Art
SIGHTS UNSCENE
SHOPTALK: LA Art News Hammer, NY Galleries
Hammering is Done The Hammer Museum has been transformed, and it’s happened so gradually over the past two decades that we barely noticed it. Sometimes one section would be closed off, sometimes another, and every so often a new section would be unveiled. There’s the...
POEMS "Reservoir" and "Dead Men Don't Marry"
Reservoir You take the back lane, following the curve of street until it meets the steps to the reservoir. At the top, triumphant, you stop for a cigarette, puffing smoke in the face of legs and lungs. Let them burn this day before your cross- examination. In England,...
Bridget Riley Hammer Museum
We tend to prize a certain class of “master” drawing above and beyond the no less essential sketches or more mechanical work; and we could probably put most if not all of the drawings in “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”—a compact but gorgeous...
COMICS Amelia Clipart for the Testudian Foundation
Arthur Simms KARMA
Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to...
Mai-Thu Perret David Kordansky Gallery
There’s a special kind of push-pull pleasure to an exhibition that derives from conceptual interests, but is realized through material experimentation and finesse. Such was the case with Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s appealing new exhibition “Mother Sky.” My first...
Michael Hilsman Various Small Fires
Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon...
Eric Nash KP Projects
Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world. While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with...
Zimmer Frei Wonzimer
Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art. One way to...
Global Asias USC Pacific Asia Museum
At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and...
Yolanda González Museum of Latin American Art
The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana...
Hot Shot Muffler Macho Stereo
This iteration of Macho Stereo was a durational performance by Marcus Kuiland Nazario with Paul Donald presented by CultureHub, a collaboration between the legendary New York theater La MaMa and the Seoul Institute of the Arts at Hot Shot Muffler in Highland Park....
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Thornton Dial Blum & Poe
In the works made a few years before the artist’s death, Thornton Dial created layered, heavily textured compositions with an array of found materials, such as ash, wire fencing and scrap metal. Caked onto the thick canvases, the objects are almost...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Vaginal Davis Marc Selwyn Fine Art
A series of secreting, grotesquely glamorous portrait paintings rendered in gloopy lip gloss, lustrous nail polish, sparkly eye shadows, tints, and creams pay homage to queer-feminist heroes and the power of the performative body. Intimate in scale, Vaginal Davis’...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Lee Krasner Kleefield Contemporary Art Museum
Cubist, geometric, abstract, and seminal—together those words sum up the exhibition of Lee Krasner’s work, “A Through Line” at the Kleefied Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition traverses Krasner's vibrantly colored path, showcasing her wide range of painted works...
REMARKS ON COLOR: Rose Matters May's Hue
She does! She really does! An integral part of the community, Rose Matters more than you might imagine. After all, where would we be without rose-colored glasses, rose hips tea, rose water or some child’s irresistible rosy cheeks in Buffalo New York in the dead of...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Francisco Palomares Bermudez Projects
A native Angeleno, Francisco Palomares captures his version of the city through his paintings of fruit vendors and street views of bright storefronts (such as Merry’s Flowers LLC and Botanica del Indio), adding personal allusions to his childhood through his still...
