As I wrote to preface ARTILLERY’s 2021 “Top Ten” compilation, there could have easily been a parallel list of 10 or more shows and exhibitions approaching the level of the ten I selected.  At one time, the magazine designated a few “honorable mentions,” usually, as I recall, footnoted in fine print.  (There are only so many pages, after all; space limitations are a real thing.)  This, too, was originally going to be appended to the “Top Ten” list; but after some discussion with my editor, it became clear this might not be quite enough—especially considering a number of important out-of-town shows that (especially in view of a ‘travel hesitancy’ no doubt corresponding to some extent with the far more pernicious ‘vaccine hesitancy’) demand to be brought to California.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Seduction” (1985)

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted
curated by Margot Norton
New Museum – New York
June 30, – October 3, 2021

In some respects this slightly constricted retrospective brought Hershman Leeson’s work full circle—having presented Hershman’s Electronic Diaries as encoded into a strip of synthetic DNA, and personalized antibodies created in conjunction with the pharmaceutical company, Novartis.  But I sometimes wonder if there is any way to do justice to the full scope of Hershman Leeson’s work without institutional commitment on the scale of an entire museum (possibly more than one institution).  This is a plea to L.A.’s MOCA to commit the resources necessary to bring an expanded version of this show (see, the ZKM/Center for Art and Media’s Civic Radar) to the museum(s).  If they need help, they might look up Amelia Jones (who led a terrific conversation with the artist by Zoom in conjunction with the exhibition) who may have an idea or two to move this forward—see that original Top Ten again.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Electronic Diaries (1984-2019)

Alice Pelton, The Voice (1930)

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group
Group exhibition curated by Michael Duncan
(Emil Bisttram, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Raymond Jonson, Lawrence Harris, William Lumpkins, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, Dane Rudhyar, Stuart Walker)
Albuquerque Museum – Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 26, – September 26, 2021

Fortunately, I don’t have to beg anyone to bring this show to L.A.—it lands at LACMA at the end of 2022 (to run well into 2023).  The operative word here is transcendental—in both material and spiritual senses.  The work here ranges loosely from the surreal and symbolist to biomorphic and geometric abstraction to non-objective painting, with some emphasis on a concept of light and space that seems borne out of the American Southwest—yet in its most outstanding examples distilled to a purity and intensity that seems illuminated to an astral dimension.  Duncan’s brilliant show promises to make the L.A.’s next winter solstice the most radiant day of the year.

Clarence Holbrook Carter, “Following” (1973)

Clarence Holbrook Carter – American Surrealist
Various Small Fires – Los Angeles
January 23, – February 27, 2021

Readers will notice that there is something of a blur amongst several of these exhibitions (really almost all of them—but with particular emphasis to a radically transmuted or transformed and ultimately transcendent vision of physical and cosmic dimensions, of consciousness itself.  Carter’s work seems to ‘land’ somewhere between Pelton and De Chirico—and birth and death—but with an intensity that could summon Lovecraft’s Cthulhu out of the cosmic void.

Make-Shift Future – installation view, Regen Projects

Make-Shift Future
Group show curated by Elliott Hundley
(Kevin Beasley, Elaine Cameron-Weir, rafa esparza, Max Hooper Schneider, Eric N. Mack, Alicia Piller, Eric-Paul Riege, Kandis Williams)
Regen Projects
March 27, – May 22, 2021

A truly spectacular show of masterpiece assemblage work by eight artists at the top of their game.  ‘Every picture tells a story’ and each of these works deliver a world—“disquieting and uncanny situations” in Hundley’s words—looking to “massage loose the underpinnings of our attachments to contemporary mythologies … and reveal … so many blind spots.” They do—and ‘I can see clearly now….’

Ohan Breiding, installation view of ceramics and drawings (2020), from “Playing Submarine,” Ochi Projects

Ohan [formerly Johanna] Breiding: Playing Submarine
Ochi Projects
February 6, – March 20, 2021

Breiding’s work defies categorization both technically and conceptually—personal on an almost tactile level yet seemingly borne out of a collective unconscious, but all leading to a kind of personal confrontation with both self and community.  They are an artist to watch.

Tom Allen, “The Song” (2021)

Tom Allen: The Song
Chris Sharp Gallery
October 30, – December 4, 2021

A spare show of five flower ‘portraits’—but they more than made good on the promise conveyed by the show’s title.  The sheer chromatic vibrancy alone shook the gallery floor to ceiling in a range that went from schoolboy-treble to the Queen’s Throat.  But beyond the chromatic effulgence, Allen cultivates and seems to pry something further from his captive specimens—a mystery or romance innate to the thing itself—taking the viewer (and conceivably the artist himself) by surprise.

Hans Holbein the Younger, “Lady with Squirrel and Starling” (portrait Anne Lovell?), oil on panel (ca.1526-28)

Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance
curated by Anne T. Woollett, Austėja Mackelaitė, and John T. McQuillen
Getty Center
October 19, 2021 – January 9, 2022

Beyond the ‘flattening’ of history that seems an inevitable side effect of accelerating technological change, seismic social and political disruption, and environmental degradation, I was not surprised that this breathtaking exhibition drew so many contemporary artists here.  Portraiture stops history short, faceting and dissecting character across culture and the electrically reactive skeins continuously woven between subject and artist.  A ‘world-wide web’ indeed—and not so flat after all.

Alice Neel, “The Family” (John Gruen, Jane Wilson & Julia), oil on canvas (1970)

Alice Neel: People Come First
curated by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
March 22, – August 1, 2021

More portraiture, and even more irony—absurd to ask if the world needs it or why; we’re all (clearly) going there, and here’s why.  People may or may not “come first.”  (I disagree with Neel’s fundamental motivating principle.)  But Neel connects with what connects us—whether (com)posed or seemingly caught between movements or a characteristic gesture, we see and hear the dialogue—questions, more than assertions, of ‘self’.  It’s not who we are; it’s how we are.  The painting provides us with an open-ended ‘why?’—and so there we are.  (The show will travel to California this year, but not Los Angeles.)

Sonia Gomes:  When the Sun Rises In Blue
Blum & Poe
November 6, – December 18, 2021

As noted above, it’s hard to say whether ‘people come first’—but their stories can be compelling; and encountering this Brazilian artist’s work in an American exhibition space for the first time, it was astonishing to see and feel a powerful narrative sense wedded to a formal command of material and space that made me think of John Outterbridge’s assemblage work (also Senga Nengudi) as if distilled through the formal syntax of Anthony Caro.  The materials—textiles and fabric remnants, driftwood, heirloom fragments—are collected close to home (she is based in São Paulo), but her meticulous workmanship and brilliantly composed and articulated form have a cumulative power that seems capable of transporting us to another dimension.

No—you didn’t miscount.  There are only nine more here.  But we’re already well into 2022—and did you really need any more?