News
ARTISTS TALK OF FEARS OVER A SECOND TRUMP TERM
Featuring Vian Sora
December 4, 2024
The Iraqi artist Vian Sora has seen the absolute worst that politics has to offer – she spent most of her first 30 years living under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, then endured the destruction of her country following the US invasion in 2003. Years later, she surfaced in the United States as a refugee. Her art, which mixes bright, neon colors with motifs from the ancient history of her homeland, is a testament to the history that has scarred her and her resilience as a survivor.
UNC GREENSBORO GETS $5 M. CONTEMPORARY ART GIFT
Including Mimi Smith's "Armor for any Eventuality," 2020
October 24, 2024
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina Greensboro will receive a gift of 270 contemporary artworks and funding worth $5 million from Carole Cole Levin, a North Carolina-based artist and philanthropist.
The gifted works represent around 140 artists, the bulk of whom were born in the U.S. and half of them born before 1950, and will start to be exhibited in spring 2025. Separate funding will also allow the museum to renovate its building and establish an arts and humanities center in Levin’s name. It is set to open 2026.
ARTIST TALK: KARLA DIAZ "WE ARE SANTA MONICA" AT 18TH STREET ARTS CENTER
18th Santa Monica Public Library 601 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90401
Saturday, October 26 at 2 pm
Artist Karla Diaz will speak about We Are Santa Monica in the library courtyard at Santa Monica Public Library on Saturday, October 26 at 2 PM.
Two vibrant artworks, We Are Santa Monica at the Santa Monica Public Library and Youth Powerful Voices at the Virginia Avenue Park Teen Center, are rooted in community workshops led by Diaz last summer at the Juneteenth Festival and the Teen Center. Both sessions focused on storytelling and sharing, and fostered dialogue about racial justice, cultural equity, and community well-being.
PBS SOCAL "ARTBOUND" FEATURING JOHN VALADEZ
October 17, 2024
"The Cheech," Artbound, episode 1, season 15, PBS SoCal (Valadez, 21:20 – 22:56)
The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum showcases the actor's collection of more than 700 pieces by Mexican-American artists. Told through perspectives of established artists and those who know him best, the film tells his journey from comedy icon to Chicano art advocate.
FEDERICO SOLMI RECEIVES THE B3 HONOUR AWARD IN THE ART CATEGORY
October 14, 2024
B3 Festival of the Moving Image is awarding this year's honorary prize in the art category to American-Italian artist Federico Solmi. In his socio-critical cross-media artworks, he always holds up the flag of democracy. Federico Solmi, born in Bologna, Italy in 1973, has been living in New York since 1999. His groundbreaking work was recognized with the award of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2009. Solo museum surveys include American Circus at the Haifa Museum of Art in Haifa, Israel, in 2016; The Grand Masquerade at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois, in 2019; and Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, in 2022–23. His upcoming solo show The Great Farce is scheduled to open at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, in Chicago, in September 2024.
ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION | KEN GONZALES-DAY AT YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
September 10, 2024
September 12, 2024 at 4 pm Ken Gonzales-Day will talk with Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Yale Center for British Art, about Composition in Black and Brown, a two-part public art project emerging from his engagement with the collections of the Center and the Yale Peabody Museum. A reception will follow.
EDRA SOTO: ‘THIS KIND OF ARCHITECTURE LIVES IN THE BACKGROUND’
September 5, 2024
The Puerto Rico-born, Chicago-based artist’s new Public Art Fund project brings the domestic architecture of her childhood home to Central Park. In her series Graft, Edra Soto has been mining visual iconography from her upbringing in Puerto Rico, namely the wrought iron fences (rejas) and breeze blocks (quiebrasoles) that are ubiquitous in the island’s residential architecture and were prominent features of Soto’s childhood home.
ART EXHIBITS BEING INSTALLED ON CAMPUS FOR CROSSING OVER: ART AND SCIENCE AT CALTECH, 1920–2020
August 30, 2024
Now through September 13, a number of indoor and outdoor art exhibits will be installed across campus in preparation for Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020, an exhibition by Caltech Library as part of Getty's PST ART event.
Dabney Hall—Lounge will feature an exhibition gallery, Powers of Ten, on the histories of images in the work of Caltech scientists and engineers. It will highlight new work by Hillary Mushkin, Caltech research professor of art and design, and artist Lia Halloran.
EDRA SOTO "GRAFT" OPENING SEPTEMBER 5 AT THE DORIS C. FREEDMAN PLAZA, CENTRAL PARK
September 5, 2024
Graft on view September 5, 2024 - August 24, 2025
Edra Soto explores the relationship between our private, interior lives and shared public history and culture. Graft is the latest in an ongoing series of installations based on rejas, wrought iron screens frequently seen outside homes in Puerto Rico. Rejas often feature repeating geometric motifs that can be traced to West Africa’s Yoruba symbol systems, in contrast to the Spanish architecture celebrated in official Puerto Rican tourism. Graft investigates how Puerto Rican cultural memory often masks the Black heritage of the island as folklore.
NEW THREE-YEAR ARTS SERIES WILL CENTER NYC’S LATINE COMMUNITY FEATURING EDRA SOTO
August 29, 2024
Next Thursday, September 5 in Central Park, artist Edra Soto will unveil a new sculpture from her Graft series (2013–), made from corten steel and terrazzo and inspired by the wrought-iron fencing often seen outside residences in Puerto Rico. The work, which she describes as “a monument to working class Puerto Rican communities,” will be presented with Public Art Fund to mark the first phase of Historias — a comprehensive three-year arts and cultural initiative centering Latine narratives across New York City, led by the Lower East Side’s Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center.
PHUNG HUYNH: PINK DONUT BOXES IS PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE EXHIBITION AGAINST MONOCULTURE OPENING SEPTEMBER 19, 2024
Phung Huynh: Pink Donut Boxes explores the lived experiences of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees resettled in Southern California, home to one of the largest Southeast Asian refugee populations in the world. In these works, Huynh transforms the pink donut box—a cultural icon in Southern California—into a powerful signifier of survival, resilience, and collective memory, using it as a backdrop to delicate portraits of the artist, her parents, and other members of the refugee community. Phung Huynh: Pink Donut Boxes is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Against Monoculture, which explores intersections of art and activism in relation to food justice.
CENTRAL PARK STATE OF MIND: EDRA SOTO PUTS THE HOME IN PUBLIC ART
August 26, 2024
Last year, Edra Soto had just about the best year an artist can have: in addition to solo shows at Engage Projects, Cleve Carney Museum and Hyde Park Art Center, her work was shown at New York’s LatchKey Gallery and acquired by the Whitney Museum. The coming of a new year did little to slow her momentum: she’s capping off 2024 with a large-scale installation at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and solo showcases at Portland, Maine’s ICA and Chicago’s own Comfort Station.
LAURA KARETZKY NAMED A 2024 NYSCA/NYFA ARTIST FELLOW IN PAINTING
August 13, 2024
$696,000 Awarded to 87 New York State Artists Working in Fiction, Folk/Traditional Arts, Interdisciplinary Work, Painting, and Video/Film. New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced the recipients and finalists of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program, which it has administered for the past 39 years with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). NYFA has awarded a total of $696,000 to 87 artists (including 3 collaborations) throughout New York State, whose ages range from 25-79 years, in the following disciplines: Fiction, Folk/Traditional Arts, Interdisciplinary Work, Painting, and Video/Film.
LACMA AND METRO ART PRESENT AN EVENING WITH KEN GONZALES-DAY
Join Metro Art commissioned artist Ken Gonzales-Day and LACMA curators Eve Schillo, Associate Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, and Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art, as they delve into Gonzales-Day’s latest artwork, Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects. Inspired by the idea of transporting the body and mind, and by the station as an excavation site, Ken Gonzales-Day‘s glass-tile mural for the north and south concourse level walls aims to transport transit customers across time and place by immersing them in an environment where images of objects—spanning many cultures, continents and eras—mined from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection are reproduced at an enormous scale. Gonzales-Day’s artwork will invite viewers to think about museum collections and their connection to the outside world in unexpected ways.
ALTAMED ACQUIRES WORKS BY KARLA DIAZ AND JOHN VALADEZ
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to annouce the acquistions of works by Karla Diaz: Mario, 2023, When my tears fall record, Torera II (Bullfighter) and John Valadez's Aztec Gent. Karla Diaz's surreal paintings chronicle a collective unconscious of cultural iconography, pop references, current events, and familial dynamics and traditions that shape the worldview of the artist and her communities. In Diaz's latest series, she expands her visual storytelling to encompass music and performance through the Northern Mexican genre of narrative ballads, the corrido. John Valadez, a trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 70s and 80s, following the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and 70s, his work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternative vision.
LACMA ACQUIRES GRISELDA ROSAS' "LA BATALLA DE VORTEX" AND "TRAGALUZ (SKYLIGHT)"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquistion of Griselda Rosas' La Batalla de Vortex and Tragaluz (Skylight) by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Acquisition made possible through the Drawings and Prints Department and the generosity of Karen R. Constine. Informed by her fluid experiences with the Mexico and US border and life between Tijuana and San Diego, her work deconstructs the ambiguities of identity and place, learned, and generationally passed subjugation, and the legacies of colonization and conflict.
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO ACQUIRES VIAN SORA'S "CHERRY PICKERS" AND "UNTITLED WITH A LOTUS"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce the acquistions of Vian Sora's Cherry Pickers, 2022 and Untitled with a Lotus, 2024 by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA. The gallery extends our sincere apprecation to the board and the generosity of Henry V. Heuser, Jr. Sora's mixed media paintings suggest the struggle of the individual, often employing faceless, androgynous figures that transmute into abstract expressionism. Figures and cultural motifs are progressively enmeshed in gestural fields of color, rendering them sometimes invisible. This dialogue between figuration and abstraction acts as a metaphor that reflects upon the detritus of war and nature that distorts our world, memory and physical boundaries and ultimately the dynamics of change. She is inspired by the human will to survive during suffering and dig within the detritus to begin again the replication and rejuvenation of life itself.
THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS HOUSTON ACQUIRES HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA'S "LEANING, HOLDING, PUSHING"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce the acquisition of Hector Dionicio Mendoza's Leaning, Holding, Pushing by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Congratulations to Hector and we extended our sincerest gratitude to the Latino Art Fund for making this possible. Mendoza's ancestral matrice forms the foundation for his ambitious and expansive multimedia practice, with its surprising explorations and unconventional use of natural, organic, synthetic and recycled materials, he explores themes of migration and the environment as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories.
EDRA SOTO NAMED ONE OF THE 2024 WINNERS OF THE JOYCE AWARDS
$500,000 in grants will support the creation of new works by five artists of color
July 30, 2024
The Joyce Foundation today announced the recipients of the 2024 Joyce Awards, marking the 20th anniversary of the foundation's annual awards program supporting artists of color in the creation of new, community-centered works with organizational partners across the Great Lakes region. Expanding each grant from $75,000 to $100,000, this year marks the Awards' largest total amount given to date, with $500,000 in grants to support five projects. The 2024 awardees deeply engage communities through co-creation and collaboration across disciplines to explore diverse cultural identities, invigorate public spaces, and foster healing and connection.
LOS ANGELES CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY HONORS KEN GONZALES-DAY WITH THE JEDI AWARD
Each year, LACP’s community comes together to celebrate and honor those whose work redefines photo-driven practice. This year’s event will bring the photographic and creative communities together for the awards presentation, including an exhibition launch with works by the honorees, followed by a reception
This year’s JEDI Award (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) will be given to Ken Gonzales-Day, a celebrated artist and scholar, whose impact stretches beyond the space of the photographic image, to include advocacy work with municipal agencies, to public art, walking tours and curatorial projects, all uplifting and focusing on Chicanx and queer bodies in his work.
JUNE EDMONDS PORTRAIT OF GRANT D. VENERABLE UNVEILED AT CALTECH
The portrait stands in the front lobby of Venerable House, named in 2021 in his honor, and embodies the enduring legacy of Caltech's first Black undergraduate.
June 19, 2024
Edmonds took a biographical approach to the portrait, which features landmarks and elements from throughout her subject's life. It includes the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company Building where Venerable worked and met his wife, Thelma Scott; the McAlpern Hotel he owned and managed; the family's Chandler car; and gears symbolizing the chalkboard eraser manufacturing plant Venerable would later own and manage.
KEN GONZALES-DAY ANNOUNCED AS A 2025 QUEER ARTS MENTOR
QUEER | ART | MENTORSHIP supports a year-long exchange between emerging and established artists in four different creative fields: Film, Literature, Performance, and Visual Art.
June 18, 2024
QUEER | ART | MENTORSHIP was founded to develop an intergenerational and interdisciplinary network of support and shared knowledge for LGBTQ+ artists. The program nurtures exchange between artists at all levels of their careers, working against a social separation between generations and disciplines.
JOHN VALADEZ AWARDED THE 2024 LATINX ARTIST FELLOWSHIP
Fifteen artists living and working across the United States and in Puerto Rico have been awarded the 2024 Latinx Artist Fellowships by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum.
June 18, 2024
The USLAF, a non-profit organization formed in 2015 to address the underrepresentation and underfunding of Latinx art. As part of the year-long Latinx Artist Fellowship program, each artist receives $50,000 in unrestricted funding to support their creative work, as well as opportunities to participate in public programs co-hosted by USLAF.
SOLMI: SHIP OF FOOLS
Concurrent with the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
April 18, 2024
Examining ideas of power and contemporary culture, SOLMI – Ship of Fools opens April 18, 2024 in Venice, Italy, concurrent with the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition spotlights new and recent video works, large-scale mixed media paintings, pastel drawings, ceramics, oleographic sculpture, and a virtual reality experience, culminating in a “total work” of art, choreographed by Solmi.
VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE: DR. ANITA BATEMAN, JUNE EDMONDS, YRNEH GABON, AND CCH POUNDER IN CONVERSATION
March 29, 2024
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles invites you to a virtual roundtable with Dr. Anita Bateman, June Edmonds, Yrneh Gabon, and CCH Pounder on Friday, March 29 at 1pm PT.
Join us for a conversation between Curator and Art Historian, Dr. Anita Bateman, artists June Edmonds and Yrneh Gabon, and actress and art patron, CCH Pounder about the themes, influences, and works present in our current exhibitions, "Meditation on African Resilience" by June Edmonds and "Spirit Leads Me" Yrneh Gabon.
PHUNG HUYNH RECEIVES 2024 MARCIANO ART FOUNDATION ARTADIA AWARD
March 19, 2024
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce Phung Huynh as a recipient of the 2024 Los Angeles Artadia Awards. Since its inception in 1999, Artadia has steadfastly championed emerging talents, leaving an indelible mark on the cultural landscape. Over the past 25 years, Artadia has been a catalyst for artistic innovation, providing crucial financial support, mentorship, and recognition to countless artists who have gone on to shape the culture of contemporary art. In its 25th year, Artadia is thrilled to continue doing what it does best – providing impact that not only includes financial assistance, while also cultivating a community that values artistic expression and champions the next generation of visionaries.
MORE THAN 40 GALLERIES THROUGHOUT GREATER LOS ANGELES JOIN THE PARTICIPATING GALLERY PROGRAM FOR PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE
Getty today announced that more than 40 art galleries in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California have joined the Participating Gallery Program of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the expansive collaborative event that will begin on September 15, 2024. In this third edition of PST ART—formerly known as Pacific Standard Time—dozens of museums, scientific institutions, and performing arts organizations will offer a multidisciplinary and multifaceted exploration of the intersections of art and science. Their exhibitions and programs, on view over the course of five months, will be amplified by the presentations of the galleries in this third iteration of PST ART’s Participating Gallery Program.
KEN GONZALES-DAY AWARDED 2024 ART JOURNAL AWARD AT NATIONAL COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Ken Gonzales-Day as the 2024 awardee of the Art Journal Award for his essay "Race, Whiteness, and Absence in Studio Practice," 2023.
"HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA: BUSCANDO FUTURO / LOOKING FOR A FUTURE" EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH
February 10, 2024
HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA: Buscando Futuro / Looking For A Future exhibition walkthrough will be held on Saturday, February 10, at 2pm PST.
Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s work materializes oral histories, ancient wisdom, familial parables, and personal and communal experiences to engage the many myths and realities of migration. Combining an array of sculptural forms and materials—including assemblage, cast, and hand-sculpted techniques, along with found, salvaged and industrial materials, his works are informed and guided by his own personal experiences and the realities and politics of the U.S./Mexico border. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, it ignites our consciousness with narratives that embrace magical realism and Latinx/e futurism while exploring themes of migration and the environment, spirituality, as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories that expand upon a new latinidad.
"GRISELDA ROSAS: DONDE PASÓ ANTES (WHERE IT HAPPENED BEFORE)" EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH
February 10, 2024
GRISELDA ROSAS: Donde Pasó Antes (Where It Happened Before) exhibition walkthrough will be held on Saturday, February 10, at 2pm PST.
Informed by her fluid experiences with the Mexico and US border and life between Tijuana and San Diego, Griselda Rosas deconstructs the ambiguities of identity and place, learned, and generationally passed subjugation, and the legacies of colonization and conflict. She often focuses on the pre-colonial and post-colonial war scenes and the introduction of Catholicism to Indigenous customs in the Americas as part of the Spanish colonial agenda. Rosas examines these histories alongside her roles as an educator and single mother, frequently collaborating with her young son to produce works that pulsate with the energy of an uninhibited child’s eye and hand.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE TO PARTICIPATE IN 2024 BORDER BIENNIAL / BIENAL FRONTERIZA 2024
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite will participate in the 2024 Border Biennial / Bienal Fronteriza 2024 at the El Paso Museum of Art. The 2024 Border Biennial / Bienal Fronteriza 2024 focuses on the unique identity of the borderland, which includes a diversity of experiences. The exhibition explores how artists define the region and what it means to them. Works on display speak to how artists in the borderland experience history, gender, culture, race, sexuality, food, environment, and politics. While most focus on the United States / Mexico border, the exhibition does provides an opportunity to reflect on a broader definition of borders and their conditions worldwide. On view from December 15, 2023 - April 14, 2024.
O’MELVENY & MYERS LLP, LOS ANGELES ACQUIRES EDRA SOTO’S "LET LOVE WIN", 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Edra Soto’s monumental sculptural installation, Let Love Win, by the esteemed Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Soto created Let Love Win in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and as her personal stand in the social justice movement and Black Lives Matter. The work spans more than 20 feet and consists of over four hundred portraits of victims of police brutality that have been individually embossed into soft metal, resembling a contemporary version of a religious votive or milagro. Our sincere thanks to Elise Barclay, curator of the collection.
PUBLIC ART DIALOGUE AWARDS EDRA SOTO THE 2024 PAD FOUNDERS AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce that Edra Soto has been awarded the 2024 PAD Founders Award for achievement in the field of public art. Public Art Dialogue (PAD) is an organization devoted to public art. Often manifested in representational form, Edra Soto’s work walks the line between visual arts, social practice, immersive installations, and architectural interventions. She aims to challenge the boundaries between audience, artist and the work itself, prompting viewers to reconsider the nature of urban space, cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility. Soto’s upbringing and relationships with communities in Puerto Rico and the US informs her artistic practice.
THE CROCKER ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA'S "FAMILIA UNIVERSAL/ UNIVERSAL FAMILY"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Hector Dionicio Mendoza's Familia Universal/ Universal Family by the Crocker Art Museum. Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s works are informed and guided by his own personal experiences and the realities and politics of the U.S./Mexico border. Familia Universal (Universal Family) commemorates the journey that many migrant families have made and continue to make in order to start a new life in the U.S. The gallery extends its most sincere appreciation to Scott Shields, curator at the Crocker Museum, and board member Simon K. Chiu for his generous support.
ALTAMED ART COLLECTION ACQUIRES KEN GONZALES-DAY'S "SECOND GARROTE", 2014-2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Ken Gonzales-Day's Photograph, Second Garrote, 2014-2023. Part of his Searching for California's Hang Trees series, which grew out the artist’s research into the history of lynching in the West, it was created to bring attention to the invisible history of racial violence in rural California. The AltaMed Art Collection in Los Angeles, one of the largest Chicano art collections in the world. Our sincere thanks to Susana Smith Bautista, chief curator of the AltaMed Art Collection.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES ACQUIRES SHERIN GUIRGUIS' "UNTITLED (BENNU)"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Sherin Guirguis' Untitled (Bennu). Untitled (Bennu) is part of a series of works inspired by Farīd al-Dīn Aṭṭār’s 12th-century Sufi poem, The Conference of the Birds (Manṭeq al-ṭayr). The artist channels her ancestors, personal experiences, and agency as a woman to draw parallels between Aṭṭār’s story of self-awareness and kinship, and the mythologies of ancient Egypt’s sacred birds. Guirguis transforms designs of centuries-old Egyptian dovecotes (giant earthen towers built to house pigeons) into abstracted avian forms, bringing to light overlooked and silenced voices. The gallery extends its sincere gratitude to Anna Katz, curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Drawings and Photography Committee for its generous contribution.
CARLA JAY HARRIS AWARDEE OF THE ROBINSON PARK RECREATION CENTER PUBLIC ART PROJECT
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Carla Jay Harris as an awardee of the Robinson Park Recreation Center Public Art Project. Harris i. one of two artist chosen whom the city has engaged to conduct extensive research and community engagement through collaboration with Northwest Pasadena residents and stakeholders, and develop specific content and themes which will serve as the basis for the public art concept at the Center.
TRISTRAM LANSDOWNE ANNOUNCED AS A ROSWELL ARTIST IN RESIDENCE RECIPIENT
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Tristram Lansdowne as an awardee the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. Well known by visual artists as the "Gift of Time", the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program was established in 1967 to provide gifted studio-based visual artists with the unique opportunity to concentrate on their work in a supportive, collegial environment for an entire year. This gift of time allows artists to work without distraction in an effort to break new ground and focus on individual goals. The Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program’s interest is in strengthening the vitality of the visual art in New Mexico and has been a catalyst in broadening community understanding of contemporary art for over fifty years.
VIAN SORA FEATURED IN NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Vian Sora has been featured in New American Paintings, issue South #166. First published in 1993, New American Paintings is bimonthly juried exhibition in print. Each regionally-focused edition features the work of forty painters. Working with curators from the nation’s top museums, we review the work of more than five thousand artists a year and publish the best we find.
ARTIST TALK: FACE TO FACE IN CONVERSATION, KEN GONZALES-DAY & ERIKA HIRUGAMI
January 18, 2023
Come join for a conversation at 5 pm with featured artist Ken Gonzales-Day and Erika Hirugami, Founder & CEO of Curator Love, Co-Founder of the UNDOC+Collective and professor at Claremont Graduate University. They will discuss their respective projects and the past, present, and future of cultural representation. More conversation and refreshments to follow the presentation.
OZ ART NWA ACQUIRES HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA'S SCULPTURE "COYOTA/E", 2022
December 20, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles congratulates Hector Dionicio Mendoza on the acquisition of "Coyota/e", 2022, by OZ Art NWA in Bentonville, AR. We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to Olivia Walton, co-founder and chair of OZ Art NWA, the board of the foundation, along with Chad Alligood, independent curator and art historian.
PÉREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI (PAMM) ACQUIRES EVITA TEZENO'S PAINTING "THE RHYTHM OF STREET LIFE", 2023
December 20, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the Pérez Art Museum's acquisition of Evita Tezeno's collage-painting, "The Rhythm of Street Life", 2023. Our heartfelt congratulations to Evita and our most sincere appreciation to Maritza Lacayo, Assistant Curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the PAMM curatorial team, and PAMM's Collectors Council.
BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART (BMA) ACQUIRES MIMI SMITH'S SEMINAL SCULPTURE "DON'T TURN BACK", 1985
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the Baltimore Art Museum's acquisition of Mimi Smith's sculpture "Don't Turn Back", 1985. Our congratulations to Mimi Smith and our sincere appreciation to Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Head, Department of Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art; Asma Naeem, The Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director; the curatorial team, as well as the Contemporary Accessions Committee and the Board of Trustees.
LIA HALLORAN AND KIP THORNE TALK AND BOOK SIGNING WITH JESSE DAMIANI
December 16, 2023
In conjunction with her current solo exhibition, Warped Side, Lia Halloran and Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne are joined by curator and writer Jesse Damiani to discuss their 13-year collaborative odyssey which resulted in The Warped Side of Our Universe — An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. The book, published by Norton/Liveright and released this past October, features Thorne’s poetry and Halloran’s original art to create a new type of book that is a “shape-shifting pageant of art, science, and poetry” and doubles as a vehicle for communicating major scientific breakthroughs of our time.
The paintings presented in this exhibition are a cumulation of the friendship and collaboration between Halloran and Thorne to mobilize science, art, and poetry to explore aspects of the universe that many people are curious about: black holes, wormholes, and other strange phenomena.
ARTIST TALK: SHERIN GUIRGUIS AND KRIS KURAMITSU IN CONVERSATION
December 16, 2023
Join Sherin Guirguis and Kris Kuramitsu, Senior Curator at Large at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, for an in-depth exploration of Sherin's practice and her current solo exhibition, A’aru // Field of Reeds: Gathering.
Using site, text, and recovered histories as the core of each series, Egyptian-American artist Sherin Guirguis develops projects that engage audiences in a dialogue about power, agency, and social transformation. Her research-based practice aims to make the often invisible work of historically under-recognized women visible once more, engaging both formal and social concerns by juxtaposing the reductive Western language of minimalist aesthetics with that of Eastern ornamentation. Inspired by the epic Sufi poem "The Conference of the Birds," her solo exhibition presents a new series of mixed media paintings combining gem-toned mineral pigments and 24k gold on meticulously hand-cut paper.
EDRA SOTO ANNOUNCED AS A JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER 2024 ARTS/INDUSTRY RESIDENT
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Edra Soto as a 2024 recipient of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center 2024 Arts/Industry Residency program for their 50 year anniversary. Hundreds of artists have benefited from the celebrated Arts/Industry residency program since its beginning in 1974. Arts/Industry offers artists the time and space to focus on the creation of new work and a unique location for their studios. Artists-in-residence work at the Kohler Co. factory in the Pottery and/or Foundry. Participants are exposed to a body of technical knowledge that enables and encourages them to explore new ways of thinking and working.
DON’T MISS THESE 5 GALLERIES MAKING THEIR ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH DEBUTS
December 8, 2023
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.
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2024 IS BIGGER THAN EVER, WITH THE ADDITION OF 5 CURATORS FOR THE FILM AND PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
December 6, 2023
Co-organizers Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles select fellow filmmakers, artists, and curators to help develop the unprecedented Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, opening March 20, 2024. The Whitney Museum of American Art announces the addition of five curators to help lead the film and performance program for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Co-organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli have invited Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Taja Cheek, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker to join them in developing a Biennial that goes beyond the Museum’s traditional in-gallery presentation to showcase the latest creativity and innovation in art, film, performance, and sound.
LACMA ACQUIRES KEN GONZALES-DAY'S "RUN UP" AND ANTI-LYNCHING DRAWING
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's acquisition of two works by Ken Gonzales-Day: Run Up, 2002, a photograph from the Searching for California's Hang Trees series, and Untitled (After Hale Woodruff, Giddap, 1935), 2021, from the Anti-Lynching Drawings (with Figures Removed) series.
The gallery extends its most sincere thanks to Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator of the Wallace Annenberg Photography Department, and the LACMA Development team for helping to make this acquisition possible, along with Paula Ely and Cesar Rueda for their generous contribution.
3ARTS ANNOUNCES 2023 NEXT LEVEL AWARDS
3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, announced the recipients of its 3Arts Next Level Awards—$50,000 unrestricted cash awards given to past 3Arts awardees—during the festive 3Arts Awards Celebration held last night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. While 3Arts has in the past awarded three Next Level grants, the roster this year was expanded to include two additional awards for teaching artists; at $50,000, this is the largest no-strings-attached cash award for teaching artists in the world. 2023 Next Level recipients are teaching artists Miguel “Kane One” Aguilar and Regin Igloria and visual artists Dianna Frid, Edra Soto, and Dorian Sylvain in recognition of their outstanding work in the arts and in neighborhoods across Chicago.
PUBLIC ART FUND’S ANNOUNCES 2024 EXHIBITION PROGRAM, INCLUDING "EDRA SOTO: GRAFT"
Public Art Fund will debut Edra Soto’s new interactive metal and terrazzo sculptural works at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. The artist’s ongoing series, Graft, integrates architectural intervention and social practice to investigate the relationships between Puerto Rican cultural memory, its African and Black heritage, and the threads of colonial historical lineage in the United States.
Her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto’s Public Art Fund project marks the next iteration of her Graft series. Soto will continue her practice of using rejas, patterned iron-wrought screens ubiquitous in post-war Puerto Rican architecture, to illustrate the complex relationship between historical memory and community involvement. A stand-alone steel lattice-work screen will stretch across Doris C. Freedman Plaza, accompanied by domino tables and chairs that invite audiences to sit down for a game, clarifying Soto’s call for a public forum.
THE SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES VIAN SORA'S "DILMUN"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's acquisition of Vian Sora's painting Dilmun. Our hearty congratulations to Vian Sora on having her second work enter the permanent collection. The gallery also extends its most sincere appreciation to James Gleeson, PhD, Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Collections Committee and the SBMA Board of Trustees.
EDRA SOTO ANNOUNCED AS CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL PARTICIPATING ARTIST
This is a Rehearsal–the title of CAB 5–explores how contemporary environmental, political, and economic issues are shared across national boundaries but are addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation. CAB 5 builds on and expands Floating Museum’s ongoing work, including site-responsive art and design projects and public programs, to explore divergent interpretations of infrastructure, history, and the role of aesthetics as a mode for expanding how we frame the relationship between our environments and ourselves. Works will be on view from November 01, 2023–February 11, 2024.
YRNEH GABON AWARDED MUSEUM OF BLACK CIVILIZATION ARTS RESIDENCY
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Yrneh Gabon has been awarded the 2024 Arts Residency and Black History, at the Museum of Black Civilization, Dakar, Senegal. Gabon will be living and working in Dakar, Senegal for the duration of his residency.
HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY AND THE ASTRONOMICAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PLATE COLLECTION (HARVARD PLATE STACKS) ACQUIRE LIA HALLORAN
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of six unique cyanotypes by Lia Halloran, by the Harvard College Observatory and the Astronomical Photographic Plate Collection (Harvard Plate Stacks).
The gallery congratulates Lia Halloran on having her work enter the collections of these esteemed institutions and extends its sincere appreciation to Thom Burns, Curator of Astronomical Photographs, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is a research arm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, in Cambridge, MA.
THE MYTH OF NORMAL A CELEBRATION OF AUTHENTIC EXPRESSION
The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression looks at societal norms that have been codified over our collective past. Focusing on the achievements of MassArt’s alumni, this exhibition is guest-curated by Mari Spirito ’92, Executive Director of Protocinema, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
YRNEH GABON AWARDED 2023-2024 FULBRIGHT RESEARCH AND ARTS FELLOW
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Yrneh Gabon has been awarded the 2023-2024 Fulbright Research and Arts Fellow and heading to Botswana, Southern Africa, hosted by the Okavango research institute (ORI) at the University of Botswana. As a research Scholar, Gabon will explore the ecology of the Makgadikgadi Pans (geomorphologically playas) and the Okavango Delta, using qualitative research methods to answer the questions: what are the ecological links between the Okavango Basin and the Makgadikgadi Salt Pond, and what are the ecological and sociological shifts that have taken place over time? Additionally, investigating the ecological balance between plants and animals at the Makgadikgadi Pans and the freshwater Okavango basin.
ART BASEL REVEALS 277 PREMIER INTERNATIONAL GALLERIES FOR ITS AMERCIAS FAIR
September 12, 2023
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.
EDRA SOTO AWARDED U.S. LATINX ART FORUM ARTIST FELLOWSHIP
Our country’s Latinx artists—creatives of Latin American or Caribbean descent who live and work in the US—have made significant and vital contributions to American culture. Yet these artists have lacked visibility and received little of the philanthropic or institutional support necessary to secure their place in the story of American art. Designed to address this systemic and longstanding lack of support, and now in its third year, the Latinx Artist Fellowship is awarding $50,000 each to a multigenerational cohort of 15 Latinx visual artists each year for an initial commitment of five years. Administered by the US Latinx Art Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts and supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, this award is the first significant prize of its kind and celebrates the plurality and diversity of Latinx artists and aesthetics.
THE ALFRED R. SHANDS III AND MARY N. SHANDS MASTER SERIES: VIAN SORA
August 13, 2023
The gallery is pleased to announce that Vian Sora will be in conversation with Contemporary Curator Tyler Blackwell at the Speed Art Museum as a part of their The Alfred R. Shands III and Mary N. Shands Masters Series. The event will take place on August 13, 2023, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm EST.
ARTISTS IN DIALOGUE: DELITA MARTIN & EVITA TEZENO
August 10, 2023
The gallery is pleased to announce that Evita Tezeno will be in conversation with Delita Martin at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as a part of their Artists in Dialogue Series. The event will take place on August 10, 2023, 6:30 to 7:30 pm CST. Contemporary artists Delita Martin and Evita Tezeno talk about their backgrounds and the unifying themes in their work.
THE FIGGE ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES PAINTING BY EVITA TEZENO
August 1, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce the acquisition of Evita Tezeno's Standing on the Promises, 2022 by the Figge Art Museum. The gallery extends its most sincere thanks to Andrew Wallace, Director of Collections and Exhibitions; The Board of Trustees' Acquisition Committee; and Dr. Randy Lewis, Davenport, IA.
Standing on the Promises takes its inspiration from one of Tezeno's favorite gospel hymns, “Standing on the Promises of God,” written by Russell Kelso Carter in 1886.
THE SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES VIAN SORA'S FOREST REMAINS, I
July 5, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Vian Sora's painting Forest Remains, I, by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The gallery offers its deep appreciation to James Glisson, PhD, Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Eik Kahng, Registrar; and Nicolas Mutton, Chair, Basil Alkazzi, who underwrote the acquisition, and the entire SBMA Board of Trustees.
Forest Remains, I, further reflects upon the distortion and confusion that immigrants face when attempting to resettle, seeking to find clarity amongst the metaphorical forests they journey through.
THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES VIAN SORA'S LAST SOUND
July 5, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Vian Sora's painting Last Sound, by the Baltimore Museum of Art. The gallery extends its most sincere gratitude to Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Head, Department of Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art; Asma Naeem, The Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director and Chief Curator; Cynthia Hodge-Thorne, Meyerhoff-Becker Curatorial Fellow; and Helene Grabow, Senior Collections Development Manager; Shelby Merritt, Associate Registrar; as well as the Contemporary Accessions Committee and the Board of Trustees.
Last Sound, a large mixed media painting on canvas, is a response to the displacement and oppression that migrants and immigrants confront — the hardships endured, their constant refusal, lost identity, and the last familiar sound that keeps resonating in their life.
THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO ACQUIRES KEN GONZALES DAY'S ERASED LYNCHINGS I, 2006
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce The Art Institute of Chicago's accession of Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynchings I, 2006, into the permanent collection. The Erased Lynchings series (2002-ongoing) began with a focus on the history of lynching in California and has brought new scholarship and awareness to the history of lynching nationwide. The research specifically expanded the number of known cases in California, and the work now includes the lynching of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and Jews, in the American West and nationwide.
MONTALVO ARTS CENTER ANNOUNCES PHUNG HUYNH AS A 2023 LUCAS ARTIST FELLOW
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Phung Huynh as a 2023 Montavlo Arts Center artist fellow. Of 370 applicants, 65 artists—spanning careers from emerging to established—were awarded Lucas Artists Fellowships: 30 in the field of visual arts, 19 in literary arts, and 16 in music/composition and performing arts.
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK ACQUIRES KEN GONZALES-DAY'S THE WONDER GAZE (ST. JAMES PARK)
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce the Museum of Modern Art's accession of The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park), 2006, by Ken Gonzales-Day, into the permanent collection. The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park) is one of the most recognized photographic works by Ken Gonzales-Day. It depicts the lynching of Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes in St. James Park, San Jose, CA, in 1933. It is part of the Erased Lynchings series (2002-ongoing), which began with a focus on the history of lynching in California and has brought new scholarship and awareness to the history of lynching nationwide.
THE DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES PHUNG HUYNH'S ARN CHORN-POND
Luis De Jesus is proud to announce the Museum of Modern Art's accession of Arn Chorn-Pond, 2023, by Phung Huynh, into the permanent collection. This graphite drawing on a pink donut box depicts Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian musician, human rights activist, and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime. He is an advocate for the healing and transformative power of the arts, especially music. Arn Chorn-Pond is one of nine works in Huynh's sold out series, From the Donut Box, informed by her experience as a refugee of Cambodian and Chinese descent from vietnam.
US LATINX ART FORUM ANNOUNCES NEW LATINX ARTIST FELLOWS
The US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) today announced the newest cohort of the Latinx Artist Fellowship. In its third year, the fellowship annually recognizes 15 of the most compelling Latinx visual artists working in the United States today and aims to address a systemic lack of support, visibility, and patronage of Latinx visual artists—individuals of Latin American or Caribbean descent, born or long-living in the United States.
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART'S ACQUIRES GRAFT, 2022, BY EDRA SOTO
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce the Whitney Museum of American Art's acquisition of GRAFT, 2022, by Edra Soto. GRAFT was featured in the museum's landmark exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," organized by the DeMartini Family Senior Curator, Marcela Guerrero. The gallery wishes to thank the museum and everyone who made this acquisition possible.
KARLA DIAZ AWARDED THE DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART ACQUISITION PRIZE
April 20, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce that Karla Diaz has been awarded the Dallas Museum of Art Acquisition Prize for her watercolor and ink painting Torera (Bullfighter), 2023. We are honored to be the beneficiary of this purchase prize which is made possible by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program.
EVITA TEZENO NAMED A FELLOW OF THE 2023 JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that Dallas-based artist Evita Tezeno has been named a 2023 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her fellowship is supported in part by the Joel Conarroe Fund, named for the former President of the Foundation who was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1977.
CAROLYN CAMPAGNA KLEEFELD CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES JUNE EDMONDS' "SILENCE"
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of June Edmond's Silence. June Edmonds’s Flag series explores the American flag as a malleable symbol of ideals and promises, and creates space for new symbols of identity and inclusivity. The idea for the series was prompted by several personal experiences she had involving the American and Confederate flags, and the rise of the Far Right during the 2016 presidential election. Silence (and a smaller version titled Innocence) is the only painting in the series that doesn’t follow the classic configuration of the Stars and Stripes. Instead, the composition of Silence bears a striking resemblance to the Confederate banner. Edmond's states: "Silence — the telling of lies, conscious and unconscious ignorance, and the benefit of presumed innocence — is what I am addressing in this flag painting."
We extend our sincere gratitude to Paul Baker Prindle, director of the Museum.
PHÙNG HUYNH NAMED 2023 HONOREE FOR WOMEN OF IMPACT AWARDS IN THE ARTS
March 16, 2023
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.
JUNE EDMONDS AWARDED MACDOWELL SPRING-SUMMER FELLOWSHIP
February 14, 2023
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.
HECTOR DIONICIO MENDOZA AWARDED LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY FOUNDATION 2022 BIENNIAL GRANT
January 28, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Hector Dionicio Mendoza as a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2022 Biennial Grant.
Twenty artists working in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, craft, and new media are awarded $20,000 USD each in unrestricted grants. Established in 1918 by Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of Tiffany & Company, the Foundation remains one of the largest single sources of monetary grants to artists working in America today.
EDRA SOTO AWRADED LUCAS ARTISTS FELLOW AT THE MONTALVO ARTS CENTER
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce Edra Soto's upcoming Lucas Artists Fellow Residency at the Montalvo Arts Center. The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program (LAP) is a creative incubator and cultural producer dedicated to investing in artists and their work. We support visual artists, composers, writers, performers, scholars, and others from around the world to undertake critical investigations of contemporary issues, and to create and present new and experimental works.
ZACKARY DRUCKER WINNER OF 2023 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL U.S. DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL JURY AWARD: CLARITY OF VISION FOR FILM "THE STROLL"
January 28, 2023
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).
EDRA SOTO WINNER OF 2022 REE KANEKO AWARD
January 26, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that gallery artist Edra Soto has been awarded the Bemis Center's 2022 Ree Kaneko Award. This annual award is bestowed to artists that have participated in Bemis's exhibition or residency programs and is named in honor of Ree Kaneko, Bemis Center co-founder, first Executive Director, and Board Member Emerita.
The Bemis Center's Ree Kaneko Award was created to award $25,000 unrestricted, by nomination to an alum of the program to provide financial support to increase the capacity of an artists practice. There will be a conversation held with Edra Soto: March 9, 6–7pm
FOUR WORKS BY VIAN SORA ACQUIRED BY THE GRINNELL COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART, GRINNELL, IOWA
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, Iowa recently acquired four works by artist Vian Sora. The works included Eden I,2022, Eden II, 2022, River Bed, 2022, and Thirst, 2021. Sora's work utilizes a synthesis of styles and iconography taken from both her native, modern and ancient Iraq and adopted cultures, along with a variety of techniques, Vian Sora’s mixed media paintings embody imagery that suggests the struggle of the individual in the face of personal and social upheaval, often employing androgynous figures that transmute into expressionist abstraction.
GABRIEL SANCHEZ FEATURED ON COVER OF NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS ARTIST OF THE WEST COMPETITION
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Gabriel Sanchez has been featured on the cover of New American Paintings Artist of the West Competition. Sanchez's recent paintings explore how proximity and union, ever-present aspects of Cuban society, inform notions of solitude and intimacy. Sanchez’s works focus on Cuban current events and politics as seen through the lens of portraiture.
KEN GONZALES-DAY'S "THE WONDER GAZE (ST. JAMES PARK)" ACQUIRED BY THE BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, IL
December 9, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park) was recently acquired by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston. The Wonder Gaze (St. James Park) is one work from Ken Gonzales-Day's ongoing Erased Lynchings series which he began in 2002. The series seeks to reveal that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed, and that in California, the majority of lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; and that more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity. It is Gonzales-Day’s continual engagement with history and his interest in peeling back the layers that makes his work so powerful and continuously relevant.
ANTONIA WRIGHT & RUBEN MILLARES WIN $25,000 JUROR’S CHOICE AWARD FOR LARGEST-EVER NO VACANCY, MIAMI BEACH; MARITZA CANECA WINS $10,000 GMCVB’S PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD
December 8, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Antonia Wright & Ruben Millares have been awarded the Juror's Choice Award for the 2022 edition of No Vacancy. The duo have been awarded a prize of $25,000 for their presentation of Patria y Cida at the Faena Hotel Miami Beach. No Vacancy is a juried art competition that celebrates artists, provokes critical discourse, and invites the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as destination art spaces. Artists were drawn from a call for submissions and selected by representatives from the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places Committee, Cultural Arts Council (CAC) and MBVCA. For the second edition of No Vacancy, $35,000 in prizes were awarded, including the $10,000 Public Prize by the GMCVB and the $25,000 Juror Prize awarded by a panel of art experts.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE AWARDED A SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY COMMISSION TO CREATE A PORTRAIT OF 2022 HONOREE DR. ANTHONY S. FAUCI
November 10, 2022 - October 22, 2023
The gallery is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite has been chosen to commisson a portrait of public health expert Anthony S. Fauci for Portrait of a Nation 2022 Honoree to be exhibited in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Crosthwaite’s portrait will be debuted alongside new commissions by Kenturah Davis, David Hockney, Kadir Nelson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Robert Pruitt, and Ruven Afanador. Crosthwaite's innovative piece presents a stop-motion animated piece of Dr. Fauci and will be accompanied by seven drawings.
LAURA KARETZKY SELECTED AS A FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BENNETT PRIZE AND RISING VOICES 3 EXHIBITION
November 29, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud ot announce that Laura Karetzky is a Finalist for the 2023 Bennett Prize and Rising Voices 3 exhibition. The Bennett Prize was founded by art collectors, curators, and philanthropists Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt. It seeks to propel the careers of women figurative realist painters who have not yet realized full professional recognition, thereby empowering new artists as well as those who have painted for many years. As a finalist, Karetzky will be in consideration for the $50,000 Bennett Prize and the runner up prize of $10,000. The opening of the exhibition and announcement of the winner of the Bennett Prize will take place at the Muskegon Museum of Art on May 18, 2023, in Muskegon, MI.
PHUNG HUYNH AWARDED 2022 CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP FOR VISUAL ARTIST FELLOWS
August 31, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that Phung Huynh has been awarded a 2022 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artist Fellows. The CCF fellowships are one of the most "prestigious arts fellowships in the region, which helps artists build successful, sustainable careers that support the thriving Los Angeles arts scene."
JUNE EDMONDS AWARDED 2022 CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP FOR VISUAL ARTIST FELLOWS
August 31, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that June Edmonds has been awarded a 2022 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artist Fellows. The CCF fellowships are one of the most "prestigious arts fellowships in the region, which helps artists build successful, sustainable careers that support the thriving Los Angeles arts scene."
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN "AT HOME: ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION" WITH LACMA CURATOR RITA GONZALEZ
PRESENTED BY THE YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
REGISTRATION REQUIRED | Wednesday, October 19, 2022 | 1:00-2:00 PM |
The gallery is pleased to announce Ken Gonzales-Day's participation in "At Home: Artists in Conversation" with Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Presented by the the Yale Center for British Art, at home: Artists in Conversation brings together curators and artists to discuss various artistic practices and insights into their work.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN "LYNCHING IN THE WEST: DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES WALKING TOUR"
PRESENTED BY BRIDGE PROJECTS
REGISTRATION REQUIRED | Saturday, October 29, 2022 | 10:00 – 11:30 AM
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will lead a walking tour around historical sites in downtown Los Angeles to that expands on the history of lynching in California. Organized by Bridge Projects, the in person event will take place on Saturday, October 29, 2022 beginning at Union Station at 10 AM. The walking tour will revisit places and events made infamous in the first decades of Los Angeles – a period that was colored by great social, economic, and cultural unrest.
LIA HALLORAN TO PARTICIPATE IN "COSMIC EXPLORATIONS: AT THE INTERSECTION OF SCIENCE, SPACE, ART, AND CULTURE:" THE 11TH CONFERENCE ON THE INSPIRATION OF ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, PASADENA, CA
REGISTRATION REQUIRED | Friday, September 23, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran will be speaking with Kip Thorne in a discussion, "Poetry & Painting: The Warped Side of our Universe" on Friday September 23, 2022. The talk will run from 8:30-9:15 AM and is part of the 11th Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena Programming.
GALLERY WEEKEND LOS ANGELES: JOHN BROOKS + JONATHAN VANDYKE
PRESENTED BY LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
Saturday, July 30 at 1:00 PM + 4:00 PM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to participate in the second edition of Gallery Weekend Los Angeles, presented by the Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA) from July 27-30, 2022. In conjunction with their current solo exhibitions, the gallery will present John Brooks and Jonathan VanDyke in back to back readings on Saturday, July 30th as part of readings on Saturday, July 30th as part of our Gallery Weekend LA programme. We will begin with John Brooks at 1pm followed immediately by Jonathan Van Dyke. A second presentation will be held at 4pm.
LAURA KRIFKA ARTIST TALK AND EXHIBITION WALK-THROUGH
RSVP REQUIRED
Saturday, May 14, 2022 at 2:00 PM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to invite you to an artist talk and exhibition walk-through with Laura Krifka on Saturday, May 14th, at 2:00 p.m. This talk is presented in conjunction with "Still Point," the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view through May 28, 2022. This is an in person event. RSVP: gallery@luisdejesus.com.
LIA HALLORAN INSTALLATION AT THE EXPLORATORIUM
DOUBLE HORIZON
May 13 – August 7, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran's Double Horizon will be featured at the Exploratorium. Double Horizon is an immersive three-screen video installation that envelopes the viewer in artist Lia Halloran’s portrait of Los Angeles. The installation will be on view through August 7, 2022.
THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION ACQUIRES FEDERICO SOLMI'S "THE CHARMING STATESMAN"
April 20, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce that Federico Solmi's painting titled The Chaming Statesman (2019) has been acquired by the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. The drawing will be exhibition among other recent acquisitions until May 31st.
JUNE EDMONDS AWARDED 2022 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP
April 8, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that June Edmonds has been awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts."
LAURA KARETZKY SELECTED AS A FINALIST IN THE 2022 OUTWIN BOOCHEVER PORTRAIT COMPETITION
"TOAST" WILL BE ON VIEW IN THE EXHIBITION THE OUTWIN 2022: AMERICAN PORTRAITURE TODAY AT THE SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
April 30 - February 26, 2023
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Laura Karetzky is a finalist in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition celebrates excellence in the art of portraiture. The forty-two portraits were selected through an open call that garnered more than 2,700 entries from artists working across the United States and Puerto Rico. The portraits will be on view at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery through February 26, 2023.
LIA HALLORAN TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
SEEING STARS
April 27 – June 30, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran will be participating in Seeing Stars, a group exhibition at the University of Leeds' Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery. Guest curated by Hondartza Fraga, a visual artist living in Leeds, the exhibition shines a light on contemporary artists who use and challenge the newest technologies for space imaging in their art practice. The artists in this exhibition bring the human sense of wonder back into sharp focus – blurring the line between fact and fiction.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO GIVE LECTURE AT THE ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER
PRESENTED BY THE ANDERSON RANCH ARTS CENTER
Sunday, June 12 | 7:00 PM
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be giving a lecture at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado with guest faculty member Benjamin Timpson. This free in person event will take place on Sunday, June 12 from 7–8 PM. Registration required.
ANTONIA WRIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, NEW ORLEANS
#FAIL
March 12 – June 19, 2022
The gallery is pleased to announce that Antonia Wright will participate in the group show, #fail, at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. The multimedia group exhibition, presented by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans and Spinello Projects, brings together works by artists that expose the systemic failures facing our world. #fail explores a world in crisis and it is treated as social and poetic materials. Through a multidisciplinary presentation, the artists express existence as a failure worth narrating.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN "THE NARRATIVE ARC OF LATINX PHOTOGRAPHY" PANEL
PRESENTED BY APERTURE AND THE LUCAS MUSEUM OF NARRATIVE ART
Zoom | Thursday, February 24, 2022 | 7:00 PM ET
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be participating in the Aperture Conversations "The Narrative Arc of Latinx Photography." The event will begin with an introduction by Pilar Tompkins Rivas (guest editor of the “Latinx” issue of Aperture, and chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles) and will also feature artists Sofía Córdova and Perla de León moderated by professor and writer Jesse Alemán. The event will take place online via Zoom on Thursday February 24, 2022 at 7:00 pm ET.
RODRIGO VALENZUELA & KEN GONZALES-DAY ARTIST TALK
REFRESHMENTS SERVED | RSVP ENCOURAGED
Saturday, February 19, 2022 at 10:00 AM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles cordially invites you to attend a Frieze Los Angeles Special Event featuring back-to-back Artist Talks with Rodrigo Valenzuela and Ken Gonzales-Day, on Saturday, February 19th, from 10 to 11 AM. The talks will be held in person at the gallery in Downtown LA, and are presented in conjunction with the artists current solo exhibitions: Rodrigo Valenzuela: New Works for a Post-Worker's World and Ken Gonzales-Day: Another Land. Refreshments will be served. Free admission; reservations are not required, but encourage. Masks will be required for this indoor event.
CARLA JAY HARRIS TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE SPARTANBURG ART MUSEUM
BLACK ANATOMY
February 17 – June 30, 2022
The gallery is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris will participate in the group show, black anatomy, at the Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina. This dynamic exhibition features artists who bring intimate and charged bodies of work that represent their present-day voices while simultaneously keeping a toe dipped in the waters of their collective past experiences. Sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings illustrate their shared understanding of the Black experience in contemporary culture and reveal work that unfolds in tones of universal truths.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
A SITE OF STRUGGLE: AMERICAN ART AGAINST ANTI-BLACK VIOLENCE
January 26 – July 10, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be participating in a group exhibition, A Site of Struggle: American Art Against Anti-Black Violence, at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art. This exhibition explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100 + year period.
CARLA JAY HARRIS TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT LOS ANGELES UNION STATION
WE ARE...PORTRAITS OF METRO RIDERS BY LOCAL ARTISTS
January 1 – December 31, 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris is participating in a group show at Los Angeles Union Station presented by Metro Los Angeles. Celebrating the diversity of Los Angeles County and the community of transit riders, We Are…Portraits of Metro Riders by Local Artists is an exhibition that features portraits presented throughout the Metro system and online. Each rider portrait has a story that is personal and universal, intimate and immediate—a single story among the many stories of 840,000 daily riders on Metro, and each told by an artist with ties to neighborhoods served by Metro. This multi-site exhibition and series of events is presented by Metro Art in collaboration with Metro’s Office of Civil Rights, Racial Equity & Inclusion and Communications departments.
EDRA SOTO & JOEY LICO IN CONVERSATION AT LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
WINE & REFRESHMENTS | RSVP ENCOURAGED
Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 7:00 PM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to invite you to an exhibition walk-through and conversation between artist Edra Soto and curator Joey Lico in conjunction with EDRA SOTO: The Myth of Closure / El Mito del Cierre, on Wednesday, December 15 at 7:00 p.m. This is an in-person event. Reservations are not required, but encouraged.
JUNE EDMONDS SOLO EXHIBITION AT CAL POLY UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
November 17 - December 10, 2021
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be having a solo exhibition at Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo. The exhibition will take place from November 17 through December 10, 2021.
KEN GONZALES-DAY FEATURED IN UPCOMING LECTURE, "THE POETICS OF ART AND INTERVENTION"
PRESENTED BY THE GETTY
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be featured in an upcoming lecture with Getty curator LeRonn Brooks, Claudia Rankine, Monica Youn, and Jess Row. The event will take via webinar on November 17, 2021 from 5:00-6:00 p.m. PST / 2:00-3:00 p.m. ET.
CROCKER ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES JUNE EDMONDS "STILL SAYING HER NAME"
November 6, 2021
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce that June Edmonds' painting Still Saying Her Name, 2020, has been accessioned into the collection of the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, CA. We are grateful to Simon K. Chiu, Chair of the Collections and Acquisitions Committee, and Scott Shields, Associate Director and Chief Curator, for making this acquisition possible.
JUNE EDMONDS TO GIVE RUSSELL FOUNDATION LECTURE
PRESENTED BY UC SAN DIEGO VISUAL ARTS DEPARTMENT AND MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be giving a Russell Foundation Lecture presented by the UC San Diego Visual Arts Department and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The event will take place via webinar on October 27, 2021 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. PST / 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET.
LIA HALLORAN FEATURED IN DEPARTURES
"SPACE: A LETTER FROM DEPARTURES EXPLORING THIS MONTH'S THEME"
October 19, 2021
I THINK ABOUT SPACE, and my place in it, obsessively. As a 26-year-old non-white woman, I aim to take up space, as the mantra goes, yet bump against the barriers of a world and a mind socialized against that. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I’ve only ever known erratic stimulation from spaces: awe-inspiring one minute, horrifying the next. I now share space with someone I love. For many, it's an endlessly relatable experience in its contradictions, clothing-pile politics, and navigation. My side/your side. Please get away from me/please come closer. Who takes what call from where.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO GIVE ARTIST LECTURE ON "ERASED LYNCHINGS"
PRESENTED BY USC FISHER MUSEUM OF ART
Thursday, October 21, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be giving an artist lecture on his ongoing Erased Lynchings series at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. The event will take place on Thursday October 21, 2021 from 2:00pm to 3:00pm
ARTIST TALK: JUNE EDMONDS, CARLA JAY HARRIS & KARLA DIAZ AT LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
MODERATED BY SHANA NYS DAMBROT | RSVP REQUIRED
Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 11:00 AM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to invite you to an artist talk with June Edmonds, Carla Jay Harris, and Karla Diaz in conjunction with the artists' current solo exhibitions. The talk will be held on Saturday, October 23rd, from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm, followed by a Q&A. This is an in-person event. Seating is limited and reservations are required.
LIA HALLORAN SELECTED AS AN EXHIBITOR FOR THE LAX ART PROGRAM
LAX TERMINAL 1 | GATE 9 | POST-SECURITY
November 2021 – November 2022
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran has been selected to partipate in the LAX Art Program. The LAX Art Program presents up to 20 exhibitions a year in collaboration with our partner, the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs, to create vibrant public spaces at the airport.
JUNE EDMONDS 40 YEAR SURVEY AT LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY LABAND ART GALLERY
FULL SPECTRUM
September 25, 2021 - February 20, 2022
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 December 11, 2021. The exhibition has been organized by Laband Art Gallery director and curator Karen Rapp.
CHRIS ENGMAN, KEN GONZALES-DAY, AND LIA HALLORAN TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT USC FISHER MUSEUM OF ART
ART AND HOPE AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
September 10 - December 9, 2021
The gallery is please to announce that Chris Engman, Ken Gonzales-Day and Lia Halloran are participating in a group show, Art and Hope at the End of the Tunnel, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles 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.
JUNE EDMONDS INCLUDED IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE HARRIS ART GALLERY
NEW HISTORIES
September 7 - October 28, 2021
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce June Edmond's partipation in a group show, New Histories, curated by Dion Johnson at the University of La Verne's Harris Art Gallery. With an idiosyncratic use of images, and signifiers, the exhibition offers access into rich visual worlds of personal reflection, layered symbolism, and prophetic vision. The exhibition will be on view from September 7 through October 28, 2021.
THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM ACQUIRES WORK BY KEN GONZALES-DAY
August 30, 2021
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce the accession of six photographs by Ken Gonzales-Day (American, 1964) 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.
MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES WORK BY KEN GONZALES-DAY
August 30, 2021
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. The exhibition was curated by María Ramirez ’21 (2020–2021 Simonds Curatorial Intern) and Jason Vrooman, Ph.D, Chief Curator and Director of Engagement, Middlebury College Museum of Art. Art & Protest unites examples of socially engaged art—produced primarily in the United States but in a few instances around the world—from the 19th century to the present to showcase the artistic and ideological patterns that occur across different eras and social movements, and the aesthetic or conceptual strategies artists use to demonstrate the need for social change.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN ARTIST TALK, "ART BREAK: PORTRAITURE"
PRESENTED BY THE GETTY
Friday, July 30, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will particpate in a discussion of ancient portraiture with Getty antiquities curator Jens Daehner. The event will take place via webinar on July 30, 2021 at 12:00 p.m. PST / 9:00 a.m. ET.
ZACKARY DRUCKER TO PARTICIPATE IN ARTIST PANEL
RADICAL TENDERNESS: TRANS FOR TRANS PORTRAITURE
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture, on view at the Alice Austen House Museum, highlights photographic work from four trans and non-binary artists whose portrait photography exudes tender intimacy and calls for a radical shift in visibility politics. Guest curator, Dr. Eliza Steinbock, will be joined by participating artist Zackary Drucker for a dialogue about the ways that trans and queer people use artwork to connect with one another, historically and today. The discussion will be preceded by a guided virtual tour of the exhibition by the Alice Austen House’s Executive Director Victoria Munro.
OOLITE ARTS ANNOUNCES 2021 ACQUISITION OF ANTONIA WRIGHT ARTWORK
PIECE TO BE DISPLAYED IN 2023 UPON THE OPENING OF NEW CAMPUS IN MIAMI
June 23, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Antonia Wright will be one in seven artists to have artwork aquired as part of Oolite Art's renewed acquistions program. These pieces will be on display at the Oolite Arts' new campus in the City of Miami opening in 2023. The program was launced last year by Oolite's Board of Directors in an effort to ensure that more Miami artists are represented in major collections. A jury comprised of Miami and nationally-based curators, Tami Katz-Freiman, Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Larry Ossei-Mensah, helped select the diverse group of both established and emerging artists from a pool of more than 500 artists who are current residents or alumni of Oolite’s programs.
ANTONIA WRIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION AT OOLITE ARTS
"NATURAL TRANSCENDENCE" FEATURES WORK INSPIRED BY RE-INGEGRATING WITH NATURE DURING THE PANDEMIC.
June 15, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Antonia Wright is participating in a group show, Natural Transcendance at the Oolite Arts in Miami. This group show presents works that reflect an ethereal sensibility toward nature manifested during the pandemic. It is a reaction to urban culture and the segregation of humanity from nature. The artists included in the show react to how the pandemic opened up opportunities for re-integragrion into nature; both literally and spirtually. Antonia Wright will be presenting a cyanotype portrait in this show, which blurs the lines between human and plant.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN TRAVELING GROUP EXHIBITION "MANY WESTS: ARTISTS SHAPE AN AMERICAN IDEA"
PRESENTED BY THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM AS PART OF THE ART BRIDGES INITIATIVE
2021 – 2024
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be participating in Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea, a group exhibition that examines the perspectives of 48 modern and contemporary artists who offer a broader and more inclusive view of this region, which too often has been dominated by romanticized myths and Euro-American historical accounts. Many Wests features artwork from the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and four partner museums located in some of the fastest-growing cities and states in the western region of the United States. It is the culmination of a multi-year, joint curatorial initiative made possible by the Art Bridges Foundation. The collaborating partner museums are the Boise Art Museum in Idaho; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon; the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City; and the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington.
IN DIALOGUE: SMITHSONIAN OBJECTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
KEN GONZALES-DAY'S PHOTOGRAPH FEATURED IN TALK CO-HOSTED BY THE SMITHSONIAN AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
June 1, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that The Smithsonian and The National Museum of Natural History are co-hosting a talk about historical objects from their respective collections. This talk will focus 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^ and a 3D printed replica of a Tlingit clan crest hat will be starting point of the discussion. Both objects offer insight into the ways museums have used Indigenous objects to further colonialism as well as the Smithsonian’s recent efforts at cultural restoration.
JIM ADAMS TO PARTICIPATE IN TRIENNIAL AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY
VANCOUVER SPECIAL: DISORIENTATIONS AND ECHO | OPENING MAY 29, 2021
May 27, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that 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 PART OF GROUP EXHIBITION AT THE GETTY
PHOTO FLUX: UNSHUTTERING LA
May 25 - October 10, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be participating in group exhibition, Photo Flux: UnShuttering LA at The Getty. 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. Their work is foundational for an emerging generation of artists participating in the Getty Unshuttered program, which engages teens to seek photography as a platform to amplify social topics that resonate in their own lives. Guest curated by jill moniz.
FEDERICO SOLMI AND LAWRENCE WESCHLER IN CONVERSATION AT LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
RSVP REQUIRED: SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2021
5/13/2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Federico Solmi will be in conversation with Lawrence Weschler on Saturday, May 22, at 11:00 a.m. in conjunction with Solmi's solo exhibition The Bacchanalian Ones. This conversation will be the gallery's first in-person event at the new 1110 Mateo Street location. Due to social distancing seating will be limited, so an RSVP will be required. Please RSVP at gallery@luisdejesus.com with the names of the people in your party.
KEN GONZALES-DAY'S WORK ON PUBLIC DISPLAY AT THE WENDE MUSEUM
TRANSFORMATIONS: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art
May 5, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that a photograph by Ken Gonzales-Day is now currently on display as part of group show TRANSFORMATIONS: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art at the Wende Museum. While the show opened October 4, 2020, the museum was closed to the public as part of an effort to protect the community from the COVID-19 epidemic. On May 1st, the Wende opened its collection and exhibitions back up to public viewing and the dates for the exhibition have been extended to October 24, 2021.
STANIAR GALLERY TO HOST VIRTUAL ARTIST TALK WITH KEN GONZALES-DAY
MAY 11, 2021 at 1:30 p.m. PST and 5:30 p.m. ET
April 30, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be doing an artist talk and walk through of his solo show Profiled which is currently installed at the Staniar Gallery located on Washington & Lee's campus in Lexigton, Virginia. Due to COVID-19 the show is currently only accessable to W&L community members, however, a virtual walkthrough of the show is available to all on their website. Ken will be speaking about his work via zoom on May 11, 2021 at 1:30 p.m. PST/ 5:30 p.m. ET.
ZACKARY DRUCKER TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP SHOW, "RADICAL TENDERNESS: TRANS FOR TRANS PORTRAITURE"
THE ALICE AUSTIN HOUSE MUSEUM
March 19- June 1, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Zackary Drucker is participating in group show Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture. Timed to coincide with the International Day of Transgender Visibility on March 31, Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture highlights photographic work from four trans and non-binary artists whose portrait photography exudes tender intimacy and calls for a radical shift in visibility politics.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE RECEIVES SAN DIEGO PRIZE
March 13, 2021
We are delighted to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite was recently awarded the 2021 SD Art Prize. This year the prize focused on binational artists and he along with Beliz Iristay, PANCA Paola Villaseñor and Perry Vasquez were recognized for their tireless work to bring creativity and passion for their art to the San Diego Arts Community. These artists will be showcased in a group show opening in October. Founded and supported since 2006 by the San Diego Visual Arts Network, the SD Art Prize was conceived to promote visibility and public interest in talented local artists, and encourage community engagement and critical dialogue with San Diego’s contemporary art scene.
FEDERICO SOLMI TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP SHOW AS PART OF THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION AT THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
"SEEING DIFFERENTLY", MARCH 6 - SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
March 3, 2021
The gallery is excited to announce that Federico Solmi will be participating in the centennial exhibition of The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. His piece, The Great Farce, in a Portable Theater edition, will be part of this incredible show that celebrates the impact of artists from the 19th century to the present, including Simone Leigh, Sam Gilliam, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Stella and Howard Hodgkin, amongst other iconic historical works by Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Jacob Lawrence.
LIA HALLORAN TO PARTICIPATE IN THE SAN FRANCISCO EXPLORATORIUM'S 'AFTER DARK' WEB SERIES
WILL AIR ON YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK ON THURSDAY, MARCH 4, 2021 at 7:00 P.M. PST.
February 27, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran will be a guest speaker for the San Francisco Exploratorium's After Dark Online: Art + Science digital programming. This event will be streamed via YouTube and Facebook on Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. PST.
Explore the intersections of art and science through the practice of individual artists who weave science, technology, and methods of discovery in their practices. The artistic process, much like the scientific process, is a form of inquiry vital to learning—an open-ended process of investigation, speculation, imagination, and experimentation. The Exploratorium highlights artists who clarify the reciprocal relationship between art and science and how it can inspire a deeper understanding of the world.
JUNE EDMONDS- VIRTUAL | EQUITY & REPRESENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY ART
A PANEL DISCUSSION FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH
February 25, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be part of a panel, Virtual | Equity & Represenation in Contemporary Art- A Panel Discussion for Black History Month.
Over the course of time in America, large swaths of art history have been omitted, erased, or ignored. This absence has created a significant void in the narrative around how people of African descent and people of color have contributed to the artistic canon.
The impact presents significant disadvantages for artists of color. From artists that have difficulty gaining representation, to art historians overlooking Black and Brown artists’ contributions, to collectors that do not have access to works they would like to acquire, the playing field has never been level. Bias shows up in art schools, in institutions, in hiring practices, in the primary and secondary art market, and in the critical voices that influence all of the above.
Recent news of high-profile curatorial appointments are a move in the right direction. However, there is significant work that remains to be done. What kind of new and inclusive art world can we as art professionals help to create?
ANTONIA WRIGHT TO PRESENT INSTALLATION WORK AS PART OF ILLUMINATE CORAL GABLES
WORK WILL BE ON DISPLAY FROM FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 14
February 12, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Antonia Wright will be participating in an outdoor public art initiative in Coral Gables, Florida. Illuminate Coral Gables (ICG) focuses on the intentional use of light and technology to transform public art by day into magical and mysterious work at night. Her piece Yes/No uses barricades as a symbol of global climate of resistance. By lighting the barricades being used by the Illuminate exhibition throughout Coral Gables, her intention is to highlight the ubiquitous nature of these objects and their ambiguous intent to protect and control. By transforming a utilitarian object into a light work, the glowing objects will create a line throughout the streets of the city, evoking the divide and connection between bodies.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN ARTIST TALK, "PHOTOGRAPHY AS REVOLUTIONARY AESTHETIC: AN LA ARTIST CONVERSATION"
HOSTED BY THE GETTY
February 17, 2021
Thursday, February 25, 2021, at 5 pm
ONLINE ONLY
Artists Todd Gray, Cauleen Smith, and Ken Gonzales-Day, each with distinct approaches to photo-based practices, discuss how they integrate concepts of identity and explore the tensions between refusal and inclusion. These artists are all native to California and their experiences as professors and artists reinforce the importance of place and community. Addressing themes from the forthcoming exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA, they’ll discuss their commitment to creating and expanding opportunities for emerging artists to stand, flex, and grow.
'WE ALL HAVE TO CREATE OUR OWN UNIVERSE.' DIRECTOR, PRODUCER AND ARTIST ZACKARY DRUCKER ON TELLING NUANCED TRANS STORIES
VIA TIME
February 8, 2021
The common thread that runs through the work of multimedia artist, director and producer Zackary Drucker is a commitment to telling stories of trans resilience, whether that’s through her photography, her work as a producer on the award-winning series Transparent, or as co-director of the new HBO docuseries The Lady and the Dale. “I never want to do the same thing twice. I am led by curiosity, by anything that I don’t understand,” Drucker says.
LIA HALLORAN'S ART FEATURED AS ILLUSTRATIONS IN JANNA LEVIN'S BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE
February 5, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran recently created the illustrations that went along with Janna Levin's book Black Hole Survival Guide.
"Janna Levin, as a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University, US, is the perfect tour guide to shepherd us through these topics in Black Hole Survival Guide. Over the course of only 160 pages – beautifully illustrated by Lia Halloran in a natural marriage of art and science – she takes us on a breakneck journey through the cosmos. We travel alongside a fellow astronaut named Alice, against whom we are compared and contrasted on various occasions, all in the spirit of learning and good natured competition."
- Emma Jones
EDRA SOTO'S EXHIBITION SPACE, THE FRANKLIN, TO RECEIVE GRANT MONEY AS PART OF HYDE PARK ART CENTER'S ANONYMOUS DONATION
February 2, 2021
In a suprise announcement from Hyde Park Art Center this last Monday it was made known that the center had received an anonymous donation of $560,000 to be distrubuted to artist run spaces and curatorial ventures in Chicago. With this grant money they have decided to award $8,000 to each of their participants of "Artist Run Chicago" and the rest will be disbursed into 20 additional grants. Amongst the grant reciepients is Edra Soto's space, The Franklin. The Franklin, which is run out of her home, is a beloved community-oriented show space in East Garfield Park.
KEN GONZALES-DAY AND LIA HALLORAN TO PARTICIPATE IN PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
January 28, 2021
In preparation for the upcoming Pacific Standard Time which focuses on the intersection of Art and Science, The Getty Foundation has recently awarded southern Californian institutions with the first round of grants. We are pleased to announce that two of our represented artists, Lia Halloran and Ken Gonzales-Day will be presenting works as part of the programing. This 3rd iteration of Pacific Standard Time will present an ambitious range of exhibitions and public programs that explores the connections between the visual arts and science, from prehistoric times to the present and across different cultures worldwide. From alchemy to anatomy, and from botanical art to augmented reality, art and science have shared moments of unity, conflict, and mutual insight. The next PST theme connects these moments in the past with the most pressing issues of today. By examining such critical issues as climate change and the future of artificial intelligence, PST will create an opportunity for civic dialogue around the urgent problems of our time.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE AND FEDERICO SOLMI'S WORK IN THE OUTWIN: AMERICAN PORTRAITURE
NOW ON VIEW AT D'AMOUR MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
October 30, 2020 - April 4, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite and Federico Solmi's work will be included in The Outwin: American Portraiture show, which has now traveled to D'amour Museum of Fine Arts. The Outwin: American Portraiture Today premiered at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in the fall of 2019. Every three years, artists living and working in the United States are invited to submit one of their recent portraits to a panel of experts chosen by the museum in the call for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The works of nearly 50 finalists were selected from over 2,600 entries. For the first time in the triennial’s history, the museum specifically asked that submissions respond “to the current political and social context,” and this resulting presentation offers perspectives on some of today’s most pressing issues.
CARLA JAY HARRIS TO PARTICIPATE IN NORTON MUSEUM OF ART'S 80th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION AND AUCTION
January 19, 2021
The gallery is pleased to annouce that Carla Jay Harris' work will be part of the Norton Muesum of Art's 80th Anniversary Virtual Celebration. This year in order to celebrate the anniversary there will be two events, both online and accessible from home. On Febrauary 6, there will be a virtual celebration which will lightlight the museum and community and will feature artists, special guests, behind-the-scenes glimpses and more.
From January 25- February 8th, there will be an online auction that will be presented via Sothebys.com.
TRACTION: ART TALK WITH KEN GONZALES-DAY, JANUARY 14, 2021
PRESENTED BY INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES
January 12, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be doing an online art talk in conjunction with The Insitute of the Arts and Sciences. Ken Gonzales-Day's interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. For Traction: Art Talk, Gonzales-Day will be joined in conversation by Professor Karolina Karlic.
TRACTION: Art Talk with Ken Gonzales-Day and Karolina Karlic
January 14, 2021
5-6:30 p.m. PT
LIA HALLORAN NAMED A 2020- 2021 C.O.L.A. MASTER ART FELLOW
December 30, 2020
The gallery is very honored to announce that Lia Halloran has been named a 2020-2021 City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellow. As a C.O.L.A. Fellow, Halloran will be awarded a $10,000 grant to produce a new body of work which will be premiered by the City of Los Angeles in Spring 2021.
The 2020/21 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellows in literary, performing, and visual arts are: Neel Agrawal, Noel Alumit, Edgar Arceneaux, Maura Brewer, Nao Bustamante, Jedediah, Caesar, Neha Choksi, Michael Datcher, Sarah Elgart, Lia Halloran, Phung Huynh, Farrah Karapetian, Ruben Ochoa, and Umar Rashid.
FIVE WORKS BY ERIK OLSON ACQUIRED BY THE ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA, CALGARY, CANADA
The gallery is pleased to announce that five paintings by Erik Olson were recently aquired by the Art Gallery of Alberta, Calgary, Canada. Working across different mediums, inclulding painting, sculpture, printmaking, and video, Erik Olson balances the scientific with the poetic in a dynamic visualization of his personal life. People, places and experiences become the subject of works that question our presumptions and our perception of the world. The figures and portraits that populate his canvases can be likened to characters in mystery plays, each flaunting their own constructed personas and exuberant color. Olson's playful curiosity often leads him to explore a variety of content across multiple scales: from the subconscious psychology of the sitter, to the windswept landscapes of America, to the scale of the planets and the vast cosmos.
EDRA SOTO'S "OPEN 24 HOURS" ACQUIRED BY DEPAUL ART MUSEUM AT DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, CHICAGO, IL
December 30, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Edra Soto's Open 24 Hours (Albright-Knox ), was recently aquired by the DePaul Art Museum at DePaul University, Chicago. Soto, who recently participated in group show Unreachable Spring also became affliated with the gallery this year. Her work is an unrelenting love song of purserverance and community action through the challenges of socio-economic disparity and institutional racism. Her work Open 24 Hours was conceived on her daily dog walks through Chicago's East Garfield Park neighborhood where she would collect discarded liquor bottles that she would come across in vacant lots.
BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES FIVE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZACKARY DRUCKER
December 16, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that the Baltimore Museum of Art has acquired five photographs by Zackary Drucker for it's permanet collection. The acquistion includeds three self-portraits from the "Relationship" series (produced in collaboration with Rhys Ernst from 2008- 2014 and debuted at the 2014 Whitney Biennial) and two photographs from the "Before and After" series (produced in collaboration with A. L. Steiner in 2010- 2011). The acquision is an outcome of BMA's "2020 Vision," a year of exhibitions and programs dedicated to the presentation of the achievements of female-identifying artists. 2020 Vision builds on the BMA's efforts over the last several years to expand its presentations of women artists and artists of color, and to more accurately reflect the community in which it lives.
CARLA JAY HARRIS'S "THE PATH " ACQUIRED BY CROCKER ART MUSEUM
December 16, 2020
The gallery is delighed to announce that the Crocker Art Museum has acquired Carla Jay Harris's The Path. The Path is one of more than 20 works in Carla Jay Harri's ongoing series Celestial Bodies which she began in 2018. In Celestial Bodies, Harris uses narratives of kinship, creation, and myth as tools to understand, undo and build anew. Cloaked in a firmament of stars and sumptuous red fabrics evocative of Mt. Olympus, the protagonists in Celestial Bodies exist in a contemplative and meditative dimension outside of our own reality- a utopian black society that we can look to for inspiration. Celestial Bodies began with black bodies floating ro flying through space, but has become grounded in the landscape- a transition and evolution that Harris relates to her own spiritual growth, becoming politically and socially reengaged as the foundations of her practice have been firmly established. In the tumult of 2020, creation has become a refuge for Harris.
ARTIST TALK: UNREACHABLE SPRING | SATURDAY, DEC. 19, 1:00 PM PST / 4:00 PM EST
MODERATED BY LINDSAY PRESTON ZAPPAS & LUIS DE JESUS
December 15, 2020
In conjunction with the final week of the Unreachable Spring, the gallery will host an artist talk on Zoom, December 19th, 1:00 PM PST / 4:00 PM EST moderated by Luis De Jesus and Lindsay Preston Zappas. This conversation will serve as a summation of the exhibition and provide insight and dialogue towards the socio-political atmophere in which these works were created. From isolation and death, to social activism, to personal responses to systemic oppression, we speak with our artists about making art during a year unlike any other.
FEDERICO SOLMI’S THE GREAT FARCE ACQUIRED BY THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce that a seminal work by Federico Solmi (b. 1973) has been acquired by The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. The Great Farce “Portable Theater” (2020) is a translation of Solmi’s most ambitious work to date, The Great Farce (2017-2019)—a monumental, multi-channel video installation that presents a sprawling send-up of empire-building as an enterprise. Past and present, history and amusement, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in The Great Farce—a scathing commentary on contemporary culture, where spectacle and celebrity may be distractions from sinister machinations and speed contributes to the blurring of myth and truth.
CARLA JAY HARRIS PARTICIPATES IN GROUP SHOW 'ARCHIVE MACHINES' AT LAMAG
July 30- December 31, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris will be included in ARCHIVE MACHINES at Los Angeles Municiple Art Gallery. ARCHIVE MACHINES brings together recent works by Southern California artists that examine the archive as a conceptual vehicle to de-center singular narratives and encourage plural perspectives through the activities of revisioning, resisting, rewiring and relating. Carla Jay Harris' work explores the Black experience during Jim Crow. Central to the piece is a set of archival images sourced from Library of Congress.
KAMBUI OLUJIMI AND EDRA SOTO'S WORK SELECTED AS LEILANI LYNCH'S TOP PICKS FOR UNTITLED, ART MIAMI BEACH 2020
December 3, 2020
Leilani Lynch, curator at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami selected a group of works to highlight as part of the virtual UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach art fair. Within her selection both Edra Soto and Kambui Olujimi's installation works were featured.
KAMBUI OLUJIMI TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP SHOW AT SECCA
DRAWN: CONCEPT & CRAFT
November 26, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Kambui Olujimi has work part of a group show at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, SECCA. His piece, Under Tarped is part of a group exhibition, DRAWN: Concept & Craft. DRAWN brings together the diverse works of over 60 artists from around the world in an exhibition that provides a rare, revealing look into the creative process and artists' unique relationship with the art of drawing.
MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRÉAL RECENTLY AQUIRED PIECE BY NICOLAS GRENIER
WORK WILL ALSO BE INCLUDED IN GROUP SHOW, DES HORIZONS D'ATTENTE
November 25, 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Nicolas Grenier's painting From Our Position, Yours is a Mystery (2017), was acquired by the Musée D'Art Contemporain De Montréal, Canada. This work will also be show in upcoming group show, Des Horizons D'Attente, which will showcase the museum's 21 new aquisitions.
NICOLAS GRENIER CURRENT FELLOW AND INTERNATIONAL RESIDENT AT ZK/U CENTER FOR ART AND URBANISTICS
November 25, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Nicolas Grenier is a fellow and part of the international artist residency at ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics. While he is there he will be working on a project based on a system allowing a paradigm shift toward a post-capitalist economic culture. At this stage he is working with a programmer to build a non-monetary exchange mechanisms, while also designing the architecture for a common pool of resources that could be shared between people in a small group, a neighborhood or a city.
ARTIST TALK: EDRA SOTO SPEAKS WITH ART HISTORIAN, ROBERT R. SHANE
ZOOM CONVERSATION IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE CENTER FOR ART AND DESIGN AT COLLEGE OF SAINT ROSE
Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce that Edra Soto will be in conversation with art historian and critic Robert R. Shane organized for the Center for Art and Design at College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY. The talk will focus on Soto's interdisciplinary work around themes of colonization, family, and social justice and will conclude with a poetry reading by Spencer Diaz Tootle.
KAMBUI OLUJIMI RECEIVES COLENE BROWN ART PRIZE
BRIC AWARDS $100,000 to 10 NEW YORK CITY-BASED ARTISTS
November 11, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Kambui Olujimi has received a 2020 Colene Brown Art Prize, which awards $10,000 to New York-based artists via BRIC.
Now in its second year, the award is underwritten by artist and former BRIC Board Member Deborah Brown and her sister Ellen Brown in memory of their late mother, Colene Brown, and is funded through the Harold and Colene Brown Family Foundation.
Drawings from Kambui Olujimi's series When Monuments Fall is currently on view at the gallery as part of the group exhibition Unreachable Spring through December 19, 2020.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO BE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT UCLA
SPECULATIVE FORENSICS: THE 5th ANNUAL UCLA ART HISTORY GRAD SYMPOSIUM AND WORKSHOP
November 7, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be a keynote speaker for the UCLA Art History Graduate Symoposium and Workshop. The annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium is the longest running symposium of its kind in North America. Initiated in 1965, the symposium provides a forum for graduate students to present original research in a scholarly format. Organized collectively by a cohort of students, the symposium is organized around critical themes and issues addressing the history and current state of art historical scholarship.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE TO PARTICIPATE IN VIRTUAL FIRST FRIDAY
ARTS DISTRICT AT LIBERTY STATION
November 6, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite will be participating in a virtual first friday put on by the ARTS DISTRICT Liberty Station and the NTC foundation from 4:00-7:00 PM PST. This event will be free with registration and highlights 7 unique artists, performances, walkthroughs and talks. Hugo Crosthwaite will be discussing his installation at the Station mural Column A and Column B: A continual mural narrative performance.
This mural was created in 16 days and was a performance about creative process and nature of art. He'll also be showcasing his video Tzompantli, a stop-motion animation that draws from the motifs from the installation. There will be a subsequent Q & A.
FEDERICO SOLMI TO PARTICIPATE IN GROUP EXHIBITION "EVERYTHING IS ART, EVERYTHING IS POLITICS"
ONLINE EXHIBITION BY ELGA WIMMER AND BERTA SICHEL
October 1 - November 31, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Federico Solmi will be included in Everything is Art, Everything is Politics curated by Elga Wimmer and Berta Sichel as an online exhibition. Appropriately curated during the 2020 election, this work features artists grappling with social and political motifs. In particular, artists who have had the politcal turn personal with how their work has been viewed by onlookers.
KEN GONZALES-DAY TO DESIGN METRO LINK WILSHIRE/FAIRFAX PURPLE LINE EXTENSION
October 29, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be working with Los Angeles' Metro to create work for the new Whilshire/Fairfax purple line extension entitled, Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects. Inspired by the idea of transporting the body and mind, and by the station as an excavation site, Ken Gonzales-Day‘s glass-tile mural for the north and south concourse level walls aims to transport transit customers across time and place by immersing them in an environment where images of objects—spanning many cultures, continents and eras—mined from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection are reproduced at an enormous scale. Gonzales-Day’s artwork will invite viewers to think about museum collections and their connection to the outside world in unexpected ways.
EDRA SOTO RECEIVES JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION GRANT
October 22, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Edra Soto has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant is an unrestricted award in which $25,000 is granted to 25 different artists from throughout the United States. Selected artists are first nominated by artist peers and arts professionals from throughout the United States and then chosen through a multi-phase jurying process, which this year was conducted virtually. The 2020 artist cohort represents a wide range of creative approaches and backgrounds as well as ethnicities, ages, and geographic locations—further enumerated below. In addition to the financial award, grantees also gain access to a network of arts professionals, who can provide consultations on career development and financial management.
Edra Soto is currently part of group show, Unreachable Spring, currently on view.
CARLA JAY HARRIS PARTICIPATES IN ARTIST TALK, WOMEN AND THE VOTE, IN CONJUNCTION WITH EXHIBITION, A YELLOW ROSE PROJECT
COLORADO PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS CENTER
October 27, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris will be participating in an artist discussion "Women and The Vote" in conjunction with exhibition A Yellow Rose Project.
This talk will take place at 5pm GMT on Colorado Photographic Art Center's Instagram Live.
A Yellow Rose Project is a large scale photographic collaboration made by women all across the country. A year ago, artists were invited to make work in response, reflection, or reaction to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The goal of this project was to provide a focal point and platform for image makers to share contemporary viewpoints as we approached the centennial. Our mission in researching the complication of this anniversary was to gain a deeper understanding of American history and culture, from this moment in time, to build a bridge from the past to the present and on to the future.
JUNE EDMONDS FEATURED IN FORD FOUNDATION EXHIBITION, "FOR WHICH IT STANDS"
PRESENTED BY ASSEMBLY ROOM
October 8, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be included in For Which It Stands curated by Assembly Room at the Ford Foundation Gallery. For Which It Stands is an evolving physical and online exhibition platform featuring over thirty-five contemporary artists who use the iconic American flag, loaded with centuries of convoluted history and exclusion, to create new symbols of national identity. Amid a highly volatile political climate and rise in white nationalism, these artists assert their place and affirm the multiplicity of the American experience while addressing issues of police brutality, systemic racism, socioeconomic disparities, alternative facts, and a patriarchal society, among others.
June Edmonds will participate in an artist talk on October 24th, 2020.
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION OPENING + ARTIST PANEL: KEN GONZALES-DAY
PRESENTED BY WENDE MUSEUM
October 4, 2020 from 12-2pm PT
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will participate in a panel discussion with Chelle Barbour, Farrah Karapetian, Richtje Reinsma, Daphne Rosenthal, Jennifer Vanderpool, and Bari Ziperstein on the occasion of the opening of the digital group exhibition Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art viewable through the Wende Museum website.
The event will take place on the Wende Museum website on Sunday, October 4, 2020 from 12-2pm PT.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE TO PARTICIPATE IN FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE MORELIA
CINÉPOLIS MORELIA CENTRO | CINÉPOLIS LAS AMÉRICAS | ONLINE VIEWING
October 28- November 1, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite will be included in film festival, Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia. He will be screening his new film, A Home for the Brave as part of the Mexican Short Film Section and it will be screened at the Cinépolis Morelia Centro, Cinépolis Las Américas as well as concurrent online screenings for an international audience.
The festival will take place between October 28- November 1, 2020
ARTIST TALK: KALEIDOLA GUEST SPEAKER SERIES- JUNE EDMONDS
PRESENTED BY LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY
September 11, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be speaking at Loyola Marymount's Department and Art History's guest speaker program, KaleidoLA. The event will take place via Zoom on Friday, September 11 at 12:15 to 1:15 pm.
ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION: HUGO CROSTHWAITE
PRESENTED BY THE PATRIA & PHILLIP FROST ART MUSEUM AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
September 16, 2020 from 5-6 pm ET via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite will join Judithe Hernández and Itzel Basualdo for an Artist Panel Discussion moderated by Maryanna G. Ramirez and Amy Galpin of the Frost Art Museum. Featured in the Frost Art Museum’s exhibition, Otros Lados, these artists bring distinct perspectives to Mexican and Mexican American experiences.
CARLA JAY HARRIS TO PARTICIPATE IN SF CAMERAWORK BENEFIT
September 10 - 25, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris will participate in See How Beautiful I Am, the 2020 SF Camerawork Benefit Auction, to be hosted by Artsy. Harris has donated a print from her Snake Bearer series.
Over its 46-year history, SF Camerawork has provided early career opportunities for artists. SF Camerawork’s mission and programs are dedicated to engaging and enriching local artists and their creative work.
JUNE EDMONDS INCLUDED IN "FOUNDING NARRATIVES" AT THE MEAD ART MUSEUM AT AMHERST COLLEGE
August 25, 2020 - July 18, 2021
Founding Narratives presents artworks produced in the United States between 1800 and today that offer opportunities to consider the role of art in creating, reinforcing, and challenging stories about national identity. Drawn entirely from the Mead Art Museum’s extensive collection of American art, the exhibition 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.
KEN GONZALES-DAY INCLUDED IN GROUP EXHIBITION "THIS IS AMERICA | ART USA TODAY"
KUNSTHAL KADE AMERSFOORT, THE NETHERLANDS
September 26, 2020 - January 03, 2021
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be included in the group exhibition This Is America | Art USA Today at Kunstal KaDE in the Netherlands, September 26, 2020 through January 03, 2021. In This Is America | Art USA Today almost forty American artists bring the United States to the Netherlands in the form of paintings, photographs, murals, documentation and installations. Their work addresses current issues like identity, city culture, climate change, and ‘Trump’.
SEMINAR AND ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION: LIA HALLORAN
PRESENTED BY LUMEN AND ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN VIA ZOOM
August 25, 2020 from 8-10 pm BST / 12-2 pm PT
The gallery is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran will be participating in a seminar hosted by art collective Lumen and curator Stephen Nowlin focused on the current group exhibition, SKY, at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.
FEATURED: CARLA JAY HARRIS IN PÓLISART
"CARLA JAY HARIS: DESERT COTTON"
August 22, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Carla Jay Harris has been honored with the cover of the 100th Issue of PólisArt Magazine, including a twenty-two page editiorial feature on her Desert Cotton series.
"My nomadic childhood is what, in part, attracted me to photography. The camera is a way for me to connect to permanence. Memory, heritage, and loss are major themes in my work."
—Carla Jay Harris
HUGO CROSTHWAITE INCLUDED IN THREE-ARTIST EXHIBITION "OTROS LADOS"
PATRICIA & PHILLIP FROST ART MUSEUM AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
August 22 - December 13, 2020
Hugo Crosthwaite will participate in a three-artist exhibition Otros Lados at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, FL. "Al otro lado" is a phrase used in Mexico to describe areas of the United States populated by Mexican immigrants. The fluid nature of migration, exile, labor, and cultural exchanges between Mexico and the U.S., resonate in the daily lives of people in both countries.
ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION: KEN GONZALES-DAY
PRESENTED BY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LOS ANGELES
August 13, 2020 AT 4PM PT via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be participating in the first of several virtual discussions about the project In Plain Sight. Program 1: The Los Angeles Orbit panel will be moderated by rafa esparza and Cassils and introduced by MOCA.
In Plain Sight (IPS) lead artists rafa esparza and Cassils present an overview of IPS followed by a panel discussion with Bamby Salcedo, Beatriz Cortez, Yosimar Reyes, and Ken Gonzalez-Day. Artists featured in this panel generated the phrases that formed the ring, or “shared orbit path,” around downtown Los Angeles over the July 4 weekend. Artists will show IPS images and discuss their individual practices as artists and organizers in relation to their involvement in IPS. Panel includes discussion of Los Angeles as the second largest city of immigrants in the United States and explores how the multicultural conditions of the city have generated experimental collaborative practices by artists and activists alike.
ARTIST TALK: CARLA JAY HARRIS AND BRENDA E. STEVENSON IN CONVERSATION
HOSTED BY SF CAMERAWORK
August 12, 2020 at 4:30pm PT via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce "Making Bitter Earth," an online conversation between artist Carla Jay Harris and historian Brenda E. Stevenson, Ph.D., moderated by SF Camerawork Board President Michelle Branch on Wednesday, August 12, 2020. Harris and Stevenson will discuss their recent collaboration, Bitter Earth, a site-specific installation whose title is taken from the 1960s blues track “This Bitter Earth,” written by Clyde Otis and sung by legendary blues women and rhythm and blues singers Dinah Washington, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and Mikki Howard.
KEN GONZALES-DAY INCLUDED IN "THE SPREAD," CURATED BY MARK VERABIOFF
DE BOER GALLERY
August 1- September 5, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will exhibit previously unseen work in the group exhibition, THE SPREAD, curated by artist Mark Verabioff at de boer gallery.
THE SPREAD, which explores themes of civil war, protest, cultural and racial insurgency, climate change and sanctioned travel will follow a similar logic to Verabioff’s installations to disrupt the authority associated with authorship by acknowledging the complex interplay between object, creator, viewing context and audience through the lens of queer feminist discourse.
ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION: JUNE EDMONDS
PRESENTED BY FLUX ART SPACE
July 26, 2020 at 1 pm PST via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce that June Edmonds will be participating in "Conversations About Abstraction with Six Black Women Abstract Artists in Los Angeles," a panel discussion featuring Sharon Barnes, Adrian Culverson, Adrienne DeVine, Holly Tempo, and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth and moderated by jill moniz and Isabelle Lutterodt.
ARTIST RESIDENCY: EDIE BEAUCAGE
SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS' ARTIST RESIDENCY PROJECT
July 7 - August 7, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that Edie Beaucage will participate in the inaugural session of the School of Visual Arts' Artist Residency Project. This new, fully online residency program has been designed for fine artists working across discipline, medium and platform. While the ability to travel and gather in person remains an uncertainty for many, the Artist Residency Project aims to deliver a robust residency experience to participants all over the world directly through online platforms. Working with SVA’s distinguished faculty, participants will be encouraged to develop their practice without regard to limitations of location or the necessity for travel. The goal of the program is to create an inclusive online space where artists can thrive, nurture their practice and build an active, engaged community across borders.
FEATURED: ZACKARY DRUCKER IN VOGUE
"LOOK UP: 80 ARTISTS ARE SKYWRITING TO HIGHLIGHT THE INJUSTICE OF IMMIGRATION DETENTION IN AMERICA"
July 7, 2020
"Nosotras te vemos means 'we see you' in the feminine version of the phrase, a subtle way of recognizing one femme to another. I want to convey a message of unity to the transgender women and to all the people living in forced detention at South Texas ICE Processing Center.
During the Obama administration, while addressing the proposed legislation of North Carolina to bar trans students from restrooms that correlated with their gender presentation, then attorney general Loretta Lynch said to transgender Americans, 'We see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.' It was an incredible moment historically because trans people had never been spoken to so publicly. To have a person from the president’s cabinet speak directly to a community that had been ignored and silenced was such a powerful paradigm shift and validation. "
—Zackary Drucker
ZACKARY DRUCKER AND KEN GONZALES-DAY TO PARTICIPATE IN #XMAP: IN PLAIN SIGHT
July 3, 2020
In Plain Sight is a coalition of 80 artists united to create an artwork dedicated to the abolition of immigrant detention and the United States culture of incarceration. A highly orchestrated mediagenic spectacle and poetic action, this project is conceived in five parts -- a poetic elegy enacted on a national scale, an interactive website, an anthology docuseries, accessible actions for the public to take to join the movement against immigrant detention, and cultural partnerships producing arts-related education and engagement.
FEATURED: LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES ON KCET'S SOUTHLAND SESSIONS
"FORCED TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS, ART GALLERIES EMBRACE ONLINE EXHIBITIONS"
June 30, 2020
For Luis De Jesus of the eponymous gallery on South La Cienega Boulevard, moving online has been an expansion rather than a limitation. When lockdown began, his staff was already redesigning the gallery’s website, so they added an “online viewing room.” “It’s like the second gallery that we don’t have,” De Jesus said, “It functions like an alternative space, a project space, and that to me is very exciting.”
ARTIST TALK: ZACKARY DRUCKER
VIOLET HOUR PRESENTED BY BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
June 24, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that the Baltimore Museum of Art will present Zackary Drucker in conversation with her personal muse and mentor Rosalyne Blumenstein, LCSW, a legendary trans rights activist whose portraits and archival photographs comprise an important part of the BMA’s exhibition Zackary Drucker: Icons. They discuss their approach to concepts of photographic beauty and their personal involvement in trans activism. Renowned photographer, curator, and educator Allen Frame moderates the conversation and BMA Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Leslie Cozzi hosts a live Q&A following the discussion.
CALIFORNIA AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM ACQUIRES WORK BY CARLA JAY HARRIS
June 16, 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the California African American Museum, located in Los Angeles has acquired work by Carla Jay Harris. Harris' Sphinx (2018) is currently on view in Sanctuary, a group exhibition of recent museum acquisitions that focuses on safe spaces and self-care as part of the African American experience. Founded in 1977, the CAAM is the first African American museum of art, history, and culture fully supported by a state.
MEAD ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES WORK BY JUNE EDMONDS
June 15, 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, MA has acquired work by June Edmonds. Convictions IV (2020) is part of her ongoing series of Flag Paintings, which explore the alignment of multiple identities such as race, nationality, gender, or political leanings. Named for its founder, William Rutherford Mead (an 1867 graduate of Amherst College and a partner in the storied architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White), the Mead holds the art collection of Amherst College, celebrated for its American and European paintings, Mexican ceramics, Tibetan scroll paintings, English paneled room, ancient Assyrian carvings, Russian avant-garde art, West African sculpture, and Japanese prints.
TARBLE ARTS CENTER AT EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY ACQUIRES TWO ARTWORKS BY FEDERICO SOLMI
June 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, IL has acquired two seminal works by Federico Solmi. Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth (2012) is a single-channel video running 10:09 minutes enclosed within a hand-painted presentation box and The Beloved Autocrat (2018) is a unique artist book consisting of 12 bound paintings. Both works were exhibited recently in Solmi's 2019 full scale survey exhibition at the Tarble. The Tarble Arts Center is a major cultural arts resource serving east-central Illinois. Its founding purpose is to “take the arts to the people."
ARTIST TALK: KEN GONZALES-DAY
ECHO/LOCATE PRESENTED BY BRIDGE PROJECTS
May 21, 2020 at 5pm PT via Zoom
The gallery is pleased to announce that Bridge Projects' ongoing event series Echo/Locate will host Ken Gonzales-Day for an artist talk, virtual site visit, and discussion via Zoom. The group will embark upon an hour-long exploration into the purpose and power of the Gonzales-Day's series Searching for California Hang Trees and Erased Lynchings. Gonzales-Day will be in his studio, and the Bridge Projects team will be scattered throughout Los Angeles at locations pertaining to his practice.
INTERVIEW: ZACKARY DRUCKER
"NO SPACE FOR SELF INDULGENCE"
May 20, 2020
The gallery is pleased to announce that the McEvoy Art Foundation has published an interview with interdisciplinary artist Zackary Drucker through their ongoing conversation series titled McEvoy Arts at Home. Interviewed by Steve Polta, director of the San Francisco Cinematheque, Drucker reflects on witnessing her lineage and shifting consciousness through lyrical film-making.
FEATURED: LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES TO PARTICIPATE IN NADA'S NEW PROFIT-SHARING DIGITAL ART FAIR
ARTFORUM
May 14, 2020
“FAIR is NADA’s response to the current situation, in line with our commitment to supporting a global community of galleries and artists,” said NADA executive director Heather Hubbs. “While many of these art spaces have been temporarily closed to the public, this new model provides an opportunity to showcase the best of contemporary art, while demonstrating our collaborative spirit and fostering mutual support for one another.
LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES JOINS GALLERYPLATFORM.LA
HYPERALLERGIC: 80 LA GALLERIES BAND TOGETHER IN AN EFFORT TO SURVIVE THE PANDEMIC
May 14, 2020
GALLERYPLATFORM.LA launches May 15, featuring online viewing rooms for small and blue-chip galleries, video profiles of artists, and a column on the history of LA galleries — all to help galleries stay afloat.
MEAD ART MUSEUM ACQUIRES 7 PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ZACKARY DRUCKER & RHYS ERNST'S "RELATIONSHIP" SERIES
May 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, MA has acquired seven photographs from Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst's Relationship (2008-2014), a series of intimate snapshots taken by the artists that depicts the arc of their real-life love story. Named for its founder, William Rutherford Mead (an 1867 graduate of Amherst College and a partner in the storied architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White), the Mead holds the art collection of Amherst College, celebrated for its American and European paintings, Mexican ceramics, Tibetan scroll paintings, English paneled room, ancient Assyrian carvings, Russian avant-garde art, West African sculpture, and Japanese prints.
KEN GONZALES-DAY INCLUDED IN "SEEING NOW" AT 21C OKLAHOMA CITY MUSEUM HOTEL
April 2019 - May 2020
This multi-media selection of works by over two dozen artists explores what and how we see today, revealing the visible and hidden forces shaping both what the contemporary world looks like, and how we consume and interpret that information—how visual and psychological perception are evolving in the 21st century.
THE DAVID OWSLEY MUSUEM OF ART ACQUIRES WORK BY JUNE EDMONDS
April 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University located in Muncie, IN has acquired work by June Edmonds. Convictions I (2019) is part of her ongoing series of Flag Paintings, which explore the alignment of multiple identities such as race, nationality, gender, or political leanings. Central to the mission and vision of the David Owsley Museum of Art is the global art collection—we turn to it to learn, to celebrate, to heal, to dream, to empower.
ARTIST TALK: LIA HALLORAN AND KIP THORNE TO DEBUT A SECTION OF THEIR NEW BOOK
"THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE" IS PRESENTED BY PIONEER WORKS
April 25, 2020 at 1:30pm PST via Zoom
Lia Halloran and Kip Thorne will debut a section of their book, to be published by Norton this upcoming year, as part of The Universe in Verse. Ordinarily a ticketed charitable event, with all proceeds benefiting a chosen ecological or scientific-humanistic nonprofit each year, the 2020 edition will be livestreamed on April 25, 2020 at 1:30pm PST.
KEN GONZALES-DAY APPOINTED 2019 FLETCHER JONES CHAIR IN ART
SCRIPPS COLLEGE
June 9, 2019
The Scripps College Board of Trustees has announced the appointments of Ken Gonzales-Day, professor of art, to the Fletcher Jones Chair in Art, Julia Liss, professor of history, to the Mary W. Johnson and J. Stanley Johnson Professorship in the Humanities, and Sheila Walker, professor of psychology, to the inaugural appointment of the Laura Vausbinder Hockett Endowed Professorship, effective July 1, 2019.
FEATURED: LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES IN ARTILLERY MAGAZINE
QUARANTINE Q&A: ART, LIFE, AND THE BUSINESS OF ART DURING COVID-19
March 26, 2020
An interview with Luis De Jesus & Jay WIngate by Anna Bagirov in Artillery Magazine.
FEATURED: NICOLAS GRENIER ON CBC RADIO
THE NEW MASTERS: CONVERSATION WITH THE 2019 SOBEY ART AWARD FINALISTS
March 5, 2020
The annual Sobey Art Award is Canada's most prestigious prize for contemporary artists. Established in 2002, the award honors Canadian artists 40 years of age or under, who have exhibited their work in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
JUNE EDMONDS WINS INAUGURAL $10,000 AWARE PRIZE FOR WOMEN ARTISTS AT THE ARMORY SHOW
March 5, 2020
US artist June Edmonds has been named the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Aware Prize at The Armory Show. Presented by the Paris-based nonprofit Archives of Women Artists: Research and Exhibitions the juried award goes to one female artist whose work is shown as a solo booth presentation within the fair’s Galleries section.
ZACKARY DRUCKER'S "ICONS" OPENS AT THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
March 1 - June 28, 2020
Zackary Drucker: Icons weaves together two semi-intertwined personal narratives, juxtaposing newly created self-portrait photographs of artist, producer, and activist Zackary Drucker with pictures the artist has taken of mentor and friend Rosalyne Blumenstein, LCSW, who directed the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center’s pioneering Gender Identity Project in the 1990s. Depicting two women of different ages and experiences and the scars that they bear, Drucker’s work interrogates assumptions about transformation, beauty, aging, and mortality. Her searching, meticulous self-portraits expand on the groundbreaking Relationship series Drucker co-created a decade ago. Forming part of Drucker’s ongoing project to record and chronicle the trans community, her images of muse and mentor Blumenstein capture the cinematic flavor of the artist’s timely revision of art historical precedent.
GROUP EXHIBITION: ZACKARY DRUCKER INCLUDED IN "FLUIDITY"
SYKER VORWERK- ZENTRUM FÜR ZEITGENÖSSICH SKYER VORWERK- ZENTRUM FÜR ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST
February 23 - May 17, 2020
Curated by Alejandro Perdomo Daniels and hosted by Syker Vorwerk, Fluidity creates a framework for positions in contemporary art that articulate the spectrum of gender difference, the overriding certainties regarding gender, sexuality, and desire, making it clear that the traditional identity categories of men and women, heterosexual and homosexual represent incomplete approaches to real life experiences. Instead of reproducing normative narratives through affirmation or negation, the exhibition shows perspectives that destabilize systems of normality and power. Based on the work of nine selected contemporary artists, Fluidity addresses a field of tension of unlimited scope and reflects the plurality and performance of contemporary art production in an international context.
GROUP EXHIBITION: LIA HALLORAN INCLUDED IN "SKY"
ALYCE DE ROULET WILLIAMSON GALLERY AT ARTCENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN
February 20 - August 3, 2020
An immersive examination of how humans have conceptualized the sky throughout history, SKY will demonstrate how the unfolding realities exposed by new science are affecting change in the understanding of ourselves, our planet and beyond.
A NEW ARMORY SHOW PRIZE WILL AWARD $10,000 TO AN OUTSTANDING FEMALE ARTIST
ARCHIVE OF WOMEN ARTISTS: RESEARCH AND EXHIBITIONS
February 19, 2020
The Armory Show in New York is partnering with the Paris nonprofit Archives of Women Artists: Research and Exhibitions (AWARE) on a new juried award. The AWARE Prize will recognize the best booth dedicated to a solo presentation of a female artist, awarding $10,000 to the artist or her estate. The shortlisted artists are Yuko Nasaka (1939–, Japan) with Belgium’s Axel Vervoordt Gallery; Rina Banerjee (1963–, India) with Galerie Nathalie Obadia of Paris and Brussels; Aase Texmon Rygh (1925–2019, Norway) with Oslo’s OSL Contemporary; Alexis Smith (1949–, US) with Garth Greenan Gallery in New York; and June Edmonds (1959–, US) with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION: FEDERICO SOLMI TO PARTICIPATE IN "VIDEO ART::DOOMSDAY DREAMS"
PRESENTED BY THE BROOKLYN RAIL
February 12, 2020
A conversation with Eleanor Heartney, Joan Jonas, Barbara London, and Federico Solmi, moderated by Martha Schwendener, and Phong Bui to celebrate the publication of Barbara London's recent monograph Video Art: the First Fifty Years (Phaidon) and Eleanor Heartney's new book Doomsday Dreams (Silver Hollow Press).
LIA HALLORAN UNVEILS A NEW COMMISSION
SIMON'S FOUNDATION FLATIRON CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS
February 11, 2020
On Tuesday, February 11, 2020 from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm in the 5th floor Lounge of the Simon's Foundation Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, a new commission by Lia Halloran will be unveiled. Solar (2019) is a mural-sized cyanotype measuring 120 x 131 inches and inspired by the artist's ongoing series Your Body Is A Space That Sees.
ZACKARY DRUCKER INCLUDED IN "ORLANDO," CURATED BY TILDA SWINTON
MCEVOY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
February 7 - May 2, 2020
Orlando presents recent and newly commissioned photographs inspired by the themes of Virginia Woolf’s prescient 1928 novel, which tells the story of a young nobleman during the era of Queen Elizabeth I who lives for three centuries without aging and mysteriously shifts gender along the way. Orlando is guest curated by Tilda Swinton and organized by Aperture, New York.
LIA HALLORAN'S "DOUBLE HORIZON" OPENS AT THE PETER AND PEARL MULLEN ART GALLERY AT ARTCENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN
January 30 - March 15, 2020
Double Horizon features works by Lia Halloran that investigate the personal, physical, psychological, and scientific exploration of space.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE TO SPEAK AT THE BURLINGAME LIBRARY FOUNDATION
January 26, 2020
Kim Sajet, noted art historian and the first woman to serve as Director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will speak at the Burlingame Public Library on Sunday, January 26th. Born in Nigeria, raised in Australia, and a citizen of the Netherlands, Sajet brings a global perspective to the position. She is also the host of the Portrait Gallery’s new podcast series, “Portraits,” which explores themes of art, history, and biography.
Kim will introduce Hugo Crosthwaite, the first-prize winner of the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. His award-winning stop-motion drawing animation, A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez, will be shown at the event.
JUNE EDMONDS FEATURED IN "THIS PLACE," CURATED BY JUNE EDMONDS FEATURED IN "THIS PLACE," CURATED BY JILL MONIZ
QUOTIDIAN, LOS ANGELES, CA
January 25 – March 28, 2020
This PLACE focuses on artists who articulate, correct and/or challenge historical narratives about geographical and cultural perceptions of place. Grounded by never exhibited 1960s ceramic works by Dale Davis — multimedia artist and Brockman Gallery co-founder who made space for the black arts west movement, This PLACE highlights how artists know, remember and reimagine environments that are relevant to their identities, aesthetic concerns and histories that define public visual awareness.
THE COLLECTION OF BETH RUDIN DEWOODY ACQUIRES A WORK BY MIYOSHI BAROSH FOR THE BUNKER ARTSPACE
January 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Miyoshi Barosh's embroidered painting Paintings for the Home (Portrait) (2010) was acquired by the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody for The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, FL. Paintings for the Home is a series of works painted to resemble found thrift store paintings which are then embroidered with black abstractions that may be ink blots, decay, or disease. Paintings for the Home (Portrait) was first exhibited at the Gallery in 2010 and again in 2020 as part of a three-gallery city-wide retrospective after the artist's untimely death. Presenting rotating exhibitions and viewable storage of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker Artspace opened in December 2017 and showcases a wide range of contemporary art by both well-known and emerging artists, displayed alongside iconic pieces of furniture and other curiosities.
ANDRÉ HEMER AT MASS MOCA RESIDENCY PROGRAM
OPEN STUDIOS ON JANUARY 28, 2020
January 1 - February 1, 2020
We are pleased to announce that André Hemer is an artist-in-residence at The Studios at Mass MoCA. The Studios is MASS MoCA’s artist and writers residency program situated within the museum’s factory campus and surrounded by the beautiful Berkshire Mountains. Operated by MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program, the residency runs year-round and invited artists make work on site for periods of 4-6 weeks. Hemer is a resident for the month of January and will be featured in the open studio event. While in residence Hemer has been collecting videos, images, and 3D scans using the environment within the Museum campus—these will be developed into new paintings, sculptures, and video works to be shown during 2020.
THE ELI AND EDYTH BROAD MUSEUM ACQUIRES KEN GONZALES-DAY'S ERASED LYNCHINGS
January 2020
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynchings III (2019) was acquired by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. Opened on November 10, 2012, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad) is a dynamic contemporary art museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, which serves as both a teaching institution and a cultural hub for East Lansing and the region.
NEW YORK- PRESBYTERIAN ACQUIRES SEVERAL PAINTINGS BY JUNE EDMONDS
December 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that New York-Presbyterian Hospital has acquired several paintings by June Edmonds from her ongoing series of abstract paintings that explore how repetition, movement, and balance can serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal connection. The acquisition includes the massive and seminal painting Story of the Ohio: For Margaret (2017), inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, the enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil War America who was known for killing her own daughter rather than allowing her child to be returned to slavery. This event took place near Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, where June Edmonds did an artist’s residency in early 2017 and was also the inspiration for the events depicted in Toni Morrison's Beloved.
THE MCEVOY FAMILY FOUNDATION ACQUIRES PAINTINGS BY LAURA KRIFKA
December 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Laura Krifka's painting Copy Cat (2017) was acquired by the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (MFA) presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, MFA’s vision is to create an open, intimate, and welcoming setting for private contemplation and community discussion about art and culture.
THE COLLECTION OF BETH RUDIN DEWOODY ACQUIRES WORKS BY HUGO CROSTHWAITE FOR THE BUNKER ARTSPACE
December 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Hugo Crosthwaite's drawings Tijuanerias #34 (2011) and Tijuanerias #48 (2011) were acquired by the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody for The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, FL. The drawings are part of a series titled Tijuanerias in which the artist, inspired by Goya's Los Caprichos, creates new myths and narratives about the violence and excesses of narco wealth in his hometown of Tijuana. These drawings were featured in the artist's first solo exhibition with the Gallery, Tijuanerias on view from April 14 - May 26, 2012. Presenting rotating exhibitions and viewable storage of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker Artspace opened in December 2017 and showcases a wide range of contemporary art by both well-known and emerging artists, displayed alongside iconic pieces of furniture and other curiosities.
THE PIZZUTI COLLECTION ACQUIRES A PAINTING BY LAURA KRIFKA
December 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Laura Krifka's painting Tipping Point (2019) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
KEN GONZALES-DAY: DECOLONIZING THE MUSEUM
ARTIST TALK, FACULTY WORKSHOP AND CLASS VISIT AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART
November 21, 2019
The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be conducting an artist talk and workshop "Decolonizing the Museum" at Middlebury College, in Middlebury Vermont. Through invited expert speakers/facilitators, this workshop series open to faculty and staff seeks to provide participants with leading insights and methods in rethinking how the institution and instructors can promote change against deep-rooted structures of oppression at a curricular/institutional level while fostering greater equity in the classroom.
October 3, 2019, 12:00pm. Crest Room
HOOD MUSEUM OF ART ACQUIRES A PHOTOGRAPH BY KEN GONZALES-DAY
November 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's photograph Nightfall II (2006) from the series titled Search for California Hang Trees was acquired by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. Dartmouth's collections are among the oldest and largest of any college or university in the country, but it was not until the Charles Moore–designed Hood Museum of Art opened its doors in 1985 that they were all housed under one roof and made available to faculty, students, and the public.
KEN GONZALES-DAY WILL GIVE KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION CONFERENCE "ALL-INCLUSIVE: PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE"
November 1 - 3, 2019
The conference All-Inclusive: Photography for Social Justice is co-hosted by the West and Southwest Chapters of SPE and the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, minutes from the San Jose Airport and less than an hour from the old stomping grounds of Group f/64, which includes Carmel, San Francisco, and Oakland.
The conference will explore how photography is used to challenge injustice, pursue social equality, and advance human rights through creative skills in order to inspire social movements, to witness, to resist oppression, to pose the difficult questions, and to stimulate debate and awareness about critical social issues. It will take place concurrently with Ken Gonzales-Day's solo exhibition at Santa Clara University.
FEDERICO SOLMI FEATURED IN "THE QUEST FOR HAPPINESS- ITALIAN ART NOW" AT SERLACHIUS MUSEUM, MÄNTTÄ, FINLAND
October 26, 2019 - September 27, 2020
The Quest for Happiness – Italian Art Now presents a selection of the most interesting Italian contemporary artists. Their common theme is the quest for happiness. The majority of them have never exhibited in Finland before.
HUGO CROSTHWAITE AWARDED FIRST-PRIZE IN SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY OUTWIN BOOCHEVER PORTRAIT COMPETITION
October 26, 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that gallery artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been awarded First Prize in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
Hugo Crosthwaite’s work will be presented in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, a major exhibition premiering at the National Portrait Gallery October 26, 2019 through August 20, 2020. The exhibit will present the work of this year’s nearly 50 finalists, including seven artists that were shortlisted for prizes, selected from over 2,600 entries. As the first-prize winner, Crosthwaite receives a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a notable living person for the museum’s permanent collection.
THE PIZZUTI COLLECTION ACQUIRES PAINTINGS BY CAITLIN CHERRY
October 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Caitlin Cherry's painting Solar Asian Doll (2018) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
FEDERICO SOLMI AND HUGO CROSTHWAITE ARE 2019 OUTWIN BOOCHEVER PORTRAIT COMPETITION FINALISTS
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, WASHINGTON, D.C.
October 1, 2019
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced the finalists for its fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Their work will be presented in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, a major exhibition premiering at the National Portrait Gallery Oct. 26 through Aug. 30, 2020. Every three years, artists living and working in the United States are invited to submit one of their recent portraits to a panel of experts chosen by the museum. The works of this year’s nearly 50 finalists were selected from over 2,600 entries. The first-prize winner, to be announced this fall, will receive a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection.
LIA HALLORAN FEATURED IN "THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE: VISUALIZING THE COSMOS IN ART" AT SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART
September 29, 2019 - February 16, 2020
Drawing primarily from SBMA’s permanent collection and supplemented by loans from area collections, The Observable Universe explores a diverse range of artistic representations of the cosmos roughly coinciding with the ‘Space Age’ of the last sixty years.
FEDERICO SOLMI'S SURREAL, SATIRICAL UNIVERSE COMES TO THE BLOCK MUSEUM COLLECTION
September 25, 2019
Past and present, history and amusement, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in Federico Solmi’s monumental media work, “The Great Farce” (2017), recently acquired by Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art. The Block received the multiscreen, limited-edition work as a gift from the artist’s studio in recognition of the museum’s upcoming 40th anniversary and its related initiative “Thinking about History.”
Originally commissioned for the 2017 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, Germany, “The Great Farce” is Solmi’s most ambitious work to date in terms of technical complexity, physical scale and scope of content. Featuring a cast of time-traveling world leaders with a feverish madness for power, Solmi’s animation turns a frenzied, fun-house mirror to grandstanding historical figures.
THE COLLECTION OF BETH RUDIN DEWOODY ACQUIRES A PAINTING BY JIM ADAMS FOR THE BUNKER ARTSPACE
September 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Jim Adams's painting Faith (1996) was acquired by the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody for The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, FL. The painting is part of a series of portraits of black archetypes that the artist created in the 1990s and 2000s. Presenting rotating exhibitions and viewable storage of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker Artspace opened in December 2017 and showcases a wide range of contemporary art by both well-known and emerging artists, displayed alongside iconic pieces of furniture and other curiosities.
The Pizzuti Collection acquires paintings by June Edmonds
September 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that June Edmond's painting Sign of Life Flag (2019) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
Zackary Drucker's Relationship series discussed in The Body Electric
YBCA Zine
September 9, 2019
An essay by curator Pavel S. Pyś on the exhibition The Body Electric, which originated at the Walker Art Center and will travel to the Yeba Buena Center for the Arts and the Miami Dade College Museum of Art and Design. The exhibition includes works from Relationship (2008-2014) by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst.
The Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody acquires a painting by Laura Krifka for The Bunker Artspace
September 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Laura Krifka's painting Piggyback (2019) was acquired by the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody for The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, FL. The painting was featured in the artist's first solo exhibition with the Gallery, The Game of Patience on view from September 7 - October 26, 2019. Presenting rotating exhibitions and viewable storage of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker Artspace opened in December 2017 and showcases a wide range of contemporary art by both well-known and emerging artists, displayed alongside iconic pieces of furniture and other curiosities.
Zackary Drucker featured in "The Body Electric" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
September 6, 2019 - February 23, 2020
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents the West Coast debut of The Body Electric, an expansive array of more than 70 works revealing the ways that technology changes our collective understanding of the body, everyday life, and sense of self.
The Pizzuti Collection acquires a painting by Caitlin Cherry
July 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Caitlin Cherry's painting Miasma (2019) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. The painting was featured in the group exhibition I've Got A Good Mind To Give Up Living And Go Shopping Instead, on view at the Gallery from July 13 - August 17, 2019. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
Nicolas Grenier Shortlisted for the 2019 Sobey Art Award
June 12, 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is proud to announce that Nicolas Grenier is a finalist for the 2019 Sobey Art Award. The Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada will present the 2019 Sobey Art Award exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. The exhibition presents the work of the five outstanding Canadian artists who have been shortlisted for the 2019 Sobey Art Award.
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery acquires a photograph by Ken Gonzales-Day
May 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's Shonke-Monthin, Osage by Joseph Palmer (National Museum of Natural History, D.C.) (2014) was acquired by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The photograph is part of the artist's ongoing Profiled series and was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in the two-person exhibition titled UnSeen: Our Past In A New Light from March 23, 2018 through January 06, 2019
Association of Art Museum Curators Names Recipients of 2019 Awards for Excellence
UNSEEN: OUR PAST IN A NEW LIGHT, KEN GONZALES-DAY AND TITUS KAPHAR CURATED BY TAÍNA B. AND ASMA NAEEM
May 6, 2019
The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) and the AAMC Foundation has named the 20 U.S. curators who will be receiving its 2019 Awards for Excellence. This year’s honorees were selected from 150 nominations, and work in a variety of fields, including native and indigenous art, contemporary art, folk art, medieval art, American art, media art, and photography.
Judith Pineiro, executive director of AAMC and AAMC Foundation, said in a statement, “For 15 years, curators have recognized the trailblazing achievements of their peers through our annual Awards for Excellence. It is a privilege to celebrate this year’s awardees who, through their work, have fostered dynamic dialogue and broader engagement in the arts.”
Taína B. Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latinx art and history at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and Asma Naeem, chief curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, for “UnSeen: Our Past in a New light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar” at the National Portrait Gallery
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College acquires paintings by June Edmonds
April 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that June Edmond's painting A Tisket (2018) was acquired by the Davis Museum at Wellesly College in Massachusetts, USA. One of the oldest and most acclaimed academic fine art museums in the United States, the Museum was founded more than 120 years ago by the first President of Wellesley College. The Davis collections, which span global history from antiquity to the present and include masterpieces from almost every continent, are housed today in an extraordinary museum building, designed by Rafael Moneo, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In addition to dynamic presentations of the permanent collections, and installations that support specific coursework and research interests, the Davis hosts a rotating series of engaging temporary exhibitions and programs organized to inform, delight, and challenge its visitors.
The Neiman Marcus Art Collection acquires work by Dennis Koch
April 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Dennis Koch's color pencil drawing Untitled (Versor Parallel) (2019) was acquired by the Neiman Marcus Art Collection in Dallas, TX. The Neiman Marcus Art Collection began in 1951 when Stanley Marcus purchases a large-scale Alexander Calder mobile and reflects the company’s broad interests in high quality, creativity artworks that span all media. With the initial purpose of enriching the environment and supporting artists who explore unusual paths of creative expression, the collection has grown to hold some 2,500 works of art.
The Battery acquires a photograph by Chris Engman
February 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Chris Engman's Landscape for Quentin (2017) was acquired by The Battery in San Francisco, CA. The Battery is a private social club, a boutique hotel, a hub for music, arts, and literature, and a philathropic organization founded by Michael and Xochi Birch in 2014.
The Pizzuti Collection acquires an additional painting by Britton Tolliver
January 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Britton Tolliver's painting Traffic Light (2018) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
The Pizzuti Collection acquires a painting by Caitlin Cherry
January 2019
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Caitlin Cherry's painting Sapiosexual Leviathan (2019) was acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. The painting was featured in the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery, Threadripper, on view from January 12 - February 9, 2019. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
EDRA SOTO RECIEVES FOUNDWORK ARTIST PRIZE
The gallery is pleased to announce that Edra Soto has received the Foundwork Artist Prize. The Foundwork Artist Prize is an annual juried award that we inaugurated in 2019 to recognize outstanding practice by contemporary artists. The honoree receives an unrestricted 10,000 USD grant and studio visits with the distinguished jurors. The honoree and three short-listed artists are also featured in interviews as part of our Dialogues program.
The Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection acquires several works by Dennis Koch
August 2018
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection has acquired several Cutouts (2018) by artist Dennis Koch. Part of a new series in which original LIFE Magazines are carved page by page to reveal interior images, thus transformed into hand-cut magazine sculptures, these works interrupt and reconstruct common narrative strategies while compressing time and space into one image. Launched in 1980 in Boston, MA, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection collects artwork that is experimental, intellectually curious, and technically precise across all media.
Artnet News Profiles Luis De Jesus: "I’ve Always Been an Advocate for Diversity"
LUIS DE JESUS HOPES THAT A NEW CLASS OF LATINX COLLECTORS WILL EMERGE IN THE US LIKE IT HAS IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY.
July 23, 2018
A former artist and one of only a few successful Latinx dealers in the US, Luis De Jesus understands the difficulty of getting the art world to pay attention. Since founding his gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in 2010, he has made a career of showing young artists with something to say, and has quietly become a staple of the city’s art scene in the process.
Flaten Art Museum acquires work by Ken Gonzales-Day
May 2018
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's Hands Up (2015) was acquired by the Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. This photograph was first exhibited in the artist's second solo exhibition at the Gallery titled, Run Up on view from April 4 through May 9, 2015. It was exhibited again in Ken Gonzales-Day: Shadowlands at the Flaten Art Museum from September 1 through October 29, 2017. Founded in 1976 at St. Olaf College, the Flaten Art Museum has evolved from college gallery to collecting museum with programming that is regional, national, and even international in scope.
The Microsoft Art Collection acquires works by Chris Engman and Lia Halloran
February 2018
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Chris Engman's photograph Prospect (2016) from his ongoing Prospect and Refuge series and Lia Halloran's drawing Andromeda, after Mollie O' Reilly (2017) from her ongoing series Your Body Is A Space That Sees were acquired by the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, WA. The Microsoft Art Collection was launched in 1987 by a committee made up of employees interested in collecting and displaying artwork created by artists from the community. Over the past quarter-century, the Collection has mirrored the corporation’s meteoric growth with nearly 5,000 artworks on display in over 130 buildings throughout North America.
The Pizzuti Collection acquires three works by Britton Tolliver
December 2017
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Britton Tolliver's paintings Icarus (2017), Distant Roam (2017), and Night Goat (2017) were acquired by the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Originally founded as an independent nonprofit by the Pizzuti family to share exhibitions of contemporary art from their private collection, the organization and its beautifully renovated building were recently acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art.
Museum of Comtemporary Photography at Columbia College acquires several works from Zackary Drucker's Relationship series
December 2017
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that six photographs from Zackary Drucker's Relationship (2008-2014) were acquired by the Museum of Comtemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, IL. Relationship (2008-2014) is a series of intimate snapshots taken by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst that depicts the arc of their real-life five-and-a-half year relationship, during which one transitioned from female to male, and the other from male to female. Founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography began collecting in the early 1980s and is the world’s premier college art museum dedicated to photography with more than 15,000 objects by over 1,500 artists in its collection.
Minnesota Museum of American Art acquires work by Ken Gonzales-Day
October 2017
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day's photo-based wallpaper The Lynching of Spanish Charlie (2016) was acquired by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, MN. The work is part of the artist's ongoing Erased Lynchings series and was first on view at the Museum in the exhibition Ken Gonzales-Day: Shadowlands from January 19 through April 16, 2017.
THE PHYLLIS AND ROSS ESCALETTE PERMANENT COLLECTION OF ART AT CHAPMAN UNIVERSTIY ACQUIRES WORKS BY LIA HALLORAN AND KEN GONZALES-DAY
July 2017
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran's Triangulum, After Adelaide Ames (2017), Paper Dolls (2016), and Ken Gonzales-Day's 41 Objects Arranged by Color (2016) were acquired by the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Both of Halloran's works are part of Your Body is a Space That Sees an ongoing series of cameraless cyanotypes that highlight the achievements of the Harvard Observatory female researchers who made significant contributions to the field of astronomy. Gonzales-Day's photograph is part of his ongoing Profiled series in which the artist photographs sculptures of the human form as found in international museum and anthropology collections as a way to reveal the emergence, idealization, and even folly of race. Beyond its role in curating art in public spaces, the Escalette Collection is a learning laboratory that offers diverse opportunities for student and engagement and research, and involvement with the wider community.
INTERVIEW BY A. MORET WITH LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
Volta Basel 10/ Booth #C21
September 2014
A. Moret interviews Luis De Jesus on the gallery's participation in VOLTA Basel 10.
Press
Composition in Black and Brown is part of Profiled (2008–), an photographic series that grew out of his research into the history of racial depictions in exhibitions and museum displays. Gonzales-Day has brought this project not only to the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum but also to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum, the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the archive of the 1915–16 California-Panama Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and many others.
By Sarah Cascone
Is it finally time for Mimi Smith to get her due? The 82-year-old feminist artist’s mini retrospective at Art Basel Miami Beach with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles fittingly features a suite of sculptures made from clocks, with references to pressing social issues added to each hour.
By Maximilíano Durón
Mimi Smith, an artist associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, offers one of the most striking showings in the Survey section, for historical presentations. 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.
Lia Halloran: Night watch presents a new series of paintings capturing the passage of time across multiple scales—whether through the movement of star trails, the changing of seasons, or the Earth’s steady orbit around the sun. Through interplay of colors and textures, Halloran’s works engage in a dialogue between the mechanical and organic. Referencing the iconic Device works of Jasper Johns, this series investigates the many mechanisms that symbolize the passage of time.
By Christina Stock
Something unusual happened at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (RAiR) compound. Two of the current artists found a kinship that reflects in their art created at the compound. An idea was born: instead of having two separate exhibits, RAiR artists Tristram Lansdowne and Ryan Crowley decided to combine their work into the exhibit “Wicked Wells and Window Wipeouts,” which includes the artists talk at the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art (AMoCA), 409 E. College Blvd., on Dec. 6 at 5:30 p.m.
By Michele Stueven
Los Angeles-based Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis’s work Rise has been unveiled at the recently opened Aviation/Century Metro Station near Los Angeles International Airport on an elevated light rail station along the K-Line at the intersection of Aviation Boulevard and Century Boulevard.
The Driehaus Museum has announced “A Tale of Today: Materialities,” an expansive contemporary exhibition “that invites viewers to discover the history and architectural richness of the Museum through the eyes of artists who are rooted in the Midwest.” Including works from Rebecca Beachy, Jonas Becker, Olivia Block, Barbara Cooper, Richard Hunt, IOTO, Beth Lipman, Luftwerk, Dakota Mace, Bobbie Meier, Laleh Motlagh, Ebony G. Patterson, Jefferson Pinder and Edra Soto, working across disciplines. “A Tale of Today: Materialities” will run February 7-April 25, 2025.
As a war survivor and immigrant, Dubai-based Iraqi artist Vian Sora, who is also showcasing her House of Pearls at the Art Week, said, “We live a collective trauma, but war is acute in that either it ends or it remains with you continuously…The survival mode does not switch off and those are the images and their forms added and stripped away on my canvas.
Presented in conjunction with the Wende Museum’s Counter/Surveillance exhibition and co-presented with the History of Science Society, this event explores the history, impact, and biases of facial recognition technologies. Historians Sharrona Pearl (Texas Christian University) and Iris Clever (University of Chicago) and LA-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day will discuss the intersections of surveillance, race, and artistic resistance, offering fresh perspectives on one of today’s most pressing issues.
By Katie Neith
This fall, Halloran has two new exhibits that are part of an expansive art event taking place across Southern California and organized by the Getty, called PST ART: Art & Science Collide. One of those exhibits is a series of oil paintings called Night Watch, which attempts to examine how machines and tools might symbolize the natural passage of time.
By Jessica Gelt and Ashley Lee
“CUT — Six Artists on the Edge”
This group exhibition — featuring works by David Adey, David Daigle, Sherin Guirguis, Fran Siegel, Edra Soto and Samira Yamin — is all about the various methods of cutting as methods of creation and transformation of physical objects: tearing, slicing, carving, drilling, laser cutting and more.
By Renée Reizman
PASADENA — In Lia Halloran’s mixed media painting on cyanotype, “You, Me, and Infinity” (2024), two half-planetary bodies abut at the center of a five-panel canvas. Thin, wavy tendrils expand out from smaller particles, suggesting light, distance, frequencies, or alien signals. Two pale silhouettes of children float among the cosmos. These imprints were created by Hallohan’s children lying on the cyanotype as it was exposed in the sunshine. One of the legs is repeated in a ghostly echo, evidence of a restless toddler.
By Maan Jalal
The solo exhibition of the US-based Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora explores concepts of violence through the metaphor and the process of pearl creation. Her large-scale, abstract, colourful paintings and works on paper also draw on her experiences as a war survivor and immigrant. Until December 5; Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
By Shana Nys Dambrot
Once you accept that linear time is probably an illusion, albiet a pretty convient one, then riffing on the ways in which humans have measured it become a playground of transcendent imagination. With a plurality of scientific instruments and devices, with poets’ eyes trained on the stars, with the rings of trees and the orbits of celestial bodies and the cycle of tides and seasons, with the discovered resurfacing of older and older works of glaciers, comets, and humanity…
There’s no shortage of art this fall that’ll remind you of famous people running for the most powerful offices in the world. And then there’s Federico Solmi’s “The Great Farce,” which recently opened at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. It’s like all of the election year art, all at once, magnified, multiplied and crammed inside eight minutes of chaos.
Aviation/Century is the eighth station on the K Line and features Rise, a prominent artwork installation by Sherin Guirguis. The station will be the new endpoint for the C Line, which now runs between Norwalk and Aviation/Century. The K Line will continue between Expo/Crenshaw and Westchester/Veterans, and between Aviation/Century and Redondo Beach, the new terminus for the K Line’s south segment.
In her first solo show at Luis De Jesus, Melissa Huddleston lined the room with a series of marbled paintings on paper that she made by immersing the sheets in a bath prepared with a surface of floating paint, which she manipulated to effectively draw in water. Lush and mottled, with color settling into unrepeatable arrangements, each resulting pull evidently creates a monoprint.
By Julia Levy
One such alumnus of his courses, Bailyn recalled, is Lia Halloran ART ’01, who has since made a career out of visual art inspired by astronomical concepts. In 2023, Halloran published the book, “The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves” in a nearly two-decade collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne.
By Adam Ludwig
Funded in part via the Getty Foundation’s current PST ART: Art and Science Collide initiative, the exhibition unfolds across six sites at the hermetic institution. In it, materials from Caltech’s archives are presented alongside work by artists such as Helen Pashgian, Lita Albuquerque, and Lia Halloran in spaces that are usually reserved for scientific research and instruction. In wielding scientific materials as and alongside aesthetic ones, the exhibition makes all of Caltech into a playground for various forms of observation.
On Wednesday, October 23, Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center (TJMHC) hosted an opening reception of the Allen & Marianne Langer Contemporary Human Rights Exhibit. The new exhibit is titled Witnessing Violence: Help or Harm? One key inspiration for this exhibit was artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series which utilizes altered lynching photographs to confront the spectacle of these extrajudicial, white supremacist killings.
By Lily Brown
The Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA) and its digital counterpart, GalleryPlatform.LA, kicked off their inaugural DTLArts Day — a celebration of not just the Arts District, but also its surrounding contemporary art scenes. Painter Laura Krifka led a walkthrough of her solo Luis De Jesus exhibition, “Carousel,” which explores the politics surrounding sensuality, desire, and the representation of women's bodies.
Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora’s latest show “House of Pearls” is a collection that — according to The Third Line, where the exhibition runs until Dec. 5 — uses “pearls as a metaphor for achieving stability and the needed structural integrity for life itself to regenerate.” In it, Sora “explores … caustic cycles, the solid and fluid violent states intrinsic to nature from which pearls grow.”
By Jody Zellen
Gluck amassed a vast body of work, (making collages for over 70 years) and on view at Luis de Jesus Gallery are a selection borrowed from his estate and created in the 1930s and 1940s. These elegant, small scale works were influenced by Surrealism and share a kinship with other artists making collages at this time including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Hanna Hoch, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. The exhibit also includes vitrines with books, documents and ephemera that showcase many of these influences.
By Tim Johnson
A conversation about Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River and the uses of photography featuring Ken Gonzales-Day.
“Barthes once wrote that he had never made a photograph. Remember that? There’s practically nobody alive today who could say that. That’s the framework we have to think within. We’re all implicated.”—Ken Gonzales-Day
By Avi Loeb
Yesterday, in a public lecture organized by Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, for which I served as founding director, the Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne described his scientific and artistic work on warped spacetimes. Most recently, he collaborated with the artist Lia Halloran to illustrate his mental picture of black holes, wormholes and gravitational waves. Kip’s partnership with Lia gave birth to images as beautiful and explanatory as Galileo’s sketches.
By Walker Mimms
If you head north on Interstate 95 from New York, you’ll find that unease in another large-scale corrective from an artist. As you approach New Haven, on the right you’ll pass “Composition in Black and Brown,” a billboard by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day collaging his photographs of 18th-century marble busts from the Yale Center for British Art, which commissioned the work.
By Jessica Gelt and Ashley Lee
Three exhibitions Desire is at the center of Laura Krifka’s figurative oil paintings in “Carousel”; Canadian painter Tristram Lansdowne explores the use of representational space through water colors with “Burrito Planet”; and, marking the centennial of surrealism, “Unlocking the Mind: Early Surrealist Collages” focuses on Nathan Gluck’s World War II-era work.
“Unlocking the Mind: Nathan Gluck’s Early Surrealist Collages” brings together a selection of early career artworks by Nathan Gluck (1918-2008) spanning approximately ten years, from the late 1930s through the late 1940s. The works on view reflect the young artists deep appreciation of modern surrealist masters like Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Domenico de Chirico, and include experiments with narrative prose and original poetry.
By Lindsay Preston Zappas
In many of the works in Tristram Lansdowne’s exhibition, Burrito Planet, it seems gravity has taken a day off. In his watercolor works, landscapes stretch and warp around all four edges of the paper, becoming framing devices for the objects he depicts within — in one, a Western landscape takes a swift 90-degree turn, and is sent careening vertically down the edges of the drawing. Within these uncanny framing devices, Lansdowne plays cheeky trompe l’oeil games employing Magritte-style compositions.
West Coast tastemaker Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is among them. Founder Luis De Jesus told Artsy that he felt inspired to join the fair after his Atlanta-based collectors encouraged him to check out the city. He was particularly encouraged to show the work of gallery artists Evita Tezeno, June Edmonds, and Melissa Huddleston. Prices for the works range from about $10,000 to $40,000. In the first few hours of the fair, De Jesus and co-owner Jay Wingate noticed just how eager new collectors were to learn.
By Jesse James
This year’s program, titled Work in Progress, emphasizes the beauty of the artistic journey itself, shedding light on the process of creation rather than just the final product. Over the last 50 years, the residency has welcomed over 500 artists to its fold, featuring Edra Soto. By merging the creativity of the artists with the technical prowess of Kohler’s artisans, the residency has become a space for innovation, where participants can experiment with new ideas, stretch their skills, and find inspiration in the craftsmanship of industry.
By Magrira
Edra Soto's latest piece, “Graft,” is on display at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park at 60th Street and 5th Avenue, until Aug. 24, 2025. This series of installations is based on rejas, wrought iron screens frequently seen outside homes in Puerto Rico. These screens, often featuring repeating geometric motifs, trace back to West Africa’s Yoruba symbol systems, contrasting the Spanish architecture celebrated in official Puerto Rican tourism. “Graft” investigates how Puerto Rican cultural memory often masks the island’s Black heritage as folklore.
By Mike Cummings
The billboard, which is titled “Composition in Black and Brown I” and will be on view near exit 44 through October, depicts a photographic collage by the Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. It combines photos of portrait busts and other sculpture from the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Peabody Museum, and prompts questions about the historical constructions of race and modes of representation.
The California Institute of Technology is set to unveil a groundbreaking exhibition that delves into the interplay between art and science over the past century. “Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020," featuring Lia Halloran will open on Friday, September 27, marking a significant contribution to the PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. Organized into three interconnected thematic sections — The Infinite Lawn, Time Stream, and Powers of Ten — the exhibition guides viewers through a journey from the vast expanses of the universe to the microscopic world of subatomic particles. Each section aims to illuminate the complex relationship between scientific discovery and artistic expression.
By Stephanie Kulke
Past and present, history and myth, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in Federico Solmi’s “The Great Farce” (2017), a monumental media work in the collection of Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, on view now through Dec. 1.The exhibition is the first time The Block Museum has mounted the full presentation of Solmi’s installation “Federico Solmi: The Great Farce.” The immersive eight-minute installation consists of nine video projections spanning the entirety of The Block Museum's largest gallery.
The revolutions of carousels, with their interplay of monotony and shifts in perspectives, serve as a compelling approach for Krifka to explore cycles and breakdowns of feminine identity. She considers the weight of society’s gaze and describes “an experience that is constantly fragmenting and reforming, and then falling apart again." From its projections of beauty and embodiment of pleasure, to its anxieties of immobility against the momentum of aging, Krifka's “carousel” plays with the social constructs of feminine desire framed by a world that seeks to define and control its edges.
By AWT Editors
Laura Krifka’s art has long been a reflection of the complex interplay between power, desire, and identity. Her latest exhibition, “Carousel,” now open at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, continues this exploration, offering viewers a chance to confront the ever-changing nature of the feminine experience. Through a series of evocative figurative paintings, Krifka questions societal constructs of desire while examining how the gaze—both external and internal—shapes our sense of self.
By Nicky Ni
On September 19, the Block Museum will open a solo show by Italian-born, New York–based artist Federico Solmi, with a single featured work, The Great Farce, which will transform the museum’s largest gallery space into a monumental video installation. A Guggenheim fellow, Solmi has exhibited mixed-media installations of animated videos internationally that incredibly saturated colors and biting satire.
Lansdowne's detailed watercolors examine the painterly relationship between surface and volume as they pertain to our visual world. He approaches the combination of images intuitively, guided by a strategy of loose association and visual rhymes.
By Shana Nys Dambrot
A suite of new quasi-nudes by painter Laura Krifka continues her dual examination of the optical mechanics of perspective and space and the physical and secret mechanics of beauty and desire. Complexifying her relationship to art history, Krifka’s scantily dressed figure paintings exist in fully realized worlds of forced sightlines, improbable architecture, and caustic still life vignettes.
The gallery’s fall season starts off with three coinciding exhibitions: Laura Krifka Carousel, Tristram Lansdowne Burrito Planet, and Nathan Gluck Unlocking the Mind: Nathan Gluck’s Early Surrealist Collages. Krifka uses figuration to reflect upon our desires derived from human constructions. Lansdowne takes to watercolors to explore shifting genres. Gluck’s show looks at his career throughout the 1930s and 40s and the influence of the surrealist movement on his collages.
By Waltpaper
Finally, I was thrilled to see new works by Hector Dionicio Mendoza, represented by Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles. His show-stopping work delves into a world of Magical Realism, taking inspiration from oral histories, ethnobotany, and personal experiences learned from his grandfather’s practice as a fifth-generation curandero (shaman).
By Eliza Jordan
The 30th edition of The Armory Show (September 6-8) closed over the weekend in New York, culminating in a lively presentation of 235 galleries from 35 countries. Guided by its Director, Kyla McMillan, it was shown at the Jacob K. Javits Center, with various categories—Galleries, Focus, Solo, and Presents—encompassing an array of eye-catching creations from global emerging and established names, including sculptures, videos, paintings, large-scale installations, performances, and more.
By Stephanie Casanova
After winning an award from The Joyce Foundation, The Sculpture Center is partnering with artist Edra Soto, who will create the bus shelter and an indoor gallery exhibition next year. The La Distancia (The Distance) project will address themes of displacement, identity and culture. The indoor exhibition will be on display in May and June. The permanent bus shelter sculpture will be installed in May.
By Jenise Silva
From painting hairballs to creating large-scale installations and dragging paintings through public spaces, Seattle-based artist Margie Livingston has made some tracks. She's also made quite an impression on art lovers who seek her work out at Greg Kucera, her long-time gallery. These days, her art inspiration is coming from an unlikely place.
NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund presents Edra Soto: Graft, the latest iteration in an ongoing series of architectural interventions, in an exhibition at Central Park. With her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto continues her sculptural practice of using rejas, the patterned wrought iron screen-like gates ubiquitous in post-war Puerto Rican architecture, to create a monument to lower and middle-class Puerto Rican communities.
By Aaron Ginsburg
Artist Edra Soto’s first large-scale work in New York City pays tribute to the architectural legacy of Puerto Rico. Presented by the Public Art Fund, “Edra Soto: Graft” draws inspiration from rejas, the wrought iron gates often found outside homes in Puerto Rico, and serves as a monument to lower and middle-class Puerto Rican communities. The exhibition will be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park at 60th Street and 5th Avenue from September 5 through August 24, 2025.
With Laura Krifka's solo show at Luis de Jesus, Carousel, about a month away, we wanted to look at the last few years of works (and a remarkable painting from 2024 as part of the Carousel show) in today's A Portfolio.
CAROUSEL: September 14 - October 26, 2024
Artist reception: September 21 - 4 -7 pm
By Lisa Deaderick
Contemporary artist Hugo Crosthwaite has spent his career disrupting conventions, which includes his latest exhibition at the Mesa College Art Gallery. For two weeks, he’s been engaged in muralism as performance, complete with a costume and opportunities for visitors (or, the audience) to interact with him while he works/performs.
By Cornelia Feye
Hugo Crosthwaite was born in Tijuana and still lives in the house he grew up in behind his father’s curio shop. He is known for his fluid graphite and charcoal figurative black and white drawings that sometimes grow to the size of murals. His portrait drawing of Dr. Anthony Fauci was recently included in the National Portrait Gallery. So, Crosthwaite’s exhibition Tijua Color at Bread & Salt’s main gallery comes as a bit of a shock. Crosthwaite’s life-size paintings are bursting with vibrant colors and hang on normally white walls, now painted in dark red, green, orange, blue and gray.
By Julia Dixon Evans
Hugo Crosthwaite: 'The Rupture of the White Cube'
Visual art | Prolific artist Hugo Crosthwaite is having a month. With one solo exhibit already on view at Bread and Salt, he's also just installed another at Mesa College Art Gallery. In "The Rupture of the White Cube," curator Smadar Samson worked with Crosthwaite to design a unique and symbolic structure in the middle of the gallery that disrupts the viewer's gaze within the gallery space. The 12 foot cube also serves as a room-within-a-room where Crosthwaite has installed murals. Work on paper and a projected animation will also be on view.
By Emily Rosca
AURORA, IL — It may not be springtime, but Aurora is in bloom thanks to a new mural and sculpture garden on Downer Place in the downtown area. Called "Aurora In Bloom," the mural depicts flowers from in and around Aurora. The blooms adorn the side of a brick building adjacent to five free-standing sculptures, called "Graft," designed by Chicago artist Edra Soto.
By Coco Picard
In 2012, Edra Soto began Graft, an ongoing series inspired by the rejas of Puerto Rico’s homes, windows, porches, and fences, which allow the circulation of air while delineating public and private space. Soto’s resulting architectural interventions not only transplant her native Puerto Rican identity onto U.S. territories but further highlight how cultural identity and the architectures upon which we rely are situated within a dynamic web of historic and contemporary relationships.
How can photography help people better understand their environment amidst an era of rapid development and climate change? In the final episode of Widening the Lens, artists Edra Soto, Victoria Sambunaris, and Dionne Lee discuss how photography helps them bear witness to the constantly changing American landscape, and the ways in which art can help us move forward at this critical juncture.
The Third Line announced House of Pearls, the gallery's first solo exhibition with Louisville-based artist Vian Sora. The exhibition presents new paintings and works on paper that explore pearls as a metaphor for achieving stability and the needed structural integrity for life itself to regenerate.
By Josef Woodard
Vian Sora's Dilmun featured in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's newest exhibition. In an odd but pointed way, the new exhibition In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA eagerly seeks to invalidate and disprove a Gertrude Stein quote, strategically placed at the entrance to the show. Almost a century ago, in an age before modern art and museum culture had found a way to get along, Stein said, “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”
By Edwin Folven
When the new Metro D Line subway station at Wilshire/Fairfax debuts in fall 2025, it will open a grand new portal for people to experience Los Angeles’ rich art and cultural institutions along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile.
Art is a key component of the transit experience and the design of Metro’s subway stations. Each station has three to five public artworks specifically reflecting the surrounding communities. At the Wilshire/Fairfax station, an artwork by Ken Gonzales-Day aims to capture the depth and diversity of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s expansive art collection and the environment in which it is displayed.
By Julia Dixon Evans
On a warm August afternoon, Hugo Crosthwaite stepped back from a vivid, steel-blue wall in the sun-streaked Bread and Salt gallery. In one hand, he held a gold paint pen. In the other, the cardboard backing from the pen's packaging, covered with dabs and blobs of gold. Tapping the tip of the pen against the cardboard to get the paint flowing, he reapproached the wall.Bright scenes on canvases rest, awaiting installation against each wall of the main gallery — each wall painted a different, earthy hue. Color is everywhere. Crosthwaite is well-known for his black and white drawings, animations and murals that blend Mexican folklore with cityscapes and vivid portraits of the people that pass him on the streets. But in this new exhibit, he's venturing into color — for the first time.
By Ryan Hardison
This Saturday, as part of the Barrio Art Crawl, peruse the free opening receptions for a pair of new exhibitions at Bread & Salt from 5 to 8 p.m.. Tijuana-born Hugo Crosthwaite’s multi-hued Tijuacolor, on display through October, marks a departure from the artist’s black-and-white charcoal drawings. Visitors can also check out What’s Your Type? at the Athenaeum Art Center within Bread & Salt, an interactive group exhibition exploring regional typography through October 25.
Metro Art-commissioned artist Ken Gonzales-Day and Los Angeles County Museum of Art curators Eve Schillo and Rita Gonzalez discuss the artist’s work on Tuesday, Aug. 20, from 7-8 p.m. at the museum. Gonzales-Day’s artwork “Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects” will be on display in the Wilshire/Fairfax subway station on the D Line Extension.
By Carson Woś
Upon first glance one might view Luis Emilio Romero’s paintings as a translation of traditional textile patterns from the artist’s homeland of Guatemala, but upon further inspection, these pieces go far beyond this initial inspiration. The canvas itself is a plane organizing striations of pigments and their optical relationship with light: a topic of obsessive fascination for the artist. These dense fields of linear tones play with the viewer’s eye tracing pathways through the maze of rhythmic patterns, and just as one feels they have decoded the formula of repeating elements, particular anomalies begin to surface.
By Lila Victor
FREEDOM, Black in Mayberry’s Juneteenth exhibition, brought together 14 incredibly talented Black artists to bring light to themes of racism, social justice, and freedom. Over the course of its week-long run, the exhibition sparked conversations, promoted curiosity, and engaged people across all identities with thought-provoking and brilliant art. From sculptures to mixed media to photography to paintings to pencil, the diverse array of mediums showcased many different approaches to complex topics. Equally intelligent and creative, all of the artists featured have their own unique voice and story.
By Julia Ehlert
While objectivity may rule the day in science, it takes a sense of imagination, wonder, and creativity to see beyond the limits of our current knowledge. In September 2024, Caltech will take part in the landmark arts event, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty. PST ART will span dozens of institutions across Southern California with exhibitions featuring more than 800 artists. Caltech entities on campus and at JPL received grants from the Getty Foundation for three separate projects that will explore the event’s theme in unique ways.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Luis Emilio Romero's Fortress of Light / Fortalez de Luz. In his first solo show at the gallery, on exhibit are geometric abstract paintings inspired by ancestral traditions.
By Kristin Sakoda
The National Association of Counties (NACo) is dedicated to the advancement of excellence in public service, and annually, NACo recognizes new and exceptional government programs from counties across the nation. We are so excited to win six achievement awards this year, for artist Phung Huynh’s work with Office of Immigrant Affairs in our Creative Strategist program; Phung’s work (again!) on our Civic Art Division’s community engagement-rich commission of her artwork Sobrevivir at the Los Angeles General Medical Center; the Countywide Cultural Policy and two projects that came from it, the Arts and Culture Needs Assessment and County of Los Angeles Land Acknowledgment and Toolkit developed with Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission and Tribal members; and the aforementioned Creative Wellbeing initiative.
By Franchesca Baratta
Performaces, sunsets, and a celebration of the citywide arts moment. Last night, we partnered with Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA) to kick off their new website and Gallery Weekend Los Angeles–a three-day celebration conclusive of events and exhibitions that showcase the city’s art, artists, and art institutions–with a launch party on the rooftop of ROW DTLA.
By: Mona Brittain
A whirlwind” is how Tezeno describes the last few years of creating intricate, bright-colored collages; exhibitions; international sales; interviews; meeting collectors including Pauletta and Denzel Washington; and receiving a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts. Tezeno is one of the artists whose work was chosen for “Multiplicity. Blackness in Contemporary Collage,” recently exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
By Jill Singer
For LA’s Luis de Jesus Gallery, Guatemalan-born, New York–based artist Luis Emilio Romerohttps://www.luisdejesus.com presented canvases whose mark-making and patterning resembled the kinds of weavings that have been passed down in Romero’s community for generations. “The paintings speak powerfully to the notion of meditation, while the history of indigenous Guatemalan weaving techniques adds a complex spiritualism and peaceful involvement to his process.”
By Jonathan Fineberg.
Imagine you’re watching the cacophony of action-packed scenes rapidly and randomly bumped up against one another in the trailer for Federico Fellini’s already disorienting film Juliet of the Spirits and suddenly you find yourself actually in the film; it has become reality! That’s the best way I can describe the sensation of Federico Solmi’s exhibition Solmi - Ship Of Fools at the Venice Biennale (Palazzo Dona’ Dalle Rose, Fondamente Nova).
Noel Alumit profiles the Cambodian American artist Phung Huynh who’s repairing Buddhist statues — and, in the process, connecting to her own heart.
Whether they’re looking at looted Greek antiquities, stolen indigenous artifacts—even remains—or Jewish-owned art pillaged during World War II, museumgoers often overlook just how exactly these pieces came to be in a museum’s possession. This question of provenance arose for artist Phung Huynh when reflecting on thousands of decapitated Buddha heads from Asian countries in museum collections...
Independent New York opens on May 9 and with it, Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora will present a new body of work with David Nolan Gallery (Booth 606). This follows acquisitions of her work by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Shah Garg Foundation, among others, along with recent profiles in Artnet, The Guardian and Vogue Arabia.
The Artnet Gallery Network has thousands of artists and artworks—with more added all the time—and our liaisons know what's available better than anyone. We asked them to share a few of the works that have captured their attention, and their picks are a great way to get inspiration for how to expand your collection, discover a new artist, or start the journey to finding that perfect piece for your home or office.
Public Art Fund will debut Edra Soto's new interactive metal and terrazzo sculptural works at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, Engage Projects relays. Her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto's Public Art Fund project marks the next iteration of her "Graft" series.
A leading figure in the Chicano Arts Movement launched in the 1970s, Valadez is among the finest socially engaged figurative painters working in Los Angeles. His debut with the Luis De Jesus gallery opens Saturday and will include a mural-scaled painting, "Chaos," that press materials say seeks to unravel common cliches around the "haves and have-nots."
Griselda Rosas’s large mixed media works on paper, representing Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, were among the fair’s show stoppers. Rosas somehow combines the textures of paint with densely stitched or embroidered passages. The pieces are moody, atmospheric, full of surprises, and downright mystical in the way that they usher thread into the shimmery realm of fabulist landscapes. The artist, based in Tijuana and San Diego, straddles the US-Mexico border, and her stitching on paper can echo the back and forth, coming and going, of migration. In the far edge of one piece is a tear Rosas sutured. The divide is a wound; the wound needs repair.
Dozens of artists and project spaces opened their doors across six stories of the multi-use building, inviting the public into a whirlwind of contemporary creative output through both polished presentations and behind-the-scenes views. I spent the majority of my visit in Laura Karetzky's studio taking in the textures and hues of her storytelling through paintings.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women's Board held its first of two fundraising soirées, titled, "Art à la Carte," at the University Club on Monday, March 25. The lovely event featured an in-depth artist talk with Iraqi American artist Vian Sora, and the museum's Contemporary Art Curator James Glisson, PhD.
"I came out of the womb and knew I wanted to be an artist. It’s all I know.” Growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, Evita Tezeno was surrounded by female relatives who were quilters and seamstresses. Little bits of fabric could always be found around the house, and it’s this patchwork, folk-art style that has inspired Tezeno’s immensely popular collage paintings since the beginning of the 21st century. Tezeno’s paintings overflow with Black joy: colorful, harmonious scenes of Black Americans dancing, playing guitar, dressed up to go out, holding flowers.
Now known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson iterates the definition of resilience by stating: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us / Sing a Song full of the faith that the present has brought us / Facing the rising sun of our new day begun / Let us march on, Till Victory is won. Featuring ten recent works, June Edmonds’ show “Meditations on African Resilience,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, visualizes these words. Edmonds not only transcends abstraction: She firmly establishes her voice as a 21st-century painter who unapologetically interrogates the limited lens of the art-historical and its gatekeepers.
In honor of Women's History Month, we're celebrating the contributions of women throughout art history, including artworks by women from LACMA's collection. In this vibrant watercolor from 2021 entitled Trenzas (Braids), My Alter Ego, Karla Diaz pays homage to her Mexican heritage and the symbolic import of her ancestry through the attributes of her forefathers and foremothers.
The Candlewood Art Festival, named for the fragrant ocotillo that dots the landscpae around Borrego Springs, takes it cues from the generous spirit of the Sky Art sculptures in Galleta Meadows. The festival, meant for audiences of all ages, aims to inspire new ways of seeing and understanding the unique landscape and community of Borrego Springs, for local visitors alike. The artists, who all live and work in Southern California, were chosen for their ability to develop projects that thoughtfully and meaningfully connect with the people and environment of Borrego Springs.
Espacios & Lines showcases the talents of 16 local artists, with half of them working across borders and five residing in Baja California. Their artwork delve into themes such as shared symbolism, unique perspectives, reimagined boundaries, the necessity of design, and design as a tool for reconstruction, offering viewers a profound exploration of our region's cultural tapestry.
“Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” which is on display at 18th Street Arts Gallery’s Propeller Gallery, is an exploration of American Mexican identity from the 1970s through today via the paper and canvas work of artist Karla Diaz. Called her first institutional solo exhibition in Greater L.A., the exhibition features 37 of the writer, teacher and multidisciplinary artist’s new and recent works. At the heart of the exhibition is “The Silver Dollar” (2021), a work on paper that commemorates Ruben Salazar, the L.A. Times reporter and columnist — the city’s leading Latino media voice — who was killed in August 1970 when a sheriff’s deputy shot a projectile into East L.A. bar the Silver Dollar.
The works of 16 local artists are featured in a new cross-border art exhibition titled "Espacios & Lines" appearing at Terminal 2 at the San Diego International Airport. The exhibition, which explores the border of art and design follows the World Design Oranization's joint designation of San Diego and Tijuana as the World Design Capital 2024. Artists whose work is featured in the exhibition include: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition champion winner Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.
Black strength, endurance, joy and harmony are all qualities found in L.A.-born artist June Edmonds’ work. In her new exhibition, “Meditations on African Resilience,” Edmonds takes a deeper look at the river leaf emblem, a sacred quatrefoil used as a spiritual symbol (unity, balance and protection) as well as a symbol for “the power and regality of kings, healers and deities” in the Kingdom of Benin in what’s now southern Nigeria. Pay attention to the “deep color,” as Edmonds calls it, used to tap “into a part of our psyche linked to an ancient memory that exists within all of us.”
With 16 local artisans at the helm, half reveling in their binational and five planted firmly in Baja California, prepare for an immersion into diverse perspectives and cultural symbiosos. Among the spotlighted talent, we find Hugo Crosthwaite, the esteemed Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition champion.
The title of Griselda Rosas' exhibition, "Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before)," recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, "Once upon a time...," but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn't frame so much as foreground the action depicted there. Which is slightly ironic because the works Rosas has created—in watercolor, embroidery, collage, and other materials—are vessels for a volatile chemistry of color and texture that variously congeal, smolder, and sublimate into a nebulous array of babies, battles, conquistadores, vortexes, regalia, insignia, animals and tissues.
The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time…,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the action depicted there. The works Rosas has created here—in watercolor, embroidery, collage and other materials—are vessels for a volatile chemistry of color and texture that variously congeal, smolder and sublimate into a nebulous array of babies, battles, conquistadors, vortexes, regalia, insignia, animals and tissues. Alive, or in some transitional necrosis, they remain highly resistant to the perspective offered by narrative.
Throughout New Directions, the photographic image features as a tool to foritfy—but also unsettle—ideas about history and identity. Major themes in the exhibition examine the power of archivevs, digital image culture, the social structures of race and gender, and the landscapes as a repository for history. While some of the artists embrace photography as a documentary medium, others develop strategies to destabilize the authority of the image.
Just as LA celebrates its annual fair week, the pinnacle of the commercial art ecosystem, several shows across the city take a different approach, offering alternative creative visions and celebrating the abject, the margins, the forgotten.
With a vibrant palette and crisp lines reminiscent of comic books, Diaz’s paintings combine childhood recollections of Mexico and LA, domestic family scenes, pop culture, fantasy, and dreams with a focus on social justice, a crucial part of Slanguage, the community art space she co-founded with her husband, Mario Ybarra Jr., in 2002.
As an artist, curator, and educator based in the agricultural community of the Salinas Valley in California, Hector Dionicio Mendoza embraces Latinx/e futurism while exploring themes of migration and the environment, spirituality, as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories that expand upon a new latinidad.
Step into the world of artist Karla Diaz at 18th Street Art Center. Her vibrant paintings in "Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home" draw inspiration from everyday experiences, pulling you into swap meets, protests, and familiar domestic spaces. This introspective exploration delves into the beauty of the ordinary, reminding us how seemingly mundane moments shape our lives.
Slanguage has since become a crucial community resource and a platform for emerging artists, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, rooted in the idea that reflecting on the nuances of one’s life—however ubiquitous and ordinary they might seem—can both provide a sturdy foundation and abundant terrain for artistic inspiration. Diaz has applied that notion of introspection to her own painting practice, especially in the new works she created her show at 18th Street Art Center. The show’s title, “Wait ’til Your Mother Gets Home,” nods to a warning Diaz heard all the time in her Mexican American household growing up, particularly since she had a proclivity for drawing on the walls as a child. With equal parts whimsy and clarity, Diaz depicts the likes of swap meets, protests, and bedrooms, tapping into the disparate places and people that, crucially, make a life.
18th Street Arts Center is now showing Karla Diaz: Wait ‘til Your Mother Gets Home, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the Los Angeles area. The exhibition consists of 37 new and recent works on paper and paintings, along with an installation that commemorates Rubén Salazar, the civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times reporter murdered in 1970.
The title of the exhibition, “wait ‘til your mother gets home,” is a familiar expression Diaz heard frequently from her aunt, who stayed with her after school as a young girl. Toggling between the domestic sphere and the world at large, the phrase suggests a conflation of past and future that is familiar to Diaz. Her artworks operate simultaneously in multiple worlds, those of her dreams as well as the everyday.
When the Frieze art fair lands at Santa Monica airport in Los Angeles for its fifth edition next week, it will find itself in an art market tossed by economic and political uncertainty — from heavily debated Federal Reserve rate cuts to the upcoming US presidential election. Responding to this, the market seems to be pausing to catch its breath and reassess its frenzied post-pandemic pace, dynamics which dealers will be hoping the fair can shake up.
As crowds begin to flood into LAX for the warm weather and the fifth edition of Frieze L.A., the City of Angels is brimming with countless knockout exhibitions. These eight must-see gallery shows during L.A. Art Week will give visitors and locals alike a taste of the city’s robust cultural schedule.
June Edmonds’s new paintings in “Meditations on African Resilience” draw inspiration from the emblem of the river leaf (ebe-amẹn), a sacred quatrefoil symbolizing unity in the ancient Kingdom of Benin. This symbol is the foundation for Edmonds’s third solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, running from February 24th through April 13th, where she explores themes of resilience and memory.
As a child, Diaz got in trouble for drawing on walls. "Wait 'til your mother gets home!" her aunt would yell. That rebellious spirit stayed with the writer, teacher and multidisciplinary artist who dedicates her craft to uplifting the voices of marginalized people.
In her writing, painting, video, performance and installation practice, artist Karla Diaz tells kaleidoscopic stories of introspection, memory, and identity. With an irrepressible love of pure color, syncopated pattern and rich textures arrayed in luminous layers, Diaz combines portraits, landscapes, scenic vignettes, and glowing aspects of dreamlike abstraction.
Carla Jay Harris, whose artistic journey is rooted in Los Angeles, presents a captivating blend of photography, installation, collage, and drawing, all meticulously crafted to explore intellectual, emotional, and psychological landscapes. Utilizing both studio and street photography, she captures foundational images on film, later integrating them with hand-drawn illustrations and digital collages in her digital studio.
The Central Pavilion, the focal point of the expansive Venice Biennale, will focus on "the queer artist," "the outsider artist," "the folk artist," and "the Indigenous artist," according to a press release. A large section of the pavilion will be dedicated to LGBTQ+ artists and a special display will center queer abstraction.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on January 24 revealed the sixty-nine artists and two collectives slated to participate in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, opening March 20. Titled "Even Better Than the Real Thing," this year's iteration of the Biennial is curated by Chrissie Iles, who organized the 2004 and 2006 editions of the event, and Meg Onli. The pair will be assisted by Taja Cheek in organizing the performance program and by Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr., and Zackary Drucker in assembling the film program.
In Buscando Futuro / Searching for a Future, Hector Dionicio Mendoza presents mixed media floor and wall-based sculptures. The overarching theme of migration and the various ways both people and animals move from place to place is both subtly and overly communicated. Through the individual works, the installation itself becomes a journey of discovery, place and sense of self as articulated through the sensual assembling of unusual yet commonplace materials.
Such enigmatic storytelling is found in every room at All Stars, thanks to Phillips' keen collector's eye. And after his death in 1966, his museum's curators maintained his mission of supporting newer artists. There's Los Angeles-based Aaron Maier-Carretero, whose large oil painitng "not in front of the kids" is a jarring confrontation of domestic abuse, love and tension in home life.
According to the agenda, PRCS will provide a presentation that includes key introductions for Corey Dunlap, Public Art Coordinator from the Cultural Affairs Division, and artist Carla Jay Harris and Deborah Aschheim, who have been chosen to accomplish two tandem Public Art Projects with a budget of $200,000 each.
Here I will draw from several bodies of my work, including two series, Erased Lynching and Profiled, and an exhibition entitled Unseen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, ending with my Constellations series, to share the different ways in which my exploration of race, whiteness, and absence have informed my pracitice.
There are nonetheless some incredibly potent moments. A gallery featuring works related to resistance is beautifully installed. There, De la Loza's powerful bodily protest images hang withing view of Ken Gonzales-Day's elegant photographs of California hang trees. (Sometimes the absence of a body can be just as poignant as its presence.)
Our favorite story came from Mexican artist Hector Mendoza. As we entered a booth in the main show attracted by a huge sculpture of a wolf-like creature hanging from the back wall, Mendoza came smiling towards us and readily told us it was called Coyota, a tribute to his aunt Zenaida, who was one of the few females to smuggle immigrants across the Mexico-US border. She realized women were often beat and raped by the mostly male coyotes, after paying dearly for their services, so she took on the job to protect them as well as make a profit.
Dreaming of Home marks the 30th anniversary and reveals the ways in which artists have interpreted, reflected, and expanded narratives of LGBTQ life since then. The exhibition brings together works across photography, interactive digital art, abstract painting, and conceptual sculpture, that consider issues of migration, trans safety, domesticity, parenting, chosen family, and feeling at home in one’s body. Bringing together works by 20 international LGBTQ artists including Clifford Prince King, Zackary Drucker, and Amos Mac, the exhibition offers a complexly layered exploration of home through the queer gaze.
Physicist Kip Thorne and visual artist Lia Halloran began to collaborate on a magazine article about the strange, warped space-time in and around a black hole more than a decade ago. It was never published – but it inspired a much more ambitious project.
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center celebrates 50 years of the Arts/Industry residency program in 2024 with 12 new artists. Sharif Bey, Shae Bishop, Justin Favela, Cathy Hsiao, Sahar Khoury, Mary Anne Kluth, Lauren Mabry, Harold Mendez, Martha Poggioli, Lee Emma Running, Edra Soto and Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj were all selected for the 2024 residency.
As the curtain falls on 2023, Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 stood as a grand finale in a packed calendar of art fairs. Attracting a staggering 79,000 visitors, North America’s largest art fair encapsulated this year’s trends and transformations. Throughout the fair, exhibitors reported a revived enthusiasm among attendees, with several galleries remarking on a robust return of collectors and the palpable energy that defined this year’s edition.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles sold Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s Coyota/e (2022) to a prominent Southern art foundation. The gallery also sold two sets of Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynchings V” postcards to separate “major East Coast institutions.” A large-scale sculpture by Hector Dionicio Mendoza, Jalando/Pulling (2020), sold to a bicoastal collector.
Sherin Guirguis’s exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, titled “A’aru // Field of Reeds: Gathering,” is deeply rooted in the 12th-century Sufi poem “The Conference of the Birds.” Guirguis, along with a collective of female artists and activists, explores the geometric forms of old Egyptian dovecotes and translates them into evocative abstractions using ink, gouache, and gold leaf. Her works on paper reflect a connection to previous generations and the solidarity she has found within her creative community.
María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, picks her favorite works at Art Basel in Miami Beach.
The Mexican American artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza creates work that deals with “migration and futuristic styles, but also thinks about mythology,” Ortiz says. This sculpture depicts a figure with wooden legs carrying a globe-like object. “The artist is playing with the motif of aliens, as immigrants are called ‘aliens’ in this country,” Ortiz adds.
Titled “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing”, this will be 81st edition of the Whitney’s signature survey of contemporary art, which is one of the most anticipated and divisive exhibitions of its kind. The Whitney Museum of American Art announced Thursday that five curators will join Whitney curator Chrissie Iles and Los Angeles-based curator and writer Meg Onli in assembling its upcoming program: Bangkok and New York-based multidisciplinary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai; asinnajaq, an Inuk filmmaker and artist whose practice centers on modern and historical Inuit experiences; Taja Cheek, a musician known for her experimental composition; Greg de Cuir Jr, co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade, Serbia; and Zackary Drucker, an American multimedia artist and activist, and Whitney Biennial 2014 participant.
When one tries to make sense of the vivid hues in Iraqi artist Vian Sora’s paintings, the word “chaordic” comes to mind. Inspired by historical, environmental and psychological landscapes, Sora’s works reflect order in a chaotic yet opulent world.
‘Abzu’- Sora’s monumental painting exhibited by the Los Angeles gallery, Luis De Jesus, at this Art Basel Miami Beach show, is yet another statement of resistance. Informed by her personal experience and global perspective of life in the Middle East and abroad, Sora uses water to symbolise flux, resilience, and rebirth amongst shifting attributes—exposing human necessity and vulnerability.
The 2023 edition of the fair offers the best in contemporary art in specific sectors. Art & Object has selected 10 works by artists, who we think are worth following and collecting.
An Iraqi-American artist who was born in Baghdad and is based in Louisville, Kentucky, Vian Sora makes large-scale abstract paintings that deal with themes of war, political upheaval, migration, and geographic and cultural displacement.
In her site-specific installations as well as smaller scaled works, Halloran has experimented with a wide range of media (drawings, paintings, photographic cyanotypes) to create works that explore relationships between the body and various scientific principles. These include investigations of scientific classification systems as well as our solar system. Her works are seductive and extremely impactful when seen from afar and upon closer examination, the nuances of her chosen subject matter become evident.
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.
While the Cultural Center’s exhibition feels so full that it becomes difficult to comprehend how all 51 pieces fit together, CAB’s installations on the south side offer respite and meaning. An installation by local artist Edra Soto, located at 75th and Ellis Avenue, is a small concrete shelter; its modern design hearkens back to decorative architecture from Soto’s native Puerto Rico. Titled La Distancia, the structure speaks to diasporic traditions but also importantly functions as a much-needed bus shelter for the 4 and 79 buses.
The organizers of any biennial have to strike a balance between serving the expectations of visitors, participating artists and donors on the one hand and, on the other, the needs of the neighborhoods that host the installations. The latest iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial — the fifth since it began in 2015 — leans hard, and sometimes tumbles, in the second direction.
On a sliver of the Floating Museum’s studio property, the artist Edra Soto installed “La Distancia / The Distance,” a remarkable bus shelter made of ornamented concrete, its patterns inspired by Puerto Rican and West African designs, just feet from a Chicago Transit Authority bus stop. According to Majeed, the original plan had been to work with the C.T.A. to build the shelter in the public right of way.
Being a debutant at one of the biggest balls in the art-fair calendar can be a daunting experience. This year, 25 first-time participants, nearly 10 per cent of the total 277 galleries, will set out their stands at Art Basel Miami Beach alongside big-name dealers dominant in the market. But what does it feel like to be a fair virgin?
The pride and prestige of being accepted need to be balanced with practical considerations. Luis De Jesus of the eponymous Los Angeles gallery says taking part in a US fair helps keep costs down. As a newcomer in the Nova sector for works created in the past three years, he is showing several new Graft sculptures by Puerto Rico-born Edra Soto, with Vian Sora’s painting “Abzu” in the Meridians section, a platform for large-scale pieces.
Art has the extraordinary ability to bridge gaps and illuminate complex concepts in ways that words sometimes cannot. This is exactly what artist Lia Halloran achieved with her latest project, “Warped Side,” an exhibition that merges art and science to explore the wonders of the universe. Inspired by conversations with renowned astrophysicist Kip Thorne, the artwork takes viewers on a visual journey through the mind-bending concepts of black holes, wormholes, and time warps.
For our S/S 2021 issue: TLmag35: Tactile/Textile/Texture, TLmag featured six contemporary artists who are using the traditions of weaving to create groundbreaking and innovative work.
From an early age, New York-based artist and designer Liz Collins was drawn in by textiles, fibre and weaving as tools that connected to her artistic expression. After starting her own knitwear brand in the mid 1990s, Collins naturally moved into other creative fields including interiors and contemporary art. Her diverse body of work includes installation, sculpture, performance, textiles, commissions and collaborations with design brands, but no matter the project at hand, there is an underlying dynamic energy and vibrancy to her work that conveys her distinctive artistic vision
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.
Face to Face unites two complementary bodies of work by LA-based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day. Pandemic Portraits includes photographs of artists, dancers, writers, and other culture workers taken at the height of the pandemic, shedding light on moments of intimacy in the face of isolation. Profiled features images of sculptural busts and other works found in storage rooms of major US museums, including the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery, raising critical questions about race, identity, and representation. The two series are linked by a 2022 portrait of Dr. Steven Pratt of the Osage Nation and an image of the 1904 bust of his great grandfather, Shonke Mon-thi^.
Ken Gonzales-Day, 58 and Scripps College’s Fletcher Jones Chair in Art, is currently balancing two spotlights, one shining from the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art and the other from The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, where the art and photography professor is being double featured.
Earlier this month, CLMA\, unveiled “Face to Face: Ken Gonzales-Day,” which showcases two of the Silver Lake resident’s more recent projects, his “Pandemic Portraits” series which displays images of creatives during the pandemic, and “Profiled,” photographs. Barely a mile away at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery hangs Gonzales-Day’s second exhibit, “Queer-ish: Photography and the LGBTQ+ Imaginary.” The exhibit will continue until December 15 and is divided into four parts: touch, portraiture, queer imaginary, and acting out.
Chicago-based Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto is participating in the festival for the first time this year. Her work over the past decade has focused on her experiences with migration and socioeconomic and cultural oppression. Her collaboration with poet Adalber Salas Hernández, which will be displayed during the live magazine show, combines her artwork and videography on life inside the home with a poem Hernández crafted.
The exhibition showcases the works of eight multigenerational artists whose pieces speak to pre-Hispanic and colonial heritage while referring to different migrations in and from Latin America. Encompassing a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation and video, the artworks grapple with issues such as modernity, coloniality, patriarchy and gender. Artists in the exhibition give voice to peripheral communities by presenting traditional materials and techniques in combination with new technologies and methods of making, which encourage viewers to form new ways of seeing the past in order to better understand the present.
A new exhibit, “Face to Face: Ken Gonzales-Day,” presenting the photography of artist Ken Gonzales-Day, opens Friday, Oct. 6, at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art. Gonzales-Day, an art professor at Claremont’s Scripps College since 1995, has been exploring the history of race and its representation for more than two decades. The exhibition juxtaposes two overlapping bodies of work, “Pandemic Portraits: and “Profiled.”
In Gladys Knight’s version of “The Way We Were” (1974), she sings, “Can it be that it was all so simple then; or has time rewritten every line; if we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?” Upon viewing “Evita Tezeno: The Moments We Share Are the Memories We Keep” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, the resounding answer is an unequivocal yes. Featuring paintings formed by Tezeno’s family memories, the show is a must-see, worth tattooing on one’s mind. These works solidify her place within the canon.
For Chicago-based, Puerto Rican–born artist Edra Soto, home is a psychic, geographic place as well as a locus for gathering and community. It is also a political space that defines who we are as civic and social beings. The complex relationships between citizenship and migration, displacement and belonging, inform the impressive suite of sculptural installations comprising “Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT,” an unconventional survey celebrating ten years of this ongoing project by Soto.
The brainchild of trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort and her business partner Philip Fimmano, New York Textile Month surveys a vast array of talents and collective initiatives looking to revive and innovate age-old fiber and fabric craft traditions.
Over the past decade, Liz Collins has emerged as a prominent figure in the fiber art and textile design worlds. From fashion to site-specific installations, the Brooklyn-based heavyweight has worked across innumerable mediums and applications.
Today more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans call Chicago home, and the Museum of Contemporary Art pays homage to that community with a new exhibition. Visual artist Edra Soto is known for her exploration of Puerto Rican vernacular architecture, which is reflective of the island’s history, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is amplifying her work and the work of others for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Episode No. 619 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Edra Soto and José Lerma. Soto and Lerma are among the 18 artists featured in “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition examines the artistic genealogies and social justice movements that connect Puerto Rico with Chicago, which is home to third-largest mainland population of Puerto Ricans. “entre horizontes” was curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn.
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. The number represents a slight dip compared to 2022, during which a record-breaking 283 exhibitors participated. 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. Incoming director Bridget Finn, who will arrive to the organization this fall, will lead the 2024 fair.
Art Basel in Miami Beach’s forthcoming edition (6-10 December) will feature stands from 277 galleries—an astounding number that, nevertheless, represents a 2% dip from last year’s 282 galleries. Exhibitors and attendees will benefit from an overhauled fair layout structured around five plazas that organizers say will provide “improved visitor flow and seating, eating and drinking rest points”. Among those 277 exhibitors will be 24 making their debut at the biggest art fair in the Americas, with most of the newcomers based in the US. Also joining the South Florida fray for the first time are three closely watched Los Angeles galleries—Stars, Château Shatto and Luis De Jesus— plus several international entrant including São Paulo-based Galatea, Montreal-based Bradley Ertaskiran, Warsaw-based Galeria Dawid Radziszewski and Cairo-based Gypsum Gallery.
Chris Engman’s recent body of work confronts a long-standing photographical quandary: where does documentation end and artwork begin? On view with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Engman’s work demonstrates the formal and conceptual possibilities for combining faithful record and aesthetic creation.
Above all, my experience talking to an embodied AI was eye-opening. It forced me, maybe for the first time, to seriously consider the paradigm-shifting possibilities AI affords. I discussed these possibilities—and the excitement and fear surrounding them—with Avery Suzuki, assistant to Nicolas Grenier.
Co-curated by John G. Hampton and Lillian O’Brien-David, Conceptions of White examines ways in which whiteness and the white race have shaped the world.
In addition, Conceptions of White includes a photograph by Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. He attracted a great deal of attention with his Wonder Gaze exhibition, which highlighted a hidden legacy of lynching in California. A significant number of people of Latin American ancestry were among those who suffered these atrocities. O’Brien-Davis says in the video that Gonzales-Day took photographs of lynching postcards and digitally removed victims’ images. In the early 20th century, people kept them as “popular souvenirs”.
On Thursday, I checked out the new exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in downtown L.A.: “Evita Tezeno: The Moments We Share Are the Memories We Keep” and “Aaron Maier-Carretero: a hundred peonies.” Tezeno’s autobiographical exhibit consisted of snapshots of everyday Black life in Texas depicted in vibrant, large-scale, mixed-media portraits of relatives like her grandmother and great-uncle.
Each piece radiated warmth in the patterns and relationships among the subjects, especially in “When Family Gathers,” depicting a multigenerational family sitting around a table.
Maier-Carretero’s series was intimate in a different manner. It took a look into the mind of an artist in a creative rut. He spent two months painting peonies every day. His struggle to get out of his head and delve into the nitty-gritty of the art form reflects a frantic desire for inspiration. No peony painting is the same as the next. As he moved from canvas to canvas, he made the flowers with new textures and tones. The result is best represented in the last paintings he made for the series. In them, he used fewer layers of acrylic and instead portrayed the outline of a peony, using only the necessary strokes.
On Thursday, September 7, 2023, at 3 PM, Pepperdine Libraries will present a panel conversation with artist Phung Huynh, whose exhibition, Donut (W)hole, is on display in the Payson Library Exhibit Gallery through September 10, 2023. The event is free and will be held in the Surfboard Room at they Payson Library on the Malibu campus.
Gonzales-Day's art is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A gnarled and withered tree set against verdant green hills and a lush and leafy one amid parched golden fields both look like paradise. The tension between what you know about these two places and what you see of them conjures an unsettling landscape filled with ghosts.
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.
The exhibition awards considerable space to Latinx experiences. Ken Gonzales-Day's devastating Erased Lynchings (2006), part of a larger series the artist developed between 2002 and 2017, features a grid of fifteen appropriated souvenir cards from extrajudicial murders in California between 1850 and 1935, the brutalized bodies of the victims removed from the images.
"We wanted to tell different stories, something beyond the 'Cowboys and Indians.'" Explains Chaloupka. "And I think it comes across in the breadth of the artwork." Perhaps the most upsetting piece in the exhibition in Ken Gonzales-Day's confrontational "Erased Lynchings," which features 15 real-life photographs of lynching postcards, old photos that were circulated in the 19th and 20th centuries to intimidate families of color out of majority White areas.
Through landscape photography has been a consistent theme in Chris Engman's work, these photographs are especially intriguing because they are also records of drawings and paintings on photographs which were made together with his four-year-old son.
What should be a slow Labor Day weekend is instead a full-tilt week of creative engagements—with major gallery (and library, and online) exhibitions across the city from downtown to WeHo to West Adams and Chinatown. Saturday, September 2; Evita Tezeno: The Moments We Share Are the Memories We Keep at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Central Wharf Park in Boston is set to welcome an extraordinary public art experience this September: Edra Soto's Graft. Graft is guest-curated by Pedro Alonzo with Now + There, a Boston-based public art non-profit delivering engaging installations throughout the city.
Visual artist Nicolas Grenier offers us this summer a living installation during which the visitor is invited to interact with an artificial intelligence embodied by a human. The idea of Voices was to create a live discussion space with artificial intelligence embodied by a human, in order to explore the gray areas of transhumanism with the public.
As a painter, I like to invent narratives and characters from my imagination. So I would say that I am bold and intrepid when I paint. I don't hesitate to go "off-road" in invented territories while betting; on the spot, I will fall back on my paws like a cat!
Edra Soto's GRAFT series bus shelter has been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This project, which has seen multiple incarnations, including at EXPO Chicago 2022, a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, as well as her solo exhibition "La Distancia" at ENGAGE Projects, is now part of the MCA's permanent collection.
A colorful abstract painting by the Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora has recently entered the collection of the 1914-founded Baltimore Museum of Art, in Maryland, in the US. Sora's painting, "Last Sound," was part of a museum initiative to diversify its collection by acquiring more than 100 multicultural objects.
Carla Jay Harris, whose multidisciplinary practice includes photography, installation, collage, and drawing, will be at the meeting, which is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. at the Recreation Center at 1081 N Fair Oaks Ave. in Pasadena. Aschheim and Harris will share their artistic background and approach to the project, which involves extensive research and active engagement with the Northwest Pasadena community.
The American West is vast enough to contain innumerable stories. Yet for generations, American movies, books and paintings have told relatively few of those tales, almost always centered on people of European descent. Ken Gonzales-Day digitally alters photographs of vigilante violence—mostly lynchings—to remove the bodies of Native American, Asian American, and Latinx victims.
The exhibit, called 'Placeholder,' will feature the works of internationally renowned Tristram Lansdowne. Lansdowne was born in Victoria and has roots in the Cowichan Valley. The exhibit features a collection across 15 years of series. Lansdowne's artist statement says it showcases an evolution.
"Many Wests" showcase the work of 48 modern and contemporary artists, who predominantly identify as Asian American, Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, or Latinx. The exhibition includes a wide range of artistic mediums, such as paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and videos. Ken Gonzales-Day digitally alters historical photographs of vigilante violence, removing the bodies of Native American, Asian American, and Latinx victims.
There was also a video installation by Federico Solmi, an Italian artist now living in New York. Goshen said the art "is actually deconstructing the feast in a very critical manner, that is asking what actually happens at the feast behind closed doors."
LA JOLLA, Cali.—Born in Tijuana in 1977, artist Griselda Rosas has her ear to the ground on both sides of the California-Mexico border, listening intently to the eternal stories of conquest, colonization, and conversation. The stories flow into drawings and sculptures, multilayered imagery in which thread, paint, and collage combine to create an almost archeological presentation of hybrid cultures and histories.
It is a science in itself to do a successful art exhibition, and the truth is that artists are trained to question and look at anything from a different unique perspective. It is all about risk, or maybe a better word is audacity with bravura and determination. In French, we have a saying, "La chance sourit aux audacieux" chance smiles at the audacious and the braves.
Chicago's summer is always full of art and creativity. It is also a season of activism and advocacy. Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT offers a mid-project survey of the GRAFT series to date by artist Edra Soto.
When Chilean photographer and installation artist Rodrigo Valenzuela tells a universal, labor-informed story, he focuses on “the tensions found between the individual and communities” that often feature day laborers or the artist himself. With that, Valenzuela’s work serves as, what he calls “an expressive and intimate point of contact between the broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency.”
Valenzuela’s newest exhibition, Workforce—now on display at The Print Center in Rittenhouse Square—imagines a sci-fi tinged future for the working class, a class changed by issues of immigration and the practices of privilege, based in part by his own past as the son of a postal worker who arrived in America as a day laborer.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce ERIK OLSON: The Mountain and the Sea, a new series of striking and expressive landscape paintings. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Calgary-based artist Erik Olson is known for his imaginative and innovative approach to painting. Recognized for his powerful portraiture as well as his deeply personal explorations of landscape and color, his work utilizes scale to express the larger context of the human experience.
Chicago-based artist Edra Soto created a series of work about her homeland, Puerto Rico, and her migration to her adopted hometown. Soto makes temporary public sculptures that evoke island culture and architecture. Her artwork has been exhibited in Brazil, Cuba and the Whitney Museum in New York City. At Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, the big garage doors are open, welcoming visitors into Soto’s immersive structure.
American assimilation and its effect on identity has long interested Phung Huynh, 46, who left her country after the end of the war. Her 2021 series, “American Braised,” which is currently on view in the exhibition “Vietnam in Transition, 1976-Present” at the Wende Museum in Culver City, Calif., inlays imagery from her own refugee experience into glass snow globes atop cumbersome wooden bases.
The Los Angeles-based Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela - who came to the U.S. as an undocumented construction worker, studied art at the University of Washington and is now an associate professor at UCLA - puts the "work" in artwork.
Edra Soto's sculptures are lovely places to be inside: dappled light shines through walls made of orante blocks or windows covered in decorative screens, casting shapely shadows that mingle with the free-flowing breeze. There might be a bench to sit on, a table to play dominoes at, or an architectural essay to read. If you're really lucky, a slice of pineapple upside-down cake or some spam-valveeta-pimiento sandwiches will be on offer.
The show was borne of a collaboration between the independent art spaces The Franklin, The Mayfield, and HPAC. Artists Edra Soto, Madeleine Aguilar, and Alberto Aguilar, founders of the first two aforementioned spaces, all hold a passion for the material of the ordinary. This joy in turn catalyzed the scent, sound, and images of strength that adorn HPAC’s walls.
The Chicago Architecture Biennial, a nonprofit that explores innovative ideas and the future of design, has announced the participants scheduled to showcase their work in the fifth edition of the exhibition. This year’s event, entitled This is Rehearsal, is scheduled to run from Sept. 21 to Jan. 2, 2024, and will welcome more than 70 worldwide artists, architects, and designers presenting their work at sites across the Chicago metropolitan area.
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.
Two of today’s leading conceptual sculptors are also among the fellows: Edra Soto, whose interventions look at how Puerto Rican domestic architecture has been exported the world over.
Last month, I drove to Houston for the Glasstire Gala and had the opportunity to see a few exhibits, including the Pipilotti Rist installation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and Evita Tezeno at Houston Museum of African American Culture.
An amalgamation of skyscrapes captured in Sicily, Indonesia, Thailand, and New Zealand, the Vienna-based artist's new body of ambient, fresco-like works serve as sensory portals into the skies above far-flung places.
There are a lot of paintings of beds, bedrooms, and kitchen tables, perhaps the result of some pandemic hangover. One example is Aaron Maier-Carretero. His painting series “A Lobster Named Dinner”—so named because, well, he had a pet lobster in childhood and it was called Dinner—captures his home and reworks family interiors from photos.
This third cycle is the strongest yet. “It’s been exciting to see the artists in this show working at the boundaries of what representation can be: paintings that hover on the edge of abstraction, that engage with the modern world, and that tell stories from inside communities that have often been excluded from the history of Western painting,”says artist and 2023 Bennett Prize juror Zoey Frank.
The Hyde Park Art Center and Chicago-based artist Edra Soto describe the artist’s show, “Destination/El Destino: A Decade of Graft” as a mid-project survey: Soto is definitely not finished with the series of work that is the show’s subject. The title references the transplantation, or grafting, of a piece of the artist’s Puerto Rican heritage onto her Chicago home.
The acquisition fund has led to massive career growth for some local artists, like Evita Tezeno. Since having a piece acquired last year by the DMA, Tezeno has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her first solo museum exhibition opens at the Houston Museum of African American Culture this month.
“The Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) is proud to present Evita Tezeno: Out of Many, curated by HMAAC’s Chief Curator, Christopher Blay. The exhibition opens Thursday, April 27, with a reception from 6- 8PM, and will be on view for closing festivities on Juneteenth and Father’s day weekend, June 17.
Lines unconfined, colors ablaze, Chris Engman’s latest exhibition Prism is seen anew through the artist’s lens and paintbrush in tandem with his 4-year-old son Elio. Crafted with eclectic mediums, from dollar store children's paint to high-quality acrylics, oils, and pastels, twelve works showcased at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles unveil a kaleidoscopic vision of Engman’s artistic melding of photography, drawings, and paintings.
The drawings and paintings were made together with his 4-year-old son, Elio, in some cases, and by Engman in others. Drawings on paper by Engman or his son, are often used as source material, embellished or combined or altered freely. They are, among other things, an incomplete record of his and his son’s preoccupations, and the struggles and joys of their relationship.
We have two portraits of media moguls by Federico Solmi (b. Italy) in the media room: “Oprah Winfrey as Cleopatra” and “Warren Buffet as Court Jester.” Reconfiguring historical narratives across eras, Solmi endeavors to create artistic commentary which disrupts the mythologies that define our societies. His portraits depict figures who appear to be scanned into a game engine, the artist offering dystopian depictions of social icons and criticism of new technologies.
There is a lot of straight-up positivity and joy in the work of artist Evita Tezeno, which is another big reason why Evita Tezeno: Out of Many, which opens this Thursday, Apr. 27 at the Houston Museum for African American Culture, is one of the year’s must-see art exhibits. CityBook flagged the show in our spring Arts Issue, and then Vogue got the scoop with a feature on the 62-year-old, Dallas-based artist shortly after it was announced Tezeno and Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus had each been awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto’s largest exhibit to date is all the buzz at the Hyde Park Art Center. Showcasing her large-scale GRAFT series featuring sculptures that blend elements of Afro-diasporic architecture, accompanied by documentary photographs and drawings that counter colonial narratives, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT illuminates the past through her work, highlighting the enslaved sub-Saharan African population’s influence on Puerto Rican architecture.
At 62, Dallas artist Evita Tezeno is getting some long-overdue recognition. Vogue magazine profiledTezeno last week in an article headlined: “The Rising Dallas Artist Spotlighting Black Life — And Black Joy — In the South.”
Evita Tezeno, a mixed media collage artist based in North Texas, has been featured in Vogue Magazine and recently won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Fine Art. Her colorful collages depict Black joy and have been purchased by celebrities such as Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. Tezeno started her artistic career as an impressionist painter and had a dream where an angel gave her a book of sketches and told her she would be successful if she followed its instructions. She has a solo exhibit this month at the Houston Museum of African American Culture.
Evita Tezeno is having a good month. The North Texas-based mixed media collage artist is featured in Vogue Magazine. "I know I told my parents and my grandparents that I wanted to be on the cover of famous magazines and newspapers and travel the world with my artwork," Tezeno said. "I did not imagine that I would be in Vogue this quickly."
Elsewhere, Edra Soto presents an iteration of her ongoing series, “GRAFT,” now in its tenth year. A red-painted architectural intervention based on cast-iron fences seen throughout Puerto Rico, the piece contains images of the sky or the trees that are meant to “show the transformation of the landscape” after Maria as opposed to more graphic images of devastation and destruction, she said. “When the hurricane happened, that was probably the most depressing time of my life living in Puerto Rico. I felt in my bones that it was something that I needed to document.”
The Dallas Museum of Art has scoured the world for works of art to grace its walls and galleries. But Thursday it announced 12 acquisitions it made from its own back yard—this year’s Dallas Art Fair, which is open to ticketed attendees today through Sunday, April 23, at the Fashion Industry Gallery in the downtown Dallas Arts District. The team chose to acquire 12 artworks by nine artists: Chelsea Culprit, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Karla Diaz, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Riley Holloway, Yifan Jiang, Yowshien Kuo, Masamitsu Shigeta, and Nishiki Sugawara-Beda.
A sculpture by Edra Soto invites us to reconsider how we look at images of destruction. As part of her ongoing project GRAFT (2022-), the artist recreates Puerto Rican quiebrasoles – literally “break the sun” – latticed concrete screens that are ubiquitous features of vernacular architecture on the island.
The Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Chicago, mounts the largest solo exhibition to date of works by Puerto Rican artist and educator Edra Soto. "Destination/El Destino: A Decade of Graft" consists of large-scale sculptures, photographs, drawings and games and includes her latest work, which features more than 500 tin stars hand-tooled by the artist.
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.
Twelve artworks from this year’s Dallas Art Fair will be added to the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Artworks are from Chelsea Culprit, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Karla Diaz, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, Riley Holloway, Yifan Jiang, Yowshien Kuo, Masamitsu Shigeta and Nishiki Sugawara-Beda.
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) will welcome 12 new works into its permanent collection at no cost thanks to an acquisition fund that allows the museum to select work from dealers taking part in the Dallas Art Fair. Works acquired by the museum with through the fund this year also include... Karla Diaz’s watercolour painting Torera (bullfighter) (2023) from Luis de Jesus Los Angeles.
Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto’s forthcoming largest exhibit to date is set to be all the buzz at the Hyde Park Art Center. Showcasing her large-scale GRAFT series featuring sculptures that blend elements of Afro-diasporic architecture, accompanied by documentary photographs and drawings that counter colonial narratives, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT illuminates the past through her work, highlighting the enslaved sub-Saharan African population’s influence on Puerto Rican architecture.
Devoted readers of this column might remember a short item about artist Edra Soto a few months back around her exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, which mentioned her local ubiquity, with an installation in Millennium Park and participation in prominent group projects at the Chicago Botanic Garden and with the dance troupe The Seldoms. Both bolstering the item's argument and undercutting its newsworthiness, a press release hit my inbox two days later announcing Soto's "largest solo exhibition to date," at the Hyde Park Art Center, opening this week.
“BREAKING MORE BOUNDARIES,” A GROUP EXHIBITION RELATING TO MARIETTE PATHY ALLEN INCLUDING INVITED ARTISTS ZACKARY DRUCKER AND JESS T. DUGAN, FEATURES ART THAT DISPLAYS THE TRANSFORMATIVE VALUES AND PERCEPTIONS OF INCLUSIVENESS THAT ARE EMBODIED IN MARIETTE’S WORK.
“GRAFT,” draws on architectural motifs—repeating stars, circles, and other shapes— ubiquitous in Puerto Rico that have since been exported all over the world. In her work, Soto, who was born in Puerto Rico, highlights the cultural appropriation of these patterns, which were originally found on cast-iron fences outside homes in Puerto Rico.
From June 1 to July 30 (opening on the evening of June 3 from 6-9pm), Culture Lab LIC will celebrate Mariette's work with the exhibition Breaking Boundaries: 50 Years of Images alongside another exhibition with work by other artists inspired by, or in the spirit of, Mariette's work titled Breaking More Boundaries. The latter will feature invited artists Zackary Drucker and Jess T. Dugan.
Geoff Green, collector, on behalf of himself and wife, Sheryl Adkins-Green, on their must-sees at the fair:
• Evita Tezeno at Luis De Jesus: While it’s amazing to see the art world come to Dallas for the week, it’s also nice to recognize the Dallas-based artists who have a presence at the fair. Evita’s stunning work draws on the influences of Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett; she is a marvelous colorist creating unique, richly patterned paintings depicting hope, joy, and love.
“Evita Tezeno: Out of Many” at Houston Museum of African American Culture (April 27-June 17)
This new exhibition by the Texas-born collage artist showcases her technique that combines painting and collage.
Tezeno’s tapestry-like works are carefully constructed from a variety of materials she brings together to depict everyday scenes from Black Life in America. Turning the phrase “Out of Many, One” and its Latin form E Pluribus Unum, which articulates the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers, the exhibition “Out of Many” aspire to those ideals, representing, with fondness, the days in the lives of everyday Black Americans.
Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowship is given to 48 disciplines divided into 4 broad categories: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Creative Arts. In the Fine Arts category, the winners were Pamela Council, Jamal Cyrus, Kapwani Kiwanga, Diane Severin Nguyen, Tammy Nguyen, Samantha Nye, Evita Tezeno, and Lavar Munroe.
From Escher to Refik Anadol, from de Chirico and Depero to Pak, from Balla and Boccioni to Krista Kim, from Piranesi to Primavera De Filippi, great artists of the past meet the contemporary pioneers of digital art in the territory of the imagination, between immersive swings , digital zen philosophy, technonature, blockchain sculptures, virtual reality, generative literature and artificial intelligence.
This year, two visual artists, Houston-based Jamal Cyrus and Dallas-based Evita Tezeno, are among the winners. Last year, Mr. Cyrus had a solo exhibitionat the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Ms. Tezeno was one of three Texas artists whose work was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art through the Dallas Art Fair.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced this week the 171 scholars and artists who were awarded its acclaimed 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships. This year’s class includes some of today’s most closely watched artists.
Among the winners in the fine arts category are Pamela Council, Jamal Cyrus, Kapwani Kiwanga, Diane Severin Nguyen, Tammy Nguyen, Samantha Nye, Evita Tezeno, and Lavar Munroe, whose representation with Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery was announced in tandem with the fellowship news.
A new installation at Redwood City's Art Kiosk aims to shed light on the issues surrounding undocumented immigrants' hardships in modern-day America. The work is a product of artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza and is called "Mil USOS/Labor Monument: Portrait of my aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, others, parents, and grandparents."
A new installation at Redwood City's Art Kiosk aims to shed light on the issues surrounding undocumented immigrant's hardships in modern-day America. The work is a product of artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza and is called "Mil USOS/Labor Monument: Portrait of my aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, others, parents, and grandparents."
It is within this context of national trauma that Gabriel Sanchez paints people, his friends and acquaintances in Havana and other places, many of them social outsiders who make their way through these troubled days. They are young people mostly, in their 20s or 30s, an age of dreams and ambitions.
There are many stories within the works in "Yo te cuido," each unique, provocative and vibrant in their own way. The title of the exhibition translates to "I care for you." One seemingly common theme within the works is Rosas' exploration of what she calls "ancestral memory" — the idea that the colonialist histories of the Americas is something that still informs our everyday lives, both genetically and sociologically.
On March 4, Laguna Art Museum celebrated 41 years of connecting artists, collectors and the community at the sold-out California Cool Art Auction, Benefit & Bash. As Laguna Art Museum’s most important fundraiser of the year, the auction raised over $450,000 to support the museum’s exhibitions, programs and art education initiatives.
Edra Soto: Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT
(Hyde Park Art Center)
An exploration of the artist’s long-running project inspired by the vernacular architecture of Puerto Rico
Opens April 22
The gallery’s stand is devoted to the work of a single photographer, Rodrigo Valenzuela, a Los Angeles-based artist who was born in Chile. Valenzuela draws on his experience in construction to build found-object sculptures. He photographs his creations and screen prints the images onto canvas collaged with repurposed time cards to explore the relationships between labour, unionisation and the consequences of automation
Issues of the journal regularly include original artwork. Portable Gray commissions artists to produce the journal’s cover and publish work in the pages of the journal. For the fourth issue, Portable Gray commissioned images from Edra Soto’s “Open 24 Hours,” an ongoing series of photographs Soto takes of bottles she collects in and around her neighborhood in South Chicago.
Haunted by the anticipation of an increasingly unpredictable future, Nicolas Grenier’s recent body of work reads as metaphysical landscapes that examine the limits of reality. Informed by the awareness of a progressively quantified existence, Grenier’s visual language relies on both dependency and interference of information classification systems. Through a series of drawings and paintings in varying dimensions, the works emerge from the horizon whose view is obstructed by spatial intervention.
BRIC’s spring Gallery exhibition, When I Am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly, showcases seven artists whose work delves into the intertwined nature of desire and sadness. Through their pieces, Ayanna Dozier, Ilana Harris-Babou, Meena Hasan, Lucia Hierro, Catherine Opie, Chuck Ramirez, and Pacifico Silano explore the myths of the American Dream that shape and govern our personal narratives.
The Print Center is honored bring the work of the outstanding artist Rodrigo Valenzuela to Philadelphia for the first time. I know his work will resonate powerfully with our audience, and will make a meaningful contribution to our conversation about immigration, privilege, labor and unions, as well as to our understanding of current photographic practice.
– Elizabeth F. Spungen, Executive Director
Mixed-media artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza has unveiled “Mil USOS/Labor Monument: Portrait of my aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, others, parents and grandparents,” a public art installation on display at Redwood City’s Art Kiosk now through April 30. It shows “a figure kneeling on one knee to represent the millions of exploited immigrants that contribute to society in more ways than one,” she said, adding that the artwork’s name, “Mil Usos” translates to “One Thousand Uses.”
Hugo Crosthwaite is a storyteller at heart. Through his drawings, which range from intimate, black-and-white ink sketches to large-scale, charcoal murals, Crosthwaite closely studies the everyday. Much of his work reflects both on his formative years in Rosarito, Baja California—a city just 10 miles south of the international border—as well as his adult life, which he’s spent straddling the U.S./Mexico border.
A new installation at the Art Kiosk aims to shed light on the issues surrounding undocumented immigrants' hardships in modern-day America. The new installation is a product of artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza and is entitled Mil USOS/Labor Monument: Portrait of my aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, others, parents, and grandparents.
Through a research-based praxis engaging art history and the everyday, collecting snapshots spanning centuries and cultures, Los Angeles-based artist Edie Beaucage engages in autofictive explorations. She redefines personal histories by creating iconic portraits at a larger-than-life scale.
“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.
Walking through Edie Beaucage's show of sculptures and larger-than-life portraits is like wading through clouds of brushstrokes made of vivid greens, blues, and pops of orange, the subjects of the paintings staring coolly at you.
Dive into the painting, inside the painting itself, seems to call Nicolas Grenier with the exhibition "Sketches of an inventory". Presented in the very large room of the Bradley Ertaskiran gallery, this set of fifteen works, including two sculptures, navigates audaciously between real space and imaginary space. We are in a gallery and float at the same time in a stratosphere in the company of layers of colors and landscapes proposed by the artist.
We've been following Nicolas Grenier and his subtle social criticism for ten years. With his stylistic attraction to architectural processes, symbols and diagrams, developed with a color painting in quite remarkable gradients.
A new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego draws on experience living in a borderland. Griselda Rosas: Yo te cuido is the artist's first solo museum exhibition and will present both sculptural installations and textile drawings inspired by inheritance and inter-generational knowledge.
What impresses about the work is the way you use line and color and the quality of the touch of the hand, but also what you're positioning creates a space for liberation. I feel that these works are ultimately about liberation; a liberation of queer identity, a liberation of being in the world. The lush intensity of that experience. And the new possibilities are liberatory.
The Hyde Park Art Center announced their slate of Spring programs on March 7, including the opening of Edra Soto’s largest survey to date, Destination/el destino: a decade of GRAFT. The survey will be featured at HPAC’s April 22 Spring Center Day. The GRAFT series was developed as part of HPAC’s Center Program, which, according to the Center, “allows working artists access to space to develop studio practice, inclusion in critical dialogues, guidance from professionals in the field, and a platform to show new works to a broader, diverse audience.”
The title of San Diego-Tijuana artist Griselda Rosas' first solo museum show, "Yo te cuido," translates to "I take care of you." It's a nod to her entire artistic practice, structured primarily around the restrictions and inspirations of raising a son.
Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT is the largest exhibition to date of the Puerto Rican artist, educator, and community organizer Edra Soto. Rooted in themes of cultural hybridity, the exhibitionfeatures a new large-scale commission of the artist’s GRAFT series with porous sculptures, documentary photographs, drawings, and games that activate the Art Center’s indoor/outdoor main gallery. Creating a playful and open environment for dialogue, transformation, and communal healing, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT is on view from April 23 to August 6, 2023.
One gallery that will be highlighting NFTs is Assembly, Houston, which will show the work of Rodrigo Valenzuela as both photographic prints and digital NFTs. Recognized for his images of collected industrial and mechanical objects against hazy backgrounds, through the presentation of Valenzuela’s work the gallery will assist collectors new to acquiring NFTs.
Dozens of art lovers braved the rain Wednesday to catch the opening night of two exciting new contemporary art exhibitions at BRIC: One exploring myths of the "American dream" and the other a deeply personal film and collection of drawings based on old photographs.
Steeped in the history of iron screen-style architecture common in post-war Puerto Rico, artist Edra Soto's new residency and exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego's North campus will showcase large installation works. Breeze blocks known as quiebrasoles and iron gates known as rejas form the backdrop — almost a viewfinder — for Soto's work. Soto will be in residence through late May, and will be on site for "Meet the Artist" hours this Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
A new pop up art exhibit is coming soon to NorthPark Center as part of the mall’s collaboration with the Dallas Museum of Art. Talk of the Town will have its opening night from 6 – 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 21 with a collection of art exploring womanhood from several artists. The exhibit will also coincide with Dallas Art Fair’s 15th edition.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck will curate the exhibit. The following artists will be featured: Sarah Awad, Sarah Cain, Johnny Floyd, Danielle Mckinney, Arcmanoro Niles, Maja Ruznic, Keer Tanchak, Evita Tezeno, and Summer Wheat
This Thursday, 03-09-23, (6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.) Edra Soto will give a talk as the 2022 Ree Kaneko Award winner. This annual award is bestowed to artists who have participated in Bemis's exhibition or residency programs and is named in honor of Ree Kaneko, Bemis Center co-founder, first Executive Director, and Board Member Emerita.
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants and asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border whom the artist regularly sketches while they wait to make the crossing. This is “Caravan,” a series of sculptures and a short stop-motion animation in which they star—the anchor of a new exhibition by Hugo Crosthwaite in which he continues his decades-long process of documenting the personal experiences and individual stories of the human beings who undertake this perilous journey.
Painter Edie Beaucage is all about invention—in her style of abstract portraiture, in her “Californicois” identity as a Quebecoise in sunny SoCal, in her curiosity about the characters she meets and the personalities she imagines, in her intellectual love of art history and her open-hearted embrace of life’s endless possibilities. Her combination of bright, rich hues and muscular layering of brushwork creates flickering surfaces full of texture, light, and shadow; which at the same time are stylized as flattened in a quirky, folkloric way that eschews realism but explores individuality in the subjects.
The Schingoethe Center of Aurora University’s “No Place Like Home” features artwork by 38 artists, including Theaster Gates, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Wendy Red Star, Edra Soto, and Carrie Mae Weems.
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. Predating the feminist art movement of the 1970s, Smith’s bold work excavated the nature of womanhood and domesticity before it was popular.
Tijuana-born artist Hugo Crosthwaite’s work combines portraiture, sketching, painting, ceramics, photography and animation to create dense and layered compositions. Working primarily in black and white, Crosthwaite brings characters from allegory and popular media to illustrate the human condition, interacting with the architecture of Tijuana and dreams of the border. His work often elevates the ordinary person to heroic levels showing the trials they endure while surviving in contemporary society.
Everyone has a story to share. Phung Huynh, a Los Angeles-based artist and educator who has exhibited her works internationally as well as completing public art commissions across Los Angeles County, came to Scripps College to share hers.
The Schingoethe Center of Aurora University presents "No Place Like Home," an exhibition featuring artwork by 38 artists, including Theaster Gates, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Wendy Red Star, Edra Soto and Carrie Mae Weems. It continues through April 28.
Chicago-based artist Edra Soto is having a moment with two back-to-back exhibitions:
“The Myth of Closure /El Mito del Cierre” continues through March 5 at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, and her largest exhibition to date, “Edra Soto: Destination/Destino: A Decade of Graft” at the Hyde Park Art Center, is presented April 23 to August 6.
Italian and New York–based artist Federico Solmi has explored themes of colonialism, nationalism, religion, and consumerism in his unique brand of digital art. His latest exhibition, Joie De Vivre, may be his most ambitious to date, with digital canvases displaying “video-paintings” that he has animated. The exhibit even includes a virtual-reality experience which puts the user directly into the world of one of his artworks.
DUBAI: March 2023 will mark the 20th anniversary of US-led invasion of Iraq, which led to destruction, displacement, and prolonged political instability. One of the millions who witnessed the chaos unfold is the Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora. “There is nothing that I don’t remember,” she says from her atelier in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Museum of Contemporary Art added 123 works by 68 artists to its collection in 2022, which now numbers nearly 8,000 artworks, museum officials announced Tuesday. The acquisitions reflect a diverse group of artists, including many from Los Angeles.
The historic arts organization BRIC opened its latest exhibit on Wednesday, bringing a packed crowd to their latest display that explores the mythos of the American dream via individual experience. “When I am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly” features the work of seven artists (Ayanna Dozier, Ilana Harris-Babou, Meena Hasan, Lucia Hierro, Catherine Opie, Chuck Ramirez and Pacifico Silano) at the BRIC House in Fort Greene, and will be on display until April 30.
Inspired by a polaroid of his late uncle, Frank, Pacifico Silano began collating imagery of queer men from an era of liberation and tragedy. As Pacifico came of age, art became a space to ask questions both sacred and profane, and to look for answers where once there had only been questions.
Recognising the power of archival images to bridge generations and explore longstanding archetypes of gender and sexuality, Pacifico explored the connections between past and present in new and revelatory ways.
At Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles, the artist displays figurines, paintings and animations that draw on the physical, psychological and cultural landscapes of borderlands
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.
This show, 20 years in the making, follows Hugo Crosthwaite, a Tijuana artist who draws from his experience as a citizen living on the Mexico–U.S. border, sharing what he observed of the landscape and politics. For his new exhibit “Caravan,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Crosthwaite spent days with a camera and sketchbook, capturing portraits and stories of the thousands of migrants and refugees trekking the border. The show includes paintings, sculptures and videos that are inspired by the stories he witnessed. This recommendation from The Times’ art and design columnist Carolina Miranda is currently open and runs until March 4.
Every three years, participating Tennessee museums, arts venues, and arts organizations curate and present exhibitions under a common theme designed to connect the exhibitions and promote the state’s existing visual contemporary art scene. This year’s theme for the Triennial is RE-PAIR, authored by Consulting Curator Dr. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Participation came from curators from institutions in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. Each of the four centers will enjoy a highlight weekend of scheduled events and receptions at participating venues.
Through the Lattice reflects upon the ongoing relevance of the lived environment, whether as owned, alienated, or desired. Each artist foregrounds the role of place—and its aesthetics of style, ornament, design, pattern, and architecture—in their recent works. Though diverse in their methods, the artists share a concern with the deeper meanings of space as well as its material construction.
For many, Lucha Libre represents something more personal and intimate. Karla Diaz’s “Las Dos Luchas/The Double Fight” (2022), from a series of new watercolors created for the exhibition, features scenes from the artist’s life punctuated with scenes from lucha. Made after she underwent brain surgery, these paintings illustrate the Diaz’s healing journey as she began to recover her memories.
The work of 15 of those artists was brought together in what is already the first academic exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art organized by a major U.S. museum in half a century. It is called "There Is No Post-Hurricane World: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," and it will be on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted for its spectacular collection of modern and contemporary American art.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles opening reception for Mimi Smith and Hugo Crosthwaite’s solo exhibitions: The opening reception for the new solo exhibitions at the downtown Los Angeles gallery has been rescheduled from last Saturday to this Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. While the exhibit itself is still available to view, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to celebrate the shows with fellow artists and art lovers. Details can be found on Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’ website.
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.
The Chicago-based Puerto Rican-born artist is having a moment. Her show “The Myth of Closure” is at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art through March 5, and she now has work at New York’s Whitney Museum. Soto’s biggest solo exhibition yet – “Destination/El Destino” – comes to Hyde Park Art Center in the spring. Large-scale, immersive works are often embedded with viewfinders that reveal documentary photos upon closer inspection. Many tackle the legacy of colonialism and question the use of public spaces.
Edra Soto was in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. She was visiting her mother when, she tells me, “I lost my landscape.” The destruction affected her immensely. She saw things that she felt she could not speak aloud. After being faced with the loss of her home landscape, she began to document the disaster. “I had never seen Puerto Rico the way that it looked then. I had never seen the landscape in that way. I felt, in my bones, that I was part of something historical.”
The museum-curated auction will feature works by over 125 of California's most sought-after artists including Lita Albuquerque, Charles Arnoldi, Billy Al Bengston, Kelly Berg, Alex Couwenberg, Joe Goode, David Ligare, Jean Lowe, Andy Moses, Gwynn Murrill, Fabia Panjarian, Ruth Pastine, Astrid Preston, Ed Ruscha, Beth Waldman and many more. Proceeds from the annual auction provide vital support to the museum, directly benefiting major initiatives, education programs, exhibitions and community engagement.
In his own research through numerous newspaper archive microfilm from 1849-1880, Ken Gonzales-Day has uncovered over 350 cases of lynchings of Latinos — 59 of which were in Los Angeles — by investigating incidents in the West that were previously reported as “white”. Gonzales-Day and Beserra Núñez are part of an ongoing conversation about placing a Mexican American-Latino historical monument in Los Angeles to educate people of the history.
Hyde Park Art Center announces “Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT,” the largest exhibition to date of the Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto. Rooted in themes of cultural hybridity, the exhibition features a new large-scale commission of the artist’s “GRAFT” series with porous sculptures, documentary photographs, drawings, and games that take advantage of the Art Center’s indoor and outdoor main gallery.
The three contributors to the smart, nervy “Land of the Free” examined borders, migration and the vexed, static-clouded conversation that takes place between mutually distrustful cultures. Joe Minter brought martial-looking sculptures assembled from scrap iron and used car parts, Hugo Crosthwaite painted murals of his native Tijuana on the MANA walls, and Vincent Valdez haunted visitors with the faces of the Central American disappeared, printed on translucent rice paper, spotlighted and hung like ghostly banners from the ceiling of a narrow chamber that felt very much like a temple. Together, they suggested that barriers impede those who erect them as much as they harm those they restrain.
What is white, as a shade, a concept, an identity? Too often, binary ideas cloud deeper investigations into the historical construction of whiteness as a race. In this group exhibition, curators Lillian O’Brien Davis and John G. Hampton explored connections between the political myth of whiteness that developed alongside the dispossession of Black and Indigenous people and the aesthetic and philosophical significance of white in art.
Milad mentions the word ‘chaos’ to describe her upbringing and the same can be said about her art, but in the most positive sense; it’s a beautiful chaos and a feast for the eyes. Milad’s tapestries are like layered portals taking the viewer to another world — her personal world; a depository for bits and pieces of what interests her. Her 2021 mixed-media work “Nada Que Decir” is a typical example. In English, its name means ‘nothing to say.’ However, it seems there is a lot to be said, but perhaps when words fail, pictures can do the talking.
MANA came roaring back with gorgeous, provocative, emotional show that highlighted everything that the institution does well, and reaffirmed its indispensability to Jersey City arts. “Land of the Free” also felt familiar: Joe Minter’s wonderfully belligerent sculptures made of rusted chains and car parts were continuous with the Hudson County tradition of adaptive re-use in visual art, and Hugo Crosthwaite’s lively drawings of his native Tijuana presented the Mexican border city as a place of danger, exhilaration, and cultural collisions very much like the ones we’ve all grown accustomed to in urban Jersey.
Politically minded to the core, the Whitney show is also a thing of serious tenderness, and of many individual beauties, among them Candida Alvarez’s double-sided mountain landscapes; Edra Soto’s sculptural garden wall embedded with viewfinder photos of storm-altered island life; and painted salutes — part public mural, part prayer card — to secular martyrs of the near and distant past by Armig Santos, based in San Juan, and Danielle de Jesus, based in Queens.
I am Edie Beaucage; I live in Venice Beach, my art studio is in Inglewood, and I have gallery representation in Downtown LA. I am connected to the Los Angeles art community in many ways, especially to my artist’s studio friends at the Art Complex 1019 West Manchester. I moved here from Quebec because I could see this city as an incredible creative platform. I am a painter and video artist.
Sanchez is a 29 year old Cuban-American born in Miami. His painted subjects are Cubans who, while desperate to leave Cuba, have a Cuban sensibility that is tough to forsake. While Sanchez’s painted portraits seem flattened in dimension/technique they are full of humanity. The viewer witnesses the angst of being young and in Cuba (Sanchez’s perspective). This is a warm, understandable exhibition where portraits tell the story.
American contemporary artist and designer Liz Collins is the latest artist to leave her mark, with a newly installed colorful and dynamic mural on the public plaza to accompany the colorful iconic umbrellas she designed for the triangle months earlier.
“My interest in using the body as a principal tool enables me to undermine the boundaries of politics, to challenge social conventions and to test the endurance of viewers,” says Miami-based artist Antonia Wright in her introductory biography. The Cuban American artist has received praise and recognition for her utilization of art, her body and expression to expose societal realities.
A solo exhibition of works by multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto, “The Myth of Closure | El Mito del Cierre,” opens soon at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art. Soto “has transformed her practice to honor the loss of what once was, while seeking a path of acceptance for the transition of her aging mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s,” writes the Museum.. “She channels her struggle to reconcile this new reality through deconstruction, collage and familiar themes in her art practice.”
This year the exhibition added seven more portraits and among them the stop-motion animation portrait of Anthony S Fauci by artist Hugo Crosthwaite. The innovative piece offers an atypical approach to the portrait genre. The artwork compiles a stop-motion animation that suits nineteen drawings from which only seven will be in view at the exhibition.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was the first to accept his Portrait of a Nation Award. As Hugo Crosthwaite’s moving portrait captivated the audience, the room fell silent, heavy with the weight of uncertainty that has shaped the last few years and in reverence for the man who became synonymous with hope as the nation battled a devastating public health crisis in COVID-19.
Anthony Fauci said that when he was approached by the National Portrait Gallery of an “unusual person” they suggested to create his portrait, “not only was I not reluctant about it, I got very excited about it.” The Fauci work from artist Hugo Crosthwaite covers the bookends of his career, from his work on HIV/AIDS in the 1980s to the current Covid pandemic.
Mexican artist Hugo Crosthwaite is being honored this weekend in Washington, D.C. as the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery opens the "Portrait of a Nation" exhibition. Crosthwaite's portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, will be unveiled Thursday alongside portraits of Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Ava DuVernay, Clive Davis, Marian Wright Edelman and José Andrés.
Gabriel Sanchez uses portraiture as a means to make visible the contemporary reality of Cuban citizens. Stranded on an oppressive island, young Cubans are angry and disillusioned. Sanchez finds himself amidst these tensions in his intimate portraits of those closest to him as well as complete strangers. Sanchez renders the humanity of Cubans with tenderness; he captures their vulnerability, but also their strength and spirit.
Born and raised in Baghdad, Vian Sora witnessed multiple wars in Iraq firsthand, suffering personal loss while sharing in the collective loss of her country. From a young age, she used art as an outlet to work through the trauma of conflict and displacement.
A stop-motion drawing animation of Dr. Anthony Fauci by San Diego/Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been selected to appear in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The portrait is one of six honoring “extraordinary individuals who have made transformative contributions to the United States and its people” as part of the 2022 Portrait of a Nation Awards.
National Portrait Gallery is honoring seven influential minds at their upcoming Portrait of A Nation exhibition. Serena and Venus Williams, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Marian Wright Edelman, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés and Clive Davis were chosen to become immortals on canvas for the showing. Other pieces feature a photograph portrait of Marian Wright Edelman, work by José Andres, Kenturah Davis, and Hugo Crosthwaite that will all show in Portrait of a Nation, showing at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on November 10 to October 22, 2023.
Tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay are among the famous faces going on show on November 10 in the “Portrait of a Nation” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Hugo Crosthwaite’s multifaceted depiction of Fauci consists of both a series of drawings and a stop motion animation.
The museum’s new works also include a portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who spearheaded the American response to COVID-19. Hugo Crosthwaite diverged from the other commissioned artists’ more traditional interpretations of portraiture and created a stop-motion animation. Crosthwaite’s work also includes 19 drawings on paper, and seven will be displayed in the National Portrait Gallery’s upcoming exhibition.
The Portrait Gallery has also commissioned a portrait of the public health expert Fauci by artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971), first-prize winner of the Portrait Gallery’s 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The resulting artwork is composed of a stop-motion drawing animation and suite of 19 drawings on paper, seven of which will be on view.
The new additions—which will be exhibited on the museum’s first floor through October 22, 2023—include a joyous Serena Williams by Toyin Ojih Odutola, the duplicity of Venus Williams visualized by Robert Pruitt, José Andrés feeding the world by Kadir Nelson, a multimedia imagining of Anthony Fauci and his work by Hugo Crosthwaite, an abstraction of Ava DuVernay evoking the moving image by artist Kenturah Davis, and more.
Anthony Fauci doesn't know how history will remember him, but he does know how it will see him. On a recent Saturday, he's inside a private room at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, looking at the work of art that will hang alongside presidents, celebrities, inventors and other distinguished Americans. It's a video –– a stop motion animation –– chronicling his landmark career through a series of intense drawings that leap out from the screen.
Dennis Koch, Bitcoin Magazine’s art gallery coordinator, described why this space is important, saying, “Meetup locations like Bitcoin Park in Nashville or Bitcoin Commons in Austin affirm that there’s no replacement for spending time with Bitcoiners in real life. The same goes for the new Bitcoin Magazine Art Gallery. We want to build a tactical meetup and exhibition space for artists. Nashville has a tangible bitcoin vibe, and BMAG is going to be a big part of this expanding scene.”
A Los-Angeles based Mexican American, Ken Gonzales-Day heard echoes of the rhetoric used to justify lynching in the calls by radicalized white men for armed Americans, to patrol the Southern borders against migrants. Gonzales-Day sought to shift viewers’ attention away from the hyperbolic accusations that criminalize racial minorities to the aggression of the vigilantes. His images seek to prompt viewers to question the true threat to American communities in the past and today—racial minorities or white supremacist vigilantism?
Steaming machines or spike-laden devices crouched like metal reptiles populate the staged industrial spaces pictured in Rodrigo Valenzuela’s two black-and-white photographic series “Afterwork” (2021) and “Weapons” (2022).
Whether Valenzuela’s imagery engages with present-day workers, utopic visions from a modernist past, or a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, capitalist structures of time come under critique throughout BRIC’s exhibition. His work defies the capitalist conceit of linear progress by showing us ongoing labor exploitation that reaches back to the beginning of the industrial era, and it revolts against the structures that systematically control the time of worker’s lives.
Serena and Venus Williams, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Marian Wright Edelman, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés and Clive Davis have been chosen as the seven recipients to be honored at the National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) upcoming “Portrait of a Nation” exhibition. Highlights also include Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop-motion animation of Dr. Fauci, who became the face of the US’ response to the COVID pandemic.
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. Shows at the Vincent Price Art Museum and Skirball Cultural Center highlight the potential of art to memorialize and record our histories.
Celebrating 15 years in business, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles newly opened a 6,500 sq. ft. space on Mateo Street in the vibrant Arts District. With prior roles in the curatorial departments at the Americas Society and the New Museum in New York, de Jesus focuses the program on showcasing a diverse roster of artists addressing the social archetypes of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
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.
This multimedia exhibition “examines the absurdities of the human experience through the lenses of colonialism, nationalism, religion and consumerism” from the “perspective of a cultural voyeur,” say the exhibition materials. The words used to title the works of art offer further clues into Solmi’s video-based world: Bacchanalian, debauchery, bathhouse.
“Pacific Gold,” the resuscitated survey’s 2022 edition, offers a revelatory look at fresh art in the region, but not without controversy. COSTA MESA, Calif. — “Pacific Gold” is the swaggering title of the 2022 edition of the California Biennial, a regional survey that has been in existence, under various missions and monikers, since 1984.
“Joie de Vivre” is as processual examination of Federico Solmi’s multimedia creations. A fully immersive experience, this exhibition combines art, sound, motion and even virtual reality to honor Solmi’s social commentary. Each piece is characterized by an over-saturation of its subjects and often crude depictions of their nature. There is a sense of indulgence, a lens into the American culture of all-consuming power. This satirical approach results in the vibrant, alluring, and borderline humorous work of Solmi.
The Orange County Museum of Art opened in its ultramodern 53,000-square-foot building in Costa Mesa last weekend with a 24-hour extravaganza featuring music, movies, dancing, guided tours and entertainment.
Celebrating a shared cultural history of unstoppable resilience, collective action, and rising up against oppressive, anti-progress systems, Creative Resilience is a curated space of safe expression, joy and uplift, systemic overhauls and reimagined futures — things which would perennially benefit everyone, but all the more so in this prolonged period of darkness, threats, struggles, and isolation.
Founded 20 years ago by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz, Slanguage Studio opened its doors to the community of Wilmington as an artist-run space. Slanguage has since expanded its creative teachings, aspirations, and community engagement globally to creatives, innovators, and teachers of all backgrounds. We Run Things, Things Don’t Run We is an homage and oeuvre of many generations that have contributed to the history, community-centric values, conscious intent/ content and intergenerational, alternative learning space of Slanguage Studio.
The Seldoms share the process and outcomes of four Toolbox projects now through November 3 at the Hyde Park Art Center, in celebration of the company’s twentieth anniversary. Hanson, along with company members Damon Green, Dee Alba and Sarah Gonsiorowski developed dances inspired by the creative practices of sculptor Edra Soto, sound artist Sadie Woods, painter Jackie Kazarian and fiber artist Jacqueline Surdell.
Phung Huynh is an L.A. artist and educator – and creator of sobrevivir, which means survival in Spanish. The artwork was commissioned to publicly apologize to the over 240 largely Mexican immigrant women who were forcibly sterilized at the hospital in the ‘60s and ‘70s
Miami artist Antonia Wright is among a growing number of women artists who share Paula Rego’s outrage over anti-abortion forces and who create art in protest. “With the reversing of Roe, I feel anxiety for younger women and the fear they must have around unexpected pregnancy,” Wright says. Her arresting art is now on view at Spinello Projects. It addresses women’s challenged right to control their reproductive health. The work is both fierce and delicate, resonant with a terrible beauty.
More than a dozen works of art by 14 artists were commissioned for the new Metro K Line that opened last week. Artwork for the stations on the route was integrated at the plaza, concourse and platform levels. Riders will experience new neighborhood landmarks showcasing culture and community. Artists include Ingrid Calame, Eileen Cowin, Kenturah Davis, Dean Erdmann, Sherin Guirguis, Carlson Hatton, Mara Lonner, Geoff McFetridge, Rebeca Méndez, Erwin Redl, Kim Schoenstadt, Jaime Scholnick, Shinique Smith and Mickalene Thomas.
"Rhythmic Inquisitions" brings together 19 of Black painter June Edmonds' abstract canvases going back 25 years. There are "energy wheel" paintings in bright colors, inspired by Edmonds' meditation, and two large "mapping" paintings that might seem to be nothing more than wavy lines in varied colors. There's a bit more to it.
Artnet News spoke with Howard Tam about his burgeoning collection, and the works of art he plans to add to it next. Tam shares he would like to add works by Andre Butzer, Dinh Q. Lê, Andre Hemer, Sopheap Pich, Kyle Dunn, and Louis Fratino in the near future.
Entering Jean Lowe’s Encinitas studio isn’t exactly like stepping into a dreamworld, but it’s pretty damn close. It’s filled with spectacular mise-en-scène-style painted artworks and papier-mâché pieces. Look up, and one might spot ornamental vases rendered with the Coors logo. A close examination of books on a shelf actually reveals them to be painted renderings with tongue-in-cheek titles.
Strands of myth are woven through, seen in Hector Dionicio Mendoza’s cardboard “Coyota,” which sports human arms and legs, and Simphiwe Ndzube’s “Ndlovukazi,” which draws on folklore from his native South Africa.
Artist Jean Lowe's latest full-gallery installation is a surreally life-size, cardboard and papier mache rendering of a car dealership, complete with a massive "Swank Tank," the Hummer EV.
On the occasion of the recent opening of his big mid-career retrospective Joie de Vivre, through February 26, at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey (an easy hour’s train ride out of Penn Station in Manhattan), the Wondercabinet herewith concludes its two-part serialization of Weschler’s biographical sketch of the artist Federico Solmi.
Mimi Smith has spent a lifetime making art that integrates her personal life with the tumult and beauty of the surrounding world. Over the past fifty years, Smith has been making artwork as an archive of our struggle to survive and maintain our humanity, addressing the environment, nuclear war, AIDS, terrorism and feminism (before the word was commonly used) in compelling mixed media works, which she considers sculptures.
While for many Californians pink donut boxes signal little more than the arrival of a favorite snack, for Cambodian refugees and their children, the ubiquitous, cheerful-looking packaging is often deeply intertwined with their family history of resettling in the United States. Several years ago, Phung Huynh realized the bright pink packaging offered a highly symbolic and visually striking canvas for her drawings. The portraits depict her family and other members of Cambodian and Vietnamese communities in an effort to highlight their stories of hardship, trauma and resilience.
As a Latinx artist in a city and state where we continue to be underrepresented, I was drawn to represent at least part of my cultural heritage. Many of these objects are rarely on view in the physical world of the museum. I wanted to record them, at this time, to invite their presence in a shared space below the earth. The work is a portal, through which all may travel, from the past to future, or from darkness to light. The journey is up to them.
Guests attending Wednesday night's opening party for the 2022 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse gave rave reviews to the creativity, furnishings and artowrk which trabnsformed a historic Heights townhouse into a showcase of modern interior design. Artist Liz Collins is one of the artists whose work hangs on the Showhouse's walls. "I love interior designers and I want them to see my work and imagine it in that context," she said.
In a world proliferating with contemporary art, with its variety of styles, subject matter and materials— an art world that often surprises, cajoles and sometimes shocks viewers—“Your Place in the Multiverse” is even more surprising than most exhibitions.
Solmi’s solo exhibition Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum traces his journey from Bologna, Italy, as the son of a butcher born in 1973, to his latest turn as a societal voyeur in the United States, transforming this elegant outpost of the Smithsonian, a little known but spacious museum in deepest Northern New Jersey, into a digital space truly worthy of the term “metaverse.”
So, I asked Feldman, the sly old impresario, a bit later, “Who the hell is this Federico Solmi character, anyway?” Feldman’s eyes widened as he broke into one of his wide gleaming smiles. “Someone,” he pronounced, delphically, “well worth looking into.”
No Vacancy is a juried art competition that supports and celebrates mainly local artists, provokes critical discourse, and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as temporary art destinations in their own right. This year will be the largest to date, with an expanded program presenting 12 artists creating site-specific works at 12 iconic Miami Beach hotels.
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.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is another wonderfully curated booth, featuring June Edmonds, Nicolas Grenier, Laura Krifka, Vian Sora, and Evita Tezeno—shout out to Dallas-based artist, Evita Tezeno, for making some of the most earnest pieces at the fair. Tezeno’s collage paintings employ richly patterned hand-painted papers and found objects in a contemporary folk-art style.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles began The Armory Show with a bang. With a compelling booth of newly created paintings by artists June Edmonds, Evita Tezeno, Vian Sora, Laura Krifka, and Nicolas Grenier, the gallery appeared to have one of the most visited booths at the fair. Within minutes of the opening, the gallery had sold work by Sora, Edmonds, and Tezeno. A gallery representative noted that sales were going strong by mid-day Thursday, with multiple pieces going to prominent collections in Malaysia, Texas, and Pittsburgh, plus institutional queries lined up for that evening.
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.
Meta’s new office picks up right where Moynihan left off, infusing three lobbies and a central atrium across 700,000 square feet with ambitious site-specific artworks by such emerging and established artists as Baseera Khan, Liz Collins, and Matthew Kirk. Visible to passersby in the Moynihan Train Hall’s waiting area is Liz Collins’ vibrant ode to New York roadways and street signage. The Brooklyn fiber artist mined patterns from the chaotic cityscape to create zigzag-striped textiles created on a Jacquard loom, a 19th-century weaving apparatus considered a predecessor to modern computing.
The 2022 FVA fellows are: April Banks (Interdisciplinary-Mixed Media); Nao Bustamante (Interdisciplinary-Mixed Media); Enrique Castrejon (Installation); Patty Chang (Interdisciplinary-Mixed Media); June Edmonds (Painting); Reanne Estrada (Interdisciplinary-Mixed Media); Asher Hartman (Installation and Experimental Film and Video); Iris Yirei Hu (Installation); Phung Huynh (Painting); Young Joon Kwak (Interdisciplinary-Mixed Media); Sandra Low (Painting); and Suné Woods (Experimental Film and Video).
In 2014, through a Smithsonian Artist in Residency Fellowship, Gonzales-Day sought to photograph and address the underrepresentation of Native Americans, African Americans and Latinx in sculpture. The project resulted in the 2018 exhibition, “Unseen: Our past in a new light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar,” which was presented as part of the museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition program.
The Marietta College art department is pleased to present “BITTER EARTH,” an exhibition by California artist Carla Jay Harris in collaboration with Dr. Brenda Stevenson. Bitter Earth is a collaborative mixed-media installation project exploring the historical Black experience. Harris questions how did the shadow of Jim Crow impact the lives of her elders, and the broader question of what aspects of the past are remembered, represented, and reproduced in contemporary society?
In the building’s “Ring Lobby”, which is visible from the waiting area of the Moynihan train hall, Brooklyn-based artist Liz Collins has applied her signature, vibrantly-colorer textiles to create Every Which Way, a sprawling installation across four walls spanning more than 100 feet in length.
When Meta workers move into their sprawling new Manhattan office complex in the historic James A. Farley Building in a few weeks, they will pass large-scale art installations including a painted mural of various ecosystems by artist couple Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard, bright textile swaths inspired by New York’s streetscapes by Liz Collins and an intricate, symbol-filled multi-panel painting by Matthew Kirk.
Meanwhile in the Farley Building’s Ring lobby, which is visible from Moynihan Train Hall, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Collins contributed Every Which Way, a work composed of 29 upholstered padded panels in her signature vibrant textiles that span over 100 feet and depict geometric patterns found in New York street signage.
But there is also plenty that explores the culture and aesthetic significance of trees — be it the literal pattern of a tree’s form or the ways in which trees function as symbols of creation (the Bodhi Tree or the Tree of Life), as well as death. 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.
Pacifico Silano is known for sourcing archival images of gay pornography, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, to interrogate white masculinity and American clichés through the lens of queer desire. He creates his work by photographing, rather than scanning, the archival photographs he has collected. Silano often layers them physically on top of each other, sometimes repeating the process with several magazines, and then takes a picture of the final layout. He makes further edits to those images by cropping or scaling them to show the pixelated grain, paper fibers, rough edges, or a detail of the magazine spine.
Jonathan VanDyke’s opulent sewn paintings fuse geometric pattern and expressive gesture. His works emerge through complex and prolonged processes of accumulating, mark-making, and piecing, often taking over a year to conceive and construct. Gathered from his family, friends, and companions, the fabrics that make up his paintings are stained and marked by way of techniques he first devised through long-term collaborations with performers from the NYC queer art community.
At the heart of this garden, there is now a new monument that is not only poignant but also timely. “Sobrevivir,” by L.A. artist Phung Huynh, marks the coerced sterilizations that once took place at the hospital in the 1960s and ’70s — mostly of Mexican women from working-class backgrounds. It also pays tribute the 10 people who filed a class-action lawsuit against L.A. County doctors, the state and the federal government for sterilizing them without adequate consent.
"I want the art to be impactful and meaningful and create a deep experience for contemplation for viewers," said artist Phung Huynh. "The material is made of metal to symbolize the mother's strength, and I want this to last forever."
A new art project is intended to serve as an apology to the more than 200 women who suffered forced sterilizations decades ago at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. Artist Phung Huynh's piece, "Sobrevivir," the Spanish word for "survive," serves as an ode to the survivors, many of whom immigrated from Mexico.
It’s a part of our history which isn’t often talked about, the coerced sterilization of thousands of women across the country, including in L.A. County. Now one hospital is taking steps to acknowledge and apologize.
During a somber unveiling ceremony Monday on a grassy courtyard at LAC + USC hospital, county officials gave the public the first look at “Sobrevivir,” an art installation by Cambodian-American artist Phung Huynh of Los Angeles in the works since 2018, ever since the county Board of Supervisors issued a motion containing an apology.
In Your Body Is a Space that Sees, mesmerizing and yet eerily familiar, Lia Holloran exposes us to a series of accessible artworks that seem as complex as the depths of space themselves. The 2016 Art Works Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts heralded Your Body is a Space that Sees, which is now on view at LAX.
Lavi Daniel is a self-taught painter whose unique vision has been equally shaped by love for a certain Renaissance sense of color-blocking and balance, intimacy with the evocative potential of abstract textile design, and the organic surrealism of memory and wonder in a child’s imagination.
These practices parallel the Erased Lynching photographs of artist Ken Gonzales-Day. In these digitally manipulated versions of historical photographs, the bodies of lynching victims have been removed, leaving only the images of the perpetrators subject to our gaze. It is an opposite approach to that of the Emory iconoclast. Yet the redacted or defaced pictures in Bibb’s book similarly attest to a reader’s active rejection of oppression.
Los Angeles-based painter and video artist, Edie Beaucage, is committed to her direct and subjective imagination. She intends to create images in a vast spectrum of undefined categories, allowing vague ideas, inconclusive views, wobbly constructs, pleasure or sorrows, and fun to be included in the art conversation. This way, she actively opens up the critical discourse in new and different avenues.
At first glance, Vian Sora’s works look like cosmic implosions. Flat, organic forms act as viewfinders for boisterous textures that resemble bubbling, oozing acid; wet, dense cement; and hazy cosmic dust. But Subduction, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, does not speak of intergalactic or otherworldly realms. Rather, it pertains to the entropic and ever-changing geological processes of the earth.
The characters depicted in the drawings, whether living or dead, close or distant, share a common denominator. The starting point for each individual that is tenderly rendered in each drawing is John’s subjective and emotional relationship to them. All are objects of his fascination or affection or both, whether they are family members or interactions that were enabled by what Brooks calls “the whims of the algorithm”. These are portraits of a community that the artist made some sort of connection with, and the degree to which they caught his eye can vary from lifelong friendships to Instagram discussions about architecture, politics, or queerness.
The topics addressed in Vian’s work and practice are deeply personal to her history but at the same time universal in how they relate to what we as humans have faced in our world historically and today. The impact of loss and grief and rebirth, honoring those lost, and calling attention to the way we navigate violence, are present in her work in a way that can resonate with so many. For the artist conducting this interview, talking with Vian was an enriching experience that, like her work, was filled with tonally heavy topics, but always with growth, healing, and hope present.
From examining the primal nature of water to engaging mythology, animism, and Indigenous tradition and to speculating on new horizons, Andrea Carlson (Chicago, IL), Carolina Caycedo (Los Angeles, CA), Paul Maheke (England), Josèfa Ntjam (France), Claudia Peña Salinas (Brooklyn, NY), and Vian Sora (Louisville, KY) focus on the ways in which water is both a site of mourning and renewal.
What makes Harris so special is her magical ability to create fantastical (and yet intimately familiar) works. These art pieces feel as though they’re fables, and we’re familiar with the characters and landscapes. Using a combination of photography, her own unique digital painting method, and acrylic, Harris stuns with large format artworks which are accessible across an array of viewers.
Three fine solo shows of paintings offer personal perspectives as unique as the artists who created them: Laura Krifka, Evita Tezeno, and Nancy Evans. Tezeno’s work is a delightful, vibrant mixed-media swirl of collage and acrylic. “My Life, My Story” is reminiscent of a quilt, a layered narrative of family life in which the textured mediums also convey the stories. Krifka’s “Still Point,” is a beautiful tribute to light, the human body, and the human heart. With domestic settings framing lustrous images, her stunningly accomplished work pulls at the heart and reaches the soul. Nancy Evans focuses on a celestial landscape rather than a human one in “Moonshadow.”
In Fleurs du mal, Evans moves from American Modernism to a post-apocalyptic version of American Regionalism, unsettling, ravishing and surreal. Within its potent symbolism, many American myths collide. Evans infuses Fleurs du mal with a poetic sense of ruin and devastation, but also with the possibility of renewal.
Tezeno creates scenes of everyday life that have a timeless quality. They could be images of now, or from the past. While representational, they have a folk art quality so they appear simple, yet complex simultaneously. The works are composites filled with an array of different materials. Whoever these figures may be, they round out Tezeno’s story and illustrate a vital community.
The sensation of the show is Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite, whose “Borderlands” includes a roomful of small, explosive sketches of scenes from an enhanced version of the artist’s hometown, wild, wall-sized acrylic paintings choked with Mexican signifiers and pregnant with foreboding and whispers of violence, and a vibrant wraparound favela sketched all over the surfaces of a large room.
Bodies and faces stare back from the walls of John Brooks’ studio in the Portland neighborhood. They’re sketched onto paper with energetic markings, largely in pastel tones. Drawings like these make up his current show at a gallery in New York City’s East Village. “Which perhaps is a bit weird given that I think of myself as a painter,” Brooks says.
Fairgoers buzzed about work by Ukrainian artists at the Sapar Contemporary booth, or the pieces by local artist Evita Tezeno that had already been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, and gallerists—a mix of local and international—were eager to note the difference between Texas crowds and those at other fairs.
Taylor is among several artists who portray mirrored gazes. So does Melissa Ann Pinney in her public-bathroom photograph “Portrait of Jael” and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a nude self-portrait in which he’s entwined with another unclad man, with the artist’s visage mostly hidden behind his camera. Even murkier are the faces in Laura Karetzky’s “Toast,” a painting that includes people reflected in, and distorted by, a chrome-clad toaster.
Lia Halloran’s work ‘Your Body is a Space That Sees’ is a series of cyanotype prints that source historical imagery to trace the contributions of women in astronomy from antiquity to the modern-day. Halloran’s work draws from narratives such as the historical accounts of Hypatia of Alexandria, and the work of a group of women at Harvard in the late 1800’s known as Pickering’s Harem or the Harvard Computers.
Moonshadow brings together the artist’s series of Moon paintings, painted between 2014 and 2020, for the first time. In a departure from her abstract practice, and a long career that encompasses performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and sound elements, Evans’ cosmic paintings take inspiration from the sublime forces of nature which the artist has experienced throughout the course of her life in California, from her upbringing in California’s expansive and fertile Central Valley, to the raw and rugged Pacific Ocean coastline, and the high desert landscapes of Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.
Sherin Guirguis is an Egyptian American artist famous for her visual arts, and contemporary centerpieces aimed at engaging audiences in a dialogue about power, agency, and social transformation. She is also known for using her works to shine a spotlight on marginalized and contested histories relating to women.
Jean Lowe’s work parodies our most banal behaviors by inviting us to consume images of our own consumption. Visitors to Your Place in the Multiverse, a survey of Encinitas-based artist Jean Lowe’s work from the last 20 years, have the distinct experience of entering the exhibition through the gift shop.
A story which is now being unboxed. Phung Hyunh is a Cambodian-American artist who came to America as a refugee. In her exhibit, "Doughnut (W)hole," at Self Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles, she uses a pink doughnut box instead of a white canvas to capture a taste of the Cambodian-American refugee experience.
One artist who will show preexisting work is Vian Sora, who was born in Baghdad but now lives in Louisville. Her paintings convey a fluid-like sense of motion between the figurative and the abstract. She’ll be presenting seven pieces, including the new painting River Bed, a response to last year’s deadly Kentucky tornadoes. “If you look at that painting, there are deflated bodies resting over branches,” Sora says. “I don’t want to say it’s about climate change, but it’s definitely a reaction to that.”
Brooks masterfully depicts landscapes, still lifes, and portraits through a wholly singular approach to artmaking. Nude and clothed men, vegetation, shells, and various scenes from nature are captured with a fluidity and tenderness that demonstrates a powerful connection to the subjects he chooses to draw. Through his application of graphite, colored pencil, and pastels, the artist offers us a peek into the relationships he has forged with the world that he creates with delicacy and precision.
Occupying the opposite pole of painting are the socially engaged works of Karla Diaz at the Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus (Booth 5.03). Diaz’s deep, color-saturated canvases tell personal stories of migration from Mexico to the United States, as well as preserve folklore from her heritage.
The Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, which director Kelly Cornell told me was modeled after the Tate’s Outset program, utilized this year’s $125,000 grant to add ten new works to the Dallas Art Museum’s permanent collection—unexpected choices and classic beauties, like a homoerotic vase by Krzysztof Strzelecki called “Olympia” via Anat Ebgi, “Joy, Compassion, Generosity” by Texas native Evita Tenzeno via Luis De Jesus, and “Untitled (laborer)” by Kaloki Kyami via Keijsers Koning, which recently relocated from NYC to Dallas.
Like previous bodies of Krifka’s work, the domestic space is the container for these devious glances, yet there is always the allusion to an “out there” that is more scenic and wild. Several paintings subtly capture sunrise or sunset, the fading light visible in the painting’s background. Sink or Swim pictures a dim and banal kitchen sink that looks out to a lavish private beach. The fantasy always remains at a distance, trumped by the real. Everything But depicts a similar kitchen sink set into an unremarkable Formica countertop, but rather than peer out over a landscape, the sink looks out into a mirror that reflects the entire scene back at us, giving the viewer the uncanny ability to see what would be behind us in the painted scene.
At the Dallas Art Fair press preview yesterday morning, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) announced its acquisition of ten works of art, three of which are by Texas artists. These acquisitions are made possible by the Dallas Art Foundation + Dallas Museum of Art Acquisition Fund, which was established in 2016. Evita Tezeno, a Dallas-based mixed-media artist who is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, is the third Texas artist to have work acquired by the DMA from the Dallas Art Fair.
Los Angeles-based Egyptian artist Guirguis' artwork is inspired by forgotten stories of marginalized communities, particularly women. This work, "Here I Have Returned," was a site-specific sculpture created for an exhibition at the Pyramids Plateau in Giza, Egypt last year. It is shaped like a sacred musical instrument played by Hathor, the ancient goddess of music and dance.
This May, the Baltimore Museum of Art will open an exhibit that explores the concept of transformation as artistic inspiration. Shapeshifting: Transformations on Paper will feature 35 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books from the BMA’s collection that touch on ideas of renewal, shifting manifestations of identity, and classical myths. Shapeshifting features works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Margaret Burroughs, Paula Gately Tillman, Zackary Drucker, Saya Woolfalk, and many others.
This is what we see: sweat, desert, automobiles, men’s fashion, men’s bodies, and blue jeans. But this is not what Pacifico Silano wants us to notice in his solo exhibit If You Gotta Hurt Somebody, Please Hurt Me. Instead, the reconstructed photographs from the 1970s and 80s become an iconic part of what Silano is turning a critical gaze towards: toxic masculinity and its intersection with white queer desire.
Here’s a shortlist of recommended booths: global powerhouse Perrotin; iconic-to-cool NYC dealers Kasmin and Karma; European bastions of important discourse Hales Gallery, London, and Kerlin Gallery, in from Dublin; and L.A. outposts of cool Anat Ebgi, Louis Stern Fine Arts, Night Gallery, Luis De Jesus, and Various Small Fires (L.A., Seoul), which also unveils a permanent Dallas space timed to the opening of the fair. (We’ll be catching up with VSF’s Esther Kim Varet in the coming weeks for an in-depth profile.)
There’s something about Gabriel Sanchez’s work that’s almost addictive. Maybe it’s the serotonin-boosting colour palettes – something that’s been lacking here in the UK – or his ability to capture friendship, hope and intimacy. Either way, the audience are invited to learn more of the people he’s painting, whether it’s by listening in on a phone call or observing a trio (in the nude) as they peak over a wall.
“I interviewed these ‘donut kids,’ and I asked them to give me photographs of them as children when they were at the donut shop,” Huynh says, explaining her process. She overlaid the childhood photographs with portraits of the “donut kids” now “to have this relationship of then-and-now, and how they're forging their new identities with this very complicated past.”
Representing a variety of fields, 180 recipients of 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships were announced on April 7. The artists include Tyrone Ta-columba Aiken, Lisa Corrine Davis, Nathaniel, Donnett, June Edmonds, Mark Thomas Gibson, Lisa E. Harris, Alisha Wormsley, Autumn Knight (film/video), Ja'Tovia Monique Gary (film/video) and Gary Burnley (photography).
Sex is everywhere and nowhere in the photographic work of Pacifico Silano. Take, for example, Violent Delights (2022), a black-and-white image of a shirtless man with shaggy hair who tightly clasps a rifle with one hand, while the other grabs something, or someone, below, just beyond the frame. This image, with its allusion to sex and thinly veiled parallel between the phallus and physical violence, is a key work in the artist’s new, two-part show in New York.
Your Place in the Multiverse stirs up plenty of conversation. The five-part installation – which occupies the entire lower floor of the Museum – tackles capitalism, consumerism, feminism, environmentalism, animal rights and the bizarre value we place on ephemera, all while making us laugh out loud (and offering free snacks!).
Artist Jackie Milad is motivated to memorialize her Honduran and Egyptian heritage as she considers the importance of authorship and dissemination of history. “JACKIE MILAD: Birth” consists of four large scale works that combine painting, drawing and collage on hand-dyed canvas, making visual references to creation myths of Ancient Egypt and Mayan civilization. Via “disparate” imagery, Milad contemplates her own mixed-cultural upbringing as well as the complexity of history-making.
Huynh hopes to uplift doughnut kids by centering their stories and experiences in her latest work. While history can benefit from a variety of perspectives, Huynh says that it can be problematic when those who exist only on the periphery are the sole authors of the past. “I really am against the whole American dream narrative — ‘Look at these Asians, they come here and they pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and they’re successful’ — because it demonizes purposely Black and brown folks. It also masks the extreme trauma that our parents faced and experienced, and how that trauma is passed down,” she says.
In a word, karma. Together, the 20 paintings on view feel heavy with the accumulation of history: karmic cycles of violence, pestilence, and death. (Sora, who was born in Baghdad, remained in the city through multiple wars, including the 2003 United States invasion, before emigrating.) And yet, the work also sings with the equally abiding presence of growth, rebirth, and new life.
Equally lovely are the gilded, fantastical images of Harris’ A Season in the Wilderness. Infused with light and a sense of magic, Harris shapes boldly hued visuals myths both mysterious and captivating. With gold leaf elements that mirror that of Byzantine icons, Greenfield’s “A Survey, 2001-2021″ creates powerful paintings that subvert negative stereotypes about Black people and culture. Like Bey and Harris, a fierceness in palette matches passion for his subjects, serving as a framework for a message of pride, hope, achievement and sacrifice.
Huynh, a bubbly 44-year-old with black bangs sweeping across her face, created these portraits first by drawing her subjects in a style reminiscent of Pop Art, then silkscreening them, along with vintage family photographs, onto the pink cardboard donut boxes that have become emblematic of donut shops run by Cambodian-Americans. "These donut shops represent a cultural space where refugees and immigrants reshape their lives in the process of negotiating, assimilating and becoming American," Huynh writes.
Another such project is artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series. Since 2000, he’s been collecting and digitally manipulating photographs of lynchings, removing the victims’ bodies from the frame. The rationale, he says on his website, is that “by erasing the victim’s body I hoped to create a visual experience that would force the viewer to focus on the crowd, and in doing so, to address the underlying racism and bias that was so foundational to many of these acts of collective violence”.
"Donut (W)hole" expands on Huynh's earlier body of work portraying first-generation Khmericans on pink doughnut boxes using graphite pencil. A refugee herself, Huynh could relate to many of her subjects' experiences of hard work and persistence. Huynh's father fled the Cambodian genocide and eventually relocated to the United States from Vietnam with his family, but not before spending some time in a Thai refugee camp.
Every time I encounter Carlson Hatton’s work, I come away with distinct sensory experiences of each artwork’s components: paint, shadows, shapes, and objects—human or otherwise. A barrage of images, whether figures or scenes from his paintings, appear in my mind like past movies or dreams, to finalize his confluence of art and its impact.
Embracing the classical and the contemporary, John Brooks’s paintings yearn to create other worlds, a desire that Garth Greenwell argues underlies both art-making and queerness.
Odd machines, both weapon-like and suggestive of mechanical creatures, inhabit artist Rodrigo Valenzuela’s solo art installation called “New Works for a Post-Worker’s World” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. Valenzuela’s large photo-based works play with the idea of the elimination of “workforce,” pushed aside by automatons that no longer require human operators. “To me, industrialization and the early labor union movement are a very integral part of the beginning of modernism,” Valenzuela said.
“There’s a lot of body in this,” Hunt said. “We’ve all been through something pretty intense together as a global civilization. I’m interested in how that informs people moving through these presentations.” Examples of this include Amia Yokoyama’s sensuous ceramics of contorting, melting figures at Stanley’s and Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege’s hanging works constructed from fabric, faux fur, and hair that visitors can interact with at Stars. At Luis De Jesus, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s tightly composed photographs resemble Constructivist post-apocalyptic landscapes, devoid of people.
There is definitely a focus on featuring Black artists. There are a number of female group shows we’re seeing being presented. There are some really exciting artists. Evita Tezeno is showing with Luis De Jesus, and she’s actually from Dallas. Her work is incredible. And she’s really just getting the recognition that she deserves. So, we’re excited. And excited how her work hasn’t really been shown in Dallas before. So, I’m excited for an LA based gallery to show the work to an audience in Dallas.
To make the works in this show closing on Saturday, Rodrigo Valenzuela built a stage in his backyard on which he constructed haunting creations in metal. He then photographed his creations in black and white, often pumping in fog as he did so to enhance their eeriness, and printed the images himself. This exhibition presents two bodies of works, “Weapons” and “Afterworks,” in which menacing creations of welded scrap metal appear like futuristic torture devices or strangely alien machines that have outlived their purpose.
Associate Professor of Art Lia Halloran has gotten her wish, as her exhibition celebrating women’s contributions to astronomy, is currently on display in Terminal 1 at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The exhibition, Your Body is a Space That Sees, was selected by the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs for installation at Gate 9, and thirteen pieces in the series will be available to ticketed passengers through the fall of 2022, where it is expected to reach eight million viewers.
For instance, Rodrigo Valenzuela, who is a teacher at UCLA, is making incredible work right now. His practice looks at the working class and issues of labor, immigration and protest. Represented by Luis De Jesus gallery, he’s got a beautiful new book out and has put together a striking presentation for Focus.
In “Another Land” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day invites viewers to face the ugliest parts of ourselves and our nation’s history: its legacy of racialized violence. This latest series of drawings is informed by Gonzales-Day’s extensive research into the history of lynching in the conquest of the Americas and are a continuation of his “Erased Lynching” series, in which he appropriates and reinvents historic lynching images and artworks.
Rodrigo Valenzuela. Industry, automation and displacement, along with workers’ struggles for unionization, are longtime interests of Valenzuela, whose photography and cast concrete sculptures will be on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’ booth. Get familiar with the L.A.-based Chilean artist’s photography first, however, in “New Works for a Post-Worker’s World,” the downtown L.A. gallery’s first solo presentation of his work. Valenzuela is an assistant professor at UCLA, and his black and white images in the current show, the gallery writes, “suggest the roaring steel mills of the past, quickly abandoned once outdated, while also offering a retro futuristic vision in which workers and machines devised a better plan than their mutually assured futility.”
Lia Halloran traverses through mechanisms of experimentation in order to document motion of matter. As an interdisciplinary artist, Halloran examines the interconnectivity of scientistic cultures and the performance of light. Halloran recently presented Your Body is a Space That Sees at LAX Terminal 1, as well as a solo exhibition, The Sun Burns My Eyes Like Moons at Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles. In this interview the artist deep dives into the creation of cyanotypes, her Dark Skate series, and the influences of mythology and science on her practice.
Valenzuela is a Chilean former day laborer in landscape, construction, and more. In the two videos on view, Prole (2015) and El Sísifo (2015), sports provide a backdrop for investigating issues of race, labor, solidarity, and workers’ agency. Both videos accurately paint a picture from a perspective I never thought to consider. One of the videos titled “Prole” featured several immigrant workers engaged in indoor soccer and a discussion of worker unionization.
The American worker is having a moment. Headlines have declared the current power shift from employer to employee as “The Great Resignation” of twenty-four million people, and, for the first time in fifty years, unions in the United States are increasing in popularity, infiltrating some of the largest corporations. Indeed, one of the silver linings of this horrific pandemic has been this empowerment of the worker when automation and downsizing have eroded their perceived value for decades. Perhaps this is why Rodrigo Valenzuela’s first solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, RODRIGO VALENZUELA: New Works for a Post-Workers World, feels so timely and authentic.
Rodrigo Valenzuela's futuristic vision of a mechanical world devoid of humans is so ominous, it makes us shudder - much like the surrealist films of Luis Bunuel. Valenzuela creates poetry from rebellion in eerie factory scenes that are filled with sinister machines and scary automatons – yet there are no humans in sight or glimpses of nature, except the mist which creates a surreal light. We do not know why the humans have gone or why they have turned machines into dangerous weapons. Was there a revolution? These puzzling, dream-like images are left open for the viewer to interpret. They are so visually well-organized that the underlying aggression and paranoia is almost subliminally felt. As Valenzuela told me, they are “memories from the future.”
The lynching of James Reed, in Crisfield, Maryland, on July 28, 1907, for the alleged murder of the police officer John H. Daugherty. This image was modified for The Atlantic by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose technique, as showcased in his "Erased Lynchings" project, is to digitally remove the victim and rope from historical photographs of lynchings. By erasing the victims’ bodies, Gonzales-Day pushes the viewer to focus on the crowd and, by proxy, the racism and bias that were foundational to these acts of violence.
In their projection of a post-worker’s world, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s Afterwork series and Weapons series speaks to the elimination not only of individual laborers but of the idea itself of the work force, pushed aside by the very shapes we see here: odd machines and automation, engines that no longer require an operator, but that rage when no one is watching.
In Work for a Post Worker’s World, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s grayscale photographs feel like ominous apocalyptic factory scenes — pictures of invented machinery that, devoid of people, imply a future where the robots have taken over. A closer look, however, reveals familiar materials arranged in haphazard but careful compositions.
Highlights include artists looking at labor and industry, such Rodrigo Valenzuela’s new series of performative photographs. These uncanny images invoke early steel production, when workers were treated as engines, while imagining a new relationship between man and machine in a post-worker’s world (showing with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles).
The new and temporary installations, include "Out of the Blue," a group show curated by John David O'Brien, in Terminal 7's art gallery and running through summer 2022. The solo exhibits, "Your Body is a Space That Sees" by Lia Halloran, in Terminal 1, and "Tumbleweeds" by Pontus Willfors in the customs hallway in the Bradley International Terminal. The latter two are on display through fall 2022.
A new exhibition by Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela explores the implications and philosophical consequences of what happens to laborers as technology and automation displace reorganize, and potentially destroy existing work environments. New Works for a Post-Worker’s World is the artist’s first solo exhibition, and it will be on display at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (DTLA) now through Feb. 19.
And 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.
For more than 35 years, Jean Lowe has been making art imbued with a proprietary blend of wry wit, visual seduction, and incisive cultural critique. Working in sculpture, painting, and installation, Lowe draws us into elaborate reconstructions of our own value systems, empowering, entertaining, and implicating us all at once. Lowe talks with HereIn’s Contributing Editor Jordan Karney Chaim about humor, sneak attacks, and the power of objects.
Rodrigo Valenzuela, Ken Gonzales-Day, Michael Kindred Knight at Luis De Jesus. Three concurrent solo exhibitions. Rodrigo Valenzuela’s New Works for a Post-Worker World speaks to the elimination not only of individual laborers but of the idea itself of the workforce. In Another Land, Ken Gonzales-Day presents a new series of drawings started in 2020 as part of a commission project for the Smithsonian’s Journal of the Archives of American Art. Michael Kindred Knight’s newest body of work, Guide Meridian, represents a progression in his approach to abstraction as complex pictorial events that are developed over time.
Ken Gonzales-Day, the Los Angeles-based visual artist best known for his Erased Lynching photographic series (2002-ongoing) and the related 2006 book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, has been researching and collecting Latinx photography spanning from the 1850s to the 1950s.
Brooks goes on to discuss how the inclination to make work that appeals to a wider audience necessarily dilutes the message and intention of the work, creating art that is, ironically, less accessible. Instead, he advocates for honing in on individual interests and experiences as the path to making work that is both honest and compelling. He confirms, “I’m making work that I want to make. I feel a great sense of freedom in that respect. I feel, all of a sudden, rather unafraid, which I think is necessary. I’m not interested in making impenetrable work…I think there are a number of entry points for people.”
A new exhibition, We Are. . . Portraits of Metro Riders by Local Artists, is now on view in Union Station’s Passageway Art Gallery. Each rider portrait has a story that is personal and universal, intimate and immediate — and each is told by an artist with ties to neighborhoods served by Metro. Artwork by Carla Jay Harris will be included in the exhibition.
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.
A name unfamiliar to most will be June Edmonds. The Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University presents a thrilling solo exhibition serving as a forty-year survey of the Los Angeles-based artist. “June Edmonds: Full Spectrum” displays more than forty pieces made between 1980 and 2021, representing the first opportunity to offer attention to the artist’s lifelong commitment to portraying Black positivity in her artistic practice.
The exhibition includes 35 portraits celebrating the diversity of Metro's ridership, with transit riders of different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds included. Artwork by Carla Jay Harris will be included in the exhibition.
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 the nearby 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.
Los Angeles-based painter June Edmonds takes inspiration from the multiple inflections of the vesica pisces. Known for her large, abstract paintings depicting vibrant energetic wheels and neutral flags, Edmonds draws upon her meditation practice and American history — often highlighting the undertold chronicles of Black Americans — to create works that slow the viewer down, encouraging us to contemplate the myriad energies (and histories) coursing all around us.
In his massive sculpture Mariposa/Butterfly, Hector Dionicio Mendoza portrays the insect through a lens that blends power and elegance. Broad, sweeping wings extend in four quadrants from a driftwood thorax, which is topped with a large, muscular, metal hand, fingers tucked into a fist. The hand is coated in golden paint, which seems to trickle down its black forearm as though it is blood. Whose hand is raised here, and why is it raised in protest?
In the tradition of 20 century great Romare Bearden, Texas native Evita Tezeno creates richly embellished collages depicting the same Black woman in a variety of situations, including the play of emotions she felt during the pandemic lock-down last year. Tezeno explores our limited lifespan, sheltering in place, and hopeful transformation. Collectors loved them; the NADA booth quickly sold all her work. // “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.”
Many of the artworks — including pieces by Zackary Drucker (self portait, above center), Josh Reames and Laura Krifka — were found at L.A.’s Luis De Jesus Gallery. “It’s really important to support working artists,” says Clayton.
Dallas-based artist Evita Tezeno presents several new collage-based paintings that reflect on her experience living through the pandemic. They each present portraits of Black women holding various objects—a miniature house, a bountiful bowl of fruit. “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.
Karetzky adeptly addresses this new convergence of human interaction and observation in her work. The notion of watching someone through a digital platform has largely influenced daily life because of social distancing — sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Now, even as we peel our eyes away from these windows to re-enter our offices, schools and shopping centers, we all seem to be stuck between two windows.
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.
With more than 250 galleries, including 43 first-timers based in countries from Uruguay to Zimbabwe, Art Basel Miami Beach might be the most renowned fair in town this week — but it’s by no means the only one. 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.
December is right around the corner and we’re happy to say Miami Art Week is back in grand fashion. 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.
Working in painting, sculpture, installation and architectural engagement, artist Sherin Guirguis practices a hybrid form of object and image constructions that draws equally on personal, emotional gestures and thoughtfully sourced motifs from the outside world. Navigating individual, family, and cultural memory through abstract language and specific narratives, for Guirguis the act of embodying the schemes and energies of the past in evocative visual forms anchors history more indelibly within the present.
Tracing her journey from figuration to abstraction, “Full Spectrum” at Laband Art Gallery surveys the practice of June Edmonds over the past 40 years. Edmonds was born in Los Angeles, where she continues to live and work. Over the years, consistently considered the complexity of the Black experience, through race and history. Early representational works are personal images of domestic scenes. More recently, Edmonds has employed a language of abstraction, utilizing shape, repetition, and color. She has explored little-known narratives of historic women, redlining, and the symbolism of the American flag. Providing the first opportunity to consider the full spectrum of Edmonds’s ouevre, more than 40 paintings and drawings, made between 1980 and 2021, are on view.
The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a simultaneous solo show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Nine years ago, June Edmonds made a painting that, if not an immediate turning point in the 40-year development of her work, nonetheless signaled a direction that has lately come into full flower. “Gee’s Jungle” (2012) is included in the aptly titled survey “June Edmonds: Full Spectrum,” at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery in Westchester. The painting is composed of about a dozen mandala-like geometric disks of saturated color — the full spectrum — rendered in short, thick strokes of dense paint, each laid on with controlled concentration.
During all hours of day and night in the bustling city of Cairo, you'll hear the sound of blaring horns, like cars communicating in a secret language. At the Pyramids of Giza, though, all you'll hear is the wind - a language the ancients were familiar with - and currently, Egyptian-born, L.A.-based artist Sherin Guirguis' sculpture Here I Have Returned (2021), with its two cymbals clanging when the gust is strong.
“We,” Susan Silton’s first solo show with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, featured a suite of sixteen photographic prints of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in Northern California. Each black-and-white work presents two nearly identical views of coastal redwoods, resolutely earthbound trunks emerging from the grassy floor. Silton shot them on her iPhone; vantages capture clearings and the receding spaces of deep, dense groves that eschew the aperture of sky.
Based in Los Angeles, Egyptian-American visual artist Sherin Guirguis draws her inspiration from the journeys of women fighters who have left their mark on history. She is taking part in the Forever is Now exhibition at the Giza Pyramids. As usual, she evokes the stories of women from different eras: the goddess Isis, the feminist intellectual Doria Shafik... Sherin Guirguis' feminism is not limited to gender equality, but evokes the right of women to live freely, questioning the relationship between the individual and society.
June Edmonds is known for large-scale, dynamic abstract paintings that pay homage to African American figures and historical events. The concurrence of her 40-year survey, June Edmonds: Full Spectrum at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University and an exhibition of her recent work, Joy of Other Suns, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is perfectly timed - during the current renaissance of Black art - for overdue critical recognition of her constantly evolving aesthetic style. The survey is accompanied by a 64-page catalogue with essays by Dr. Jill Monitz and Laband Art Gallery Director, Karen Rapp, that will be launched at the gallery in November and ensure her position in African-American art history.
My first encounter with Rodrigo Valenzuela’s work was through his video works like Diamond Box (2012–2013), in which the artist paid undocumented migrant workers an hourly rate to tell their stories for the camera. A Chilean-born artist who illegally worked as a day laborer before earning his MFA from the University of Washington, Valenzuela saw his own experiences reflected in the voices of these workers—a familiarity that imbues these works with a sympathetic resonance.
Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day discussed his ongoing series, “Erased Lynching,” Thursday at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. Invited as part of the museum’s Fall 2021 exhibition “Art and hope at the end of the Tunnel,” Gonzales-Day talked about the history of lynching’s erasure in California, particularly of Latinx people.
A man dressed in brown stands before a row of trees, the color of his garments and the sturdiness of his posture evoking the solidity of the forest behind him. To his left, a fire eater spits flames into a tangerine sky. If this all sounds like a dream, well, it is. “El ´Árbol y el Tragafuegos” — “The Tree and the Fire Eater,” in English — was painted by Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz and it emerges from her dreams and her memories. The tree-man? That’s her, as a figure she once embodied in a dream. The fire eater was inspired by “Dragón,” a man — and actual fire eater — she knew from her family’s native village in the Mexican state of Colima. His real name was José and he hoped to one day become a truck driver.
Perhaps no artist of this year’s winners so starkly conveys the binational experience on both sides of the border quite like Hugo Crosthwaite. Blending fantastical elements and intimate portraiture, his drawings seem otherworldly, yet remain grounded in real-life issues. His work has been collected by everyone from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego to National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
“For years, I was just trying to turn my back to a little bit of the intensity of the experience of not only being an immigrant, but being an Iraq immigrant in America, but also being an American,” Sora said. “And I feel like I was really faced with that here, not in a bad way.”
A brand new exhibit has graced the Laband Art Gallery, "June Edmonds: Full Spectrum", which displays her best works from the past 40 years. The exhibit ranges from her first-ever oil painting to her most recent American flag collection –– but all pieces emphasize her commitment to Black positivity. For the past four years, Karen Rapp has been directing and curating the Laband Art Gallery for students and Westchester locals alike. “I became aware of June’s work a few years ago through her American flag paintings series for which she has received much acclaim. I wanted to present this 40-year survey of her career because she has been making stunning works from a Black feminist perspective that speak to everyone,” said Rapp.
The vibrant, curvilinear abstractions of June Edmonds have a backstory. Calling to mind travel routes and topographical mapping, her latest works explore race, history, and the Great Migration, paying tribute to Black female pioneers and early Southern California landowners. This gallery exhibition coincides with “June Edmonds: Full Spectrum,” a 40-year survey of Edmonds at Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Edmonds also recently installed a mural in La Jolla, Calif., and she is giving the Russell Lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego on Oct. 27.
Full Spectrum is a 40-year survey of the work of Los Angeles-based artist June Edmonds, who has spent her career “centering Black American experience.” The show spans early portraits of herself and other Black women, prefiguring contemporary painters of African-American domesticity like Jennifer Packer,through recent abstract compositions made up of hundreds of individual, distinct brushstrokes. Concurrently, Luis de Jesus will be staging a show of contemporary work by Edmonds, Joy of Other Suns, up through October 30.
Though the Fisher Museum features art of many different mediums (including amazing quilted tapestries and more abstracted collages), the exhibition excels most in its presentation of various portraits. The portraits displayed a range from Damian Elwes’ Basquiat-inspired canvas to Simon Toparovsky’s futuristic-looking cast aluminum busts and Ken Gonzales-Day’s collection of “Pandemic Portraits” depicting fellow artists, models and friends.
For a city that was once part of Mexico and nearly 50% of the Los Angeles population being Latinx, it’s fair to imagine that the number of art galleries, museums, and spaces showing Latinx work here would roughly mirror that number. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t. That’s why, when Latinx Heritage Month rolled around this year, all of us at Curate LA felt the need to celebrate and shine a light on the Latinx artists, curators, and spaces working hard to close the gap. All month long, we’re featuring Latinx artworks, events, and exhibitions on our social media, newsletter, and website. To kick us off, here’s our list of 16 Latinx-owned museums, galleries, and art spaces in Los Angeles and our surrounding areas who you can show some love to this month.
To walk into Moremen Gallery, in Louisville, and view the exhibition of John Brooks’s new paintings is to have a visceral experience of queer time. The twenty-one oil paintings, most of them large format—roughly four and a half by four feet, or larger—use contemporary pop-culture references, allusions to art history and literature, and images of Brooks’s friends and social-media acquaintances to create a kind of transhistorical community.
In each of Carla Jay Harris’ photographic collages at Luis De Jesus in the Arts District, the artist drops us into an allegorical narrative that is frozen in time. In each, figures commune with each other in ethereal landscapes which layer washy color over mountain peaks and rock formations to imbue them a celestial atmosphere. Though based on photographs, Harris collages texture and pattern over her figures and landscapes, adding painterly gravitas to her scenes.
The four winners of the annual prize will collectively show off their latest works, which range from street-style pop-surrealism (PANCA) and Turkish-style ceramics (Beliz Iristay), to black-and-white drawings (Hugo Crosthwaite) and subversive paintings (Perry Vásquez). There will be an artist reception on Oct. 9 from 5 to 8 p.m.
THE FALL EXHIBITION SEASON is officially underway and some of the first new gallery shows to open feature five early- and mid-career artists to watch. Each has a unique visual voice. What unifies their latest work is a resonance with the contemporary moment. Deborah Roberts, Carla Jay Harris, and Brittney Leeanne Williamsare confronting hard truths about ourselves, our communities, and our democracies and considering the empowering effect and emotional toll of these realities on our children and on Black women, their bodies, in particular. Sculptural reliefs by LaKela Brown utilize an ancient art form to document the lives of contemporary women.
“I hope what the section does is show the complex nature of how each of us might envision the future,” says Wassan Al-Khudhairi, the curator of the Focus section at this year’s Armory Show. “The works are informed more by the idea of looking into the future as a place to start rather than making work ‘about the future’.” Works are often interdisciplinary, the curator says, and engage in notions of cross-cultural collaboration, environmental stewardship, mutualism, care and the power of communities coming together. Al-Khudhairi says she wants to “create a space that captures the ideas of a group of artists that consider the future in the context of our current conditions”. Carla Jay Harris’s series Celestial Bodies (2018-ongoing) at the Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus depicts ancient gods inhabiting the spaces where heaven meets earth, in the guise of peaceful and empowered Black characters.
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. Her newest pieces, featured at The Armory Show and in her current solo show with Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, “A Season in the Wilderness,” build upon her earlier body of work, responding to the circumstances of the pandemic and the social and political unrest that ensued.
It was also exhilarating to visit the post-pandemic expansions of Anat Ebgi Gallery and Luis de Jesus Gallery, both of which have relocated and expanded their programs. Carlson Hatton’s must-see exhibition of dynamic, multi-layered paintings in one gallery room at Luis de Jesus, navigates complex detours and returns by combining dense patterning, intricate figuration and subtle marking in emotionally-charged, vibrant colors.
“The future is happening. It is limitless,” Transparent producer Zackary Drucker said. “I think that the trans and nonbinary community have tools to offer everybody — tools for survival, tools for self actualization that are invaluable. Our stories are universal. They’re not at all niche.”
Last summer, with art fairs on indefinite hold and museums shuttered, former art fair director Helen Toomer saw an opportunity to bring together the art community safely in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, where she and husband Eric Romano run the Stoneleaf Retreat artist residency in Eddyville. Last year, the inaugural Upstate Art Weekend invited visitors to explore 23 art spaces throughout the region. This year, there are 61 participants, ranging from Storm King and Dia Beacon toward the south up to galleries in Hudson and Art Omi in Ghent, furthest from the city. Stoneleaf is presenting solo exhibitions from Hiba Schahbaz and Liz Collins, plus site-specific projects by Lizania Cruz, Macon Reed, and Rebecca Reeve.
Emmy-nominated artist and filmmaker Zackary Drucker (“This Is Me,” “Transparent”), who made her longform directorial debut earlier this year with the HBO documentary series “The Lady and the Dale” and serves on the Outfest board, returns to the festival she credits with fostering her development as an artist and subsequent leap from the experimental art world to a film and television career.
For this iteration of the exhibition, which debuted at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019, artists were invited to respond to current social and political contexts. First Prize was awarded to Hugo Crosthwaite for his “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez” (2018), a stop-motion drawing animation that recounts a young woman’s journey from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States.
Flags have a history as a contentious subject in art, probably because of their lasting grip on our political imaginations. In 1970, for instance, three artists were convicted of flag desecration in New York, and in 1988, Dread Scott sparked controversy by layinga U.S. flag on the ground. I thought of those incidents when seeing “Counter Flags,” curated by Natalia Viera Salgado, a co-founder of the art space Pública in Puerto Rico and a resident at Abrons Arts Center. The exhibition is a mini philosophical inquiry into flags as symbols of nationalism, with attendant pride and critique. Edra Soto and the duo Melissa Raymond and René Sandín contribute eye-catching celebrations of Puerto Rican culture, although a version of Soto’s work, “Tropicalamerican 21” (2021), was recently and more evocatively displayed on Governors Island, where it blew in a sunroom, accompanied by music.
In a 2005 interview, architect Oscar Niemeyer confessed, “I prefer to think like André Malraux, who said, ‘I keep inside myself, in my private museum, everything I have seen and loved in my life.’” Artist John Brooks, in his second solo show with Moremen Gallery, appears to share Niemeyer’s affinities. We All Come and Go Unknown, on view until August 21, 2021, includes nearly two dozen oil paintings that teem with references to beloved cities, films, novels, artists, actors and friends from Brooks’ global queer community.
The newest installation in the Murals of La Jolla project is a highly saturated abstract painting by prestigious LA-based artist June Edmonds. Edmonds completed her undergrad at San Diego State. This piece is based upon Henrietta VanHorn-DeBose, who was the first African-American woman to settle in La Jolla, beginning in the early 1900s, and ultimately Henrietta and her husband Thomas DeBose would own multiple properties along Draper Ave.
The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the department of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American studies announced a new student award, the inaugural Mariposa Prize. The prize was funded by and based around the work of Hector Dionicio Mendoza, a mixed- media artist who teaches in the visual and public art department at California State University, Monterey Bay.
“What are we looking at?” You hear that (usually rhetorical) question a lot in art galleries and design houses – also in accounting firms, screening rooms, at construction sites, and (really) business meetings of any kind – frequently spoken with some impatience. (We’re always in a hurry here, even as we’re telling ourselves to slow down – which is what this question is actually asking for permission to do.) It is understood that what is referred to here is a presentation, or representation of the actuality, the thing, what we all agree to agree is the reality. How we may think about that agreed-upon actuality or reality becomes a matter of both methodology and attitude.
Multidisciplinary American artist Carla Jay Harris also began to incorporate mystical ideas into her work due to her personal experience. “In my larger art practice, I always start with something going on in my personal life,” Harris explained. “And after graduate school, I felt a bit sort of adrift. Looking at mythology and spirituality was my own way to ground myself. And that’s what really got me into it.”
With the majestic radiance of stained glass windows, the cosmic imagery of planetarium ceiling murals, the fractal arabesques of primordial soup, and the precise geometrical armatures of ancient architectural motifs, a suite of four cyanotypes at monumental scale by Lia Halloran — actually two cyanotypes and their corresponding 1:1 scale hand-painted negatives — are made both by and about the power of the sun.
I also like Aaron Maier-Carretero’s somewhat disturbing enormous painting titled not in front of the kids. The palpable, hidden violence is terrifying in the work.
Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe recently opened as an exhibit at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan. The exhibit features 10 art installations from American artist Jean Lowe that use satire and humor to touch on topics such as consumerism, environmentalism and feminism. Jean Lowe is a multimedia artist whose installations at the NEHMA include paintings, artist-made furniture and a short film where Lowe dresses as a fictional talk show host to discuss her works.
The mysterious, slowly-unfolding plot kept me off-balance and deeply absorbed. The disjointed, imaginative visual style suggests pop music videos more than any conventional opera video I’ve ever seen,and works marvelously well; great credit for this to director of photography Michael Elias Thomas, production designer Yuki Izumihara, and lighting designer Pablo Santiago. James Darrah, Zackary Drucker, Joy Kecken, and Raviv Ullman directed. Costumes are by Molly Irelan. The Boston Lyric Opera Orchestra provided the instrumental soundtrack, conducted by David Angus.
“My approach to diversity has been an organic one,” says Luis De Jesus, owner of the eponymous gallery downtown. “Being Puerto Rican, a person of colour and a gay man, I’ve always been conscious of the need to support artists of diverse backgrounds and perspectives.” He names grassroots galleries and museums that have tirelessly held a place for Latinx art, among them La Plaza De Cultura Y Artes, the Museum of Latin American Art and the Latino Arts Network.
As a child, artist Hugo Crosthwaite spent a lot of time hanging out in his father's curio shop in Rosarito, Mexico. It was there that the seeds were planted for his particular approach to art. "That's where I learned English, by just interacting with American tourists," Crosthwaite said. "I would tell them stories about a little ceramic idol and I would make up stories about 'Oh, this is Tlaloc, the god of rain.' It wasn't."
The latest work in the Murals of La Jolla public art program, June Edmonds’ “Ebony on Draper and Girard,” was completed July 19. Unlike other murals that are printed out and hung on a building, this one was painted on a three-story column over several days on the alley-facing side of 7724 Girard Ave.
My bias in art appreciation leans toward figuration/realism. I like abstraction particularly when it informs the emotional nature of realism. Carlson Hatton is a terrific painter. The “armature” for his painting is the figure/realism which he then emotionally deconstructs by abstraction. Hatton’s talent portends ever better painting to be seen in LA.
For Los Angeles-based artist June Edmonds, the in-production “Ebony on Draper and Girard” mural is about more than making a three-story statement on the alley-facing side of 7724 Girard Ave. in La Jolla. It’s a salute to Black women and their role in La Jolla’s development.After completing a mural inspired by Maria Valdez, the first Afro-Latina woman to own property in Beverly Hills, Edmonds was invited to create a piece for the Murals of La Jolla public art program. She researched names such as Henrietta VanHorn-DeBose and Carrie Coleman, who were among the first to own property on Girard and Draper avenues.
When I first came across the work of Rodrigo Valenzuela, a Chilean artist whose films and photographs often deal with labor themes, the record-high unemployment and an increasing reliance on technology brought on by the pandemic placed the often staggering statistics about the future of work in the front of my mind.
Now my friends, brace yourselves for a “sublime cosmic phenomenon” of the exhibition by maverick, Los Angeles artist, Lia Halloran (b. 1977) at Luis De Jesus Gallery. The exhibition title, The Sun Burns My Eyes Like Moons, refers to photographs Halloran took during the total solar eclipse in 2017. This body of work is her homage to the sun.Halloran’s large-scale cyanotypes are produced through exposure to the sun. Each cyanotype panel is a unique positive imprint that occurs by placing translucent paper under the sun that acts like negative film absorbing light. Saturated with blues, black and pops of color, Halloran’s painting “evokes the overwhelming grandeur and luminosity of the sun.”
The show features the arresting, large-scale cyanotypes of L.A.-based artist Lia Halloran along with their painted negatives. The mesmerizing work in the show is an homage to the sun, but instead of bright yellows and oranges that radiate light, Halloran’s suns are that rich, deep-sea blue that is created through the cyanotype process. Her suns are almost amoeba-like, swirling and erupting with captivating line work that reach out like tentacles. Halloran integrates scientific concepts into her studio practice by researching solar eclipse expeditions and ancient Egyptian temple reliefs.
But the most visceral work in this exhibition goes to Antonia Wright and “Suddenly We Jumped,” a 14-second video documenting the artist being thrust into a sheet of glass. The result is expectedly dangerous and unexpectedly beautiful. The piece accompanies “MAP,” her photograms of glass panes the artist shattered with a hammer—Wright’s furious and reasonable response to the police killings of unarmed Black people in 2020.
The 2021 Acquisitions artists include Cara Despain, Susan Lee-Chun, Nicolas Lobo, Reginald O'Neal, Marielle Plaisir, Jamilah Sabur and Antonia Wright. A jury comprised of Miami and nationally-based curators, Tami Katz-Freiman, Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Larry Ossei-Mensah, helped select the diverse group of both established and emerging artists from a pool of more than 500 artists who are current residents or alumni of Oolite's programs. Oolite Arts purchases new works each year through its Acquisitions program.
For Smith, it’s a thrill to be included in the show. “I studied some of these artists when I was in grad school.” she says. “Some of them were my first introductions to what the possibilities were for being a Black artist—that you didn’t have to be this one type of artist making this one type of work; that we could be expansive, complicated, and not monolithic in our approach.”
The 2021 Acquisitions artists include Cara Despain, Susan Lee-Chun, Nicolas Lobo, Reginald O’Neal, Marielle Plaisir, Jamilah Sabur and Antonia Wright. A jury comprised of Miami and nationally-based curators, Tami Katz-Freiman, Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Larry Ossei-Mensah, helped select the diverse group of both established and emerging artists from a pool of more than 500 artists who are current residents or alumni of Oolite’s programs. Oolite Arts purchases new works each year through its Acquisitions program.
Hatton's latest body of work explores the psychological and physical terrain of the post-pandemic world.
Zackary Drucker: Aimee Goguen, 38
"To me, Aimee Goguen’s work unlocks a limitless and imaginative internal universe. It spans genres and is truly masterful in every form. She is an abject visionary and a prolific artist’s artist in Los Angeles."
The works included in the show feature re-imaginings of ancient mythology with contemporary issues. A painting called Bus Stop (Leda and her Cygnets) become a parable for gun violence. 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.
Or the cyanotype frames (photographic procedure) by Antonia Wright, who “integrates and combines her body and that of a palm tree, forming a union between the human body and nature,” Mitrani pointed out.
I create self-portraits often and especially when something extraordinary is happening. This was the first time I got fillers injected and I loved the bruising on my face. I do participate in Pride but I don’t believe it’s a value that we should elevate. I think of pride as conceit and have expunged pride from my life in order to not be vulnerable to shame. The only way to not have any shame is to not have pride and to find humility.
In the group exhibition Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City the artist Dee Shapiro brings together six contemporary artists who explore content and form of narrative painting ranging from interiors to landscapes, personal to imagined, realistic to fantastic. Featured artists: Jennifer Coates, Laura Karetzky, Judith Linhares, Ernesto Renda, Kyle Staver, and George Towne. The show runs through June 28th.
"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."
As VanDyke's"painting" brings together the Columbus region's textile and military histories with the most modern art practices, The Columbus Museum is proud to add this important work to its permanent collection holdings.
This unique group exhibitions features recent works of 32 established and emerging artists, manyare exhibiting at the gallery for the first time. The exhibition encompasses a variety of media, scale, and modes of presentation, with artworks that address themes of cultural resilience, the articulation of marginalized histories, and the significance of embodied knowledge.
THE SHOPHOUSE gallery in Hong Kong is pleased to present group exhibition “I & the ME” by Anders Lindseth, Iabadiou Piko, Josh Reames, Julian Watts, Kour Pour, Mahsa Tehrani, Osamu Kobayashi, Yves Scherer and Zhang Ji. Participating artists are invited to create two works, one representing “I”, the subjective side of the artists evaluating themselves. Another piece about “Me” – the objective side of themselves shaped by the market, exploring how artists rover around today’s art world.
"The real showstoppers — Solmi’s video paintings — are situated in the main gallery. Created using a unique synthesis of painting, drawing, 3D digital animation, gaming, screen recording and motion capture software, each video is developed through a process that may take up to three years to complete. Seeking to achieve what he views as a humanizing of artificial looking digital imagery, Solmi scans the textures of hand-drawn or painted figures, objects, and settings, and maps the scans over digital skeletons, the blueprint-like imagery that is created using animation software. Motion is incorporated by capturing movements that he and his assistants create in the studio. In this way he creates compositions that resemble expressionistic figurative paintings brought to life. "
Ken Gonzales-Day is among the artists included in “Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition opens when Getty Center re-opens on May 25, and will be on view through October 10. “Photo Flux” features pictures by 35 Los Angeles-based artists who challenge ideals related to beauty, representation, cultural capital and objectivity. It was curated by jill moniz.
"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. "
By expanding these little details, Silano also makes the viewer focus on the materiality of the pages. In the larger works, the dot matrices become visible, and the dog-eared folds look less crisp. Sometimes, if he has duplicates that have aged differently — whether by oxidisation or literal wear-and-tear — he places the same page next to itself. He tries not to change the pages themselves any more, as he did when he was a student. The turning point came after he worked in New York University’s Fales Library, where he was forced to make his collages without a blade. “There’s a sensitive gesture of gently laying something on top of another,” Silano said.
I think my work is similar to an enormous open-ended casting session. I create characters that could become actors in a play or a movie but instead, they land in a painting. There is no "theme" per se but rather a suite of relations between pictures. Wilfried Laforge at SVA recently introduced me to Warburghian Iconology, Jean Michel Durafour, and W.J.T Mitchell's studies of images. It is the closest and most excellent concept I can use to describe my thinking process. I can explain my exhibitions in terms of image juxtaposition and active metonymy.
“The mythology of the Wild West as being somehow different from the history of lynching is the first part of the problem,” Gonzales-Day said when I asked for his thoughts in light of his work. “There’s this sense that the lynchings here weren’t how it happened in the South. So the invisibility of those cases is just repeated by counties, governments, and by individuals and schools.”
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.
Our impulse to tell stories is as human as the need to consume them. It shouldn't come and go like a new trend. That's why I was so surprised to learn that the art world had rejected narrative art until recently.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has moved his gallery to Mateo Street in DTLA. His space is now heroic in size. Federico Solmi inaugurates the gallery. Solmi dominantly uses computing processes to produce his extravagant morality play films/videos. There are so many skillful layers from the unique painted frames that surround the video monitors to the “films” themselves. I must call his films, films. The word “video” is too simple to describe the depth and nuance of Solmi’s art. The opportunity to experience Solmi’s work wearing Virtual Reality goggles is beyond wondrous. A peak experience. Take this opportunity while you can.
Solmi’s recurring subject is the knowing abuse of power, and he has a bleak and urgent message for us regarding this particularly agonizing moment in history: it has happened before, it will happen again, and there is very little within our power to stop it. Bucking convention, Solmi even sees it from the perspective of the aggressors, whose greatest wish is to wall themselves off from the rest of us, the better to enjoy the fruits of their plunder.
Evita Tezeno’s mixed media collages are folksy images crafted from colorful and patterned paper. On view are both close cropped portraits and full-bodied figures with exaggerated features who often appear in flowery fields of green, a cheerful setting that contrasts with the works’ titles. While the images pay homage to artists like Romare Bearden, Tezeno’s whimsical representations feel like fairytales filled with determined, loving and compassionate figures. Through evocative titles such as “The Soul Knows My Silence,” “My Dreams Make Me Who I Am,” and “My Life Tells Where I Have Been,” Tezeno evokes the plight and struggles of her subjects.
On view now in the Taschen Family Gallery, Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art examines how a political watershed moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, initiated a radical change in the perception of art and culture. The show presents the metamorphosis of objects from everyday life through discarded flea market items to museum pieces, where they finally become sources of artistic inspiration. Transformations includes materials from the Getty Conservation Institute as well as works by contemporary artists Chelle Barbour, Ken Gonzales-Day, Farrah Karapetian, Richtje Reinsma, Daphne Rosenthal, Jennifer Vanderpool, and Bari Ziperstein.
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.
Artblog contributor Susan Isaacs interviews Jackie Milad, an Egyptian-Honduran American artist, curator, mother, and arts administrator. The conversation covers the difficulty of balancing life, work, and art; Jackie's artistic process; and pressures she has felt- e.g. cognitive dissonance about making art about identity. Jackie has a number of current and upcoming shows, which you can read about in this post.
In his “Profiled” project, artist and art historian Gonzales-Day has mined the collections of established museums such as J. Paul Getty and the Smithsonian, among others, photographing portrait busts exploring Western assumptions about beauty and human value through the material legacies of slavery, colonialism and white privilege.
Five years ago, in the spring of 2017, Surrey Art Gallery featured Adams’ work in “The Irretrievable Moment,” the biggest exhibition of his career. The title reflected the tone and nature of his art, which curators said “combines historical events with speculative futures, real people in imagined situations, and mythological people in contemporary scenarios.” Meantime, the ongoing pandemic hasn’t really changed the way Adams paints at his home studio.
A few weeks ago I talked about the solo exhibition, Better Days, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles by Dallas based artist Evita Tezeno. Her collage paintings on canvas and rag board introduce you to a variety of characters in everyday life. And what interesting characters they are…Sunday was the last day of the exhibition, and Tezeno flew to Los Angeles to hold a private reception for its closing. I asked her if the characters in her paintings are based on real people. Does she photograph them first? To my surprise, her answer was no. She paints from memory, inspired by family, friends and neighbors. For me, it was another example of how a conversation with an artist deepens the experience of their work.
Despite the artist’s more provocative paintings that attempt to provide social commentary about Cuba, it is when Sanchez’s attention is truly focused — in his reverential tribute to his wife, “Laura” (2020), for example — that the viewer is compelled to start paying attention, too. The exquisite amount of tenderness he takes, with each tendril of her hair, the exact purse of her lips, even the wisps of her lower eyelashes, is a reminder that paying attention to others is sometimes the most radical act of all.
Like transplanting skin, interdisciplinary artist Edra Soto inserts her replicas of vernacular Puerto Rican architectural forms, namely the wrought iron rejas screens and concrete quiebrasoles ubiquitous on the island, into new spaces throughout the Americas in her ongoing GRAFT series. The migration of these forms becomes a metaphor for literal migration, raising issues of colonization, identity, and family in works that stretch wall-to-wall across galleries spaces or become free-standing structures, such as Screenhouse—her public commission for Chicago’s Millennium Park on view through April 2022.
Her characters possess overwhelming pride in their surroundings, their loved ones, and the attention paid to how they represent themselves. Viewing Tezeno’s lively colored work replicates a leisurely drive through a small Black town, encountering its most fascinating figures, passing by shotgun houses and acres of green landscape or leafing through an old family photo album and seeing mixed-media collage versions of beloved relatives on page after page.
Pacifico Silano describes himself as a ‘lens-based artist,’ not as a photographer. While this may seem like a somewhat superfluous label, it has its merits. As he has pointed out, Silano does not take any of the photographs that he publishes — rather, his artistic practice is rooted in cutting, collaging, layering, and arranging various images from printed media. What results is far from a mere reiteration of these photographic ephemera; instead, we are presented with a wholly original exposition of the themes contained in these pictures.
Part verdant jungle, part Art Deco wallpaper, Lansdowne’s interiors combine the comforts of modern furniture with the adventure and intrigue of imaginative plant life. His sources draw from design websites, real estate listings, and product advertisements, modified in a way that produces exciting and intricate settings. His interiors are both inviting and unwelcoming, appealing and foreboding; critiquing the superficial nature of luxury real estate.
Evita Tezeno's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Better Days, features colorful collage paintings that depict a cast of black and brown characters in harmonious and joyful everyday scenes inspired by the artist's life, memory & dreams.
And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.
Capturing artists, writers, photographers, dancers, and opera singers living and working in Cuba, Gabriel Sanchez’s exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is dedicated to the Cuban avant-garde community from the perspective as a first-generation Cuban-American. “Mirando Al Mundo” (Looking at the World) documents the artist’s creative contemporaries—often naked, or isolated against solid colored backgrounds or blue skylines—with inquisitiveness and sensitivity. In the press release, Sanchez reveals many of his models are openly gay in a country that stifles #LGBTQ expression, yet are willing to tell their stories through his paintings. The exhibition is an empowering portrayal of a generation who are stripped bare of garb and fable in order to redefine an abstruse reality.
Carla Jay Harris developed her “Celestial Bodies” series, which features mythological female figures, to reflect on the universal notion of belonging.
As the planet enters the beginning of a post-pandemic, post-Trump administration era, it was wonderful to be baptized in optimism from Evita Tezeno’s exhibition, “Better Days” at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. One sweeping taste of these works results in a single message: Tezeno’s unique voice reflects a masterful synthesis of several groundbreaking aesthetic approaches that pay tribute to Black culture in her use of acrylic mixed-media collage on rag paper.
Employing richly patterned hand-painted papers and found objects in a contemporary folk-art style, Evita Tezeno’s colorful collage paintings on canvas and rag board depict a cast of characters in harmonious everyday scenes. Inspired by her family and friends, childhood memories in South Texas, personal dreams and moments from her adult life—and influenced by the great 20th century modernists Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and William H. Johnson—scenes of joy animate her vision of a Black America filled with humanity.
Reames views the visual complexity of his paintings as a strength, rather than being willfully cryptic for its own sake. "There can be moments of discovery or ahas down the road,” Reames says. “All the artwork that I live with, I typically will discover new things in it down the line, and that’s a really important experience for me — the kind of experience I want other people to have with it.”
From his fascination with flying to his desire to see the world in its totality from space, [Jim] Adams’s decades-long art pursuit seems as much about the scope of his journey as a Black man moving through time and mapping the coordinates of pleasure and meaning as it is about the paintings those experiences have produced. This is the visual literacy we need to engage now, so that instead of performing allyship through what’s trending, viewers come to understand how Black diasporic people, and specifically, one Black man, might interpret identity and mobility vis-à-vis painting.
Tezeno uses collage and vibrant colors to tell a visual narrative of her life experiences. “I hold close the memories of days gone by. I relish the time before there were Wi-Fi, cell phones and so many other technological visual distractions,” says the artist in her statement.
My paintings are a celebration of positive contemporary possibilities. In an era of mass-media thought-coercion, my work is committed to the preservation of intellectual and spiritual independence. I invest my seemingly whimsical subjects with genuine purpose, presence, and the intense assuredness of self-realization. My vibrant portraiture of moments and my casual characters alert the viewer to the urgent need to develop, express, and celebrate the saving force of indelible personality. My process involves gathering images and arranging storyboards from a broad array of sources ranging from Venice street life, to a multitude of paintings and photography in art history; to the contemporary art scene.
Evita Tezeno and Jas Mardis speak with Good Morning Texas about their show Sharing Memories, currently on view at Art Centre of Plano.
Beyond being eye-catching, some of the works reflect the times we are living in. Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares’ light installation “Yes/No” was inspired by the protests against racial injustice that have been happening for years and came to the forefront in 2020.
In the Profiled series, Gonzales-Day recontextualized sculptures by putting them in conversation only with other sculptures- and the fraught spaces between them. Not dissimilar to theater, his Profiled works tell complex, socially layered stories by simply placing human figures together across empty space. Gonzales-Day describes, "I wanted to take these existing objects and give them a voice, a chance to be in dialogue with us and with each other across time. They're from different periods, they're from different places, some are identified, some are unidentified, which speaks to questions of who has a voice and who is denied a voice, who is represented and who is denied representation.
A hand-dyed, pink-tinted canvas pinned to the wall, ripped at its center like an aging bedsheet lying out on the lawn to dry, provides the ground for Jackie Milad’s recent painting “Gold Bars” (2020). Bright yellow fringe gives shade to a smattering of snake-like lines, evil eyes, emojis, text, and patterns that scatter and accumulate like dust across the work and peer out from under layers of overpainting and rosy thread. Offering a cluster of different processes of mark and labor, “Gold Bars” gathers a variety of multidisciplinary moves into one totality, like the practice of musical sampling mobilized for visual means.
But, it’s not all international artists. Illuminate includes local flavor. Antonia Wright, artist: “We are so excited to be a part of Illuminate Coral Gables. It’s just a really uplifting and inspiring exhibition that questions the medium of light.” Ruben Millares, artist: “We love how they all integrate, and you can see them across all of downtown Coral Gables, so no matter where you are you get a nice visual of one or several of the pieces.”
The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and winter’s shorter days can be challenging for some people. The city of Coral Gables, Florida, is taking unique steps to remedy the situation.Beginning February 12 and running until March 14, the Coral Gables Community Foundation will present an art initiative called Illuminate Coral Gables (ICG). The project will use “light and technology to transform public art by day into magical and mysterious work at night,” the Board of ICG said in a statement.
Eternal Witness marks Adams first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and his first in the United States in over 45 years. The exhibition will present new paintings and sketches completed over the last four years along with a selection of works dating to the mid-late 1990s and the early 2000s.
Pacific Standard Time will include dozens of simultaneous exhibitions and programs focused on the intertwined histories of art and science, past and present, that together address some of the most complex challenges of the 21st century—from climate change and environmental racism to the current pandemic and artificial intelligence—and the creative solutions these problems demand.
Although Adams casts Black men and women in the role of classical heroes and deities, his work isn’t only a commentary on current events and geopolitics. Adams’ practice also captures dramatic skyscapes, planetary eclipses, and astral constellations that are apolitical and ahistorical. By connecting mythic subjects, modern-day people, and dream-like settings in his paintings, Adams uncovers qualities of our nature that have remained the same throughout time.
Evita Tezeno has exhibited at the ArtCentre previously, and this time will be showcasing her Cubism-inspired collages. Evita works with handmade paper, acrylic paint and found objects. Her work has been lauded by entertainers, media personalities and professional athletes for its use of color, texture and shapes. She has been commissioned by the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, the Deep Ellum Film Festival and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“Eternal Witness” is a show emblematic of the endless pertinence of history. Adams maintains that history is just as relevant today as it ever was when it was happening. The scenarios may change but he pursues the notion that the ideas driving humanity, for instance, the glorification of war or striving for power, remain persistent throughout time. The pyramid, a common structure throughout this series, remains a pinnacle of historic monuments that are significant in themselves but also carry individual projections. In Eternal Symbol 1996, the structure of cosmic proportions that has sparked conspiracy theories about its origins is positioned in an orangey burnt sienna background high above dusts of a cerulean blue sky.
The two first met at a party in California for Stephen Hawking. Levin had written about the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Kip Thorne in her 2016 book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, and the Los Angeles–based Halloran—an associate professor of art at Chapman University whose work is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles—had been working with Thorne on a decade-in-the-making mix of writing and art about what she called “the warped side of the universe” (to be published next year by W. W. Norton & Company).
The exhibition presents new paintings and sketches completed over the last four years along with a selection of works from the 1990s and 2000s. Philadelphia born Adams has lived in Canada since the 1970's and at age 78, this marks his first solo exhibition in the United States in over 45 years.
Eternal Witness marks Jim Adams' first solo exhibition with the Gallery. The exhibition will present new paintings and sketches completed over the last four years along with a selection of works dating to the turn of the millennium.
Jim Adams, an artist based out of British Columbia, presents a collection of paintings and drawings mostly drawn from a series named Mythic Sketches. The artist is interested in how myths, “both classic and obscure,” still represent the realities and struggles we undergo today: “jealousy, ambition, hubris, greed, and the glorification of warfare.” His images carry signs of ancient Egyptian pyramids and ruins, but his subjects are updated for the times: all heroes and deities wear 21st-century garb.
Mr. Olujimi’s portrait series starts sober, the early entries often literal, in black or blue ink. But soon he was applying color washes, emphasizing traits, blurring others, doubling or tripling his subject’s likeness. With rich colors and deconstructive verve in the later portraits, the series recalls a jazz piece that improvises on a theme toward a raucous, polyphonal resolution.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has revealed works by its artists that have recently added to museum collections. The Nasher Museum in Durham, North Carolina, acquired Peter Williams‘s 2020 painting Birdland; the Baltimore Museum of Art acquired photos from two series, “Relationship” and “Before and After,” by Zackary Drucker; Federico Solmi‘s video installation The Great Farce Portable Theater was acquired by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; Edra Soto’s installation Open 24 Hours is now held in the collection of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; and five works by Erik Olson have been acquired by the Art Gallery of Alberta in Calgary, Canada. Additionally, the gallery announced that Lia Halloran has been named a 2020–21 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellow. As such, Halloran will be awarded a $10,000 grant to produce a new body of work.
I'm thinking through your term queerfacture. Queerness is a way I'm embodied, a suffusion of my person reflected in the ways I make and do. It includes a lot of feelings that I can barely even touch and tendencies for which I can't find words. To live as queer is also to internalize all the acts of resistance and harm you've experienced, while gauging those you might yet face. Imagining and making and gathering differently – queerfacture – is a way of working through, letting go, transforming.
Mary Salvante, the director of Rowan Universtiy Art Gallery and curator of this exhibition art titled "The Bacchanalian Ones," by Federico Solmi, which will include virtual reality and augmented reality works.
The reminiscent, hypnotic mythological creations of Asad Faulwell are mixed-media treasures. His oeuvres are technically almost incomparable, as the Iranian-American artist insists on incorporating the tradition of Persian craftsmanship, yet uses intricate techniques, vibrant colors, and repetitive constructs in harmonious works. Such a handiwork-based approach results in richly textured, three-dimensional pieces built with spun threads, beads, needles, and sequins atop painted images.
JACKIE MILAD thinks of her layered, mixed media works as time-based art. She employs layering as a strategy to protect, hide and transform recurring symbols like eye, snake, brick wall, and breast. She cuts and draws and paints and sews, cannibalizing previously-exhibited works to make new works. A part of one piece becomes the beginning of another. This ongoing, ever-evolving process of creation refuses the notion of artworks as static, archival objects.
At first glance, the works in Rodrigo Valenzuela’s recent exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery look like drawings, but the images are actually built from a complicated series of “translations” from one medium or situation to another. The Chilean-born LA-based artist’s starting point in these images is the ubiquitous polystyrene forms of consumer packaging; these are then cast into concrete components and carefully stacked into composite sculptural forms that are then photographed and translated to photogravure. Defying their immovable appearance, the sculptural forms are specifically constructed without reinforcements or adhesives binding the parts together and exist only for their final output in two-dimensional form, as seen here in these intaglio prints.
The Rowan University Art Gallery offers a couple of reasons why people should make an appointment during a pandemic to see its newest exhibition, “The Bacchanalian Ones” by Federico Solmi, in person. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity in South Jersey to see art enhanced by augmented and virtual reality.
In other words, Hyde forces us to look with fresh eyes through visual propositions that challenge our habits of seeing. At times he achieves astonishing poetry. A good example in the show is Goddess (2020), which brings together acrylic and acrylic dispersion painted over an inkjet print. The painting reads as abstract, until you begin to notice the presence of the photographic image beneath. However, Hyde obviates any attempt to clearly interpret this image by painting over it.
We had the good fortune of connecting with Carla Jay Harris and we’ve shared our conversation below.
The show also features work by June Edmonds, André Hemer, Kambui Olujimi, and Edra Soto. This Saturday, December 19, all six participating artists will be talking about “making art during a year unlike any other”in a Zoom conversation moderated by Luis De Jesus and Lindsay Preston Zappas, editor-in-chief of CARLA. While we sorely miss in-person events, remote talks like this one make it easier for all artists to participate, so don’t miss this rare occasion.
Federico Solmi’s timely solo exhibition here, “The Bacchanalian Ones,” interrogates the greed and corruption of world leaders both past and present. The artist’s paintings and multimedia installations caricature his famous (and often infamous) subjects—from the realms of politics, religion, the military, and the aristocracy—by combining digital technology with the most traditional of media. Solmi’s acidic portraits reveal these renowned figures for what they really are: soulless prevaricators crazed by power.
Unreachable Spring takes its title from the eponymous painting by Laura Krifka. The painting was slated to be featured as the sole work in her first Viewing Room on the gallery website, accompanied by an essay by the writer and art critic Andrew Berardini. Laura began the painting in late March—within days of the start of the Covid lockdown in the U.S., and shortly after learning that she and her husband were expecting their first child. By summer it had become clear to us that it was the lede for a deeper exploration of ideas and subject matter.
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. He is a professor of art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA where he has taught since 1995. Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series features photos of lynching postcards where he removes, or 'erases,' the victims in order to focus on the white crowds gathered to witness the murders.
When I set out to write this piece on women fiber artists in the Hudson Valley, I didn't recognize the brazen naivete of my quest. Fiber is not like paint—it is not a single material. It is terrycloth and leather, polyester batting and velvet, microfiber, fur, wool roving, cotton thread, raw silk, muslin, burlap, tulle. And that is just a sampling of what artists in this "medium" are working with to create sculpture and three-dimensional drawings, site-specific installations, and wall-mounted works. I tried to find a through line with the historical aspect of women's fiber and textile crafts, but some were rejecting it, some were carrying the torch, and some were indifferent. So rather than try to find a neat container that encompasses this beautiful gamut of creators, I would rather simply say: Behold these splendid, talented artists creating utterly distinctive and beautiful work that makes use of fiber.
BRIC has announced the ten winners of its second annual Colene Brown Art Prize, which awards $10,000 to New York-based artists yet to receive institutional support.
Of the 2020 recipients, Zachary Fabri, Christophe Roberts and Scherezade Garcia are based in Brooklyn. The other winners are: Caitlin Cherry, Nate Lewis, Joiri Minaya, Kambui Olujimi, Erwin Redl, Naomi Safran-Hon and Michelle Segre.
Rodrigo Valenzuela’s most recent series, Stature is comprised of eight photogravures that capture the artist’s studio constructions. In rich monochromatic tones, Stature elicits brutalist imagery through forms created from concrete molds of discarded waste. The Chilean-born artist’s work is part of a trilogy exploring modernism and is on view at the Asya Geisberg Gallery through December 19th.
Montreal-based painter Nicolas Grenier places recognizable diagrammatic shapes in colourful gradients to mimic political affiliation graphs and charts. While viewing the artwork, visitors are provided with an Approval Matrix sheet—via PDF for online visits—to map their positions on the current state of the world and where it’s headed.
At Luis De Jesus in Culver City, a group show gathers a loose array of artworks that were made in response to recent events. With so many crises affecting our country, the work diverges in focus, addressing a range of issues: pandemic’s loneliness, the toppling of monuments, and the lives lost to police brutality. Unusually, the gallery has included artist statements next to each artwork, allowing the viewer into the thinking behind each work, and providing a connective personal tone across the exhibition
The New York–based Joan Mitchell Foundation has named the twenty-five artists who are recipients of this year’s Painters & Sculptors grants, which are meant to assist artists making exceptional work and who are seen as deserving greater national recognition. Each grantee will receive $25,000 in unrestricted funds. The foundation, which was formed in 1993 to celebrate and expand the abstract painter’s vision, noted in a statement that it felt especially compelled to make the awards this year, given the current landscape in which artists are operating.
While group shows can sometimes lack a coherent vision, this one seems worth a trip. All of the works were made during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from bitingly political paintings to beautiful reflections on home. The featured artists are June Edmonds, André Hemer, Laura Krifka, Kambui Olujimi, Edra Soto, and Peter Williams.
Texas native Evita Tezeno is known for her whimsical collages that capture the beauty and joy of day to day experiences. Her mixed media depictions of Black women, men, and children are inspired by moments from her own life as well as children’s stories. Through her work, Evita seeks to inspire the viewer and bring laughter to the lives of others.
The intaglio print edition, which is called WE, engages the messiness of subjective observation through pairings of the same subject. In this case multiplicity/repetition — of the images and also of the phrase silkscreened below each pair — activates difference. The repetition of one phrase in Type Specimens, through twelve different mastheads, activates intersection. Those of us immersed in a politics of identity have always attempted to transcend the confines of classification through multiplicity. But I’m having a hard time these days coping with “multiple truths,” especially as that applies to journalism. Nuance, which I’ve often relied on in my work, feels like a thing of the past, when facts could be agreed on, but one could still discuss subtleties.
In another corner, works focus on citizenship through the individual experience: Cuban native José Manuel Nápoles’s portrait of his fiance expresses a childlike exuberance that belies the agonizing displacement of emigration, while Iraqi-American Vian Sora paints silhouettes of human heads, their faces obscured in crimson fissures resembling desiccated deserts and violent blood splatters.
Unreachable Spring is a group exhibition featuring artists prompted by a desire to take refuge in their work and address this transformational moment in a personal way.
Speaking from separate corners of Chicago, Chicago artists Bob Faust, Edra Soto, and Sadie Woods and art historian Greg Foster-Rice brought warmth, passion, and a will to change the world to their panel discussion of art and its potential as agent of social change (part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Art Design Chicago program and the Chicago Humanities Festival).The panel began with each artist showcasing their recent work, beginning with Edra Soto’s Graft, recently displayed at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. Graftborrows from iron screens common in post-war Puerto Rican architecture to allow Soto—and the viewer—to explore the devastation wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria and the later inaction by the United States, the invested colonial power.
In the exhibition’s accompanying text the artist writes, “These paintings fold in on themselves to protect, they fold back on themselves as they attempt to reconstruct. These paintings guard their own inner reality.” To Bonner, cutouts “betray an inner confusion and chaos,” while layered images “depict second guesses.” Fittingly, the star-shaped folds conjure memories of paper fortune tellers that succinctly relayed our destinies in times when the future felt less tenuous. Shifting stories (v1-v3)deflect any sense of a neatly ordered reality. They indulge entropic anxieties.
"POW!" stands for "portraits of women," and the installation examines the way women were portrayed in abstract expressionism and modernism. Lowe created a replica of a midcentury museum exhibition space — a massive canvas painted as a rug and set on the floor, cloth-mâché and cardboard sculptures made to look like impressively realistic decorative plants, and then three "framed" paintings — painted directly on the gallery wall.
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to museum displays. Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of Colifornia, Irvine and a MA from Hunter College in New York. He is a professor of art at Scripps College in Claremont,CA where he has taught since 1995. In 2017 he was awareded a Guggenheim fellowship in photography.
Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto's work will be featured in "Unreachable Spring," a group exhibit of works done during the Covid-19 pandemic and which opens at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery on Oct. 17. Soto's piece "Let Love Win" depicts many faces on embossed metal which are highlighted by ink of different colors. One of those faces depicts Breonna Taylor, the Black woman killed by police in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13 of this year.
Vienna-based artist André Hemer spent lockdown creating new paintings based on his process of layering thick, colorful paint streaks on a flatbed scanner and digitally scanning them. These abstract works, alongside his first sculptures, are on view in the artist’s first New York solo show, and capture something of the isolation of lockdown and the unexpected beauty of a slower-paced life.
A conversation with a deported Mexican immigrant he met on the streets of Tijuana became a stop-motion animation art piece that won artist Hugo Crosthwaite first prize in “The Outwin: American Portraiture,” a Smithsonian exhibition featured at the Springfield Museums.
A Smithsonian-sponsored exhibit of works by 50 select artists from throughout the country opens today in the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at the Springfield Museums. The artists were finalists in “The Outwin: American Portraiture Today,” running through April 4. Among the works is first prize-winner Hugo Crosthwaite of San Diego, the first Latinx artist to receive this award since the national competition was founded in 2006.
Works from the triennial’s fifth edition, including Crosthwaite’s stop-motion drawing animation, “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez,” can still be viewed online at portraitcompetition.si.edu. The Outwin 2019 will also travel to the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield Museums, Massachusettes (October 3, 2020–April 4, 2021) and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. (September 10, 2020–January 23, 2022).
Virtual Exhibition Openings at the Wende Museum. A virtual opening to celebrate the launch of two new exhibitions: Transformations: Living Room -> Flea Market -> Museum -> Art and See Thy Neighbor: Stern Photographers Thomas Hoepker and Harald Schmitt in the GDR, presented via the 3-D platform Matterport. The program will feature a panel discussion with Transformations artists including Ken Gonzales Day.
In honor of the release of Legacy Russell‘s Glitch Feminism, Russell and a group of artists, writers, and activists including Salome Asega, Caitlin Cherry, Zoé Samudzi, Tsige Tafesse, McKenzie Wark, Mandy Harris Williams, and Jenna Wortham will gather on Zoom to respond to the text. Glitch Feminism is a vital new manifesto and Russell’s research as a curator breaks new ground on themes of gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new-media ritual. The celebration’s format—a Zoom critical discussion, and everyone’s invited—couldn’t be more apt.
Rowan University Art Gallery presents The Bacchanalian Ones, an exhibition that investigates the contradictions and inaccuracies in historical narratives that have led society to a chaotic era of misinformation, corruption, and hypocrisy. On view by appointment from November 2, 2020 – January 9, 2021, The Bacchanalian Ones will feature augmented reality-based artworks, a new virtual reality project, paintings, and never before seen video animations from artist Federico Solmi.
Evita Tezeno is a collage artist who spends about 12-hours a day, 6-days a week inside her Dallas art studio working on her latest project; a 19-piece collection of collages inspired by the pandemic. "It's called 'Daughters of the Crown'," Tezeno said, pointing out the 'corona' means crown. "I was sketching one night and looking at the news, and it just came to me."Each piece features the same character, depicted with different aspects of living in a pandemic."I chose a Black woman to represent that," Tezeno said. "It's very personal. It's very personal. I had an artist friend that perished because of COVID."
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will kick off its new exhibition season with New Art South Florida, the 2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium (SFCC) exhibition. Featuring the work of 13 preeminent South Florida artists who are recipients of the 2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium awards, the exhibition will be curated by NSU Art Museum's Director and Chief Curator, Bonnie Clearwater, a longtime champion of South Florida artists. The exhibition's artists work in a wide range of mediums and include: Broward County: Nathalie Alfonso, Shane Eason and Andriana Mereuta; Miami-Dade County: Itzel Basualdo, Franky Cruz, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Nicolas Lobo, Monica Lopez De Victoria, Kareem Tabsch and Antonia Wright; Palm Beach County: Ates Isildak; and Monroe County: Michel Delgado and Mark Hedden.
If you’re looking to add to your art collection, or maybe even start one, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego brings back its biennial Art Auction. Bid on a variety of artworks for sale — from painting and sculpture to photography and works on paper — created by emerging and international artists including Leonardo Drew, June Edmonds, Luchita Hurtado, Jean Lowe and more.
“The Democracy Project: 2020” manifests the great, besieged “project of Democracy” as an online exhibition for Artillery’s September/October issue, featuring recent work by a diverse selection of the West Coast’s most compelling artists. Whether approaching the theme ironically, or with reverence (or a bit of both), the artists below are chosen for their political engagement, provocative content, and significant contributions to the diversity of the art world. ARTISTS: Kim Abeles, Sama Alshaibi, Aaron Coleman, Eileen Cowin, Asad Faulwell, Corey Grayhorse, Mark Steven Greenfield, Salim Green, Ken Gonzales-Day, Alexander Kritselis, Ann Le, Alejandro Macias, Renée Petropoulos, Mike Reesé, Miles Regis, Julio M. Romero, Stephanie Syjuco, Meital Yaniv.
The South Florida Cultural Consortium (SFCC) announces 13 awards to distinguished South Florida artists through its 2020 Visual and Media Artists Program. The Consortium, an alliance of the arts councils of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties, has recognized seven individuals from Miami-Dade County (including Antonia Wright), three from Broward County, one from Palm Beach County, and two from Monroe County.
Former Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, Ken Gonzales-Day, thinks about who is and who is not represented in the National Portrait Gallery and in the Smithsonian collection as a whole, while researching in the institution’s massive digital archive.To commemorate MHz Foundation’s collaboration with the Smithsonian Open Access initiative, we asked artist Shana Lutker, one of MHz Curationist’s Advising Editors, to introduce the new Smithsonian Open Access collections to artists and talk with them about what they found.
“Seed to Harvest,” an outdoor photo exhibition at Wellesley College by artist Alexandria Smith, portrays five of the first Black graduates of the college in bold portraits. For her final project, Elana Bridges, class of 2020, brought the show online and drafted in-depth bios of each graduate to accompany the photographs.
“I thought it was important to highlight where they were coming from before Wellesley … to make a point that Wellesley didn’t make them special,” says Bridges. “These women on their own, in their own right, were gifted and deserved to be in this space. Wellesley gave them the tools to continue their social justice work.”
“Al otro lado” is a phrase used in Mexico referring to shared borders with the United States and the space populated by many Mexican immigrants on the other side of the Mexico/US border. Inspired by award-winning author Reyna Grande’s A Dream Called Home, a required text for FIU’s First-Year Experience Program, Otros Lados weaves narratives of historical memory, personal experience, and social justice. The works of Itzel Basualdo, Hugo Crosthwaite, and Judithe Hernández offer shared vantage points with Grande’s memoir, bringing distinct perspectives to Mexican and Mexican American experiences.
The image above is from Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series, which documents the historic lynchings of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American individuals across California. The victims in these images have been removed by the artist. The horrific nature of these crimes often makes it difficult to see the apparatus that surrounds the spectacle of the dead body on display. By removing the victim, Gonzales-Day allows us to see what is hiding in plain sight: the white audience gathered for this act of racial terror. The image is a stark reminder of the invisibility of white identity. Whiteness permeates through western society as thoroughly as the air that we all should have the right to breathe. The people in this particular image are not all actively tying a noose, but their mere presence and inaction creates an atmosphere within which such violence is normalized and perpetuated.
"My paintings recreate moments and situations in life that we might encounter. The purpose of my realism is to attract the audience closer to the subject's message. The figures that I paint carry a history of each being that any person could relate to and understand the conflicts that individuals transmit. My current project is works in dialogue with the Cuban culture. Each painting is a small scene of the events that happen daily."
Edra Soto spoke with Esthetic Lens recently as part of our Creative Quarantine feature. She brought us into the loop about projects that were put on hold because of quarantine, projects that still moved ahead, the current iteration of her GRAFT piece, and using her Instagram account to advocate for social justice.
Edra Soto’s ongoing 24 Hours project, in which she collects and glorifies discarded liquor bottles, and her GRAFT series, inspired by the iron rejas screens in her native Puerto Rico, have heavily influenced the trajectory of her art career and public interventions. These bottles and iron-wrought kaleidoscopic and geometric formations have graced her home in Garfield Park (where she also co-directs The Franklin, a backyard artist-run project space); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Blue Line Western Station; the Chicago Cultural Center and, most recently, Millennium Park, where her first public art commission Screenhouse, will be on view for two years.
Venturing to Upstate New York and Western Massachusetts for Upstate Art Weekend Renée Riccardo and I took the train from Grand Central Station to Croton Falls to pick-up a rental car...From there, it was a short drive to the Starlite Motel, where works by Hope Gangloff, Liz Collins, Jeffrey Gibson and others were wonderfully installed around the restored 1960s motor lodge.
This year’s auction will works including paintings, sculptures, photography and more — all donated from artists and galleries both locally and internationally. The auction, hosted on ARTSY.com, will feature approximately 100 works by early career and internationally recognized artists, including Leonardo Drew, June Edmonds, Luchita Hurtado, Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Trevor Paglen, Helen Pashgian, Ed Ruscha, Marnie Weber, and James Welling.
This spring, Los Angeles-based artist Lia Halloran was to have joined Caltech as artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences as part of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. COVID-19 upended those plans, and Halloran’s residency has been postponed until the spring of 2021.
The past few months have been busy for Halloran, however, as she has put the finishing touches on a book project she has been working on for more than a decade with Kip Thorne (BS ’62), Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, and one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. The book, The Warped Side of Our Universe, is to be published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2021 and features poetic verse by Thorne alongside paintings by Halloran.
“The art produced by Mexican and Mexican American artists in the U.S. has a long history that continues to reverberate–this echo is a dynamic and necessary narrative that expands traditional interpretations of American art,” said Amy Galpin, Chief Curator at the museum. Artist Hugo Crosthwaite, whose paintings are featured in the exhibit, was born in Tijuana, Mexico and the cultural aesthetics are influenced with his crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States. The subject matter he paints is inspired by the novel A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande.
"I think you know a lot about how visibility is, you know, begins with representation, begins with images and how the kind of dearth of images of people with disabilities and trans people and people of color existing in public life have kind of invisibilized to us and made our need sort of…underground, concealed, the physical needs for us to exist. Invisibilized representation in the trans community I think has really been front and center and the conversation over the past several years because of the emergence of gender diversity on screen and the counter."
- Zachary Drucker
Carla Jay Harris is equally driven by research and materiality, as she builds complex mixed media images and objects on the foundations of painstaking historical deep dives into personal and geopolitical events. Across photography, collage, drawing, and environmental installation, Harris delicately blurs the boundaries of space and time to highlight ancestral rhymes and the follow-on effects of history. Part of her practice involves literal place-making, as she incorporates her juxtapositions of archival and original images with pattern, portrait, and talisman into rooms that ideally function as social gathering points where the conversations sparked in the work can continue in the present.
When I first saw Carla Jay Harris’ project Celestial Bodies at AIPAD (NYC) in 2019 I was spellbound. More than beautiful and graceful, her work was ethereal. Like a bashful vagrant, I conspicuously loitered by the Kopeikin Gallery booth, hoping I would have a chance to meet the artist. Ironically, I learned that she was from my hometown of Los Angeles. Emblematic of her stratospheric talent, it required a transcontinental journey for me to be introduced to someone that was practically my neighbor. Perhaps you really can’t go home again! I chatted online with Carla in June 2020 about her work and process.
As the pandemic tethers us close to home, Calgary-born Erik Olson has unveiled a travelogue three years in the making of his 10,000-mile motorcycle odyssey through the storied places and dysfunctional underbelly of the United States.
For her new online exhibition, “Corps Sonore,” artist Caitlin Cherry sources her subjects through social media. They include “Instagram influencers, glamour models, rappers, and exotic dancers — Black American femmes who play a dominant role in shaping popular culture without due credit.”
The oil paintings and digital collages in Caitlin Cherry’s online show “Corps Sonore” call forth a phantasmagorical nightclub harboring cliques of bionic sirens bathed in an opulent, rippling iridescence. Sourced from social media feeds, Cherry’s reimagined subjects embody a specific ideal of Black femme beauty associated with rappers, exotic dancers, and glamour models—women whose efforts are frequently disparaged, ignored, and, in some instances, even criminalized.
Gonzales-Day’s powerful and nuanced investigations of intersectionality and racial violence stem from an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of art history and a desire to rewrite a more inclusive past and advocate for a more equitable present. The work has a gravitas that is often accentuated by a poetic manipulation of light and form, and exhibits Gonzales-Day’s dexterity in working in a range of modes from performance and installation to projects that are more documentary in nature. What is perhaps most profound about his work is that he invites inquiry and connections, but not without effort from his audience; the more open the viewer, the more the work reveals.
When De Jesus was forced to close in March, he transitioned to an online platform and even managed to make a couple of sales. Given that the gallery was able to reopen for private appointments last month, he’s cautiously optimistic. As a whole, however, the industry has taken a hit: In an Art Dealers Association of America survey of nearly 170 art galleries in April and May, galleries across the country forecasted a gross revenue loss of 73 percent in the second quarter of this year.
More recently, she has produced prismatic paintings from photos of Black femmes (including models, exotic dancers, porn actresses, rappers, and influencers) culled from social media. Inspired by the promotional posts of a Brooklyn cabaret, her newest works feature its servers and dancers in suggestive poses, flattened by delirious patterns and alphanumeric codes onto canvases with widescreen dimensions. Here, the slipperiness of digital images comes up against the slickness of oil paint, which she manipulates into a kind of filter that both obscures and refracts representations of Black femininity. A virtual presentation of Cherry’s new paintings and digital collages, entitled “Corps Sonore,” is currently viewable in the online viewing room of Los Angeles’s Luis De Jesus Los Angeles through August.
The exhibition opens with a rapid, stand-alone animation that displays 19 images at a speed evoking the highway, testing our powers of perception and suggesting that the story of the journey could be told entirely visually, as if by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who avoided scripted narration. The first sets the bike against an expanse of sky and sea near Vancouver, recalling Arthur Rimbaud’s discovery of “eternity” in the sea merged with the sun.
An American painter based in Los Angeles, Edmonds has described her work as a “doorway to memory,” which is evident in the many allusions to longstanding African traditions and influential African Americans from bygone eras...“The bending lines of contrasting colors lead your eye around the painting, and in person, the texture invites a close look,” says Gilvin. “It intrigues me because of the almost dizzying experience of studying it, and because of its conceptual and formal conversations with other artworks.”
Chicago-based artist Edra Soto made a gate studded with viewfinders. They show tiny images she captured in Puerto Rico the day after the hurricane. And another artist has an entire installation open for visitors – it’s a recreated beauty salon that explores the struggle of businesses owned by women on the island. The show was organized by Columbia College’s Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Arts.
Caitlin Cherry: Corps Sonore at Luis De Jesus. An online show that toggles between art, technology, codes, Cherry's Black femmes, & digital graphics that function like visual intermissions.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography has reopened with the exhibit “Temporal: Puerto Rican Resistance,” an exploration of Puerto Rico’s contemporary history documenting protests, life during and after Hurricane María and the art of the resistance. Artists include Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Mari B. Robles López, Eduardo Martínez, Ojos Nebulosos, Adriana Parrilla, Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo, Erika P. Rodríguez, Edra Soto, SUPAKID, and Rogelio Báez Vega
During the Obama administration, while addressing the proposed legislation of North Carolina to bar trans students from restrooms that correlated with their gender presentation, then attorney general Loretta Lynch said to transgender Americans, “We see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.” It was an incredible moment historically because trans people had never been spoken to so publicly. To have a person from the president’s cabinet speak directly to a community that had been ignored and silenced was such a powerful paradigm shift and validation. —Zackary Drucker
Over Independence Day Weekend, 80 artists [including Ken Gonzales-Day and Zackary Drucker] asked Americans to look up at the skies. Throughout July 3 and 4, messages related to immigration were written at 10,000 feet by World War II military planes, sky-typed over 80 sites related to the country's network of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, immigration courts, and the southern border. The idea was to bring attention to these facilities, which may not be familiar to many Americans.
The purpose of the temporary works was to raise awareness about social injustice rampant in the US’s immigration system and where these injustices are carried out. Over the weekend, XMAP: In Plain Sight uplifted the children and adults who have suffered from inhuman living conditions, the separation of detained families, violence, and, in some cases, death at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE.
Two fleets of five skytyping planes each are set for takeoff across the country this Independence Day weekend armed with calls for the abolition of the immigrant detention in the United States as part of the project “In Plain Sight.” (Developed from older skywriting technology, skytyping planes inject oil into their exhaust systems to produce a white smoke that is released into the sky by a computer-controlled system to produce precise letter-writing.) Phrases like “Care Not Cages,” “Unseen Mothers” and “Nosotras Te Vemos (We See You)” will momentarily hover above 80 locations — including detention facilities, immigration courts, prisons, borders and historic sites like Ellis Island — before dissipating into the atmosphere.
A group of 80 artists from around the country have teamed up to produce skytyped messages that will appear over immigrant detention camps around the United States, as well as other sites related to internment and incarceration. Among the participating artists of “In Plain Sight” are Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; graphic designer Emory Douglas, once the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party; and a range of cultural practitioners, including Ken Gonzales-Day, Harry Gamboa Jr., Mary Kelly...
For Luis De Jesus of the eponymous gallery on South La Cienega Boulevard, moving online has been an expansion rather than a limitation. When lockdown began, his staff was already redesigning the gallery’s website, so they added an “online viewing room.” “It’s like the second gallery that we don’t have,” De Jesus said, “It functions like an alternative space, a project space, and that to me is very exciting.”
Chicago-based, Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist Edra Soto’s work is about bringing people together. Through sharing experiences and questioning histories, Soto invites us to reimagine and meet between worlds. The way one feels around Soto’s work is something quite special, that very same feeling of community gets activated through her work by incorporating food, elements of memory and place such as tiny viewfinders, while also creating spaces for joy.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping. For the past six years Laura Karetzky’s practice has examined the way technology and virtual communication is able to sustain us in various states of perspective, as it confounds our idea of autonomy and community.
There is a profound stillness in Carla Jay Harris’ photographs—her framing and shooting style emits a pervasive calm that quiets the anxiety of her subject matter. Harris’ ability to create silence amid moments of emotional upheaval is eerie, tense, and evocative. Two bodies of work portray people and places in the midst of economic and cultural change; Dirt, Dust, Sand, Concrete (2012–2015) shows Smithfield, Virginia, amid a corporate buyout, and Culture of Desperation (2012) portrays a struggling record company during lean times.
Some of the most alluring art shows happening virtually this season. Chris Engman: Looking at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Ongoing at viewingroom.luisdejesus.com
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gives us a chance to be amused and fooled by Chris Engman’s photographs, that give you a sensation that what you see is three-dimensional paper sculptures. But no, my friends, don’t trust your eyes. Come close, and “touch” these framed photos with your eyes, and discover to your astonishment that you have been magically tricked.
The California African American Museum (CAAM) presents recently acquired works in its exhibition called Sanctuary. The exhibition focuses on safety and refuge in relation to the African American experience. One piece in the exhibit is from Carla Jay Harris, which pictures a female figure in a celestial landscape. She explains, “I’ve had a bit of a nomadic life…Through my life, I seek to connect with permanence. Safe space and making time for self-care is essential to your own mental health and wellness.”
In this Episode I feature June Edmonds, a west coast based abstract painter that was awarded the AWARE prize during the 2020 Armory show in NYC. AWARE, an acronym for Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, is a Paris based non profit that this year debuted an award for a Solo Exhibition of Work by a Woman Artist. June’s work was exhibited by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Artist Ken Gonzales-Day has been widely recognized for the “Erased Lynching” series, which include lynching postcard photos that effectively “erased’ the victims of lynching and focused on the white crowds gathered to witness the murders. Gonzales-Day argues that the erasure of the lynching victim “allows the viewer to see, for the first time, the social dynamics of the lynching itself.” The photos, absent of the images of victims, “helped us to recognise the dynamics of whiteness within the complex history of racialised violence in America,”
Pacifico Silano uses photographs from vintage gay pornography magazines to make colorful collages that explore print culture and the histories of the LGBTQ+ community. His works are generally large scale, evoking strength and sexuality along with the underlying repression and trauma that many marginalized individuals experience.
Searching for California’s Hang Trees, grew out of the research artist Ken Gonzales-Daywas doing for his book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935, published by Duke University Press in 2006. In it, Gonzales-Day sets out to assemble the most complete record of lynching in California that had yet been published. What his research uncovered, was that contrary to popular belief, African Americans were not the only targets of lynching in California and the west. In fact, Gonzales-Day was also able to document the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants, at least in part due to their racial identity. In doing so, Gonzales-Day has revealed a history of violence against immigrants in the west that still goes on today, with mass incarceration and family separation taking place at our borders.
You know what actually, was our very first collaboration? The ‘I Love Chicago Project.’ From when I was in my MFA studio at SAIC. It was an installation to bring together all types of disciplines—sound, performance, musicians. A lion, and a lion tamer. Even then, I was drawn toward leading a project space. I had a fascination with crossing the boundaries.
The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) announced on Thursday that it plans to launch a new digital art fair to support member galleries who have been impacted by Covid-19. Titled “FAIR,” the online initiative will boast of a profit-sharing model designed to give participants who have recently experienced revenue loss due to the closure of their physical locations a financial boost. Kicking off next week, FAIR will run from May 20 through June 21.
Galleryplatform.la launches May 15, featuring online viewing rooms for small and blue-chip galleries, video profiles of artists, and a column on the history of LA galleries — all to help galleries stay afloat. Luis De Jesus also added that “this period has been a welcome respite from the hectic, nonstop schedule of back-to-back gallery shows and art fairs. It’s given me time to think about the business — what’s working and what isn’t.”
Greetings from the timeless void of quarantine, where we all feel like astronauts who have been in space just a little too long. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with your essential guide to all things arts — and operatic krumping. On Instagram, I’ve been very much enjoying Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop motion animations of his quarantine drawings.
Within figuration, the materiality of oil paint has been bound to its relationship to the depiction of skin. Velasquez went so far as to say that if not for skin, oil painting wouldn’t exist. ...This obsession with material skin seems to have lost its privileged position due in no small part to how incredibly realized it’s been within the traditions of western art history. There is a completeness to Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) and Saville’s surgical portraits that followed, that have made contemporary artists disregard flesh, instead pursuing a frontier that investigates the body as one that is weightless, boneless, hollow, thin, and digital- phantom bodies.
Since 2017, The Universe in Verse has been celebrating the natural world — the science, the splendor, the mystery of it — through poetry, that lovely backdoor to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling to reveal reality afresh. And now here we are — “survivors of immeasurable events,” in the words of the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, “small, wet miracles without instruction, only the imperative of change” — suddenly scattered six feet apart across a changed world, blinking with disorientation, disbelief, and no small measure of heartache.
Federico Solmi (Italy, 1973) currently lives and works in New York. Solmi’s work utilizes bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society His exhibitions often feature articulate installations composed of a variety of media including video, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Solmi uses his art as a vehicle to stimulate a visceral conversation with his audience, highlighting the contradictions and fallibility that characterize our time. Through his work, Solmi examines unconscious human impulses and desires in order to critique Western society’s obsession with individual success and display contemporary relationships between nationalism, colonialism, religion, consumerism.
I expect to see a post-epidemic rising of physical modifications made to existing public spaces and new spaces designed with public distancing considerations in mind. Perhaps these changes manifest more through policy rather than physically, but maybe we will see a combination of both. Most of my work is motivated by a public approach to design a space or an activation. This is something I’m hoping I don’t have to give up in the future, but I wouldn't be surprised by future changes.
J'ai rendez-vous avec Nicolas Grenier dans so atelier de l'îlot Bellechasse. Ce n'est pas la première fois que j'y recontre des artistes, mais il se pourrait bien que ce soit la dernière... / I have an appointment with Nicolas Grenier in his workshop on the Bellechasse block. It is not the first time that I meet artists there, but it may well be the last ...
There’s a challenging tension to his work in the way he conflates entertainment and celebrity and power and authority,” says Bleu Cease, RoCo’s executive director and curator. “And there is a push-pull … It’s attractive, but once it draws you in, it’s grotesque and maybe even repelling. Things are on the verge of breaking down and there’s a sense of impending doom.
How are you overcoming the challenges we are now facing?
Like many other galleries, we are looking for ways to stay present and relevant. We recently launched our new website and we’re in the process of adding a new page that will pull together all of our artist’s video and film projects as well as links to other feeds and impromptu and intuitive content. We’re in production mode—a good thing.
Art galleries provide necessary spaces for creative discovery and connection—experiences we all may be seeking in our current existences. Luckily, many galleries across the country can still be visited virtually, and at your work-from-home leisure through Artnet Galleries.
If you’re in need of an art break, here are 13 of our favorite exhibitions, from New York to California, that you can gallery hop through your laptop.
It has already been a busy year for Griselda Rosas.
Her work is on display across the county, at Balboa Park’s San Diego Art Institute, the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. She is now preparing to open a show in May at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Gallery in La Jolla with her three 2019 San Diego Art Prize co-finalists. And in October, she will have a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in conjunction with a retrospective on artist Yolanda López.
The $10,000 Aware Prize for solo presentation by women artists was awarded to June Edmonds, whose politically charged paintings were represented at the fair by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Tezeno’s work consists of collages with cubist influences. Her bold use of color, texture and shape are the core of her collages. Inspired by the images that she sees in her sleep, Evita translates these visions through mixed media, combining handmade paper, acrylic paint and found objects. Pulling from experiences and children’s stories, she creates whimsical images that provoke laughter and thought to help enrich the soul.
“Citizenship acknowledges the political power of images,” [curator Georgia Erger] said, “and the power that comes from the fact that photos, and graphics and ultimately video and film can be so widely and easily disseminated, and therefore, much more accessible.” The works of art include 20th-century photographs by Leonard Freed, a series of etchings by Francisco de Goya, and engravings by William Hogarth, along with “Erased Lynchings,” which Mr. Gonzales-Day produced from 2006 to 2019. Based on actual postcards, and his visits to where lynchings took place, Mr. Gonzales-Day’s work shows crowds gathered at places across America, such as California and Montana, to watch the hangings.
June Edmonds’ dark, seemingly abstract paintings at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (Booth 827, Pier 94) are actually based on flags and their palettes are derived from a spectrum of black and brown skin complexions.
June Edmonds’s Flag Paintings explore the American flag as a symbol of ideals, promises, and identity. Each flag is associated with the narrative of an African American, past or present. Edmonds explores the psychological construct of skin color, utilizing the primary colors of brown skin tones to build symbols of American identity that reflect the broader changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the country's population and the ideals and promises enshrined in the Constitution.
Additionally, the inaugural edition of the $10,000 Aware Prize for solo presentations by women artists—presented by the Paris-based nonprofit AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions) in partnership with the Armory Show—was given to June Edmonds, whose work at the fair is presented by the Los Angeles-based gallery Luis De Jesus. Edmonds is known for abstract paintings that explore race, gender, and politics, and the prize was juried by a cast including AWARE co-founder Camille Morineau, writer and curatorial activist Maura Reilly, and Swiss Institute director Simon Castets, among others.
Drucker of Los Angeles explores the novel’s themes of gender and time as part of her photo series “Rosalyne,” which show trans elder and activist Rosalyne Blumenstein in a variety of poses that evoke some of the classical imagery of the novel as well as the blending of time periods. A photo of a nude Blumenstein mimicking the pose of a nearby Venus de Milo also manages to recall the aesthetic of Potter’s film.“Rosalyne is a legend in the trans community,” says Drucker, who lives in Los Angeles. “The photos came about because I felt she was the perfect living Orlando, she was traveling through time and crossing genders.”
CBC Listens IDEAS with Nahlah Ayed interviews the four 2019 Sobey Art Awards Finalists across two episodes, "The New Masters: Sobey Art Awards: Part 1 & 2." Nicolas Grenier discusses his practice and two projects, The Time of Work and Vertically Integrated Socialism.
The first-ever winner of the Armory Show's AWARE Prize is artist June Edmonds. The $10,000 juried prize was given for the excellence of the artist’s work and for the Luis de Jesus Los Angeles gallery’s courage to present a solo-female artist’s work in a market that has systematically undervalued art made by women. The prize's short list of five finalists also included Rina Banerjee, Yuko Nasaka, Aase Texmon Rygh and Alexis Smith. AWARE co-founder Camille Morineau said, “Edmonds was unanimously selected by the jurors, who coalesced around the discovery of her new Flag Paintings—a breakthrough body of never-before seen work by the artist presented by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles at this year’s Armory Show.”
This week we made our way to Luis De Jesus’ opening of Britton Tolliver’s Bend To Play and Ethan Gill’s, New Paintings. Upon walking into the gallery, we were met by the boldly colored geometric abstract paintings by Tolliver. The vibrant works featured thick layers of smoothly applied paint the resulting decisive forms suggestive of decadent topographical psychedelic maps. The satisfying hardy spreads of acrylic paint resulted in the paintings existing more as sculptures and exemplified the physicality of Tolliver’s practice, which requires pushing paint through sieve-like grids.
I’m 42 now and not playing much golf. I’ve been making art to some degree my whole life and have been focusing on running my gallery, painting and selling my work. My career is finally in a good place, but golf is never far from my mind. I went to the U.S. Open in 2018 at Shinnecock Hills. I attended the 2012 Ryder Cup at Medinah. Last fall, I drove up to French Lick in Indiana to watch the Senior LPGA Championship. I can still cite stats that I memorized about the great LPGA players of the 1980s. As an architecture buff and a huge Seth Raynor fan, one of the things I really miss is playing great layouts. Some favorites of mine include Pinehurst No. 2, Royal St. George’s, Southampton Golf Club, Friar’s Head, Valhalla and the Old Course.
Highlights that both flaunt the space’s architectural potential and honor the integrity of the artwork include Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours (2017). Her pristine white vitrines house polished liquor bottles found on her daily walks in Chicago’s Garfield Park, challenging notions of “detritus” and making an industrial room devoid of natural light shine.
As the kick off to the 2020 edition of the Armory Show edges closer and closer, the fair has announced a new art prize to add to its list of juried awards. The AWARE Prize, which will be presented for the first time this March, will deliver a $10,000 prize to one deserving female artist, or the artist’s estate, whose works will be exhibited in a solo presentation in the Galleries section of the Armory Show.
We came across an installation from Puerto Rican Edra Soto. It's called Open 24 Hours and looks like different stands with several polished glass bottles inside, some clear, some green. And the art has a creative story to go with it: On her walks through Garfield Park, Edra Soto noticed how the streets became a "24/7 living history of a place," always collecting waste on display for all to see. Inspired by the high number of liquor bottles, she began taking them home, removing their labels and photographing them. One man's trash is another woman's art.
On her walks through Garfield Park, Edra Soto noticed how the streets became a "24/7 living history of a place," always collecting waste on display for all to see. Inspired by the high number of liquor bottles, she began taking them home, removing their labels and photographing them. One man's trash is another woman's art. We circled around the display of bottles a few times.For something to go from trash on the street to being cleaned up and used in art, that's a sort of rebirth in itself, right? The kind of rebirth only an artist with imagination can bring about.
Perspective is constantly shifting, from Lia Halloran’s cyanotype of The Great Comet, 2019, trailing clouds of glory, to the spider who does an unscripted walk-on in Christopher Richmond’s looped video of a rotating asteroid, Viewing Stone, 2018. The spider remminds the viewer how ultimately small we, and spiders, are in the cosmic view of things.
Hugo Crosthwaite, the 2019 first place winner was recognized for a stop-motion animated drawing. “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez” (2018) depicts a young woman from Tijuana and explores her pursuit of the American dream. The animated video project is part of a series based on oral histories Crosthwaite has gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lewis & Clark College's Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery will host Making a Better Painting. The regional exhibition showcases the work of 18 artists from around the Pacific Northwest who seek to spark conversations about paintings from a practitioner's point of view. Each of the artists address at least one of the four exhibition themes in their work: painting in the expanded field, painting and politics, painting in the Anthropocene and painting after technology.
A personal telescope belonging to astronomer George Ellery Hale, developed in 1885 that afforded a precise view of the night sky representing a leap in astronomical technology, is adjacent to Lia Halloran’s The Great Comet, 2019, a monumental cyanotype suggesting the marvels of astronomical phenomena that might have been experienced by pre-technological peoples
The artists shortlisted for the prize, funded by French nonprofit AWARE, are Yuko Nasaka, Rina Banerjee, Aase Texmon Rygh, Alexis Smith, and June Edmonds. The perception that art made by women is less valuable is one that the French nonprofit Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE) seeks to correct. For the 2020 Armory Show, the international art fair held every year in New York City, AWARE will recognize a solo booth of a woman artist by a gallery at the fair with a $10,000 award to either a living artist or her estate.
Drawing its title from my Pulitzer Prize-nominated book of the same name, Lynchings in the West: 1850-1935, this series considers the transracial nature of lynching in California, from statehood to the last recorded lynchings in 1935, as well as other western states and territories outside the historically better-known Southern black lynching areas. Given the broad number of people touched by this history (Asians, Anglos, Blacks and American Indians), many will be suprised to learn that Latinos (Mexican, Mexican- American, and persons of Latin American descent) were statistically more likely to die of lynching than those of African, Asian or European descent.
Artist Lia Halloran has skateboarded through runoff drains in pitch darkness, piloted a plane solo over Los Angeles and navigated dense theories of interstellar wormholes.Her diverse studio practices simply follow her personal curiosities, which she said often land her in interdisciplinary spaces where she can warp and manipulate concepts of space and time.The alumna most recently experimented with spatial distortion through an audio-visual installation called “Lia Halloran: Double Horizon,” on display at the ArtCenter College of Design’s Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery until March 15.
Every three years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery showcases finalists of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, named for a late benefactor. A total of 46 works are on display from the latest edition, selected last year by a panel of jurors from more than 2,600 submissions, all from American artists who were instructed to respond “to the current political and social context.” Hugo Crosthwaite’s A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a three-minute video of stop-motion animation, took First Prize.
Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, but not in Miyoshi Barosh’s archly adorable world. Her kielbasa-shaped glass sculpture, Untitled (Sausage) from 2015, gleams suggestively from a vitrine at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. In case you doubt its Freudian implications, its cellmates are a penis and a pair of breasts, also made of glass, both trussed with twine as if ready for the oven. The vitrine’s fourth occupant, Untitled (Meat), is a smooth hunk of reddish-brown glass, tied up like a small ham. Equating body parts with meat is nothing new, but these works put a sharper point on Barosh’s more prominent work in textiles, which tends to be exuberantly domestic and slightly macabre.
Specifically, we have selected two paintings by Jonathan VanDyke , who lives and works in New York, related to his latest series of works exhibited for the first time in the personal How to Operate in a Dark Room (Gallery 1 / 9unosunove, September-November 2019) . This type of works testify to the level of mastery achieved by the artist in the creation of sewn paintings.
In the early 2000s Los Angeles-based artist Miyoshi Barosh started making large-scale textile sculptures that combined the intimacy of craft with the bold, irreverence of Pop. Though vibrantly colorful and often playfully ironic, a dystopian sense of decay and death characterized these pieces. After the artist’s untimely death last year, the artworks have taken on new poignancy; they’re spirited, contradictory, and full of mischief and the carnivalesque madness of contemporary life.
Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) returns to Hollywood for its international art fair producing a dynamic and informed cross-section of international contemporary art. The massive exhibition will feature 50 artists at the historic Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard utilizing the ballroom, bars and athletic spaces of the once celebrity hot spot.
Carla Jay Harris’ series, Celestial Bodies, does not entirely eliminate facial features in the work, but the features of these powerful women are not the focus either. Rather, Harris creates regal, spiritual images that combine a range of mediums. She terms them a link between the mythological and the real; travels as a child in a military family, and a sense of rootlessness, of being an outsider attracted her to the inclusiveness of legend.
Sherin Guirguis created the Kholkhal Aliaa installation inspired by a Bedouin anklet. "How do you make art in a place that's so beautiful? The idea was to create a piece that honors the site and honors the beauty and grandeur of this geology and landscape, while also bringing in the people's history and culture, weaving it together so you can engage with the place and its story."
Lia Halloran, Double Horizon, at Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery. To create large-scale filmic views of Los Angeles, Halloran takes to the air, mounting four cameras to an airplane that she piloted during more than 30 flights. She has put the footage together into an immersive, three-screen projection that is accompanied by a score created by Allyson Newman. Runs through March 15. ArtCenter South Campus, 1111 S. Arroyo Pkwy., Pasadena
A painter, photographer, and science enthusiast, Lia Halloran fuses together artistic creativity with a splash of scientific elements into her works. As an investigative explorer of space in its physical, psychological, and scientific forms, Lia uses these concepts as a major point to begin her creations; art allows her to express various concepts in science and gives her an outlet to explore many different themes that relate to humans, such as our place in the world, both psychologically and emotionally.
For the past four years, Margie Livingston has been dismantling the line between painting and performance. In a hybrid form of Action Painting, performance, and Land Art, she drags constructed paintings across terrain, inscribing the canvases with the ground to what she calls Extreme Landscape Painting or “non-painting painting.” Inherent in this process is the use of chance procedures and the knowledge that the ideas change and evolve as she gets into the work.
Three local galleries are honoring the groundbreaking artist and L.A. native with simultaneous exhibits: Before she succumbed to uterine cancer last February at age 59, artist Miyoshi Barosh spent the better part of three decades cultivating an art practice that was compassionate yet contrarian, conceptual yet craft-made, and Pop yet profoundly personal.
Throughout L.A., three galleries have teamed up to honor artist Miyoshi Barosh, who passed away last year. Barosh’s fiber-based work is exuberant and joyful. LOVE!, one proclaims, next to a giant oversized yarn tassel. At Night Gallery, a collection of pink oversized and fabric cartoon legs called Large Legs spew off the wall. At Luis De Jesus, I ♥ Kitties is a photograph of a cat’s head, embellished with embroidered patches. While this all might sound saccharine, Barosh’s work intentionally tugs our heartstrings to get at larger messages of consumerism, ecological failure, and social control. By using techniques associated with “woman’s work” and a cutesy aesthetic, Barosh slyly pokes at our associations with each, while uncovering a rawer, more unnerving element underneath.
Brooks’s promotion of expansive thinking connects to his work in curation (as the director of Quappi Projects he steers the gallery’s exhibition program), and to his interest in poetry. He describes himself as “a person who writes constantly in my head as I move throughout the day.” Though it felt natural for him to eventually connect his painting to his poetry practice, the result was nonetheless transformative. The titles for his most recent body of paintings are all drawn from his poetry. His series of work, “A Map of Scents,” on view at Moremen Gallery during the summer of 2019, employs this strategy of poetically titling his pictures, as well as a fresh aesthetic that Brooks explains came from integrating his process of collage-making into his painting.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles announced the opening of two new galleries, “The Earth is a Brush” and “Love,” on Saturday, Jan. 11.
Margie Livingston’s “The Earth is a Brush,” the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, will be on view through Feb. 15. Miyoshi Barosh’s “Love,” the late artist’s third solo show with the gallery, will also be on view through Feb. 15. Her work combines humor and dystopian irony in a style she dubbed “conceptual pop.”
While researching Latino portraiture from the 1800s, the photographer Ken Gonzales-Day found an image of a young Latino man. "Last man hanged in Los Angeles," was written on the back. When he read that phrase, Gonzales-Day came to the conclusion that he didn't have a clear understanding of California history. To make sense of his discovery, he began to work on the series of photographs that's now known as "Erased Lynching" (2006). The Santa Clara University Art Department's exhibit "Ken Gonzales-Day" features several of his photographs from the collection.
Santa Clara University (SCU), a flag bearer in an ongoing crusade for social justice, regularly raises awareness of social issues through the arts. A free exhibition of 25 Erased Lynching and California Hang Tree photos by Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day is on view through Jan. 24 in the Gallery of the Art and Art History building.
“Ken Gonzales-Day is an artist who makes work as an act of compassion,” said exhibition curator Renee Billingslea, a senior lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History.
ZACKARY DRUCKER: I think all of us in the community have had those moments of being like, “Is this going to somehow alienate people who aren’t ready yet?”
SUSAN STRYKER: Why is it that trans issues have become like a front-and-center issue in the culture wars?
ZACKARY DRUCKER: I think capitalizing on people’s fear is what has landed us in this moment right now, and you have hope on one side and fear on the other.
Carla Jay Harris’s work investigates how physical space influences psychological space. Through photographs, composites, sculptures and built environments, Harris explores the interaction of the interior with the exterior, of home with the outside world, of image and meaning. A 2015 graduate of UCLA’s MFA program, where she studied with Catherine Opie and James Welling among other artists, Harris exhibited her work this fall at Sonce Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles.
Yale School of Art faculty member and alumna Sarah Oppenheimer ’99 ART, along with some former faculty members and alumni, are featured in the current Artspace exhibition “Strange Loops,” on view through the end of February. The group exhibition explores psychological affect and the human condition expressed through instruments, systems, and objects of human design.
So I went to The Female Lens expecting a counter-attack, an alternative narrative of reproof. Did I find one? I didn’t discern such a narrative but what I did find was like a well-mixed box of chocolates, a selection of images, differing greatly, both in content and approach. Some were provocative, with a twist, such as Zackary Drucker’s shot of a slender honey-blonde lying on her back on a cement floor, apparently in a basement - there are household appliances and paper bags of stuff around - and she is seemingly naked beneath a plastic apron. Broad silver tape has shut her mouth but her eyes are open and unafraid.
Hugo Crosthwaite's La Güera, 2018, is featured in the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine in print in January 2020.
...The selection includes far more photographs and videos than paintings and drawings, although some entries blur those categories. The top prize went to Hugo Crosthwaite for a series of black-and-white drawings, animated into a video, of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez. She is a young Mexican woman who ventured north across the border in search of the American Dream, but has since been deported. The artist encountered her in Tijuana. As winner of the top prize, Crosthwaite will be commissioned to do an official portrait. The 2016 winner, Amy Sherald, made a painting of Michelle Obama that became one of the gallery’s most popular attractions.
I have never before seen an artist who can sidle right up to Goya’s Caprichos or Desastres de La Guerra and not only survive the comparison but generate mutual enrichment. Hugo Crosthwaite’s TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles, and Other Legends) at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents a breathtaking collection of drawings ranging from small to mural-size, as well as video animations and books, all made over a period of over a decade. Crosthwaite’s work addresses life on both sides of the US–Mexican border where he conveys the feeling of life bottled up beneath a merciless cork, his observations packed with violence, tenderness, pain, boredom, and his mind-boggling draftsmanship. —Daniel Gerwin
Ultimately, spending time with artists is what truly “floats her boat.” Currently, she is working with her dear friend and renowned artist Antonia Wright on a project called “WWWW - Suffer in Style” that will be the next ARTSail residency. The two plan to produce a luxury chain of accessories inspired by environmental causes in an effort to make climate change more stylish. “It is about talking about dark issues with irony and humor,” she says, “while making it all — art, fashion, etc. — as accessible as Mother Nature.”
Ken Gonzalez-Day’s images from the series Erased Lynchings sees the artist digitally remove the dead hanging body of a nameless murdered person of colour, in order to avoid re-victimising the individual. This places our attention on the real guilty subjects, those white people who take it upon themselves extrajudicially to police black and brown bodies. The black body is here removed from the gaze of white eyes, a form of sight which undergirds the social dominance of whiteness. Gonzales-Day writes: “The work asks viewers to consider the crowd, the spectacle, the role of the photographer, and even the impact of flash photography, and their various contributions to our understanding of racialized violence in this nation.”
Positioned at entrance to UNTITLED, overlooking the South Beach is Ruben Millares and Antonia Wright’s It’s not down on any map; true places never are (presented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles), a motorized public sculpture made out of flagpoles, chains, a steel platform, and 16 flags of countries currently involved in migration crises, such as Venezuela, United States, South Sudan, Myanmar, Turkey, Germany, and Mexico. Rotating in a steady half loop, the chain structure moves the flags up and down, creating a metallic machinery noise as the flags ascend, squeeze through the chains, and rise again. Flags which have traditionally been placed on high ends of dwarfing poles are upside down, crumbled, and eventually risen, in a system that recalls the instability and interchangeability of sociopolitical power and nationalistic ideologies.
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., named Hugo Crosthwaite the 2019 winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, an astute selection for several reasons. Crosthwaite’s entry, a meditative, three-minute stop-motion animation about a woman migrating from Mexico to the United States, stretched the conventional bounds of portraiture and affirmed the genre’s relevance, both of which are aims of the prize. Over nearly two decades, Crosthwaite has applied portraiture’s concentrated attention not only to individuals but even more avidly to place.
Don’t miss: The greenspace of Lummus Park has been commandeered for public art displays under the auspices of the fair, all of them large-scale works—look for the kinetic sculpture from Miami-based artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares. Make sure, too, that you pick up a copy of Untitled News—or whatever writer-in-residence Osman Can Yerebakan chooses to call the daily dispatch he’s been tasked with producing about the fair and its fairgoers.
My work is about emotions. And emotions have no ethnicity. So my figures may represent my Blackness in all the different hues I use in my work, but still people of all ethnicities see my work and they can identify with it. Sometimes, I’ve listened to non-brown people say, ‘Oh, Black work is so controversial. It intimidates me.’ But I just had a showing at my studio, and I had mostly caucasian Americans come, and they were all piled in my studio, gathering around my work saying, ‘Oh my goodness, I feel so much joy, I am so happy!’ And this is what I try to convey in my work. I want to bring joy, I want to bring happiness.
Double Horizon reflects the artist’s ongoing investigations of the body’s relationship to space in three simultaneous, large-scale, aerial views of the greater Los Angeles landscape. Double Horizon is Lia Halloran’s most recent work in her ongoing investigations into the physical, psychological and scientific explorations of space.
The Baltimore Museum of Art has announced that it will dedicate the next year to women artists, most notably by spending its entire acquisitions budget for the year on works of art by women, as part of its 2020 Vision campaign. The museum’s permanent collection contains over 95,000 pieces of art, but only about 4% of those pieces were created by women. Next year’s initiative is meant to help rectify that imbalance. “You don’t just purchase one painting by a female artist of color and hang it on the wall next to a painting by Mark Rothko...To rectify centuries of imbalance, you have to do something radical.”
Galleri Urbane Marfa + Dallas ushered in a trio of exhibits over the weekend: Sight-reading by abstract painter Arden Bendler Browning, Time/Life by multimedia artist Dennis Koch, and The Gift Edit: Contemporary Ceramics by Sam Mack, Melinda Laszczynski, Aisha Bryant, Lindsey Howard, and Iren Tete. I haven’t had the chance to see the new shows, but after getting some sneak peeks on social media, I’m particularly excited for Koch’s Time/Life portion. The three exhibits are on view through December 28.
NADA, December 5–8: With representation from 25 countries and 56 cities, the 17th annual NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) art fair will take place at Ice Palace Studios, putting a focus on supporting new voices in the contemporary art community. Joined by 136 presenters this year, the fair will feature 71 NADA member galleries and will also include 28 first-time exhibitors.
Fairgoers can expect to see solo showings of artists like Agnieszka Brzezanska (BWA Warszawa), Guadalupe Maravilla (Jack Barrett), Ariana Papademetropoulos (Soft Opening), Aaron Gilbert (Lulu), and Peter Williams (Luis De Jesus Los Angeles)...
It’s an exciting year for UNTITLED Miami Beach, the fair situated on Ocean Drive and 12th Street that’s celebrated for being highly curated, architecturally mindful, and pleasant to navigate. The 2019 edition launches Monuments, a new program of large-scale, site-specific installations such as It is not down on any map; true places never are (2019). This kinetic outdoor sculpture by collaborative artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares, presented by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, consists of a group of flags sliding up and down on a flagpole in an allegory of complicated global hierarchies.
Roya Farassat’s paintings on paper are bold yet soft, rendered in various grays, blacks, whites, and a light, saturated red. Her relaxed, informed brushstrokes form eyes, hands, horns, and monsters. A single eye under a traditional wedding gown is haunted by a big, black shadow of a hand in Finally A Bride (2013), while a pattern of round, red lines surround a vaginal image in Private Eye (2009). Like Davoud’s painting, Farassat’s works are filled with empty, large spaces that are as vibrant and meaningful as shapes and figures, telling parts of a story without many words or gestures.
Vibrant and joyful with eye-popping colors and textures, Thread at the Long Beach Museum of Art pushes the boundaries of textile art. Selected works range from modern to contemporary and display the ability to use thread to create narratives, sculpture and political comment.
Laura Krifka's The Game of Patience at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is at its core about seduction, built through scenarios of being seduced, and how the artist constructs each painting to both seduce, and, by revealing subtle (metaphorical) cracks in the foundation. The interview covers topics such as: playing with repulsion; the frank reactions Krifka’s received from more non-Art World audiences about being a ‘weird lady’ for the things she paints; her process of working with models, and more...
Evita Tezeno seeks the pleasures of life through the eyes of visual expression. Her exuberant passion for life leads her to explore the human experiences related to her childhood memories and life’s encounters. Using bright colors soft hues, and bold figures, Tezeno crafted visual stories, by the use of hand made papers, crayons and other mediums, that evoke smiles, joy and thoughts of yesteryears.”
The Baltimore Museum of Art will celebrate 2020 by adopting a daring new policy designed to reverse the art world’s historic marginalization of female artists. Museum director Christopher Bedford said Thursday that every artwork the BMA purchases for its permanent collection next year — every painting, every sculpture, every ceramic figurine — will have been created by a woman. In addition, each of the 22 exhibits on view will have a female-centric focus. Nineteen will showcase artworks exclusively by women and will include works by at least one transgender woman, Zackary Drucker...
The title of this year’s winning work, by Hugo Crosthwaite, tells us the name of the person represented in the artist’s three-minute stop-motion animation of black-and-white drawings. It is A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a young woman from Tijuana, Mexico, who is seeking a better life in the United States. Her face emerges from a blank space, like a piece of paper or canvas, and then we watch as her body is sketched in, as though she’s materialized from nothing. In a series of brief vignettes, we learn about the danger that she, like other migrants, has faced, including violence and sexual harassment.
The new exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles by Mexican-American artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971) grabs your attention the moment you walk into the gallery. The artist, who lives and works in San Diego and Rosarito, Mexico, created a monumental, 27-foot wide multi-panel work called Death March. Multiple human figures and skeletons compose a funeral march, appearing to honor the deceased in a manner that calls to mind Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.
The collective work resulted in a “bright, “vibrant,” “rhythmic” and richly layered project that references, among other things, jazz, the Inglewood-raised saxophonist Kamasi Washington, the late rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle, and low-rider car culture. Though it’s been 20 years since Hatton moved to L.A., the city is still revealing itself. When he embarked on the Crenshaw/LAX project, his impressions and understanding of the city shifted.
In Ratio: Poems, Laura Karetzky creates paintings within paintings. These intimate and personal works construct narratives that bring people together while also suggesting gaps in time. Karetzky layers pictorial fragments that resemble cell phone selfies and snapshots, juxtaposing large-scale realistically rendered scenes with smaller insets. The pieces are beautifully painted figurative representations that include close-ups of faces, corners and walls of interior spaces, as well as exterior scenes extracted from everyday life, many including groups of people.
For painter and video artist Hugo Crosthwaite, life has unfolded in equal parts on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and he has come to understand that in a way the border region itself is its own nation, with a unique culture that is both blended and divided, and a population comfortable with dualities. Both his films and graphite and ink drawings on canvas—often at monumental scale—exist in a black-and-white palette and are rich with regal, stylized detail.
The painter is showing a new series of drawings, panel paintings and animations that chart the ebb and flow of humanity, along with unseen magical phenomena, in the U.S.-Mexico-border region where he lives and works. (The artist divides his time between Rosarito and San Diego.) Crosthwaite, a painter whose work is as influenced by comic books as it is by Gustav Doré, recentlywon the top prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwi Boocheyer Portrait Competion, pays tributes to Goya’s Caprichos. A recent series capturing grotesqueries and folly.
Los Angeles-based painter, Edie Beaucage, crisply deploys multi-hued brushstrokesto set off characters in color field drama and fantastical spaces. Edie received her Masters of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design in 2010. Her work has been exhibited at the UNTITLED art fair and is part of the Creative Artists Agency Collection. She is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Los Angeles artist Lia Halloran wants to touch the heavens and to celebrate women who had the same ambition long before her. Her The Same Sky Overarches Us All, at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, mostly consists of seven-foot-high vertical prints inspired by a group of women known as the Harvard Computers. Halloran weaves their story, along with her own and the universe’s, into cosmic vignettes.
The video begins with the sound of a guitar strumming and a voice singing in Spanish. The main character is sketched quickly, beginning with her eyes, then face, hair and shoulders. She gazes into the distance. Over the course of the three-minute stop-motion drawing animation video, we watch as the main character goes about her life, immigrating to the United States and trying to succeed in her new country.
Portraiture is due for a reframing. Although the art form has traditionally served to memorialize the affluent and the powerful, the finalists of the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition point to a future where portraits empower the disenfranchised. The triennial competition, founded in 2006 by an endowment from the late Virginia Outwin Boochever, calls for artists to “challenge the definition of portraiture.” First-prize winner Hugo Crosthwaite does just that. His 2018 stop-motion animation, A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, illustrates one woman’s journey from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been named the first-prize winner of the fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which aims to reflect the contemporary state of portraiture in the United States. Recognized for his stop-motion drawing animation A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, 2018, Crosthwaite is the first Latinx artist to receive the $25,000 award since the national competition was founded in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Amy Sherald, the previous winner of the prize, the San Diego–based artist will receive a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the National Gallery’s collection.
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has announced the winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a triannual contest honoring artists that “challenge the definition of portraiture.” Hugo Crosthwaite, a San Diego-based artist, will take home the $25,000 prize, which also comes with a commission to create a new portrait for the museum’s permanent collection.Crosthwaite follows in the footsteps of now-veritable art star Amy Sherald, who won the last Boochever award in 2016.
Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts.
Mendoza created White Wilderness/Maleza Blanca at the invitation of the museum. Chief Curator Maria Esther Fernández was first impressed with his work about seven years ago when he was part of a group exhibit at the Triton. She kept him on her radar for the future for a major, solo exhibit.
"Painting is an interesting medium — it's old and traditional, and in that respect it has inherent qualities that keep it grounded. It is the most primary visual language, pigments on a flat surface, and to me it acts as a constant reminder of the temporality and physicality of our bodies. By contrast, the types of socio-political power dynamics that I often explore are rather intangible, diffused and abstract."
In her first exhibition with Luis De Jesus, Laura Krifka presents a series of seductive, even voyeuristic domestic interiors in which semi-clad female and male figures engage in intimate moments of conversation, reading, and repose. Though at first glance they appear to be straightforward portraits of our interior worlds, a little more looking reveals more choreographed compositions—shadowy figures gaze in at these figures from shrouded windows; the figures themselves angle their bodies; even the wallpaper, so vividly hued and loudly patterned, plays a part, leading our eyes where the artist chooses. Taken together, the paintings present a sly theater of sexuality, or as the gallery puts it, a “game of patience.”
Laura Krifka is a superlative, if shifty, storyteller — a cross between a delectably unreliable narrator and a canny ventriloquist. Her intriguing recent oils on canvas and panel at the Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles are painted with brushless exactitude, their crisp and controlled surfaces belying personal and interpersonal complexities beneath. Krifka tells it super-straight, but the “it” is slant.
Past and present, history and amusement, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in Federico Solmi’s monumental media work, The Great Farce (2017), recently acquired by Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art. The Block received the multiscreen, limited-edition work as a gift from the artist’s studio in recognition of the museum’s upcoming 40th anniversary and its related initiative “Thinking about History.”
Speaking of pop culture, if you’re excited to see the upcoming Joker film, you may want to stop by Frederico Solmi’s work at the gallery of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. The animation and colors present in his five-minute video, The Drunken Boat, are eerie and mesmerizing. Notable historic figures are seen partying together, vulgar smiles on their faces. It’s like a nightmare steeped in a rainbow of colors that you can’t stop watching.
At Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City, Laura Krifka’s hyper-realistic figurative paintings build to create an uncanny mood. In each work, figures are placed within an interior domestic space, and subtle sexual cues build as you view the works. The breast of a sleepy figure mimics the egg-patterned wallpaper behind her; lemons in various stages of juicing are laid on a table next to a bare buttox. These more overt sexual themes are soon overtaken by more subtle ominous ones—strange shadows fall over the furniture in each painting, as if someone or something is looming just outside of the picture.
Paul Anthony Smith: Containment is on view at Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles through Saturday, October 13. The solo exhibition is the Jamaican-American, Brooklyn-based artist’s first with the gallery.
Selfies in domestic interiors, mobile phones, and computer screens are ubiquitous throughout Laura Karetzky's paintings. Her fragmented figures inhabit familiar interior spaces such as a bedroom or a work space, resonating altogether the uncanny in our daily experiences in this digital age, where the boundaries between space, time, self and other become increasingly blurred and at times even disorienting. In this interview with Art Spiel Laura Karetzky reflects on her figurative painting roots, her process, and her upcoming projects.
Throughout The Body Electric,groupings of artists demonstrate shared engagements with themes of transgender identity (Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, Juliana Huxtable), visualizing queerness (Paul Mpagi Sepuya), and race (Howardena Pindell, Lyle Ashton Harris), speaking to how we negotiate our sense of self in relation to media-driven systems of representation.
With sweeps of blue and white, painter and photographer Lia Halloran explores the often overlooked accomplishments and progression of women astronomers through her exhibition The Same Sky Overarches Us All. Curated by Taras Matla, acting director of the University of Maryland’s Art Gallery, the exhibit is beautiful — and it has an admirable purpose. “Everyone’s promoting gender equality… this is a good place to portray female accomplishments,” said Victoria Hernandez, a senior art and communication major who works in the art gallery.
Paul Anthony Smith, Containment, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Smith collages bits of photographs of people taken throughout the African diaspora (Jamaica, Brooklyn, Puerto Rico) and then carves into these to create patterns that mask and mute the original image. Afterwards, he scans, manipulates and silkscreens the result, creating yet another layer of distortion.
In 'White Wilderness,' sculptor deploys natural forms against violence and oppression.
Mendoza’s work in “White Wilderness/Maleza Blanca” is towering in scale, but they’re not simply heavy objects that take up space or to stare at in awe; they bear a meaningful, psychological weight.
As a collective, we wanted to take time to hightlight those that are doing the hard work of pursuing their own creative and academic goals. While also paving the way to further the representation of marginalized people in the arts and humanities. We have called this series, Taking Our Seat, for our current feature. We sat down with artist, Jackie Milad.
Drucker, the 36-year-old transgender artist, activist, actress and producer of the television series Transparent, who The New York Times described as “tall and blonde with eyes as blue as swimming pools”, momentarily loses her train of thought.I had asked her what she sees when she sits in front of a mirror. “That's such a revealing question, it's wonderful,” she says, smiling.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announces the acquisition of a photograph of the bust of Shonke Mon thi^, who was a prominent warrior and spiritual leader of the Osage people and hereditary Chief of the Pa tso li^ Big Hill Band at the turn of the 20th century. This work by Latino artist Ken Gonzales-Day was first displayed by the Portrait Gallery in UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, which was presented as part of the museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition program.
The work is undeniably chaotic, struggling to contain the exploded forms of color and texture and memory in a surge of energy and heat. And yet it also holds a persistent beauty, lines of elegance and grace that cut through the debris and roughness in lucid and reassuring curves. What is left is both a hope and a hollowness: streets clear of foreign tanks, skies absent of fighter jets, the silent stillness of a bombed-out city, this vast and sudden absence, this aching emptiness.
Now, it seems the Shed, a new arts complex in the heart of Hudson Yards, may be going through its own, lower-key crisis. Earlier this month, a boycott of fitness properties such as Equinox, Soulcycle and Blink over owner Stephen Ross’ decision to host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump bled into other investments. The artistic duo who style themselves Zackary Drucker + A.L. Steiner have removed their work from the Shed’s “Open Call, Group 2” exhibition, in protest of Ross’ fundraiser.
Zackary Drucker says she’s used “code-switching” as a trans woman navigating the complex contexts of social and cultural structures. Add to that, she appreciates the nuances of moving between and among the interconnected yet oppositional worlds of fine art and entertainment production in Los Angeles.
Laura Krifka takes on the classical stance of European academic painting in her first solo show with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, smashing ivory tower patrician preciousness with a cheeky wit, advanced technique, and lush elements of both social realism and rococo modernism. The new work represents an evolution from her Flemish Renaissance style toward more modern visual cues and a crisper hand that is less folk-inflected and while not quite surreal, are certainly uncanny.
I’ve been running THE FRANKLIN with my husband Dan Sullivan since 2012. THE FRANKLIN is a gazebo type of space designed by us and located in the backyard of our home. After completing my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, the artist-run community in Chicago became my preferred to-go-to community. I was fascinated by the energy, enthusiasm, comradery and complicitness I kept finding while experiencing the artists-run spaces. This experience brought me lifetime friendships, my first exhibition at a major Chicago art museum and an invaluable collection of art that continues to grow. Exchange, support and the gift of visibility are all a part of the M.O. that motivates us to foster the artist-run model as an intricate part of our life philosophy.
Ken Gonzales-Day is a historian, and the author of the book Lynching in California. He included the Callahan lynching story in his book as an unconfirmed case. And he says that people don’t often realize how common racist violence was in the history of the Western US. “I wanted to write a book to clearly demonstrate racialized violence was active in California, and that it wasn’t just some sort of race-neutral wild-west frontier sort of activity, which is what many people thought at the time,” he says.
Laura Krifka’s forceful painting, entitled Grab Bag, 2016, oil on canvas, 40” x 30,” is a wonderfully perplexing image of a nude woman covering her genitals with her hands, in a harsh flash bulb kind of light. Her vintage hairstyle and the sleazy curtain behind her, plus the strange color sensibility (it almost appears like a colorized black and white film still) make it seem like a still photo from the 1930’s to 40’s. It’s almost like she is on display in a Hollywood casting couch kind of way.
Connecting writing and visual art, Brooks titles his pieces after phrases from his poems. Poetry also takes on a more subtle and philosophical role—just as poetry uses enigmatic language, so too does A Map of Scents require a close reading. Brooks refrains from direct narratives and overt political statements; rather, meaning takes shape as each individual work contributes to a collective gallery of memories.
Take, for instance, Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto’s interactive iteration of “GRAFT (Cuba),” a version of which was presented at the Chicago Cultural Center earlier this year, and which consists of a patterned metal wall that features photo documentation of Soto’s experiences. While the Cultural Center version showed images of Soto’s hometown in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, the Cuba iteration features photographs taken in Havana. The reward of seeing this piece in person is that in this iteration, the pie-shaped mirrors on the patterned white wall also reflect the other pieces in the gallery, reminding viewers of the closeness and collaboration that sparked this show.
Yes, in the work I danced for myself—my personal form of grieving—but I hoped it could embody many people’s grief. I find that with spectacles and casts of thousands, it’s more difficult to access feelings and content, since the content is too often the spectacle itself. I tend to focus more on intimate collectives because they’re more meaningful to me personally, and I like to construct situations that allow for others to feel.
Concordia grad Nicolas Grenier has been shortlisted for one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art prizes, the Sobey Art Award. Global’s Tim Sargeant meets the Montreal artist who could walk away with a $100,000 prize.
Few other places in New York conjure up such strong feelings. For residents, those feelings range from irritation to revulsion. For tourists, it’s a must-see falling somewhere on their itinerary between the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State building. From the unwashed hordes to stores that can be found in any mall to the neon sorcery decking every block, there’s no question that Times Square is a repository of excess in every way. Whether you find it distasteful or endearing, there’s no denying its pull, even if your personal contact with it is limited to TV on New Year’s Eve or, for locals, a train transfer on its many platforms.
Best known as a co-producer of the TV series Transparent, Zackary Drucker is an artist-activist who has devoted her career to making the world less grey and lonely for people who, like her, define themselves as transgender or non-binary. Her photographic and video artwork has been shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York, the Venice Biennale, and nominated for an Emmy. But in one of her most recent projects, she has resorted to direct action, creating an open-access database of pictures available to any media outlet, anywhere in the world, wishing to represent people who don’t fit into traditional gender moulds.
Beautifully curated, Three Years: The Davyd Whaley Foundation, exhibited at Castelli Art Space in June, offered a look at the works of seven artists supported by the foundation over the past three years. The collection of diverse, exciting art included a wide range of lustrous works; a mix of sculpture, paintings, and photography.
“My transition from young white boy with a false sense of privilege in the 1970s to young tranny-girl with little or no privilege was a real smack in the face,” Rosalyne Blumenstein wrote in her 2003 autobiography, Branded T. “My spirit and soul seemed to be uplifted and smashed on a daily basis.”Blumenstein is an icon. I met her, in 1993, when I came to New York as a newbie trans activist from San Francisco and visited the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, where Blumenstein, a self-described “woman of transexual experience,” lent street cred as director of the center’s pioneering Gender Identity Project, which included an HIV-prevention program for trans people.
When tasked with defining America, the forefathers of this country attempted to create a union that, though forged in rebellion to an oppressive regime, was ultimately funded by slave labor. By declaring this land a union where all men are created equal, only to deny representation and basic civil liberties to all who are not white men, the framers of our constitution bequeathed to us a contradiction that we are still working to correct today. Almost 250 years later, with the divisive nature of our political system and a multitude of bifurcation points within each party, it seems that defining the American identity has become nearly impossible.
Jamie Martinez: Congratulations on your recent shows, especially the solo booth with Ronald Feldman at the last Armory. It was one of the top booths in many publications. We’ll have to get back to that. Can you first talk about your background in the arts and your journey to becoming an artist in New York? Where did it all begin? Federico Solmi: Well, it’s a long story. It all began almost 20 years ago, when I left my hometown: Bologna, Italy, and I decided to move to New York to pursue a career in the arts. It was the best decision of my life, of course; not an easy decision, but it proved to be the right one.
“Guest-edited by Tilda Swinton. Inspired by Virginia Woolf,” so reads the cover of this year’s summer edition of Aperture. The issue and the accompanying exhibition are centered around Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, a piece of writing Swinton knows intimately, as she embodied the character Orlando in Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation of the novel.
Concordia grad Nicolas Grenier, BFA 04, is among five shortlisted candidates in the running for the Sobey Art Award, the largest prize in Canada for young artists. The prestigious prize for contemporary Canadian art is awarded annually to a Canadian 40 or younger who has exhibited work in a public or commercial art gallery in the previous 18 months.
Your Body is a Space That Sees is a series of large-scale cyanotype works (approximately 6ft x 6ft) that source the fragmented history and contributions of women in astronomy to represent a female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery and historical accounts of a group of women known as ‘Pickering’s Harem’ or the ‘Harvard Computers’. This little-known group of up to forty women made significant influences in the field of astronomy by setting up classification systems that are still used today to measure the distance,at and chemical content of stars and yet were paid less than half the wages of men.
Caitlin Cherry’s growing invaluability to the art world should come as no surprise; her commitment to black female subjectivity places the oft-imitated but systematically dismissed aesthetics of hip-hop hustle front and center, posing a real threat to the sleepy status quo we've come to expect from genre figuration. Smart, subversive, and incontrovertibly sexy, Cherry's pieces hum with radioactive irreverence, transforming viewers into beholders with the flick of a brush.
The Sobey Art Foundation and National Gallery of Canada have named the five finalists for the 2019 Sobey Art Award, which is presented annually to a Canada-based artist age 40 or younger. The finalists represent Canada’s five geographic regions, with Nicolas Grenier representing Québec. An exhibition of works by the short-listed artists will open at the Art Gallery of Alberta on October 5, and the 2019 Sobey Art Award winner—to be revealed on November 15—will receive 100,000 Canadian dollars ($75,300).
The Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada are delighted to announce the five finalists for the 2019 Sobey Art Award. As one of the world's most prestigious contemporary art prizes, the Sobey Art Award is presented annually to a Canadian visual artist age 40 and under."The Sobey Art Award helps to keep the National Gallery of Canada current within the dynamic landscape of contemporary art in Canada. It offers invaluable opportunities to exchange ideas between curators and artists across the country, and the chance to learn about a myriad of different artistic practices." notes Dr. Sasha Suda, CEO and Director of the National Gallery of Canada.
A Toronto artist showing in Berlin, a Montrealer working in Los Angeles and an Inuvialuk artist based in Calgary are among this year’s finalists for the $100,000 Sobey Art Award. The leading visual-art prize for younger artists, the award recognizing Canadian artists 40 and under from five regional categories, will be announced in November.
A flag, any flag, is the very definition of a symbol, a thing that exists in the service of what it represents, such as a nation for example, or a movement. At the same time, a flag is also a color story, a designed image, and a made object. The American flag in particular enjoys status as both image and object as well as symbol. Its distinct patterns are perhaps the most recognizable and narratively fraught in the world. Laws prohibit its physical destruction, but not its use as elements of corporate logos, fashion items, and superheros.
Multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto raises important issues through simple means. Her large-scale sculptures and interventions are modeled on ornate fencing and other architectural details native to Puerto Rico; they’re a subtle introduction to a rich and nuanced cultural history. Recently, she’s begun including “viewfinders” within these fence-like constructions, loaded with photographs from the island and elsewhere. Her projects are simultaneously universal and intensely personal—as is the case with her ongoing fascination with Iris Chacón, a performer and entertainer she first encountered on television as a child.
First published in 1985, the essay by Donna Haraway known as The Cyborg Manifesto made waves by criticizing the gender essentialism and idenity politics of feminism and encouraging people to unite with others baded on affinity. It proposes the symbol of the cyborg as rejection of boundaries "unfaithful to their orgins" and that this symbol can help to free peple from racist, male-dominated capitalism. The essay also purports that the "boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion."
Jonathan VanDyke’s 13-minute long video “Saints” could hardly be more different: it features images of feet walking over colorful scraps of cloth and a white, mask-like piece of paper covering a face, with the heavily made-up eyes peeking through.
For Aperture’s Summer 2019 edition, guest editor Tilda Swinton turned to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando for its uncannily prescient explorations of gendered identity.Set in the 16th century, the titular protagonist lives for 300 years, sliding back and forth between the genders on the way. Swinton’s fascination with the novel began when she starred as the titular character in the 1992 film adaptation directed by Sally Potter.
Jasper Johns famously attributed the origin of his iconic painting of the American flag to a vision he had at night; likewise, June Edmonds arrived at her first stroke-by-stroke reconstitution of a flag through a dream she had in 2017, after she returned to her home town of Los Angeles from a residency in Paducah, Kentucky. In her case, though, it wasn't about the same stars and stripes; during her residency, while driving to Memphis, she had seen a wall-size Confederate flag—a looming, unapologetic beacon still standing on the Southern hillside—to which she later responded in a series of paintings.
The actress makes her first foray into art curation in a photography show that revolves around the gender-defying themes of Woolf’s novel Orlando.Tilda Swinton can boast of many achievements, having performed in more than 70 films, including Michael Clayton, for which she won an Oscar in 2008. In a way hers is the broadest of careers, stretching from her salad days of the 1980s working with the acclaimed independent director Derek Jarman to her appearance in this year’s Avengers: Endgame, which is already one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
Long relegated to the margins of the art world, LGBTQ artists have always tested the borders of expression. Now they’re claiming their place at center stage.Zackary Drucker’s videos delight in deconstructing gender binaries (she’s also a producer on Transparent).
June Edmonds, Allegiances and Convictions, at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. An exhibition by the L.A.-based painter dwells on the significance of flags — both as visual statements and tokens of identity. In this case, each of her flags pays tribute to African American history past and present.
Stare long enough and you will find things hidden in the paintings — a moon here, a figure there, or maybe even a few things that aren’t really anything at all, like what you see when you name the shapes of clouds. Sora thinks of the work not as being about her experiences, but being driven by them. For her, that explosive section of a painting could be reminiscent of a car bomb, though a viewer might never make that connection. One wonders if abstraction becomes a kind of armor in her work, a way of confronting past trauma without being overwhelmed by discernible representations of it.
The solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist June Edmonds at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is a series of multi-colored paintings inspired by the American flag. All of them, vertical, and in earth tones, evoking the variety of brown skin colors.
TRhe Festival of Jewish Arts and Music (FOJAM), formerly Shir Madness Melbourne, takes over the Melbourne Recital Centre in a day-long immersion of contemporary Jewish culture with 30 performances across music, theatre, dance and conversation on Sunday 8 September, 2019.
In painter Vian Sora’s latest solo show, she illustrates a similarity between Berlin, Germany and Baghdad, Iraq. During a residency in Berlin last year, she had the chance to learn about the city’s rebirth after World War II. “As an Iraqi born artist,” she said, “my first-hand experience of war, political upheaval, migration and subsequent geographic and cultural displacement has deeply affected my life and my art. Since leaving Iraq, my works expressively address these issues.”
Edra Soto's warmth, generosity, and kindness are apparent (and contagious). She speaks candidly about her work, her influences, and her upbringing in Cupey, Puerto Rico. Her motivations, her life experiences, and her perspectives push her audience to more closely examine their own neighborhoods, sidewalks, fences and homes. In a contemporary art world that can often reject the participation of the audience, Soto takes the hands of her viewers and looks them in the eye. She acknowldges their bodies, their physical presence, and their memories. Her artistic and personal lives are bound together, which some might consider a great risk. However, her exceptional body of work deomnstrates the opportunity for shared growth by revealing vulnerabilities.
El Museo del Barrio, the NYC museum dedicated to Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American culture turns 50 years old this year. Frieze New York, the biggest week of the year for art in New York, kicks off on Thursday, and it won't overlook the milestone of the institution, which was founded in 1969, when Latino artists were largely overlooked by mainstream museums.
Another themed section of the fair turns a spotlight on contemporary and modern Latin artists. Taking cue from the legendary performance artist Ana Mendieta, Diálagos presents works from artists whose practice includes a bold sense of color, pageantry and performance, alongside a highly politicized examination of identity. Ken Gonzales-Day explores, through various media, the material legacies of identity-based oppressions, casting an unflinching eye over histories of slavery, colonialism, gender-normativity and other systemic evils.
The anchor fair of the week promises to be just as chock-full of programming as in previous years. There are also some new additions, including the Diálogos section, which will show works by Latinx and Latin American artists like Ana Mendieta, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Marta Chilindron; and the Frieze sculpture prize, a new commission made this year by up-and-coming artist Lauren Halsey.
Double Horizon takes its title from Lia Halloran’s three-channel video installation composed from documentation of roughly thirty flights the artist made in the course of her training in air piloting and navigation and early aviation experiences over the greater Los Angeles area. In its play of continuous moving and transformed moving images, the work represents a significant departure from work that precedes and continues alongside it.
Adventurous and thought-provoking but remarkably free of big artistic statements and the attendant egos, an exhibition at the artist-run project space Serious Topics in Los Angeles might be the antidote to the international biennial surveys opening next month. The artists who organised the show, Kristin Calabrese, Joshua Aster and Torie Zalben, call it Dreamhouse vs Punk House (Plus Cat House). Very few of the nearly 200 miniature paintings and sculptures included measure more than 5 by 5 inches and most are significantly smaller—beautifully installed in three hand-built, high-rise dollhouses, each with its own character.
Graft (2018), the most recent version of Soto’s ongoing series of architectural interventions, transforms the Cultural Center’s lower-level gallery into a site for active viewing and engagement, in keeping with this civic institution’s public mission and the artist’s commitment to social practice. The central component is a continuous wood screen that runs the length of the gallery’s street-side windows, obscuring our view of the outside world. Instead, the viewer’s gaze is directed to the screen inside, painted a vibrant monochrome coral and punctuated with a rhythmic pattern of geometric cut-outs.
How far will an artist go to create their work? ORLAN altered her physical appearance, transforming herself using elements from famous paintings and sculptures via plastic surgery. Marina Abramovic invited Museum of Modern Art visitors to sit still and silently across from her for unspecified durations of time over 10 weeks in 2010. Lia Halloran, an artist who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the San Francisco Bay Area, learned to fly airplanes in order to film the landscape of Los Angeles from the sky.
Another artist involved in the exhibit is Evita Tezeno. “Black female artists are not represented in the community like everyone else is,” she said. “It is more of a male-dominated society. This exhibit is a marvelous vehicle to show what we are made of as a Black female artist.” Tezeno is a print maker and collage artist and has created artwork such as I Am Somebody, which depicts a strong female who has been through a lot.
For “Dreamhouse Vs. Punk House (plus Cat House),” nearly 200 artists made works averaging 4 x 4 inches to be shown in three thematic multi-story dollhouses. It may sound like just so much whimsy, but this delirious exhibition/installation hybrid is an impressive and imperative total work of art. Organizers Kristin Calabrese, Joshua Aster and Torie Zalben achieve a delightful presentation whose ebullience belies the months of planning and weeks of construction that went into it. After all, six-story dollhouses in which each floor’s apartments are conceived, decorated, lighting-designed, transformed into micro-installations and/or curated like proper individual salons don’t just happen by themselves.
The Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground in Queens holds the remains of around 1,000 people, many of them African or Native Americans—but it only has four grave markers, all naming men. The women buried at the landmarked site are now publicly remembered at the Queens Museum, in the exhibition Alexandria Smith: Monuments to an Effigy (18 August), the Bronx-born artist’s first solo show in New York City. “My focus was to honour the women,” Smith says of the show.“Traditionally, women of colour—their stories have been buried or changed, or just not really told.”
Downtown Baltimore got a surprise this April, with the reveal of a large format work of art affixed to the side of Harbor Park Garage, a parking garage located at 55 Market Place. The artwork, which is visible from the Jones Falls Expressway, is a custom piece by artist Edie Beaucage.
It was in an unlikely place to contemplate art where Karla Diaz, co-founder of Wilmington-based art collective Slanguage, began to formulate the idea behind the current exhibit at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum. At the law offices where some of the museum’s collection hangs—including several second wave abstract expressionist pieces—Diaz noticed how some employees’ desk decorations matched the colors of the paintings and how even their clothes complemented the works.
Stock photos don't have a great reputation when it comes to gender-inclusivity. Options are limited at best or non-existent at worst.
That's why Vice Media's feminist channel Broadly decided to launch their own stock photo library of gender-inclusive images. The Gender Spectrum Collection includes over 180 images featuring 15 trans and non-binary models
On Tuesday, Broadly, Vice’s vertical covering women, gender non-conforming folks, and the LGBTQ+ community, published a stock photo library featuring more than 180 images of trans and non-binary models that, according to the site’s announcement, “go beyond the clichés of putting on makeup and holding trans flags.” It is the first database of its kind, and, while stock photos might seem like the stuff of goofy memes, it actually represents a historic step forward for queer representation in media.
Lately, I have been thinking of 1 minute short stories when I paint. I want to know who the character is, what is she doing and that she is being herself. I am interested in finding an emotional value to the portrait; then I feel the character has landed. It’s similar to finding the right tone when you play music. My work can range from emotional loss and fragility to bravura and extravagant characters. It is all improvisation and it varies with my mood.
Solmi exploits emerging technologies to reveal the hypocrisies in contemporary society, making art with political and social commentary as a means to disrupt the power structure of our technological age,” the Italian artist’s site says. “ … Solmi confronts the audience with his own absurd rewriting of past and present-day events. Solmi stages a virtual world where our leaders become puppets, animated by computer scripts rather than strings.
The exhibition is a series of portraits of young Los Angelenos that captures the condition of isolation in a world full of technological distractions. Although more connected than ever with the rise of social media, studies suggest that people are losing their ability to cultivate meaningful interactions. Younger generations in particular – who came of age during this technological shift – have been severely impacted, and report experiencing high levels of social isolation, inadequacy and anxiety that is exacerbated by the culture of hyper-exposure society has embraced.
Federico Solmi’s large-scale, one-of-a-kind books (each contain six acrylic paintings) are some of the most unique works on paper I’ve ever seen. They feel like medieval folios—heavy with paint—yet the pages still turn easily. Solmi’s Counterfeit Heroes series is the newest and frighteningly timely iteration of his many years of work indicting power-hungry politicians and celebritism. His images are the right kind of creepy. He also reminds us of the very real link between our present and our imperial past.
A photographic image represents the transformation of the three-dimensional world onto a flattened picture plane. In our mind’s eye, we recreate the scene to understand the image. Many photographers are interested in the relationship between illusion and reality and the camera’s ability to collapse or expand space. In the 1970s and 1980s, photographers like Zeke Berman and John Pfahl fabricated interventions in the natural and man-made landscape that only cohered when seen from a specific vantage point— the exact spot where they placed their cameras.
Karla Diaz and her partner, Mario Ybarra Jr., believe community involvement is crucial to art. That’s easy to see in the couple’s current exhibition at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, which makes viewers part of the conversation right from the title: Call and Response, When We Say…You Say. Diaz and Ybarra are co-founders of the Wilmington-based art collective, Slanguage. This exhibit, which opened Jan. 28, connects pop culture and high art to highlight the conversations that occur between art pieces, artists, and patrons.
Federico Solmi’s painting-video hybrids resemble the early viral internet pages of Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, which consisted of a near bottomless reservoir of United States iconography, collaged into schizophrenic politically-driven compositions. Solmi’s doing pretty much the same thing, but in the form of an object. In these works, the United States is cast as colonizer and oppressor.
Continuing her exploration of the representation and visibility of black women, the paintings Caitlin Cherry showed at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles depict black female figures who appear to be trafficking in the sort of flattened sexuality seen on Instagram. The women pose in alluring ways, as if the paintings were selfies that might procure thousands of likes.
There is no single archetype of the art dealer. Many gallerists are known for their selflessness and devotion to the creative process, but there are certainly bad apples, infamous for running glorified racketeering schemes. It can present a tricky dilemma for a young artist seeking representation—eager to take her career to the next stage, but wary of locking herself into a relationship that might not pay off.
Talking with Evita Tezeno feels like the first day of spring after a long, dismal winter. Even though she’s been earning a living through her art since the 80s, she talks about her life, her journey, and her art with the enthusiasm and excitement of a new artist fresh on the scene. Her calm energy and smooth storytelling make an interview feel like a conversation between friends.
In Culver City, I stopped by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, to see the exhibition of Los Angeles photographer Chris Engman. The trademark of his art is fooling your eye not once, not twice, but many times. And the more his art fools you, the more pleasure it delivers. At the entrance to the gallery, you are confronted by a full-scale installation made out of several vinyl photographs that make you believe you are stepping into water, walking through a forest, and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Refraction features Containment, a site-specific work originally commissioned for the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 in Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as new photographs from the Prospect and Refuge and Ink on Paper series. These various photographic projects range from architectural to sculptural to two-dimensional, each acknowledging strategies of seeing. Refraction explores the relationship between illusion and reality by exposing the deceit inherent in photographic image-making while engaging in philosophical and material play around slips in translation.
Hall and Soto’s “Forgotten Forms” is a clever composition of seemingly everyday objects that play off of each other’s vibrant colors and visual architecture in order to paint a vivid image of neighborhood identity.
Soto pays tribute to her native Puerto Rico by centering the exhibit around the coral-pink patterned concrete blocks or “quiebrasoles,” used as bus shelters in urban areas to shield waiting passengers from the sun. Additionally, the exhibit contains a massive series of pink “rejas,” or iron fences, another colorful feature of urban Puerto Rico.
"I continue to work with the reinterpretation of Myths. For most of human history, the 'Gods' had one (or more) dominions over which he/she held sway, and seen by those who worshipped them as beings with the same faults and frailties as the human race."
The first thing one notices upon entering Caitlin Cherry‘s show at Luis De Jesus is her sensational palette so improbable that it seems to have dropped from outer space. Clashing vibrant colors contrast, oscillate and dazzle as though her paintings were a laser light show. As the shock of hue subsides, you find yourself drawn into a bizarre alternate world ruled by curvaceous mystic black women who exude eccentric glamour while confronting discriminatory stereotypes.
“Remembrance,” at Rose Gallery. A group show featuring work by artists such as Martin Parr, Carla Jay Harris, Lebohang Kganye and others explores the ways in which photography has molded ideas of family and the ways in which that notion intersects with society and politics. Prior to the opening, the gallery is hosting a photography sale to raise funds for those affected by recent wildfires.
Hollywood loves selling binaries — comedy or drama, period or futuristic, action or romance, which means it should come as no surprise that this same philosophy typically applies to gender. So when Zackary Drucker, a transgender woman who had a background in experimental art, entered the industry in the early 2000s, she (predictably) had a hard time with the adjustment: “We all exist in so many worlds, but trans folks, especially, have a different way of compartmentalizing,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to integrate.”
In a world where every image is distorted, manipulated, aspirational and dysmorphic, what is to become of painting's history of generating interpretive, fantastical pictures? Beauty is both longed-for and suspect, female power is both lauded and feared. What is a self-assured paint warrior with an operatic talent and a love of disruptive art history supposed to do?
As the partial shutdown of the federal government enters its second full week, all Smithsonian museums and many other agencies in D.C. and beyond have shuttered for lack of funds, or are getting ready to close for an indefinite period...Other major shows that are, for now, closed to the public include a long-anticipated Bill Traylor retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Charline von Heyl survey at the Hirshhorn, and a Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar two-person affair, set to finish its run on Sunday at the National Portrait Gallery.
My paintings draw from the full range of abstraction’s possibilities, fusing diverse positions and processes in hard-fought, deeply considered compositions. I execute each work in a series of discrete stages: initial layers of paint are almost completely obscured by subsequent ones, with masking tape used to both inscribe and preserve areas of interest as the composition evolves.
Public art is the icing on the cake in the transformation of Liberty Station from a formal, staid Navy training center into a vibrant entertainment, shopping and arts destination. This year, six artists participated in Installations at the Station, the NTC Foundation’s public art program, which will continue next year. This year’s projects included community-painted skateboards representing a wave and a ship on a rooftop, a braided rope bench inspired by the native tribes and the Navy and murals of border scenes by Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite as part of an ongoing narrative in multiple locations that started in 2009.
And so we come to the Wildass Beyond of the exhibition itself, a dystopian beyond in the “no where” here and now. You forget that you’re in a city, least of all New York City, when you enter into the idyllic and rustic space, your feet literally in the dirt, so you feel at once reminded of and ensconced in Earth, something that is so easy to forget in the epicenter of global capital and its technologies of cable, wire, concrete and steel. Yet this is the imagined earth that remains after the end of the world.
A panel of nationally recognized curators, local arts professionals and community members from the Purple Line Extension Section 1 area has selected artists to create site-specific, integrated artworks for Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax and Wilshire/La Cienega Stations. The diverse range of accomplished artists includes: Ken Gonzales-Day, Todd Gray, Karl Haendel, Soo Kim, Eamon Ore-Giron, Fran Siegel, Susan Silton, and Mark Dean Veca.
I first came across Caitlin Cherry’s work through her excellent Instagram account, where she jokes about her art (one of her paintings mocks her for ripping off George Condo), posts pictures of her sphynx cat, and displays new work (recently, a tote bag emblazoned with a W-9 form). Her installation at New York’s Performance Space, A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN, brings her into collaboration with Nora N. Khan, American Artist, and Sondra Perry.
The Seattle-based artist fastens long straps to a canvas or wooden panel, which is usually covered in several alternating layers of gouache and acrylic paint. Livingston then attaches the straps to a harness inspired by those worn by body builders for strength training, and drags the painting facedown behind her across varying environments, like hiking trails, city parks, and asphalt roads.
Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours is an exploration of consumption, waste, and vernacular architecture. Discarded liquor bottles accumulated during Soto’s daily walks through East Garfield Park in Chicago are transformed into jewel-like totems. Rejas, decorative iron screens enclosing outdoor domestic areas in Puerto-Rico, also serves as an influence on the work—highlighting an interplay between security and ornamentation. They are beautiful, haunting, socially conscious works.
It brought together a similar intergenerational mix of racially diverse artists who identify widely across the gender spectrum, though their prompt was slightly different, creating responses to recontextualize the Segal rather than replace it outright. The results varied from Ken Gonzales-Day’s proposal to scatter sculptural corpses around the park to Carrie Moyer’s and Sheila Pepe’s photo-play satire of today’s middle-class lesbian life.
With this initial installment of Broadly’s Trans Legends oral history project, which I’ve led as a contributing editor to the site, we are shining a light on trans resilience by gathering stories and wisdom from 13 trans women who have been witness to—and key characters in—decades of LGBTQ history.
In each of the four paintings in Josh Reames’s exhibition BO-DE-GAS, uniformly distributed idiomatic images floated graphically on raw canvas surfaces. Punctuating each of the intimate gallery’s four walls, the paintings were supplemented with three black, wall-mounted handrails that sported a selection of attitude-declaring bumper stickers.
To say that Los Angeles-based artist Chris Engman’s photographs are trompe l’oeil illusions would be a gross understatement. Created through an elaborate and time consuming physical process, his work evocatively merges indoor and outdoor environments into mesmeric compositions that both perturb and dazzle viewers with their non-binary disposition.
One way in which the architecture of everyday life can be reformatted is through acts of political dissent, which transitions a familiar place into a site of extraordinary significance and enduring cultural relevance. This process is alluded to in Guirguis’s 2013 series Passages // Torroq, which reproduce architectural details from Cairo’s main train station. Untitled (lahzet zaman), (Untitled [moment in time] ), is fashioned after one of the most prominent features of the station, the windows and clock of the corner tower.
Deborah Roberts wants us to see black people—black girls and women specifically. For Roberts, this seeing begins in the face—what many deem the reservoir of recognition.1 But when recognition escapes the black woman (whether cis, queer, or trans) time and again, we must pause, and realize it isn’t enough to simply look upon their visage to recuperate the trodden history of patriarchal whiteness. Instead, Roberts wants us to see differently or, in her words, to “see [black] people not as parts or as a single person…[but] as a whole human being.” This charge is a complicated one: what is it that distinguishes a single person from a whole human being?
DnA explores moments in the school’s history, which track with LA’s growth as an art and design capital--from its founding on Wilshire Boulevard through its transition from what artist Billy Al Bengston calls its "constipated" years in the 1950s. Alum Garth Trinidad recalls the struggles in the 1990s and remarks on its blossoming in Westchester today. Edie Beaucage talks about being part of the new generation that has revived painting.
Who doesn’t love a good magic trick?! Photographer Chris Engman masterfully demonstrated that augmented reality and light projections are not the only way to create mesmerizing perspective illusions. Good old traditional photography will get you there as well if you’re creative enough. Chris Engman transformed 2D landscape photos into awe-inspiring rooms, where each inch is covered with prints to give off a 3D perspective.
Photographer Chris Engman is one of his landscape photos at a large scale in an unusual way: instead of showing it as a 2D print, Engman transformed a room into his photo by covering the wall, ceilings, and floors with prints.It’s essentially what you’d get if you used a projector to project the photo into the space, except he used prints instead of light.
Having known VanDyke’s work for almost a decade, I was struck by the multifaceted approach he took with research, performance and presentation. The exhibition consisted of two elements, two acts of looking: a 48-hour performance, during which VanDyke stood and observed 16 quilts, one at a time, for 3 hours each. All the quilts were selected by the artist from the museum’s collection. Simultaneously there was an exhibition curated by the artist with objects selected from the museum’s collection alongside his own paintings.
For the first time in its 11 years, the Creative Time Summit, the world’s premier conference at the intersection of art and politics, will convene in Miami from Nov. 2-3 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, Perez Art Museum Miami, Little Haiti Cultural Complex and other venues.This international platform for socially engaged art not only will consider topics of relevance to Miami, but that also were generated by Miami. For instance, sea level rise and borderlessness will be highlighted by Miami’s unique positioning as the major U.S. mainland link to the Caribbean and Latin America, and as a place particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Among purchases by notable individual collections was Kenneth Montague’s acquisition of Jim Adams’s Centurion (Self Portrait) (1977) from Luis De Jesus Los Angeles for the Wedge Collection. The large acrylic on canvas work was purchased on opening night. “Adams grew up directly under a major flight path in Philly, and dreamt of one day flying his own plane,” Montague explained on Instagram. “Upon arrival to Canada’s West Coast while still in his 20s, he immediately got his pilot’s license… and started painting.
The 19th edition of Art Toronto includes 102 exhibitors from seven countries, and it kicks off tonight at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. For years, the Surrey Art Gallery has been highlighting important artists overlooked by other Canadian art institutions. Among these talents is the 75-year-old Surrey local Jim Adams, whose retrospective The Irretrievable Moment they presented by the Surrey Art Gallery (as well as the Reach in nearby Abbotsford) in 2017.
On the canvases, we find a reflection of contemporary America, from the hypnotic beauty of the landscape to the exuberant music on the streets to the struggles of those at the margins. All this comes through exquisitely in the forceful colours and spirited brushwork for which Olson has become well known.
Paul Anthony Smith’s show Containment was expressly concerned with what cannot be contained, what exceeds the bounds of a single photograph to render, or an individual consciousness to reconcile. The discontinuous self, memory as an act of creative nonfiction, history as endlessly splintered and unreliably narrated – over the past few decades, these have all gelled into foundational truths and served to underpin myriad image-making strategies favoring montage, disruption, and contradiction.
Curator of painting and sculpture & Latino art and history at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Taína Caragol, said: “I co-curated UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar with Dr. Asma Naeem, as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s 50th anniversary program..."
Chris Engman’s Prospect and Refuge teaches us not to trust our eyes. On display at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery through November 18, the exhibit unsettles our senses of depth and scale, interior and exterior, origin and reproduction. It ushers us into artificial spaces and then immerses us in the tropes of nature. Engman achieves his uncanny effects mainly by taking enormous, high-density photographs and then affixing them to walls, ceilings, floors, and objects in domestic rooms and workspaces...
Though Luis De Jesus and Tarrah Von Lintel technically share an address in the Culver City gallery district, their operations are independent of each other. However, this month these neighboring exhibitions are very much in conversation. Unintended as this confluence is, in each of the three artists having solo shows at 2685 S. La Cienega we see a version of the same dynamic—a totally unexpected, materially subversive and exceptionally analog, labor-intensive take on what would otherwise be traditional mediums of photography and drawing.
Federico Solmi has created a drawing of George Washington, Pope Francis and Christopher Columbus holding the world as well as a glass of wine and other props. Solmi investigates the contradictions and inaccuracies of historical narratives, scanning his paintings into a game engine to combine past and present-day events.
Three large wooden tables that feature in-process paintings, resource books and a host of media are installed in the middle of the Lux Art Institute’s main gallery. The impromptu workshop has started to resemble the studio of artist Lia Halloran as she begins her residency at the museum. Halloran will continue to make work in the space for the next few weeks, while the current exhibit frames her interest in invisible histories and reimagined possibilities in astronomy.
Olson, who offers portraits of Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and Charon, Mercury, Venus and a violently erupting quasar, among others, admits his knowledge of the cosmos was somewhat limited at first. But he became fascinated not only with the science-based observational data but also the naming of them in Greek and Roman mythology.
Photographer Chris Engman invites you to enter a world within a world. His photography installation, titled Containment, is an immersive work that features images spanning the walls, ceilings, and floors of a specially constructed room. Upon stepping foot inside the space, you’re transported from a gallery setting to the middle of a bustling stream surrounded by a dense forest with trees cloaking most of the blue sky above.
Artist Chris Engman transports natural landscapes such as waterfalls, caves, and vast deserts to domestic interiors by securing large-scale photographs to the room’s walls, ceilings, and floors. “I believe photography derives its power precisely from the fact it can’t be entered, however much we may want to,” Engman tells Colossal. “When I make photographs I try to be mindful of this, even to exploit it.”
From a distance, Paul Anthony Smith’s “picotage” pieces, 2012–, resemble movie stills interrupted by television static. Up close, they look like pictures dotted with tiny dabs of white paint. Smith creates these small, textured imperfections by carefully picking apart his mounted photographs with a ceramic needle, exposing their white undersides.
Prospect and Refuge, an ongoing series of work by photographer Chris Engman, investigates the medium of photography through complicated juxtapositions. this body of work explores the relationship between illusion and materiality, nature and the man-made universe, moment and memory. through engman’s documentation and detailed re-creation, the artist asks the viewer to consider how we understand photographs and how we experience the world.
An exhibition of new works by an internationally acclaimed Canadian artist was inspired by a motorcycle trek across North America.
Like the grand sweep of McClure’s paintings, Laura Krifka’s 8-minute stop action animation, entitled “Sow The Wind,” features pioneer children (albeit paper puppets on strings) in a perilous environment filled with angry adults, wild beasts and death and destruction—all the while to the sound of a sweet upbeat nineteenth century waltz.
Acclaimed for her original, independent vision, Evans combines a homespun sense of craft with a visionary’s quest for the cosmic. Making molds from found vegetation, Evans connects earthly decay to the Big Bang universe through rendered sculptures of Hindu symbols, lingams, kundalinis, and voids. They are at once sexual, ancient, and expressive forms. The scope of the investigation has pushed Evans into a career that encompasses performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and sound elements.
Likewise, the embellished comeliness of Faulwell’s portraits bely disquieting details symbolizing the complicated personas behind the bombers’ superficial glamour.Surrounding their grisaille semblances, colorful flowers, haloes, ornamental filigrees and collaged photos signify dignity and consequence without disclosing much individuality. These women might be beautiful were their eyes not blackened, obliterated, and interlaced with serpentine vines. Their mask-like countenances bring to mind sphinxes embedded with riddles pertaining to motivations and morals.
"I began my career as a documentary photographer. I worked in that capacity (primarily in New York) for nearly ten years. For most of that time, I thrived on the energy and challenges of photojournalism. However, towards the end and over time I began to feel bit constrained – constrained not only by the practical limits of journalism but also the demands of a commercial art practice. In reaction to these feelings, my interest in fine art blossomed."
Danica Phelps draws with uncommon grace. Her line moves with liquid ease, following the momentum of time. It describes what happens in her life, and it also makes things happen. As her beautifually affirming show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles attests, her line has agency.
Since 1996, Danica Phelps has been keeping track of her income and expenses, integrating details of her financial life into her artworks. Often placed below simple, yet elegant and descriptive pencil drawings, Phelps creates long strips of short vertical lines— red for expenses and green for income—where each painted mark on the page represents a dollar. Using her finances as a point of departure, her layered and multi-dimensional artworks investigate the relationship between labor and value, both within and outside the art marketplace.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce DANICA PHELPS: Many Drops Fill a Bucket, the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2011, to be presented from August 4 through September 1, 2018. The drawings and sculptures that Danica Phelps has created for Many Drops Fill a Bucket record the experiences that she and her son, Orion, shared together during trips to California and India earlier this year.
A Tijuana artist is painting murals to raise awareness about the Trump administration’s family separations in San Diego. Hugo Crosthwaite is painting Mexican families on the beige walls of the Arts District Liberty Station. In one painting, a mother clutches her son. In another, a family behind bars, separated.
With the collapse of time and geography in the artistic plane, Solmi strongly underlines the ways in which state power, colonialism and imperialism have a symbiotic relationship with capitalist ambitions. Using drawing as a starting point, he creates a hybrid artistic medium by which to criticize – today’s society. With this goal in mind, the artist uses various media which lead drawing to a new state of movement and dramatization, through the use of 3D technology, game engines, motion capture, paintings and screens.
Next door, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has two fantastic collage-centric solo shows on view until July 28th. Dennis Koch: Beyond the Funny Farm! Crypto-K, Cutouts, Cut-ups, Copies, Mirrors, Membranes, and Temporal Algorithms comprises sculptures and works on paper inspired by dizzying literary theory alongside modified LIFE magazines. The artist has incised into the publications, creating compositions that play off of the cover story and the images from advertisements within. My personal favorite is “Sex Kitten” Ann Margret, hair wild, surrounded by a chorus of televisions.It’s the show in the front room, however, that I found myself thinking about days after seeing. SOMETHING ELSE: The Collages of Nathan Gluck is a survey of the late artist’s small works on paper that spans from the 1930s to the 2000s. Gallerist Luis De Jesus was a close friend of Gluck, who himself worked as a window dresser and assistant to Andy Warhol (among many other adventures). De Jesus lovingly organized this tribute with a personal eye to the artist’s singular wit and personality, sorting through a treasure trove of material in Gluck’s estate.
If Gluck is known at all, it’s as the man who assisted Andy Warhol in his commercial-art business for about a dozen years, ending in 1966. That standard view of Gluck as playing second fiddle to Warhol isn’t quite wrong, but it gives a false impression of how things stood when they first met, around 1951. At that moment, Gluck, a decade Warhol’s senior, was clearly the more sophisticated, mature, and art-educated of the two. He made this photogram, for instance, exactly ten years before Warhol’s tried his hand at the same medium, while still in art school. This and the other early collages at Luis De Jesus show that Gluck was fully clued-in to the latest in European Surrealism at a moment when Warhol was still literally in short pants.
Luis De Jesus hopes that a new class of Latinx collectors will emerge in the US like it has in the African-American community. A former artist and one of only a few successful Latinx dealers in the US, Luis De Jesus understands the difficulty of getting the art world to pay attention. Since founding his gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in 2010, he has made a career of showing young artists with something to say, and has quietly become a staple of the city’s art scene in the process.
Artists’ creations can be inspired by many different experiences. Traveling to a foreign city, meeting a new person, undergoing illness or even facing political upheaval can provide ideas for new work. For Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora, inspiration comes from a mixed palette of life experiences. She was born and raised in Baghdad and grew up with certain expectations as the oldest daughter and granddaughter of a Middle Eastern family.
A pair of exhibits at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles demonstrates two distinctly different approaches to the manipulation of paper in the service of cultural commentary. "SOMETHING ELSE: The Collages of Nathan Gluck" celebrates the centennial of the late artist's birth. Mr. Gluck is primairly recognized as Andy Warhol's early commercial art assistant. But the show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents an overdue retrospective of Mr. Gluck's own versatility and skill with collage, but also the wide-ranging possibilities of art form in general. Works on displayinclude photogram, steel engraving, gouache, watercolor, rubberstamps, and marbalized paper and exhibit stylistic influences of the decade in which they were created, such as cubism, surrealism, modernism, pop, word/ text, and postmodernism.
Transgender representation in media is shamefully scarce, offering few avenues for trans people to see their stories represented accurately in the world of entertainment. What’s even rarer is for trans women, especially trans women of color, to call the shots in the industry. But in the film Mother Comes to Venus by trans director Zackary Drucker, that reality is flipped on its head.
Absent are bodies in Pacifico Silano’s After Silence, yet this absence leaves a haunting presence in what remains. The artist, who only photographed magazines he personally culled over the years, was given access to former Whitney curator Richard Marshall’s collection of gay pornography, donated to NYU Fales Library following Marshall’s passing in 2014. From leather daddies to Americana and foaming beaches, all that is dear to queer life permeates from the pages, not excluding euphoria, endurance, and death.
When did you start incorporating printed imagery/print techniques into your work? About seven years ago my practice was driven by drawing and painting, but I became more conceptually interested in the off-handed quick cell phone pictures that I took as progress shots, than in the actual drawings or paintings. The camera added an extra layer of remove and movement and calculation that felt right.
I’m primarily interested in making paintings and drawings but I think that my practice is largely influenced from editing video work. At some point, I got tired of all that I depended on to make video installations, but I still wanted that complexity within my work. The passage of time, multiple viewpoints, and the experiences, sources and interests that lurk behind all images
After years of tenaciously applying, Brooklyn native Alexandria Smith got the news she’d been waiting for—the mixed-media visual artist had been accepted into the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts residency program. Her patience had finally paid off.
Although many artists and non-artists alike engage with the process of collaging, a successful collage is not that easy to achieve. For the merger of unrelated images and/or texts to resonate beyond the obvious, there is much to take into consideration— point of view, message, cohesion of elements, formal arrangement, etc. Juxtaposing disparate elements from various sources does not necessarily construe art. Collage has a broad history and those who venture into collaging must take into consideration their historical precedents.
Something Else represents the first survey exhibition of collages created by Nathan Gluck, who is recognized as Andy Warhol’s pre-pop commercial art assistant. Gluck helped shape and create many of Warhol’s most famous illustrations, ads and designs. He also assisted Warhol with his early transitional pop pieces. The collages on view span nearly 70 years, from the late 1930s through 2008. Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is located at 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. For information, visit luisdejesus.com.
Evita Tezeno creates collages using mixed media that remind one of quilt making as the texture of the figurative forms are palpable. Using brightly colored patterns and cubism to depict the human figure in her paintings she complicates perspectives that help to see the subjects in her artworks in a nuanced way.
The portraits are also landscapes. They include architectural elements, complex geometry and a dazzling palette of glistening gold, luxurious purple, blood red and deep black. They play off of Eugene Delacroix and Pablo Picasso’s exotic depictions of Algerian women. Faulwell’s intent was to continue that in a different way.
Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ platform dubbed "them" has revealed its first major project, Queeroes, a short film series developed in partnership with 5050by2020. The initiative includes a mentorship program designed to elevate storytelling from queer, trans and POC points of view. Mentors include Soloway, Emmy winner Lena Waithe (The Chi, Master of None) and writer-creator-showrunner Tanya Saracho (Vida). Featured voices in the program are Zackary Drucker, Chelsea Woods and Natalia Leite.
The bicoastal art-film nonprofit Dirty Looks today detailed the upcoming edition of its “On Location” festival in Los Angeles, naming the four programs that will form the core of its month-long screening series of queer cinema in queer-oriented spaces...Also on deck for the L.A. edition of “On Location” is a survey of short films and documentation of the life of Zackary Drucker, an influential trans performance artist and filmmaker who has been a producer of the Amazon series Transparent since it premiered in 2014.
In her collages, Roberts takes found images of black women and girls and alters them with pigment and paint, manipulating the optics of advertisement to create new fictions of beauty. “My art practice,” she writes, in her artist statement, “takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman.”
Her practice mainly focuses on the body and its relation to sexuality and gender, as well as the hidden aspects of transgender history, through facts and her own sexual identity. Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst also documented their gender transition together, through an amazing series of photographs called Relationship. This project gives an unprecedented, intimate insight and provides crucial knowledge about such an important process.
Based in Texas, the artist is known for creating collages out of found photographs, paintings and drawings. These often depict black girls entering adolescence, evoking moments of drama, strength and joy. It is Roberts' first solo show in Los Angeles.
“THE GREATEST SCIENTISTS are artists as well,” said Albert Einstein. For as long as artistic expression has existed, it has benefited from interplay with scientific principles – be it experimentation with new materials or the discovery of techniques to render different perspectives. Likewise, art has long contributed to the work and communication of science. We asked four outstanding artists to comment on their work and its relationship to science.
The body of work is maximal and grotesque and off-putting, but at the same time viewers can't look away, Cease says. "There's a complex push-pull and a cinematic character to them. They pull you in, they're transfixing. And then you realize what you're looking at. There's an implication, for sure, it's not just skewering the powerful leader, it's also pulling us in and then we realize, 'Oh wait, we're really just sitting back watching this happen.'"
Sometimes what’s absent from a museum says more about history than what’s included. Two contemporary artists—Titus Kaphar, who is African-American, and Ken Gonzales-Day, who is Mexican-American—have spent their careers addressing this issue. In the National Portrait Gallery’s newest exhibition, Unseen: Our Past in a New Light, the two artists take contrasting approaches—and work in two different mediums—to tell the stories of the missing and overlooked. The museum’s director Kim Sajet says Unseen hopefully will act as a town square.
Even before pie charts and bar graphs, before we’re plotting curves and breaking down conic sections in algebra and analytic geometry, we become very accustomed to the graphic visual representation of every kind of trend, concept, and systematized data or information. It almost goes hand in hand with the way we structure ideas, systems, and organizations.The visual concepts become part and parcel of the systems and ideas they express. They become integral to the way we extrapolate, track progress, draw conclusions, predict outcomes.
Los Angeles- based, Gonzales-Day mines museum archives and photographs sculptural objects most of them rarely, if ever, displayed publicly. His work deconstructs racial hierarchies, considers beauty ideals, and evaluates how artists have treated and interpreted white bodies and bodies of color. He embarked on this aspect of his practice in 2008 during a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
Last Saturday, March 18, a memorial service was held for Jack Doroshow, better known as Mother Flawless Sabrina, who passed away on November 18, 2017. A prolific drag queen and activist, Flawless Sabrina was a queer icon without parallel, whose work and mentorship has profoundly influenced (and continues to influence) generations of LGBTQ+ people. Among Flawless Sabrina’s closest confidantes was Zackary Drucker, an artist and cultural producer who is working to preserve Sabrina’s legacy through the Flawless Sabrina Archive.
There's something invigorating about Erik Olson's rough-hewn artistry. He's known for his portraits, faces jagged and disintegrating in gooey slashes of colour. But his latest body of work, one of his self-described tangents, focuses on trees. Including unabashedly jerry-built tree houses - with what might be called a faux-naif style, except that it feels too genuine. The results are exuberant, childlike and intriguing.
Other videos take a more abstract approach. Three works by Italian artist Federico Solmi, collectively titled Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth Video Trilogy (2011–2014), present a loose narrative and surrealist whirl of political symbolism in a jarring mono-channel animation. Cartoonish dictators and bloodless politicians move through landscapes of corporate logos and flag motifs. There is little sense of specificity, and yet the characters and scenarios feel disturbingly identifiable and common — political machinations have become as predictable, impersonal, and codified as ballroom dance.
Some years ago, a student of mine made what might be construed as a Freudian slip in a written exam, when she bemoaned the pernicious effects of a “dominant white male vulture.” That vulture is certainly still picking the flesh off the bones of mainstream cinema (should that read “manstream”?), and AIFF is doing its best to redress the gender balance, not only by screening work by women (in 2017, 53% of directors who had films at AIFF were women), but also through its Pride Award which is presented this year to transgender media artist Zackary Drucker, a co-producer of Transparent, the Amazon TV series.
Thick, gray paint peels from the walls of the gallery, revealing shocks of white underneath. A large tower has crashed to the ground (when? it’s unclear), and barricades, painted ghostly white, hide fluorescent lights, throwing shadows across the cracking walls. In this evocative environment, altogether titled Tower, 2018, one doesn’t simply encounter Rodrigo Valenzuela’s work but rather becomes drawn into its political implications.
Fast forward 40 years later, and I learn of the second of Durden & Ray’s “Book Club” group shows curated by Steven Wolkoff – the premise being to take a book regarded (then or now) as particularly ground-breaking (which in fact Adler’s book was at the time it was published), and offer a group of artists opportunities to have at and flesh out various aspects of the book – themes, motives, incidents, characterizations, or other dimensions – and/or their contemporary relevance/resonance or broader cultural implications.
“It’s not a direct response to any one political or military event in Iraq,” said Abrams. “It is inspired by the experiences of Vian Sora, a person from Iraq who has come to the United States and made her home here as a visual artist. It’s a piece that takes the totality of now well over a decade-and-a-half of our shared experience — both Americans and people abroad — as we try to absorb this world history.”
“As an adolescent, I discovered that by taking a Polaroid picture of myself dressed as a girl, I could escape the confines of boyhood.” Zackary Drucker, artist, trans activist, and producer of the series Transparent, shares how photography saved her life in the opening letter of Aperture magazine’s latest issue. Themed ‘Future Gender’, the issue is an expansive celebration of trans pioneers and today’s trans icons, guest edited by Drucker herself.
This year’s Round Hole Square Peg is dedicated to the question “What is queer photography?” and Tarely will join jurors Laura Aguilar, Paul Bridgewater, Zackary Drucker, Bert Green, and Robert Summers in selecting Best in Show.
A special in-studio episode of The Limit Does Not Exist! podcast. Lia Halloran is the type of artist who knows no bounds, exploring everything from the depths of our solar system to her local skate park. In this episode, Halloran shares her keys to successful collaborations and why she seeks out learning new skills. Plus, she offers advice on funding your ideas and why personal embarrassment can be a really good thing.
Zackary Drucker: I wanted to start by telling the story of how I found my way to you and your writing as a fourteen-year-old queer youth. It was the mid-’90s and I’d recently discovered the word queer. There I was, in the LGBT and women’s studies section at the bookstore. I don’t know what possessed me, but I shoplifted a copy of Gender Outlaw, and discovered the word transgender, and found myself in your words and in your experience in a way that I had never felt reflected before.
Multifaceted artist, versatile and absolutely impossible to circumscribe in a definition, he works, or rather, he manipulates, or even deconstructs; no, in reality, it dismembers, corrodes and fleshless, everything. Yes, everything. The symbols. Characters. The men. The environment. History. Everything that the artist has seen, heard, read, studied, lived, passed through a meat grinder before being re-assembled and served on a plate that reads «Here is civilization».
Her work is centered on ideas concerned with cultural and individual “Failure” (the failure to make life better), Utopia, and Ruins. Materials such as fabric, glass, steel, Plexiglas, foam, fiberglass, paint, and found objects together with fabrics and yarn are used with both comic irony and heartfelt sincerity, pointing to both material and emotional excess. The uses of vernacular craft processes and folk traditions in combination with digital technologies contradict ideas about progress and technological determinism. While socio-economic questions are raised around ideas about authenticity, labor, and value in the use of craftwork, value is also seen as a projection of ourselves onto things, like cute animals on the Internet, mythic American landscapes, and the built environment.
In these days of digital magic, it’s rare to have an “Oh, wow!” moment looking at a photograph. When everything is possible, nothing is exceptional. But Los Angeles artist Chris Engman doesn’t rely on computer wizardry to create his weirdly surrealistic images. Instead, he constructs elaborate, labor-intensive installations, which he uses a camera to document.
Même si elles sont conçues individuellement, les peintures de Nicolas Grenier se regroupent autour de ses préoccupations socio-environnementales. L'artiste de 35 ans, qui vit en partie à Los Angeles, a été marqué par l'élection de Donald Trump à la présidence des États-Unis et par sa coïncidence avec la montée des partis d'extrême droite en Europe. / Even if they are designed individually, Nicolas Grenier's paintings are grouped around his socio-environmental concerns. The 35-year-old artist, who lives in part in Los Angeles, was marked by the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and by its coincidence with the rise of far-right parties in Europe.
IntoThis Podcast is delighted to present our conversation with Montreal artist Nicolas Grenier. With an impressive display of talent, Nicolas lays down a path for self-scrutiny paved with paintings, architectural installations, videos, texts, etc. His works both, seduce and confront the viewer with formalist elements and objective imagery. He holds a BSA from Concordia University and a MFA from the California Institute of the arts. He is represented by Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal and by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles in LA.
"When I was four years old, maybe even younger, I would dive into this chest of dress-up clothes that my mother had in the basement and my parents would take Polaroids of me. This is something trans folks have done since the inception of photography. Imagining themselves outside the constraints of their everyday reality."
Featuring work by Cindy Sherman and Juliana Huxtable, and guest edited by artist, activist, and producer, Zackary Drucker, Aperture’s new issue celebrates the infinite possibilities of our identities. Newton’s third law, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” goes far beyond the scope of physics. We can see it in all areas of life, perhaps most clearly where oppression exists and takes root.
Upon coming up with this idea, Grenier then asked himself: “How do I, as a painter, visually display [it]?” The artist, who sometimes spends months developing his projects, admitted he liked the idea of land as a starting point for the pieces in Precarious Geographies. He used it to build upon the ideas and concepts in his paintings.
As a transgender artist, actress and producer, Zackary Drucker (Transparent, I am Cait) is often asked about trans narratives in film and television. In part, that’s why she’s curating the TransNation Film Festival, running this weekend in Los Angeles.
The linchpin of the show is a fictional text Gonzales-Day created from 1993 to 1996 but revisited in 2017. It traces the life of Ramoncita, a two-spirit person, from her early life as a naive indentured servant, all the way to old age as a self-actualized artist. The story is set during the Mexican-American War and involves one other central character, Nepomuceno, a New Mexican who fights on the Mexican side and is forced to secret himself home after the U.S. victory. The book is presented as an historical artifact, with a selection of pages available for reading in the form of framed photographs filling an entire wall of the back room. Many images in the gallery’s front were originally made as illustrations for the book, in which they also appear.
A new tradition may be starting between the transgender film festival TransNation and the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Los Angeles. For the second year in a row the two groups are collaborating to bring relevant trans stories to a collective stage. Stepping into a similar role as last year, filmmaker and producer Zackary Drucker (Transparent) has been given the official title of creative director this year.
Ending DACA will be Donald Trump’s Trail of Tears when he forces American children who lack documentation to a country they may not remember, and more importantly it breaks up families. Breaking up of families was a central component of slavery because it diminished individuals and communities and kept people of color from being seen, or seeing themselves, as equal to whites.
The illusion of shallow space contained in Tolliver's newest paintings evokes an enthralling game of tug-of-war between figure and ground. Wild color and dancing gestural forms, all vibrantly alive, wrestle one another, pushing forward towards the viewer. The forms nestle tangled within the confines of an intricate lattice— the glue that reigns disparate elements into a complex unity. Each composition employs the modernist grid, which remains always parallel to the picture plane and never tilted into perspectival space. Like a chain link fence or map coordinates, the artist's grid keeps things in check in an otherwise restless space.
On the second floor, hanging from the ceiling, two pairs of pants feature the words “MIGRA” and “NO ICE” affixed to the waist areas. These are the work of Hector Dionicio Mendoza, an artist who immigrated to America in the early 1980s at the height of punk music, and the pants look very much like artifacts of East L.A. Chicano punk history.
Ken Gonzales-Day's exhibit Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City (through Oct. 28) is the product of such excavations. Tracing his family back to 16th-century New Mexico, the Los Angeles artist learns about his complicated genealogy and writes his family history as if it were a novel in which his ancestors are the characters. The exhibit, which runs as a complementary show to PST, features photographs of the artist posing as each character, both male and female. Most prominently, he performs the role of Ramoncita, a “two-spirited” Zuni woman of New Mexico wearing Spanish colonial garb.
The singularly remarkable thing about Ken Gonzales-Day’s re-creation of his breakthrough 1993-96 photographic project, Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River is the infinitely expansive temporal envelope it seems to occupy. This is more than partially by design in that it appropriates literary tropes and motives of 19th century frontier novels to serve a much larger conceptual and cultural conversation. That such a conversation might be no less relevant and possibly even more urgent today, though, could scarcely have been anticipated when the work was being made. Now, against a backdrop of seismic human migration and planetary change, it seems as if the project could have been made 60 years ago or just yesterday.
In our culture we find “space” everywhere. It is prevalent as a type of background noise in our speech and writing. Space is taught in geometry, physics, architecture, and even in psychology, with terms like “personal space” and “psychological space.” The (often subliminal) purpose of adding space to terms that stand-alone is to make those terms more passive, and to give the term’s user distance from the subject.
And in a photomural by the Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzalez-Day, the body is conspicuous through its absence. The mural is based on one of many photographs the artist has tracked down of lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans and Chinese immigrant men in California in the early 20th century. In the nocturnal picture used here, men milling around a tree look upward, but the object of their attention is missing. The artist has erased the form of the hanged victim, leaving dark, empty space.
History is written by the victors, or actually by those in power. Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, culturally specific museums, such as the Leslie-Lohman Museum, El Museo, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, have been reclaiming scholarship and writing history from multiple perspectives, making for a more nuanced and complex interpretation of US history. Those interested in the future of Confederate symbols (flags, monuments, sites) and how to properly provide interpretations that are nuanced and multifaceted, can take a page from the book of culturally specific museums.
"I'm a trans woman myself, and I think that the lived experience that I bring to my job in 'Transparent,' and all of the entertainment projects that I work on, is crucial. You can't just make it up and have this kind of created notion of what a trans experience is like. I think that the only way that our stories can be told accurately is by us."
It says a great deal about the post-genre moment that these works would be at home now in a range of sculptural contexts, even if, for instance, the use of pantyhose was a dramatic, disjunctive move when Senga Nengudi first started engaging with it decades ago. There are striking pieces here using fake fur and innertube rubber (Victoria May), vinyl (May Wilson), industrial felt (Lloyd Hamrol) and found afghans (Miyoshi Barosh). Allusion to the body is one through line, many of the soft surfaces evoking skins, pelts or protective coverings. Contrasts between the animate and the mechanical, the organic and the industrial, is another.
In the main gallery, Eric Beltz’ graphite rendering hangs near nonobjective abstractions; while Soo Kim’s double-sided cut-out print fractures the sight-line of Laura Krifka’s small but incisive Scar (2015) adjoining other female figure paintings by Phung Huynh, Junghwa Hong (painting pictured above) and Georganne Deen. Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia’s paper weaving offers a fitting metaphor for intermingled visions. Others number too many to mention, but each piece in this show exudes a worthy presence; and somehow they all work together. You’ll likely linger longer than you intend.
“We the people” is a slogan for the United States and a rallying cry. But the exhibit asks: Who is the “we”? In response, Christopher Harrison (independent curator and artist), Johnnay Leenay (Minnesota Museum of American Art), Mary Anne Quiroz (Indigenous Roots Cultural Center) and Maggie Thompson (Two Rivers Art Gallery) present artwork with disparate cultural points of view. Artists include Star Wallowing Bull, Zackary Drucker, Rico Gatson, Susan Hauptman, Nooshin Hakim Javadi, Steve Ozone and others.
Laverne Cox narrates the history of the transgender civil rights movement in an illustrated video in collaboration with Time and the ACLU. The video is a collaborative effort from “Transparent” producer Zackary Drucker, artists Molly Crabapple and Kim Boekbinder and Cox.
These familiar yet monstrous creatures are echoed in Roya Farassat’s “Menagerie” series. Each of these nineteen pieces was created using mutually exclusive processes. Farassat bleached toned paper with a unique pattern resembling a Rorschach inkblot, and then, expanding on the dissolved areas, added ornamentation in white acrylic paint to create a hybrid of negative and positive processes and space. The resulting figures resemble chimeric combinations of insects and human beings: The King (2013) could be a moth wearing royal robes, and Tribal Dancer (2013) seems to have the features of a mantis along with a bra, tutu, and tiara.
Nicolas Grenier’s Vertically Integrated Socialism, presented at Centre Clark from May 18 to June 23, is also a kind of ambiguous moral fable. Grenier’s “architectural fiction,” delivered as a live lecture-performance by artist with video accompaniment, takes the form of a condo pitch presentation and warps it into something vaguely dystopian. Originally conceived in the post-crash aftermath of 2009, while he was a student at CalArts with a studio in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, the project is an attempt to conceive a “Machiavellian solution” (i.e., one that “solves” a problem by dispensing with ethical considerations) to the overlapping problems of homelessness, gentrification and real-estate speculation.
The rogues gallery of Rorschach-blot insects in Roya Farassat’s spiky and spectral “Menagerie” series is drawn with bleach. That erasure gives them ghostly pallor. Using delicate white marker, Farassat outfits each with humanizing costumes and props. “The Bride” has a lacy ivory skirt and freakishly long arms; “The Gangster” wields rifles. Still, they maintain their sheer, alien bugginess.
Sensing resonances between Messiaen’s inspirations and our contemporary challenging political moment, artist Susan Silton decided to restage the work in a large warehouse space in downtown LA, not far from the site of her 2015 operatic piece A Sublime Madness in the Soul. The all-female cast and crew will feature four musicians accompanied by four dancers performing a minimal score choreographed by Flora Wiegmann. The work will be preceded by an introductory reading by Cristina Frias of a text by Hannah Arendt, well known for her writings on totalitarianism.
I met my grandmother, Flawless Sabrina, when I was 18. It was 2001, and I had just moved to New York City from Syracuse. I went to the West Side Piers for Wigstock, a drag festival they had back then. I couldn't afford the $20 to get in and see the performance, so I hung out near the entrance and took pictures of some of the queens who were coming in and out. As Flawless Sabrina left, I took a picture of her, and she said to me, "You're on the wrong side of the camera, kid."
Visual artist Lia Halloran's newest exhibit, Your Body is a Space That Sees, features large-scale paintings of astronomical objects that were photographed and catalogued by women working at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s. Those women, along with their male colleagues, took thousands of photographs, catalogued and characterized the cosmic objects therein, and changed the landscape of space science. Despite the impact their work had on the world, those women were left out of history for many decades, a fate suffered by many female scientists that is now being somewhat remedied.
Tamales fashioned from crushed Doritos. Grilled cheese sandwiches turned golden brown with a hot clothing iron. Brownies formed from crushed cookies, candy bars and hot coffee. Samples of these dishes were handed out to a dinnertime crowd gathered at the Sister Hearts Thrift Store on West Judge Perez Drive in Arabi on Monday (May 22), during the "Prison Gourmet: New Orleans Cook-Off." A group of women, all formerly incarcerated, re-created the dishes they had made in their prison dormitories, using whatever tools they had and food purchased from the commissary or stolen from the prison kitchen. The evening was co-sponsored by Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz and Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, which is planning a major exhibition in spring 2018, focusing on Louisiana's high incarceration rate.
Théâtre-vérité, récit-mise en abyme ou exposition-conférence ? Un peu tout cela, le projet proposé par Nicolas Grenier dans un centre Clark méconnaissable. L’espace est feutré et les miroirs tout autour précipitent le public au coeur de l’intrigue. / Truth theater, story-telling or exhibition-conference? A little of all this, the project proposed by Nicolas Grenier in an unrecognizable Clark center. The space is hushed and the mirrors all around bring the audience to the heart of the intrigue.
In a city known for its vibrant food culture, some New Orleans' culinary traditions receive scant attention. That includes the enterprising recipes developed and shared by prison inmates.The Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, in partnership with Los Angeles artist Karla Diaz, wants to bring attention to dishes created by formerly incarcerated women in the upcoming workshop "Prison Gourmet: New Orleans Cook-Off" at Sister Hearts Thrift Store in Arabi.
For the last couple of years Canadian artist Erik Olson has been working almost exculsively on portraiture works, developing a wider range of representations of the individual. During his recent, highly productive stay at The La Brea Residency in LA, he created a new series of large oils on canvas as well as smaller oils on paper, further experimenting with the traditional format.
Artist and photographer Ken Gonzales-Day explores the history of racial violence in America and a survey of his work, Shadowlands, which opens today and runs through April 16 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, investigates how this history informs our current reality. Among the works is Gonzales-Day's series Erased Lynchings, a set of digitally altered 19th and 20th century lynching postcards, where hanged figures of various races have been removed by the artist, allowing the remaining participants to take focus.
What better place to come down from a trip than within the cozy home of Tristam Lansdowne’s New Horizons I, where we admire the city from afar within the protective interior of neo-hippie modernism. Here, perhaps all that remains of our wild adventure are the ceramic vases perched on the fireplace, reminiscent of the magic cacti, now neutralized. Grab the pillows and lie down on the couch; the hyper-activity of your brain deserves a rest.
Right now, a large recreation of an early Andy Warhol store window display is on view at The Art Gallery of New South Wales's current exhibition, Adman: Warhol Before Pop. It's a rare piece that was produced by the budding artist in 1955 for high-end department store Bonwit Teller, to advertise a perfume called Mistigri by Jacques Griffe.
For more than a decade, Ken Gonzales-Day has been exploring the history of racialized violence in America, creating several bodies of work that are brought together for the first time in this exhibition. Cumulatively, his work is a powerful and complex statement that challenges what we thought we knew about this country’s great dilemma. The Los Angeles–based artist has extensively researched lynchings in California, where Mexican Americans and Asian Americans were widely targeted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Adams eagerly talked about "The Irretrievable Moment," the title of the biggest exhibition of his decades-long career as an artist. "I thought, what the hell, I'm coming up on my 75th birthday, let's see if we can pull it off here," Adams recalled. "And it turned out to be bigger than I thought it would be."
The artist’s depiction of landscape is a subjective experience of the outdoors, a cultural and psychological construct.
In each canvas, Carlson Hatton creates a filigree of geometric and organic shapes that cohere against black backgrounds or fields of sky blue. Playing with positive and negative imagery and all sorts of layered effects, Hatton is adept at weaving together colors and shapes into unified, complex paintings that possess the looseness and abandon of street graffiti combined with a crisp exactitude. Some works have realistic elements in the foreground isolated against a maze of abstraction, but this recognizable imagery is the exception; most figurative and objective elements are well camouflaged.
Looking at the paintings gives one a sense that they are viewing a city map, topographical overview or satellite image of some sort. The satellite image effect magnifies the color range and brightness of the sections – making the works burst like a digital photo. The paintings do an amazing job of combinig the influence of the digital and organic worlds on the canvas.
If it seems like Adams’s paintings have a story to them, that’s intentional. He tries to capture “the irretrievable moment” (the title of his art exhibit), which he describes as “where you’re committed to the action but the action hasn’t actually happened yet.” Such is the case with the signature image of his show, Nighthawks (Homage to Hopper).
In a way, Trump bookends the fairs, with Golden Showers playing outside the VIP tent at the end of the pier. Just beyond the entrance, meanwhile, is Federico Solmi’s work, in which two animated clips in elaborate frames, set against a backdrop of red satin curtains, show the new president arriving at a grand palace.
With a set of wheels and a decent 4G connection, anyone can come visit these sites, which have been conveniently plotted as Dropped Pins on Google Maps courtesy of the Desert X website. The best work engages the viewer with a dialogue with the land, including Sherin Guirguis’s One I Call, a clay bird refuge with glittery bits of gold in the open roof, nestled in the shadow of a steep cliff in the serene Whitewater Preserve.
At another trailhead further west, near the base of the Whitewater Preserve, the Los Angeles-based Sherin Guirguis has built a domed, earthen sculpture like the pigeon towers popular in Egypt, where she grew up. The towers are typically used to breed the birds for food or sport (and, more rarely, for espionage missions). Her sculpture has niches for birds, but she doesn’t expect any to actually use it; she wants viewers to wonder about its significance.
There's sculpture that requires viewing from multiple angles, then there's the kind that stops viewers in their tracks. In artist Miyoshi Barosh's case, audiences are compelled to do both. Her inexplicable, intriguing creations are fashioned from unpredictable stuff such as yarn and cast-off clothes, as well as more "traditional" elements including paint, steel, glass, and more. But the aesthetic arrangement of unconventional raw material yields methodically rendered artworks with a conceptual core. Wry, dystopian undercurrents lurk in the various textures, patterns, and forms all waiting to be teased out.
I was blown away. Krifka is interested in the seduction and terror of American mythology and its relationship to the sublime. Combining a deep knowledge of art history with technical chops that can only be called post-academic, Krifka conjures one powerful image after another. These are not easy paintings; in fact, they are truly weird in the best surrealist sense of the work. Yet they gnaw at you in the way that the best art does. Given the current political climate, Krifka’s exploration of American condition will take on even more resonance.
Last week, Pioneer Works held a lecture discussing Dava Sobel's new book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, as part of a series of events bridging the arts and sciences. In a collaborative conversation with artist Lia Halloran and the center's director of science Janna Levin, Sobel took to introduce the audience to the untold story of Harvard’s first female computers.
From the lynching of Charles Valento (aka “Spanish Charlie”) in 1920 to the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, Los Angeles-based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day brings America’s violent racial past into the present in a visceral show at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul. Shadowlands, on display through April 16, amounts to a smart critical analysis of race in America. One series in the show, Erased Lynchings, presents images that Gonzales-Day created from vintage postcards of lynchings in the 19th and early 20th centuries — but the victim has been removed, in order to show only the crowd.
Photographer and Scripps College professor Ken Gonzales-Day decided to take a look at history to see if it would shed any light on the situation. "Initially, I was just trying to understand it as a Mexican-American myself," he said. "I was trying to understand the context in which people could turn against a whole part of the community."
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has acquired Iran: Pillars (1882-1989), a 2009 painting by Iranian artist Asad Faulwell, continuing its active acquisitions programme of contemporary Middle Eastern art.
A ghostly tree caught in the glare of headlights at night. A few scattered trees framed by a barbed wire fence in what seems to be a random field. The gnarled branches of a massive oak tree. Los Angeles artist and academic Ken Gonzales-Day creates these and other images. The story they tell is deeper than the roots of the trees, though.
Susan Silton resides in Los Angeles. Her multi-disciplinary projects engage multiple aesthetic strategies to mine the complexities of subjectivity and subject positions, often through poetic combinations of humor, discomfort, subterfuge and unabashed beauty.Silton’s work takes form in performative and participatory- based projects, photography, video, installation, text/audio works, and print-based projects, and presents in diverse contexts such as public sites, social network platforms, and traditional galleries and institutions.
Aude Moreau and Nicolas Grenier are conceptual artists who use the forms and symbols of architecture to make social and political statements in the guise of great visual art. They were recently honoured by the city of Montreal and the Contemporary Art Galleries Association. Moreau won the Prix Louis-Comtois for a mid-career artist, worth $10,000, and Grenier won the Prix Pierre-Ayot for an artist under 35, worth $7,500.
In 2001, Ken Gonzales-Day set out to write a book on Latino portraiture in 19th- and 20th- century California; his research led to his discovery of dozens of images and written records of lynching, and, ultimately, to his 2006 book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935. On view through April 16 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Shadowlands, which grew out of this publication, comprises his own photographs, archival images, books, and ephemera. All of this material, along with his photographs about this country’s recent racial violence, deftly compresses history and raises questions about our historic construction of race.
With this we have arrived at the most pertinent aspect of Solmi's work, social and political satire, conducted with forms and methods imbued with sarcasm, kitsch and irony. The artist claims to be self-taught, but also to be a scholar of history, literature and politics, as well as obviously a passionate user of science fiction cinema and video games. If I have to find a model in the past, the references to James Ensor and Emil Nolde, the great blasphemers of the Expressionist avant-gardes, are certainly immediate; in the present, one can perhaps find a closeness of Solmi to William Kentridge, either for the techniques used (even if Kentridge often tends to mix real images and drawings), or for the style often close to the grotesque and primitive.
I think they don’t want to connect because usually satire is not very elegant or polite. It’s always brutal, direct, grotesque, and aggressive. I think my work is connecting better now because I am astute with experience, and of course I’m becoming an older and more mature artist.
This past summer, in a stand-alone cube not much bigger than a closet, Montreal-and-LA-based artist Nicolas Grenier reversed the give-and-take polarities of art-world commerce. For The Time of the Work, Grenier invited 14 artists and one collective to contribute works to the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s “SIGHTINGS”project series.
Artist Carlson Hatton is hard at work developing his artwork for Hyde Park Station, part of the Crenshaw/LAX Line. Inspired by his many explorations in the community, his concept is to capture the musical vibrancy and historical legacy of the area in a fresh and contemporary manner. The artwork imagery aims to balance the energy and social nature of the commercial boulevard with the tranquility of home gardens found in the neighborhoods in between. All set within compositions filled with intricate patterns and color resonant of the light and sky at sunset and sunrise.
There is an unexpected delicacy to Vian Sora’s exhibit Displaced Narratives (1619 Flux:Art + Activism). The Iraqi-born artist approaches the difficult subject of displacement with a thoughtfulness that makes her art accessible. There is also timelessness to this collection; found in the use of ancient Mesopotamian technique of engraving the canvas, the reference to ancient iconography, the use of gold thus referencing byzantine art, the more modern floating and abstracted figures and compositions, and the contemporary color pallet, which are combined beautifully to create a transcendent visual experience.
Edith Beaucage’s paintings pulsate with bright acrylic pigments at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City. This fresh and inspiring exhibition, Sequencer – Spectrum – Reverb, features 25 mostly small-to-medium sized paintings that interact with each other playfully. Beaucage’s world is filled with techno music surround sound. Her abstract, gooey, melodious and loosely representational portraits of millennials are aptly titled with Euro pop names, such as Basil and Zeek, Otto in Pottsdam, Producer Bruno B, and DJ Ferdy Scholk.
“Representation is where acceptance and understanding begin,” transgender performance artist Zackary Drucker explained in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Film is such an integral component in creating empathy. It shapes how so many people perceive the trans experience.”
...Allowing them to gawk for a while, I took in the success of the show before rounding up the troops to see the rest of what Culver City had to offer that night, stopping at Edward Cella‘s for a crazy terrific installation by Jun Kaneko and Luis De Jesus’ two-person show with Bryan Zanisnik and Edith Beaucage. We couldn’t make it to ALL the Culver City openings unfortunately, but finished the night at The Mandrake to retrieve our buzzes...
On a hot night in July at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst perched on stools to discuss their new book of photographs, “Relationship.” It is by far the most personal of the many projects they have worked on together. The photographs chronicle their six-year romance, which ended soon after many of these images were shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2014.
It’s an honor to write to you as the guest editors of Out’s October issue. For those of you who don’t know us, we are artists and filmmakers. We are both trans, but in opposite directions — Zackary is a trans woman, and Rhys is a trans man. We both moved from New York City to Los Angeles to attend CalArts, and we both transitioned at age 25. We have many things in common, but we are also very different. We both identify as queer but have been L, G and/or B at different points in our lives. We are collaborators and colleagues, and were formerly romantic partners.
In our daily life we have become addicted to technology that does not push boundaries, it simply helps us connect virtually and feed our appetites as consumers. It seems that people are more concerned with uploading their selfies and vacation videos, or downloading the latest app, than improving the human condition and spending those couple dollars on charity. I think this is a crucial moment in history, where in the next twenty to thirty years we will be deciding if we want to live as actual humans, or as digital entities within virtual reality. If we decide on the latter, we may stop meeting real people altogether. Sadly, the decision isn’t up to us, but to some tycoon in Silicon Valley. Of course, not everything is negative. Realtime graphics engines have become an incredible tools and inspiration for me to take advantage of.
Edith Beaucage, “Sequencer, Spectrum, Reverb,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. In loose, wild brush strokes, the L.A. artist captures figures in hallucinatory landscapes that evoke a painted rave. Also on view will be an exhibition of photographs and large-scale video by Bryan Zanisnik, a New York-based artist preoccupied by the architecture of monuments and theatrical sets.
Federico Solmi’s “The Brotherhood” offers a dystopian nightmare-scape where the cult of celebrity overwhelms one’s every sense. The pseudo-cliché of the beautiful versus the profane collides in the meticulously painted frames of “smart” TVs projecting Solmi’s drawings and paintings, as rendered into 3D animation loops portraying some of the most notable times of history. The exhibit is overwhelming and would definitely terrify any suburban mom.
Dubbed the TransNation Festival, the October event’s proceeds will benefit Los Angeles-based organizations that provide services to transgender people, including the festival’s creator, St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, who have one of the largest transgender health programs in the country. Celebrity Kelly Osbourne is lending her voice to the cause, along with award-winning transgender creative Zackary Drucker.
Built by the US army in 1907, the remote and beautiful Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, went from a soldiers’ barracks that was active until the 1970s to an artists’ residence in 1987. In this lovely, quiet environment, I feel deeply conscious of my inner world. In my weeks here, I’ve come to recognize how the noises and distractions of modern life affect me and how all the micro interactions that I have with nature, other people, and technology influence my life. This residency feels like a spiritual gift.
In Relationship, their new book of photographs, artists Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker document the six-year span of their romantic union—a time period when their careers and lives were undergoing incredible (and parallel) shifts. By 2014, when the book concludes, they’d gone from grad students in the arts to artists featured in the Whitney Biennial (where these photos debuted publicly), and from making films at home on severely limited budgets to working on the blockbuster Amazon show Transparent.
The cynical and unsettling feelings that resonate throughout the video installations are a reflection of Solmi’s views on human history. “I definitely see a pattern of wrongdoing, from ancient Rome to the present. Through the deception of politicians, consumerism, and celebrity culture, we have created our own dystopia,” Solmi explains. “The Brotherhood promotes our hypocrisy by mirroring and exaggerating it, becoming obsessive to the point of stupidity and chaos. In the series, this forms a cycle where we are the inspiration for the horrible decisions these leaders made, and they continue to influence us.”
Text beneath the photo instructs the viewer, “Do not look at the Negro,” directing one’s gaze instead to “the seven WHITE children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle.” The caption calls to mind artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s project “Erased Lynching,” which removes the bodies of lynching victims—many of whom were Mexican-American—from lynching photos, focusing the viewer’s attention instead on the white perpetrators and spectators. Rather than record the suffering of the victim, the focus on the spectators highlights the pathologies of whiteness.
The Brotherhood, according to the artist, consists of the powerbrokers of world history. They are gathered here to celebrate their victories without a moment of regret: Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, Christopher Columbus, Benito Mussolini, Sitting Bull, Marie Antoinette, Idi Amin, Montezuma and more. He seems to say that the abuse of high position spans centuries, continents, race and gender.
Un projet original intitulé Le temps de l'oeuvre, le temps du travail débutera lundi dans l'espace d'exposition SIGHTINGS de l'Université Concordia. Cet été, des amateurs d'art vont acquérir une oeuvre d'art en restant dans le cube transparent SIGHTINGS le temps que l'artiste a mis pour la créer. / An original project called The Time of the Work will begin on Monday in the SIGHTINGS exhibition space at Concordia University. This summer, art lovers will acquire a work of art while staying in the transparent SIGHTINGS cube the time it took for the artist to create it.
Curated by Michael Duncan, her mysterious, sometimes brooding, sometimes triumphal work elegantly portrays archetypical images that transcend cultures and dwell in a gauzy, imaginative realm between faith and fairy tales. Evan’s first major solo project since 2012, the show is inspired both by her global travels and her spiritual travels through a variety of myths, rituals, and shared images.
Toward the back of the Jason Vass gallery, past nearly 40 other works on paper, canvas, fabric and resin by Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans, sits "Lion," a tabletop sculpture with enough dense energy to serve as an exclamation point to all the rest.
In “Score Settling,” Teresa Margolles made jewelry from glass shattered in shooting incidents. In the labels, instead of describing the pieces, she describes the crime. Another artist, Ken Gonzales-Day, edited images of lynchings and removed the victims so the focus can lie squarely on the perpetrators. The exhibit is loosely organized around four themes. In “Objects and Absences,” artists use photographs and found objects to create connections to the missing.
When she was younger, filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist Zackary Drucker promised herself that she “would never be bored as an adult.” As a result, neither are her audiences. Through her work, Drucker confronts gender norms, sexuality, the body, and her own experience as a trans woman, challenging viewers to reconsider their attitudes about each. Her work ranges from highly personal photographs of moments with her partner, to chilling incantations of LGBT slurs juxtaposed against the tranquility of an autumn landscape.
Among the most powerful works in the exhibition, for me, are a group of photos by Ken Gonzales-Day. He has taken archival photographs of lynchings and photoshopped out the victim so that we focus on the perpetrators of these heinous acts. These works have had a profound impact on me, and have made me look inward and ask myself the very uncomfortable questions, ‘When have I not spoken up? When have I been a bystander to injustice?'
Between 2008 and 2014, Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker were both transitioning genders — Ernst from female to male, and Drucker from male to female. They were also a couple. For six years, the two photographed themselves and each other, documenting both the course of their relationship and the joys and trials of the transitioning process. The 2014 Whitney Biennial featured 46 of their photographs, in addition to a collaborative film called She Gone Rogue and a performance piece by Flawless Sabrina, an iconic drag performer.
Last Thursday evening the rare books room on the third floor of the Strand bookstore in Union Square was filled by transgender people and their loved ones. Two young artists had come together to talk about their new book with a curator named Stuart Comer and one of history's most important gender scholars: the artists' transgender "auntie," Kate Bornstein. A collaboration between Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship documents their six-year love affair, during which both of them changed their sex.
"Dude, don't be weird," Zackary Drucker told her former romantic partner Rhys Ernst during a photoshoot at BuzzFeed’s studios in New York last June. As they stood beside one another, Ernst had turned his face away from Drucker, as if attempting to distance himself from her. He finally settled into a pose.
LA-based artist Lia Halloran serenades the spirit of science-inspired art through this early imaging technique in a poetic project titled Your Body is a Space That Sees — a cyanotype celebration of women in astronomy, whose discoveries and contributions to understanding the universe date back to antiquity yet remain largely obscure.
The final cast was reasonably diverse and undeniably talented, as history has proved. Contestant Abigail DeVille is the youngest sculptor included in Hauser, Wirth, & Schimmel’s monumental Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016 exhibition. Transgender performance artist Zackary Drucker is an associate producer on Amazon’s celebrated Transparent series, and has exhibited at institutions like MoMA PS1 and the Hammer Museum.
In the animations the Brotherhood struts down red carpets to the flash of camera lights, descends imposing flights of stairs and socializes at a magnificent ball on the fashionably gross order of New York’s famous Met Gala. The installation work, dubbed “The Ballroom,” is set up like a theater, complete with crimson curtains, and our job is to passively gape. Black waiters haul giant champagne bottles and enormous lobsters on silver trays to a cohort of dancing celebrity power, textbook leaders and villains who get increasingly intoxicated as the sumptuous event wears on.
“Technically, I’m reproducing or miss-using rudimentary print techniques, but conceptually I try to reference a visually complex world that I think we’re out of sync with,” explains Hatton. “I want to offer perspectives that are not fixed; they are in flux and comment on the bombardment of info that smothers us daily. The work is informed by Photoshop, printmaking, and collage because of the infinite sense of layering that all three offer.”
Skin—dragged and torn, wrapped and layered, weeping and fossilized—resonates from Margie Livingston’s latest exhibition, Holding it Together. On view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Livingston’s exhibition offers nine pieces that contemplate structure and form as an enduring plexus. Acrylic and leather are employed as canvases, which become the base by which Livingston plays with and blurs sculpture, painting, and dimensions. These pieces, what Livingston names “paint objects,” reach out from the walls and draw in the light of the gallery, glowing and nearly vibrating, beckoning viewers for a closer look.
Why did you decide to integrate 3D space into your photography? It might be the other way around—that I was interested in integrating photography into 3D space. Even when I work with flat planes mounted on a wall, I’m thinking about space. I’m thinking about the allegory of space, the language of including and excluding, of interior space and exterior space. And I just happen to be using photographs as a material to break into that space, to layer, to cut into it, to fold it, to splice it, to create multiple spaces in one flat area.
For the past three years, Mimi Smith (pronounced Mim-ee) has been part of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Create A Living Legacy (CALL) Initiative, working with legacy specialists Allison Schooler, Catherine Czacki, and Denise Schatz to collect information on the artist’s personal archive of artwork and documentation. This project has resulted in an active database of the artist’s works, one that links information and images of her extensive inventory of drawings, installations, and sculptures with the physical location of those pieces in the artist’s studio.
A sense of paradox, of duality, pervades “Where We Are Standing.” Although Ms. Farassat, who is Jewish, was never forced to wear a chador, the women in her 24 paintings are all shrouded, sometimes revealing only a single oversize eye. In cartoonlike portraits created from 2009 to 2013, the women are depicted with layered brush strokes in a limited palette. Some have devil’s horns; in a piece titled “Neither Angel Nor Monster,” the face is featureless and gray, engulfed in a frilly pink veil. Ms. Farassat wrote later in an email: “I paint the resistance of faceless women who are in need of identity and who question their personal, sexual and political freedom.”
Here’s our Lookbook from Volta NYC the 2016 Edition of the art fair. All photos courtesy of POVarts staff. Edith Beaucage, "Gudbjorn and Petunia" and "Zest" at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
I had an opportunity to attend two art fairs: VOLTA NY and The Armory Show. With a whole slew of art fairs this weekend and little time to explore, I hit the ground running.
Using a combination of sculpture, photography, and painting, Kate Bonner speaks to our current state of confusion about what, exactly, photographs are and where they live (in the "cloud," on paper, or in memory, to name a few possibilities). Made with the help of CNC routers and scanners, her works manipulate images in ways obvious and not and force them to interact with colorful frames and supports. Bonner, who is based in Oakland, has an upcoming show at Luis De Jesus in Los Angleles.
For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is Zackary Drucker, the transgender performance artist and associate producer of “Transparent,” who shares her list exclusively with T. (Read more about her most prized possession, a ceramic cat, here.)
"We are spreading freedom and liberty across our empire, and we will continue to rule the world thanks to our invincible military. Our currency is gaining strength. Our appetite for supremacy and authority endures. And because of this, the rest of the world is on their knees. God bless America." Titled American Circus, Federico Solmi's piece is actually from 2014, but it seems as though it could have been created specifically for this occasion.
The exhibition’s opening piece, Federico Solmi’s Pope Fucking Machine After Leonardo (2015), is a mechanized sculpture where rotating dictators kiss the Pope’s erect penis. Are the curators equating the Vatican with the Orthodox Church? The Vatican has certainly been guilty of cozying up to dictators—but then, so has the U.S. government. Pope Francis, with his anti-capitalist stance, rails against defense contractors, and washing the feet of the poor, and his revolutionary encyclical on the environment is also part of the story.
Zackary Drucker is a Los Angeles-based artist and co-producer for the Amazon original series “Transparent,” nominated for three Golden Globe awards, including Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy. Here, she recounts the significance behind a ceramic cat from her childhood in Syracuse, N.Y., that temporarily takes the place of an actual, living pet.
Federico Solmi (Bologna, 1973) returns to Naples after six years of absence, in the enchanting and melancholy setting of the former military wool mill, near Porta Capuana, guest of the Dino Morra Contemporary Art Gallery. On this occasion, the Bolognese artist, who has lived and worked in New York for fifteen years, exhibits a video trilogy entitled Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth, a rich and multifaceted work, created through three years of research work.
One of the great things about the fairs is the amount of painting on exhibition. For painters it's a slice of heaven. Even if you don't love everything you see, the sheer variety is satisfying. I started with some last-century work and moved into a few installations and individual artworks.
30. Zackary Drucker: Drucker, a multimedia artist who was featured on our list of 15 revolutionary transgender artists, participated in Cooper Union’s acclaimed “Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Archives and Aesthetics” alongside Chris Vargas, Vaginal Davis, Justin Vivian Bond, and others. Drucker is also a co-producer on the acclaimed Amazon series “Transparent,” which will return for a second season in 2016. She will also be featured alongside longtime collaborator and partner Rhys Ernst in a photography show at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in spring 2016, which will explore the pair’s journey a transgender couple.
With The Great Dictator, the artist illuminates the gallery and model spaces, through an elegant videotrilogy - A Song of Tyranny, Chinese Democracy and The Last Day on Earth and The Return of the Prodigal Son- which makes use of images borrowed from the world of comics, videogames and the Internet, a sharp reflection on a sick organism, on a system that has abandoned its qualities to suck the democratic sap of society.
Of course, language and technique have evolved a lot compared to the works of 2005, and clearly the number of collaborators and assistants has increased, but let's say that this doesn't really matter: what matters is to make new projects and deal with increasingly good artists ... and New York certainly does not lack these challenges. Sometimes it is very difficult to work with the studio full of people, but with my type of research there is no alternative: I need 3D modelers, video editors and assistants. But the most exciting moment is the preparation of the video storyboards: a very intimate process.
The small space wreaks of incense and is an echo chamber of bizarre sounds emanating from the excellent, but admittedly out of place piece of work by Italian artist Federico Solmi. The Brotherhood (2015) is hallucinatory animation depicting a mechanical doll-like Pope acting very Satanic indeed, parading through the streets, waving like an animatronic horror movie character at his blank-eyed constituents.
Entering James Hyde’s show at Luis De Jesus, one immediately wonders: What sort of pictures are these? At first glance, it is difficult to determine whether the expansive images are manual or mechanical, painterly or photographic. Materially, they are hybrids. Each canvas is inkjet-printed with one or more intricately detailed landscape photos that are subsequently covered, divided and framed by abstract hand-painted curves and circles suggestive of Minimalist and Color Field painting.
The surprise of the week was Untitled Art Fair located on Miami’s South Beach. I found it risky and full of discoveries. The selection of galleries was diverse and prospective. The booths were spacious and well installed to appreciate large-scale works that also included installation and sculpture. Adriana Minoliti at Diablo Rosso (Panama), Nino Cais at Central (São Paulo), and Edith Beaucage at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (Los Angeles), are some highlights of my selection. The fair therefore affirms itself to be a great spot to glimpse aspects of Latin American art, both in the emerging and very en vogue rediscovery range, but also as a place for different U.S. and Canadian proposals.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s manipulated archival photographs of Western lynching victims and the crowds that witnessed and committed their mob-mad murders allude to these lost lives by erasing the victims and their ropes from his images. The works are subversive – titles like This is What He Got or Five in a row cue viewers to search for the victims/subjects in the images and to imagine them in the spaces they once occupied. The voyeuristic point of view creates a kind of complicity that aligns the viewer with the pictured mob rather than with the victims, with whom most might seek to empathize. There is a kind of moral presence in the corporeal absences in Gonzales-Day’s images that picture atrocities, whether we can see them or not.
In this 4-minute, short-form pilot, Southern for Pussy, real life mother and daughter and longtime collaborators — Zackary Drucker and Penny Sori — traverse a wide swathe of political and intrapersonal subjects, toggling between the conventional (online dating, aging, and relationships) to the unorthodox (vaginal atrophy, smoking dope, and cruising for sex). These mother-daughter vignettes deftly straddle hilarity and honesty; the short was recently in the exhibition, Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Archives and Aesthetics, in the New York gallery 41 Cooper Union, and premiered on the Chicago web series platform, Open TV.
“I started working on Transparent two and a half years ago when Jill was developing the pilot, and the cultural landscape was so different back then. It was before the quote-unquote ‘trans tipping point,’” the show's co-producer and trans consultant Zackary Drucker told us. “We’ve made these enormous strides, I think, over the past two years, and I think it absolutely informs our flexibility on Transparent with the trans characters, because we are all kind of moving forward more rapidly..."
Karla Diaz is not a chef, but she's gained a dedicated following for the food she makes. A performance artist in Los Angeles, Diaz has spent the past six years demonstrating how to cook dishes like tamales made out of of Cheetos, soup from Corn Nuts and pork rinds, and orange chicken made with instant ramen and strawberry jelly. She doesn't use a stove, a blender, or conventional utensils—just tools that can be built out of trash bags and toilet paper, and ingredients she would find if she were incarcerated. She calls it "prison gourmet."
Positioned south of the Convention Center at 10th and Ocean Dr., the Untitled Art Fair returns to its prime beach real estate this year, bringing with it another year of tightly-curated booths, installations and special projects. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the bustle of ABMB, complemented by the fair’s signature tent design, which boasts wide aisles and spacious booth for exhibitors that gave the exhibition a distinctly relaxed air, while offering ample light to emphasize the works on view.
The United States is a great nation, but the atrocities and genocides on which its history rests cannot be ignored. Washington is certainly a myth, but for me it remains an ambiguous figure. At his death, 318 slaves owned by him were listed on the Mount Vernon estate. The New York State Iroquois tribe, exterminated by settlers, dubbed Washington " the village destroyer ." He could have done more to protect the weak, but his interests were different.
With a title like Deepwater Horizon, Barnard is explicitly touching on shock-doctrine political, cultural and environmental issues; and sure enough there are references to oil slicks, murky depths and churning, fulminating debris (in the most gorgeously tactile whites, veined with cobalt flecks, pinkish streaks, eliding into watery blues—Barnard is a master of the corrupt, not-quite-white). In certain respects, this is almost literally rendered imagery. But Barnard is also mining the forbidden terrain of the beauty we find in the pathology, the mythic fail measured by exquisite inflammations, volatile reactions and recombinations.
Alkotója, a mindössze harminchárom éves, éppen krisztusi korban levő Nicolas Grenier megfogalmazásában a Vertikális Szocializmus olyan építészeti típusterv, amely „a modern nagyváros körülményei között kezeli a gazdasági, politikai és társadalmi egyenlőtlenséget.” / In the formulation of its creator, Nicolas Grenier, who is only thirty-three years old and just in age, Vertically Integrated Socialism is an imagined architectural design and ideology that “addresses economic, political, and social inequality in the context of a modern metropolis.”
Perceptual psychologists have long dismissed the notion that our brain records images like a camera; seeing is an interactive process of grazing, in a visual field that extends around us on all sides, rather than a series of flat images projected to a single point. Yet photographic images retain special authority as records of visual experience. In his current exhibition, James Hyde undertakes to dislodge this persistent prejudice.
Back in 2003, Los Angeles-based artist Susan Silton was given a solo exhibition for her projects Aviate and hemidemisemiquaver, reconfigured ornithological photos and a video projection, respectively. Now, the artist returns with The Whistling Project, which she began in 2010 as an in-depth study of the human voice. In addition to the metal casts of pursed, presumably whistling lips on view, Silton performs at SITE with her all-woman whistling ensemble, The Crowing Hens, on Saturday, Nov. 7.
In this conversation, Flawless Sabrina, Zackary Drucker, and Elisabeth Sherman, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney, discuss the tarot card readings; the first drag contest Flawless Sabrina initiated in 1959; and the ever-changing landscape of New York City. The interview is illustrated by snapshots taken by Drucker inside the apartment.
Using images taken from the internet in a grotesque collage about today's politics, Solmi composes 3-D (Cry Engine) images that recall both science fiction and the tabloids. Most of his videos are housed in hand painted wooden frames and incorporated into suitably shaped paintings. The video-painting "Chinese Democracy" is composed of three parts, each of about nine minutes (A Song of Tyranny, Chinese Democracy and The Last Day on Earth and The Return of the Prodigal Son), in which Solmi denounces the self-destructive nature of mankind
Zackary Drucker (trans consultant on Transparent): I have concerns about trans actors being cast in roles that are being written by cis people entirely. I read a lot of pilots last season and they had trans characters just popping up and saying, "I'm trans. I'm trans. I'm trans. Genitals!" and then disappearing. Writers that are trans, consultants who are informing cis writers to help create more complex renderings of our lives, it all has to happen.
The "Bring Your Own Body" exhibit at the Cooper Union in New York City features works of transgender artists and archives from the renowned Kinsey Institute illustrating the experience of the transgender community in America through official history as well as modern-day artistic expression.
FAITH, a hot-button issue in the political arena these days, is the subject of a messy, restless new exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford. The exhibition, organized by James Hyde from New York, with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation and others, consists of artworks in all media by a dozen artists. Some of the artists, like Matt Collishaw, Patty Chang and Josiah McElheny, are rising stars. This is a fashionable show.
Using crude gaming software, Solmi brings together some of history’s greatest tyrants and creeps – Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Marie Antoinette – and has them strut their stuff on the red carpet and the dance floor. More than anything, Solmi captures the garish pomp and obscene self-display that despots almost always prefer.
In his latest output, Federico Solmi scans hand-painted imagery and applies it to digital three-dimensional models of world leaders. He then imports each into a video-game platform and records their movements as if they were on a movie set. Titled “The Brotherhood” 2015, this series includes “video-paintings” of mostly infamous leaders with works that indict the viewer and society as much as the leaders themselves, as they flamboyantly posture like shallow celebrities.
As a society, we’re waking up to the idea that gender identity doesn’t fit into two neat, blue and pink boxes, but rather exists on a spectrum that might not always mirror the biological body. Perhaps nowhere is the notion of gender fluidity being more tangibly explored than in the fashion industry, where designers are increasingly creating collections that blur the boundaries between boys and girls.
Important figures of the world historical and political scene such as Pope Ratzinger, Marie Antoinette, George Washington, Mussolini and Napoleon animate the scarlet red walls of the Soho gallery. With an aesthetic reminiscent of that of street theater puppets, the artist represents these illustrious characters with grotesque and satirical features, in a swirl of bright colors that recall the circus atmosphere, not far from the reality that nowadays surrounds political and prominent socialites. Thus, within painted frames appear parades and masked balls that see the protagonists move with forced and jerky movements as if really animated by wires.
Solmi, 42, who was a butcher in Bologna, decided to play the New York card with his very complex animated videos, inserted in very colorful object paintings. In this second exhibition he has drawn an allegory of power: a truly original style that allowed him to achieve the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and to obtain a professorship at Yale University. Stories that can only happen in the new world.
Mimi Smith says of her art, “I consider my work to be feminist, social, and conceptual, sculpture and drawing. Although my earliest work from the ‘60s was feminist in both a personal and political sense, there was no available vocabulary for it at the time and it often was misunderstood when I first made it. The word feminism was not a word in my own vocabulary until the early ‘70s, and then its ideas and actions inspired me with hopes and ambitions for things I had not previously imagined or even considered.”
The vast majority of the art we see — in Jackson Hole and pretty much everywhere else — comes in neat, tidy packages: a surface, covered with paint, contained by a frame, displayed on an otherwise blank span of wall. Artist Kate Bonner, however, mutilates that neat package, exposing the guts of our traditional ideas about what a piece of art is and thus forcing us to confront and question those ideas.
Aujourd'hui, dans les grandes villes du monde, la manière dont nous concevons le développement immobilier et l'urbanisme est constamment remise en question par la croissance démographique, la migration, le fossé grandissant entre les riches et les pauvres. / Today, in the big cities of the world, the way we understand real estate development and urban planning is constantly challenged by demographic growth, migration, the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. I grew up in multiple cities in Texas and Michigan. I’ve lived in Japan, Chicago, Brooklyn, San Francisco and now Oakland. Maybe it is because I have lived in so many cities, or because I was very shy when I was young, that I am interested in location and structural divisions and how they shape perspective. Part photo, part sculpture, my work is an attempt to expand space and to bar entry. I use scissors, scanners, digital erasers and jigsaws to break apart images and deny story to the viewer.
Een werk dat mij aangenaam verrast is Vertically Integrated Socialism van de Canadese kunstenaar Nicolas Grenier. Grenier, die geïnteresseerd is in ongelijkheid binnen politieke, economische, culturele en sociale systemen en principes, ontwierp een experimenteel huisvestingsconcept dat de sociale piramide in één enkel gebouw integreert. / A work that pleasantly surprises me is Vertically Integrated Socialism by the Canadian artist Nicolas Grenier. Interested in inequality within political, economic, cultural and social systems and principles, Grenier designed an experimental housing concept that integrates the social pyramid into a single building.
In the collaborative project, Relationship (2008-2013), Drucker and Ernst document their romantic partnership as a transitioning transgender couple—Drucker from male to female, Ernst from female to male. “We are all collectively morphing and transforming together, and this is just one story of an opposite-oriented transgender couple living in Los Angeles,” Drucker has said. The artists fairly represent and qualify their own experiences in terms of the gender discourse they provide, and thus the work can produce relatable, understandable narratives in terms of content.
This narrative, however, is merely a scaffold for Beaucage’s sun-drenched, acid-hued palette and the assurance with which she renders loose portraits — in broad, fluid strokes as relaxed as her subjects. The lush, Arcadian surroundings get the same treatment. Trees are little more than wavering verticals: a kelp forest in a rainbow of shades. Mountains, lakes and sky are rendered breezily in lemon yellows and cobalt blues, appearing to glow with energy.
Our artists are crafting stories and expanding upon themes in this week’s gallery picks. #4: Edith Beaucage’s Chill Bivouac Rhymes invites you to follow a small group of teens at a rave concert. In parallel to Roland Barthes search for openness of interpretation in literature; Beaucage organized her current exhibition to allow for a looseleaf narrative.
They stand against a background filled with an American flag, and before a bank of microphones, nodding their heads to acknowledge the cheers of an unseen crowd. Their faces are ghoul-like, complete with waxy-looking skin, dark bags under eyes that practically pop out of their heads, and curious crimson splotches that resemble splattered blood. The bright reds, whites, and blues that comprise the scene glow and pulse continuously.
"The viewer will discover the paintings by looking through sculptures and painting installation. Twelve feet tall multicolor trees, an octagon geometric shape and freestanding painted campers are installed on the gallery floor to produce a deep focus space. The inclusion of the three levels of foreground, middle ground and extreme background objects create for the viewer a effect similar to a depth of field composition in cinematography; allowing the viewer to focus on both close and distant planes. In addition to paintings, Beaucage has created enamel on iron pieces that where fired at 1450° F; fusing glass to metal. Influenced by Limoges enamelings from the mid 1600s, her ravers are incapsulated in a deep glossy tranced out spaces."
There’s something unnervingly sinister in Nicolas Grenier’s Promised Land Template (2014). The work’s looming wooden exterior dominated one of the Biennale’s central galleries with a mysterious, monolithic weight. On one side, a doorway leads into a small interior cell. A potted cactus sits on the tiled floor. A pair of paintings hang lit by a false skylight, their desert ochres, pinks and blues mapped by texts that hint at utopian dreams. It’s another world; calm, eerie, claustrophobic. For Grenier, who splits time between Montreal and Los Angeles, it’s a metaphor for the failed systems of integration and immigration, a transitory space that at once promises and denies hope.
A focus on contemporary landscape, both real and imaginary, is at the center of Chris Barnard's paintings. At Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Barnard's large romantic paintings are reminiscent of 19th century American landscape art, replete with sweeping vistas and dramatic light. Incorporating tightly rendered imagery with heavy viscosity and saturated colors, Barnard imbues this idealized vision of the American West with forbidding truth.
The gorgeously painted Revenge is a depiction the Utah desert. What looks to be an empty landscape is, in fact, anything but. This is the site of a secret test area for military drones. In the distance, Barnard has wielded his palette knife to create a sculpted surface of landscape in regurgitation.
Iran-born, New York-based artist Roya Farassat is a new addition to this list. Her work was recently included in an exhibition that travelled from the Queens Museum to the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, and her paintings of women in veils and welded steel wall installations have been shown in numerous solo and group shows across the US and abroad, including art fairs in New York, Miami, Dubai, and Kuwait.
From night at the Palace to afternoon in a mysterious Venice alley, the gritty glamour of L.A. serves as a backdrop to this enigmatic game of hide-and-seek. At the story's end, model Daisy and transgender performance artist Zackary reunite in a single morphed portrait.
Performance artist/filmmaker/occasional actress Zackary Drucker has evolved from a superstar of the Los Angeles queer scene to a prominent figure in the American art world. Onscreen, the CalArts graduate is best known for her performance as "Darling" in the short experimental film She Gone Rogue, a dream-like exploration of gender and identity with cameos from Holly Woodlawn, Flawless Sabrina, and Vaginal Davis.
If the images on display in the Torrance Art Museum’s latest photography exhibit cause people to gaze with curiosity or take a second look, that’s OK. The show is meant to challenge the definition of a photograph. “This exhibit shows how artists are using photography in new and different ways, how they’re redefining the medium and challenging the medium."
I think Dennis Koch is a total nut job. He is mad. He is crazy. Imagine Koch in his shack inventing strange drawing apparatus and mechanical coloring devices. And I am unreservedly digging his topographically psychedelic color field maps and crystallographic circular implosions at Luis de Jesus. I figured the subject matters and reference materials would be beyond me and reading the press release only confirmed my suspicion.
Nicolas Grenier’s Promised Land Template (2014), an elegant, corporate-looking folly, made of wood, that fast-forwards viewers into a honey-coloured dystopia. The tomb-like structure suggests an art gallery in which glowing paintings on warm walls invoke the digital in their colour and graphics style, and speak to the displacement of ethnic populations. The central painting, recalling a labelled illustration, represents the “End of the Line: Designated area for problematic population groups,” which cynically offers up a mock utopia with “green grass,” “decent facilities” and “proper graves” interred in “indifferent dirt.”
In anticipation for her upcoming MFA Thesis show at UCLA opening April 30th, we spoke with Shoebox PR artist Carla Jay Harris about her work, her influences and the state of documentary photography today. Keep an eye out for Carla’s upcoming exhibition at UCLA and follow her on social media to see how her Thesis show is evolving, progressing and changing.
America's majestic drag queen mother has spent her life mentoring her daughters and granddaughters...Rarely do these people get recognized, and almost never while they're alive. To be honest, I'd heard Flawless's name bandied about for years, but I never really knew who she was. So when I received an email last fall from performance art star Zackary Drucker announcing a funding campaign for the Flawless Sabrina Archive, my first thought was "Shit, she's dead," followed by "Does she really need an archive?"
Rodrigo Valenzuela is obsessed with ruins, or more specifically, with the ghosts of decay and displacement that lurk within urban renewal. A Chilean-born immigrant, Valenzuela spent years working under-the-table construction and janitorial jobs while navigating his way through art school and to permanent residency in the US.
Like Wolkoff, Margie Livingston makes sculptural objects from acrylic paint, which she thickens with a gel medium. She pours and pools it into swirls of color. Once it dries, she takes the highly elastic skins and folds or drapes them. Other works are carved from dry chunks of paint into remarkable shapes. Livingston says of her process: “I’m playing with the weight of paint, letting gravity reveal the material’s flexibility.”
Television has so refined the model of caddy woman-centric talk shows that nearly every major network has one. The "by women for women" panels of hostesses typically include a stand-up comedian, an African-American woman (or two), an A-list headliner and a lesbian. Then there's the wildcard: likely to be Asian or Republican, possibly both. Discussion points run the gamut of hot topics—everything from ISIS to Sarah Palin, from a woman's perspective… and that is, in part, why The Skew is so important.
Kate Bonner lives and works in Oakland, CA creating sculptural works through both digital and manual processes that combine photography with physical structures. Chopped up glimpses of photographs are mounted, layered, and reassembled on solid surfaces, variously bent and reaching away from the wall, or simply leaning up against it; their unexpected forms exceed the typical photographic frame, in turn making the entire wall or room the frame.
Photographer Carla Jay Harris generously shares with LFF about how her nomadic existence inspires her work; her upcoming thesis exhibition, If She Were Me, for her studies at UCLA; her wish for art; how LA is for women in art and more.
Karla Diaz is an activist, artist, writer and one of the founders of the artist group Slanguage Studio. A couple of years ago, she got interested in the prison food system in California and in particular in the prisoners’ ingenious strategies to overcome the culinary flaws of the CDCR cafeterias. It turns out that prisoners create their own recipes using the limited list of ingredients they can buy either from the jail commissary or the vending machines. The men also design kitchen tools using whatever is available to them and make some unconventional mixtures of ingredients to create their own unique flavours.
This year Tourjee, along with her friend Zackary Drucker, the artist and Transparent associate producer, has embarked on preserving Doroshow’s life’s work and activism. The Flawless Sabrina Archive — presently unfurling on the western wall in the form of boxes heaped with old gay magazines, photographs, notebooks, letters, and court documents — is a nonprofit, set up by Tourjee and Drucker, that aims to be a historical resource for the LGBT community with a focus on young artists, performers, and students.
A few years ago when I started to develop these video paintings, I had pretty big dealers and curators who said video paintings were a terrible idea. Who does video paintings! Nowadays, the video game industry is much bigger and has more visibility so my work is more culturally relevant. But for me, I could tell there was something relevant happening – an aesthetic revolution. People were creating these parallel worlds with an incredible quality of graphics and I was interested in figuring out how to tweak those graphics and use them to create artwork with social commentary.
La iglesia del Gran Seminario acoge la obra Vertically Integrated Socialism del artista canadiense Nicolas Grenier. Propone un alojamiento experimental que integra toda la pirámide social en un único edificio, que expresa y critica la estratificación de la estructura social. / The Church of the Grand Seminary houses the work Vertically Integrated Socialism by Canadian artist Nicolas Grenier. He proposes an experimental accommodation that integrates the entire social pyramid in a single building, which expresses and criticizes the stratification of the social structure.
The open-mindedness of the collectors can be inferred from one of the works on display: Federico Solmi’s “Douche Bag City” – a critique of capitalism – includes 15 screens, each surrounded by a black laser-cut frame with Gothic or Baroque undertones, that use video game imagery to follow Dick Richman, “a Wall Street capitalist with greed and anger issues.”
For the 2014 Biennial, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst present three collaborative projects. Ernst is a director and filmmaker; Drucker’s work as an artist spans photography, film, and performance. The photographs on view on the Museum’s third floor, Relationship, are an intimate and diaristic record of their relationship as a transgender couple whose bodies are transitioning in opposite directions (for Drucker from male to female, and for Ernst from female to male).
As it happens these are extremely interesting, held together in an engaging architectural installation, a wooden box with weird traction sandpaper flooring, by local artist Nicolas Grenier, and one of them, Incoming Flux (2014), in oil and acrylic on wood, is among the most intriguing and accomplished paintings I’ve seen for a long while. But it is typical that these paintings are seemingly only considered acceptable for the Biennale because they deal with a subject matter, a topic, a social or intellectual issue, rather than just being purely visually or aesthetically rewarding.
Solmi’s trio of video paintings are haunting and cynical. You may find yourself mezmerized by the moving caricatures, The Last President of the United States, The Next President of the United States, and The Wall Street Tycoon.
Nicolas Grenier's paintings reference visual maps of information that merge abstraction with polemics. They take their cues from data visualizations where gradients are often used to depict transitions from one state to another, often with arrows that flow in multiple directions indicating the different ways that information can move. Under the title "One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune" Grenier creates a suite of paintings in which colors are mixed to form earth-toned gradients sharing space with cryptic texts and looping arrows.
This summer, artistic collaborators Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst hit a high point in their careers by being included in the Whitney Biennial. The diaristic photo portraits on display recorded their relationship and their bodies as they transitioned (for Drucker from male to female; for Ernst from female to male), even as their lives continued to evolve.
Par des moyens symboliques et architecturaux, Nicolas Grenier transpose la réalité des populations apatrides en une expérience pénétrante. Son œuvre Promised Land Templateest présentée au Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) dans le cadre de la Biennale de Montréal. / By symbolic and architectural means, Nicolas Grenier transposes the reality of stateless populations into a penetrating experience. His work Promised Land Template is presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) as part of the Biennale de Montréal.
SculptureNotebook is an online platform that features artists, events, books, and other cultural material pertinent to issues in contemporary sculpture. FEATURED ARTIST: Kate Bonner, Seen through the side, 2013. Digital print on MDF. 36 x 44 x 10 in.
The idea to include The Queen in the Transparent opening titles came from associate producers Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst. Drucker and Ernst have steadily won acclaim for their art work over the last three years, with projects featured in the inaugural Made in L.A. 2012 biennial and the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
With sections previously shown in the Made in LA 2012 and the Whitney Biennial, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s current exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles captures in scattered pictures and videos the rise and fall of their years-long love affair, a relationship that ravels and unravels whilst both more fully transition into their true genders.
Nothing is more engaging than fantasy. When at the height of imagination, we are capable of conjuring rational or unrealistic scenarios based purely on our own desires. The possibility, in combination with perceived actuality, defines existence. We are composed of things known and experienced, and that which can be imagined, which is eminently apparent in the paintings of Tristram Lansdowne. Drawing from the familiar visual cues, palettes and landscapes of his upbringing, yet drawn to imaginary exploration, Lansdowne’s environments reflect a surreal blend of otherworldly structures and recognizable, ever nostalgic elements.
Transformation is never easy, but almost always necessary, and in the case of Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, a cause for undaunting exploration. Their most recent collaboration, aptly titled “Post/Relationship/X” explores the intimate moments within a relationship between an opposite-oriented transgender couple, during which time Ernst transitioned from female to male and Drucker transitioned from male to female.
America in general and Los Angeles in particular have a reputation as places for a second chance, places where anyone might reinvent a self. Photographers and filmmakers Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst are emblematic – and in mind-and- body-bending ways. Their work moves forward propositions perhaps first encountered 20 years ago in Cathy Opie’s widely acclaimed art. At Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Druckerand Ernst show two videos and a selection of 62 color photographs that were featured in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial this year.
Nearby, amidst the beaming rows of trans and cis supporters sat two young artists, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, who had more than a hand in shaping Transparent. Long time collaborators, Drucker and Ernst have had a surge of attention in 2014. At the Whitney Biennial they showed a photo series that documented their six-year relationship between 2008 and 2014, a period during which both transitioned — Drucker to female, Ernst to male.
Last Saturday (September 13) at the Craft in America Center, Miyoshi Barosh shared a retrospective of sorts at our open house in celebration of the Body Conscious exhibition. Here’s a few photos from the talk and open house.
The artist Zackary Drucker presented the film, in the context of Queer/Art/Film—L.A., a film series presented at Cinefamily and curated by Lucas Hildebrand. Zackary’s work is imbued with her interest in queer and trans history—a history that is hard to trace and therefore precious, whatever form it takes. Let Me Die a Woman presents its trans characters as specimens, to be scrutinized within a medical frame, but it also implicitly allows us to wonder at the motivations of the individuals who were willing to undergo the objectification of that frame, in order to achieve a presence, as representation, for unknown others—for us, in the future.
The canvases of "Les Femmes D'Alger" combine the positive and negative images of these women that persist today, rendering their figures as both sinister and auspicious, shadowy yet vibrant. As the title notes, the works also channel the treatment of women by the old masters of art. Referencing pieces by both Eugene Delacroix and Pablo Picasso, Faulwell turns away from art history's tendency to eroticize the female body and instead depicts the women as warriors.
Mimi Smith is a really interesting artist who probably isn’t as well-known as she deserves to be. She started working in the 60’s, and she actually made this dress for herself when she was pregnant, which is kind of amazing. At the time, women’s maternity dresses were very different than they are today; most of them were very full, flowing, they had Peter Pan collars. The idea was to obscure that you were pregnant, basically, as opposed to today, where you see women with very form-fitting maternity clothes. It’s prescient in the sense that here she has placed a clear bubble over the area where the baby is, so that she’s really drawing attention to it and saying, “There’s a baby in here; I want you to see it.”
How do photographers qualify for inclusion? Some, like Ken Gonzales-Day, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Lyle Ashton Harris, do so by using photographs as one piece in a larger project involving social commentary and self-dramatization. Gonzales-Day’s untitled photograph of two antique busts from the Getty collection riffs brilliantly on the double meaning of the word “profile,” which in this instance implies both the angle from which these faces are seen and the degree to which they fit with the viewer’s expectations regarding facial features and racial identity.
Chatting with Smith, who’s soft-spoken and self-deprecating, is congruent to the experience of her artwork; her creations, unassuming at a glance, have a sharp undercurrent of ferocity and critique. Smith is best known for her ‘clothing art’ produced during the sixties, the exemplar being “Steel Wool Peignoir” (1966), a negligee comprised of steel wool and lace, a brutal deflation of marital romance vis-à-vis domestic drudgery.
Smith's and Bee's art makes us laugh at the idiocy (the fears and myths) informing the male homosocial codes legislating women's repression, while asserting a feminist blockage of the conventional male humor perpetuating the history of women's persecution and enforcing a code of female homosocial norms in sync with male supremacy.
The works in the exhibit “ask similar questions about the impact of history on beauty,” she says. “What do we do with the beautiful trees that Ken Gonzales-Day photographs, but which we later come to find out are trees on which men were once lynched? Is there an ethics of seeing that refuses to shut out this historical legacy?”
Transgender artists Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst are transitioning in opposite directions and have captured their individual transformations in the "Relationship" series, a collection of photographs on exhibit as part of Biennial 2014 at The Whitney Museum of American Art from March 7 to May 25. The photo series is an intimate diary of the couple's love affair and their gender identity transitions -- Drucker from male to female and Ernst from female to male.
Ink on Paper represents a temporary shift in Engman’s artistic practice from photographic documentation on environmental installation phenomena – records of processes and the passage of time – to a consideration of photographs themselves as an inherently false, mediated and distancing way to experience the world. By focusing not on outer constructions but on the photograph as a constructed challenge to perception, this new body of work continues Engman’s inquiry into the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.
The news is supposed to provide information and context about what is going on around us locally and globally so that we can make informed decisions in our daily lives and at the ballot boxes. The free press and its modern iterations have long been venerated as the lynchpin of democracy. Yet, evolving tastes and cultural norms, as well as financial concerns, seem to be leading the traditional news media astray from this noble role, leaving space for genuinely informative reporting. To a certain extent, satirical news coverage is filling the void. So where does today’s confused news media landscape leave us?
Similarly, it’s the overlapping and sometimes complex inter- twining of studio setup, painting and photography that makes Jonathan VanDyke’s work so similarly hard to pin down. Known mostly for his paintings, which slowly drip paint onto the floor with a series of tubes hidden behind elaborately woven or constructed surfaces, photography has taken a more leading role in his practice, which employs his studio as a performative framework.
What are you working on in your studio right now?
I’m making draped paintings out of white paint skins. Just to clarify, a paint skin is what I get after pouring out whole gallons of acrylic paint to form a sheet and then leaving that sheet to dry. So far, most of my paint skins have been multicolored, but I’m pouring special white skins for the draped paintings, and I’m developing a way to create a white-on- white pattern so the surface of the painting will shimmer in the light, kind of like a damask tablecloth. I stumbled across the idea of making draped paintings when I tied some scraps of dried paint into a big loopy
At last weekend's Paris Photo LA, many works stood out to us for their ability to talk about photography in fresh, captivating ways. One such artist at the helm of sculptural photography pieces is Kate Bonner, who showed two of her works at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles booth this year. Bonner's works typically combine photography, sculpture, and installation for pieces that appear to come out of walls and corners. At the fair in particular, one seemed to be trying to leave the fair entirely, as it was positioned at an exit.
NJCU is currently displaying artwork by Mimi Smith, an acclaimed artist that has been doing artwork since the 60s, which was later categorized as “Feminist Art.” The name of the show is named “Constructing Art About Life.”
A trompe l’oeil photograph may seem like an oxymoron — photographs are constantly fooling the eye with their verisimilitude. Yet in his exhibition at Luis De Jesus, L.A. artist Chris Engman has managed to create photographic images that evoke this playful artistic tradition while examining the mechanisms of their own presentation. They engage in a kind of generative navel-gazing: Photography has caught itself looking.
My current body of work (titled Bounty, recently on view at VOLTA NY) explores these contradictions. In these paintings, I engage questions of light and dark, truth and fiction, substance and surface, reality and mythology. To address these concerns, I evoke the wide vistas, dramatic light, and stunning terrain of romantic landscape painting. However, I work to undermine that romanticism by layering images and materials and, for example, re-framing “heavenly” light and the color white as forces of darkness and portents of sorrow. My hope is that viewers are left wondering about what it is they are looking at—whether projected over, breaking through, covered up, or emerging from behind—and why.
If his work looks like your dusty Yes album jackets or the cover art of those Arthur C. Clarkes you toss aside in the used-book bin, it's for good reason; like them, artist Tristram Lansdowne is deeply concerned about the future. In his paintings, citrine glass biodomes are nestled among mountain peaks, volcanoes belch lavender plumes, and tidy concrete platforms negotiate cliff faces in as surefooted a way as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
Edith Beaucage sought to capture the courage it took to chart one's path as an immigrant in "Dragon Frederick Louis of Rimouski," a lush painting full of bold strokes and melting colors. "I'm not Asian, I'm French-Canadian, but I connected with their story of immigration. I believe that all immigrants have to have a dragon with them to undertake such a big move. They have to be courageous. These two men were that and their story had that underlying American theme of being able to do what you want in a new place."
The first time Rhys Ernst saw Zackary Drucker was in 2005 at a bar in the East Village. At the time, both were aspiring artists. Rhys had recently graduated from Hampshire College and was working for MTV networks. Zackary had graduated from the School of Visual Arts and was appearing on a reality TV show called “Artstar,” hosted by Jeffrey Deitch.
Two rows of color photographs make up Drucker and Ernst’s glamorous Relationship, 2008-13. In the top row, a figure with long bleached-blond hair poses in heels or in a dark apartment; below, a person with short dark hair lounges in bed or wades in the ocean. The series documents the couple’s gender transitions, artist Drucker from male to female and filmmaker Ernst from female to male, in images that, like gender, walk the line between documentary and performance.
When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an industrial strip in Northeast Los Angeles. Besides the open door, the house also stood apart with its manicured lawn and the polished wood floors I glimpsed through the doorway. It was as if Drucker’s house was in color, and the rest of the neighborhood in black and white.
Carlson Hatton’s immense and powerful exhibition of mostly mixed media drawings on view at the Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College is both fantastical and compositionally complex. Working in a variety of media including oil, pastels, watercolor and pencil, Hatton’s drawings are endlessly inventive as each of the many images function both as discreet object but also as an indispensible fragment of a much broader and comprehensive visual tapestry.
Edra is a conceptual artist working out of her home in Garfield Park surrounded by two dogs, several masks, and an array of work that her and her husband have collected over the years. It was this collection that was a major piece of inspiration for THE FRANKLIN, an exhibition space and free-standing structure existing just behind their home.
Google “feel better” and 130,000,000 suggestions for attaining happiness pop up in 0.24 seconds. If the American Dream is working, why are so many of us overdosing on sugar laden treats or seeking joy in the endless line-up of adorable pets that populate You Tube? Miyoshi Barosh opens her examination of this conundrum by confronting us with “Feel Better,” a mattress-sized wall sculpture of a chocolate bar flecked with gold, imprinted with its title, commanding us to improve our emotional state. This humungous symbol addressing the pitfalls of destructive consumption is in a face-off with four digital prints of adorable kitties across the room. A scattering of burns revealing underlying collages of colorful printed fabrics mars the kittens’ irresistible faces. In an adjoining room, Barosh’s “Arcadia” is a standout adaptation of crazy quilt fabrics into a folksy 3-dimensional suggestion of computer gaming landscapes. Re-interpretations of vintage post cards of scenic America with titles such as “Monument to Manipulated State of Well Being” reinforce sculptures including “Monument to the Triumph of the Therapeutic,” emboldening Barosh’s captivating examination of a variety of ways in which cultural failure has become internalized. - Diane Calder
Jean Lowe is not an illusionist in the conventional sense of the term. Her painted images and papier- mache sculptures don’t typically fool the eye by closely resembling the things they represent. Her game has more to do with the machinations of the mind, the conflations and confusions between what we know, want and believe.
A subtle irony simmers in this work, bolstered by the manipulated Internet-sourced courtroom photos of the revolutionaries and their amplified sanctification. Faulwell’s intent seems to hover on the boundary between commemoration and a derailing of precisely how that commemoration is visualized.
Performance/video artist Zackary Drucker and London-based photographer Manuel Vason have teamed up to create a series of self-reflexive and sometimes enigmatic images shot in Milan in 2010 during one of Drucker’s seminal performances. Drucker’s imagery does more than explicate transgendered identities; each of these photographs in some way expands the transgender dialectic to include, and indeed embrace, the compulsion toward violence, voyeurism and the interior space of the body versus the exterior space of public display and performance.
Silton's exhibit isn't just a philosophical exercise, it also touches on what is still a sensitive topic 75 years after Steinbeck published his novel: labor. "I was really interested in the notion of labor and class and how that resonates today," said the artist.Silton's exhibit isn't just a philosophical exercise, it also touches on what is still a sensitive topic 75 years after Steinbeck published his novel: labor. "I was really interested in the notion of labor and class and how that resonates today," said the artist.
FEEL BETTER: The exhortation, wish, or command, chiseled in “stone” calls to me in huge upholstered capital letters from what looks like a black vertical gravestone in relief hung as a tapestry on the wall. On it and on the floor are shiny gold-colored nuggets or “rocks.”
Miyoshi Barosh’s 2013 installation concentrates in one piece her deft use of linguistic slippage, and the dark humor of double entendre. Through the intense materiality of language-as-sculpture, the work activates a kind of monumental craftsmanship that oscillates between the fleeting virtuality of a Facebook “wall” and the timeless finality of a tombstone. That the work is made of illusionistic movie prop materials (fabric, paint, foam, fake gold) adds to this collision.
The clash produces in the viewer a Brechtian estrangement effect, as when we are obliged to stand at a certain distance from the work, a distance that prevents us from being sucked in by the face value of language or the seduction of workmanship in the materials alone. According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “words are deeds.” Language
This strong group exhibition at Catherine Clark Gallery is rounded out by Kate Bonner, Lauren Marsden, Bruno Fazzolari, Josh Greene, Patricia Esquivias, and collaborators Gareth Spor and Piero Passacantando celebrates the contributions made by CCA graduates and staff and further strengthens Clark's ties to the neighborhood.
Contemporary painter Laura Krifka paints highly emotive, intensely vibrant fantasies, capturing a dynamic sense of audacity and repulsion. The California-based artist begins her process by creating sculptural models based on correct anatomy, configuring them to convey an ambiguous narrative within a light box, and then photographing the composition before painting her large-scale artworks. Each of Laura’s paintings contains an element of anxiety. Her characters are tinged with a poignant sense of longing, fear, pain, or rapture, and gaze off the pictorial plane, suggesting the viewer is capturing an intimate and present moment.
Laura Krifka makes paintings, sculptures and videos that dissect common fantasies of power and identity. Her work is both gorgeous and terrifying often dealing with fantasies of beauty and nobility, myth, power, identity seduction and the American dream, exploring the relationship of light and dark through a range of influences from art history to fairyland with a post-modernist twist.
Laura Krifka’s work feels both classical and contemporary—a collection of myths that transcend time, stuck on the spin cycle from one era to the next. There is a soft religious quality in each face as he or she slowly responds to pending doom, lurking out of view. Such off -stage suspense feels exactly this way—theatrical.
In contrast, there’s nothing self-satisfied in the figurative paintings by Sarah Awad and Laura Krifka, both of which treat the human body as a universe that is at once intimate and alien — as comforting as a lover and as disquieting as dread.
Using photography as a main component, the artists visit and revisit objects and images, manipulating them, cutting them and repositioning them until the originals are transformed into new iterations. The iteration becomes a documentation of the changes that take place between originals and the outcome. The final pieces are collages and configurations of process, landing in a space pushing the boundaries of three-dimensionality. Kate Bonner’s new work is a strong example of that push, disrupting the limitations of two-dimensional images.
I passed out a series of postcards I produced in conjunction with a concurrent public project of mine about free speech called Utility, which is installed on five utility boxes in neighboring Pasadena. It’s incredibly gratifying to extend a work’s sphere of influence beyond the gallery or museum. If one person who never sets foot in a traditional art space posts one of my postcards on her/his refrigerator, the work, to my mind, has achieved great success. And this is in sharp contrast to how success is defined by the institutional art world. In addition to the accessibility of public space, I’m drawn to the relationship between public space and media proliferation; public space is where and how media of every conceivable nature goes viral. As such, it’s propaganda’s chief venue. So I regard the public realm as a rich site for subversive intervention
The work inspired Silton to look more closely at names and how they function. "When I saw John's piece I began to think about the ways in which we identified with this sequence of letters as being ourselves, even if we have the same name as countless other people," she says, "A name becomes the stand-in for the body." Nowhere is this perhaps more true than in the art world. In her essay for Silton's book, art historian Liz Kotz reminds us that an ad for an exhibition may consist of nothing more than a name, and that shows and works are routinely referred to in the same way: "We're doing a show of Richard Prince.' 'We just bought a Sherman.'"
Featuring works by Kate Bonner, Andrew Chapman, Anthony Discenza, Aaron Finnish, Chris Hood, and Cybele Lyle, the overall aesthetic of the installation is chromatically minimal, which helps to keep the room from feeling cluttered. In a continuation of the exhibition title, the works are all deliciously anti-cathartic. What we see is a biopsy from a larger narrative that the artists never full reveal. Instead the works confront the viewer with tension and aura, encouraging the consideration of the exhibition as a whole.
I predominately work on paper. I love the fragility, the flatness, the lightness, the way that watery color sinks into it, and the fact that you only have so many chances to get it right before you’ve gone too far. There’s no re-gessoing or sanding back down for me.
“The last time I nailed it, hmmmm….
Have to say that would probably be back in 2010, when I had two solo exhibitions, one in Los Angeles and one in Chicago. It was super tough, but I felt as an artist, that is the reward and the challenge, juggling life, ideas, and simultaneously being
responsible for daily life stuff as well. For me, Nailed it!”
–Britton Tolliver
This Bologna boy, living in New York, updates the fucked-up narrative of Bishops balling with Nazis in an arcane video format. At times it’s reminiscent of early shoot-up video game, Doom, and at other more poignant moments the illustration of esteemed RCA professor Andzej Klimowski. It is, of course, also satirical: Chinese Democracy and The Last Day on Earth (2012) ridicules communist leaders’ abuse of power, while leaving the US presidencies shortcomings hanging. Once hooked in, the viewer is left gagging for more.
Drucker kicked off the evening with “Bring Your Own Body,” a tribute/biographical monologue to the late transgender figure Lynn Elizabeth Harris. Harris, who was born a hermaphrodite in Orange County in 1950, was raised as a female through high school and beyond by parents who never reconsidered his gender identity...
What is “Chinese democracy” supposed to be — a pun? If you want to find out, then be sure to check out New York–based Italian artist Federico Solmi’s exhibition, mysteriously titled Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth. Replete with crazy videos, crazy paintings, and crazy drawings, this outlandish show comically explores the decline of all Western civilizations through a buffet of symbolic characters and apocalyptic scenarios
A baker’s dozen of arts-centric individuals and organizations were celebrated by White Rock council as ‘community inspirations’ Monday. The list of nationally and internationally known honourees was far from complete, Mayor Baldwin noted in recognizing the 13 artists in attendance and another nine who were invited but were unable to attend.
The "Graying of Whiteness" section was introduced by Ken Gonzales-Day, now professor of art at Scripps College, Claremont, California. Since then he completed a book on the history of lynching in California, "Searching for California Hang Trees," and has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. My essay from the book follows below. Image captions have been retained from the original text. But, a decade later, many of the artists have changed galleries, obtained other ones, or some have gone out of business.
Next, we stopped at the Luis de Jesus Gallery to meet with L.A. artist Ken Gonzales-Day and see his new exhibition of photographs, including the well-known image of two male faces seen in profile. These are bronze portraits from the Getty’s collection, one depicting a white male and the other a black man, staring at one another across a wide divide. Looking at Gonzales-Day’s photographs, your first impression is of the elegant beauty of the museum objects he has chosen as his subjects. But the cool surfaces of these photos are always impregnated with palpable racial, ethnic and cultural tensions.
In “Profiled,” Gonzales-Day sorted through busts from storage rooms of art and history museums from Europe, the Americas and Asia in search of different depictions of race. He collected Western European works from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries depicting the perceived “scientific” images of racial difference. The seemingly random group of individuals shown unknowingly helped create the racial stereotypes they happened to embody. When paired together we can easily recognize one sculpture as Asian, another as Native American, regardless of their marbled, identical skin tones. In the art history canon we see categorization and hierarchy emerge, using bodies as if they were variables.
The American tradition of lynching transcended the white-black milieu of the Deep South. Two social historians, William Carrigan and Clive Webb, have made a strong documentary case that the "lynching rate" for Mexican-Americans was comparable to that for African Americans.3 California led the way in anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese vigilantism. According to legend, Joaquín Murrieta – one of the great figures in Gold Rush and Chicano history – chose his second career in banditry in response to the hanging of his half brother.
Artist Ken Gonzales-Day was researching early photographic images of Latinos in California when he came across a portrait that propelled his work in a whole new direction. "I turned it over, and on the back somebody had written, 'Last man hanged in California,'" he recalled, "And at that point I realized I didn't know what that meant. Did that mean legally executed? Did that mean vigilante committee? Did that mean lynch mob?" There were no books on the subject, so Gonzales-Day began combing through archives throughout the state. He found over 350 documented cases of lynchings in California. But unlike their Southern, African American counterparts, the victims of this violence were largely Latino. What's more, California lynchings had been consistently neglected by historians and scholars.
Ken Gonzales-Day uses photographs to picture sites of secrecy and hidden history. Light-jet prints mounted on aluminum panels yield a stately, almost ceremonial presence. In his Conceptually oriented pictures, prominent blank space often functions as a visual signal that something is missing -- something that the subtly exalted photograph may or may not be able to identify, but that looms large nonetheless.
Mendoza is one of a group of artists displaying altars and installations for the exhibition, “Forgotten Stories, Remarkable Lives: Días de los Muertos 2012.” It’s part of the Oakland Museum of California’s 18th annual Days of the Dead, which remembers deceased loved ones and celebrates their lives.
Bidibidiba is a figure of speech for love, pleasure & sentimentality. Bidibidiba is where characters are build with painting activation in mind. Childlike multicolored brushstrokes are used to build abstractions that are part of the figure. There is a lot of interesting interaction with the background & the figure in the painting.
Bidibidiba is the title song of the 1970 movie “L’homme Orchestre” (“The Orchestra Men”) with French comedian Louis De Funes. Specifically, the Bidibidiba dance within this comedy had the effect of molding a desire in Beaucage for a modern and colorful life. Bidibidiba is light, entertaining, new, and full of sentimentality: idealistically bound portraits of diverse characters including girls and philosophers, art students (both fictional and real), hipsters with mustaches, Egyptian girls, princesses, knights, dragons, musketeers, wigged women, bearded men, and dandies. They are sometimes in conversations or simply doing their jobs of being portraits and holding the paint together.
Solmi’s imagery is childlike – but paradoxically not with the accompanying naivete of a child’s point of view. It’s clear he is having fun ridiculing the values of our misguided society -- corruption, greed, power and excess. A kind of visionary who proffers a cautionary tale in words and pictures, Solmi may be pulling our leg and warning us at the same time. His artistic vision is all once playful, imaginative, gruesome, amusing, violent and shocking. Brilliant, yes. We can only hope it is not prophetic.
Zackary Drucker is a dynamo, who, at the young age of 29, has created an insightful body of films, photographs and performances challenging gender normativity. Her work, which always intersects with her own transsexual identity, postulates queer alternatives to the status quo. She has staged performances inviting audience members to perform depilatory actions on her body.
The ability to capture the strangely atavistic nuances of any counter- culture can be a daunting proposition at best, yet Hugo Crosthwaite approaches his subjects—all from the darkly mythic border town of Tijuana, including prostitutes, drug-addled adolescents, murderers or madmen—with wit, sensitivity and compassion. In his first solo exhibition at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, titled “Tijuanerias,” Crosthwaite presents us with 102 ink drawings, small in scale and intensely realized in both content and form, as well as a large-scale installation in the back gallery comprised of an 80-foot-circumferential mural, divided into distinct sections and made of charcoal, graphite and ink on archival rag board.
Imagine glancing quickly past photographer Chris Engman’s work, Transplant—where the entire image of a tree is constructed using panels of images—while in development. Is it any less real when you are unaware that it is a set of constructed images? Is it more false because the images are broken into smaller, square frames? Can you say, definitely, that the tree exists at all, despite being photographed in one place and constructed in another? These are all questions Engman forces the viewer to confront after his first, quick, absorbing glance, and all questions Engman himself considers in the process of developing his work.
Hugo Crosthwaite's small drawings line the front gallery's walls at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. A jig saw puzzle of catholic school girls, nudies, saints, tattoos, and ghosts fill the pieces that are excerpts of life in Tijuana. Many of the scenes are positioned like movie stills, a young girl could be walking off of a surreal set, or she's unwittingly walked into another dimension. It's cartoonish and seedy, and the spaces where people linger could be the backside of a carnival.
Filmmaker Rhys Ernst and artist Zackary Drucker have a name for their situation. They sometimes refer to themselves as “reverse heterosexuals.” “It’s radical to most people that we’re such a normal couple,” says Ernst, who met Drucker three years ago in the backyard of a mansion in Los Angeles, the city where they now share an apartment. At the time, both were beginning a period of life-altering transition: Drucker from male to female, Ernst from female to male.
Though physically immersive, the installation is, paradoxically, less viscerally compelling than the small, discrete works, but still plenty invigorating. Throughout Crosthwaite's work, lust and violence are tempered by grace; tradition embraces surprise. Acts of witness marry feats of imagination, and a crazy equilibrium makes it all hang together.
In the decades after gold was discovered in California, lynch mobs hanged more than 300 people- frontier justice delivered by vigilantes. That part of the state's history had faded until Scripps College art professor and photographer Ken Gonzales- Day found a picture one day. That led to another photograph and another, and now to an exhibit at the Vincent Price Museum of Art in Monterey Park.
Zackary Drucker is a transgender performance artist who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality and seeing. The artist uses a female pronoun, and through her participatory pieces she complicates established binaries of viewer and subject, insider and outsider, and male and female in order to create a complex image of the self. “The Gold Standard” is a collection of Drucker’s projects, including performances and photography, documentation and exhibitionism, and combinations of the above.
The roster of emerging and under-recognized L.A. artists for the inaugural Hammer/LAX Art biennial has been released, along with an announcement of a $100,000 prize to be awarded to one participant. Liz Glynn, Analia Saban and Henry Taylor are among the 60 artists tapped for the show.
Krifka creates post-modern fairytales for the cynical dreamer. Her feminized landscapes, fetishized religious iconography, and historical surrealism challenge the assumptions that enable their subject matter. And yet, with her lush aesthetic touch, she also indulges in them. The exhibition shows us that fantasies are not just for silly little girls.
Who says fractals can’t be fun? Dennis Koch’s colorful canvasses first appear to be abstract, but the works are actually visual manifestations of mathematical codes and theories in Physics.Yet Koch shows that even though he works in geometrical recursion, his paintings look like inviting Froot Loops. He applies Systems Theory to his works, layering different steps to create a great, overarching superstructure.
Mother depicts the interior of a massive airplane hangar, with a domed roof spewing out beams of colored light. Our vantage point above the nose of the massive aircraft allows a look inside the cockpit, where a hazy silhouette confronts us. Beneath the wingspan is a crude topographical map suggesting that the airplane, or Mother, has consumed mother earth and replaced its terrain with machinery. Using another familial title with Father (Fat Man), a spherical drone planted on the desert surface emerges from a network of calculated brushstrokes. "Toward Trinity" identifies a newly a realized trinity of the 21st century--the Father, Mother, and Star Child.
With his latest effort, the burgeoning publishing mogul shifts a gear that looks to me like a focus from the people to the artist — the rich, mesmerizing and artistically elevated art publication, TRANSLADY FANZINE. As coffee-table as OP is pocket-sized, TRANSLADY FANZINE does not attempt to hand a microphone to the infinitely varied experience of transgender females, but rather is the product of an obsessively intimate collaboration between Amos Mac and a muse, the acclaimed performance and video artist Zackary Drucker.
I talk with my friend Nathan Gluck about Andy Paperbag...oops, I mean Andy Warhol, blown fuses, John Cage window displays, grocery shopping for items that will change the cultural landscape forever, Lucille Ball's strange choice of protégés, Factory phonies, Greta Garbo's garbage, the origin of muttonchops, Amy Vanderbilt and Jackie O. wannabes, the strange disappearance of Op-Artist Bridget Riley, who wants a "fun" baby, Ben Day dots, and casually loaning items to friends only to have them end up locked away under glass in a museum 20 years later.
Romantic traditions of American landscape painting get apocalyptic comeuppance from our post-nuclear era in eight new paintings by Chris Barnard. Dubbed "Toward Trinity," presumably after the New Mexico blast site where the first nuclear weapon was detonated 66 years ago, the works are a pointedly unhealthful concoction of glamour and destruction, thrilling power and impending ruination.
Saturated with color, often psychedelic and wild, Koch’s work is also cerebral, meticulous, highly disciplined, and multilayered. Through principles of mathematics, physics, Jungian archetypes, cycles, sequences, recursions, cymatics, planetary movements, and movement of thought between the brain’s hemispheres, Koch is concerned with underpinnings and structure, macro to infinitesimal, apparent or subliminal.
The entryway and two east galleries are occupied by 12 intimately scaled paintings and five tabletop sculptures by Lavi Daniel. His oils on canvas and linen are the best he has made. Solid, muscular and brushed into existence with a perfunctory, get-it-done-quickly vigor, each is also dreamy and elusive: a lovely symphony of subtly modulated organic tints quietly electrified by otherworldly light.
It's a curious mix that Lavi Daniel conjures in painting and sculpture. Both are about density but in very different ways. The paintings use light to push some shapes forward while others dangle in space. Forms are a cross between organic and geometric which adds to the ambiguity of their existence as something tangible. There is the feel of light coming over the horizon, a shelf that recedes into a crevice in a cave, a rock formation that juts from a wall.
“Possible Worlds,” a new installation of objects from the collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, adheres to a now familiar format, blurring the line between curating and art making. Artists Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz (of the artists’ collaborative Slanguage) created the installation as part of a residency at Watts House Project, an artist-driven urban revitalization initiative near Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers. A more complicated back story is hard to imagine, and the danger of course, is that the show relies too heavily on a context well outside the museum walls. However, it ends up being less about Watts or community art than a reflection on how they might influence the museum.
Ken Gonzalez Day's large ink-jet prints put photographs of figure and portrait sculptures by artists and anthropologists in confrontation and conversation -- a colonial American woman and a classical Venus, for example, opposite Japanese and Eskimo women. Similarities and differences are thrown into high relief, but it's the blank chasm between them (in this case, between cultural conceptions of East and West) that looms largest.
Like a fierce but soft-spoken warrior who reveals our foibles rather than causing us harm, artist Mimi Smith (b. 1942) has spent more than four decades creating objects that interrogate the pressing social and political concerns of our time, from women’s work and social conformity to nuclear holocaust, without flinching, and with a focused gaze. From her pioneering signature clothing sculptures to installations, artist books, and readings from the evening news, Mimi Smith uses what is around her in both intimate and prescient ways, connecting our daily lives to the important, difficult and sometimes life-threatening issues of our era. But despite the exquisite clarity of her work’s incisive merging of form and concept, her art has not always been adequately understood.
CB1 Gallery hosts artist Edith Beaucage from February 26 through April 3, 2011. Her exhibition .hurluberlu, explores the relationship between her characters and their abstractions. Beaucage talks about her exhibition.
"Painting is my life and teaching was my career," says Jim. "I retired from teaching, but I'll never 'retire' from painting. They both gave me great satisfaction; teaching as a means of helping others find their creative 'voice' and painting as a way of expressing what I see in the world around me." Today, Jim is a prolific artist with works in private and public collections internationally. He works primarily in acrylic and exhibits regularly.
The three artists in this exhibition––Nena Amsler, Miyoshi Barosh, and Nava Lubelski––make works that resist being slotted into traditional categories like sculpture or painting, decoration or craft. Materially and visually, their pieces exhibit permeability or seepage—holes, drips, and stains figure prominently throughout—indicating a space where one object or concept blends into or creates a dialectic with another. These artists’ material-conceptual investigations invoke the relational perspective of the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes in her 2008 book Sharing the World, “It is no longer a question of moving in a space arranged by the words of only one subject, but of taking the risk to open one’s own world in order to move forward to meet with another world." Barosh’s sculptural chairs sprout an array of armatures—shiny black drips, metal coils, and foam protuberances—suggesting both the exuberance and the violence of growing outside or through limitations and constraints.
Gonzales-Day anticipates this response with a large diagram: a portrait of his own head inside a cruel-looking cranial measuring device. Of course reducing entire populations of people to representative archetypes is racist and dehumanizing — this we know. But what emerges from these dual portraits is something more tender and strange. Perhaps it’s the veiled eroticism of the guys in fuzzy chaps on the other side of the room, or a smaller selection of images of classical statuary defaced with lewd graffiti, but the impassive sculptural pairs begin to look oddly like couples, gazing at each other across boundaries of geography, time and ignorance.
Edith Beaucage’s “hurluberlu” paintings, which feature idiosyncratic figures and architectural references are about the rich interaction of the imagination and social spaces. Beaucage’s new series has a Rococo energy, and is peopled by an engaging cast of lusciously painted faux-naif characters. The paintings are sweet, challenging, and utterly original. To better understand the artist’s ideas, I sent her a set of questions, and also asked her husband, Glen Irani, if he would add his perspective.
A hurlyburly is a real-world Tumblr of sensory and dimensional elements, but it denotes a vision or experience that's more captivating and even funhouse than actual chaos or anything destructive. The idea that not only modern art but life itself is a bit of a hurlyburly is at the heart of Edith Beaucage: .hurluberlu.
It started with a hairball. Margie Livingston wondered if she could draw the light filtering through that hairball — and with this challenge, launched herself into an exploration of depicting 3D space in 2D space, but always by first constructing and then copying a model. In order to produce one of her early paintings, Livingston would build a model, often a grid-like structure of string and wood. Then the small object standing in her studio would provide inspiration for an atmospheric, tasteful oil study in space, form and light. But recently those objects, built as models and collectively saved over the years, began to garner as much if not more interest than the paintings.
Such exhibitions are always hard to find, but there’s one on view now at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College here in upstate New York. Consisting mostly of paintings, and with work by 60 artists, it’s called “The Jewel Thief.” Piece by piece it’s a modest affair, but as an ensemble it’s vibrant. It makes even minimally interesting components feel vivacious... The surface of a Styrofoam bench by James Hyde incorporates photographic details of a Stuart Davis painting.
Zackary Drucker Performance Artist, Filmmaker– The most memorable work to date by 27-year-old performance artist Zackary Drucker may well be a piece entitled The Inability To Be Looked At and the Horror of Nothing to See, staged four times in 2009, where Drucker lays on a table wearing only underwear and a blond wig with a steel ball in her mouth.
Chris Engman's series Landscapes is based on the vast open spaces of Washington State outside of Seattle, where Engman lives. The title of the series, just like the images themselves, suggests one thing, while revealing many others. He has a show on at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle until Christmas Eve 2010. This interview with Engman was done for the Talent Issue (#24) of Foam magazine which came out in September 2010.
The paradigm-changing result is a transparent labyrinth where – without sound leakage – viewers can glimpse suggestive movement on the screens ahead or behind the one they are standing in front of, as well as of other viewers with whom they share the Plato’s Cave of cinema and video. The works range from comic vaudeville (Edison, Lassnig, Rhode) to tragic vaudeville (Reid), from post-punk angst (Solmi) to the elegiac (Berni, Kentridge, Mosley), with much else in between.
But none of these artists seems to have as much fun as Edith Beaucage, whose confidently spontaneous figures are breezy, casual and exuberantly expressive. Usually isolated on plain white grounds, Beaucage’s characters — and they are characters, not just figures — emerge from strikingly economical means. “Monster With Blue Eyes” is a Muppet-like figure whose “fur” has been quickly delineated in a fan of broad, blue-green brushstrokes. In the diptych “Hexagon” a brushy sketch of a woman on one canvas calmly looks at another, hexagonally shaped canvas painted in thick concentric stripes. It’s a succinct commentary on viewership that makes us aware of our own position in a network of gazes.
Throughout the exhibition, Crosthwaite’s work proves haunting or political, cartoonish or literal, showing the depth of his ability and classical training. At times, it feels as if these are bad dreams made real, with surreal moments interspersed amongst more realistic ones. In “Twins,” Crosthwaite explores the inherent censorship and loss of freedom following 9/11 by depicting a man’s fist in the mouth of another in the foreground of the New York skyline.
PHONG BUI (RAIL): I think the first time I was exposed to your work was in 1989 at the John Good gallery, where Chris [Martin] had his show a year later, which was the first time I was exposed to his work. What I remember from your show was a group of frescoes painted on all kinds of materials: glass, slate, wood, medium-density board, and so on. They were installed quite irregularly.
So it started with admiration....Well, I never wanted to paint like him, but he did get me into dealing with language in art. I was always interested in the way he seemed to go from shape to sign, using letters as an intermediary step in that process. The paintings you see here in my studio are also based on Davis, though they’re a bit different from the ones at the Boiler because they incorporate actual words. There is a type of reading involved, which is a way of looking at something while not looking at the same time.
James Hyde is a painter who can rarely contain himself within two dimensions. His semiotic explorations of the medium have taken him in the direction of paint filled Plexiglass vitrines that approach the condition of sculptural installation, Styrofoam supports as deep as they are high or wide, and furniture. When he does play within a conventional painting support, as often as not found objects are affixed. But he will as good as ask you to step outside if you question his membership of the painting guild.
Consisting of thick lashings of acrylic over humongous vinyl prints of details taken from 1930s Stuart Davis canvases, [James] Hyde’s muscular manipulations (he used a housepainter’s roller) pay homage to an underappreciated American modernist while supersizing issues of influence, quotation, and sampling. A feat that owes something to James Rosenquist’s literal magnification of pop culture, Hyde’s riffs on abstract painting scale up the impacts of gestural rhythm with Times Square results.
“Brutal Beauty,” the title of the museum show, captures well the tight conflation of tough and tender in Crosthwaite’s work. An element of violence threads through it, whether in the bruised bodies and flayed skin in Bartolomé (2004), or the guns within reach of the protagonists in A Tail for Two Cities, a large drawing completed on site at the museum, pitting characters representing Tijuana and San Diego in threatening but slightly comical confrontation. As an observer of people and his native city, Crosthwaite seems almost devotional. He doesn’t glamorize or idealize either, but reveres their humble familiarity, their vitality and authenticity. In many of the drawings, Tijuana appears as a cluttered sprawl of rooftops, electrical wires, billboards and other signage, its inhabitants thick-bodied and plain-faced.
"I do consider myself a performance artist, though it’s only one of a few mediums I work with. My performance of gender and sexuality is the common denominator in all of my film, video, photographic, and performative works. My performance mode is continuous and fully-integrated into my everyday life; as a gender variant person my physicality in this world is always on the line, always under review and scrutiny to the audience of greater culture..."
Historical documentation can be phantom fodder, as well. Ken Gonzales-Day takes familiar lynching images and re-photographs them, erasing bodies hanging from trees and telephone poles to create eerie voids within the pictures. W.H. Horne’s grainy photo from 1916 of U.S. General John J. Pershing’s troops “Executing Bandits in Mexico” from Pancho Villa’s ranks—that text is handwritten on the vintage print—revises the photo, removing the “bandit.”
Hugo’s process for creating “La Cola de dos Ciudades” was the result of constructing a mural piece directly onto the wall’s surface in a pop-up gallery space in a Brooklyn warehouse in 2009. The experience was freeing, as Hugo began composing pieces for the overall composition, he moved across the space and then back, searching for visual narrative as charcoal, ink and graphite were applied to the wall’s surface. The piece was completed and Hugo was proud to present this new found work.
And while viewing “Douche Bag City” (2010), Federico Solmi’s terrifying vision of violence, I think of video games, the most ultraviolent of which are never censored by the U.S. government.
Hugo Crosthwaite’s La Cola de dos Ciudades, (A Tale of Two Cities), (2010), and Bartolomé, (2004), are the dominant works of “Brutal Beauty,” his current show at SDMA. La Cola de dos Ciudades, inspired by Crosthwaite’s birthplace Tijuana, highlights conflict between Tijuana and San Diego. Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, Goya’s Duel with Cudgels and Kahlo’s The Two Fridas provided source material. The drawing features two anguished males depicted in a graphic/Pop Art style influenced by Crosthwaite’s recent years in New York and DC comics. Crosthwaite is a superb draftsman, and the fact that he created this work in three weeks in front of an audience is a feat.
One of the images that stuck to me as I started drawing yesterday, I just did a face, it came into my head an image of Goya's black paintings – there's this painting of these two figures, these two brothers, clubbing each other to death and their sinking. And I thought that could be the image that I'm doing here, two figures having a narrative, there's this duality to them, they're either reconciling or in conflict.
Scaramouche’s cramped storefront space at 53 Stanton Street is difficult to negotiate at the best of times, but Jonathan VanDyke’s exhibition “The Hole in the Palm of Your Hand” made an easy passage even more challenging than usual. While the five constructions in the show seemed at first well behaved, a closer look at each one—and a quick glance beneath it—revealed a substantially messier side.
"The Newest" brings together a couple of collages, a few photos, a painting, a drawing and a sculpture by six young artists who live in Los Angeles. It's a sampler show that abandons logic for pleasure, leaving viewers free to weave whatever connections they want (or need) among its consistently intriguing works.
“It's hard for me to separate Nathan, the person, from the Nathan, the artist—the two were inextricably bound,” says Luis De Jesus, director of Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, who was Nathan's best friend and was with him when he died.Anyone who knew him personally can see his quirky, yet elegant sense of style, sharp wit, all-encompassing knowledge, refined appreciation of the classics and, above all, his oddball sense of humor reflected throughout his work.
Over the next 10 weeks, Silton rolled out nine more apologizing avatars: Marion Barry, Ted Haggart, Trent Lott, James McGreevey (planted next to a photo of his wife standing by the real McGreevey during his apology), Larry Craig, Chris Brown, John Edwards, Mel Gibson (with Christ wrestling the cross in the background), Bob Packwood and Mark Sanford. Each avatar is flatly animated, like a cartoon, and each weirdly reacts to the cursor — when it moves, the avatar’s eyes follow it. And each makes his apology in the same measured voice — Silton’s — which adds a layer of eeriness, and also one of intrigue: The female voice (or at least Silton’s) seems to make the men appear more sympathetic. “You want to believe them,” Silton says, “and, based on the reactions I’m getting, my voice seems to offer sincerity.”
South Bay style was on display last night when Wilmington's own media and arts collective, Slanguage, took curatorial control of MOCA's Thursday night Engagement Party series with its Psychicinema Multiplex. Founded in 2002 by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr., and based in the harbor area of L.A. specifically to cultivate relationships between diverse audiences there, Slanguage has unleashed its experimental, street art approach on venues like the Tate Modern Museum and Serpentine Gallery in London, to LACMA, to Boston public schools — and now MOCA, where Slanguage's visual assault included screenings and projections throughout the courtyard and galleries, with psychic dancers, DJs, palm readers and a prom-style portrait studio with Wilmington's hellish refineries as the backdrop.
Hugo Crosthwaite’s three graphite drawings fuse character and cartoon, idiosyncratic identity and flat graphic energy. In one of the intriguing snapshots, a man lightly fingers a frog; in another, a half-naked woman in character-cluttered undershorts glances back at us as she inks a large tattoo.
The effectiveness of UNBUILT is less the result of mercy than rigor. What the viewer sees upon breaching Southfirst’s gallery is a salon-style wall of rectilinear, mostly flat paintings of various sizes. But from the outward noise, an internal structure begins to emerge. The majority of the pieces originate in photographic images of building skeletons, which Hyde, depending on one’s point of view, embellishes, reworks, conceals, defiles, augments, punctuates, comments on, or contributes to, by painting over them.
The Wonder Gaze uses photographs to conduct and promote an inquiry into the structural conditions of lynching both as a phenomenon situated in history and as a phenomenon living through history, encompassing, though not condoning, the gamut of lynching’s presentational and representational conditions. As Gonzales-Day shows us, photography (as a technology and as an episteme) is and was integral to lynching’s structural conditions, and for this reason there is no better apparatus for staging this archaeology than photography itself.
Combining an art project with historical analysis, the practice of Ken Gonzalez-Day makes an invaluable contribution to understanding how interdisciplinary methods should be applied in art exhibits. Several of his recent art series have emerged from his research into the visual history of the lynching of Mexican and Mexican American men in California. This epic project started when the artist began looking for percentages and statistics to support an art project, and found a history under erasure.
So the walls, historical and institutional, come tumbling down. And, too, the wall itself, site of Mexican high modernism, high/low art, border politics and gang throw-downs, is revised by several artists, most notably in the small interior hall supporting Ken Gonzales-Day’s lynching erasure works. Two large erasure images, the soft-hatted heads of a crowd of white folks milling around a conspicuously empty tree, have been placed along two temporary gallery walls. One wall is covered by a large blue/black print, the stasis of the site and the frozen, bruised moment underscored by the constricted palette. The mirror-image on the other wall is printed on mirror-paper. Gonzales-Day’s lynching erasure project surgically extracts the fulcrum-point of the image that the spectacle is supposed to mediate.
Everthing in thse small compositions reveals a sharp eye for design. Coupled with an easygoing and persuasive artistic vision. "Slibowitz Serenade" typifies his talent, with its wry arrangeent of a liquor label that gives the work its title, floating against a fragment of a musical score punctuated by stars, a fragment of a sculpture, some images of butterflies and a Greco-Roman figure in profile. Gluck's collages are thick with references to Europe. "Opera/Theater" is filled with ticket stubs from operas and concerts amassed in varied continental venues.
Almost everything we've seen of Nathan's was done on a small scale. They are colorful and deft and effortless, as if he knocked them out in the evening after finishing other tasks. He was immensely prolific and generous with his work -- it sometimes seemed that no sooner did he finish a drawing than he put it in the mail and sent it off. There's a drawing he sent to Gina's parents in 1950 of a girl carrying a bunch of balloons.
Like most shows at High Energy, one of the newer galleries in LA’s Chinatown, new work shows that fine-tuned craftsmanship doesn’t have to be canonical or crippled by the austere history of modern art. Koch’s and Nieto’s work not only evidence diligent attention to finish but also evidence equally diligent attention to the exuberant, culturally-charged potentials of color and shape. While they have the classy expertise of
any color field masterpiece, the drawings in new work also gauge the high energy allure of a rainbow colored parachute.
“Phantom Sightings” takes its name from a quote by artist Gamboa Jr., equating Chicanos in Los Angeles to a “phantom culture.” One can see the theme in photo works by Ken Gonzales-Day, who has taken old images of lynchings and erased the victim in each of them. Presented in a gallery room with a reflective wall, it’s an eerie look at turn-of-the-century racial violence that implicates the viewer as well.
In a project that recalls Louise Lawler’s ongoing investigation of art objects as fetishes and commodities, Gonzales-Day photographs statuary in the storerooms of European and American museums. His interest in representations of race, gender, and class results in a number of pointed juxtapositions of white, black, and ethnic subjects that are obvious but effective. In one image, an American Indian bronze in a loincloth gestures aggressively toward a naked white-marble youth who looks back seductively. Other work here is subtler and more ambiguous, picturing the random jumble of institutional storage spaces as a mass of types and archetypes forced into peaceful coexistence.
Crosthwaite's world of violence, poverty, furtive sex and tedium gathers power from the tension between the gritty vision and the beauty and grace of his draftsmanship. His sure line, the subtlety of light and shade and finely rendered details create a sense of reality so vivid you forget that it is in black and white.
“For the last 20 years, I’ve continually visited Lavi’s studio and continued seeing his work taking off in different directions and exploring the abstract language,” says Anne Ayres, curator of Daniel’s Armory exhibition. “Finally in 2004, I saw work that gave me so much pleasure that I thought it was time to collaborate with him and the Armory Center on a mid-career retrospective.”
Lavi Daniel is a meat and potatoes painter. At the Armory Center for the Arts, a mid-career overview of his works on canvas, panel and paper is true to the ethos at the heart of his art. Organized by guest curator Anne Ayres, “Parables of Space: Lavi Daniel: A Twenty-Four-Year Survey” puts substance ahead of style. The visually satisfying and emotionally rich exhibition avoids the glamour and trendiness that often accompany contemporary art and sticks, instead, to what Daniel does best: hearty paintings whose pleasures are part of their unfancy earthiness.
In her show at McKenzie two years ago, Jean Lowe created a high-camp furniture installation of papier-mâché, taking off on the fancy Empire mode of early 19th-century décor. Now she's at it again, this time slyly constructing a psychiatrist's waiting room and office with all the right accouterments: Breuer chairs and tables, a George Nelson sling sofa, a Barcelona ottoman, a rubber plant, stacks of Kleenex boxes, a shelf full of Greek and Egyptian artifacts with Freudian gravitas.
There is so much junk mail clogging Bay Area mailboxes these days that one man built a monument out of it, 17 feet high. It could be the only thing that junk mail has ever been good for, said sculptor Hector Dio Mendoza.
Nathan Gluck, who was born in 1918, got a job working for Andy Warhol in 1955 and stayed with him, on and off, for much of the 60s. He was his 'studio assistant,' a fact which reveals that, at a fairly early stage, Warhol's enterprises were well developed. Yes, for Andy, job in New York was indeed success. Warhol's operation was commercial, rubbing shoulders with advertising agencies, photographic studios and the design departments of leading department stores (most notably Bonwit Teller and Tiffany). From the 'real' world of art, its magnificoes and dealers, he was somewhat distanced and in awe.
"I know being an arist is going to be uncomforatable, " says Tezeno, who lived in a warehouse and cooked on a hot plate. "I will live in a cave if I have to. There is nothing in the world that I want more than to be a great artist. Tezeno says women are normally not as aggressive as their male counterparts; her determination has helped her survive ten years in male-dominated industry. She's quickly becoming one of the most recognized names in the art world, and has been comissioned to do a number of festival posters including New Orleans Jazz festival.
James Hyde paints blocks of color a la Hans Hofmann on a wide swath of indoor carpeting. Roxy Paine dips a small canvas in cool white paint until what look like icicles hang from its lower edge, and Bruce Pearson gives a monochrome coating to a large panel of Styrofoam with labyrinthine trails (they look like they could have been carved by giant termites).
Mimi Smith is best known for her clothing pieces made in the early 60s. Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), a see-through dressing gown luxuriously trimmed with thick rolls of steel wool and lace, was an early example of a literalist form of slapstick humour deployed by Feminist artists of the 70s. So too was Maternity Dress (1966), a silver-vinyl micro-mini worthy of Edie Sedgwick, complete with a see-through plastic moulded dome that fits over the belly. Although both works provoke a kind of dopey, out-loud laughter, responses to them provided early indications of social analyses of Feminist art.
The retrospective exhibition of the fabric art of Mimi Smith at the Anna Kustera Gallery in New York last year received critical acclaim in the press. Smiths seminal sixties clothing sculptures garnered the most notice. "Her interest in how clothes relate to a woman's pysche has become the theme of many younger women artists' work, but Ms. Smiths wry approach to the subject is still very much her own," wrote Grace Glueck in The New York Times.
Mimi Smith's art seems to function as a shield, not only for the absent bodies it evokes, but against some of Smith’s deep-seated rage. Her sculptures can be seen as a series of responses, a wry acknowledgment of pressing issues. As if in anticipation of an atomic blast, Smith recently stitched up a group of handy coverings for the postnuclear body: steel-wool mask, chaps, and wigs. Medications for breast cancer patients have been tooled into sexy undergarments. Taken one body of work at a time, Smith’s art may seem to lack the continuity on which commercial success depends, but this collective debut showed that it has never lacked bite.
Light-handedly exploring domestic and other issues for some 30 years, Mimi Smith has transformed clothes, clocks, computer-screen images, furniture and other everyday objects into things that tweak the psyche.
In the 1950s, when Andy Warhol was a sought-after commercial artist, Nathan Gluck was his assistant, making drawings and designing layouts that are cherished today as signs of Warhol's hybrid genius. After Warhol turned to fine art, Mr. Gluck pursued his own successful career as an illustrator and graphic designer, and in retirement, he is concentrating his energies on small, beautifully composed collages, 85 of which form this impressive show. Combining a range of printed detritus -- matchbook covers, wine labels, ticket stubs -- from around the world and the past several decades, these works play on words, forms, colors (often Warholesque fluourescents) and, above all, on styles.
“Steel Wool Politics,” the title of the Mimi Smith (b. 1942) retrospective at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, inevitably conjures up the image of one of Smith’s best known works, Steel Wool Peignoir (1966; Fig. 1). Made 30 years ago, the garment is constructed of sheer pink nylon and eggshell laced edged with thick furry bands of steel wool. The frothy wire looks dainty and rich enough to ornament an elegant boudoir garment, but steel wool discourages intimacy as it suggests an inappropriate “feminine” context: not the fantasy bedroom but the work-a-day kitchen.
["Painting Outside Painting," the 44th Biennial Exhibition of contemporary American painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art] aims to provide an update on the perennial desire among painters to take painting beyond itself, that is, the compulsion to stretch the medium's physical limits and prod its conventions with unorthodox materials and techniques... Among those who take painting's basic formula to extremes, the most interesting is James Hyde, who paints with a gestural flair in oil on glass or in fresco on big blocks of Styrofoam that wittily conjure chunks of plaster cut from the monumental walls that challenged the fresco painters of old.
It seems to be standard practice in our technological culture to perceive politics and daily life as separate and unrelated aspects of society, and thus to abstract large social issues from the effect they have on personal existence. But I’ve noticed that since the advent of the women’s movement, thanks to feminist research in this direction, more and more people have recognized that such a schism is unrealistic, and have begun to explore—through artistic and other means—the ways in which public policies and private lives are interconnected. The artist Mimi Smith is one such person; these connections are the subject of her installation House with Clouds.