While contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang often grab international headlines with their projects and exhibitions, there are very few women among them. Lin Tianmiao is one of the few. That is very much due to the strength of her work, the power of its imagery, which is at once bold and delicate, and of its message, which is female-centric if not what she would call...
In case you didn’t notice, Hello Kitty invaded Los Angeles in November. If you were anywhere near Little Tokyo, you could scarcely escape the impression that not only that neighborhood, but half the population of LA’s downtown and east side had been initiated into the cult of the bow, cat-ears and whiskers. Hello Kitty has been a merchandising phenomenon for some decades now (four, to be...
During the summer of 2012, artists Eddie Rehm and Kenneth Ian Husband were enjoying something of a personal Golden Age in their tiny shared studio in Patchogue, a working class town on Long Island, New York. The studio itself was little more than a shed in the yard of Husband’s father’s modest home, but the painters made it a place for unbridled expression, camaraderie and collaboration. Rehm...
From the beginning, the plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art building have been a private collaboration between Director Michael Govan and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. This latest chapter in the quest for a new building for the county museum began at a preview I attended in the LACMA auditorium for the exhibition The Presence of the Past on June 3, 2013. More than a preview, it was a show of its own for a project that had advanced without public review, all the way to finalizing the mass, the shape and the exterior circulation of an apparently unconventional new building.
Ry Rocklen saved oyster shells, along with some rocks, then tried to unload them one day at a garage sale. “I didn’t sell a thing,“ he told me in an interview, about his boyhood collecting obsession. Decades later, he is still drawn to treasuring odd stuff: discarded junk, mail order trophy parts, even his own used clothing. Valuing their material qualities and cultural currency, he assembles...
Bodies are complicated. Choosing to work with the body as an artistic material complicates its complications. The resulting nest, where taisha paggett settles in to practice, can be thick and sticky. Paggett has grappled with the ways identity and environment are borne by the body from her beginnings in dance as an 18-year-old in her native Fresno, California, a racially segregated agricultural...
Is fashion the medium of the moment? I’m not talking about haute couture or luxury ready-to-wear fashion design. Since the ascendance of Conceptualism, the means of fabrication have been more or less beside the point in fine art; and so it would be here. This isn’t about elevating design, or even architecture—and all the materials, craft and engineering that sustain it—to the status of art. It’s...
“I’m a hypocrite,” Linda Vallejo says, referring to her latest series “Make ’Em All Mexican.” “I grew up on Fred Flintstone and Frank Sinatra. I’m all American.” She adds, “I think we are all hypocrites in one way or another. We all have our prejudices and judge each other needlessly based on color, class, education, et cetera. If we pretend that we don’t have these thoughts and feelings we’re...
Ross Rudel’s art has haunted my consciousness for a few years now. Encountering occasional works of his in group shows throughout Los Angeles, I would find myself consistently drawn in and hypnotized by what felt like a quiet, faraway presence filled with hidden potency. The LA–based artist’s sculptures and performances, carefully crafted and often employing found objects, exude deep mystery and deep purpose. Why does this work—sometimes so slight and minimal as to be barely noticeable in the gallery—have so much resonance? Where does this strange energy come from?
“There is no one authentic way to present Asian art and culture,” according to Christina Yu Yu, who was recently appointed as director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. “Once you take a piece of art and place it in a case with a spotlight,” she explains, “you remove it from its original context.” Yu well understands the importance of context. Born in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, she came to the United States as a student and trained in Asian art history here in the West. It was while in the U.S. that she began to appreciate the art of her own culture. “Sometimes it takes distance” she admits, “to learn about where you are really from.” Her point of view, both Eastern and Western, as well as her academic and professional background place her in a unique position to lead a museum of Asian art in the greater Los Angeles area, where, despite a growing population of transplanted Asians like herself, the art of the East is not widely appreciated.
From an ultramarine field, a glyph emerges. It is the shape of something, human or animal, and it appears to pirouette in the center of the canvas. Drawing closer reveals other marks scratched into the surface of the blue, or small fragments embedded in the field. One...
Installation—often understood as the act of locating, positioning and inserting—has, in Nari Ward’s exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, intersected with the examination of founding American democratic principles. This combination of past works and...
In his kinetic objects and interactive environments, Nick Dong combines the simple, fractal serenity of Buddhist design with the quirky warmth of Victorian curio cabinets, as well as a refined yet theatrical sense of surprise. Across a handful of discrete objects and...
The very model for a great photographer in the post-World War II era was Henri Cartier-Bresson, a cosmopolitan heir to a fortune who was a co-founder of the photographic cooperative Magnum and traveled the world taking photographs with his hand-held Leica camera. His...
The sculptures in Dozie Kanu’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles flirt with functionality but refuse to reveal a clear purpose. Instead, these stylish hybrids possess the elegance of aspirational interior design and the subtle menace of dystopian relics. Many of...
It’s hard to imagine another time in my life when the word “home” will carry so much weight. The past year has redefined it for all of us. Home has become more vital than ever, yet home is more unstable than ever. Home is where we were told to stay, but home has been...
Neon is a medium that has been used over time to beckon, and Leticia Maldonado’s work viewed through the large glass windows of Bermudez Projects in Cypress Park does exactly that. Maldonado’s “Autonoetic” is a collection of mixed media that blends delicately thin...
Andy Kolar’s new show at Walter Maciel Gallery, “Head in the Clouds/Left Hanging,” is a play in three acts. Like any good play, and more so than most solo exhibitions, there is a vital rhythm and active plot – a cadence. And for good reason: Kolar’s exploration of...
We observe this unfolding in Packer’s paintings: intimate, cozy scenes of home life turn into majestic statements of Blackness, power, and vulnerability. There is something political about how dynamic these paintings are and how they challenge the conventions of portraiture painting. The paintings actively diverge from the authority and rigidness associated with classical portraiture.
Fans of Los Angeles' Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional. The show marks the Los Angeles...