With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro...
Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been...
Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History. Schulz may have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but he was...
Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated around the Painter of Light™ and his artwork during his lifetime. To Vallance’s astonishment, when he recounted the dream to Kinkade’s...
Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with confidence and clear mastery of her material is Katy Hessel, who has rewritten art history from the Renaissance to the present day to...
Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed in a growing cosmopolitan milieu. Early on he studied under the tutelage of Guggenheim fellow Frank Gonzales, and took up painting,...
Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works, the book is a glimpse into a larger conversation—one that is ongoing. While the book is separated into sections by medium, the...
One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary, titled “Wayfinding,” offers vision and agility to spare. Although the theme is rather broadly drawn—referring to clay’s origins in land...
The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Having...
It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an organization such as Art + Practice, which has directly contributed to positive and long-term impact in the majority Black community...
Jeffrey Deitch reimagines his 1992 exhibition, “Post Human,” with a dialogue between the 90s works and newer ones, presenting dueling visions for the future of humanity and the self. The show is an opportunity to see Paul McCarthy's The Garden (1991-1992) and Charles...
This show has some of the best paintings that Rema Ghuloum has made, but that might be a problem. She’s honed this language—obsessively detailed, rainbow-hued, color field paintings—past the point of perfection. These paintings glow, but the unfinished, muddy, and...
Sometimes art can just be a weird, cool thing that happened one time. Like, what if you took apart a three-part sectional, stacked it vertically, and poured eight gallons of house paint through it. This is a dumb idea, but dumb stuff can be fun. With art, one plus one...
The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...
Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...
At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...
I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...
Liz Larner’s wall works evoke the weathered, mysterious exteriors of unearthed petrified wood. Suspended layers of obsidian, sage, amber, and indigo feel almost magnetized, capable of reshaping the viewer the way magnetic forces reshape landforms. The tautly stretched...
Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...
Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...