Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old...
Curatorial work began on the fifth biennial in the “Made in L.A.” series long before March 2020, and it might be March 2021 before audiences can see it in its entirety. Yet so emphatic is the exhibition’s insistence on the physical embodiment of ideas, the political...
Kevin Duffy is an LA-based actor, filmmaker and writer, who recently performed in Refracted Theater Company’s Homeless Garden—a reimagination of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard set in present-day where climate change and politics coincide. The play was performed...
Kader Attia’s debut with Regen Projects —a selection of previously exhibited and new works—continues the French-Algerian artist’s critique of modernity as embodied by Western capitalism and the mechanisms and ideologies of colonialism. Attia has frequently examined...
This exhibition is simply horrible: a catalog of horrors, a parade of barbarism made all the more wretched because we have become inured to atrocity, our attention spans irredeemably vaporous. It is both commonplace and theatrical, a fleetingly addictive...
While Rachel Rosenthal is best known for her performance work, the collage works on display in “Thanks: Collage Works from the 1970s,” with their aged surfaces and intersecting themes, reveal an artist whose force of sentiment is firmly grounded and luxuriously...
With “Metamorphosis,” Southern California-based artist Yolanda González offers a haunting solo show of monochrome images powerful enough to overwhelm any technicolor image. Her original “Metamorphosis” series, an experimental series she began in 1995, was created...
The existence of an “edge,” a precipice, an ever-deepening chasm, a transitional space from one reality into the next—be it from spring to summer, enslavement to freedom, life to death—involves a commitment to a new beginning, an awakening of sorts into an alternate...
Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery unfolds across three exhibition spaces and invites viewers to engage with the different aspects of his unusual and critical practice. Large black-and-white paintings with the repeated phrase “WE ARE...
Beauty is all around us. This thought feels simplistic, and given the past year, even wrong. Stuck in our homes, away from family and friends, a city as large and vibrant as Los Angeles becomes terribly claustrophobic. And even for those fortunate enough not to be...
CHRISTMAS IN THE BUNKER With the idea that many readers will be in bunker mode during the holidays, I have rounded up a variety of things that you can watch for free with an internet connection. Some of these were covered in previous dispatches, and some of them are...
Peter Hujar's square format black-and-white photographs are a reminder of the beauty of film and the power of a well-composed, carefully lit, and patiently observed image. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 44 and left behind an exceptional body of work that...
If a structure could imitate warmth and humanity, linking the innate wonder of nature to one’s need to inhibit it, Casa Orgánica by architect Javier Senosiain is it. Built in 1984 in Naucalpan, Mexico, Casa Orgánica was the first...
Art, at its most essential level, attempts to fix in space the experiences that pass like sand in an hourglass. On the whole, reality is almost always more complex than can be accurately represented, and meaning is missed in the variety of expression. But Shiyuan Liu...
Ben Sander’s latest body of work, "Poppies," centers on the opium poppy flower. The show is separated into two rooms, the main gallery floor featuring acrylic and airbrush paintings on wood panels and the lower loft room exhibiting the artist’s colored pencil and ink...
Nothing is just one thing. This is a sentiment that many of us here in the United States, particularly those of us with privilege, are coming to terms with in an entirely new way. From recognizing that many workers who previously went unseen are in fact essential, to...
A point of reference for Renée Petropoulos' compelling and thought-provoking exhibition "Like a Street full of Friends: Studies for Speculative Monuments" at as-is.la is her 2014 public artwork installed in downtown Santa Monica: Bouquet (Between Egypt, India, Iraq,...
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