Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an...
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm:...
“Before I went to the U.K. I had already decided to make a dress called Queen to honor the journey.” In the wake of LACMA’s highly successful retrospective (2011) “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987,” Asco founding member Patssi Valdez was invited...
In the past two years two art museums endowed by Los Angeles billionaires have opened. Eli Broad opened The Broad museum in 2015 and the owners of Guess Jeans, the Marciano Brothers, opened the Marciano Art Foundation in May of this year. While this is a huge boost to...
Avant-garde artistic movements have a funny way of morphing into the mainstream—witness the fridge-magnet ubiquity of Impressionist paintings, or the integral role of appropriated samples in contemporary pop music. Perhaps the least-known but most influential of these...
Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...
With all of the recent hysteria about immigration, it seemed like a good time to explore the original American immigrants. There is quite a rich history of movies about settlers (a word that is still used in some parts of the world) doing battle with people who were...
I GET NO KICK FROM CHAMPAGNE Dear Babs, Recently I was invited to a private art preview and cocktail party, co-hosted by a prestigious Los Angeles gallery and art museum. The event was in the desert, so most likely attendees would be traveling at least two hours from...
PST & NEW ART PRESS OK, Stalwarts, here comes... ARTMAGEDDON 3! That is, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, with some 70 arts organizations participating, plus about the same number of commercial galleries mounting theme-related shows. The marathon officially gets...
Dr. Lourdes I. Ramos was recently appointed as President and CEO of the Museum of Latin American Art in May. Previously, she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico for 12 years. She is the first Latina to hold the position...
In his short video Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), on view at Blum & Poe gallery, Jim Shaw appropriates the style of the opening narration from Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone. In this piece, a wig-wearing narrator delights in relating alluring...
There are a number of emotional responses to walking through a graveyard: firstly, satisfaction that one is walking at all and not an insensate resident; another, for those seduced by death and rejected by the quick, is the camaraderie of obliging, complementary...
Culled from five different series of Naida Osline’s photographic work since 2007, “Florescence” examines an arc of her practice that is focused on taxonomies of flora and fauna. The exhibition title, drawn from her photographic series of the same name, can be taken to...
Roughly four years ago, Paul McCarthy opened the sprawling installation “WS” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, platforming (and rupturing) the domestic fantasy at the center of Disney’s Snow White fairy tale while playing out a vivisection of its narrative on...
Generally, rubbish is quickly dispatched and secreted from public consciousness—or at least ignored. Constance Mallinson, however, revels in discards’ improbable pulchritude while questioning society’s prodigious dispersion of throwaway images, ideas and sundries. In...
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