On any given Friday, between noon and 2 p.m., you’ll find one of Los Angeles’ best taco trucks parked downtown on 3rd Street in the middle of the Arts District. How do I know this? Because Jonathan Gold says so. “Let’s meet at Guerrilla Tacos,” the LA Times food critic and man-about-town directs me in a text. Gold has agreed to meet me for lunch while we visit a few galleries nearby. I was...
Cannibalism is now a regular thing in the art world. I’m not being metaphorical by referring to the cutthroat competition of an art market mirroring the inhumanity of its elite clientele. I’m talking about actual artists eating people. In 1996 the artist Marco Evaristti served his friends meatballs made from beef and fat extracted from his recent liposuction surgery. Upping the ante, in 2012 the...
Narsiso Martinez shapes richly detailed images of farm workers in oil, charcoal and ink wash—with discarded produce boxes as his canvas. A simple trip to Costco for pizza proved revelatory for the artist, when he found a purple-and-yellow banana box at the store. When drawing on that material, his spare and beautiful work evolved. The artist combines images of the people who bring produce to...
Known as a pioneer of the farm-to-table dining movement, Michael McCarty founded his first restaurant, Michael’s, in Santa Monica in 1979. Ten years later he would open his second location in Midtown Manhattan. Michael and his wife, the artist Kim McCarty, would become known as true friends and patrons of artists—collecting, providing alternative exhibition space in their restaurants and often...
When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper? On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part summit happening” at Goya Studios. The event involved eating a fancy dinner designed by celebrity chef Richard Blais while surrounded...
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...
Dancer turned artist Madeline Hollander is best known for performance works that explore the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art. She has begun to show her pieces in galleries and museums, creating large-scale,...