artform
LABORING
Labor relations are a natural topic for film and documentaries. From the earliest days of cinema, there have been grouchy bosses. The most famous of these might be Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989). Strikes always provide a great context to explore the viewpoints of...
Shoptalk
LA Fair Report The fairs are bursting out all over in February—and I just have time to jot down a few notes before deadline. Photo LA (Jan. 30–Feb. 2) is going strong for its second year back on the westside, in the Barker Hangar. This is LA’s longest running fair, in...
Vita D’artista
Given his outsize influence on Conceptual art, it’s surprising that Piero Manzoni is just now getting his first official biography. By the time he died in 1963 at the early age of 29 from a heart attack, he had pioneered a genre of painting without color, canned his...
ASK BABS The Telephone is Ringing
Dear Babs, I really liked Hans Haacke’s retrospective at The New Museum, specifically his polls that asked viewers their opinions about current news and events. It’s cool he wants his audience to interact with his art. But it got me thinking, why can’t I contact him...
A Poem
The trail you blazed was a well-worn path. Narcissistic heroics, with one eye on posterity. Until the time rolled around to reverse into the antithesis of what you once so convincingly pretended to be: stripped of the trappings of excess, climbing the twelve steps on...
New Column Debut: “Provenance”
Architectural critics have been quick to celebrate midcentury modern architects for their pointed sensitivity to a building’s environs, noting that it was this development more than any other that distinguished California modernism from other modernist movements. But...
Interview with Isabelle Lutterodt
Isabelle Lutterodt is the director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. O’BRIEN: I know you started your activities as an artist but are now involved in administration and curation as the director of the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery. How did your life take...
Gala Porras-Kim
The urgency of revisiting an archive is found in challenging its presumed objectivity and totalizing vision, thus exposing cracks, biased ideologies, contradictions and gaps to make way for fracturing, reinterpreting, enlarging or otherwise revising our understanding....
Praise Portraits from Ghana
Perusing the 37 paintings by various Ghanaian artists in “Praise Portraits from Ghana: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...!” feels like peering into an exotic parallel dimension of popular culture. At a glance, these depictions of mostly American actors, singers,...
Whitney Bedford
Whitney Bedford’s landscapes and oceanic vistas were emotional, elusive, uncommon, sometimes based in story, or sweetly teetering on the verge of collapse. Her relationship to the paintings—and by extension ours—was both dualistic and deeply personal. Precisely drawn...
Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson’s new solo exhibition, Forever My Lady, is an exploration of propaganda, democracy and civil rights in the United States. Her collaged, sculptural objects combine elements from American and Greek elections—candidate signs, ballots, campaign buttons—and...
I Am Shelley DuVall
I Am Shelley DuVall frames the inimitable ‘80s actress as a queer icon, whose tragic life and captivating personality has always vacillated between human and extraterrestrial planes. The exhibition functions as a hybridized gallery/clothing store that also raises...
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
The first work one sees upon entering Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi is a monochromatic print of the ocean—the hazy sky fading endlessly into the sea like a Rothko color field painting. The print offers a moment of reprieve, the calm before the...
Do Ho Suh
Well known for creating full-size replicas of his dwelling spaces, South Korean artist Do Ho Suh has “moved in” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Resnick Pavilion. The installation, 348 West 22nd Street, is both ephemeral and immersive, a seemingly delicate...
Adelita Husni-Bey
The path through this darkened labyrinth is reminiscent of the Haunted House; the viewer is made to follow a path through concocted fear toward anticipated relief. Chiron, Adelita Husni-Bey’s immersive environment, however, refuses to allow the visitor to leave so...
The Getty’s “Unseen” Photographs
Having been a curator of photography in a museum myself, I know that when a new department head is appointed at an institution with a long-standing collection, he or she has to make a statement with an exhibition exploring that collection in a way no one has before....
Skirball Cultural Center
In thinking about the exhibition El Sueño Americano | The American Dream and Tom Kiefer's presentation of photographs of objects border patrol agents seized from migrants at the U.S. Mexico border in Arizona, it is difficult not to wonder about the formal presentation...
