UNDER THE RADAR
Perhaps the best-known configuration of the ever-shifting alliances within the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is the art-noise supergroup Extended Organ (XO). There’s some irony in this—apart from the very concept of an art noise supergroup—in the...
BUNKER VISION
“I am a wound and a sword, a victim and an executioner” are the first words that appear on the screen. A tender love scene follows, filmed in extreme close-up, that might have come from any black-and-white European art film of the 1960s. As the camera pulls back and...
RECONNOITER
Felicia Filer is the Public Art Division Director at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. DCA is committed to the creation and maintenance of art in the Public Works Improvements Arts Program, the Private Arts Development Fee Program, the Citywide...
Betty Woodman
No conversation about the history of ceramics in art, especially about works created by female artists, would be complete without mention of Betty Woodman. The artist, who recently passed at age 87, shifted the conventions of ceramics—that of functional objects to be...
Ann Weber
When Ann Weber began working on her current series of monumental sculptures made from recycled cardboard, vitriolic rhetoric about constructing a border wall dominated the news. Trying to grapple with the idea, her research led her in a surprising direction, to Pink...
María Berrío
Born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1982, María Berrío moved to the U.S. at the age of 18. Childhood recollections of exploring her family’s rural mountainside farm figure prominently in her large-scale collages depicting female figures inside vacant interiors and illusory...
Sarah Lucas
“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” asserted historian, Harvard professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the 1970s about why women who act in unexpected ways are often remembered, while more conventional women fade into the background....
Gustavo Acosta
Gustavo Acosta is a Cuban-born, Miami-based painter whose skillful renderings of the urban landscape merge various techniques of paint application. In his latest works, realistic images of building fragments and cityscapes are combined with monochromatic grids in...
Javier Peláez
It feels like Javier Peláez is working through something, the kind of profound human experience whose emotions formulate universal psychological archetypes. In a series of about a dozen substantial new oil on linen paintings, the Mexico City-based artist explores a...
Genevieve Gaignard
It is not Genevieve Gaignard’s brazen truths, stinging though they are, but her subtle pricks that linger worryingly— Remember This House (2019) places a portrait of Ava Gardner (as well as other pale relations) on a family photo shelf, and a stuffed German Shepherd...
Brandon Landers
In Brandon Landers’ debut solo exhibition at M+B, the Bakersfield-based, LA-born and raised artist delivers a collection of expressionistic and loosely narrative paintings that draw from his experiences growing up in South Central Los Angeles, yet the works retain an...
Holly Elander
Holly Elander's quiet Los Angeles cityscapes exude a strong presence. Desolation brings out the personalities of inanimate features that would otherwise be easily overlooked in neglected byways. This exhibition includes 21 acrylic-on-panel paintings from two divergent...
August Art is Hot!
We headed up to MOAH on Saturday, where it wasn’t just the summer wind that was hot in Lancaster. While Snezana Saraswati Petrovic continued her lush ocean-centric installation at MOAH: Cedar, the main museum featured a diverse collection of painterly curation in...
Heather James Palm Desert: : Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, and Rodney McMillian
A group exhibition at Heather James Palm Desert, "Material and Abstraction: Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, and Rodney McMillian," explores abstraction and non-representation, inviting the viewer to move beyond “either/or” assumptions about art-making, and to embrace...
REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival 2019
The Roy and Edna Disney / CALARTS Theatre (REDCAT) hosted the 16th Annual New Original Works Festival over the last three consecutive weekends, inviting audience members to step outside our comfort zone to experience three new contemporary dance, theater, music or...
HEY MISTER, WANNA BUY A BANKSY?
In May this year, a Millennial identifying himself as the You Tuber Reckless Ben Schneider entered a Los Angeles gallery and told the art dealer there that he had a Banksy painting with him. The LA Art Dealer said he’d like to check it out, so Schneider pulled a...
Jasmine Little; Robert Nava
Jasmine Little's ceramics and Robert Nava's paintings both incorporate breezily limned imagery of fantastic creatures and people. At a distance, the large stoneware vessels in Little's show, "Retrograde," appear deceptively old-fashioned; their brown-and-white palette...