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 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.

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 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 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: 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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. 

"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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 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. 

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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."

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.

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. 

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.”

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

“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.

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.

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

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. 

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.”

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.

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.” 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.” 

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.
 

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. 

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.

"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."

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.” 

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.

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. 

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?

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.

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.”

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.  

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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. 

“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.

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.