DIGITAL EDITION
Current Issue
May/June 2023
Table of Contents
BUNKER VISION Watching the Hits
Twenty years before MTV aired its first music video, people were making short films of bands and singers performing their hits. The ones from France featured A-list acts and production values. Italy gave us the best film documentation of Screaming Lord Sutch. The...
From the Editor May/June 2023; Volume 17, issue 4
Dear Reader, “Art about art is elitist,” my boyfriend in grad school used to tell me. But if that was the case we wouldn’t have AbEx, Minimalism and maybe even Conceptualism. I got it though: The art world with its various trends and movements could seem precious and...
Village Mindset Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice
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...
Extra Flavor Desert X Breathes New Life
In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop...
Commerce and Culture Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New...
Unknown Landscapes Jessica Taylor Bellamy Explores the Wetlands
“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As...
Of Murals and Mullahs The Revolutionary Graffiti of Iran
It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in...
“Britt Ransom: Arise and Seek” at Pitzer College Art Galleries
When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain,...
ART BRIEF Hermès Bags a Win Against Artist
The Hermès Birkin handbag is the stuff of legend. Named for actress Jane Birkin, each bag is hand-tooled in the finest leather or crocodile. The bags are highly sought out by the nouveau riche. Customers for new releases are placed on a waiting list and there is a...
OFF THE WALL Stickering it to the Man
Graffiti has always been a declaration of independence and individuality; it’s the big I AM, designed to disrupt everyone else. Large Graf throw-ups, or wall pieces, may show off the artist’s skill and message, but they are also considered vandalism—incurring maximum...
THE DIGITAL Worshiping at the Altar of Algorithmic Creativity
As I sit and stare out the window and contemplate human existence, my upcoming day and this overdue column, AI is endlessly cycling—solving problems, making systems more efficient, creating previously unseen connections, secretly planning world dominance and on top of...
BUNKER VISION Chaos Access TV
Before the advent of online videos, the only way to take your moving images outside of the underground film and video art context was to get them on television. Chris Burden made commercials, and performance artists infiltrated The Gong Show, but the real hidden...
CODE ORANGE May/June 2023 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner, Maureen Vastardis, and our finalists, Maureen's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the May/June 2023 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter...
ASK BABS AI-generated Art (Again)
Dear Babs, Your last letter really pissed me off. You spent so much time talking about how great AI art is that you glossed over the more serious issues of copyright and intellectual property. What gives? —Pissed in Pasadena Dear Pissed, I only got so many words for...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Fowler Museum
SHOPTALK: LA Art News Hammer, NY Galleries
Hammering is Done The Hammer Museum has been transformed, and it’s happened so gradually over the past two decades that we barely noticed it. Sometimes one section would be closed off, sometimes another, and every so often a new section would be unveiled. There’s the...
POEMS "Reservoir" and "Dead Men Don't Marry"
Reservoir You take the back lane, following the curve of street until it meets the steps to the reservoir. At the top, triumphant, you stop for a cigarette, puffing smoke in the face of legs and lungs. Let them burn this day before your cross- examination. In England,...
Bridget Riley Hammer Museum
We tend to prize a certain class of “master” drawing above and beyond the no less essential sketches or more mechanical work; and we could probably put most if not all of the drawings in “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”—a compact but gorgeous...
COMICS Amelia Clipart for the Testudian Foundation
Arthur Simms KARMA
Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to...
Mai-Thu Perret David Kordansky Gallery
There’s a special kind of push-pull pleasure to an exhibition that derives from conceptual interests, but is realized through material experimentation and finesse. Such was the case with Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s appealing new exhibition “Mother Sky.” My first...
Michael Hilsman Various Small Fires
Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon...
Eric Nash KP Projects
Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world. While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with...
Zimmer Frei Wonzimer
Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art. One way to...
Global Asias USC Pacific Asia Museum
At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and...
Yolanda González Museum of Latin American Art
The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana...