Imagine you check your mailbox to find a neatly folded copy of The New York Times waiting for you, its headline reading, “Herr Hitler’s Nazis Hear an Echo of World Opinion.” Wait. What? A double-take ensues as you encounter Susan Silton’s most recent work of art. As part of a trilogy of artworks created in response to the political realities in America since 2016, this singular piece creates and...
How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, now at the Broad in Los Angeles, interrogate the...
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with the mysticism of Jung’s collective unconscious. While created separately by five artists and three artist teams over the course of...
If the art world is a microcosm of our society at large, then the performance stage presents a unique opportunity for artists to write or rewrite reality as they would prefer it to be. It’s undeniable that women continue to face a host of gender-specific difficulties, both in society and in art, whether it’s lack of representation, repression of agency, or objectification—not to mention such...
Right from the start, “Zoe Leonard: Survey,” a career-spanning exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, establishes the artist’s role as an art-world renegade and provocateur. Now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary site, the installation begins with a pairing of photography and sculpture in a narrow gallery where Leonard’s photographs made through airplane windows...
A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children...
Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his...
At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually...
It's been 30 years since Martin Puryear's last solo exhibition in Los Angeles—an exciting place to contextualize Puryear's work considering the city's history of burgeoning sculptural practices, especially those relating to assemblage and minimalism. The show includes...
Laguna Castle is a domestic show, focused tightly on the objects and spaces of everyday living. The solo exhibition at Night Gallery takes its name from the complex in Echo Park that hosted artist Hayley Barker’s residency in the apartment of the late community...