"After joining Luis De Jesus in July 2020, Los Angeles artist Carla Jay Harris is presenting her first exhibition with the gallery. She is showing large-scale works on paper, unique hand-embellished archival pigment prints. Made in response to the pandemic and last summer’s racial reckoning, the works document 'intellectual, emotional, and psychological environments.'”

Carla Jay Harris has long used mythology in her work as a tool to make sense of reality. Her series 'Celestial Bodies' (2018–20) reflects her personal experiences as an American kid growing up outside the United States, picturing Black and Brown protagonists navigating mystical landscapes.

Curated by art critic Edward Goldman, the concept of the exhibition emerged out of the bleakness and ambiguity in the initial stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Goldman, who was still able to visit artists in their studios, asked the question “how has this difficult time affected your art-making?”. To his delight, the artists responded that it had allowed them to spend more time in their studio, creating art that had more focus and deeper meaning, giving Edward hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

L.A. Edge, situated at both the edge of campus and the larger LA county, brings together a group of artists whose professional practices cover a range of themes and media. The works elude thematic boundaries in favor of embracing the breadth and depth of our community at a time when the arts, and a liberal arts education, have never been more important and uncertain.

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. The works were chosen by Paul Martineau, Curator of Photographs and Karen Hellman, Assistant Curator of Photographs, and made possible through the support of Dr. Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director and the J. Paul Getty Trust. 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce the acquisition of Ken Gonzales-Day's Next morning when Jimmy woke, the cowboys were gone, Livermore, CA, 2003, by the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Middlebury, Vermont. The photograph will be included in Art & Protest: Artists as Agents of Social Change, on view from September 14 - December 12, 2021. 

“My work has always had a political ethos, it comes out of my self-awareness as a black American. This work is a compendium of modernist form and the politics of right now. I had been working, shifting the work toward a more abstract base. I had always been a figurative narrative painter.”

“When I hear spirituality, I think about a connection to something larger than self, however you define that. God, a sense of the universe, a sense of nature.”  

“NADA x Foreland presents a taste of the artists and galleries in the upstate artistic sprawl with a dialogue between Catskill and the international circuit. This is a celebration of a moment to recognize a strong extension of the international arts community; one informed from a long and rich history imbued with a new audience and new generation of producers,”  said NADA x Foreland co-organizer Jesse Greenberg. 

'Silton steps back here—or to be more precise, places us in what is both a neutral space, the convergent space of shared human language and agreed-upon perceptual field or actuality, and a kind of secular-sacred space that, in the terms of the most counter-intuitive theories of perception may, in Möbius-twist fashion, represent no mutually agreed-upon reality whatsoever.'

"The overwhelming physicality of the pieces coupled with the elusive energy of the materials and processes, and the esoteric dimensions of specific planetary and meteorological phenomena — all of it bounces around with a sense of wonder at the sheer accomplishment of them, even as one senses other, larger forces are also at work."

"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." 

“I used the lines of the streets from old maps in the artwork. There are curves on the right that represent the curve of Girard Avenue on the south end. The curves on the top are like the north end of Draper Avenue.”

“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.”

"A few months ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I had the pleasure of visiting Lia Halloran’s studio where I experienced these works in progress. Of course, no hugs, no kisses were allowed, just masks and safe distance. But, let me tell you, looking closely at her paintings, I felt that I was diving deep into the cosmos communicating with stars, gods and muses."

The exhibition examines the dynamics of exclusion and violence affecting Latinx and Latin Americans, as well as artists’ strategies to embody justice and creative and personal freedom.

"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."

"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."

"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. 

"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.”