On a Roll

LA artist Sandy Rodriguez is having a very good year—her work is currently in a solo show, “Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation” (through April 17), at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, plus she’s part of two major exhibitions in the LA area, “Borderlands” at the Huntington Museum (through fall 2022) and “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12) at LACMA.

I love the fact that everything she uses to make her work is carefully considered and contributes to the meaning of the work. For “Borderlands” she created a monumental 8’x8’ map of greater Los Angeles which mines deeper histories of the land. That map—YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Porciúncula /Los Angeles—shows topography, flora and fauna, language and stewardship over time. This work, like much of her oeuvre, is on amate paper, made by a hand-process that predates the Conquest, or the coming of the Spanish to the Americas. It is made from tree bark in a traditional manner involving being pounded by lava rock to bind the fibers. “At the time of the Conquest, it became illegal to make this paper or work on this paper,” she says on a museum video. “If it’s outlaw paper, I’m going to use this paper and tell that story on this sacred paper.” Rodriguez also uses pigments that are mineral and earth-based—in the gallery, there’s a showcase featuring the pigments she uses.   

The solo at the Amon Carter features 30 new works-on-paper she created during her stay at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency. It was during a turbulent time of COVID rising and nationwide demonstrations against police brutality, and she looked to the natural world around her to guide her. Studying and collecting native plants, she incorporated them as raw material for this series, which includes landscapes, maps, scenes of protests, and botanical studies. A big congratulations, Sandy!

Fairs Bouncing Back After Pause

Frieze returns to Los Angeles after a pause last year due to you know what. This time (February 17–20) it’s bound for a new location next to the Beverly Hilton, in a new structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast and his firm wHY, which created the white tent at previous Frieze LA on the Paramount lot. Leading the return is Christine Messineo, newly appointed director of Frieze LA and New York, with the LA edition featuring over 100 galleries from 17 countries. Also new will be a public art component, Frieze Sculpture Beverly Hills, in Beverly Gardens park, with support from the city of Beverly Hills.

Among the galleries at the main event will be 38 LA-based galleries—(the usual suspects): Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, David Kordansky, L.A. Louver, Regen Projects and Various Small Fires (VSF). They will be joined by first-timers Bortolami, Sean Kelly and Galerie Lelong & Co., as well as New York returnees Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Gallery Hyundai, Pace, Maureen Thaddaeus Ropac, and David Zwirner.  So, okay, a pretty heavy-duty array. Given the rather riotous success of Art Basel Miami in early December, Frieze should also benefit from people eager to gawk and gab and buy gobs of art.

Looks like other art fairs will also sprout around that time, including Felix returning to the Roosevelt Hotel, also February 17–20, and a new fair, the Clio Art Fair for “independent artists,” at the Naked Eye Studio on the same weekend. No news on any dates for Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which made an inspired move to the Hollywood Athletic Club in 2020. Apparently, that cost a bundle to launch.

Meanwhile, Intersect comes to Palm Springs Feb. 10–13, with exhibitors, talks and programming at the Palm Springs Convention Center and some other desert locations. Specifics aren’t out yet as of this writing, but in a brief chat director Becca Hoffman conveyed their commitment to building community and connecting with the local art ecology. Hoffman was formerly director of The Outsider Art Fair. Intersect has already debuted in Aspen and Chicago.

At the start of the year the long-running Los Angeles Art Show returns to the LA Convention Center, January 19–23, after getting off-schedule in 2021 with a summertime session. This show covers both modern and contemporary art, and is making concerted efforts to be more relevant with special programming, this year concentrating on the global environment. The new direction is being led by Kassandra Voyagis. “With a focus on the global effects of humankind on the planet,” she said in a press release, “It is the right time to present voices from around the world, and I am excited to facilitate this wonderful event.”

Photo by Libby Lumpkin.

We Love You, Dave!

Dave Hickey (1938–2021)

Dave Hickey, who died this past November, at 82 (about a month to the day this is being composed), was in many ways a godfather to Artillery, friendly with its editor and several of its contributors, but more importantly, in his intellectual scope, irreverence, eclecticism and unflagging pursuit of fresh beauties in every medium and across a richly diverse cultural terrain, a guiding critical spirit. Long after the Cool School’s halcyon days (he wrote the catalog essay for Ed Ruscha’s SFMOMA 1982, I Don’t Want No Retrospective) and his years on the rock ‘n’ roll caravan—including songwriting in Nashville, writing for Rolling Stone, and backing up Marshall Chapman’s rhythm section—his essays for LA’s Art Issues tore a swath through the domain of art and cultural criticism as wide and as glittering as the Vegas Strip. His epochal 2001 SITE Santa Fe biennial, “Beau Monde” (which I covered at the behest of Artillery’s editor), was, among other things, a material and architectural dramatization of the art conversation he had himself ignited, and which not so incidentally foregrounded Los Angeles as an art and creative capital. It gives us no small joy to carry his legacy—“bad acting and wrong-thinking;… courageously silly and frivolous;… enthusiastic, noisy;… seductive, destructive”—forward, because (as he said in the same essay), “art doesn’t matter.  What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy …—as a forum of contested values where we vote on the construction and constituency of the visible world.” —Ezrha Jean Black

Other News

One of the top five art books of the year cited by NPR’s Heller McAlpin is “Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody,” authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria and Don Choi. Cody helped create the sleek postwar Palm Springs look and designed a number of celebrated buildings still standing, including the Del Marcos Hotel and the Palm Springs Public Library. Yes, you can stay at the Del Marcos and enjoy the updated Mid-century furnishings and the central swimming pool outside your door. Catherine Cody is his daughter. Other books on the list are “Woman Made: Great Women Designers,” “Bird: Exploring the Winged World, “The Unwinding: and other dreamings,” and “William Morris.”