Cornelia Parker's landmark retrospective at Tate Britain journeys through her multimedia work to narrate a country willingly stuck in small-island-energy. Parker (b.1956) examines objects by considering how they change when their associated value is disrupted,...
OUTSIDE LA: Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain
GALLERY ROUNDS: Lev Rukhin East 26 Projects
Russian exile Lev Rukhin creates grand works of realism tinged with just enough peculiarity to suggest doubt. They are dreamlike—much of the imagery is suspended in a nimbus—and implies both memory and trickery. This device is quite intentional; the exhibition is...
COMICS Where the Wild Beasts Are
GALLERY ROUNDS: Barbara Kruger Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Me You "Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You." is a classic Barbara Kruger experience. The exhibition serves as an introduction to those who may be unfamiliar with her work, yet also engages with seasoned viewers by re-presenting older works in grand, high tech and...
COMICS Joseph Wright of Derby
Book Review: STREET ART & SOCCER "The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art" By Mitja Velikonja
The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art By Mitja Velikonja 176 pages DoppelHouse Press Graffiti and street art are often considered synonymous since they affect the urban environment in similar ways. But graffiti is...
COMICS A Bunch of Sour Grapes
Top 10 Picks of 2021
I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows...
OUTSIDE LA: Jasper Johns Philadelphia Museum of Art
As the room unfolds before a viewer’s eyes there is a veritable procession of numbers going from one to nine through all the gyrations of being outlined, filled in or partially obscured. It is as though the sequence of this set of well-known forms is taken...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley
Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former...
OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Various sizes of square panels mostly covered with dots with groups of parallel lines and occasional fields of paint line the gallery walls of Locks Gallery in Jennifer Bartlett's installation "Recitative"—its title derived from a rhythmic free form vocal style of...
More Fireworks for MOCA Art Brief
One of the most memorable events at MOCA occurred when Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploded gunpowder from an exterior wall of the Geffen Contemporary just after sunset, setting off blinding and spectacular explosions before a huge crowd unprepared for such...
ASK BABS FRIEND’S ART SUCKS
Dear Babs, My longtime friend recently started painting and selling his art online. We live in different cities, and it’s been hard to meet because of the pandemic, but he’s having me over soon, and I know he’s going to want my thoughts about his art. The problem is I...
COMICS Future Features for Creative Creatures
COMICS Concerned Creative Artists Against Climate Change
Dozie Kanu’s “to prop and ignore” Manual Arts, Los Angeles
The sculptures in Dozie Kanu’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles flirt with functionality but refuse to reveal a clear purpose. Instead, these stylish hybrids possess the elegance of aspirational interior design and the subtle menace of dystopian relics. Many of...
Remarks on Color: Subterranean Smog September's Hue
Subterranean Smog is not one color or another, but a sickening miasma of grays, browns and a lingering smoky orange. Drawn from the bowels of the earth, SS identifies with the antihero -- Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, Alex from a Clockwork...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Shoshana Wayne Gallery Group Exhibition "Above & Below"
Fans of Los Angeles' Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional. The show marks the Los Angeles...