Artillery, January/February 2023, "Black Diaspora Emerging" featuring Chance the Rapper.

Connective Threads

Fiber Art from Southern California Curated by Carrie Burckle and Jo Lauria

On view now at The Broad is William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows a special exhibition featuring more than 130 exceptional works spanning 35 years of the celebrated South African artist’s practice. As you walk through each gallery you will immerse yourself in his artistic world and enjoy a multi-sensory experience which will capture your imagination through film, sculpture, theater, opera, and installation, including interactive works such as his 30-minute five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012) as well as early works rarely or never seen in the United States. This is a fascinating exhibition that you won’t want to miss!  Buy your tickets today at thebroad.org.

William Kentridge, Stereoscope, 1999. 35mm animated film, transferred to video and DVD. The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles © William Kentridge.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

In Downtown L.A.

DIANE ROSENSTEIN

Open Season Amy Bennett

Amy Bennett Weirdo, 2022, Oil on panel, 8 x 7 in.

Table of Contents

VOLUME 17, ISSUE 3, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023

Black Diaspora Emerging

FEATURES

Adenrele Sonariwo: From Lagos with Love - by donasia tillery 28

Chance the Rapper: Black Art Amplifer- by donnell alexander 32 Allana Clarke: Reframing a Ritual- by annabel keenan 42

BOOK REVIEWS

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues - by scarlet cheng 30

Jeffrey Vallance: A Voyage to Extremes - by doug harvey 48

FEATURED REVIEW

Marshall Brown: SBMA - by renée reizman 38

COLUMNS

ART BRIEF: No Food Allowed - by stephen j goldberg, esq 24

DECODER: Lefty Art - by zak smith 26

ON THE COVER: Mia Lee, Chance the Rapper, Chance the Gentleman , 2022, courtesy of the artist See page 32.

ABOVE : Chance the Rapper, from a photo detail by Keeley Parenteau.

RIGHT: Victor Estrada, Lavender Glitte r, 2022, mixed media, courtesy the artist, photo by Gene Ogami

NEXT PAGE, Top: Allana Clarke, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, photo by Tito Molina/HRDWRKER.

Bottom: Jeffrey Vallance, The Clowns of Turin: Found on the Holy Shroud , (detai;) 1996, collage, pencil and marker on paper, 22 x 29 ¾ in., collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, courtesy of Jeffrey Vallance and Tanya Bonakdar.

THE DIGITAL: Current Crypto Market - by seth hawkins 46

BUNKER VISION: Afrofuture Zombies - by skot armstrong 54

SIGHTS UNSCENE: Octavia E. Butler - by lara jo regan 56

OFF THE WALL: Homeless Art - by anthony ausgang 58

ASK BABS: Jack of Not All Trades - by babs rappleye 60

DEPARTMENTS

SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng 22

PODCAST: Death of an Artist by lauren guilford 40

POEMS by alexandra jade; john tottenham 60 COMICS: Cab Calloway by butcher & wood 63

REVIEWS

Victor Estrada @ ArtCenter 50

Justin Liam O’Brien @ Richard Heller Gallery 50

Judy Fiskin @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art 51

Nimer Pjota; Iglesias Peco @ François Ghebaly 52 Lisa Solomon @ Walter Maciel Gallery 52

Alonzo Davis @ parrasch heijnen 53 Sarah Kanouse @ 2220 Arts + Archives 53

Dear Reader,

My social media intern recently sent me a text with an unmistakable degree of urgency. She stated that Chance the Rapper was trying to get in touch with me by Instagram message. “Who?” I replied. My assistant, being of the millennial generation, was not at all surprised by my ignorance. I think she even anticipated my dumbfounded reaction, hence her urgency. “I don’t think you understand,” she said, and proceeded to explain the relevance of the young rapper and how remarkable it was for him to actually be reaching out to us on our Artillery Instagram—let alone that he is a follower. Of course, an introduction was immediately made.

What on earth would a noteworthy musician such as Chance want with me, an editor of an art magazine? My interest was piqued. After informing a few of my younger friends, it was confirmed: It was extraordinary that this massively popular rapper was reaching out to me.

My assistant made the e-intro and soon we were united, digitally; there was to be a Zoom meeting. I included my assistant in the thread and the Chance team joined in on the Zoom call, about six of us in all. A few faces made an appearance, but most of the participants kept their video off. We were all waiting for Chance. I was nervous by now, and still couldn’t imagine what this meeting was all about. Soon he appeared, but not in the flesh (as it were). There was a big letter C that pulsated in rhythm to his speaking voice, like the all-powerful Oz, although Chance was soft-spoken, thoughtful and polite.

I was informed that Chance has been collaborating with the fine-art world on a specific art project. He was working with the Black Diaspora and wanted more inclusion of these important artists. Being from Chicago, and a regular patron of the arts, Chance couldn’t help but notice the lack of Black artists in the art world and the elitism that exists in the fine-art world. Unfortunately, I found his observations to be quite accurate.

Chance would be in LA in September, doing another collaboration with artist Mia Lee (whose portrait of Chance is on our cover), at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I contacted writer and hip-hop aficionado Donnell Alexander—who I’ve known for years, since the old LA Weekly days—and he was eager to do something on Chance, for whom he has great respect.

Chance is very keen on working with African artists and this project will end up in West Africa in the New Year. It so happened that a new gallery in West Hollywood, dedicated to exhibiting African artists, caught the eye of writer Donasia Tillery, who appears in the issue with a Zoom interview of African art dealer Adenrele Sonariwo from Lagos. Annabel Keenan, our New York contributor, writes about New York–based Trinidadian-American Allana Clarke’s work, which deals with Black attitudes to hairstyle. All this came together to present features on the Black Diaspora Emerging in the art world.

I love starting off the New Year with fresh new content and a rapper on the cover. It’s nice to mix things up a bit. Isn’t that what art is supposed to be all about? The art world is constantly changing, just keeping up with the world. And Artillery is right there with it. Happy New Year art lovers!

Photo by: Maxim Elramsisy

FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS

From his Arts District home, Donnell Alexander writes and podcasts about culture, politics and cannabis. Alexander’s sentences have appeared in The Nation and Daily Kos, as well as on KCRW and numerous weed-related podcasts. As a evangelical Christian child, the Ohio native knocked on doors, Watchtower mags in tow.

Donasia Tillery is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker whose work centers art as a mode of radical honesty, individual healing and collective liberation. She is a recipient of MOZAIK Philanthropy’s Future Art Writers Award (2022). Her writing has been featured in Artillery , CARLA , Curate LA and others.

Renée Reizman is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator. She coauthors dialogues in diverse communities to study the ways infrastructures shape our culture, policy and environment. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic, Art in America, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vice and more. Follow her @reneereizman

Lauren Guilford is a curator, writer and art historian based in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Art History from UCSB with a focus on Baroque art and critical theory, and an MA from USC where she wrote her thesis on the history of alternative art spaces in Los Angeles. She has written for Frieze and Speciwomen

Mía Lee, a painter and textile designer from Chicago, focuses on figurative paintings that depict familiar human experiences, delicacies of relationships and emotional states from a first- and third-person perspective. Her large-scale works incorporate cartoonish figures with intense facial expressions. Mia’s portrait of Chance graces our cover.

STAFF

Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher EDITORIAL

Bill Smith - creative director

Emma Christ - associate editor

John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor

John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Ezrha Jean Black, Laura London, Tucker Neel, John David O’Brien

COLUMNISTS

Skot Armstrong, Anthony Ausgang, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Lauren Guilford, Seth Hawkins, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Babette, Lane Barden, Natasha Boyd, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Max King Cap, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Alexia Lewis, Richard Allen May III, Christopher Michno, Barbara Morris, John David O’Brien, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, Eli Ståhl, Allison Strauss, Cole Sweetwood, Donasia Tillery, Colin Westerbeck, Eve Wood, Catherine Yang, Jody Zellen

NEW YORK: Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

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Hello, Good-Bye New Year for Hammer Museum

Was 2022 a blur? It feels like it went by very quickly, too quickly, as we transitioned into the New Normal. People have returned to indoor dining, theaters are open and museums and art fairs are back—though some museums still recommend reservations. The galleries are doing business, but many of them stayed open throughout—were they considered “essential” businesses? In any case, they were essential for me, as they gave me a chance to see art throughout the last two-plus years. Clearly, artists didn’t stop producing work, which is a good thing. Some had to move to different types of work or were inspired to do different kinds of projects.

New buildings or renovations give us a sense of progress and, after years of construction, the revamped Hammer Museum will finally be completed next March. The change has happened incrementally, so there have been no shutdowns, other than for COVID. The Hammer will have a better-defined entrance on the corner of Wilshire and Westwood, a new outdoor sculpture ter-

Art Fair Report

The stalwart LA Art Show returns to the LA Convention Center Feb. 15–19, with its educational division, DIVERSEartLA, presenting works that focus on the global climate crisis. There will be eight interdisciplinary projects including artist Alfredo De Stefano and The Italian Cultural Institute presenting artists Pietro Ruffo and Elia Pellegrini. The fair will continue its recent focus on Asia and will feature a new Japanese Pavilion with over 15 galleries, plus more South Korean galleries participating in their own section.

This year’s Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 16–19) moves to the Santa Monica Airport, with some 120 galleries plying their wares. If you want to go, buy tickets NOW, especially as this year they’re selling tickets with timed entry, and I see that some slots are already sold out! You can also buy a parking pass at the same time, but these are timed also, so be sure to read the fine print. https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-los-angeles/tickets.

In addition to that venue, we can enjoy Frieze Week in various parts of the city, starting February 13, at galleries, museums and

Desert News

Not long ago, artist Andrea Zittel said she was stepping back from High Desert Test Sites (HDTS), the biennial of desert-sited artworks and installations that I’ve always found a wonderful mix of experimentation and artistry, if a bit unecological for all the driving we had to do. She was letting HDTS and A-Z West, her studio complex, be run by a team. However, in November she sent out a public statement saying she would take back the reins of HDTS as artistic director. This isn’t too surprising, as HDTS and especially her studio A-Z seem to me to be so much a part of her. Not only did she set up the studio when she moved to the desert decades ago, but the design and development of the different

race and will make the entire ground floor along Wilshire added gallery space. From street side, the building will be more clearly an art museum. Sanford Biggers’ 25-foot-tall cast bronze Oracle, previously in New York’s Rockefeller Center, will highlight the sculpture terrace. In the last two decades a total of 40,000 square feet of additional space has been added, made possible by the 2015 acquisition by UCLA (the Hammer’s parent) of the adjoining building on the Glendon Avenue side.

All this allows more space to display the Hammer’s own collection: drawings, prints, photographs, artist books from the Grunwald Center Collection and the contemporary art it has been collecting recently. Several new sections are already open, including the spiffy new gift shop with windows overlooking the street and a dedicated space for prints and drawing, curated by Cynthia Burlingham and her staff at the Grunwald Center. (As mentioned in my last Shoptalk report, the inaugural show in that space, “Picasso Cut Paper,” was a gem, and what a beautiful installation.) The new restaurant Lulu is open, developed by one of America’s great chefs, Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and one of the founders of the farm-to-table movement.

Many kudos to Hammer Director Ann Philbin, who’s had the vision and the drive to make this all happen!

other spaces. Highlights include “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows” at The Broad; “Alicia Piller: Within and Strings of Desire” at Craft Contemporary; “Bridget Riley Drawings: from the Artist’s Studio” at the Hammer; “Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” and “New Abstracts: Recent Acquisitions” at LACMA; “Henry Taylor: B Side” and “Simone Forti” at MOCA Grand. Well, that’s basically the terrific exhibitions we have on in Los Angeles now and upcoming! I highly recommend “Regeneration” at The Academy, and “Kentridge” at The Broad, both exhibitions rich in content and wonderful in presentation.

I have my own addition for those seeking art and inspiration—”Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts” (through March 27) at The Huntington in San Marino. This is a fascinating show, very much about the wonderful animators of the early Disney studio who brought life and wonder to furnishings, architecture and inanimate objects. Lots of concept and preparatory drawings, plus some of their inspirations in European porcelain and decorative arts.

components, and the art production that continues there, are part and parcel of her art practice.

Also, they will be turning away from the biennial model they’ve had for 20 years and cutting back to concentrate on their core projects. “I have formally assumed the role of artistic director of HDTS,“ writes Zittel in the announcement, “both to oversee the grounds and artworks and to help ensure the long-term viability of A-Z West and HDTS. I also remain an active member of the HDTS Board.” New programming will be announced in the new year, but in the meantime they need to raise new funding. To that end, Zittel told me recently, they’ll be having their first fundraising event in Joshua Tree this spring.

Welcome to the New Year, Everyone!

Installation view of “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. (Joshua White / JW Pictures/©Academy Museum Foundation).

Sanford Biggers, Oracle , 2021, photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund. Rendering of the new Hammer Museum entrance by Michael Maltzan Architecture.

An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites: 2002-2015. Image courtesy of High Desert Test Sites.

Installation view, ”Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency,” Artists Space, October 8, 2021–January 15, 2022, photo by Filip Wolak.

Monet with a Side of Mashed Potatoes

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A bomb explodes in one of the Met’s galleries leaving 13-year-old Theo motherless in the harrowing opening of Donna Tartt’s 2013 bestselling novel, The Goldfinch. In the wake of the explosion, caused by an apparent terrorist attack, a mysterious survivor prompts Theo to steal Dutch 17th-century artist Carel Fabritius’ painting of the small colorful bird, setting off Tartt’s convoluted Dickensian plot. Ever since reading the novel and viewing the film depicting swirling billows of dust and debris inside the Met’s Dutch galleries, I have been concerned that such an attack could easily happen at almost any American art museum.

Recently, on a visit to MOCA on Grand Avenue, my ladyfriend asked if she could check her overstuffed handbag, and was told the museum does not check in items, causing her the discomfort of lugging her bag around the galleries. I was horrified by the prospect that visitors could conceal virtually any kind of weapon or substance in their handbag or backpack.

I spoke to the director of a major Los Angeles art museum who rebuffed my suggestion that magnetometers be placed at entrances to museums and visitors’ bags should be searched, claiming it was not worth the “inconvenience” or the expense. It seems almost inevitable that some tragedy will occur at an art institution given the substitution of young “visitor assistants,” many of them art students, for experienced security personnel at numerous museums in recent years.

Hapless “security guards” have proved to be no better than mere bystanders at deterring the defilement of art masterworks by climate change activists during 2022 at numerous European art institutions. The climate protestors have flung everything from mashed potatoes to tomato soup at such masterworks as Monet’s Haystacks at the Museum Barbarini in Germany and van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery. Fortunately, the only thing preventing damage to the paintings has been the panes of glass protecting them. Some protestors have also recited speeches and slogans which have gone viral while gluing themselves to the ornate frames of classical works such as Botticelli’s Primavera at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, unimpeded by security.

The climate protestors—going by such names as “Just Stop Oil” and “Last Generation”—were seeking worldwide attention with their antics. These acts of desperation are a tacit admission that protests at energy company headquarters and facilities have become so routine that they hardly produce any media coverage.

In July, 2022, members of Just Stop Oil went so far as to glue themselves to a 16th-century copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper at the Royal Academy in London and spray paint the slogan “No new oil” under the artwork.

ART BRIEF

While the goals of the protestors are generally admirable—only a delusional politician (such as Trump) would deny that climate change is not merely real, but rapidly approaching the point of no return—holding art museums hostage is not the answer. The only positive effect may be that the activists have revealed to the world the vulnerability of art museums to serious attacks. The flip side is that obvious security lapses may provoke a mentally unstable person to deface a masterpiece, or inspire a Goldfinch-like terrorist attack.

Art institution boards of trustees should assess the lack of response to the protestors and glaring vulnerabilities of security protocols at some of the world’s most popular museums. While most of the major art institutions may be close to theft-proof, defacement of priceless artworks is a growing danger.

The Association of American Museum Directors should put these security lapses at the top of their agenda. The growing pressure on art museums to make admission free of charge has blown a hole in already stressed budgets, but fund-raising campaigns earmarked for increasing security are long overdue.

A Bold Statement

BY ZAK SMITH

I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear references to the issues of the day. “I wanted to do what I wasn’t supposed to do,” she said.

This struck me as new and odd—or, at least, counter to my experience and understanding. The contemporary art world I knew—the one I’d been told about since at least high school—very much craved messages and clear references to the issues of the day. Not only do artists whose work refers to topical lefty issues occupy an esteemed position in the layer cake of art-critical discourse, but even artists whose work’s connection to topical lefty issues are less than obvious, are obscure, or are arguably nonexistent, are described and promoted using the language of topical lefty discourse. If you believe what you read, contemporary sculptors, painters, video artists and installation installers are forever shaking up status quos, forcing us to question received ideas, critiquing commercial culture, and promoting diversities and alternatives.

At least within the relatively cloistered hothouse of the contemporary art world, my understanding is that what we were all casually expected to do is (while steering clear of becoming the kind of confrontational career-suicide who forces art-support institutions to confront the not-lefty-friendly parts of their power base) pretty much constantly tackle topical lefty topics in a way that would align us with the New Yorker or NPR view of the world, thus making it all the easier to get written up in the New Yorker or interviewed on NPR and so remain relevant. That’s what every single well-known artist in living memory had done before.

However, my friend reminded me that this top layer of the art cake—occupied by artists who casually say things like “my next retrospective”—is not the only layer with enough icing on it to put your kids through college. Many mind-bendingly good artists occupy a low or mid-tier strata where the job is less about the art speaking to writers who in turn speak to potential customers, but more just the art dealer talking straight to the customers. And sometimes what these absolutely commercially necessary customers want is: to put the painting in a bank, or a hotel, or some other place where a Republican, a small child, or an unusually Catholic person might see it. These may seem like strange places to put contemporary art, but there are a lot of them.

In many ways it is not even a question of offense . There’s a certain quality to images that make their plays for your attention on very specific terms—on my way to the drugstore I will notice images asking me to buy a beer, to watch a television show, to support a candidate and/or a cause, to change lanes, to beware of dogs, to use the other door, to press the button to call the clerk. None of these are bold creative or social statements but they all ask something super-specific of me, and they all dissolve into visual noise once the asking has been addressed: I already watch that show, I did change lanes, I voted for the other guy. Art with this quality—the quality of asking, by implication, for a judgment or a take on some other thing in the real world, the quality that nearly any representational image has—there’s always a risk that it annoys someone, that it’s a little louder on the wall than a big lavender lozenge, no matter how lovely. This can make it harder to sell.

What emerges is a bizarre class system of expression: artists who have a bulletproof sniper’s nest (like having escaped a prison camp or having gotten famous in the ’90s) out of which to spray their bullets have the ability to make art full of statements and can be sure this statement-making is received as heroic, and they can sell work off that reputation so long as it can be distinguished from those lower down in the pecking order who—while having views that are nearly identical—are less phenomena of the media than of the luxury goods business. These artists must ride to work on the same squeamish tides of commercial demand as any other product in the market and might be punished not so much for rocking the boat as for reminding the sailors the sea has waves.

Sometimes they want you to say something and sometimes they don’t, but the boldest statement—the one that involves risking something real that you might not get back—is not caring.

Illustration by Zak Smith

FROM LAGOS WITH LOVE

The Far-Reaching Vision of Adenrele

Sonariwo

BY DONASIA TILLERY

The sun is rising over my home in Northeast Los Angeles as I call gallerist and curator Adenrele Sonariwo on Zoom. She answers me from her office in the bustling West African city of Lagos, Nigeria, where her day is already in full swing, crescendoing toward the familiar buzz of a workday afternoon. Dressed in a classic black blouse, she fills the frame of my screen with a steady and warm presence, inviting an immediate sense of oneness to our interaction. This unlikely meeting across continents and time zones seems to reflect something uniquely true about African diasporic kinship; we are worlds apart and yet, powerfully united by the resonance of shared experience.

Self-described as a woman of many worlds, Sonariwo is no stranger to that global Africanist consciousness. Earning her BA from Washington D.C.’s Howard University, MA from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University and a certificate in Curating Contemporary Art Exhibitions from the University of the Arts London, Sonariwo is uniquely in tune with Blackness as a worldwide phenomenon, an inclusive lens which fuels her work as the founding director of Rele Gallery.

A pervading sense of peace and purpose surrounds Sonariwo, who is inspiring because she is so profoundly inspired. Formerly a successful accountant, her journey to the art world was unprecedented and not without risk. Her daring pivot from the safety of a secure job to the unpredictable world of contemporary art was motivated by a simple yet powerful vision: “I was

working here in Lagos, and I was seeing a lot of young artists that weren’t given platforms,” she tells me, her face bright with enthusiasm. “I thought, how do we make art accessible? How do we give these young artists a space where they can express freely? How can we trigger a new audience into appreciating, collecting and engaging with the art?” Founded in Lagos in 2015, Rele Gallery does just that, focusing its efforts exclusively on uplifting African artists and centering their perspectives within the international landscape of contemporary art.

What began as a heartfelt mission has since led Sonariwo to noteworthy professional milestones. She served as lead curator of the first-ever Nigerian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, infusing the massively important event with West African culture and history. She has organized exhibitions at Art Basel Miami, Art Dubai and New York City’s Armory Show. In 2015, she established the Rele Arts Foundation, Rele’s nonprofit component which mentors emerging African artists. The Foundation’s nine-month annual residency has catapulted several of its artists to gallery representation and exhibitions on and beyond the African continent.

Rele’s West Hollywood outpost, opened in 2021, augments her far-reaching mission, bringing a dynamic community of African artists to the international stage. “In my first exposure to LA, I spent a lot of time going to the museums. I went to MOCA, LACMA, The Broad. I went to Hauser & Wirth. I went everywhere. I was enjoying how related I felt,” she says wistfully. “I was so

inspired by the space. It was a no-brainer for me. I thought, when I do an international location, it will be somewhere that my spirit is in tune with.” Since that momentous encounter with the city, Rele Gallery Los Angeles has curated an impressive 12 solo and group exhibitions, covering topics from gender norms to spirituality from an African perspective.

Rele Gallery hits the Los Angeles art scene at a pivotal cultural moment, as galleries and museums welcome a wide range of Black artists to their halls. Still, even this significant uptick in representation may not speak to the fullness of the diasporic experience. “When I go to museums, I’m very excited to see stories that are not about struggle, stories that are not necessarily what people would expect to be coming from a Black artist or an African artist.” For Sonariwo, the work of representation is far from monolithic, requiring an unapologetically diverse gaze on African artistry.

I witnessed that versatility firsthand during my visit to the gallery this summer. In its group exhibition, “Present Minded,” African subjects soar through the air and emit X-ray vision in a timely commentary on technology, impermanence and the afterlife. I recall the show feeling like a breath of fresh air, in which African cultures were represented so colorfully, depicted beyond oppressive colonial histories. Rele’s November exhibition, “Poetics of Material,” on view in both Lagos and Los Angeles, is similarly expansive, meditating on organic and manufactured objects as

repositories for cultural memory. I wonder, is this departure from mainstream racial discourse intentional? Sonariwo answers with a resounding yes. “It is very deliberate for us. Even within the challenges of race, or in Nigeria, people are still living day to day. You’re still human. You’re still living. It’s very important for me to have a balanced approach to the way we are showing art.”

Showcasing artwork that unifies the personal and the political, the educational and the expressive, Sonariwo’s mission counteracts Western narratives that often relegate African art to false prehistoric mythologies and reductive stereotypes. Through this illumination of the continent’s vital creative contributions, her work with Rele Gallery both amplifies and transcends the discourse around representation in the Los Angeles art world, allowing artists of the African diaspora space to breathe into their full humanity. This, across time zones and oceans, languages and tribes, is the invaluable work of African diasporic representation in the arts.

Left to right: Installation view, Rele Gallery; Adenrele Sonariwo, courtesy Rele Gallery.

PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues

REVIEWED BY SCARLET CHENG

BOOKS

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues

The dolls we grew up playing with weren’t just dolls—they were alter egos, surrogate friends and family, and sometimes even symbolic forces of the universe. In this beautifully designed book, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues, we get a chance to look at Saar’s special relationship to dolls: through photographs of her extensive doll collection, sketches and watercolors she has made of her dolls, and the assemblage work she has made over the years that incorporated dolls or parts thereof.

The book begins with an informative intro by Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects, who tells us that when Saar decided to place her archives at the Getty Research Institute, they started sorting through her studio archives and found sketchbooks the artist has kept since the 1960s. The gallery has long represented Saar, so Roberts writes with natural familiarity and depth of knowledge.

The first chapter is called “Sketchbooks” and shows drawings and watercolors of the Black dolls Saar has been collecting for decades. “While some may view these dolls as derogatory, and I agree some of them are,” Saar says in the book, “I didn’t create these paintings in the same spirit of ‘empowering Aunt Jemima.’ These paintings purely depict the Black dolls as they are, with the purpose of providing love and comfort to their owner.”

During COVID Saar filled up several sketchbooks, and some of the artwork is paired with the actual doll she used as model. Yes, she does modify, and she often manages to give the drawn figures a liveliness of expression the physical dolls lack. For example, a late-19th-century cloth doll with a striped red dress becomes a rather energetic Black Floating Doll in Mystic Sky in 2022. Saar’s watercolor has the figure at a diagonal on the paper, her lips wearing a smile and her body floating against a dark blue sky filled with yellow stars, crescent moons and a ringed planet. She has escaped Earth, she is in the cosmos! That background touches on Saar’s longtime fascination for the mystical—the notebooks also include sketches of a hand with an eye in the palm, the sun radiating energy and light to the earth and moon, and a rainbow that arcs across two pages of a spiral notebook.

There’s even the story about how she found the Aunt Jemima doll that became her famous assemblage piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Saar bought her at a swap meet: “She is a plastic kitchen accessory that had a notepad on the front of her skirt,” she says. “The broom handle is a pencil and on her left side I mirrored it with a plastic toy rifle.”

Some art books seem rather patched together, their material and chapters grouped randomly, but this one holds together from beginning to end, both in text and in pictures. Having seen some of these sketchbooks at Saar’s recent LACMA exhibition, I found the reproductions to be excellent, with strong colors and sharp details. Of course, much of this unity is due to Saar’s vision, which has been remarkably consistent since she started making art in the 1960s. Now in her 90s, she has produced a body of work that has forced us to re-examine the depiction of the Black figure in visual culture, and also to recognize personal spirituality rooted in folk traditions.

Published by Roberts Projects 223 Pages

D.A.P. Exclusive

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues , 2022, published by Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

AMPLIFIER OF BLACK ART Nothing Random with Chance the Rapper’s Course

BY DONNELL ALEXANDER

Chance and Mia Lee between takes from the YAH Know music video shoot, photo by Keeley Parenteau.

“We outside! ” Chance the Rapper exclaims into his microphone. The sky is near black at maybe seven minutes after 8 p.m. in Downtown Los Angeles. Third weeknight of October. Chance had been and would be again, soon, rhyming his way through a song. The Chicago MC had been in the midst of vocalizing about his heart and his God and the shifting tides of life.

Chano—as more ardent fans might call him—stood on top of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s roof while he did his thing.

It’s our inside-out pandemic-era update on “in the house.” We Outside. And when Chance proclaimed this, approval shouts swept through MOCA’s disproportionately Windy Citizen–filled courtyard and back up toward Chance and the night. Here was that vibe called dope.

Around the artist, a drone hovered and dropped and rose to document this hip hop performance. We saw it on a 12x14-foot screen attached to the MOCA courtyard wall. Or we could take in Chance both in the flesh and on video. Determine our own adventures.

Novel as Chance’s show was, his sky performance and video work were but components of this weeknight outside.

When the MC returned to Earth, he met up across the courtyard with Chicago painter Mia Lee for the unveiling of YAH Know, a new work created in collaboration with the musician. This LA event is part of Chance the Rapper’s reset as an amplifier of Black art in museums, spaces that remain unsuitably absent of makers and faces that look like his. Humans who vibe like him.

Chance, Vic Mensa and Nikko Washington on shooting day for “Bar About A Bar” music video, photo by Keeley Parenteau.

Freshly awakened to the need for Afro-Diasporic connection in all that he produces, Chance began by producing the “Child of God” exhibition at his hometown art institute in March and is embarking on museum shows that are as much about the crowds as the art combos put before them. This reframing’s second half is a music-focused event planned for January in Accra, Ghana. The show’s being done in collaboration with Vic Mensa, Chance’s Chicago homeboy who identifies as Ghanaian.

This night in DTLA is Chance’s second museum event. Neighbors watch from the tall apartment buildings adjacent. Styleicon Russell Westbrook of the Lakers is in the courtyard, as are undoubtedly mid-level designers who’ve Lyfted over from the Fashion District. Onscreen in one drone perspective, spot-lit Chance the Rapper was downtown’s most prominent element, dwarfing the boundary that is the 110 freeway.

“Niggas at the museum!” Chance offered, again between raps.

To talk about the highs and lows, the ups and downs The friends that I had to hide to come around They told me that I knew you’d always come around Come around, come around, come around, come around —Chance the Rapper, “The Highs and the Lows” ***

Chancelor Johnathan Bennett, 29, leapt boldly into the production of musical art 11 years ago with 10 Day, a mixtape that he started while home from prep school on a cannabis suspension. The Kanye West–influenced song collection had him on the Western world’s underground rap radar while still finishing up at Jones College Prep. In 2013 he released Acid Rap , an acclaimed “tape”—hip hop mixtapes were a digital phenomenon by then—that both showcased how well he paired with Childish Gambino and brought Chance a genuine following. He’s called that song collection, “an allegory to acid.”

In April of 2015, Bennett lectured at Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute. Later that year came the lifeturn that supremely jolted Chance in substance and spirit: His daughter Kensli was born with an atrial flutter. Chance reconnected to the Christianity with which his grandmother raised him.

Not only did the subject matter of the music Chance put out after his daughter’s arrival become more spiritually oriented, but his sound also itself became more reflective of its local influences: One doesn’t have to listen hard to hear R. Kelly, Chicago blues and house. Above all else, gospel elements began to propel the records he rapped on.

Chance’s appearance in 2015’s “Ultralight Beam”—the opening track on West’s The Life of Pablo—was foremost a jawdropping debut. After flourishing on feature performances of singers such as James Blake and Justin Timberlake, Chano on “Ultralight Beam” established himself as a vanguard rap world player, within 16 bars.

He would cultivate the energy and freedom that being an independent mixtape star brings through his 2016’s Coloring Book , which the Grammys named best album despite being released as a mixtape.

At any time after 2015, Chance the Rapper could have marketed himself strictly as a gospel artist—Lecrae 2.0—and made an ethical killing. Instead, he has leaned into the artistry of hip hop.

“Fine arts are about exclusivity, right?” Chance rhetorically asked about elitism on the day we sat in the Sun Rose Room, a smart music space with wood tabletops located upstairs at the Sunset Strip’s Pendry Hotel. Here, we’re back near summer’s end, exploring the tensions within the museum world—and his biggest move since embracing Christianity.

In regular life Chance is much taller than he appears looking at him on a rooftop. Slim and brown with a high forehead and giant eyes like the Disney cartoon character that he has indeed played—Bush Baby, Lion King—the artist has just finished scrolling through digitized images of paintings that played big in the development of his visual sensibility. Widely known Chitown artists like Ernie Barnes—whose art sold for $1.6 million on September 6—and more locally popular painters like “Black Americana” stylist Annie Lee are on his phone.

“Aesthetically Black painting. There’s a certain style of painting that I grew up around.”

Prep school took him to The Chicago Art Institute. The walls

of his grandmother and her associates instilled the sensibility. Of the hundred or so professional MCs I’ve interviewed, Chance’s speaking voice contains the least distance from their performance voice.

About that art world exclusivity?

“It’s about having an artist or their art who’s heavily sought after, hedging a bet on something growing in value, also,” he said. “I think hip hop is intrinsically about access, about giving us—the people who didn’t have a space—space to be and talk about who they are.” Which would explain the MOCA exuberance, both on that roof and on the courtyard floor.

Chance’s output can find him stuck between two American aesthetic silos—too sophisticated in presentation to be a commercial radio force and a bit unorthodox for the average American museum. So far.

“When people compliment me even, they say, ‘Oh, he’s more than a rapper,’” says Chance. “But what they’re doing is devaluing what it means to be a rapper, and what hip hop is about. Which is community. Which is access. Which is representation. Which is being truthful.

“My rap has taken me all over the world,” Chance told me on the Strip. “My voice has been places that my feet have never been.”

His feet made it to Venice, Italy, last April, for the Biennale. He may have been just a rapper shooting a music video in the midst of some of the finest artists of African descent alive, but he says the diaspora embraced him. Chance was blown away to find how much wisdom and kinship they shared with him. And he didn’t receive the love simply because he’s a famous person whose face got his new crew admission to elite parties their own

The drive behind The Rapper’s museum events and that upcoming Ghana concert is as much past racial elidings and misdeeds in art as the spirit of Marcus Garvey’s early 20th-century Back to Africa movement; “We’ve been at the helm of a lot of movements,” Chance said. “Basquiat has got to be one of the saddest stories in the arts, period, because he died penniless and was exploited by people he considered to be his friends.

“At the Art Institute there’s a Basquiat on display by Illinois’ richest man—basically the Darth Vader of Chicago—Ken Griffin Jr.,” Chance continued. “The piece was purchased for, I think, $10 million, and that’s not money his estate got. It was from the secondary market. That’s money he never even saw when he was alive.

“The pieces that Basquiat made are all part of a conversation. I think that’s what artists do, they are in conversation with the world and responding to how the world is making them feel. And those conversations are unique to them.”

The dialogue that Chance is eliciting—live, spot-lit freestyle flubs and all—are critical to his time. At a time where The West appears embroiled in dysfunction, he has his eye on Africa. While what it means to be a Christian in America has become a livewire question, here is a leading-edge neo-gospel artist who was a member of his school’s Jewish Student Union.

Chance has been on my mind loads since we last spoke. I think about how he offered the most minimal response of our interviews when I asked about Ye’s latest extreme difficulties. (Q: Is anyone in his circle helping Ye? Chance: I don’t know… I don’t know… ) I wonder if Chance understands that he’s not the first person, artist or civilian, to teeter on the edge of acid and find themselves religious.

art-world currency couldn’t always cover.

These conversations with the diaspora’s creme de la creme stirred a plan to at least unsettle assumptions and economics around African people and art.

“They were explaining to me that there’s starting to become a widely publicized Black Aesthetic, and that’s mainly portraiture with Black subjects painted a certain kind of way. And what it does is make white collectors look for that aesthetic,” he explained. The paintings of his youth have been monetized. But to what end?

“Knowing that there are more and more artists from West Africa—and Black artists globally—whose status is growing, their price on sales is going up, and that’s the specific kind of art that [collectors] are looking for. And that there’s a sense of reward or that they’re doing something by investing in a Black artist. But Black art is Black art when it’s being created by Black people. All the people who work in abstraction or just don’t center their pieces on portraiture or if it’s ‘not Black’ at face value—their works are being pushed aside, basically. Or devalued.”

Pigeonholing multimedia attractions such as the one Chance gave The Art Institute and MOCA is a tough gig to undertake. Downtown, the museum architecture found itself involved. MOCA Director Johanna Burton emailed to say, “It was thrilling to see [Arata Isozaki’s Pritzker Prize-winning] building activated in that way”

None of the musings are of consequence. What is of concern? Why, that thing the painter Mia Lee told me, a week or two after YAH Know came down from MOCA’s walls. She had also attended the Art Institute event. There, Chance did not perform, but instead presented a painting from Ghanaian-based artist Naila Opiangah. At one point, attendees formed a long, stylized line.

“These different places that have been the same, like museums and galleries, they’ve been the same for so long, they don’t really reflect what the world looks like now,” Lee told me on a call from England. “He’s taking institutions for art that are known for being just one thing—just the same type or art and faces and not really being included in that—and being so disruptive. You have to respect it.”

MOCA happens to be exhibiting 30 years of Henry Taylor’s painting, drawing, sculpture and installation through April. The recognition is hard-earned and long past due.

When Lee’s grandparents immigrated from Roatan—an island off the Honduras—and landed in Chicago, those Black people most likely didn’t know to dream of a painter grandchild debuting at an LA museum of MOCA’s stature. Henry Taylor, a Black artist, a local legend, might have thought such dreaming equally out of reach.

The diaspora is undeniably having a big, complicated moment in fine art. This moment of correction could not happen without disruption. Leave it to a rapper—maybe even The Rapper—to disrupt.

“ALL THE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN ABSTRACTION OR JUST DON’T CENTER THEIR PIECES ON PORTRAITURE OR IF IT’S ‘NOT BLACK’ AT FACE VALUE—THEIR WORKS ARE BEING PUSHED ASIDE, BASICALLY. OR DEVALUED.”

RE-IMAGINING AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia

BY RENÉE REIZMAN

Above: Pantheon , 2020. Collage on archival paper. SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the General Art Acquisition Fund. © 2022, Marshall Brown Projects.

Opposite page: The Round Tower , 2021. Collage on archival paper. Courtesy Marshall Brown Projects and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. © 2022, Marshall Brown Projects.

One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through an open pit, illuminating a subterranean realm. There are thin, precise incisions along the collage, which are then mended with irregular strips of blue painter’s tape. The Round Tower (2021) is one of Marshall Brown’s many paper monsters in his solo exhibition “Marshall Brown: The Architecture of Collage” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Collage is inherently about creating unexpected amalgamations, and Brown uses the medium to build grotesque labyrinthine architectures and opaque, impassable cities. A licensed architect, urbanist and professor at Princeton University, Brown taps into his deep knowledge of architectural history. Primarily working with reference materials like old trade journals, magazine back issues and historical maps, Brown is an analog world builder crafting the future from jewels of the past.

The Round Tower references another work of the same name, created by Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi for his series “Carceri d’invenzione” (Imaginary Prisons) circa 1749–50. In Piranesi’s etching, staircases loop around a panoptic stone building, which Brown echoes in his own collage with Marina City. Piranesi combined archways, staircases, windows and cantilevers from his real-life surroundings to create these winding environments. Brown—long fascinated with Piranesi’s method of building the impossible with existing architecture—uses this work as a launching point for his own series, “Prisons of Invention.” Many of these works are included in this exhibition.

Brown mounts his free-form collages on large, blank archival paper, often embossed in the corner with his architecture license, and suspends their edges in a void. In Pantheon (2020), the curved walkway of the Guggenheim blends into many improbable routes. One ramp takes you to a mid-century modern stone facade, another extends downwards into an arrow that points into emptiness . Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful museum becomes a fortress with no clear exits. There are suggestions of blue skies, clouds and trees, but these features are turned on their axis and made inaccessible to its wanderers.

Other collages in this series prominently show concrete in repetitious forms that are strongly associated with both Brutalism and Futurism. Two figures occupy opposite ends of the composition in Prisoners on a Projecting Platform (2021), framed in circular, concrete apertures. They are separated by a mundane office building’s window facade, but in this context it mimics a jail cell’s barred doors. In Brown’s re-imaginings of prisons, aesthetics have been improved, but people are still caged.

This theme—that ideologies from the past will continue to be embedded into the future— runs through Brown’s exhibition. His “Chimera” series incorporates recognizable fragments of Le Corbusier, a Nazi sympathizer. Another, 14-03-10 (2010), samples Zaha Hadid, who was criticized for using forced labor (although the art center featured in this particular collage is not part of that controversy). Preserving these architects’ signature styles, even in fantastical configurations, means that the darker parts of their legacies will linger, but the people inhabiting Brown’s collages don’t seem troubled by these histories. A woman straight out of the 1960s lounges on a red sofa in A Choice to Do Both (2019). She gazes into the blank part of the canvas, oblivious to the architecture surrounding her.

It’s rare to see human figures doing anything but idling in Brown’s collages. They’re captured standing around at art museums, waiting at airports and gazing from balconies. It’s due to the nature of Brown’s source material; glossy celebrations of architectural achievements in which people simply marvel at their surroundings. People don’t seem to work or struggle, other than the three construction workers in 13-12-31 (2013) who are surrounded by cranes and steel. The laborers are outnumbered by the ruling class, living in the margins, visible only when they’re building Brown’s modular structures.

As much as Brown’s exhibition evokes the past, one can envision a speculative future that emerges from the historical imagery. A newer body of work, Brown’s Piranesian Map of Berlin (2022), inspired by Piranesi’s map of the Campus Martius (1762), repackages Berlin as a sprawling super-city in which the population has exploded and new development has kept pace.

Brown built this map with different types of urban diagrams that the German government produced before the reunification of East and West Berlin. The colorful zoning charts, street plans and topographic drawing fuse contradictory geographies, creating a Kafkaesque infrastructural failure. Navigating this speculative Berlin recalls Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle , K., who cannot access the titular castle and instead ambles through the surrounding village, bouncing from one dead end to the next.

While “The Architecture of Collage” has a shining surface, a closer read of the work reveals that the future of urbanism might be more dystopic than utopian. But we can still grab on to the beautiful imagery in Brown’s new worlds. We are already in an era of modular design, where homeowners are converting container ships into resorts and cheap, prefabricated cubes can be stacked into Accessory Dwelling Units. Brown shows that design can instead be more freestyle and organic. We could maintain the craftsmanship that created so many architectural icons, like Marina City, but we must also be careful not to transform them into prisons of invention.

Helen Molesworth

True-Crimeifies Ana Mendieta

BY LAUREN GUILFORD PODCAST

Ana Mendieta’s work is as much about life as it is about death. Attuned to the sacred bond between bodies and land, Mendieta regarded nature as a sensitive and emotive force entangled in culture and politics—a messy assemblage of energies and ideologies embedded in life and soil, crossing borders and spanning timelines. These forces can be traced in earth’s geological terrain and detected in its simultaneous containment of the past, present, and future—a landscape where death and life continually bloom and wither like an accordion tune. “My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid,” Mendieta explains. “Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.” These words describe a worldview that is vibrational and sensitive to the energies of life’s currents, and yet, Mendieta’s legacy is largely defined by her death and the decades of protest that have followed.

The artist Jose Muñoz asks, “what is attempted when one looks for Ana Mendieta? What does her loss signify in the here and now?” Muñoz’ questions were present in my mind when I heard curator and art historian Helen Molesworth was the host of “Death of an Artist,” a new podcast about Mendieta. The art world rarely appears in mainstream media, but when it does, it almost always comes with a sensationalized headline. It seemed fishy when I saw the thumbnail graphic for the podcast, which features an image of Mendieta’s young smiling face beaming with ambition, with the cryptic title overlaid before her and the whole image adorned with thick Tarantino-red brushstrokes. All of this gave me pause and discomfort, especially in the absence of her name and the looming presence of the word Death. I’m generally uneasy with the growing genre of the “true crime” podcast, suspicious of the agendas that intend to capitalize on the sensationalized, sexualized, and dramatized stories of violence inflicted on women (especially women of color). Molesworth (an undoubtedly excellent storyteller) begins by stating her intentions to tell Mendieta’s whole story “all the way to its shocking and troubling end… a story the art world would prefer I didn’t tell” (spoken in a tone that feels perfectly at home with the “true crime” zeitgeist).

Molesworth appropriately asks the exhausted question: can and should we separate the artist’s life from the art? How critics and curators frame Mendieta’s oeuvre is especially important, considering most of the work we see today was never actually exhibited during her lifetime—she didn’t have a chance to frame these critical conversations that shape her legacy. How can we acknowledge the injustice of her death while also creating space for expansive and nuanced discourse? I don’t claim to have the answer, and I’m left with the persistent conundrum surrounding the canonization of her work, which artist Coco Fusco says, “has nothing to do with how she lived,” arguing that ”in an art world willing to congratulate itself for championing overlooked and maligned women, we must also acknowledge—as curators, viewers, writers, collectors, dealers and protesters—the possibility that we may be complicit in a collective type of abuse...How do we remember Mendieta without viewing her practice solely through the lens of her death?” Fusco’s words resonate with the uneasy feeling that sat in the pit of my stomach throughout the podcast. The art world remains fixated on the horror of her death—telling her heartbreaking story time and time again, creating a mythological version of Mendieta, petrified by the violence carried out against her.

It’s hard to ignore the circumstances I suddenly found myself in mid-way through this critical response—as I finish this draft, I’m writing from the hospital waiting room where a lifelong friend sits beside me in pain from the abuse inflicted by her boyfriend. I am filled with sadness and rage as we wait for the nurse to examine and document my friend’s wounds. This experience brought the tragic reality to the surface: Mendieta’s death is no “mystery,” but an all too familiar story of violence that ends in the worst possible manner. While Molesworth’s podcast raises awareness of this injustice, at what cost does it do so? Mendieta’s art and life are mentioned, but they feel like lengthy footnotes, marginalia to the bigger death story. I want to put forth another kind of call to justice: Considering Ana Mendieta as an artist and a person that, like all of us, is multifaceted, particular, and mercurial; one who made work about death, as well as about life and rebirth.

Death of an Artist: pushkin.fm/podcasts/death-of-an-artist

Ana Mendieta, On Giving Life , 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC.

REFRAMING A RITUAL Allana Clarke Wrestles New Meaning into Hair Bonding Glue

BY ANNABEL KEENAN

I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show, the Trinidadian-American artist had already made a name for herself with videos, performance, photography and text-based works that explore aspects of embodied Blackness and abstraction. In “Un/Common Proximity,” Clarke exhibited work from her residency with NXTHVN, the Connecticut-based fellowship. Along with her cohort, Clarke considered the idea of proximity, geographic and ideological, and how the pandemic disrupted and altered this notion.

Installation view: “Allana Clarke: A Particular Fantasy,” 2022, Art Omi, Ghent, New York, photo by Alon Koppel, courtesy of the artist.

As part of her practice, Clarke makes cocoa-butter wall sculptures with short poems or individual words. Some are inspired by her Caribbean heritage and many contend with the experience of being Black in a society dominated by white norms. So does the material itself. As both an ingredient in balms and one inextricably tied to slavery and child labor on cocoa farms, cocoa butter is layered with significance. In the group show, one of these pieces contained the word “relentless,” a reflection of the resilience of humanity in the face of a pandemic.

Joining this work was something new for Clarke: a large, black sculpture made of hair bonding glue hanging on the wall in a heavy, undulating bundle of folds—as if a giant hand had crumpled a thick, rubbery blanket. Hair bonding glue is commonly used by Black women to adhere hair extensions to the scalp to conform to white and European standards of beauty and contend with the politicization of Black hair.

“This is often a ritual passed down from matriarch to daughter,” says Clarke over email. “It was passed down to me starting at age 13. A ritual of chemical hair straighteners and extensions.” The processes were never questioned despite the damage that continual use of the material has on hair follicles. “Adopting European idealizations of beauty signified an overcoming of the radical and political nature of Black hair in its natural state and an alignment with European standards of respectability and social mobility,” she says, adding that society still contends with discriminatory practices against Black hair. “I think about the 2016 SCOTUS ruling that it’s acceptable to deny employment to or fire someone who has dreadlocks, a common hairstyle with historical and cultural significance for those in the African Diaspora,” she says, also referencing the CROWN Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair), the 2019 California law that

prohibits race-based hair discrimination in employment and educational opportunities, which only 18 states have adopted.

Clarke considers these larger meanings of hair bonding glue and pushes the boundaries of the material. In October, she opened her first solo institutional show, “A Particular Fantasy,” at Art Omi and Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery. Across both venues, the exhibition highlighted the role of Clarke’s body in her practice. “The works oscillate between conceptions of desirability, the complexity of my articulation as a subject and a presence intertwined with shame, violence and generational trauma, but moving through to a space governed by Black feminist futurity,” she says. The exhibition title was taken from Audre Lorde’s  Eye to Eye: Black Women, Anger, and Hatred. The excerpt addresses Lorde’s upbringing and how notions of self are passed down by matriarchs, a topic Clarke says she also relates to.

Included at the Bennington location was a performance film that documented Clarke as she created a 25-foot-long hair-bonding glue sculpture as part of a three-week residency on site. Made in collaboration with filmmaker Corinne Spencer and assistance from Rafaella Binder-Gavito, Vic Coronel, Juan Lopez and Jenna Taus (all Bennington College students), the film shows Clarke’s highly laborious, performative process.

She approaches the material with an open mind to fully explore how it works. She first pours glue from the small bottles in which they are sold onto a mesh surface, creating thick layers that slowly form a leathery top as they dry. This pliable layer becomes Clarke’s canvas as she twists, pulls and rips the surface with her hands and feet. The resulting heavy, textured surfaces reveal every move of Clarke’s body, linking the two definitively.

Through this process, Clarke strips the material of its intended function. The glue no longer represents the ritual of conforming to European beauty ideals. Instead, “a new ritual emerges oriented towards resurrection, healing and freeing,” Clarke says. “The material is defamiliarized and allowed to function in a far more expansive way than it previously could. Bringing this material into the studio is a way to contend with its complexities and reorient something that I have such traumatic associations with.”

No one sculpture is like another, a fact made clear in A Particular Fantasy. Some are tight bundles of thick, folded drapes. Others are relatively flat with pinched folds across the surface, sometimes resembling maps with their pulled borders stretched like the edges of a coast. It’s impossible not to think of the artist working with the material, “like wrestling with a body” as she describes it.

Clarke’s reference to wrestling a body underscores one of the most intriguing parts of her work. The sculptures are physical evidence of her body’s labor. Every step of their creation was the result of her actions. There are very few occasions, however, where the sculptures themselves resemble bodies. In those moments when they do, when the body of the artist and the body of the sculpture collide, something beautiful and powerful occurs. For the 2022 edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Clarke made At a Depth Beyond Anyone (2022), a large sculpture installed at the Akron Art Museum. The right side of the sculpture resembles the tight bundles of folds expected of Clarke’s work, but on the left, the heavy surface unfolds onto the ground. Within this left side, the outline of a figure appears. The figure seems to be pulling away from the folds, its act of breaking free frozen in time. Perhaps this is the perfect embodiment of liberation that Clarke sought to achieve. Standing up against the weight of the thick surface, the unseen figure triumphs against the burden of its own material and a new ritual emerges.

At a Depth Beyond Anyone , 2022, 30-second hair bonding glue, 144 x 108 x 36 in., photo by Field Studio,

courtesy of the artist.

Alt Coins, Bear Market, Crypto Winter, Down Bad, Expected Returns, FTX Fraud, Government Oversight, Hacked ($477M), Insolvent, JPEGs, KYC, Liquidity Gone, Margin Trading; I could easily go through the whole alphabet alluding to the current crypto market conditions, but anyone who follows web3 or blockchain technology understands that there is blood in the streets. Well, that is not 100% true across the board. The traders are down and the holders have been defrauded, but what does that mean for those of us here for the digital ART? Honestly, it doesn’t mean all that much unless you are down bad and need to sell. Inherently there is less new money liquidity or as some like to call it—“fake internet money liquidity”—but the truly rich are still rich and the collectors are still collecting. Those with money know that accumulating during a down market is the best time to accumulate.

Not everything is sunshine and roses and some of the rich have even taken an L this last year in the digital space; Meta (Facebook) loses over $30B on metaverse projects and fires a small city worth of employees (Ouch!), the owner/CEO (SBF) of FTX trading platform and crypto government oversight activist announces that he had “a bad month” in October as he loses over $10B in customer funds prior to stepping down and filing Chapter 11 (Oopsy). To add insult to injury—let’s call it the pixelized cherry on top—current market evaluations say that Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape has lost over 90% of its value this year ($1M+ USD). (Poor Guy)

These major losses didn’t slow anything down in Miami, where collectors at this year’s Art Basel flexed their digital wealth in a volume of ways. One of my favorites was interacting with a technology-based sculpture by Brooklyn art collective MSCHF. The artwork—essentially a functional ATM located within the Perrotin Booth at the fair—oh so much more than that. The subversive art collective known for celebrity collabs retrofitted this ATM with a digital screen that scrolled through a real-time monetary leaderboard. As each patron stepped up and withdrew from the ATM, their picture was taken, ranking them based on the amount of money left in their wallet. For the opulent at Basel Miami, is was the perfect piece to feed your hubris or provide some hilarious content for social media. If you had $3.1M in the bank and a private jet—one could jaunt down to South Beach and overtake the current leader, Music DJ Diplo, who clocked in at $3M. For those over-invested in crypto—don’t be embarrassed by your account balance, you are probably at home in front of a computer anyway!

Cold and Down

BY SETH HAWKINS

THE DIGITAL

Across the bridge in downtown Miami was the new NFT event for Basel that took over two city blocks and 12 buildings, “The Gateway: A Web3 Metropolis.” Touted as a festival with classic fair-style booths, IRL art installations, NFT speakers and music—massive sponsors such as Christie’s and global galleries to the scale of Pace even grabbed a foothold. Pace Verso (the web3 division of Pace Gallery) showed a mix of artists, in which a fan favorite was Tara Donovan, known for her sprawling sculptural installations built from thousands of standard household goods. QWERTY, Donovan’s first NFT project, used the letters/symbols found on a computer keyboard in much the same way as she would use a stack of buttons in an installation. A repeated character is layered, spaced and patterned in a way that toes the line between legibility and design. In the end the 500-piece collection had the feel of digitally woven tapestries that embodied the thesis behind much of her work, yet pushed into the new realm.

For those over-invested or simply without generational wealth, just hunker down and wait it out. As Hal Borland said, “No winter lasts forever.” Or even better, as our favorite singer-turned-angry-intellectual writer Henry Rollins said, “In winter, I plot and plan. In spring I move.”

If you are rich, kindly disregard the above statement and show us that generational wealth. Now is the time to accumulate, buy the digital art and fuel the fire that will keep us warm through the rest of this cold winter.

Tara Donovan for Pace Verso (the web3 division of Pace Gallery)

A

Voyage to Extremes: Selected Spiritual Writings

By Jeffrey Vallance

704 Pages Tenement Press

Jeffrey Vallance holds a unique position in the LA art world. A contemporary of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al, his work has had a comparable impact locally and internationally, while not transitioning to the industrial fabrication mode demanded by the global fiscal laundromat subdivision AKA The Art World. Part of the reason is that he’s actually from LA—the Valley, specifically—which somehow means you can’t actually represent LA to the rest of TAW.  Mostly though, it’s because Vallance responded to his initial burst of fame by embarking on an extended peripatetic global R&D expedition that had nothing to do with Kunsthallen, art fairs, or high-end public art commissions, but rather Kings of Tonga, Presidents of Iceland, and Las Vegas vanity museums. He never so much fell off The Art World’s radar as evaded capture like some international man of mystery.

Yet another factor is that Vallance writes about his own projects better than any hack critic could, with a deadpan humor and open-mindedness completely analogous to his idiosyncratic semiotic investigations. In 1995, in conjunction with a survey show at SMMOA, Art Issues Press published The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978–1994—encompassing the Tonga and Iceland adventures, as well as his first forays into paranormal reportage and, of course, the last (and subsequent) rites of Blinky the Friendly Hen—the Ralph’s fryer whose pet cemetery funeral service landed Vallance on Letterman and MTV.

Long overdue, A Voyage to Extremes: Selected Spiritual Writings collects close to 700 pages of Vallance’s musings and reports from the intervening decades. That may sound daunting, but this ain’t War & Peace—nor Being and Nothingness neither. Not that it isn’t narratively compelling or philosophically deep—but it’s funny

And entertaining in many other ways—strangely informative like the best internet curations, or like your weird uncle who gave you Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned and a sealed vinyl copy of Spiro T. Agnew Speaks Out for your 12th Kwanzaa. A hundred little stories forming a cubist mosaic of a singular artist’s singular journey.

A Few of Jeffrey Vallance’s Favorite Things

REVIEWED BY DOUG HARVEY

BOOKS

Art historically, the ginormous yellow tome is a gold mine, providing off-the-cuff anecdotal accounts of Vallance’s legendary curatorial interventions in various offbeat thematic museums in Vegas, while elsewhere detailing extensive cross-cultural research into the religious, anthropological and philosophical significance of clowns.

As promised by the subtitle, much of the work addresses spirituality, religion, shamanism and paranormal phenomenology. Richard Nixon, Thomas Kinkade, Martin Luther, Charlie Manson, Ronald McDonald, the Loch Ness Monster and other spiritual teachers all make appearances. It’s not a fluke that Vallance’s curiosity-driven ideational flow is so reminiscent of an extended Wikipedia surf.

Much of Vallance’s most significant recent works have been embodied—however ephemerally—in his absurd and prolific social media activity, with Facebook groups that range from the absolutely authentic Valley Plein Air Club to the mind-scrambling Polytheistic Butt Plugs

Consequently, Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes seems to me to be the most successful literary embodiment of the human cognitive structures that have evolved with the internet—not from imitation, but from pre-existing structural resonance. A playful, weightless curiosity may seem like a fey and inconsequential thing, but when it drifts across a border as if the border wasn’t there, watch out! That’s when Luther’s excrement hits the Devil’s fan! And that’s why the internet is still (though sadly less and less) dangerous.

In counterpoint to this ADHD-currency, Vallance has provided a newly written overarching autobiographical framework. Arranged approximately chronologically, the included materials chart Vallance’s aforementioned trips, his mythic residencies in Vegas and Umea (Sweden), and his return to the San Fernando Valley (from whence he deploys his current, peculiar global/local influence).

This interstitial narrative skeleton generates a knowing—occasionally dark, even justifiably bitter—storyline detailing the obstacles and joys of being an artist in the 21st century, from which the oddball essays radiate like feathers on a bipolar peacock. The power of art to short circuit the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have never been articulated more elegantly.

From excrement to ecstasy, from Texas to the Arctic Circle, from the taxonomy of butt plugs to the etymology of the Tetragrammaton—all the indeterminate territories TAW tiptoes around—Jeffrey Vallance relentlessly but non-aggressively burrows beneath, collapsing rickety categorical imperatives in favor of rhizomatic ‘patacritical revelations that are equal parts Art Bell, Roland Barthes, and S.J. Perelman. Copiously illustrated.

Mike Kelley: Artist and Friend , 2011. Enamel and mixed media on panel, 16 x 20 in., collection of the Hammer Museum, courtesy of Jeffrey Vallance and Tanya Bonakdar.

Victor Estrada

Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, ArtCenter

By William Moreno

Victor Estrada erupted onto the art world landscape with his confounding work in the 1992 Los Angeles MOCA exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” along with other luminaries such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Megan Williams and Mike Kelley. What’s mystifying is that a broader examination of his work has been elusive—until now. The current exhibition at his alma mater, ArtCenter, is evidence that he’s continued creating works that both perplex and intrigue; it’s a startling corpus of images and media. Curated by Marco Rios, the purple-and-pink walled show’s overwhelming sensorial impact is extraordinarily confident.

then-contemporary zine offspring, helped popularize a visual and written language that few other periodicals would approach.

Estrada’s drawing, Sabes Que Loco (1993) pointedly places a stoic young woman in the center of a surrealist landscape surrounded by images of passion and struggle; it’s an utterly uncompromising portrait of determination. Another, The Love Machine of Nature (1996) positions women as life-giving and transformative central figures with preternatural hybridity, delivering sustenance to lifeforms unknown. The watercolor, Consubstantiation (2000) takes its cue from a somewhat obscure religious doctrine that promotes the simultaneous cohabitation of the spiritual and the corporeal. The morphing central figure in transition provides a fitting visual commentary.

Estrada is clearly in his element as a painter. His animated and lush works line the perimeter of the pink-and-purple-walled gallery, with imagery of anthropomorphic beings floating and emerging through vaguely biophilic landscapes. Both daunting and familiar, they appear as cartoon-like troglodytes of the unconscious, cavorting across canvasses with unbridled abandon. Pink, Brown, Yellow (2022) is a masterful astral composition of color and form, with a twist. At the foot of the painting sits a small, nondescript sculpture of indeterminate origin. It is an easy-to-miss element, but one that effectively demands agency and eliminates the boundary between viewer and object. Other pictures take a more direct approach. Honey Bunny (1992) depicts an ostensibly benign hare with a mixed-media protrusion jutting toward the viewer—reassuring it isn’t—but the net result is a convincing and witty provocation, reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings.” Lavender Glitter (2022), one of the imposing sculptures in the exhibit, is something of a paradox. It’s an intemperate if captivating piece, on wheels and framed by pink walls, its apex appearing to birth an elusive phantasm of indeterminate origin or intention.

Estrada has created a powerful and wryly engaging realm, and somehow, we know this domain. In the miasma of contemporary culture, the imagery seems consonant with the parade of social media contortions that define the moment. The artist knows what he wants, and the viewer is left to parse the work’s nuances—it’s an audacious expedition.

Estrada, with roots in Los Angeles and El Paso, Texas, was active in the early social justice movements such as MECha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), and later turned his focus to community teaching and, currently, instructing at UCLA. The exhibit’s title, “Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican,” is a deliberative cue that takes its nods from the hue’s lofty ascriptions: purple, an unstable color that exists somewhere between red and blue and has long been associated with royalty. But its contemporary alliteration also refers to the purportedly hallucinogenic properties of purple-branded marijuana; not unlike like its legendary pharmacological cousins. Its mythos was famously attributed to Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 song, “Purple Haze.”

The prolific show of drawings, paintings and sculptures are loosely organized by media with some 40 never-before-displayed early drawings anchoring the exhibition. On my initial visit, the lack of cohesive signage forced me into a hunting mode but, notwithstanding that challenge, the works are thought-provoking recompense.

The central suite of drawings are plaintive time capsules of the artist’s experience teaching in the City Terrace district of Los Angeles. Composed primarily in the 1990s through the early 2000s, the pencil and mixed-media works mirror the decade’s prevalent social-historical markers of a conspicuous cultural presence, now in the throes of gentrification. The drawings’ distinctive visual aesthetic reflects a parallel influence: the groundbreaking 1990s Chicano publication Teen Angels. At the time, no other magazine did more to manifest the Chicano cultural zeitgeist. It was a zine known for its straightforward black-and-white prison-style art, vernacular photographs, drawings of lowrider culture and published letters from the incarcerated seeking companionship. Teen Angels, with other

“Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican,” runs through February 25, 2023.

Justin Liam O’Brien

Richard Heller Gallery

By Ezrha Jean Black

For someone brought up within a more or less secular Roman Catholic culture, living now (atheism aside) essentially as if she were a nun, one would think I might know something about “Vespers”— the title of Justin Liam O’Brien’s current show at the Richard Heller Gallery. But I can scarcely imagine these kind of services practiced in modern times by anyone but clergy, and then only as a cure for insomnia.

Victor Estrada, Pink, Brown, Yellow . 2022. Photo by Gene Ogami

Justin Liam O’Brien, Hands of Providence , 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Richard Heller Gallery.

Although any quasi-religious or devotional aspect to his subjects must be viewed as deliberately ironic, O’Brien’s style has evolved both technically and stylistically—attenuating and sharpening what was once a rounder and Léger-loopy (almost cartoon-like) figurative contour, and moving in a distinctly surreal direction, along the (not always spiritual) lines of, say, Leonora Carrington. But O’Brien takes a more distinctly hard-edge approach to his contours, extending even to atmospheric effects, more or less in keeping with his Quattrocento Italian Renaissance inspirations. Even the explicitly transected paintings in this exhibition—e.g., Hands of Providence (all works 2022)—have the effect of separate planes or panels—very different from Carrington’s subtle dissections and excavations. The full range of O’Brien’s technical virtuosity is on display in Hands of Providence, from its stagy apprehension and notional (if undersexed) ecstasy, spatial counterpoint, slightly schematic atmospherics and aspirational poetics to its quirky details (the figure’s specs) and its scale (at 7-feet in height, the largest in a show of large works).

But, as in say, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, true believer or not, there can be no redemption for our clear-eyed seeker of—what exact ly?—a guile-free “way in?” (Yes—that’s actually in one of the titles); “unconditional love?” (ditto); “sanctuary?” cultural (or maybe en vironmental?) renascence? Doubtful—at least under the flattened terms presented in these visions (or vigils?). The implied narratives are amusing but disingenuous. That haunted lover in Vigil isn’t waiting, much less praying for the ghostly swimmer in the nearby moonlit waters. The tech-sleek architecture tells us as much. Guardian angels are one thing; a big bail bond is quite another.

In Adage, O’Brien messes entertainingly with both mythology and style-chronology, slipping in a distracted Carravagio-esque Gen-Z’er carrying a glowing handheld device beneath a large swan predictably annoyed by the switch. In true Carravagio-esque fashion, mayhem and violence proceed apace some distance directly behind the fig ures. A different kind of mischief is afoot in The Bottom of Heaven where flattened geometrics compete with discrepancies of scale and expression. Here, a red ladder rises off-center from a red plateau, while a Quattrocento surf shop denizen sits mournfully astride a white horse or pony, roughly the size of a large dog, in foreground waters, abutting a suspiciously sheared embankment. Neither love nor prayer will take this pair any higher.

Far more successful, both formally and narratively, is O’Brien’s recasting of the Annunciation. O’Brien has an outstanding facility for commingling figures within variously composed interior and exterior spaces. But here he’s exploded scale and perspectives, launching his messenger clad only in carmine shorts up and away from a similarly russet-hued pavilion as if he were leaping onto a skateboard, ready to hurl himself into the ether. A similarly out-of-scale raven presumably bestows her blessing—as Piero della Francesca himself might have if he’d known anything about skateboarding.

Judy Fiskin

Marc Selwyn Fine Art

By Jody Zellen

During the early months of the pandemic, Judy Fiskin needed a new way of working in which she did not have to leave the security of her home. Fiskin happened upon a real estate website with interior images of houses for sale and realized “I had thousands of photos of rooms, furniture and decor at my disposal.” Rather than photograph architecture and her surroundings, as she had done in the past in many of her earlier photographic series, and more recently her video work, she drew from the vast array of images presented on real estate websites, changing what she found to suit her needs.

Studying these websites begged a number of questions: How are homes for sale presented? What draws people to certain types of interior views rather than others? What would the ideal home look like?

Are real estate agents trying to present spaces that follow trends and appeal to the differing tastes of their clients?

In Fiskin’s re-decorations, things are a bit off. Each of the 16, untitled, modest-sized digital prints presents a different interior—be it a bathroom, den, wine cellar, TV room or attic, or even an exterior space like a building’s facade or a view from the deck. As Fiskin’s photoshopping is seamless, it is impossible to know what was in the original and what she added or took away. In one image depicting a bathroom/laundry room shot with a wide-angle lens, the walls are covered floor to ceiling with a blue-toned, mountainous Asian landscape that contrasts with the gray-and-white geometric pattern of the parquet floor. The one window at the back of the room frames a few trees separating this home from the next. Lined up against one wall is a bathroom sink with ornate faucets, a small blue-tiled bath,

as well as a washer and a dryer. Two vintage light fixtures emitting a warm glow hang from the ceiling. Easy to overlook, but key to the image are the arm and head of what appears to be a teddy bear seated in the bath, inserting a quasi-human element into the scene.

A Google search for “pink flamingos” returns rolls of wallpaper available at Home Depot (Horace Pink Flamingos) indicating that the bathroom covered with this pattern and depicted in another of Fiskin’s bathroom images is more generic than unique. The suite of photographs ranges from cluttered and ornately decorated rooms to those that are eerily sparse, as in Fiskin’s photograph of an empty room with deep green painted walls, a subtle white cottage-cheese ceiling and badly vacuumed beige carpet. Green, brown, beige and white translucent drapes cover a window with horizontal blinds. In the corner, just to the side of the window, is a television set on a modern stand that predates todays’ flatscreens. This room is more off-putting than welcoming.

Hot tubs might be a selling point for many home buyers, but one tucked into the corner of a low-ceilinged room without a view (the only window in the space is frosted over) is not particularly desirable. A similar feeling of claustrophobia occurs in Fiskin’s photograph of an empty attic with a golden aura that comes from yellow walls and gold-toned drapes that extend from floor to ceiling to cover a distant window. The only other object in the room is a ceiling fan trimmed in gold.

Many years ago, there was a billboard on the freeway as you approached Valencia (where CalArts is located and Fiskin still teaches) that proclaimed “If you lived here you’d be home now.” It was an advertisement for a new community that was being developed on the outskirts of Los Angeles to lure those fed up with city life. The places depicted in Fiskin’s images are more dystopic than utopian:

Judy Fiskin, Untitled (8) , 2020-2021. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

they are displays of bad taste masked as good taste and a seller’s idea of what might be appealing to generic audiences. While the pandemic redefined isolation, it is interestingly counterintuitive that Fiskin chose to composite images that reinforced that notion, rather than explore more desirable fantasies.

Paulo Nimer Pjota and Patricia Iglesias Peco

François Ghebaly

By Lane Barden

Occasionally a gallery delivers a show of work that activates the intellect, rewards an afternoon of driving, and restores a little hope. In the small gallery at François Ghebaly are Patricia Iglesias Peco’s large works on paper. Flowers rendered in understated transparent oils generously fill the paper spaces of the frames without crowding them. Sensually painted in a rich, muted palette

floor, four black-colored bronze cannonballs (empire and defeat). Elsewhere in the room there are mysterious logos, a lone cactus and some LA Dodger stickers.

Okay, maybe it still doesn’t all quite add up, but the way it doesn’t add up is charged with a palpable, tactile authenticity. There is chemistry here. Maybe the empire will, after all, break like a vase.

Lisa

Solomon

Walter Maciel Gallery

By Genie Davis

Lisa Solomon creates evocative watercolor self-portraits wearing the traditional attire of the countries that make up her ethnic heritage, as well as the traditional clothing of countries she’s had misidentified as a part of her cultural history. Perfect, precise and delicate, the portraits depicting her true heritage are 35” by 23,” while those depicting countries that are not a part of her ethnic identity are 14” by 11.” Using native attire culled from photographic archives and evoking the style of traditional portrait artists, both Solomon’s costuming and positioning of her figure varies with each culture it represents.

and wandering, inventive brush strokes, the paintings exude a casual mastery of an old art history standby in a fresh new style. The exhibition text includes quotes from Bataille about the flower’s death drama between earth and sky, and reflections on the erotic suggestiveness of the stamen serve to clarify Iglesias Peco’s inspiration and intentions.

Entering the main gallery, Paulo Nimer Pjota’s installation is a jarring arrival into a very different world. Heads and masks with hybrid grins or grimaces—derived from both ancient and pop culture—are tethered to the floor, to paintings and to grinning bronze ashtrays filled with butts. The paintings directly reference walls in the streets of São Paulo and are explosively stylus-scratched—the marks sparking and scattering like fireworks. Cutouts stylized as ancient vases floating on colored panels hint at previous empires. Stickers and logos are placed here and there throughout the works along with orange and black pumpkins, black-toned bronze cannonballs, bronze masks and cherries.

Altogether, this is a visual vocabulary in a field of signs that don’t add up until you accept that the colored ‘street wall’ panels (distressed tempera paintings) have been ‘tagged’ with disparate references. In Ballet Triadico amarela (2022), an elongated mask and red ball from Oscar Schlemmer’s incredible Bauhaus Ballet (early rebellious modernism) hover on a scarred yellow wall above an antique vase (culture and empire). In the adjacent panel, a cherry X (the cherries that come with luck at the slot machine), and below on the

Both of Solomon’s bodies of work are as layered and complex as personal lineage itself. Each are based on photographic images that she took of herself, from which she creates a watercolor painting. To these paintings she adds vividly colorful paper cutout garments and a variety of vivid geometric shapes pinned to the work, as well as embroidery thread and yarn. By using these multiple layers, Solomon creates not just beautifully realized, dimensionally alive portraits, but also draws attention to the layers of mixed racial and cultural identity present in both her own, and this country’s, often fraught heritage of immigration.

In the larger images that represent the countries in which she has heritage—Japan, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania— her portraits use polychromatic watercolor for the skin and hair. Her physical positioning is both comfortable and commanding. In From from Japan, Solomon is clad in a zig-zag patterned lavender kimono, with a spray of lovely lavender and white flowers cascading from a traditional hairstyle. Her half-smile is proud and comfortable, almost reminiscent of an icon, with a gold circle positioned behind her head. From from Poland uses an emerald-green halo shape behind her in a three-quarter profile view. Here, the artist wears a floral, richly embroidered jumper and a slightly lighter emerald headscarf.

When representing countries in which she has no heritage, as in From from Ecuador, her face and hair remain in monochromatic watercolor, the black, gray and white emphasizing that the subject isn’t wholly present in her bright clothes because she does not belong in the garb of this nation. In these images, her smile appears a bit uncomfortable, her gaze slightly skeptical, as if questioning what she is doing in clothes which don’t “fit” her culturally. It is the same in other images depicting the artist in Inuit and Tibetan attire.

In an adjoining room of the gallery, Solomon’s brightly colored crochet links are gracefully looped and draped down the walls. The

Patricia Iglesias Peco, Las Flores del bien , 2022. Photo by Paul Salveson.

Lisa Solomon, From from Japan, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Walter Maciel Gallery.

links are meant to reference a human connection that goes beyond cultural or ethnic differences or arbitrarily dictated points of origin.

Inclusive, beautifully wrought and highly relevant as our socalled melting pot society grows ever more divided, Solomon’s work shines with humanity and a spirit of belonging, regardless of culture or origin.

Alonzo Davis parrasch heijnen

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Alonzo Davis’ paintings are breathtaking in their materiality. Using saturated, refractive palettes, and woven paper and canvas to form a layered topography, the works assert their physicality as much, if not more than the imagery. Abstract—but with elements of pictographic language, landscape and quilting to which the title “Blanket Series” refers—Davis’ works are engaged with their 20th-century milieu, the art history that preceded it and, intriguingly, with the current discourse surrounding abstraction.

Davis is in a lively conversation with such art historical figures as Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Carlos Almaraz, Howard Hodgkin and Joe Ray; but his work also has much to contribute to the present moment. We are in a period in which abstraction has been increasingly cultivating its power of storytelling through expanding its material and gestural fields into more dimensional, personal and even spiritual territory. This includes an understanding of traditional craft as a deep cultural expression, with voices from Gee’s Bend to Sanford Biggers taking up quilting as a practice and a metaphor—which is exactly what Davis is up to in these affecting and unforgettable paintings.

Each brushstroke is as articulated as a stitch, and layered such that the foundation remains visible even under coats of assertive color and thick pigment. Compositions are built in sections, square or shard-like, overlapping and woven in wide strips, or sewn like patchwork. But, because of the generosity of the paint-handling, despite fragmentation, each stiffened unframed work occupies its wall space with the singularity of a modern painting and the gravitas of a regal tapestry. Celebration with Melon (1986) displays a skirt of fringe that enhances the textile effect, but the glow of its pink-forward personality forces a conversation on paint. Copper Flash (1989) also explores such possibilities, buried in a deep pink field of granite split by a lightning strike, perhaps being held together by gold at its broken seam like kintsugi.

Flotation Reflection (1996) presents like an elaborate picture window looking out across the sea to the horizon.

Its receding pictorial depths are a sweet spatial bend that is echoed elsewhere in the exhibition. It finds a curious counterpart in Twilight (1986) whose massive central window is a celestial glitter bomb with a small arrow pointing skyward. The arrow is a recurring motif, of the kind most heavily expressed in the urban musicality of Crescent Moon Over Memphis (1993), the most scenic of the works, and the most literal as to hiding a story in its codes.

Sarah Kanouse [Performance]

2220

Arts + Archives

By George Melrod

“My Electric Genealogy,” Sarah Kanouse’s engrossing multi-media performance at 2220 Arts + Archives, opened with projected images of various looming electrical towers, and for a moment it almost felt like a quirky homage to the mid-20th century technological sublime. In reality, it’s just the opposite: a heartfelt reckoning with a highly fraught legacy, both societal and personal. The impetus for the artist’s exploration is her grandfather, Ed Kanouse, who spent 40 years with the LA Department of Water and Power, designing the vast web of transmission lines that conveyed power from such sources as the Hoover Dam to the burgeoning metropolis of Los Angeles. His obsession with his career was such that when he died, he left his descendants stacks of snapshots of power infrastructure with just a handful of family holiday photos mixed in. Stories of his dismissiveness to his wife and mother, as well as a brutal home invasion, further cloud the family’s anxious history. But the heart of his legacy lies in the philosophy he espoused, of expanding energy usage through aggressive consumption of fossil fuels. That reckless ambition is revealed in a jaw-dropping plan (which was thankfully never realized) that would have placed over thirty power plants along the California coast, from the Mexican border up to San Luis Obispo, which Kanouse elucidates by reciting a speech that her grandfather gave proudly touting the proposal. Another focus of her critique is the Black Mesa strip mine in northern Arizona, which fed the coal-fired Navajo Power Plant. A quick synopsis of that project, with its exploitation of indigenous peoples and their lands, and of the local aquifer, gives jarring evidence of the type of environmental destruction that was tolerated in a relentless thirst for energy.

Weaving these disparate strands together is Kanouse herself, who orchestrated her multi-media display dressed primly in a vintage jacket and tie and slickly parted hair. Her persona veering from journalistic archivist to indignant inheritor, she expertly navigated three screens of running images through a mash-up of family snapshots, homemade videos and period documentary films, including one memorable 1920s scene of streetlights switching on in downtown Los Angeles. Punctuating the narrative were her own choreographed movements—shuddering to jolts of electricity, or assuming pylon-like poses—which helped inject her presentation with glimpses of playful vitality.

A rigorous, academic thinker, Kanouse calls the work “an essayistic working-through of energy infrastructure as a personal and collective inheritance,” and it’s in that parallel deconstruction of her family’s individual and global legacy that the work resonates most deeply. Behind her impassioned critique is a palpable exasperation at the damage that her grandfather left in his wake, especially given the urgent realities of climate change, and the epochal shift in thinking needed to contain it. While that’s surely not the grandiose legacy that her grandfather and his peers envisioned, it’s one we all have to live with. Watching Kanouse grapple with this weighty shared inheritance, through such crafty layering of text, sound and imagery, is at once sobering and illuminating.

Alonzo Davis, Crescent Moon Over Memphis , 1993. Courtesy of the Artist and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.

Sarah Kanouse, “My Electric Genealogy,” performance still. Photo by Cairo Marques-Nieto.

AFROFUTURE ZOMBIES

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG BUNKER VISION

One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of musicians to try their hand at making films. These films were often short. Many musicians went to art school, so short films by musicians aren’t necessarily vanity projects by celebrities.

Baloji was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When he was three his father took him to Belgium without telling his mother. He grew up as an outsider and started performing with a rap group when he was 15. A letter that he received from his mother when he was 26 was a paradigm shifter. It served as inspiration for his first album, which he dedicated to her. His stated goal is to make art that stands the test of time. In 2019 he made his first film. Although his music serves as the soundtrack for it, the film transcends the music video genre.

It opens in a Kinshasa barbershop. The opening lines of the song that provides the soundtrack are sung a cappella by a customer who is getting a haircut. The camera lands on a man walking by the shop in a lurid yellow jacket, and follows him. As he navigates the crowded streets, the jacket keeps our focus on him. He heads across a swarming traffic circle that has as its central feature a sort of robot that directs traffic. (Traffic control robots are an actual thing there.) He arrives in a residential neighborhood as night falls, and everybody’s face is lit up by their cell phones. Tossing off the yellow coat he makes his way up a flight of stairs to a dance club. In the club, everybody is glued to their phone as he sings about “everybody in the spotlight” of their phones. (The song is called “Zombies,” and refers to people becoming mobile phone zombies.) There is a lot of spirited dancing with selfie sticks and VR headsets. The camera lands on a flashy pimp who is partying at the club. One of his ladies gets up to leave.

As she leaves, we get a wonderful instrumental interlude that could have been torn from a Belmondo secret agent movie. She makes her way to the traffic circle wearing bright red so that she is easy to follow, and after crossing it starts to tear off her club clothing, starting with the straight black wig. She arrives home, where her mother appears to have a underground beauty shop in her living room. A young girl is getting an elaborate hair treatment (a sort of ironic Topsy). She explains how many likes she’ll get for it on social media.

Still from Baloji’s Zombies (2019).

Then follows a segment in the courtyard outside which most resembles a music video. It is a fashion show of wild Afrofutristic costumes with characters dancing outdoors. Following this scene comes a parade in the street featuring those costumes and a live brass band. A white man (the only one in the film) is being carried on a litter in a colonial uniform. He is tossing cash to the people watching the parade. In the final shots of the film his bloodied body is carried pieta-style to a dump. As the final melancholy music plays, a giant (a man on stilts) leads a horse (two men in a costume) down a long alley. The credits are a mobile text exchange superimposed on the action. Although this film is made by a musician, it is more of a short film than a music video. Let’s hope that this becomes a trend.

Uplifting Tales and Eroded Histories

January 21 - March 25

Richard Turner Michael Davis Paul Harris

A speculative geohistory of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Trade

- to exchange Fare - the cost to participate Social - relation to/interacting with

January 21 - March 25

Kelli Rae Adams Melissa Bouwman Frau Fiber

Mark Rumsey

Public Opening Reception: Saturday, January 21st, 3pm - 5pm. January 21 - March 25: Galleries open Thursday - Saturday, 10am to 4pm or by appointment.

Angels Gate Cultural Center 3601 S. Gaffey Street San Pedro, CA 90731 310 · 519 · 0936 angelsgateart.org

Paul Harris, The Wait of Time

Kellie Rae Adams, Beg, Borrow, Steal, 2019

Visionary science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) at her home in Altadena, CA, 1988.

LINDA WHITE

Four Decades of Painting from Geometry to Gesture

A survey exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints from 1972-2020

ANN PHONG

Ann Phong, I Am Not A Virus, 2021, acrylic with found objects

Originally organized by CSU Fullerton Nicholas & Lee Begovich Gallery, and expanded by Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion

BOTH EXHIBITIONS

Artist Talk with Ann Phong Tuesday, Feb 21, 12:15 -1 pm

Artist Talk with Linda White Wednesday, Mar 8, 12:15 -1 p.m

Major support for exhibitions provided by The Rallis Foundation, Yasuko & John Bush, Sylvia Impert, Orange Coast College Foundation, and Associated Students of Orange Coast College.

Linda White, The Pines, 1972, acrylic on canvas

Under the Bridge

BY ANTHONY AUSGANG OFF THE WALL

Thrift stores are potentially the end of the line for any object on sale therein; after that, it’s either refuse or reuse. Consequently, there’s a poignancy to the purchase of any artwork from a thrift store, whether by an ironic hipster being or a sincere abuelita. But despite prices that tend to be 99 cents and not 99,000 dollars, some art pieces seem destined to remain orphaned, which adds a certain noblesse oblige to their appreciation and collection by artists and cultural decoders like Jim Shaw, who first published his findings in the 1990 book Thrift Store Paintings. The book exults in artworks good enough to be for sale in legitimate galleries but too weird to be bought there, which explains the occasional discovery of a thrift store masterpiece “in the wild.” It’s an unfortunate paradox as thrift stores are considered as low as it gets, and collectors of Outsider Art prefer a more respectable provenance than Goodwill.

This discretion may be warranted: most donations of naïve art to thrift stores are aesthetically and financially worthless. Even so, there is artwork whose repugnance and abysmal dollar value exclude it from even that group. Homeless Art is made to satisfy the primitive, often drug-induced, art urgings of nomadic people who may not describe themselves as artists. Many of their burgeoning number are more likely to be searching for a drug dealer than an art dealer. But for those with a different agenda, busking art on the avenues is a good source of income. R.A. Wood is a “houseless” artist “in downtown LA who makes cash with his custom calligraphic drawings of names. But on a different block of Spring Street, the homeless work for pedestrians’ baksheesh, most of them favoring honesty’s comedic value to openly advertise whatever they’re lacking. One step above panhandling, sales in this quaternary art market depend on sympathy and amusement more than skill and name recognition.

Still, many Homeless Art pieces are made without an audience in mind; as a result, they can represent a self-expression purer than anything on display in many galleries and museums. And even though Homeless Art can include genres approved by the “official” art world, there is a multitude of factors making any relationship between the two impossible. After all, promoting homeless artists is difficult when most also prefer to remain nameless. Such is the case of The Master of Victory Bridge, known only by a grouping of four small paintings discovered this year in an abandoned homeless camp near the LA River. Their appearance evidences an innate artist’s ability and preference of material, even with the random art supplies available to the homeless. Individually wrapped in plastic Vons’ bags, the works seem to have had personal significance at one time, but their current state of ruinous decay shows that preservation became a low priority. Whether this is Process Art or simply circumstance is immaterial; the Homeless Art made by The Master of Victory Bridge excels. With their imagery bolstered by damage, the paintings successfully invigorate a cavalier attitude that’s refreshingly antithetical to contemporary cultural fetishism. Got art? We could use some…

The Master of Victory Bridge, Untitled, Date unknown, acrylic on canvas. 9 x 12 in.

thecheechcenter.org

riversideartmuseum.org

Land of Milk & Honey is organized by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Rosalía Romero, and April Lillard-Gomez. Focused on concepts of agriculture in the regions of California and Mexico and drawing inspiration from John Steinbeck’s portrayal of the region as a corrupted Eden, the exhibition questions ethical, cultural, and regional practices related to foodways and the venture from seed to table.

Image: Janet Diaz, Sangre Sudor y Amor: Hunger for the American Dream, 2018

This

The

Image: Sueño, 1972 (Downtown Los Angeles)

Photographer:

project was made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation, and the California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support provided by a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Sustaining Public Engagement Grant, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.Land of Milk & Honey is organized by the MexiCali Biennial.

This is an exhibition of 70 black-and-white silver gelatin prints selected from the extensive archive of the Chicano photographer’s work.

exhibition was organized by Melissa Richardson Banks and will embark on a national tour after closing in Riverside through her firm CauseConnect.

Iristay’s work is a representation of the identity created in the in-between spaces, creating installation work that critically examines the traditions in the cultures she has experienced, specifically as they relate to tradition, identity, gender, and custom.

Image: Tracing Acculturations, hand cast soil mixture tiles, underglazed paints, metal, 2021

Zeynep Dogu

No One Leaves Me Like You Do

A soft and rotten moment of loving you hits the pavement like seasonal fruit gone overripe. Skipping to the part where you leave a cigarette burning in my ashtray, I take out eyes swollen by another’s prying that pass through the mouth and caress the teeth dead. Scared they will flay me, say open wide, and betray my secret appetites and unrighteous desire for the same thing everyone else wants. I lay still as August heat in the unmade bed, a love motionless as a lake covers the deception of a quiet moment. I dissect this land of exile for instances too small to be seen, and get my voice snagged on emotion.

—ALEXANDRA JADE

Jack of Not All Trades

The Lugubrious Game

While you were busy multiplying, begetting superfluous spawn, I was lying in the darkness, emitting solitary groans.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

Dear Babs, One of my greatest music heroes recently started painting. So when a local gallery showed his art in a pop-up show, I was excited to go. But his paintings are really not good. He’s had a very long career as a musician and always puts a ton of effort into his music and it shows. But his paintings look like what they are: indulgent play by someone who hasn’t done the work to understand what they are doing. The problem is that now when I listen to his music, all I can think about are his paintings, and it’s starting to spoil the experience. I guess my question is, are there any examples of famous musicians who eventually became excellent painters? Is there hope for my hero’s paintings?

—Frustrated Fan

Dear Frustrated, Of course, it’s possible for your hero to make better paintings, but his visual art probably won’t surpass the impact and importance of his music. Becoming an innovative and important artist (musician or painter) takes time and dedication, at least if you want your work to mean something more than name recognition. It’s unfortunate but predictable that galleries are eager to capitalize on his fame to make a quick buck, with little serious investment in ensuring the work can withstand critical scrutiny.

There are few famous artists who are equally well-known for their music AND their visual art. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is a good example; she’s just a good artist in general and her visual art is as exploratory as her music. It’s the same with Yoko Ono, but she’s not really a painter. Miles Davis made some inspired paintings and drawings that could hold their own in most galleries today. Joni Mitchell can draw as lyrically as she can sing. What all these musicians/artists have in common is they had to work on their craft, try, fail and try again—and hold their visual work to the same standards as their music. That is a very rare ability indeed. It would actually be surprising if your hero was one of the few who could pull it off.

Have an art dilemma?

Send your question to Askbabs@artillerymag.com

HOSTILE WITNESS

FRI JAN 27* 8PM · SUN JAN 29 2PM

John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West

Los Angeles Philharmonic John Adams, conductor Los Angeles Master Chorale Grant Gershon, Artistic Director Jenny Wong, Associate Artistic Director

John Adams explores the harsh realities and untold stories of the California Gold Rush in his recent opera.

*Drinks in the Garden: Enjoy a complimentary drink before your concert. laphil.com/thegarden

MON JAN 30 8PM

Matthias Pintscher, conductor The world’s greatest contemporary ensemble performs Olga Neuwirth’s new score to the 1924 silent film Die Stadt ohne Juden

TUES FEB 8 8PM

Courtney Bryan premieres her own piano concerto, on a program with two other world premieres.

JOHN ADAMS

COURTNEY BRYAN

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER

Image: ...and of time (aot 4) (detail), 2000. Uta Barth (born in West Germany, 1958, active in the United States). Chromogenic print. 88.9 × 114.3 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum. © Uta Barth. Text and design @2022 J. Paul Getty Trust