In 1965, angry, fed-up citizens took over Watts, a historically Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Similar to the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings, the Watts Riots began after police responded to a minor infraction with violence, arresting two Black men...
Hidden in a quiet Mid-City tract is a Los Angeles art institution. Not that you’d know it if you didn’t slow down and really look for the five-lot compound on this quiet residential street. Otherwise you could easily miss the sign: “St. Elmo Village,” half hidden by...
When the lockdown ends and art-making resumes, there will be plenty of temptation to make art about what is happening in the world. Referencing popular culture in your art can carry risks. Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons were both successfully sued for things they...
During these last three months art galleries have been tripping over themselves to create virtual viewing rooms and walkthroughs, and to join collective ventures in online selling such as GALLERYPLATFORM.LA and FAIR (from New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA). Meanwhile,...
We Will Never Forget the Spring of 2020 On May 25 the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police ignited a tinderbox over continuing racial and escalating economic inequality in this country. Of course, we were already dealing with the dreaded COVID-19, with its...
Ceci Moss is the director of Gas—a truck gallery that serves as “a mobile autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art” in Los Angeles. She has worked as the senior editor for the digital archive Rhizome and her impressive curatorial background...
Dear Reader, Babs thinks now is the time we ask some important questions: Who are your friends, collaborators and colleagues in the art world? How many are white? How many are Black? How long has this been the case? Who controls the museums, galleries, fairs, auction...
Gomorrah by Eddi Saladoe Right when I believed that I was finally free from the angry longing and a need to hear your voice just one more time you come to me in dreams like smoke sneaking under a bedroom door the innocent sleepers unaware that the civilization...
In 2003, Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian founded Western Project. The pioneers were the third gallery to open in Culver City. In 2015, they moved out of their space and now operate in our new virtual frontier. I caught Cliff on the island Maui. Beyond the obvious...
We live in a time when the value of the work of art in society has changed radically. In February, the whole mercantile mechanism of the art world was in full swing, and by the end of March, with the global pandemic, life as we have known it had more or less stopped....
My experience at the opening night of All of Them Witches--snaking through the costumed crowds, the abundance of art from such a wide-reach of featured artists--78!-- was a maddening, sensual delight--because women, because witches. With so much to feast my eyes on,...
Journalist Calvin Trillin once claimed that California had “a profusion of lawn sculpture…as a natural product of a large retired population and a climate that permits outdoor hobbies.” Quirky though California landscaping may be, its public art has always involved...
Rather than pursuing variations on by now familiar themes, the Sacramento and Emeryville-based Robert Ortbal follows a path that may well twist into an entirely different dimension. Recently you might find the serious and intellectual Ortbal wearing an oversized dog...
During the pandemic, celebrity portrait photographer Brigitte Lacombe has been sheltering in place in Northern California. Accustomed to working on film sets, theater productions, fashion campaigns, and glossy magazine spreads, Lacombe has used the past few months to...
It looks like this may go on for a while. Even when arts venues reopen, capacity is going to face new limits. Photos of theaters in Germany where seats have been removed to accommodate social distancing, in some cases show theaters with 75% of the seats removed. Large...
Are you still changing exhibitions as you would if open and are the exhibitions virtual-only now? How’s that going? We continue to have our exhibitions onsite and our new one, HERland, will open on August 22. Our online initiative through the MOLAA en Casa program...
The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything. —John Constable In the sky we had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, and the motion of color. —Sonia Delaunay Edwin Vasquez captures the colors of light in the night sky....
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