Mike Kelley participated in our Guest Lecture series by providing this spread that he designed specifically for the centerfold of our March/April issue of 2009. John Waters is also the featured cover story in this very special issue.
Could there be such a thing as an orchestra of memory? A kind of color-organ (remember those?—no, of course you don’t; you’re too young) soundtrack of apprehension, clairvoyance, and the insight and deep vision of compressed years? (And how, after all, do we...
The GuardianSophia Wallace is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist and photographer. Through mixed media, images and video, her work looks at constructions of gender, race and sex. Her most recent work, CLITERACY, was a multimedia project that included street art,...
Mary Weatherford Mary Weatherford’s first exhibition at David Kordansky finds its roots in the powerful gestural mark making of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. These powerful large-scale paintings conflate the loose semi autonomic gestural...
Maura Bendettat Edward Cella Art + Architecture In this her newest exhibition at Edward Cella, aptly titled “Vespid Empire,” Maura Bendett has hit the ball not only out of the park but well into the stratosphere. In nature, vespids are colonial nesting wasps, and...
The big news yesterday was The Getty’s roll-out of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. (And you thought they were going to just let go of that franchise – after (let’s face it) lackluster performance and architecture modules? Not a chance.) ‘LA/LA’ stands for L.A.’s...
"An art talk co-presented by The Broad museum and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’s ALOUD series and held at the Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday, February 24, 2014 in Los Angeles. Photos by Ryan Miller/ The Broad © Ryan Miller/The Broad, 2014." From The Un-Private...
Dear Readers, The biggest art news in Los Angeles today is the arrival of MOCA’s new director, Philippe Vergne, whom staff writer Ezrha Jean Black interviews for this issue. Although Artillery instantly voiced skepticism when his predecessor came on board a few years...
The word he kept returning to was “conversation,” which, under less pressing circumstances, might have described our interview, except that Philippe Vergne, MOCA’s new director, was on a something of a treadmill. He had scarcely been on the job 10 days, and had...
Mike Kelley said for years that he would agree to be profiled in Artillery. That was practically a running joke when we would see each other at art events. Finally, in early November 2011, I contacted him to make it happen. He emailed to say he was very busy but he...
While most people half his age are searching for their car keys, Wayne Thiebaud, now 93, peppers conversations with literary references and recalls in vivid, sensual detail the coat that Hans Hoffman wore at an art reception 50 years ago—“it was so thick that it...
When I first read about Beatriz da Costa’s exhibition last year in Southern California, it sounded intense; I was intrigued and determined to see the show at the Laguna Art Museum. It featured da Costa’s most recent work drawing on the practice of engaging the...
Except for those closely involved with it, I can’t imagine many people actually look forward to the Whitney Biennial. It feels like one of those unavoidable social obligations you reluctantly drag yourself to, but once you’re there you begin—in part because of your...
The subtitle “Works from the Orange County Museum of Art” made it clear that the exhibition on view there January 11 through March 9 was a collection show. But the main title, “California Landscape into Abstraction,” at first seemed an awkward and obscure attempt to...
Martin Creed’s new exhibition—he of the 2001-Turner-prize-winning-light-bulb-turning-on-and-off-fame—is witty, playful, occasionally insightful and often very irritating. The exhibition spans the entire Hayward gallery and ranges from a spot of barely noticeable...
A search of William Burroughs on Amazon turns up 3,976 items. If you add the word biography to your search, it narrows down to 135 items. Barry Miles wrote a biography of him in 1993, and released a revised version in 2002. He has also written books about Allen...
We all wonder about the secret life of quiet people—surely, there’s turbulence churning beneath placid surfaces. In the fascinating new documentary Finding Vivian Maier, we follow John Maloof, a self-styled photo historian and first-time filmmaker, on his journey to...
I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely...
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