Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums,...
Hello, Good-Bye: New Year for Hammer Museum Was 2022 a blur? It feels like it went by very quickly, too quickly, as we transitioned into the New Normal. People have returned to indoor dining, theaters are open and museums and art fairs are back—though some museums...
There has never been a year in Los Angeles—certainly not in this century, more probably the last 30 years—when our artists haven’t delivered something surprising, extraordinary, something to change the way we talk and think about and look at the world. This year was...
In the late winter of 2019, I became enamored with Joan Didion. I and my then partner were driving the backroads of Tennessee and North Carolina as a leg of a cross country move from Portland to Philadelphia. Somewhere along our trip I picked up a copy of South and...
OCMA Redefined with its New Space What a roller coaster we’ve been on these last three years.Hard to believe how the world shut down in March 2020, and now California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announces that our State of Emergency will be over next Feb. 28. The museums...
The Cheech Is Here While many museums are opening exhibitions long delayed by COVID, one is unveiling a completely renovated building with a new focus. That would be the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, or The Cheech, in Riverside. Part of the...
As my feet touch the terrain of compact, glittering soil that covers the floor of the Hammer Projects space, it feels as if I’m stepping into another realm, another planet even. Kiyan Williams’ solo exhibition, "Between Starshine and Clay," curated by Erin...
California African American Museum LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze September 8, 2021–March 20, 2022 The Getty Center Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown’s Avant-Garde Archive September 14, 2021–January 2, 2022 Hammer Museum No Humans Involved...
Digital Art Happening In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night...
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
Like many artists who have spent most or a significant portion of their career outside the U.S. or U.K. or the major art capitals, Jimmie Durham may be less than familiar to many of us who (until now) have had only the most fleeting (or even anonymous) contact with...
Simone Leigh’s small but impactful show of new work at the Hammer Museum probes the construction of the black female subject within the historical context of the African diaspora. Her aesthetic influences are culled from traditional African and Caribbean visual art...
As we are posting this, we are informed that Arthur Jafa has not been awarded the Mohn Public Recognition Award; and we can’t help wondering if he might have been at some competitive disadvantage simply because visitors to the Museum were unable to actually flip the...
The North is very much on our collective minds lately – especially in the wake of recent news that TransCanada has suspended its application procedure to build the 1200-mile Keystone-XL pipeline to transport tar sands-extracted oil across the U.S. Plains states to the...
I am preoccupied lately (see any number of my blog posts, especially recent ones), with the evolving/devolving culture(s) of Los Angeles, the way art is made and experienced in this city, the way we connect with and experience that art and culture, and the way we...
SandylandIt put me in a great mood (once I got past the shock of a $12(!) charge at the adjacent UCLA parking structure) going into Sandra Bernhard’s show at Royce Hall. Girls night out; (boys, too). Homecoming. Lots of anniversaries among that crowd over the last...
I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world...
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