Artillery, Issue 6, Volume 17, Summer 2023

Books & Film

BUTCHER & WOOD’S TRIBUTE TO THE LATE GREAT (AND MAD ) AL JAFFEE

FEATURING OUR

Marsia Alexander-Clarke: A Journey Through Time, Videos 1989 to 2022

Mark Steven Greenfield: A Survey, 2001-2021

April Bey: The Opulent Blerd

Explore brand-new, one-of-a-kind items specially curated for the whole family! Find books and games for kids, limited edition art pieces, handcrafted accessories, original MOAH publications, and so much more. Not to mention all the great MOAH swag! And don't forget, when you purchase from The Vault you directly support art, history, and culture in our community.

Shop our selection online at lancastermoah.org/thevault.

Marsia Alexander-Clarke: A Journey Through Time

Mark Steven Greenfield: A Survey, 2001-2021

April Bey: The Opulent Blerd

Van Leo, “Saudi Brothers,” 1975. Vintage print. 15 13∕16 × 11 ¾ in. (40.1 × 29.9 cm). Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.

Closes July 9, 2023

Closes August 20, 2023

Closes July 30, 2023

Closes September 3, 2023

Yolanda González (USA, 1964) The Dream of the Artist / Sueño de la pintora, 2013

Fernando Botero (Columbia, 1932) Reclining Woman / Mujer recostada, 2007

Miguel Alvear (Ecuador, 1964) I am the Other / Yo soy la otra, 2004

Tania Candiani (Mexico, 1974) Reverencia, 2019

Books & Film

FEATURED REVIEW

ON THE COVER: Francis Kanai, Untitled (detail), courtesy of the artist and Malaya Malandro.

ABOVE : Bruno Schulz,1933, photo credit Bertold Schenkelbach.

NEXT PAGE: TOP, Still of Thomas Kinkade in Miranda Yousef’s documentary Art for Everybody ; BOTTOM: Dawoud Bey, T wo Women at a Parade, Harlem, NY , 1978. © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy of Sean Kelly.

RIGHT: Charles Snowden, To Ward Speech (detail), 2021 , courtesy of Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

From the Editor

Dear Reader,

Reading wasn’t a top priority in our family; I don’t think I was ever read to as a child. It wasn’t as if literature was banned in our house, but the walls weren’t exactly lined with bookshelves. The preschool in our tiny town was held at the local library, and that was my first real introduction to books and being read to. I loved the smells, the colorful spines and the quietness of the library. It was such a relaxing atmosphere that I couldn’t wait to visit it, and it was there that I fell in love with the world of reading.

In elementary school we had the Book Mobile (as there was only the High School Library). A van would come around the school on certain days of the month, and we could check out books. It was such a delight to walk around in its cramped quarters—and the driver was a little creepy. I looked forward to every visit with my finished book in hand, ready for another.

DEPARTMENTS

I can’t really recall what books I read, but I’m sure my selection wasn’t very sophisticated, unlike some of my childhood friends that bragged about reading the likes of Ulysses when they were nine years old. In high school my tastes began to advance. My friends were often smarter than I was, and they would recommend books. One book that I remember vividly—and which was responsible for really getting me hooked on reading—was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Since we didn’t live that far from Kansas, where the infamous Clutter family murder took place, the proximity added to the mystique and thrill. Every chance I got I would open that book. A few times I got in trouble for being lazy (translation: lying around reading) and was told to get off my duff, set the table, or vacuum the rug. But that book made that horrific murder come alive for me. I would be terrified and couldn’t read at night for fear it might give me nightmares.

When I left home, my first husband, an avid reader and local pot dealer, turned me on to The Beats, Philip Roth, John Cheever and Charles Bukowski—of whom I was especially fond. His work was so honest and hilariously ribald. It was inspiring to find something that I really could sink my teeth into.

As my husbands accumulated, so did my personal library. I ended up working fulltime in the cataloging department at the Tulsa University Library. I loved that job and found the two main women catalogers that I worked for to be delightfully enigmatic. I was fascinated with their job and hated to interrupt them as they were always so enrapt, sitting in their cubby holes, thumbing through the pages, taking notes. They were so smart and hip and worldly—and well-read.

I’m still a diehard fiction fan and always have a book going. I couldn’t imagine a world without reading. Every summer we publish a reading issue, just like other publications do with their recommendations. Here are ours, mainly focusing on art. We like to include films too, such as the documentary on Thomas Kinkade reviewed here by Doug Harvey. Kinkade: alcoholic misanthrope, painter of light. How irresistible is that?

No matter what your fare, we think we have an eclectic selection to consider. And don’t let anyone tell you that you’re lazy. Now get off your butt and go visit a library or buy a book—before they actually do get banned.

paintings

The first retrospective for this mid-century California artist, August 23, 2023 to January 7, 2024

Jerry Kim ©

FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS

Doug Harvey is an artist, writer, critic, independent curator and educator who lives in LA. The graphic novel of his most recent solo show, "2020 Black Abstract Paintings," should be out in time for Christmas from AC Books. His other activities may be monitored online at www.dougharvey.blogspot.com and lessart.wordpress.

William Moreno is currently principle of William Moreno Contemporary, an art advisory and consulting firm that provides advice, meeting each collector’s particular aspirations. He is also a curator, writer, executive coach and consultant for the arts, focused on issues of sustainability and management practices.

Annabel Keenan is a New York–based writer specializing in contemporary art, sustainability and market reporting. Her work has been published in The Art Newspaper,  Hyperallergic and Brooklyn Rail, among others. She holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center.

Emma Christ is a Los Angeles–based curator, writer and art historian. She holds a BA in Art from Reed College, and an MA in Curatorial Practice from USC, where she wrote a thesis on osmotic and transcorporeal relationships in contemporary art.

STAFF

Tulsa Kinney Editor

Alex Garner Publisher

EDITORIAL

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

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

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Barbara Morris is a Bay Area–based writer and artist. In addition to Artillery, Morris has written for  Artweek,  art ltd., Squarecylinder and Art Practical, among other publications. She holds an MFA in painting from UC Berkeley, and is passionate about feminist concerns and artwork that challenges racial and gender stereotypes.

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HOSTILE WITNESS

Coachella’s Flower Power

It’s summer, and time to take a breath after the roller coaster ride we’ve been on since last fall. The art world has ramped back up—new exhibitions and new galleries (Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, the second for François Ghebaly) have opened. We also had our spate of art fairs earlier this year, with Frieze LA almost doubling its size, in terms of both its gallery roster and its new venue, the Barker Hangar. The main tent (there were two) was constantly jammed, and parking was at a premium; the rumor mill buzzes they may be looking for a new location for 2024.

For this issue, I’ll focus on two things—one, an interview with artist Maggie West during the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in April, and two, a trip to New York in May. Yes, THAT festival, which I had a chance to attend for the first time. It sold out the first weekend, with some 125,000 people in attendance; I went the second weekend and found it extremely crowded. West’s was one of four new art installations commissioned this year—along with Kumkum Fernando, Vincent Leroy and Güvenç Özel—plus several holdover presentations from previous fests.

West’s “Eden” is an expansion of her regular practice in which she takes time-lapse videos of flowers and plants, following their blooms and slight movements. In post-production, she combines and manipulates the images, often erasing the background so the subjects appear to be floating in space. The details of these

plant forms were projected onto larger-than-life extruded sculptures in the shape of flowers and fronds, some up to 60 feet tall. The work provided a lyrical, striking reminder of nature in the very man-made setting of a vast contemporary music festival.

“During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time gardening,” said West. “Obviously, I had a lot of free time—I was so stressed out. A lot of galleries, a lot of things went under, so for me I started gardening as a way to cope with that, and I got really into time-lapse photography.” Not surprisingly, her recent body of work reflects her fascination for flowers and plants. She added, “There’s a sense of hope and renewal when you see things grow and change and bloom.”

One also notices a lot more detail when images are enlarged, as was the case at Coachella, where people could walk up to and between the sculptural pieces. “A lot of my work involves a recontextualization of subjects by using colored lighting,” West said. “It gives you a new perspective; it makes you take a second look at it.”

Maggie West’s “Eden,” front view, Coachella, 2023

Summer in New York

One of the delights of Chelsea is coming upon the unexpected treasures. For me there were two discoveries. One was Kelly Akashi’s “Infinite Bodies” at Tanya Bonakdar—a truly sublime grouping of sculpture and installation, some pieces displayed on rammed-earth pedestals in a very spare space. The pieces featured parts of her body: a slim torso, dangling legs and hands, along with bronze, glass and found objects.

In the second half of May, I took my first trip to New York in four or five years. The beat of the city is back, with bars and restaurants filled to the brim, and the Met packed with long lines for two blockbuster shows (Karl Lagerfeld and van Gogh). The Roof Garden Commission featured a Lauren Halsey installation, a series of sculptures that recreates ancient Egyptian columns and statuary with African faces and African-American graffiti on block walls made to look like walls of ancient tombs. I also passed through the Cecily Brown show. She has never been one of my faves, but I like these recent paintings, with her confident handling of very drippy paint that feels extraordinarily playful and luxuriant.

One afternoon I spent wandering Chelsea, where galleries are so densely packed you can easily drop into a dozen over a few hours. At David Zwirner was Yayoi Kusama’s “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers” (up through July 21) which included painting and epic sculpture—one room was filled with three large undulating screens covered with polka dots, as if her pumpkins had unfurled; another room contained a couple of her gigantic psychedelic flower sculptures. Unfortunately, to enter the new Infinity Mirror, there was a line down the block, so I skipped that.

Interviewing Kusama in Japan over 20 years ago was one of the most riveting professional moments of my life—she was semilucid, although her memory was selective, recalling, for example, how frugal her onetime boyfriend Joseph Cornell was. They once went out to dinner with another couple and she recollected that he "decided that the four of us would share one dish between us.” She recounted all this with her deadpan face, but there was a certain humor in the way she told the story—breathlessly, with hardly a pause, as if she were rushing to get the story out.

Kusama became known for her net paintings in which she knit together a series of wavy lines across the canvas, creating a “net” effect. These were largely monochromatic, with occasional introduction of other background colors, such as yellow. In contrast, her recent paintings are a riot of color, and quite brilliant arrangements of lozenges, fat lines and human faces. It’s her gift that they somehow work together.

The other discovery was Colombian photographer Ruby Rumié at the Nohra Haime Gallery, in the exhibition "Us, 172 Years Later." There were two portrait series here, both of Colombians with their favorite foods; one close-up and the other full-length. The way Rumié has arranged the foods, such as peppers, cherimoya and blue crab, is both whimsical and strangely beautiful—many of them are worn as headgear. Then there are the faces of her subjects—old, young, male, female—faces that have remarkable character and directness, grounded in dignity and a powerful sense of identity. The background has been taken from 19th-century colonial-era prints, which to me suggests the history behind each person. It's also a way to visually flatten the background and let us focus on the faces and personal attributes.

I especially love the way the artist depicts herself. In one enlargement (C-prints mounted on aluminum), she’s walking barefoot wearing a long, off-white cloak with matching trousers and carrying a big bundle of bananas. She’s holding them up against her face so that you can’t see her features. This tells me she’s a chronicler—that her face is not important, but her story is. I really look forward to seeing much more from her.

Left: The Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey, The Met, 2023 Right: Ruby Rumié,"Us, 172 Years Later," 2022.

Art World Roiled By AI “Parasites”

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

The US Copyright Office issued a landmark ruling in February that users of AI-generative programs may not apply for copyright registration of the resultant images. Additionally, the company that owns the AI-image-generative program Midjourney was sued in federal court for copyright infringement by several artists. The complainants’ lawyer released a statement labeling AI programs as “parasites.”

The ruling made it clear that copyright law mandates “human authorship” for registration of images. Graphic novelist Kris Kashtanova wrote a comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, illustrating it primarily with panels created by using Midjourney. The Office ruled that an applicant for such registration is under a duty to disclose which images in a book or compilation were created using AI: “Because the current registration for the Work does not disclaim its Midjourney-generated content, we intend to cancel the original certificate issued to Ms. Kashtanova and issue a new one covering only the expressive material that she created”—such as text written by her and any graphic panels she created independently.

The Office examined the Midjourney-image-generation process in detail, including how the program refines images from background static or noise based on prompts by the operator, and determined that “the process is not controlled by the user because it is not possible to predict what Midjourney will create ahead of time.”

“To obtain the final image, [Ms. Kashtanova] describes a process of trial and error, in which she provided hundreds or thousands of descriptive prompts to Midjourney until the hundreds of iterations [created] as perfect a rendition of her vision as possible.” The Office rejected her explanation: “Rather than a tool that Ms. Kashtanova controlled and guided to reach her desired image, Midjourney generates images in an unpredictable way. Accordingly, Midjourney users are not the ‘authors’ for copyright purposes of the images the technology generates ….Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the ‘master mind’ behind them.”

The decision rebuffed Kashtanova’s claim that she relied on “hundreds” of prompts that required creativity and put her in control of the process. “Because Midjourney starts with randomly generated noise that evolves into a final image, there is no guarantee that a particular prompt will generate any particular visual output. Instead, prompts function closer to suggestions than orders ….”

In a Statement of Policy in March’s Federal Register, summarizing its rulings, The Office said it was getting numerous applications for registrations of AIgenerated material. “[The] Office concludes that public guidance is needed on the registration of works containing AI-generated content.”

The Office states that it “intends to publish a notice of inquiry later this year seeking public input regarding policy topics, including how the law should apply to the use of copyrighted works in AI training and the resulting treatment of outputs.”

The proposed “inquiry” addresses an issue not touched upon in the Kashtanova decision. Midjourney and other AI-image-generating programs are “trained” using millions of images—many under copyright—scraped from the internet.

ART BRIEF

That controversial aspect of generative AI is now being litigated in two blockbuster lawsuits filed in January against Stability AI, owner of the Stable Diffusion program. First, Getty Images (which controls the rights to millions of images) filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against Stability AI. Second, a class action suit filed in California federal court on behalf of artists claims that Stability AI and Midjourney infringed on their copyrights. One of the lawyers representing the three lead plaintiffs said an AI-image-generating program is “a parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists, now and in the future… and will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists.”

These are welcome developments in the battle against the onslaught of the AI juggernaut. If copyright is to mean anything, it should protect artists’ original creations from being scraped and stolen off the Internet. AI programs use devious methods for creating “art,” and the users of these programs are not legitimately “artists.”

New Art in the Metro System

BY SCARLET CHENG

With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro Art, the transportation agency’s public art program, required a public engagement component for every project, and the artists found different ways to make those connections meaningful.

Mark Steven Greenfield’s Red Car Requiem at Historic Broadway Station pays homage to the Red Cars, the nickname for the Pacific Electric Railway system, which was an extensive mass transit system that ran throughout

tiny, hand-cut pieces of glass, and produced in Cuernavaca, Mexico, over a six-month period.

Audrey Chan’s design borrowed directly from her public engagement: for Will Power Allegory she interviewed many people connected to the area where her work is located, the Little Tokyo/Arts District station. During one Nisei Week, she held a workshop at The Japanese American Community & Cultural Center to discuss historical images and her project.

Southern California in the last century. In the 1920s it was the largest electric railway system in the world, covering over 1000 miles of track.

The artist himself has memories of the Red Car. “My father was in the service, and we were out of town quite a bit,” said Greenfield. “Once when we came back, the Red Car was gone. Overnight it disappeared.” This project is his way of recalling a system that provided mass transportation to millions of Angelenos, as Metro is doing today. “I’m a student of history, to me history is really important,” he added.

He did his community outreach by preparing a survey sent out by the Cal State LA Alumni Association, culminating in a Zoom discussion, and now Metro has an archive of personal memories of the Red Car. His final design was abstract. “I wanted to convey the energy behind the Red Car—the vibration, sound, movement,” he asserted. The image is of a series of fragmented rosettes or wheels in red, orange and yellow, with pieces spinning off of them which runs steady on the concourse level, the longest continuous piece Metro Art has ever commissioned—148 feet long and 10 feet high. The work is a tour de force of mosaics composed of millions of

Will Power Allegory includes 14 panels on the platform level of the station, each featuring people or a public gathering, such as the traditional Japanese Obon Festival, which happens in Little Tokyo every year, or a GabrielinoTongva ceremonial dance or a group of protestors. These large, brightly hued panels are made of porcelain enamel steel, translated into the durable material by an artwork fabrication company in Tumwater, Washington, that creates museum-quality work.

“It’s loosely thematic, I wanted there to be a lot of fluidity between different time periods, and people,” Chan said. “There are communities overlapping in various areas. I needed it to work as a whole piece, but then, also, as individual compositions.” Only one panel includes a central portrait, portraying Biddy Mason, the African American woman who was born a slave but became a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist in early Los Angeles.

Along the bottom of most panels is a procession of smaller figures of various cultures and dress. “That’s a way for the people in the station to connect to the artwork,” said Chan, “because everyone in the station is walking in some direction.”

Many more infrastructure projects are on the horizon. To learn more about opportunities with Metro Art, visit metro. net/art and click on Art Opportunities.

ABOVE, left: Mark Steven Greenfield, Red Car Requiem (detail), at Historic Broadway Station; Right: Audrey Chan, Will Power Allegory (detail), at Little Tokyo/Arts District Station.

Einar & Jamex

de la Torre

Terricolas (Earthlings)

Koplin Del Rio Gallery

Seattle, WA

29 July - 9 September, 2023

THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION Documentaries Trumped by Biopics

BY SCARLET CHENG

Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been rediscovered.

One would be Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a visionary Swedish artist now credited as being one of the first abstract painters, predating Kandinsky and Mondrian. Her life has been imagined into the biopic Hilma, directed by veteran director Lasse Hallström, with his daughter Tora Hallström playing the young Hilma, and his wife Lena Olin playing the older Hilma. If that sounds like trouble, you’d be half-right.

Af Kling trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm and painted her share of portraits and landscapes to make a living, all the while enduring male contempt, as the movie reveals. But she had a higher calling, a mystical one. “I want to study the world,” her character says in the film, “and see how things are connected.” Eventually she heeded her inner voice and joined four other women to form a group called “The Five,” to worship and seance together. In her 40s, she began making very large geometric paintings, believing them to be channeled and meant for the “Temple.” Toward the end of her life, she believed these works to be ahead of their time—which indeed they were—and had them put away in storage. That’s how the story goes, and Hallström follows the convention. What’s sad but definitely true is that in Klint’s time these works were rarely shown in public.

This artist seems a perfect subject for a biopic, with her revolutionary art and her proto-feminist leanings. Unfortunately, this film portrays her as a petulant teenager, with a circle of giggling and girlish female friends. It’s so sad to see her story trivialized, and her lovers treated more as utilitarian than heartfelt— one of them is quite wealthy, so her purse helps pay for af Klint’s expenses and many dinners out. The next one appears to be her housekeeper. With the director’s daughter cast as the title character, all the other characters got severely underwritten. On the other hand, the brief appearances of the soulful Lena Olin made me wish she had far more screen time.

For those of us who were charmed by the unexpected twists and turns of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), her new film, Showing Up, is quite a disappointment. Protagonist Lizzy is a ceramic artist, played by Michelle Williams with dreary listlessness. She has a boring admin job at an arts-and-crafts college in Portland, Oregon, and is preparing for her own solo show at a local gallery. Meanwhile, she has no hot water, and her landlady is too busy to deal with it because she’s also an artist—having two shows opening soon. Lizzy’s family, naturally, is also dysfunctional.

Lizzy’s parents are divorced, and her mother runs the department in which Lizzy works; her father is a narcissist, and her brother is on the spectrum. It’s not clear why Lizzy takes it upon herself to try to fix everything, especially when she’s

Above: Still from Showing Up (2022), ©A24; Right: Still from the biopic Hilma (2022), ©Juno Films.

so unhappy about doing it and seems to be running out of time to prep for her show.

This is a slow film, and one particularly long scene of Lizzy shaping a clay figure with her fingers feels like a documentary insert. Perhaps one on-target message the film gets across is that the life of an artist isn’t all fun and openings; a lot of it may be a grind. However, most artists I know get a lot more pleasure out of their work than Lizzy does.

The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons captures an artist’s life in an informed and captivating way. Directors Judd Tully and Harold Crooks skillfully intercut archival footage with interviews with friends and colleagues (Betye Saar, Suzanne Jackson, Henry Taylor, Lorna Simpson), and even a few with the publicity-shy artist himself.

We see the remarkable range of Hammons’ work, and the originality of his thinking. Many of us know Hammons for his body prints, in which he applied his own oiled body to large sheets of paper, then added charcoal or other pigment. Initiated in 1968 and continuing for about a decade, these were very much about Black identity and its social suppression. But this film shows us he did so much more in the way of sculpture and performance art, once setting up a blanket on the streets of New York in 1983 to sell snowballs, and calling it Bliz-aard Ball Sale. Some sections of the doc are also illustrated with animation, a style that looks like torn paper—and it works.

GENOCIDE AND GENIUS

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

by Benjamin Balint

REVIEWED BY BARBARA MORRIS

Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Schulz may have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but he was expansively gifted. The success of his literary debut, Cinnamon Shops (1934), was followed by an equally impressive Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), his only other surviving book. Although he remained a high school teacher in the drab oil town Drohobych (then in Poland, now Ukraine) for 17 years, and was a quirky, self-abnegating guy, he was profoundly aware of his own gifts as a writer, building on the legacy of role models—such as fellow Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka.

Cinnamon Shops, known in English as The Street of Crocodiles, revealed Schulz’s already depressive nature, rooted in his claustrophobic childhood home, with a tubercular father and other invalid relatives crammed into a flat above the family’s fabric shop in Drohobych. An eccentric cast of characters—notably the formidable housekeeper Adela, the father and Joseph, who stands in for the author—wander at will through convoluted dimensions, heightened by experiments in breeding exotic birds, metaphysics and necromancy.

Schulz’s own personal travails would quickly be eclipsed by the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust, a subject that Balint depicts in unflinching detail. An SS officer, Felix Landau, admired the overtones of S&M in Schulz’s artwork—often submissive figures groveling at the elegant feet of imperious women—and took the artist on as his Leibjude, “personal Jew.” This ostensibly gave Schulz a protected status belied by his ultimate murder—unsolved but likely at the hands of a rival Gestapo officer. He painted portraits of Gestapo girlfriends and completed a number of murals around town, some for the SS casino, and some for Laundau’s children’s nursery, whimsicial fairty-tale scenes.

With colorful scenes from tales like Hansel and Gretel, or a sultry Snow White surrounded by seven devoted, gnome-like dwarfs, the works cast a bit of light into some very dark recesses. Here the twisted fate of these murals takes an unexpected turn—

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

By Benjamin Balint 320 pp WW Norton

to Israel. For Yad Vashem, the institution of Jewish remembrance located in Jerusalem, the murals represent an important piece of the history of the Holocaust. Yet their use of the term “repatriation” in reference to the action carried out in Drohobych in May 2001, in which Israeli operatives surreptitiously chiseled the frescoes right off the walls, seems strained, at best. With repatriation of artworks at the forefront of ethical considerations in the global museum community, Balint’s work raises complex issues about conflicting rights of ownership.

Balint’s overarching theme of loss persists, touching on “the cold case of the missing novel, one of the literary world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.” The fate of the lost manuscript of Schulz’s final work, Messiah, remains to this date unknown. Balint offers a gripping, nuanced portrayal of Schulz’s world.

Bruno Schulz, 1933, photo credit: Bertold Schenkelbach.

Thomas Kinkade signing stacks of prints

PAINTER OF DARKNESS Cracking the Kinkade Vault

BY DOUG HARVEY

the most intensive and successful branding campaigns in the history of art. At the time, it was guesstimated that 1 in 20 American homes contained a Kinkade artifact, which encompassed anything from a hand-retouched limited-edition print to coffee mugs, collector plates, datebooks and customized La-Z-Boy recliners.

Kinkade grew up poor in Placerville, California, about 40 miles east of Sacramento, attended Berkeley, then Art Center in Pasadena. After graduating he landed a job painting backgrounds for animator Ralph Bakshi’s cinematic collaboration with comic artist Frank Frazetta, Fire and Ice. Bakshi is the most entertaining interviewee: “From what I gather, if you like Kinkade you’re an asshole. Well, I guess I’m an asshole.” This period of Kinkade’s life is the most revelatory, with snapshots of the artist in Rocky Horror drag, stories of mental breakdowns and the most intriguing of the previously unknown work that was discovered in his vault.

Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated around the Painter of Light™ and his artwork during his lifetime. To Vallance’s astonishment, when he recounted the dream to Kinkade’s family during a symposium on kitsch a few years later, it turned out that the vault really existed, and indeed contained a mother lode of non-canonical Kinkades.

In Miranda Yousef’s new documentary on Kinkade, Art for Everybody, Vallance tells the story of his prophetic dream again, and she uses the vault and its contents as a metaphor for Kinkade’s barely repressed darker side, and the toll his industrialized and sanitized version of professional painting took on himself, his family, his business partners and his legions of fans. Piecing together Kinkade’s career from talking heads, archival footage and the full cooperation of his widow and four daughters, Art for Everybody doesn’t break any new cinematic ground, but is a tightly constructed narrative.

Vallance befriended Kinkade while organizing the museumscaled exhibition “Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth” at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in 2004—a testament to Vallance’s uncanny ability to insinuate himself into unlikely situations and make improbable connections, such as trading neckties with Anwar Sadat, curating contemporary art exhibitions at the Liberace Museum, delivering XXXL scuba flippers to the King of Tonga, and so on.

If you are unfamiliar with Kinkade, the incongruity stems from the fact that his paintings (as I noted in an essay published over two years before Susan Orlean’s New Yorker profile, AHEM!) are “overtly, even militantly sentimental… detailed workmanlike renditions of traditional quasi-luminist landscapes, inhabited by homely cottages and stone lighthouses, neatly bisected by babbling brooks and waterfalls, and track-lit from heaven through a conveniently parting storm-front.”

Beloved by the Moral Majority, his career was subject of one of

While the artist’s shady business deals, debilitating alcoholism, sexual assaults, bizarre alter egos and family-unfriendly outbursts (like pissing on a Winnie-the-Pooh statue in Disneyland or yelling “Codpiece! Codpiece!” during a Siegfried & Roy performance in Vegas) are documentary gold—the real shocker for most visually literate viewers will be how accomplished a painter Kinkade actually was.

Many of his undergrad paintings are tortured self-portraits in the familiar Degenerate Art mode. “I want to paint the truth,” he says in a contemporaneous audio journal, “and the truth of this world is not happiness. The truth of this world is pain, and that’s the only truth.” But he’s also a stylistic chameleon, knocking out underground-cartoonish paintings or Gustave Caillebotte homages at the drop of a beret.

This, in turn, forces us to reconsider Kinkade’s primary oeuvre—the over-saturated, over-articulated, nostalgia-curdled landscapes—as a deliberate concept-based aesthetic strategy, rather than someone earnestly trying and failing to be Albert Bierstadt. Of course, this won’t be enough for everyone. The always droll Pulitzer-winning LA Times critic Christopher Knight, brought in as resident nay-sayer, doesn’t miss a beat when shown some of Kinkade’s early work: “He should’ve stuck with it.”

Ultimately, Art for Everybody comes across as a cautionary tale about the conflation of artistic ambition with the capitalist myth of infinite (and mandatory) economic growth. Which may also have been part of the artist’s intention. “His paintings are a brilliant look at America,” asserts Bakshi. “He’s really painting his feelings about the cheapness of our society as it becomes more greedy and hungry. Those paintings belong in The Metropolitan Museum of Art as far as I’m concerned.” I wouldn’t bet a million bucks on that, but maybe they’ll work up the nerve to screen this moving and challenging documentary.

Art for Everybody premiered in March at SXSW and is currently traveling the Festival circuit. Jeffrey Vallance is working on curating an exhibit of Kinkade’s never-shown vault paintings.

Still of Thomas Kinkade

August

Cody To Yellowstone, 2019, R. Nelson Parrish

MICHELANGELO WHO?

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

REVIEWED BY ANNABEL KEENAN

Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with confidence and clear mastery of her material is Katy Hessel, who has rewritten art history from the Renaissance to the present day to highlight the women artists who were working alongside and eclipsed by their male colleagues.

The Story of Art Without Men is well researched and expertly told. Hessel, the art historian behind the popular podcast and Instagram called the Great Women Artists , is uniquely positioned to tell this story. She includes succinct context and clear descriptions of nuanced topics—artistic movements, techniques, genres, tropes—gliding through decades and centuries with remarkable speed without giving the reader whiplash. Indeed, Hessel’s consideration of the reader is what makes her writing stand out. She explains art history with enough details to engage novices while avoiding becoming too didactic and risk boring a more informed audience.

The book begins with shocking anecdotes and statistics. A 2019 study, for example, revealed that 87% of the artists in 18 major US museum collections were men. The UK also fares poorly. The National Gallery in London, Hessel explains, only held its first major solo exhibition by a historical female artist in 2020 with Artemisia Gentileschi. Hessel offers additional facts, which are even worse for women of color, and sets the stage for what her book seeks to correct.

Hessel acknowledges caveats on the scope considered here, which is informed by her own studies that centered on a Western male narrative. Painting, for example, is the only medium discussed in the book until the 19th century, when Hessel first mentions others such as quilting, pottery and sculpture. Of course, her commitment to covering over 700 years in some 500 pages leaves inevitable gaps. However, Hessel’s work invites further research without making this additional work a requirement to understand and enjoy the text she’s provided. Additional knowledge—preconceived or studied after the fact—would certainly complement the book, but the text as is keeps the reader interested and informed.

The Story of Art Without Men

By Katy Hessel

512

pages

100 color illustrations Norton

As she embarks on her ambitious task to rewrite art history without “the clamor of men” (p.12), Hessel chooses a handful of women artists to ground each period. The earlier movements in the 16th and 17th centuries are some of the most informative, in which Hessel relies on extensive research to highlight women whose sparse historical records have been pieced together through legal documents and scholarly reports (mostly written by men). In these centuries, the women whose artistic work and influence survived were nearly always associated with aristocracy or had fathers, brothers or husbands who were also artists.

While rewriting history, Hessel takes care to explain why imbalance exists in the first place. She highlights some of the causes for the millennia-long existence of a male-centric art world, including the active exclusion of women from academies and examples of women’s contributions being downplayed, attributed to men, or erased altogether (sometimes by their own hand as women used pseudonyms to ensure a seat at the all-male table). One example in plain sight is Johann Zoffany’s painting The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–72), which features the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. All of the 36 members are painted in full portraits—except for the two women, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, who are removed from the group and represented by two barely recognizable busts.

Some of the names in these early years are well known, like Gentileschi, but most will likely be new to any reader—an exciting and welcome opportunity to learn. Unsurprisingly, as developments in women’s rights and access to formal training improved, the number of women artists increased, and their contributions were better recorded. The vast majority of the book is dedicated to the last 150 years and include familiar figures, such as Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Diane Arbus, as well as blue-chip and celebrity contemporary artists, such as Amy Sherald, Yayoi Kusama and Julie Mehretu.

Throughout the book, Hessel’s clear love for the history of art shines. She notes her favorite works and embarks on nuanced, poetic visual descriptions with reverence and excitement, as if discovering her subjects for the first time. It’s these moments that propel Hessel’s text and inspire curiosity. It’s hard to believe it took until 2023 for this book to be written, but it’s clear Hessel doesn’t want this to be the last chapter. On the contrary, The Story of Art Without Men is an invitation to constantly rethink art history and continue to fill in the gaps.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother , 1936, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), U.S National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

THE BOOK AS BOOKWORK

Luis Delgado’s Physicality as a Thing

BY WILLIAM MORENO

Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed in a growing cosmopolitan milieu. Early on he studied under the tutelage of Guggenheim fellow Frank Gonzales, and took up painting, photography and theater, subsequently graduating from the University of the Americas Puebla. In the ’80s, he moved to the Bay Area where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute and honed his practice.

After producing a body of social and documentary photography influenced by Richard Misrach, Diane Arbus, Henri CartierBresson and others, Delgado adopted a conceptual approach utilizing and combining the book form with photography as a basis for his work. In the 1990s, there was a significant shift

instigated by the defining creation of “Loteria Cosmologica” (1996). Based on the classic Mexican lottery game, the series comprises 41 silver-gelatin images printed on cards transforming them into an existentialist version of the Tarot. It’s an unexpected and sardonic body of images, which one can use to divine one’s future—converting the viewer from passive spectator to active participant. The series led to a more focused vision of using the printed book format as a vehicle for his ongoing work. With “Nocturne” (2018), Delgado published a series of starkly haunting night portraits, taken while roaming through Mexico City’s Coyoacán district and published as a fold-out book.

Artist’s books or bookworks—a term employed by Mexican author and conceptual artist Ulises Carrión)—stand in contrast to “books on art” or catalogs, and are intimate, tactile and often sequential. They have existed for millennia, emerging in the 20th century as an art form—notably with Pierre Bonnard and later the Dadaists, Kandinsky, Picasso and others. Publications materialized in the US more robustly as a conceptual practice, such as the seminal publication of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), his wry photographs of gas stations taken between Oklahoma and Los Angeles. In 2008, Ruscha stated he felt that the books were more advanced as a concept than his paintings. For many artists, such books are distinctive; democratic, creatively malleable, often cheap to produce and critically focused on the idea as paramount concern.

Beyond the creation and production, bookworks are not for reading in the traditional sense, but to consider and reflect on—a conceptual approach that relies on the viewer’s interaction with the object to effect meaning. Collectors—both institutional and individual—eye such works strategically and aesthetically. Stanford and UC Berkeley, where Delgado’s works are held, as well as the Getty Research Institute, devote substantial resources to their library holdings as research adjuncts. New York and LA’s Printed Matter Book Fairs adds a hyper-contemporary flair for collectors.

In 2010, Delgado took to the format head-on with the creation of the Malulu Editions imprint, focused on publishing a variety of group projects—most recently, Lowriders by Lou Dematteis, which was acquired by the Smithsonian. The environmentally focused 10 Carbon Conundrums—Coincidental observations, pairings of events and images through coincidental dates (2016) consists of both books and prints, a thoughtful exposé of the planet’s plundering.

Dialogos Callejeros (Street Dialogues) (2018) is a romantic tribute to the streets of Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood, named after philosophers such as Homer, La Fontaine and Schiller, as well as noted Mexican musicians As one commenter noted, “perusing this book is like changing the radio stations while driving through Polanco.” More recently, he published Are You Talking to Me? (2019) a sobering tribute honoring immigrants who died while in ICE detention facilities. Along with the government’s detached press language, he pairs a single, devastating image of a sandal or boot print as poignant homage. In production is Delgado’s love letter to Acapulco’s jet-setter golden age, roughly tracking the decades between 1950 and 1970, presented as a series of fold-out publications. Los Tarzanes (2023) is a riff on Olympic champion and star Johnny Weissmuller and infers a social milieu rife with hedonism, scandals and media speculation. But Delgado’s longer-term goal follows Carrión’s dictum of “archive as artwork”—the monumental undertaking of consolidating the totality of one’s practice.

As books’ material forms gravitate into the digital realm, bookworks created with deliberative corporeality offer a possibility of considering the physicality of the thing itself. So much the better.

Are You Talking to Me , 2019, image courtesy of the artist.

WATCHING THE HITS

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

BUNKER VISION

Twenty years before MTV aired its first music video, people were making short films of bands and singers performing their hits. The ones from France featured A-list acts and production values. Italy gave us the best film documentation of Screaming Lord Sutch. The American one that has best survived the test of time is Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots Are Made for Walking." Although the American films were filmed in Technicolor (which tends to not fade over time like other stocks) the production values were often cheap. They usually featured dancers in bikinis who might or might not be dancing in sync with the music. How did these films come to be?

In the late 1950s a new kind of jukebox started showing up in French cafes and clubs. These jukeboxes (called Scopitones, later rebranded for American audiences as Colorama) showed films of musical acts on a screen the size of a modern laptop. Because these machines were placed where young people congregated, the acts they featured were the actual hitmakers in films that were geared toward thoughtful music fans. We have these machines to thank for the existence of high-quality films of Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday and Françoise Hardy. When the Mafia (purportedly) brought these jukeboxes to America, they situated them in men’s clubs, where the music of the day mattered less than the jiggling assets of the dancers. Most of the American titles were filmed between 1965 and 1968. The most prestigious rock acts to be recorded were Procol Harum and The Moody Blues. Most of the other acts were cover bands and B-listers. One of the most fondly remembered performances is "The Web of Love" sung by actress/model Joi Lansing. The number is performed inside a spider web and a cannibal’s cook pot. It has become a YouTube staple. In fact, the gonzo manner in which the American musical numbers were recorded caused Susan Sontag to include them in her canon of camp.

Film jukeboxes actually have a longer history in the US. In the early 1930s there was a technology called Pan-O-Rams. It was a sort of visual jukebox that featured hot jazz films. A key difference with these was that all of the films were spliced into one long loop, and the film for your coin was whichever film was next. It is estimated that about 1000 to 1500 Scopitone machines made it to the United States. Most of the ones that survived got repurposed. There are currently machines in the visitor center at NASA. As of this writing, a working machine fully stocked (36 films) is being offered on eBay for $7500. There is a huge gray market in DVDs of old Scopitone films, and new titles show up on YouTube almost weekly. There is such a specific aesthetic associated with these films that artists making videos today will ape them for a carefree '60s retro feel. It is currently estimated that about 72 titles were made in the United States. When a new title shows up in a collector list, or on YouTube, there is the sense of occasion that is often caused by the discovery of a lost silent film in a Norwegian attic.

ENVIRONMENT MAKING Malaya Malandro on Collaboration

INTERVIEWED BY EMMA CHRIST

Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works, the book is a glimpse into a larger conversation— one that is ongoing. While the book is separated into sections by medium, the visual and written work is fluid. In fact, it’s not even clear there are two artists until you turn to the final page. Kanai and Malandro have formed a shared language, reflecting one another in their work. The result is a beautifully rendered book that allows readers to be voyeurs to their conversations about the world. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Malandro to speak about the book and the process behind it. The following are excerpts from our discussion.

CHRIST: How did you and your collaborator, Francis, meet?

MALANDRO: Through mutual friends on a strange but fated visit to Japan almost seven years ago now. We’ve stayed in touch and fostered this friendship. Our similar, or really complementing, philosophies made fertile soil for a synergetic, creative partnership.

How did this project begin?

We began talking about working together in late 2019, early 2020—exchanging phone calls and texts about things that interested us. Originally, we just had the desire to work on a project together, but we didn’t have an endpoint in mind. We didn’t know it would be a book. We were just communicating. One of us would say something like, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about

7-Elevens recently,” and then for the next few weeks we’d just be responding to that idea. Through all these conversations I guess we began building these bodies of work, just amassing materials from archival to new work. We were digging through a mass.

When we first met, you were introduced to me as a visual artist. Why this shift to writing, or at least for this project?

I’ve always written poetry, but it was my first time sharing this part of my practice. I think visual or written, there is a sense of time, embodied time—a physical feeling I’m drawn to. With poetry, I feel like I can explore this embodied time and open it up to the creation of environment. Environment making?

I like that phrase, “environment making.” You can see it in the book. You set a scene that is reflected in these photos. I know it wasn’t intentional that you two did that; there was something there, a shared notion. I think the benefit of having those conversations was that it brought a natural affinity for one another, an affinity for one another’s work and what you’re creating. I think there was an unintentional intention—like where perhaps you don’t hear the music and dance anyway. And when it starts playing somehow the choreography matches up; that our work reflects a similar spirit or ghost that haunts the world, guards the world, has visited both of us and that visit is reflected in the sensibilities in our practice. Maybe! I think we do see each other in our work. In Everything is a Self-Portrait, there is that sense of recognition, that what you see, or maybe better how you see, is your reflection—a portrait you’ve made.

Above: Francis Kanai , Untitled , courtesy of the artist and Malaya Malandro.

CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary

BY GEORGE MELROD

One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary, titled “Wayfinding,” offers vision and agility to spare. Although the theme is rather broadly drawn—referring to clay’s origins in land and water and embracing issues of cultivation, migration and sustainability—the works revel in their florid diversity, overflowing with effusive vitality. Forging various factual and fictional connections between human culture and the natural world, its tone feels at once celebratory and mournful. That it gets a little weird at times is just an added bonus.

Organized by Holly Jerger, the exhibition is spread throughout the museum’s three levels, each exuding its own sensibility. The gallery on the second floor is most down-to-earth, emphasizing humble vernacular idioms. A sense of cultural vulnerability, and durability, is immediately set by lourdes jiménez-pulido’s arc of dirt strewn with unfired clay vessels, while panels set with decals and personal objects lend an air of poignancy. Of Pueblo and Navajo descent, Rowan Harrison digs his own clay in New Mexico and uses it to create traditionally inspired vessels impaled with rusty nails and other bits of metal to represent the intrusion of industrial society, as in his Four Legged Mythological Animal Form (2023) which has an eye screw jutting incongruously from the top of its head.

Veering joyfully into the grotesque, Charles Snowden’s meditations on antiquity, sexuality, mortality and totemic symbolism rank among the show’s most striking offerings. To Ward Speech (2021) depicts an upraised hand adorned with various farmyard denizens, from a snake to a rooster to a curled-up dog, suggesting an archaic household talisman. Invocation of Worms (2021), a moon-faced, wall-mounted funerary vessel with four beady eyes and a geometric lid, plus a snail for an earring and metal bedpan below, evokes the eerie texture of a dream, as does Apotropaic Threshold (2021), his jaunty impish figure dangling from a hook, festooned with terracotta bells. Flaunting a floppy snake-faced penis, rigid phallic horns and a suggestive, vulvic cap, it’s probably not the best choice for the baby’s crib. Grounding these uncanny visions in mundane reality is Snowden’s eloquent floor installation of cracked terracotta tiles, strewn with sculpted detritus, like refuse from a restaurant. Live weeds poke through the moldy tiles, lending the scene an air of regenerative melancholy. More overtly seductive are Ryan Flores’ lushly glazed vegetative still lifes, which seem to overspill their frames, profuse to the point of decay.

The elegiac sensuality continues in the main, third floor gallery, with Courtney Mattison’s extraordinary wall-mounted centerpiece, Our Changing Seas IV (2016–19), which displays a panoply of diverse corals clustered together to suggest a swirling galaxy or Taoist yin and yang symbol. Mattison has a dual degree in marine ecology and ceramics from Brown University, so the work’s striking verisimilitude to the structures of real coral is no

accident. Presenting a plethora of vivid, multi-colored polyps, lobes and branches, and mesmerizing in its tactile variety, the work entices the viewer to confront the complexity and fragility of this vibrant underwater life form; now suffering the effects of climate change from ocean warming and acidification due to humanity’s short-sightedness. Through her use of stoneware and porcelain, Mattison's sculptures replicate the calcium carbonate materials used by corals to create their reefs.

Echoing her work’s aura of abundance, Visalia-based David Hicks derives inspiration from agriculture, presenting dense arrays of giant bulbs and blooms in a bountiful cornucopia, while Chilean-born Paz G presents a hillside capped with disarmingly eclectic vessels honoring their ancestors, as if they were still linked

to the earth, at least in spirit. Nearby, Lizette Hernández’s shimmery Raku wall forms resemble rawhide carapaces, while Connie Martin Trevino offers a fanciful tribe of globular, darkly glazed ceramic vessels, which suggest an unlikely hybrid of humans and corals; in her imagined narrative, they represent a race of Black African people who chose to give their lives to the sea rather than be enslaved. And don’t overlook Amia Yokoyama’s porcelain anime slime girl, whose drippy surface conjures an excess of viscous bodily fluids.

But the award for the trippiest work goes to Sam Shoemaker, whose interdisciplinary sculptures created from ceramic, sawdust and fungi highlight his expertise in mycology. Set on loopy bases that echo the eccentric forms of his vessels—which look like tree trunks, rocks, slabs, even little dwellings—his works are crafted to house live mushroom specimens (thankfully not cordyceps ), which, upon maturation, are preserved in situ to create sinuous, fungus-forward tableaux. In its quirky and utterly sincere reimagining of clay’s utilitarian roots, his work makes a persuasive argument, not just for the continued relevance of a ceramic biennial, but for the adaptability of this most humble and enduring of art forms.

Left: Charles Snowden, To Ward Speech , 2021, courtesy of Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Above: Rowan Harrison, Four legged Mythological Animal Form , 2023, courtesy of Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles.

Isn’t Art WNDR-ful

BY SETH HAWKINS

In a world that moves at the speed of quantum computing, filled with seemingly endless digital distractions, an afternoon at the art museum may feel like the perfect reprieve: Old Master paintings and silenced phones. Totally kidding! You are not unplugging that easily, and this is not your great-aunt’s museum we are talking about here.

The current trendy art experiences popping up around the US are immersive, experiential exhibitions. Pushed forward largely through the digital vein, whether it be VR, interactive video or the kitschy new advent of text-prompted AI images. These interactive art exhibitions are all the rage.

Once again, my art triggers are flashing. Alarms are ringing in my head, and my intrinsic need to question motives seems to always come into play. Were these exhibitions brought into existence to further art or commerce? What existed in vintage arcades, blacklight dorm rooms and the underground raves of my youth now fills museums which charge around $40 a ticket. Am I just being a selfrighteous critic like the old man that hates rap music (window to my soul—I grew up on Tupac, Snoop and The Beatles.)

All my old-man feelings aside— kids these days need constant stimulation and have microscopic attention spans combined with inflated hubris. It seems that now may be the perfect time in the art world for a more viewer -centric museum, especially one with the tag line “We are all artists.” WNDR Museum (pronounced Wonder Museum) is one of the leaders in this new art vein. Originating as a 2018 pop-up exhibition in Chicago showing a large Kusama installation, WNDR now has permanent locations in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle and a fourth opening in Boston.

WNDR is what we may call a most enjoyable spectacle—expanding like a trendy fast-food chain—each with its own Kusama. The rest of the museum is filled with a combination of experiential physical art, videos, food and even a classic Zoltar machine (á la the old movie Big) that predicts your future. My favorite artwork was an interactive digital hallway that moved and reacted like a wild oil slick as the viewer moved through the corridor. I should note that it was created by WNDR Studios. Yes, the museum also has a team that makes “art” to adorn the museum. How do we feel about a museum creating its own art? (Mr. Brainwash is currently doing it in Beverly Hills, but let’s call him an outlier or fringe case.)

In the end, it is simple: The conversation comes down to art as entertainment vs. fine art. As we consider the entertainment value this type of experience provides, where does that ticket money go? One more Kusama in the collection? At least the billionaires that opened their own museums in LA let people in for free (partly). To be clear, I had fun at the WNDR Museum, but it was not because I was seeing art masterpieces. Whether or not a cash grab, it doesn’t mean WNDR isn’t a fun place to take a date—they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Chicago WNDR Museums' Kusama installation.

POEMS

Apple

Every day an anxious man appears in my apple and offers me a Magritte.

Jackson Pollock

Sometimes the Americans form a circle around something awful that has happened. Sometimes it is a painting.

The Tao

It’s easy to have no path and no plans, but it isn’t very easy to have no thoughts, and it’ll never work out with thoughts.

—WILLIAM MINOR

Unrealized

Here, also, in this gilded void of stale sadness, things get murky.

Perpetuating frustrations, exaggerations and fabrications. Laying a false trail across the visceral ether, where ennui is a luxury. A lone sentinel, constantly on guard against my lower self, and constantly straying from my watch. So many twilights, so few dawns. So many ways of dying, so few of being born. So much far that once was near. And when it was there, I didn’t care.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

ASK BABS

Do The Right Thing

BY BABS RAPPLEYE

Dear Babs, My friend recently inherited some African and Native American masks from her uncle and is concerned with talk in the news about demands for museums to return items to their indigenous owners/countries of origin. She doesn’t think the masks are looted and loves them, but doesn’t want to keep them if they are essential to another culture. What should she/we do?

—Anxious Artifacts in Akron

Dear Anxious, If only everyone approached inherited artifacts with the same concerns as your friend. Hopefully, the masks are just tourist souvenirs or artworks made by modern or contemporary artisans. But there’s a chance they could mean the world to another group of people who want and deserve them back.

If what you might call a “mask” is made by the Hopi tribe, and in reality is the embodiment of a specific Kachina spirit, then taking an actual Kachina ceremonial artifact from the tribe and displaying it outside its intended context is akin to physically kidnapping a close friend. Your friend does not and should not own a ceremonial Hopi Kachina mask or anything like it.

To avoid this scenario, you should start by determining the history of each mask, where it came from, who made it and its cultural significance. The National Museum of the American Indian can provide an excellent introduction to the many mask-making traditions of Native American tribes. While the Met and the British Museum’s websites have plenty of examples of masks from the continent of Africa, keep in mind they have built their collections from thousands of stolen artifacts long due for repatriation. In fact, if any of “your” masks look like “their” masks, you too might own something you shouldn’t.

At the same time, you need to research the provenance of each mask and gather all evidence of how it came into your friend’s possession through her uncle. But remember, just because something was acquired “legally” back in the day, doesn’t mean you have the right to own it now. A good rule of thumb is that if one of the masks looks older than your friend’s uncle before he passed, you’re obliged to uncover its history and get advice from indigenous experts on its need for repatriation. In this case, you should consider contacting organizations like the Association on American Indian Affairs or Open Restitution Africa. Sending them an email is easy. Ultimately, if the masks are indeed of significant cultural importance and should be returned, your friend should celebrate the opportunity to do the right thing and send them home.

Mia Middleton Roberts Projects

By Eve Wood

History tells us that the highly refined, discreet object imbued with emotional resonance is an artistic choice largely made during a bygone era when the likes of such artists as Johannes Vermeer stood before a blank canvas, choosing to illuminate the specificity of the living world—whether it be a pearl earring or a kitchen maid making bread pudding by an open window. Mia Middleton’s first solo exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Love Story,” reads like a primer for the quietly majestic instances in life that so often pass us by without our noticing, harkening back to a time when life was considerably less frenzied and probably more fulfilling.

As the title of the show suggests, each of the small paintings in this exhibition contains its own unique love story—a visual paean to the ordinary objects that populate our all-too-busy lives, and often define us whether we like it or not. These works are small worlds within worlds, luminous moments of heightened and electrifying sensibility wherein the outer world seems to fall away, displaced by the singularity of each highly stylized, perfected moment. Drawing inspiration from the physical body, Middleton specifically explores the boundaries between the emotional and mystical realms that exist beyond our sensory perception, and the ways we navigate these often-murky intersections.

Many of the works in the show feel familiar and appear reminiscent of certain surreal artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Works like the hauntingly graceful Blind (2023) remind us of Magritte’s seminal 1928 painting The Lovers, in which a man and woman kiss, their faces completely covered with a white sheet. In Middleton’s image, the young woman’s head appears to be wrapped in velvet, her blouse echoing the folds of the fabric pulled across her face, adding a lusciousness and vitality to the hidden mystery. These small yet powerful, nuanced gestures are what make these paintings so mesmerizing. All her images possess a strange distance that is

at once dissociative and intimate, as if these objects were suffused in darkness or painted in a dimly lit room. As viewers, we want to look more closely, and, once we do, we too become fixed in a state of transcendence— balanced between ideals and absolutes, tenderness and chilly admonition—yet we keep looking just the same.

Penda Diakité UTA Artist Space

By Shana Nys Dambrot

In Malian-American artist Penda Diakité’s transformational paintings and collages, every element is much more than what it seems. From her impossibly detail-rich photocollage to her unique technique of hand-engraving surfaces—and the historical cosmology of her subject matter—Diakité’s vision is one of (re)discovery, delight and surprise. Her exhibition is simultaneously an intensely personal narrative of her own identity and of a broader cultural excavation, in which the truth behind that which has passed into legend is recentered.

“Mansa Musso (She is King)” is a revelatory pageant of the female figures who, though their names were often lost to patriarchal history, played central roles in what would become modern West Africa—specifically the Mali Empire. Though the love of mixing bright colors and intricate patterns is a hallmark of Malian visual culture, the figures and objects in Diakité’s compositions are more than the effect of their palette since they were organized from sourced photographs. Painstakingly built from gathered pieces of the world—humans, animals, botanicals, foods, crafts, adornments—Diakité’s work reflects how mythologies, folklores and histories are themselves constructed.

In hefty canvases displaying elaborate hand-cut collages of

Penda Diakité, Buktu , 2023.

Mia Middleton, Awake , 2023. Mia Middleton Studio Images for ALMA.

ambitious scale and unending detail, bodies (regal women of color dancing, praying, riding wild beasts) are created from images of limbs, especially hands; animals (lions, snakes, birds, buffalo, fish, camels) are formed from other species; and plants (flowers, trees, blossoms) are built out of humans and vivid creatures alike. For example, the roaring lion of Sogolon (2023) has a face made out of an upside-down blue parrot, a mane and tail from feathers and flowers, sharp claws from avian talons and a rider with a posture of motion and determination from the braceleted arms of countless others. In her specific approach to collage, Diakité uses the technique itself to create both illusion and story. Her deployment of source imagery blends line, shape, color, pattern and texture to brilliantly realize her clear and detailed figures. At the same time, those choices are not only optical—they encourage discovery and empathetic understanding in the viewer through specific poetic associations.

In the ebullient Shea Musso and Musso Koro Ba (2023), two female figures engage over ceremonial water vessels to enact what reads like a cleansing ritual. In MeeAn and the Serpent (2023), the snake that encircles her expresses not as a threat but as a living garland of thousands of flowers, embodying an ideal of beauty and power. Throughout the exhibition, the works are exceptionally prismatic and figuratively clear, but approached a few steps closer, each image reveals its universe of secrets embedded by the intensive labor and devotion of Diakité’s process. The effect is not only like magic: It contains a powerful demonstration of the interconnectedness of all things and highlights the infusion of meaningful symbolism into the blessed panoply of the world around us—and the women who have always looked after it.

Blair Saxon-Hill SHRINE

By Ezrha Jean Black

A viewer unfamiliar with Blair Saxon-Hill’s previous work might be inclined toward certain assumptions about the foundations and precedents for her style and approach to her subjects—figurative, abstracted or quasi-symbolic—or even what her subjects might actually be. There’s a certain kind of figurative art we’ve been seeing quite a lot of in recent years that “checks a number of boxes”: the quasisurreal, faux-naïve, sometimes slightly pictogrammatic, the “outsider”- or New Image–influenced. Some of it’s good, some quite good, and most of it pretty “meh.” At best, the general reaction elicited is something along the lines of: “Great. Why?”

Conceivably, there will be viewers inclined to take a similar view of Saxon-Hill’s new work, which, though not entirely discontinuous from work she has recently shown, seems a significant departure from the boldly gestural, animated and performative assemblage work she exhibited at JOAN in 2017—work that referenced both body and body politic under assault. That gallery felt compelled to underscore that this show represented a “major pivot in her artistic practice,” in that the works were entirely oil paintings on canvas. But there may be more continuity than first meets the eye. In one sense, what might have been collage, whether patterned fabrics or other natural or synthetic elements, has simply been distilled into pigment—a style and technique that goes back to Matisse and the Cubists (and still earlier). But Saxon-Hill’s imperative here is not simply to tease or invert it—no tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil or faux bois for her.

She titles her subjects “Spirits, Queens, Dogs and Flowers,” and she messes with all of them, from The Casual Dog Walker (all works 2023) to the Spring Queen to the Quiet Peacock (each

of which could have easily been, in actual flesh, Arbus subjects). She roughs up the elements, but more importantly she emphasizes their irregular, discarded or remaindered eccentricity. The couch melts away beneath the “dog-walker.” The Spring Queen’s Siberian Husky eyes pop against watermelon wallpaper. Wallpapered peacock tail feathers upstage her Peacock. Everywhere, Saxon-Hill’s impulse is to reduce or strip away. The brushstroke itself becomes form, armature or the figure in its entirety. Consider the brushstroke(s) that make the Peacock’s coiffure, or the oversized gestural white brushstroke that curlicues over the reddened dome of the Spring Queen.

Pattern and textural references notwithstanding, this is not simply paint mimicking collage. Patterns are shuffled and knocked offkilter—iris petals torn into blue cranes or just splotches; fleurs-delys melting into starbursts (In the Stars—with an ambiguously inset picture/window). Broken stripes read (from some distance) as columns of print awaiting their Editor’s scrutiny. The painting is itself a kind of performance and not without urgency. Contradicting its implied romantic premise, The Proposal distills urgency in every aspect—graphically, chromatically and compositionally.

For all their playfulness and chromatic virtuosity, Saxon-Hill’s works embrace the ceremony of her subjects—celebratory, mournful or simply aspirational. (However parodied, the portrait is itself a ceremony of vanity.) The flowers of This Year’s Garden (and the other “flowers” on view here) may be dying; but any promise otherwise is just another three-card monte. In the meantime, we’re encouraged to embrace our spirit animal (or queen)—which Saxon-Hill reminds us is more than likely a dog.

Blair Saxon-Hill, Eclipse , 2023. Courtesy of SHRINE, Los Angeles.

Bryan Ida Billis Williams Gallery

By David S. Rubin

Bryan Ida’s recent paintings of nature and its animal inhabitants examine the perilous plight of both in the face of increasing threats to the planet. With forests continuing to be torn down by industrial enterprises and climates becoming increasingly erratic, the natural order of the material world is in serious jeopardy—as is the existence of many of the creatures who live among trees and in oceans. To represent this reality, Ida developed a process whereby he splices together two discordant views of nature. He begins by painting one composition, then divides it into linear sections using tape and superimposes different painted imagery over it. Finally, he peels off the tape to expose conflicting fragments of two nature scenes.

Nature’s Way (2020), an early work in his series, focuses entirely on trees and foliage, illustrating emerging tensions by contrasting the terse yellow-green palette of a dense bamboo forest and the harsh acidic oranges of horizontal bands of leaves that simulate Venetian blinds. In 2021, Ida began incorporating endangered species into the scenarios; for example, he juxtaposed animals trapped in a field of darkness with scenes of their natural habitat. In Orangutan (2021), the tropical rainforest ape stares straight at the viewer, flanked at left by trees with the sky seen from below and at right by treetops viewed from above. With dark vertical lines closing in from both directions, it seems as if the animal stands at the precipice between the physical and the spiritual, the temporal and the timeless.

In late 2021, Ida damaged a nerve in his right arm, which caused the right-handed artist to cease painting for several months. Resilient as ever, he eventually turned to making smaller, less detailed

paintings, using his left hand. Remarkably, we would never know this if Ida had not disclosed it—the works in his “Faded Light” series are meticulous in execution, not to mention poignant in tone. In each of these predominantly monochromatic paintings, a sole animal from the endangered species list searches for a way out of a dark atmospheric field painted in shades of blue, green, red or gray. Subtle gradations move incrementally from a bleak darkness to a hopeful light, or vice versa.

Red Panda and Snow Leopard (both 2022) are particularly endearing, the subjects peering out at us from the lower regions of their depicted spaces as if pleading for help, with the crisp tactility of their coats compelling us to pet them. By contrast, the protagonists of Siamese Crocodile (2022) and Asian Elephant (2023) confidently approach the viewer, the former displaying fierce anger, and the latter appearing strong and triumphant. Such an air of determination to survive is also seen in Monarch Butterfly (2022) and Palos Verdes Blue (2023), in which the delicate insects appear to have no hesitancy about spreading their wings and flying toward the light. Through the cautious optimism expressed in these paintings, Ida reminds us of the efficacy of willpower, and that we should not give up hope for the future of our planet.

Paul Paiement

Tufenkian Fine Arts

By Emma Christ

Painting is, quite possibly, my least favorite visual medium. I’m not being disdainful, far from it—it’s simply that I gravitate toward mediums that are more immersive. That said, I was curious to see Paul Paiement’s recent exhibition, “Nexus,” as he created many of these paintings during a 2022 residency in the unincorporated community of Neskowin, Oregon. I was drawn to it because most of my childhood summers were spent in the little town of Otis, a mere nine miles down the 101; it is a landscape I’m wholly intertwined with. So, despite my lack of zeal for the medium, I went to Paiement’s show to see if he too found himself enchanted with the land.

Entering the gallery, I quickly realized that although Paiement created many of his landscape series in Neskowin, not every painting depicts that locality. Some of the works are references to views he’s seen elsewhere, such as the sunlit woods of Custer, South Dakota, and the yellowed range of Dixon, Montana. The works are exquisitely detailed—Mannerist in style—rendered in richly vibrant colors. Paiement’s process is a nuanced take on plein-air; he layers cut plexiglass atop his landscapes in patterns akin to modernist architecture. The works are positioned as a seamless blend of the man-made and the natural, a subversion of the trope that man is destroying nature. While the idea is laudable, the paintings didn’t read as a positive reconciliation, but rather as a collision.

This conflict is exemplified by the piece Chamberlain, South Dakota (2016). Paiement’s intricate landscape features an open field with a path running through it, flanked on the left by a grassy knoll, and on the right by an endless expanse of field. Splicing the painting horizontally is a sheet of plexiglass cut like a blueprint for a contemporary cabin. The overlay mirrors the landscape beneath it; the slope of the hill becomes the slant of a roof, the rolling fields become floor levels. The effect is not the subtle melding of organic and artificial— it’s jarring. The building Paiement depicts is a sleek and seemingly high-end cabin that appears to smother the landscape. The paint and plexiglass act in sharp contrast to one another, making it impossible to view the overlay as anything but an unwanted intrusion on the bucolic scene.

Although the show fell short of fully visualizing the reconcilia-

Bryan Ida, Nature’s Way , 2020, mixed media on panel, 47 x 41 in., Courtesy of Billis Williams Gallery.

tion it aspired to, there were a couple of paintings that were more successful: those of Neskowin. Salmon River Marsh 2, Oregon (2022) portrays the salt marshes found by a turnoff from Highway 101. In the foreground is a single arching tree, and in the background the hills of Cascade Head. This too features an overlay shaped like a cabin, but unlike Paiement’s other pieces, it is made from painted plywood so that the landscape flows smoothly— hardly a man-made encroachment at all. Moreover, these Neskowin works come closest to capturing the harmony Paiement envisioned, and, while I’m certainly partial to the scenes, they made me realize I may have been overlooking some of the possibilities of painting. Maybe it’s not my least favorite medium after all.

Dawoud Bey Sean Kelly

By Jody Zellen

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Dawoud Bey has used his camera to document his surroundings, looking closely at people as well as the places they live. Interested in the natural, social and political landscape, Bey has made multiple series that trace a lineage from past to present. This exhibition provides a chronology via selected images from 1976–2019, beginning with the series “Harlem, U.S.A.” (black-and-white photographs Bey shot in between 1975 and 1979) and concluding with the 2019 series, “In This Here Place,” which features eerie and haunting large-scale black-and-white images taken on plantations in Louisiana. Aiming to preserve African-American history and culture through photography, Bey also captures specific moments in time as a celebration of life. Shot on the streets of Harlem with a 35mm camera when Bey was 22 years old, the 10 images from “Harlem, U.S.A.” portray groups and individuals going about their lives: Some are aware of Bey’s presence, while others are not. The viewer’s eye dances across the composition of Four Children at

Lenox Avenue (1977), which depicts four formally dressed schoolchildren caught in mid-action as they pause on the sidewalk.

Shot on the fly, these photographs successfully capture the daily goings-on of the neighborhood, whereas his street portraits, shot 10 years later, convey more confidence, seemingly the result of more direct interactions with his subjects. With the later series, Bey’s aim was to create a studio in the streets, which allowed him to forge a relationship with his subjects (even if it was only for the duration of the shot). For example, Buck (1989) presents a young boy wearing a Batman T-shirt posed against a brick wall, his stance aggressive, self-assured and vulnerable.

Bey returned to the streets of Harlem in 2014 to create “Harlem Redux,” a series that documents the beginnings of gentrification and economic changes in the neighborhood. Harlem has become a different place, and through his photographs, Bey tracks these shifts. In Patisserie (2014), a white man using his laptop is juxtaposed with a Black woman working behind the counter of an upscale bakery. Young Man, West 127th Street (2015) documents a construction zone where a figure wearing a hoodie stands before a prominent No Entry sign. Clothes and Bag for Sale (2016) shows clothing hanging on a chain-link fence, laying on the sidewalk atop blue tarps that obstruct the view of a vacant lot. The absent people, represented by the hats, jackets and shoes, allude to ongoing displacement.

The timeline ends with examples from two recent series: “In This Here Place,” composed of photographs of plantations, and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” which features dark, unspectacular landscapes shot at night. According to Bey, the works “imagine the flight of slaves along the underground railroad racing toward freedom,” evoking the history of injustices toward the African-American community. Without being overly didactic, Bey poetically invites audiences to contemplate the past and its relationship to the present moment.

Dawoud Bey, Buck , 1989. © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy of Sean Kelly.

Paul Paiement, Chamberlain, South Dakota , 2022. Courtesy of Tufenkian Fine Arts.