedic art museums in the nation where the socialist mural by Diego Rivera can be seen. No wonder Taylor Renee Aldridge left Los Angeles to return to her native Detroit, I thought to myself as I was tooling around downtown in the brisk autumn weather. It was early evening when I arrived, and the city was abuzz with long lines for dining and people spilling in and out of bars. After losing over a million of their population, the city...
ABOLITION IN ACTION Crenshaw Dairy Mart Cares About People
The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), is continuing a legacy of Black-led art spaces in South Los Angeles. Co-founded by multi-hyphenate artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz and noé olivas, it has been operating largely under the radar since its inception in 2020. As the kids say, “If you know, you know.” The art world’s awareness of CDM, its mission and programming—all orbiting around the radical concept of abolitionist aesthetics, defined by Cullors and dorriz in a UCLA Law Review paper as the “contemporary artistic movement where artists, collectives and...
HEAVY WATER Rethinking the LA River for Future Generations
The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to establish the city, bureaucrats and businessmen fought to colonize this humble waterway. They tore it away from Indigenous people, encased it in concrete, then rerouted it past the rancheros and into the burgeoning metropolis. Even if one never visits the Los Angeles River, its presence has informed freeway construction, neighborhood character and the local ecosystem. These relationships are explored through “Brackish Water Los Angeles” at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), part of the Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide...
NATURE’S WAY Lucia Monge Collaborates with Her Environment
As a kid, Lucia Monge often gazed at birds through her grandfather’s binoculars, taking in the wonders of nature at an early age. Sometimes the birds looked so extraordinary and colorful that she pondered: Could they be real? Or were they something from a fairy tale? Those formative years in Lima, Peru, shaped Monge’s focus as an artist. “A garden is a great privilege,” she said in a recent phone interview, thinking back to those weekends when her grandfather would entertain her and her brother. Their houses were close to each other, so her grandfather made them breakfast and entertained them in the family’s shared garden. “That garden was...
THE STARS ARE ALIGNED Lita Albuquerque on Observational Astronomy
A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris. But she has always given special attention to the music of the stars, and to the desert—a fixture of both her Tunisian heritage and her life in LA. Albuquerque’s iconic celestial blue-and-gold sculptural paintings are often likened to interdimensional portals, but her multivalent work extends to architectural installation, dance-based performance, film and investigations in the natural and observational sciences. “Oh, I can talk about science!”...
