Fair News January is fair month in our fair city. The LA Art Show (Jan. 10–14) in all its massiveness returns to the Convention Center downtown, and Art LA Contemporary (Jan. 25–28) returns to Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. A month later in the nearby low desert is...
Although I’m not a big fan of Norman Rockwell’s artwork, a painting of his caught my eye after becoming the centerpiece of a controversy that has rocked the art world. Rockwell, the longtime cover illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post working from the 1920s to the...
This whole end-of-net-neutrality panic is a bit of a mystery to me. Sure, it sucks, but what were people expecting? That businessmen would suddenly do the right thing, because, like, information wants to be free? So did Frederick Douglass, but trickle-down economics...
Bill Sheehy is the director of Latin American Masters, which he founded in 1987. What led you to exhibit only Latin-American artists? Do you think that LA’s proximity to Latin America lends its art a special relevance here? I was led to exhibit Latin-American...
If you happen to be looking for a textbook example of film as collaborative art, a special feature on the DVD of The Lure might be one of the best. The movie itself is a sort of musical/horror hybrid. It involves a pair of mermaids (not the cute kind) who come ashore...
DIFFICULT SUBJECT MATTER DEAR BABS: In my art practice, I gravitate toward using ephemeral media and creating installations. Sometimes my work deals with “difficult” subject matter. Do most gallery owners steer clear of those qualities in art because it is challenging...
“Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West” is a new exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii seeking to revisit and, in effect, rewrite the history of Abstract Expressionism. Since AbEx debuted in the 1940s, the movement has been lauded by...
Artist Liz Glynn has been taking on increasingly ambitious projects by leaps and bounds, and lately more of it can be seen on the East Coast, where she’s from, than on the West Coast, where she is now based. In early 2017 she had an installation on a corner of Central...
Ages-old art historical forces of the sublime and the picturesque battle it out across a suite of abstract landscapes, in about 20 fabulously chromatic, profoundly emotional, large-scale textile-based mixed media works by Merion Estes. Picturesque, because her take on...
A lowrider’s charisma lies in its transmogrification from prosaic to fabulous: an ordinary old automobile becomes a sparkling iridescent marvel that bounces like a carnival ride, remaining street-worthy despite its head-turning ostentation. In his Royale Projects...
“Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros” makes for a companion exhibition to the Palm Springs Art Museum’s “Kinesthesia,” also shown under the rubric of the Getty’s PST: LA/LA initiative. It wasn’t intended as...
In a 1994 Paris Review interview, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously quoted an Igbo proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” In an exploration of the historical and contemporary complexities of the...
Ruben Ochoa’s “SAMPLED y SURVEYED” illustrates the artist’s penchant for transforming basic construction materials into structural installations charged with meaning. Primarily working in wood, metals and concrete, Ochoa’s referential works function as tools with...
The objects in the image seem preternaturally still, pushed off to the left side of the frame: a liquefied elastic globule seems to pull down or just barely rest at the very corner of a marble slab, above it there is a chunk of what looks like concrete with rebar...
Care for a pickled egg? How about a mayonnaise sandwich? Or maybe you’d prefer apple butter? With these questions and a simple spread of food with which to ply visitors, Michael Lewis Miller gently draws his audiences into his performances, which arise almost...
Known for her minimal interventions in public spaces, creating subtle shifts in environments, either visually or with sound, New Orleans-based Zarouhie Abdalian has garnered significant acclaim. With four components considering the concept of work, “To History”...
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