“People come and can’t find the building.” Skira Martinez smiles. “‘There’s no sign! Where does it say CIELO?’ They have an image in their mind of what it’s supposed to look like… but it’s low-key and nondescript.” Martinez props temporary, hand-lettered signs in her...
Alongside Los Angeles’ mainstream exhibition spaces, an eddy of alternative art venues swirl for a time, submerge and disappear, enjoying varying degrees of notice. A few of these combine entrepreneurial efforts along with more altruistic programming, reflecting the...
After I received my MFA in the early ’90s, this country was in the midst of a serious economic downturn and alternative gallery spaces were beginning to crop up here and there. They opened in garages, storefronts and artists’ homes. They were places where artists...
Eve Fowler’s exhibition at Mier Gallery “The Difference is Spreading,” reflects an intense, five-year-long engagement with the words of Gertrude Stein. For Fowler, this engagement is at once syntactical, visual, haptic, lingual—each form of perception sliding over and...
Nearly all of Chris Burden’s numerous and generally laudatory obituaries include in the title or first line, “...the artist who had himself shot.” Beyond the immediate and not so subtle insinuation of craziness—“People thought he was nuts,” an admiring Ed Moses told...
Photo Time in LAParis Photo and photo independentParis Photo (May 31–June 3) hit its third year—the final year of its lease agreement with Paramount Studios, wherein it takes over several soundstages and the “New York” backlot for an art fair. This year there were 79...
I’ve come to know Ed Moses as a result of a friendship with his son, artist Andy Moses. In the last few years Ed became my client and a friend who, at the age of 89, continues to work early each morning on his art. It’s been inspiring to witness an artist who...
Of late, I have been selling various valuable paper collectibles online. First to go were the early punk flyers and fanzines. Now it’s time to part with a collection of Raymond Pettibon limited edition “art zines,” as they are sometimes called on eBay. Despite being...
So, somehow I wound up teaching a couple of Modern Art History classes, right? I’m not exactly thrilled with the default textbooks, so I’m keeping my eyes open for a replacement. So when Thames & Hudson recently issued the revised second edition of Art Since 1900...
One of the things that always troubled me about Andy Warhol’s legacy was the matter of people who got elevated and left behind. It is quite one thing to sign your name to a found object, but a whole other matter to treat people as found art.Warhol could be quite mean...
UNDEREXPOSEDDear Babs, Please help me. I am currently living in a desolate land and deprived of adequate art exposure (and God knows how I love to expose myself to art). I once knew a wonderful artist who helped me with my art education but she left town several...
“I trust in the intelligence of the audience,” says artist and filmmaker David Shapiro, whose elliptical, complex documentary film, Missing People, had its debut screening at Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in April and will have its...
A trip to New Orleans is a voyage through time, through a history thick with contradictory layers, heated by much tragedy and some absurdity. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the first tragedy that disrupted the city, and it won’t be the last. It’s no accident that Tennessee...
To attempt to improve upon nature can mean creating a monster, something we are quite accustomed to in the plastic surgery industry, as we are in love with artificiality. How did this happen? Boredom with nature? Love of our own capabilities? Maybe it’s not a bad...
Fabien Castanier is a native of Paris, where he previously worked in the TV and film industries. He moved to LA in 2002 to focus on his true passion—art—and established the Fabien Castanier Gallery.ARTILLERY: What’s the one thing all the artists you show have in...
Los Angeles has lost one of its most important and influential artists: Rachel Rosenthal. A pioneer of avant-garde theater and performance art, Rosenthal inspired several generations of actors, artists and activists. She was also a good friend and spiritual mother to...
It’s a long way, spatially, temporally and culturally from the cavernous interior of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to the idyllic rolling landscape of the Civil War battle field near Bull Run Creek in northern Virginia. But it is precisely that distance (among...
The first exhibition at Art+Practice, which recently opened in the historic Leimert Park district, is a site-specific installation by veteran conceptual artist, Charles Gaines. “Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael” (2015) consists of 23 acrylic box frames...
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