The grassy plains of southern Missouri came into view as the plane prepared to land in Springfield, a small city on the edge of the Ozarks. I grew up in a much smaller town not far from there. Springfield was the big city where Mom took us to buy new school clothes. Upon exiting the airport the muggy air was practically suffocating, and I was immediately transported to the barefoot summers of my...
I recently interviewed curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado of New York’s El Museo del Barrio at the opening of Site Santa Fe’s current biennial, “Much Wider Than A Line.” Rocío was part of a team of five curators for this Site’s ongoing focus on contemporary art from the Americas. We spoke at length in person, then through email several times after I left Santa Fe. Most of the interview came from...
NYC VISUAL & PERFORMANCE ARTIST GUY RICHARDS SMIT The Grossmalerman! Show November 11, FRIDAY, 8 p.m. Ace Hotel Downtown LA 929 S Broadway, LA 90015 This is a free event held at Segovia Hall featuring Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag) The contemporary art world isn't all that different from your world, except for the glamour, unscrupulous collectors, vengeful critics and one...
Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show Come On at the RADAR Queerfail Festival, she imagined trying to seduce a prospective lover by sticking out her butt and singing...
In his 2011 book Normal Life, law professor and trans-activist Dean Spade writes of the wide-ranging goals of trans-resistance, a political awakening that fights against such manifold systems of domination that its practitioners cannot focus unilaterally on sex, gender, race, class, disability, or queerness, but must take as their object the liberation of all subjected people: “[This resistance]...
Ten. It’s our number for this issue as we enter our 10th year of publication. So we thought it would be fun to put together a batch of Top Ten Lists for the greater Los Angeles art world. Our contributors came up with categories and compiled lists of what they considered tops. While lists can be fun, they can also be fraught with problems: Why wasn’t so-and-so listed? Who cares about that? WTF?...
The downtown Los Angeles arts district has been evolving, somewhat in tandem with adjacent downtown districts, since at least the 1980s. There was a stabilizing shift at the turn of the century when SCI-Arc took over the old Santa Fe rail depot east of Alameda and began renovating it into studio, classroom and related facilities. A natural anchor and boundary for the northwest end of the...
With its third installment at the Hammer Museum, “Made in L.A.” has settled into its brand as a well-researched survey of current trends and practices in regional art. But there is never a “settling in” as far as expectations for a biennial, which raises the bar not only for curators and the artists involved, but also for those who experience it. Aiming to review the show, I spent one afternoon...
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, who has had exhibitions at two LA museums this spring—the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—Cindy Sherman is a difficult subject because the work is so well known already. The exhibition at The Broad museum does manage a few surprises, however. All but 12 of the 169 pieces in the exhibition are drawn from the Broads’ own collection, which has...
So much about the Los Angeles River is not immediately obvious. That it’s a river at all, for example, still comes as a surprise to some. Others wonder when it will ever get the help it needs to really look like a river. The natural river was at least 80 percent ground water. Now there’s no groundwater to speak of, and the river we have is mostly recycled sewage—surprisingly clean tertiary...
Highly prescient, somehow whimsical, Sandow Birk’s exhibition “Los Angeles and Her Surroundings” explores what can only be described as late-stage capitalism in Southern California. In 40 drawings that have whiffs of nostalgia, environmental and architectural...
Monica Wyatt’s “c u r i o u s e r - Assemblage Creations from Wonderland” is a magical mystery tour of immersive experience. Wyatt offers work that is, at turns, whimsical, wild, and ephemeral. Created of repurposed materials, her detailed, intricate work floats and...
Love lingers in memories of past embraces, in y(our) shared moments of agony and affection. The pains of past love form bruises–tender and swollen kinks that excite and sting. Sophia Stevenson’s MFA thesis exhibition is personal, as is our relationship (she is a...
To do a one-woman play is a challenge; to do a one-woman play about a noted public figure and keep the audience enthralled for two hours is a tour de force. That’s what Holland Taylor manages to do in Ann, which just opened at the Pasadena Playhouse (through April...
Me You "Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You." is a classic Barbara Kruger experience. The exhibition serves as an introduction to those who may be unfamiliar with her work, yet also engages with seasoned viewers by re-presenting older works in grand, high tech and...
Architectural remnants of cardboard and porcelain stand scattered across Bel Ami gallery, like elegant queer ruins. "Import Imprint", curated by Talia Heiman, is CFGNY’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles. Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kristen Kilponen and Tin Nguyen form...
Now that we are finally emerging from the stronghold of isolation in the wake of COVID-19, the familiar phrase “wish you were here,” takes on new meaning. In Roberts Projects second visual iteration of this phrase, the nine artists in this exhibition reassert the...
The title of Farley Aguilar’s exhibition “Phantom Limb” refers to the corporeal sensation of a limb that has been severed from the body–memories scratch and ache, haunted by the historical traumas of slavery that manifest in transgenerational pain and psychic...
Having opened after an entire year’s delay even as the COVID-19 pandemic entered its third year, the fifth iteration of MoMA PS1’s signature major survey of art in New York City, titled "Greater New York 2021," finds the curatorial team of in-house Curator Ruba Katrib...
Consider the rhythm of poetry, the speaking voice and the eye moving across the page, the mathematics of strict iambic and hendecasyllabic verse pressed into the service of unruly love and nature. The pace and structure of power of three is eternal, the optical...