PST AFTERMATH “An investment in the arts is an investment in our future,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti in conjunction with the release of a report on the economic benefits of PST: LA/LA. The initiative “attracted millions of visitors, supported thousands of good-paying...
Food allures our ocular faculties as much as it gratifies our alimentary and salivary organs. We devour visual stimuli with our eyes just as we ingest edibles through our mouths. It thus seems felicitous that the word “taste” applies to aesthetic predilections as well...
Whenever I mention the V.A.R.A to artists, I’m invariably met with a blank stare. The Visual Arts Rights Act, passed by Congress in 1990, grants artists a form of Droit Moral or moral rights, intended to protect artists’ control over the fate of their works. Moral...
About a month ago Virginia Katz cajoled me into leading a discussion at her regular public salon at Eastside International gallery at LA’s Brewery art complex. Since every time an art critic speaks in public an angel loses its wings, I am not really big on the whole...
If you happen to be searching for films that feature food, there are no shortages of places to look. Just about every pop culture magazine and blog has a listicle of food in film. These range from movies like Babette’s Feast (where a dinner is a labor of love), to...
Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally...
Dear Babs, Although I’ve long been an admirer of art, it occurred to me only recently, now that I have a meager disposable income, that I might start purchasing pieces of my own. But the prospect of starting my own collection is seriously intimidating. I recently...
In the future, it’s all Surf and no Turf. The issue of global warming and rising tides asks the question “What will we eat, as our food supply changes?” Four New York–based women artists have tackled the prospective dilemma in the pop-up gallery show “Flooded” in...
In celebration of Artillery’s inaugural Food Issue, caterer and collector Tom Peters has agreed to divulge several of his secret and most cherished recipes. He began both his profession and his passion in the early ’80s. Since then, he has amassed a clientele that...
It is always a thrill to see the Annual City of LA (COLA) exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG). The exhibition is a celebration of a year-long unrestricted fellowship awarded by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to a small group of...
The aesthetics and content of we still here, there (2018), Lauren Halsey’s current installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, are deeply rooted in Afrofuturism—a cultural philosophy that merges magical realism, science fiction and technoculture to...
Eileen Cowin’s work has been loosely categorized as mise-en-scène photography. But overall it is far more self-reflexive, deeply deconstructed and concerned with the relations of language to the apprehension and (re-)construction of reality. More recent work has...
A vague yet piercing look of confrontational horror animates the face of a woman, zaftig and underdressed, with piercing blue eyes, an exaggerated frown, and the upswept hair and ruddy complexion of a latter-day Vermeer milkmaid. Because of art history, and especially...
What does it mean for the life of an artwork when it can be experienced in dramatically different contexts, as a constellation rather than a point on a map? What happens when the legibility of a work is radically challenged by a shift in viewing conditions; do those...
There’s a fabulous tabula-rasa quality present in “The Shape of Cloth.” Leveraging her experience as a masterful furniture designer, Irish-expat Mary Little presents eight existing unbleached canvas sculptures and a single site-specific piece for her exhibition at...
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