The holiday spirit was everywhere in the LA art scene this past weekend, from gallery openings to open studios to fun fundraisers. At Torrance Art Museum, a lively and excitingly interactive opening for Adjacent Adjacent in the main gallery drew a robust crowd. While artist Molly Schulman wound up her motorized hands to dance through the gallery, artist Dakota Noot glittered in gold before his...
"The most important thing to me was exposure to people who are making things, to other artists,” says Doug Aitken of his education at ArtCenter College of Design. Last Saturday he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from his alma mater, honored along with three other alumni in a ceremony in Oculus Hall of The Broad, followed by a celebratory dinner at the posh Otium next door. Aitken (BFA...
Nestled on the ground floor of an academic building on Pitzer College’s campus, the Lenzner Family Art Gallery is easy to miss. Its layout is as humble and curiouser still: an L-shaped room is flanked by two alcoves too small to be rooms and too large to be closets; the ceiling feels low, and the perpetual whir of air conditioning permeates the space (“It’s always on,” says Chris Michno, the...
Enrique Martínez Celaya is embarking on a new journey, and we are faithfully following in his wake. The masterful Cuban-American painter had his first solo exhibition in LA since 2015, “The Tears of Things,” at Kohn Gallery this September. The artist took full advantage of the gallery’s sweeping ceilings, working in his preferred large scale to create a body of work that reveals the nature of...
jill moniz has been a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and is now principal of her own downtown gallery, Quotidian. She curated the current exhibition “LA Blacksmith” at CAAM. I understand that you have a PhD in cultural anthropology—how and when did you become interested in art? My mother was a curator, so I grew up in museums, art studios and around conversations about...
We tend to prize a certain class of “master” drawing above and beyond the no less essential sketches or more mechanical work; and we could probably put most if not all of the drawings in “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”—a compact but gorgeous...
Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to...
There’s a special kind of push-pull pleasure to an exhibition that derives from conceptual interests, but is realized through material experimentation and finesse. Such was the case with Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s appealing new exhibition “Mother Sky.” My first...
Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon...
Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world. While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with...