Articles

Seeing Detroit Through Fresh Eyes
Taylor Renee Aldridge Returns to her Hometown to Head Modern Ancient Brown Foundation

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Detroit for the first time in my life. What a magnificently diverse city bustling with bars and restaurants on every corner in the downtown area, with one of the top encyclopedic art museums in the nation where the socialist mural by Diego Rivera can be seen. No wonder Taylor Renee Aldridge left Los Angeles to return to her native Detroit, I thought to...

ABOLITION IN ACTION
Crenshaw Dairy Mart Cares About People

by Bianca Collins

The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), is continuing a legacy of Black-led art spaces in South Los Angeles. Co-founded by multi-hyphenate artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz and noé olivas, it has been operating largely under the radar since its inception in 2020. As the kids say, “If you know, you know.” The art world’s...

HEAVY WATER
Rethinking the LA River for Future Generations

by Renee Reizman

The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to establish the city, bureaucrats and businessmen fought to colonize this humble waterway. They tore it away from Indigenous people, encased it in concrete, then rerouted it past the rancheros and into the burgeoning metropolis. Even if one never visits the Los Angeles River, its presence has informed...

NATURE’S WAY
Lucia Monge Collaborates with Her Environment

by Eva Recinos

As a kid, Lucia Monge often gazed at birds through her grandfather’s binoculars, taking in the wonders of nature at an early age. Sometimes the birds looked so extraordinary and colorful that she pondered: Could they be real? Or were they something from a fairy tale? Those formative years in Lima, Peru, shaped Monge’s focus as an artist. “A garden is a great privilege,” she said in a recent...

THE STARS ARE ALIGNED
Lita Albuquerque on Observational Astronomy

by Shana Nys Dambrot

A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris. But she has always given special attention to the music of the stars, and to the desert—a fixture of both her Tunisian heritage and her life in LA. Albuquerque’s iconic celestial blue-and-gold...

SENSE OF WONDER
Innovation in the Islamic World

by Barbara Morris

Centuries before Leonardo da Vinci lived and worked in Italy, a Persian astronomer, physician, geographer and writer was conducting research into the nature of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283) wrote and illustrated The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence (1280), a remarkable 13th-century document cataloging the earth, the heavens and the many forms of...

DEATH OF A STAR
Directed by Jasmine Johnson New Theater Hollywood

by Gracie Hadland

The tedium of a particular self-consciousness ascribed to Generation Z was on full display in The Death of a Star, a performance and self-proclaimed “reality show,” directed by Jasmine Johnson, which had a sold-out four-day run at New Theater Hollywood (NTH) this June. The black-box theater, run by the artists Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, which has quickly made a name for itself as one of the...

NO REALER THAN OTHER THINGS
Focusing on the Positive at This Year's Whitney Biennial

by Sarah Sargent

The 2024 Whitney Biennial—“Even Better Than the Real Thing”—features artworks, films and performances by 71 artists and collectives. Within the show’s title is an obvious allusion to AI, but the Whitney suggests that it also raises the possibility of other ideas of “the real,” giving artists considerable latitude to explore the body, identity and precariousness of the natural world. Chrissie...

(BITTER) SWEET VIRGINIA
Navigating Monuments in the Cradle of the Confederacy

by Alexia Lewis

In March, an invitation to view ceramic work by New York–based artist Patrice Renee Washington brought me to Richmond, Virginia, for the very first time. A midsize Southern city often referred to being as far north as one can get until one is in the North, Richmond’s reputation preceded itself. When I informed friends about the impending trip, they were quick to remind me that it was once the...

LESSONS TO BE UNLEARNED
The 60th Venice Biennale is Less Art World and More Real World

by Patricia Watts

This year’s 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, takes an in-depth look at the work of more than 300 artists and collectives who have experienced exile and colonialism. Pedrosa’s thoughtful selections for the main exhibition and strong representation of immigrant artists in the pavilions resulted in an inspiring gathering of...

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Reviews

Prima Sakuntabhai
at The Fulcrum Press

This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...

Duelling Reviews: Joseph Beuys
at The Broad

The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...

Olivia Mole
at Gattopardo

The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...

Jingze Du
at Steve Turner

Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining...

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris
at Walter Maciel Gallery

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel...

Hiroshi Sugimoto
at Lisson Gallery

The entrance to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is partially blocked by a curved wooden wall. The wall commands recognition, separating the exhibition from the outside world. It immediately invites the visitor to...

Lauren Bon
at Honor Fraser

If the sculpture of concrete’s last big cultural “moment” (sometime in the 2010s) was typified by figurative and abstract cement statuary that merely winked at its Home Depot provenance, Lauren Bon foregrounds this material in all its blunt, obdurate force. “Concrete...

Matthew Lax
at Human Resources

On a rainy Saturday in early November, I spent the better part of an hour sitting cross-legged inside an XL dog crate. I did so in order to watch the screens mounted to the crate’s interior that broadcast Matthew Lax’s two-channel video, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG,...

Gustav Metzger
at Hauser & Wirth

The re-examination—some would say reawakening—of radical artistic movements in the postwar era has exposed the technological as well as ideological stew out of which the digital activism of today’s art emerged. The performance and conceptual art of the 1960s...

Walead Beshty
at Regen Projects

Walead Beshty brings five distinct bodies of work together in his exhibition “Profit and Loss” at Regen Projects. In each of these projects, Beshty recasts familiar urban materials (vinyl, newspaper, cement) to expose the undercurrent of suffering and desperation in...

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