Chilean-born artist Rodrigo Valenzuela explores themes of labor and automation in several series of black and white photographs at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. His exhibition, “New Work for a Post-Worker’s World,” runs through Feb. 19.

"Especially illuminating is the article devoted to the personal collection of Ken Gonzales-Day. An artist who has long engaged photography and the history of California in his work (and who currently has a show on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles). Gonzales-Day has spent years gathering vernacular images of Latinos in Southern California in the period that spans the 1850s to the 1950s. California seems only to exist in the U.S. public imagination after becoming a state in 1850. Gonzales-Day’s collection reveals who was here when the U.S. military rolled in."

"This was an era of dispossession, displacement, and diaspora for Mexican America and also a century marked by violence, deportation, and large-scale erasure that sought to disappear Latinx people from history. It's an era when Laxtinx people were 'always on the edge of erasure,' as Gonzales-Day puts it, though the photographic archive he's collected promises to keep us from oblivion."

"Karetzky plays with ideas of simultaneity and what is seen or inferred through painted visual illusions. The works concretize the sense of distance and isolation many felt during the pandemic, yet rather than see limitations, Karetzky explores possibilities."

"Across town, in downtown L.A., Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has a trifecta of shows that engage architecture in different ways. Nicolas Grenier uses a labyrinth structure as a site for presenting diagrammatic paintings that chart questions of governance (and more metaphysical questions of color), while in a separate space, painter Laura Karetzky compellingly riffs on the nature of the window — as structure, but also as metaphor. In addition, artist Edra Soto dwells on the memories and social signifiers embedded in architecture, reproducing brise soileil structures typical of vernacular Puerto Rican design, but placing within them tiny transparency viewers that feature images of people and places. To see the detail, you’ll have to check it IRL."

"Karetzky’s work feels invasive. In her next oil painting, The Window Through My Window, we find ourselves peering into another window. While I am ashamed of my speculation, the surreal image soon becomes natural, innocent, inviting, and I am like the spectator behind the lens. I want to know more. In any case, I deserve to know more, don’t I? They chose to leave their blinds open, after all."

In episode 4 of Xicano Chronicles, we feature Wilmington-based Artist Karla Diaz, notably known for her “Prison Gourmet” performance work. She performed her two-hour piece Prison Gourmet at LACMA in 2010. Since then, she has done a collaborative mural for the Whitney Museum and exhibited at Hammer Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Newcomb Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Serpentine, the Institute Cervantez, Pitzer College, MOCA, and ESMoA. Amongst her many accomplishments, she is one of the founding members of Slanguage and teaches at CSULB. Luis De Jesus Los Angeles currently represents her. 

The fair will include two special sections. The first is Frieze Sculpture Beverly Hills, a new public art program that takes after similar ones in London and New York. That section will be staged in Beverly Gardens Park, where the works will be on view for three months. The second is Focus LA, which will focus exclusively on presenting one- or two-person presentations from L.A.-based galleries younger than 15 years old. Organized by Amanda Hunt, director of public programs and creative practice at the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the section will feature Luis De Jesus, Charlie James Gallery, Parker Gallery, Garden, and Stars.

"Edmonds’s paintings invite us to step back from the physical realm, not in an effort to escape its thorny textures, but in order to realize the other narratives existing alongside us — the intangible, the metaphysical, the ancestral."

“Jamie is an art collector, and we had a lot of fun. We went to different places in L.A., and we ended up working with the Luis De Jesus art gallery, a great gallery downtown. They have amazing artists and most of them are LGBTQ — and they really care about diversity, which is something that both me and Jamie love. Every single piece is powerful, from Zackary Drucker’s self-portrait in the living room to three pieces from Josh Reames. I love them a lot.”

Shattered Glass” tells an evocative story of strength by those often marginalized because of race, ethnicity and sexual identity through works such as Gabriel Sanchez’s “Babalao Pastor, Yoruba Priest.”

"'There have been a lot of strong Black women in my life,' Tezeno said of the people she paints. The figures are all depicted with large eyes because, for the artist, 'the eyes are the mirror of soul.'"

"Evita Tezeno brings out the joy in painting, through soft hues and bold figures evoking smiles and memories of time gone by."

"Untitled Art Miami Beach (November 29-December 4, 12th Street and Ocean Drive) is celebrating its 10th edition by inviting four curators to stage presentations at the show. Natasha Becker of the de Young Museum in San Francisco is uniting 11 galleries around the theme of black voices, while art historians Estrellita Brodsky and José Falconi have focused theirs on less traditional, more outlying ways of understanding the universe."

"This year’s Untitled Art Fair will be in keeping with the festive mood, too. The 10th edition of the event will also be the biggest it’s ever been, with over 145 international galleries exhibiting and a new section, Nest, which will aim to support emerging galleries, collectives, and non-profits. But there’s more. This year, Untitled has also tapped four powerhouse guest curators to create special themed shows within the fair: Natasha Becker, Miguel A. López, Estrellita Brodsky, and José Falconi."

"In conjunction with the opening of Untitled Art Fair 2021, Miami’s non-profit art exhibition space Locust Projects kicks off Art Week with a public screening of local artist Antonia Wright’s And so with ends come beginnings, a contemplative video on sea-level rise that will play on a large screen floating off the shores of South Beach. Shot when the artist was nine months pregnant, the video is a metaphor for the dualities of ecstasy and anxiety of living in a paradise for ground-zero sea-level rise. Lummus Park, 1130 Ocean Dr, Miami Beach. Nov 29, 4–6pm."

"Johnson and Silton read the story aloud together—Johnson first and then Silton—on the last weekend of the exhibition, performing the particularity of differences manifest in its content, here embodied in the pair’s vocalization and also in their delivery. As punctual as this occasion was, 'We' spilled out from itself."

"The welcome Laband survey, organized by gallery director Karen Rapp, begins with student work from the 1980s, when Edmonds, now 62, was enrolled as an undergrad at San Diego State University. Twenty paintings are joined with 18 works on paper, plus a few self-portrait pencil studies and assorted ephemera. Billed as a retrospective, it’s more like a thumbnail sketch for one, given the modest size. But the often-bracing selection does give a good sense of the artist’s development over four decades."

"By making figurative paintings in the 1980s when figuration was out of fashion, and pursuing abstraction just when Black figuration is taking the art world by storm, Edmonds continues to defy dominant trends in order to pursue her personal process of discovery based on close observation. Her vibrant paintings weave different stories together in inclusive abstract forms to emphasize process, presence and positivity."

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce June Edmonds: Full Spectrum, a 40-year survey exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist June Edmonds, presented by Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery from September 25 through February 20, 2022. The exhibition has been organized by Laband Art Gallery director and curator Karen Rapp.

"The artist says she has always been a vivid dreamer and has long made notes about some of the more peculiar ones. “Sometimes I’d wake up and text words to myself so I could convey the feeling or the visuals,” she says. “Like, ‘felt scared.’ Or ‘dancing folclórico.’ Or ‘I picked up a metralleta [submachine gun] and started shooting people.’"

"In 'Your Body is a Space That Sees,' artist Lia Halloran created a series of large-scale cyanotype works — a photographic printing process producing a cyan-blue print. Well into the twentieth century, engineers were using the process as a simple way to copy drawings, thus originating the term 'blueprints.'"

Owned by Luis De Jesus and Jay Wingate, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is a contemporary art gallery representing emerging and mid-career artists who are engaged in regional and global art discourse with a particular focus on intersectional diversity.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce the accession of six photographs by Ken Gonzales-Day into the collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. This significant group of works includes three photographs from the Searching for California Hang Trees series and three photographs from the Memento Mori series. 

"I started questioning where I come from, something that I had never questioned before, and I started to see myself, well, yes, I'm a Mexican artist, but I'm also a Tijuana artist. So then I started playing with this notion of identity and my identity as a border artist, and then also playing with this folklore about Mexico, about what they think Mexican identity is." 

“Public art brings it to the people, which for now is especially important in La Jolla because the Museum of Contemporary Art is closed [for renovation]. Through programs like Murals of La Jolla, there are these beautiful works of art done by world-class artists, and I’m honored to be among them.”

“Peter Williams was a fearless artist,”  Julie L. McGee said by email. “His combination of acerbic wit, social commentary and beauty allowed his work to speak to and transcend the momentary.”