It’s not uncommon that an art show claims to deconstruct the human form and challenge societal notions of beauty. Derrian Pharr’s innovative “I Am a Bloodstone” makes good on this promise. The otherworldly heroines in Pharr’s works (made with pastels and prisma...
Palm Springs’ annual Modernism Week dominates the city in February, but I caught this quiet, elegant exhibit at the museum’s satellite space. It’s a revelatory history and homage to Frank Lloyd Wright craftsman Manuel Sandoval, a twentieth-century Nicaraguan American...
Time is a common theme in Kelly Akashi’s work. Doilies inherited from her grandmother represent the past. The artist’s hands, cast in bronze, serve as timestamps for the present— lines and wrinkles marking specific moments. Cast bronze seed pods represent the...
Textile art has not always been one of my favorite mediums, but Ramekon O’Arwisters' exhibit altered my thinking. At a time where being Black and Queer, and any semblance of DEI seems fraught - the artist has come out swinging. The thoughtfully curated show is...
The long-running MexiCali Biennial got a recent boost from Mellon Foundation and is currently making its mark in the eastern LA suburb of Whittier. The space, which also houses an archive, MXCL BNL LAB545, is located in an unpretentious storefront, betraying an...
As fate would have it, the biannual “Spring 2025 ArtNight Pasadena” event is taking place on March 14th—winter’s coldest, dreariest, and rainiest day. Accordingly, you select the handful of venues most likely to feature contemporary work, then set off. An hour and a...
Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at...
I’m at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies...
This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous...
I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the...
As I fought through crosstown traffic, the messages came in fast and furious. Hurry up!... Where are you?!... She’s about to arrive!... You’re gonna miss her corvette pull up! When I finally parked and made it to Melrose Botanical Garden, the crowd was spilling onto...
I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but...
The artist died during the run of her exhibition, just a few days before the new year. It is fitting given that Pippa Garner used her body as a sort of extended art project, something she worked on for years—altering it with surgeries, tattoos and piercings. The...
MOCA’s “Ordinary People” manages to tell a story about photorealism that is eclectic, diverse, condescending and drab. Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street - La Freeda, Jevette, Towana, Staice (1981–1982) by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’...
Goddesses once etched into stone tablets and later deified in oil paintings now live another immortal existence: nude or scantily clad, wet and voluptuous, digitally rendered and plastered across Reddit or X, they resemble magical beasts or aliens. Some have had their...
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