During her childhood in provincial Nigeria, Shiri Mordechay recalls traversing roadways littered with human skulls, glimpsing live babies discarded in trash cans and being spellbound by a harrowing band of voodoo practitioners that surrounded her abode and pounded insistently on its doors and windows. A green mamba once encircled her ankles while she sat at a classroom desk. Years later, in...
This September, LA gallerist Anat Ebgi launched an unheard of exhibition program committed to featuring only female artists for an entire year: a concerted effort to correct a persistent imbalance in the art world. According to Ebgi, “The exhibition program will serve as a template for the future of our gallery, as we take on more women artists who have a completely unique and uncanny use of...
Where do you start with a six-hour operatic extravaganza on sex, art, alchemy, reincarnation and the decline of the American auto industry, drenched in melodrama and symbology, with so many threads running through it that the original material, if any, is obscured; a film that is overflowing with comparisons between the reproductive, alimentary and industrial canals, and which, owing to its...
Trying to communicate the plot of Matthew Barney’s recent, nearly six-hour opera, River of Fundament, makes me feel like the SNL character Stefon ...“The movie has everything: Fran Lebowitz, gold-leafed poop, Egyptian gods, Elaine Stritch, classic cars, Maggie Gyllenhaal, a baby bird birthed from a woman’s vagina, Paul Giamatti, two pregnant women playing with an oversized feces dildo... ” The...
Step off the Metro line at Crenshaw and Martin Luther King in 2019, and the first thing you’ll be greeted by is the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, a gray monolith of Macy’s, Sears and Wal-Mart. But look further south down Crenshaw, and you’ll notice an afro rising like a mushroom cloud above the Krispy Kreme bags and Jack-in-the-Box cups.“I needed to transform the energy,” the muralist’s author,...
The opening of NeueHouse Hollywood on the West Coast—their second location—would warrant our attention regardless of any new piece of art attached to it. After all, since its first location opened in Manhattan in 2013, NeueHouse has been a hub for celebrities, artists, and creative types to mingle, brainstorm and collaborate. Expensive and exclusive, it is a marker of the city’s preeminence in...
The term, “mindful awareness,” is a buzz phrase in current therapeutic and meditation circles (and, as I discovered a year or so ago, the institutional art world—or at least the Hammer Museum, by way of its alliance with UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center). But a look back at the teaching practice and art of Corita Kent (1918–1986) almost makes you wonder if she invented it. Given what we...
More than any other MFA programs in Southern California—there are in excess of a dozen—CalArts and UCLA have long been associated with art super-stardom. Whether this perception is accurate or a mere distillation of selective anecdotes, it bolsters the mythology of getting into the right school as a launching pad to a prestigious commercial gallery. Through this looking glass, the notion of a...
Just blocks from Venice Beach near Appleton Way I’m wandering down an alley, trying to find Jud Fine’s studio. Over the cell he tells me to look for the DWP truck parked in front. But as I turn the corner the truck is pulling away. I’m not quite sure which nondescript gate or back alley garage I’m looking for. I enter what I believe to be Fine’s studio, practically tripping over a flimsy...
All good crits are alike; each miserable crit is miserable in its own way. Isn’t that the way it goes? We asked a few reliable Southern California university faculty to recommend recent MFA grad students for contributions to our Back to School issue on their critique experiences. We weren’t able to include every school, but here are a few to share with you. As you’ll see, a common denominator is...
Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense. The title of her...
When one enters the massive gallery at California African American Museum occupied by “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” it’s easy to be seduced by the cacophony of bold color, textures and geometric patterns. Power symbols appear and disappear like a nickelodeon on...
In his new collection of powerful figurative images and mysterious abstract photographs, Brendan Lott proves he is both “Looking In and Looking Out.” The exhibition is curated across two rooms at Walter Maciel, allowing viewers to move between intriguing and intimate...
It has been a while since David Rubin ended his long and distinguished career as an institutional curator, but he continues to write and curate—and continues to produce art as well. Rubin had put aside his youthful artmaking once his curatorial direction took over,...
Curated by former MOCA LA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, “Ruth Asawa: All is Possible” at David Zwirner, New York expands our understanding of this remarkable artist by presenting a selection of lesser-known pieces together with her iconic sculptures. Asawa’s...
As the room unfolds before a viewer’s eyes there is a veritable procession of numbers going from one to nine through all the gyrations of being outlined, filled in or partially obscured. It is as though the sequence of this set of well-known forms is taken...
Walking into Vielmetter Los Angeles’ sunlit loft, it’s easy at first glance to overlook the series of flower paintings inside as traditional floral still lifes. But the stark white backgrounds, untraditional choice of medium, and emotive compositions belie Hugo...
Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former...
Although photography-based collages by Joe Rudko are aggressively analog as objects, they reference the inherent pixelated optics of the digital world. Each unique piece is physically made of thousands of randomly accumulated, painstakingly spliced and intuitively...
In our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array...