The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and for some reason I was thinking the area would be trashier, near a remote woodsy area. I guess I was already typecasting Smith in my...
Up-and-coming Los Angeles-based artist Christian Tedeschi describes his former boss, Nancy Rubins as “a tornado—so much energy.” The 40-year-old assistant professor and head of sculpture at Cal State Northridge recalls his experience as a studio assistant with a combination of reverence, awe and pragmatism. His admiration for Rubins—both as an artist, and as a person—is clear. “She is no...
Many young artists, especially those coming right out of school, find working as a studio assistant to be a valuable intermediary step. If they are lucky, they learn practical skills—and perhaps even more importantly—they make significant connections with more accomplished artists.Rebecca Ripple completed her MFA at Yale in 1995 and decided to move to Los Angeles. She identified five women...
Yes, Shepard Fairey is a street art superstar, a highly collectible blue-chip artist, and a household name worthy of museum retrospectives. Fairey’s also a multiple-city muralist, a curator of talent with his own Subliminal Gallery and most recently a co-producer of the massive Art Alliance: “The Provocateurs,” extravaganza in Chicago—Lollapolooza’s answer to the art world.However, Fairey will...
Unbeknownst to many, the majority of sculptors that are known for creating large sculptures in bronze, never actually work with the material. Rather they sculpt in some alternative natural—such as clay or wax—then when the final aesthetic is reached, the object is handed off to a bronze fabricator—a foundry person—to change the sculpture’s materiality. The job of the foundry is to take that...
Climate experts have yet to advance their science to a point where we might seriously contemplate climate management, but if they ever do, they might find the curatorial method of “Made in L.A. 2014” instructive. This more sharply focused edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial of Los Angeles artists not only embraces a broadly defined institutional critique, but includes the hypothetical viewer...
Recently I went to Pascal Dombis’s Parisian studio to look into the large public artwork that he will be installing at end of this year at the National School of Architecture in Strasbourg. While there, I formulated some general reflections on his work. For awhile now, Dombis has been creating perverse computer-assisted paintings that seem to try to overthrow, or at least displace, modern...
Pierced by the oblique rays of a setting sun pouring in from the yellowing skylights, the bowels of the abandoned Domino’s sugar refinery in Brooklyn appear like the nave of a rusted cathedral. For two months this spring that majestic industrial ruin was the setting for Kara Walker’s impressively site-specific installation, ironically titled "A Subtlety" a meditation on desire, exploitation,...
Martin Mull has certainly earned his place in the canon of exceptional narrative painters, those for whom painting is a delicate and complicated process by which the artist quantifies his/her relationship to the world around them. Mull’s assessments are usually dark, even sinister at times, and this darkness derives from a seemingly inherent flaw in our humanity, as if the figures in Mull’s...
A small crowd gathers around the entrance to Fouladi Projects gallery at Market and Guerrero in San Francisco. A doorman with a long list in his hand gives me the uneasy fear that I won’t be allowed into the opening, on account of the über-hip celebrity inside. But I tell him I’m with the press, and he shrugs and steps aside nonchalantly. When I walk inside, every eye turns to register my...
Her multilayered works encompass oil, watercolor, and collaged paper cut outs. The works exist in the Black Atlantis.
The gap between memory and history has never been more obvious than since the proliferation of photography. History presents a narrow view of our past: the highest achievements and the lowest atrocities – which can even be the same depending on the historian. What is...
Red is the color of extremes, especially the Cadmium Red Deep of Lygia Pape’s posthumous show “Tupinambá” up at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. The same red as both Valentine’s Day ornamentation and oxidized blood—red represents birth, seduction, war, death and a...
I feel like most people would have a tough time imagining something more ideologically opposed to art than data analytics. Even the phrase sounds unartistic, more at home in investment banking than gallery houses. Art just feels too subjective to be encapsulated by...
Make Room's new location in Hollywood is a private garden courtyard leading into two exhibition spaces. This space, on a balmy, LA-summer evening, infused with the ethereal charm of director Emilia Yin, leant an alluring hush on opening night and afforded the...
SUMMER READING: July-August 2021 Digital Special Edition Review Subscribe or Order to Get Your Copy Today Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto Reviewed by Pelumi Odubanjo A ‘glitch’ is often considered to be an error; a malfunction that appears to temporarily cause or...
Art Is Everything By Yxta Maya Murray 229 pages TriQuarterly Yxta Maya Murray—art writer, law professor, fiction author—draws upon the disparate threads of her writing practice to construct her new novel, Art Is Everything, a kind of Bildungsroman of the Los Angeles...
After living through the angst-laden whirlwind that was 2020, I can’t imagine a better show to see than “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s dual focus on ordinary, often invisible people and social justice issues resonates...
While painting may, in most cases, operate within the mind alone, sculpture is intrinsically connected to the body. Sculpture itself has a certain corporeality. The works aren’t abstracted onto a wall, but rather exist in the world among us. We are forced to reckon...
In contrast to city symphonies’ majestic depiction of high-rises and new machinery, Yu Ji displays discarded objects and debris. Instead of emphasizing order and repetition, the artist embraces liquidity and discord.