Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “Tijuacolor,” a solo exhibition by artist Hugo Crosthwaite, on view from April 28 to May 10. “Tijuacolor” is a compound word invented by Crosthwaite that fuses “Tijuana” and “color,” referencing television and film branding concepts such as “technicolor” or “in full color.” The mural and exhibition promise a visually exciting narrative that reflects on issues such as immigration, gentrification, transculturation and violence. In keeping with the artist’s concept of impermanence and the ephemeral nature of border regions, the mural will be painted over at the end of the exhibition following the artist’s instructions.

Contemporary L.A artist Phung Huynh’s multi-layered project Angkorian Homecoming marks 50 years since the start of the Khmer Rouge Genocide. It articulates the complexity of the Cambodian American experience and the evolution of Khmerican identity from past to present, tradition to assimilation, memorial to joy. Huynh’s vision for the project includes the residencies and performance activations of Khmer dance master Mea Lath and company, as well as those of queer Khmer DJ Hunny Hach. For Huynh, the performances bring the exhibition full circle.

June Edmonds and Sherin Gurgius featured in Step and Repeat on view at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, March 6 – May 18, 2024. Inspired by the historical Pattern and Decoration movement of the mid-1970s and its impact across our region, Step & Repeat highlights 46 Southern California artists who engage with themes of pattern and decoration. The exhibition seeks to create a dialogue around those concepts, encompassing both direct explorations of the subject and works that approach it peripherally.

From February 2 through June 1, 2025 The National Academy of Sciences presents Lia Halloran: Warped Side. Artist Lia Halloran spent 13 years creating over 650 paintings for the book The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne. This exhibition presents select pieces from the series, illuminating themes such as time travel, black holes, gravitational waves, and the universe’s origins.

“LAYERS” will be on view from January 24th to March 9th, 2025.The exhibition explores the multifaceted nature of collage, highlighting its potential to merge disparate elements, challenge visual perceptions, and create new narratives. From traditional cut-and-paste techniques to digital manipulations and mixed media assemblages, “LAYERS” showcases the breadth and ingenuity of contemporary collage practices.

From January 18-March 8, 2025, the Dishman Art Museum proudly presents a selection of works by the acclaimed artist Evita Tezeno. This exhibition brings Tezeno’s vibrant and richly textured collage paintings back to Southeast Texas, where her artistic journey began. Evita Tezeno is a native of Port Arthur, Texas who graduated from Lamar University in 1984 with a BS degree in graphic design. She uses hand-painted papers and found objects to create folk-art style collages inspired by her South Texas roots, family, and personal experiences.

On view are several of her “Television Drawings,” dense transcriptions of the morning and evening news broadcasts from the 1970s and ’80s that are framed within renderings of TV sets from the era. Nearby are four clocks from the 1980s and ’90s that tackle social issues like healthcare access, environmental justice, and poverty. 

Art Basel Miami Beach has named 282 world class galleries from 34 countries and territories participating in the 2024 iteration, December 6-8 2024, with preview days on December 4-5 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Spear headed by the new director Bridget Finn Art Basel's mission to platform artistic excellence in the region and to support discovery and generative collaboration between regional and international art scenes and markets. Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present a solo presentation of historic works by Mimi Smith. 

These newcomer galleries from Cairo, Warsaw, and beyond, are rising stars on the scene. In Luis de Jesus’s powerful booth, three Latinx artists explore the landscape in relationship to migration, historicism, and the legacy of colonialism in works crossing sculpture, photography, and mixed media. Artist Edra Soto’s series of “Graft” sculptures reconsider decorative architectural elements found in mid-20th century Puerto Rico, namely rejas (wrought iron fences) and quiebrasoles (concrete breeze blocks).  In a searing series of postcard-sized images displayed on one wall of the booth, Ken Gonzales-Day has performed interventions on historic scenes of violence in the state of California, erasing the victims and leaving behind only the perpetrators.  Meanwhile, Hector Dionicio Mendoza has created a large-scale sculptural wall-work of a coyote-human hybrid.  Beyond the Nova presentation,Luis De Jesus is also showing a luminous monumental painting by Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora in the Meridians section of the fair. 

Sherin Guirguis’s latest body of work has its roots in the 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds (Manṭeq al-ṭayr) by Farīd al-Dīn Aṭṭār, which recounts the story group of birds who embark on a journey to find God. During the pandemic, Guirguis and a collective of female and female-identifying artists, writers, and activists would meet regularly to read the work together. For her solo show A’aru // Field of Reeds: Gathering, the Egyptian-born artist uses the story as a jumping-off point for her evocative abstractions based on the geometric forms of old Egyptian dovecotes.

In verse and in color, a Nobel physicist and a visual artist collaborate to portray black holes, gravitational waves and other preposterous features of Einstein’s universe.

If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be sucked into a black hole — twisted, stretched, confused, doomed — you could do worse than trip through “The Warped Side of Our Universe, An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves,” a collaborative book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Lia Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the art department at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present an online conversation with gallery artist Evita Tezeno, co-moderated by Dr. Anita Bateman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Luis De Jesus, gallery founder and director. This talk is being presented in conjunction with Evita Tezeno's solo exhibition, The Moments We Share Are the Memories We Keep, currently on view through October 28

Art Basel Miami Beach has named the 277 galleries participating in its 2023 iteration, slated to run December 8–10, with preview days on December 6–7.  This year’s iteration will focus on the Latin American and Caribbean diasporic scenes, and will feature galleries from Egypt, Iceland, the Philippines, and Poland. The fair is led by Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s director of fairs and exhibition platforms.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Evita Tezeno: The Moments We Share Are The Memories We Keep, large-scale mixed-media collage paintings.  As a continuation of My Life, My Story, Tezeno’s 2022 solo exhibition, this series of collage-paintings builds on visual narratives depicting soulful everyday scenes of Black life, introducing us to new friends, family and endearing moments from the artist’s life. Tezeno uses a combination of richly patterned hand-painted papers, acrylic paint, vintage buttons inherited from her grandmother, and other media to portray the intimacies and joys of growing up in South Texas.

Go out before it closes: Chris Engman’s exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in downtown L.A. is coming to a close Saturday. “Prism” is a series of photographs Engman created in collaboration with his toddler. He observed his child’s lack of hesitation and abundant curiosity when making art, and decided to join in. The exhibit showcases their paintings and drawings filled with childlike joy and vitality.

“A prism breaks light into its constituent parts, revealing colors invisible to the human eye. It allows us to see, in other words, what is present but not perceived. This show is titled “Prism” in part for its vibrant colors. More importantly, because a camera is a prism. And most importantly, because my son is my prism. The world that I see through his eyes is new and strange, terrifying and beautiful. How wonderful is that?”

Evita Tezeno had a bucolic childhood, ensconced in a predominantly Black community in small-town Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Today the 62-year-old Dallas artist draws upon these fond memories in her exuberant collage paintings, employing elaborately patterned hand-painted papers and found objects to depict everyday scenes of Black life: prim ladies waiting at a bus stop, young girls nattering away, women hanging laundry, couples linking arms for a stroll, gazing lovingly at each other, or dressed in their finest for a night of dancing. 

“Prolific” understates the artworks artist Edra Soto has contributed to the cultural scene, radiating from Chicago and stretching to New York, California, Brazil, and beyond. Born in Puerto Rico, Soto treats her roots as a blueprint, building expansive bodies of work upon the boundless inspiration she finds within them. 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Phung Huyn has been named the 2023 honoree in art for the Women of Impact Awards.

The Women of Impact Awards was created in honor of Women’s History Month to spotlight the efforts of our extraordinary women in the 77th Assembly District.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce June Edmonds was awarded a MacDowell spring-summer fellowship.

MacDowell will welcome 142 artists from 23 states, Washington D.C., and 11 countries for spring and summer residencies.  These fellowships at the nation’s first artist residency program in Peterborough were granted from a pool of 1,822 applications from 54 countries and every state except Hawaii. Fifty-two percent of the incoming artists-in-residence self-identify as artists of color and 76 percent will be first-time fellows.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Mimi Smith’s first West Coast solo exhibition, “Head-On,” which includes sculptures, paintings, and drawings that span the pioneering artist’s six-decade career. 

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is please to announce Zackary Drucker winner of 2023 sundance film festival U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Clarity of Vision for Film "The Stroll".  This is the definitive history of New York City’s Meatpacking District, told by the transgender women of color who created its history.  “The Stroll” was where trans women of color, shunned out of the workforce, turned to for a means of survival. Women of the Stroll past and present are brought together by co-director Kristen Lovell (for whom this is a stunning directorial debut), who worked alongside them for a decade, and Zackary Drucker (Transparent producer and The Lady and the Dale director).

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Hector Dionicio Mendoza as a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2022 Biennial Grant.  Hector is one of twenty artist to receive $20,000 of unrestricted grant funds for the purpose to give artists the opportunity to produce new work and push the boundaries of their creativity.

Conceptually positioned in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, ‘Hugo Crosthwaite: Caravan’ at Luis De Jesus deploys the languages of artistic and popular media to portray both the perils of the border and the humanity of those who must traverse it.

Hugo Crosthwaite's paintings, sculpture, and stop-motion videos in Caravan speak to the reality faced by migrants as they make the treacherous journey to the border in search of the American Dream.

“Proud is a funny word because it can be taken out of context. I am proud of the things we’ve done. But what Hugo did was to show, in a very interesting, subtle way, how complicated it all was.”

“By relinquishing control of the paint itself and allowing it to work on the canvas, my work attains a measure of hope: if nothing is settled and determined, any outcome is still possible, thus I utilize vibrant contrasting colors set often on burnt or earth tones,”  she says.

Luis De Jesus is known for showing multiple qualitative exhibitions in one go; this gallery should be on your weekend must-sees. 

"November in Los Angeles brings us shows that highlight art’s role as both a reflection of everyday life and a force to help change our reality. An exhibition at Angels Gate Cultural Center showcases the multifaceted programs of the community-based Slanguage Studio."

"The spirograph galaxy of Rhythmic Inquisitions, an exhibition of works by June Edmonds at the Riverside Art Museum, unmercifully hypnotizes. Expanding boundaries, this 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient injects Aretha Franklin’s Respect (1967) into Abstract Expressionism."

Lansdowne explores the various traditions of framing within the art historical canon – from the illusionism found in the murals of Pompeii, the realism of Flemish Renaissance painting, the techniques of American neoclassicism, and others.

Originally created by Chris Engman between 2002-2006, this is the first time this series of black and white photographs is being presented in Los Angeles. These works read differently now than when they were produced 15-20 years ago.

"This makes an upcoming exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University in Malibu (an area well acquainted with fire) particularly poignant. “To Bough and to Bend,” a group show that takes the tree as its binding theme, opens at the museum later this month. Included in the exhibition is an image by Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles artist who has long tracked the history of Mexican American lynchings in the West, a history that leads him to the trees on which these murderous actions took place."

Over the past two decades, Engman has dedicated his art to understanding how images deceive the eye and the human need to make sense of visual perception. Engman’s photography, at first glance, appears normal, yet, under careful examination, viewers become aware of the optical illusion and begin to question the constructed image. Engman’s twenty-year practice is grounded in research and conceptual thought. He documents remnants of labor and the juxtaposition of human material and vast landscape through sculpture and photography.

"It had everything in it, those shoes," said Huynh. "It's beautiful. It's strong. I wondered, 'Who walked in those shoes? Who were these women?' Leather was so symbolic of skin, of transforming suffering and scarring. The beautiful patterns and details of flora and flowers — I think flowers are very symbolic of women and fertility and also like an offering of apologies to the mothers."

The work consists of a slender disc of corten steel laid flat on the ground that bears the outlines of roses and a pair of praying hands. At night, it is illuminated from below. A pair of low benches offer a space for contemplation, and a low, curved wall features texts inspired by the women’s experiences: “If you speak English, they treat you one way,” reads one inscription. “If you don’t speak English, they treat you another way.”

“This body of work is really meant to honor the invaluable work that female astronomers contributed to their field," Halloran said. "Without these discoveries we would be nowhere near where we are now in terms of being able to measure and understand the universe.”