Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds has made a practice of illuminating Native-American life against dominant culture erasure. In his recent LA-area exhibitions at Garis & Hahn and the Pitzer College Galleries, he focused on activism and history. You tell stories of, and advocate for, indigenous peoples. How does increased urbanization affect this? For indigenous tribal citizens, I...
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus of modern life, but his 12-year-old ward Akira (Koyu Rankin)) bravely flies there in a small plane to retrieve his own dog, Spots...
“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game of gin rummy. This week there are too many people in the bar and we have to wait half an hour standing around, something that...
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands. —Martin Gayford, A...
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with Christopher Isherwood—yes, that Christopher Isherwood, the celebrated author of The Berlin Stories—it was the older man who encouraged...
Box office superhero origin stories and their sequels—from Sam Rami’s Spider-man (2002), Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008)—have grossed millions of dollars from the repeat viewings of fans who hunger to know the real story: how...
Like his multifaceted painting, drawing and storytelling universe, Trenton Doyle Hancock is many things—but he’s no vegan. The autobiographical, fantastical, art historical, comic-book world of his invention — the Moundverse — is inhabited by a variety of characters...
Although raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, Sharon Ellis mistrusts organized religion. Rather than participate in church observances, she expresses her spiritual self by painting visionary psychedelic landscapes, a now common genre that she helped legitimize in...
Chucking traditional curatorial norms out the window, Wolfgang Tillmans presents a show like it’s a site-specific installation, clustering images together—some wondrous, others just plain blah—hanging framed photographs alongside unframed prints, with the occasional...
Diego Rivera’s artistic oeuvre is so connected to our collective unconscious that touring this exhibition of 150 paintings, frescoes and drawings, feels like a homecoming. The show also includes film projections of murals that the artist created in Mexico and the US...