President Donald Trump is no fan of the arts. His first budget proposed entirely eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Congress saved both agencies by funding them in the current budget, but their...
I first realized I was an “anarchist”—somebody who doesn’t believe in government—when I first heard the word, probably when I was 11, right around the same time I figured out I was an “artist.” (I didn’t have to look that one up, though I probably should’ve.) I didn’t...
LACMA’s “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art,” (through Sept. 9) starts with a gallery devoted to Siamak Filizadeh’s digital print series "Underground." This modern-day retelling of the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (r....
Most people just call it Heaven but actually the name of the painting is The Garden of Earthly Delights. In these three panels Bosch depicted the earth, as we know it. The first panel has a wise figure (possibly religious) introducing Earth to a calm, reasonable...
Commerce imitates art. If you recently spent a small fortune to attend a cultural event in a desert locale, it probably contains DNA from a series of conceptual concerts that were staged in the Los Angeles area between 1983 and 1985. The organizer of these events was...
Anuradha Vikram is the artistic director of 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, which is currently celebrating its 30th year. Vikram is also a senior lecturer in the MFA Social Pratice Area Emphasis at Otis College. One Googles your name, and the term...
WHITE MALES NEED NOT APPLY Dear Babs, I am a Latina lesbian. My friend is a straight white male. What are the chances that either one of us will have our art judged on its own merits, which is all either of us wants? Would you suggest we show our art anonymously or...
When does an exhibition title effectively amount to a viewer advisory? I’m not sure Harry Dodge would consider the title of his current show at JOAN gallery, “Works of Love,” an instance of this. It’s not in any sense a caution, and the titles of the individual works...
Orientalist painting fantasies satirically intertwine with characters of anti-colonial resistance in “Les Femmes d’Alger,” Asad Faulwell’s ongoing portrait series recently exhibited at DENK. Drawing upon the rich legacies of Algerian War history, Islamic aesthetics...
Mining one’s own archive—especially if you are Michael Jackson’s personal photographer—can become a fruitful catalyst for exploration. Todd Gray’s recent works, framed photographs that are collaged together to become in essence bas-relief sculptures, juxtapose images...
The Seattle-born painter, sculptor and graphic designer Cleon Peterson has created a true battlefield experience with his new exhibit “Blood & Soil,” satirically making use of the 19th-century German slogan that expressed an idealization of racial identity and...
With relations between Russia and Western liberal democracies strained to the point of rupture, the rise of nationalistic fervor and anti-democratic forces on all sides, and notions of dissent and finding a viable way forward taking on greater urgency with each...
Gertrude Stein wrote in English, but in a way, Eve Fowler is acting as her translator. For the last decade at least, Fowler has been orienting her work across collage, photography, video and text-based practices in response to Stein’s oeuvre. The beguiling aluminum...
The Wilshire district gallery of Sprüth Magers is physically separated from a certain Southard’s Carwash in Galesburg, Illinois, by 1,969 miles. It is in this Los Angeles gallery directly across the street from the LACMA campus where the latest iteration of Stephen...
In the mixed-media works of his exhibition “Neo-American Transcendental,” Michael Maxwell employs materials ranging from the prehistoric to the digital. Clay, natural mineral pigments, plant dyes, wheat paste, quartz crystal, silver and gold leaf, beeswax, encaustic,...
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