In the earliest days of his unlikely, unfortunate campaign for president, billionaire Donald Trump declared in 2015: “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” adding special emphasis on the last word, delivering the bad news like a judge slamming down a gavel. As in many things uttered by our gilded president, the truth lies somewhere in the opposite direction, with Americans still grasping for...
When I moved to San Francisco to begin college nearly a decade ago, the refrain from Scott McKenzie’s 1967 hippie anthem “San Francisco” rang through my ears, beckoning me to the city by the bay with dreams of “flowers in my hair,” but I quickly learned that much had changed since the late 1960s. So I was curious to visit the “Summer of Love” exhibit at de Young museum, nestled in Golden Gate...
The Reykjavík Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall presents an opportunity to experience a site-specific installation by Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir and a film by fellow Icelander Xárene Eskandar. The Festival brings up a larger question of cultural specificity amidst the ever-expanding waves of globalism, and whether it is possible to understand and integrate the kind of cultural...
When Hannah Black wrote in her open letter to the Whitney Biennial curators “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” she did more than bolster a national debate about ownership of black pain, she connected with Denver artist Taylor Balkissoon and her frustration with her work mediated by a...
It feels like last summer was a long time ago. What with a year filled with electoral rage politics, acquitted police shootings of black people, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Wall, the reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education’s yanking of transgender protections in public schools—we’re so freaked out that maybe it’s time for a break....
There’s a scene in Paul Greengrass’s 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum when former CIA operative Jason Bourne/Matt Damon kills a Moroccan man named “Desh” using a book, what appear to be shampoo bottles, and a towel. The death match goes down in a Tangier apartment, and reaches a peak when Desh grabs a brass candlestick and slashes it at Bourne’s head. Bourne, on his back, reaches around and...
Click Here for Part 1. Art Star and painter Masami Teraoka conceived of a collaboration with Russian performance collective Pussy Riot. These words document their performance in Hawaii. THE NINTH WAVE The marketing of The Tempest was limited to an events newsletter from the Honolulu Museum of Art. The invitation to the free event caught my eye by chance. The audience on the night of the...
Artist Masami Teraoka said, “Let’s make art!” and they did. Pure art rumbles, bubbles and springs forth, like the eruption of a magnificent geyser. As the plume spray drifts and evaporates in the wind, the beauty of the gesture is the impermanent purpose. A site-specific, immersive interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest was conceived, planned, strategized and rehearsed for a singular...
“Get off Bonnie Brae!” Chris Kraus shouts from the car speakerphone when I resort to calling her for directions. I’m lost in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood that borders downtown Los Angeles, looking for the writer/critic’s house. I wasn’t sure if Kraus raised her voice for my safety (Bonnie Brae is a notorious drug-copping street), or just to point me quickly in the right direction. When I...
Can art hurt people? In mid-February, I sat in Boyle Heights’ El Tepeyac café across from a revolutionary named A. and probed him with questions in order to find out. A., a slim Latinx man wearing Elvis Costello glasses, belongs to the anti-gentrification group Defend Boyle Heights. DBH is a nationally recognized rebellion against the encroachment of art galleries into communities of color, and...
The City of Namara is a fictitious place created by Robert G. Achtel. In the photographs that define this curious and digitally fabricated location, Achtel presents Namara as a place devoid of people and filled with modernist architecture. Each building is shot...
If the endpoint of a viewer's perception in art is to re-create something in the mind's eye through one's own experience of the artwork, then the work of art is demonstrative. It acts as a catalyst for the imaginative re-creation of something the artist is pointing at...
Having gone through a recent breakup, the theme of Sam Anderson's show, "Lunch Hour," felt all too familiar as the artist examines cyclical narratives of desire and disappointment. At first glance, the show at Tanya Leighton gallery feels like a departure for those...
Once upon a time there were "record stores" where one could look through bins of new and used albums, often organized alphabetically by musician/band and type of music, allowing listeners and viewers to troll though specific musical histories. Today, many people...
The enchanting lure of a hole, the tender scuttle of a bug, the mysterious vibrations of the forest, the pungent bloom of a corpse flower, the mutability of our fleshy bodies in decay—these are things that have fascinated and bonded my years of friendship with Geena...
In "Monsoon Season," her first ever New York solo show, on view at Charles Moffett, Natalie Strait presents new paintings of women that explore climate change, gender, queer culture and the experience of being a woman today. The women in Strait’s paintings are all...
In a planet crowded with polarizing paradigms, is it possible to contribute aesthetically to larger conversations about culture and existence? Life by Design, a group show currently at the Gresham Gallery at San Bernardino Valley College (SBVC), masterfully...
The progress of his career has been a methodical march; carefully scripted, stubbornly stage-managed, and precisely choreographed—each subsequent exhibition enhancing the shudder of an already disconcerting thrum. The result of such a steady and painstaking pace has...
Figuratively speaking, this year’s Venice Biennale is a “Brick House;” a metaphor for what creative women are capable of achieving when given the opportunity. Cecilia Alemani, the first Italian female curator since the inaugural Biennale in 1895, has included a...
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is known globally for his colorful, smiling flowers, anime-inspired paintings and sculptures, and collaborations in fashion and music. His new exhibition, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, presents an intimate but powerful display of...