Zackary Drucker featured in New York Times article supporting Los Angeles artist, Aimee Gougen. 

"This group show presents works that reflect an ethereal sensibility toward nature. During a time when we were forced to stay home, away from public spaces and other people, the relationship between humans and nature shifted, causing a NATURAL TRANSCENDENCE, and a renewed sense of gratitude for the natural elements that surround us."

"Adams often features himself in his work, portraying himself as Zeus with a freaky looking grizzly bear. The work is a wonderful reminder that figurative painting is not only relevant, it’s ferocious. His images stare straight out from the canvas, locking you into their gaze. But before the relationship becomes a virtual stare-down, humour, compassion and joyous surrealism disrupt the intensity. Liberation ensues."

"Solmi reimagines these figures as devilishly smiling partiers, who are unconcerned with the people – particularly Native victims of colonialist action – who are trampled over by their revelry. The show, through all its varied mediums, points a finger towards the rampant deification of these historical figures despite the atrocities and pain they perpetuated and profited from."

"For Pride Month this year, we spoke with artists of the LGBTQIA+ community about their own self-portraiture and the act of expressing oneself through art. From blown glass to photography to painting, these artworks show us how artists can represent themselves across a wide array of media and genres, including both abstraction, realism, or alter egos."

The Smithsonian and The National Museum of Natural History are co-hosting a talk on civic awareness about the conservation of art history and material culture. For the talk, Ken Gonzales-Day’s photograph of Osage leader, Shonke Mon-thi^ will be starting point of the discussion. 
The talk will take place via Zoom on Thursday, June 10 from 2:00 PM- 3:00 PM PDT. An RSVP via Eventbrite will be required to attend. 

Jim Adams is presenting a series of paintings as part of Vancouver Special, the triennial presented at Vancouver Art Gallery. These paintings inspired by mythology and the black experience are portraits that merge storytelling of the ancient world and contemporary politics. Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo will be the second in what is envisioned as a series of exhibitions intended to provide an expansive look at contemporary art in the Greater Vancouver region.

 

Ken Gonzales-Day joins Tyler Green to speak about his participation in Getty group show, Photo Flux: Unshuttered LA. 

"Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfed while Americans died of a pandemic. In “The Bacchanalian Ones,” the inaugural exhibition at Luis De Jesus’ new downtown Los Angeles space, Italian-born Federico Solmi inspires such musings, and then some, mixing traditional painting with the latest digital technologies. The result is a captivating political theater for confronting the grim reality that megalomania is both universal and enduring."

"My paintings seems spontaneous, but it is not so unexpected, considering the amount of work I do before engaging in a series. I can think about a subject for months before I paint it. I obsessively accumulate many images in my notebooks around a topic. Afterward, in the studio, it is momentarily translated into paint. I know what I want to paint, and then I let the images develop and let them flow. I discover my pictures as I paint them, and I love the surprise of this process."

The exhibit features photographs by 35 Los Angeles-based artists challenge ideals of beauty, representation, cultural capital, and objectivity. The artists in this exhibition, primarily people of color, have radically transformed photography to express their own aesthetics, identities, and narratives.

Solmi will be presenting an immersive, large-scale video installation in a 16,000 square room with over 40 projectors. 

Column: California has a history of racist lynchings too. Ignoring that fact is mass delusion. 
By Gustavo Arellano

“The mythology of the Wild West as being somehow different from the history of lynching is the first part of the problem.”

Part of the group show Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art

"Ken Gonzales-Day’s large-scale digital print Monumental Vision: Labor/Lenin (2020) is a pigment print on vinyl itself at a monumental scale, which considers the fate of discarded sculptural testaments to Soviet rule in the implicit context of toppled Confederate monuments in the U.S. and indeed, the altars to violent colonialism that pollute so much of the world."

"I have to be knowledgeable about what came before me, but also use all the tools that are available today. So, I figured out how to domesticate technology. Instead of it feeling cold and distant, I blended it with organic painting texture, and drawings, and with motion capture I created something that, in my opinion, is very human. You feel like you want to touch it, and that’s a feeling that normally doesn’t happen with digital media."

"In recent years, and particularly since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, many of his paintings have focused on issues of systemic racism, including violence against African Americans, slavery and mass incarceration. He has said that he always “believed in the idea of bearing witness to the times in which you live.”

"Federico Solmi will feature VR art, video paintings, paintings and drawings in the inauguration exhibition of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles's new gallery in the DTLA Arts District."

“If you are curious enough, and you get close, you will see that there’s more to the work than just the fence.”

Drawn entirely from the Mead’s collection, the group exhibition Founding Narratives raises questions about representation and the absence of representation in national narratives and in the establishment of a national art, about the significance of “firsts,” and about the interpretative frameworks that museums offer about artists and artworks.