June is LGBT+ Pride month, and it also marks the month of the third annual Los Angeles-based Queer Biennial, founded and curated by Ruben Esparza, which opened on June 1, titled “What if Utopia?" I have to admit that I am disappointed by this queer biennial, unlike the prior year’s that I praised for its inventiveness and intriguing images and performances—even as it reckoned with the heavy...
It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up at the rear of the room, seemingly appropriated from some magic hour we’re bound not to see on that particular day. As I move...
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen challenges the dualist thought that dominates so much of our public discourse: the fraught oppositions of fixed cultural...
When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her own mother was here. He ended up leaving on his own, riding away on his prized Moto Guzzi V11 EV motorcycle. It was a painful split,...
Los Angeles–based artist April Bey fuses her fine arts education with a background in design to create rule-based hybrid works that intertwine a host of materials such as caulking, resin and wood along with low quality sewing needles, thread and Hitarget wax fabric, produced in China and specifically marketed to impoverished black women. In her new series, “Afrofuturist Womanism,” Bey gives us...
Luciana Abait’s survey exhibition “On the Verge” features twenty works of various mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, video installation and an augmented reality. Each work is a wondrous landscape both magical and tragic. The magic comes from the...
Luminous, pastel colors abound in new paintings from Lily Stockman’s solo show “The Tilting Chair” at Charles Moffett in New York. Overall minimalist in style, Stockman’s abstract works are full of circles, ovals and petals resembling the plants and flowers referenced...
There are no straight lines or perfect circles in Physics, there are only currents, vortexes, distorted electromagnetic fields, impossible matter and beings in a reflexive state of becoming—morphing, deforming, sprawling and spilling out with each aberrant encounter....
"Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame" fortifies the work of activists—including the show’s curators, Checko Salgado, Kim Garrison Means and Mikayla Whitmore—who catalyzed the introduction of a congressional bill this year that would designate Avi Kwa Ame...
Will Rawls’ solo exhibition, "Amphigory," at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR binds a weightless density to a lexicon of its own creation. Multi-panel installations of black & white abstract prints on paper line the three walls of the gallery space, as well as...