Naima J. Keith is the deputy director of Los Angeles’ California African American Museum (CAAM), arriving in 2016 from the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Being an LA native, what was your awareness of CAAM, their programs, and their history before leaving Los...
Both love letter and indictment, “The Modernist,” Catherine Opie’s new photographic installation and short film, blurrily overlays real places and occurrences with imagined events, creating an alternate near-term history of Los Angeles. Known as a portraitist and...
Vija Celmins’ work is best when you are caught by surprise—don’t read the manifest, just board the ship. Sublime encounters open quiet pathways to deep consideration of the now-octagenarian artist, her times and her legacy. Celmins’ exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery...
“Fever Pitch,” Wendell Gladstone’s new collection of paintings, achieves that elusive characteristic in which the longer you look, the more you see. It may be the bright, cotton candy-colored palette that draws you in, but it’s the details that keep you looking. At...
Minimalism, as Robert Hughes remarked, was the last great “ism” in contemporary art. It was perhaps defined best in the writings of Donald Judd (who hated the term), and in a few of Judd’s interviews from the 1970s. What seem significant in these are his ideas...
Looney Toons, Leger, Lewitt, and Kandinsky battle it out for aesthetic prominence across these epic and absolutely eccentric new paintings and sculptures by Rives Granade. Abstract forms, deracinated texts, and schematic signifiers festoon the gestural grounds of his...
Nearly everyone is aware of the smartphone’s impact on photographic aesthetics. Once-novel styles engendered by the cameras embedded in these devices have become so clichéd that they might pose more of a burden than a boon to smartphone shutterbugs shooting for...
There is a lacerating wit in the work of Grant Levy-Lucero, a solemn shrewdness dressed in Bermuda shorts. He is playful but he is not playing around. His exhibition of crude ceramics at Night Gallery borders one wall of an otherwise barren chamber. Displayed upon a...
Just inside the entrance and visible through the plate glass window that leads in from the hallway, a bloated lozenge floats, supported from below, in an oddly visceral pink bulb. From one corner, a white tassel hangs. Conjuring both entrails and a soiled gown, the...
During his year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, Michael Queenland roamed the streets. Rome is a beautiful city to walk in, filled with ruins and monuments, but like any modern city, it is also cluttered with trash. The detritus—what was thrown...
In the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism developed as an aesthetically pure style, stripped of the political content of 1930s Depression-era art, memorably dismissed by Arshile Gorky as “Poor art for poor people.” That attitude persisted until a counter-reaction set...
Gabriela Castillo, Hector, 2013, Cretacolor and charcoal on paper, 11 x 15 inches, courtesy of the artist. In our March/April 2018 issue, on Drawing. Read about Castillo's work and other artists in contributor Betty Ann Brown's article Seeing Reality, on page 34, and...
The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s...
"Drawing is still basically the same it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic." -Keith Haring, from Betty Ann Brown's piece. pg 34. The Drawing Issue, March-April 2018, hits newsstands today. Don Bachardy, Eli...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a...
The 4th Annual gala at 800Main this past Saturday pulled out all the stops in creating a nexus for young leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators to engage in supporting a humanitarian cause, while being able to expand their art collection and have some fun too....
"Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths," Daniel Boorstin declared in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Seemingly truer than ever in our post-truth era, this notion offers an apt point of...
Pascual Sisto's immersive video installation Inside Out is a tour de force for both its technical accomplishments and its compelling, albeit obtuse and ambiguous narrative. Sisto has choreographed an approximately twenty-minute symphony of sound, lights and video,...
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