SPIRITUAL HEALING Luis Sahagun’s Cathartic Family Portraits

BY DAVID S. RUBIN

As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of portraits of people, living or dead, who are the chosen beneficiaries of his healing efforts. For a recent exhibition at Charlie James Gallery, he turned the LA gallery into a chapel of sorts, with its shrines consisting of healing portraits of family members, including himself.

In his role as a curandero, Sahagun seeks advice from the Mexican Medicine Wheel, which is divided into four sections (north, south, east and west) that list various “medicines” such as the natural elements, certain animals, the four seasons and certain stages of human life. According to the artist, “We call it walking with our medicine. This system holds a deep connection to the invisible and intangible higher source, which can be defined as a belief system with faith and energy connection.” By

“med-

icine,” of course, Sahagun is not referring to a pill. He explains, “In my limpias I go into the spirit realm to seek knowledge or help on what is best needed for the sitter to use as medicine for their journey. Medicine is not just a chemical makeup that takes away a headache, but rather medicine as in what your spirit and soul need to be nourished.”

To begin a portrait of a living person, Sahagun functions as a spiritual consultant. In preparation for Limpia no. 1 (Maria “Mariquita” Rodriquez Sahagun), a portrait of one of his sisters, he asked his subject for permission to perform a cleansing rite and, once she agreed, the two exchanged phone calls and text messages to assess her emotional situation, how she needed to be healed, and what burdens she wanted to release. He then advised her to incorporate some specific rituals into her daily routine and informed her as to when he would be working on the portrait, so that they could share spiritually in the ritual’s energy. Next, he embarked on what he considers to be a shamanic journey, using the medicine wheel “to procure the cleansings, healings and/or purifications” that are needed as he taps into the spirit world by connecting with his Nagual, or spirit guide. Sahagun then worked on the portrait over a number of sessions while performing limpias, drawing facial features in charcoal and fashioning clothing and other features from miniature sculptures he makes to “communicate” a recommended medicine. He also adds to the mix custom-made resin beads that are “charged” with plant medicine, crystals, chants and photographic images deemed important to the subject.

From a therapeutic perspective, Sahagun considers a finished portrait to be “an individualized treatment aimed [at facilitating] healing of the heart and soul via herbs, energy work, counseling, rituals and spiritual cleanings.” Yet, in examples such as Limpia no. 3 (Jose Luis “Don Chepe” Sahagun Sotelo) , it is also a symbolic representation of the historical and cultural survival of the immigrant laborer. The subject—the artist’s father—left Guadalajara for Chicago in the 1970s due to the gang violence he encountered while working as a bus driver. Undocumented for many years, he labored in fields and steel factories before landing employment as a truck driver. In this and other portraits, Sahagun refers to the laborer by building supports for the paintings from construction materials such as drywall, concrete, silicone and lumber. In the rendering of his father, he portrays his subject as a strong, dignified survivor by appropriating the style of 17th-century royal Spanish portraiture, and crowning him in a kingly manner with a fragment of an ornate vintage frame positioned directly above his head.

When communing with the spirits of deceased figures, Sahagun relies on carefully selected old photographs, such as one of his grandmother in her 20s as the basis for her portrait. Similarly, he turns to photos of himself at several ages for his self-portraits. For one example, he sought to heal the wounds of racism he experienced while a college student at a predominately white institution, and thus focused on a photo of himself from that period while consulting with his spirit guide.

Whether or not one believes in the efficacy or validity of the healing powers intended by Sahagun’s portraits, we can all certainly appreciate their symbolic and aesthetic reverence for the enduring heritages of indigenous peoples.

Jim Shaw

Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

By Ezrha Jean Black

Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade support surfaces, his work has ventured more aggressively into both cultural politics and the mythographic foundations of Western culture—and by extension, the unconscious. The title for the show, “Thinking the Unthinkable” (an abbreviation of Herman Kahn’s 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, about hypothetical nuclear war and its aftermath) hints at this even as it underscores the artist’s ambition. Yet Shaw continues to draw heavily from the imagery of Western commercial entertainment—both comic book heroes and mid-20th century Hollywood film studios.

The most fully realized of the works here—where dream fragments seem to cohere into a unified field conjoining the undercurrents of human consciousness with the mechanisms of commercial culture—are Shaw’s acid dream studies and fullblown oil/acrylic portraits of mid-20th century Hollywood film stars (Esther Williams, Jeff Chandler and Cary Grant), and a couple of the larger works where the Hollywood promotional dynamic meets a disruptive political culture now evolved into its current pathological state. His 2019 pencil study for the larger oil/acrylic The Bay of Pigs Thing (2022)—with its naval amphibious landing gear disgorging frolicking starlets amid a wave of movie-cheerful military characters just ahead of disparate 1960s television icons (onetime NBC Tonight Show host Jack Paar and JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald)—may be one of his finest drawings. The more panoramic (48 x 77 in.) oil/acrylic rendering sets this “landing” over the crest of a tsunami-like wave cracking Washington’s Watergate Hotel in half. It could be read as a vision of the political Establishment cracking beneath the open floodgates of global cynicism, mistrust and distraction, yet Hollywood itself continues to traffic promotionally in these kind of tongue-in-cheek images.

Shaw deconstructs a classic Hollywood portrait of Grant (drawn from his North by Northwest incarnation) into a Dali-esque landscape of infant legs suspended over pooling blood through which an inset figure of Grant runs more or less as he did from the cropduster in the film, while a capsule-scale Grant-bot is launched in full armor into the stratosphere of his LSD-fired imagination. Chandler’s and Williams’ more photorealistic portraits are in turn inset with images of dreamed androgynous or hermaphroditic concepts of one another.

Shaw comes closer to giving some foundation (or at least the 20th-Century Fox pedestal) for his theoretical speculations regarding a fatally flawed or abandoned matriarchal civilization with Going for the One (2022), merging Raquel Welch as she appeared in advertising for the 1970 film of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, with some aspects of the sometimes ambi-sexually represented Hindu god, Shiva. The four-armed Welch/Myra/Shiva/Bhikshatana is conspicuously under-armed here, yet her doomsday capabilities are apparently enough to bring down the Century City twin towers—whether for sexual betrayal or budget overruns (an iconic image for Fox’s 1960 Cleopatra advertising campaign appears on the north tower) is unclear.

Shaw buries the real “unthinkable” here in his 2022 The Egg and I —paying tribute, not just to the book (and film), but the characters (based on real people), Ma and Pa Kettle—and their 15 terrifying children. Hollywood writers, directors and producers were “thinking the unthinkable” long before Kahn and The RAND Corporation. Alas the world’s many “Kettle children” are willing to play out such scenarios all the way to Doomsday.

Hugo Crosthwaite Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

By Shana Nys Dambrot

A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants and asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border whom the artist regularly sketches while they wait to make the crossing. This is “Caravan,” a series of sculptures and a short stop-motion animation in which they star—the anchor of a new exhibition by Hugo Crosthwaite in which he continues his decades-long process of documenting the personal experiences and individual stories of the human beings who undertake this perilous journey.

The sculptures are strange, haunting, surreal little things, and while one wishes there were more of them—like hundreds or even thousands, embodying even more directly the vast scale and overwhelming scope of the border’s circumstance—the family-size clusters arrayed in a pattern tracing the contour of the border region are nevertheless haunting in their evocations. Each group of four people centers around a fifth skull-headed figure, as though death were always with them, their constant companion on the voyage. In the animation, these figures are jostled and corralled and treated roughly, smuggled and shipped, and eventually released—it’s uncomfortable, and having viewed it, turning back to the ceramics again, they are further infused with the trauma of surviving the ordeal, their expressions of desperate determination given context.

Two suites of new paintings expand the central theme in diverse, self-contained series that get deeper into other aspects of the immigration story. In the black-and-white artworks of “Borderlands,” charcoal, pencil and acrylic paintings on board, create a kind of chalkboard effect: meticulously rendered figures, faces and schemes of decaying urban density emerge from the low-light background. Gestural white-line drawings in a range of styles from block text to cartoonishness and vintage Pop-era advertisements hover above these noirish boulevards, creating moments of dissonance, romance, campy threat and broken promises.

Most surprising are the large-scale acrylic-and-oil stick works on canvas from the “Manifest Destiny” series in which—for the first time in 20 years—color plays a major role in Crosthwaite’s work, however with elements of the same lexicon of black-and-white drawings that lightly decorate the ceramics and densely populate the “Borderlands” paintings, as well as imagery more specific to both the desert landscape and icons of hope like the Statue of Liberty and the Virgin of Guadalupe. These are arranged in totemic stacks and layers against a chunky patchwork cartography of teal and orange—a grabby but queasy palette of hot and cold, earth and sky, that speaks to a state of mind and body in transit, in flight, in disorientation, in violence, in hope and in striving.

to grasp at the side of the bed for balance, her fingers pinching the slippery sheets in a state of vertigo or disorientation. A shadow lurks in the pleats of drapery behind her, hovering just above her body like a ghostly tether from which she cannot escape. Periods of crisis and instability often act as catalysts for metamorphic transformations, which, as the painting suggests, require the self to splinter or double (the shadow self) in order to change and evolve. Mother’s Mirror (2022) depicts another woman who appears to be reclining in bed with her limbs splayed limply by her side in a state of total enervation. Her eyes gaze outward in such a way that could signify death. Here Malaska considers the significance of stasis, rest and decay in metamorphic stories, rendering the body as a vessel, a shell, a mortal coil the soul will inevitably shed as it travels on to other paths where it will assume other forms. In an anthropomorphic rebirth, Delivered (Among the Meadow Grass) (2022) shows a cow moments

Elizabeth Malaska

Wilding Cran Gallery

by Lauren Guilford

Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around empathy, care and interconnection (fundamental values in ecofeminist theory). Malaska tells a metamorphic story that raises questions about the soul, agency and kinship as they relate to the ever-shifting dynamics of identity.

Malaska imagines the concept of “the shadow self” in the painting Captive (2022), which depicts a naked woman in a bedroom, her head sharply downturned and her spine hunched, concealing her face with her hair as it cascades towards the ground. She appears after giving birth to a woman. The adult-sized newborn’s sticky body lays curled in the fetal position, still tethered to her cow mother’s umbilical cord in an unconscious state. In contrast, the cow mother confronts the viewer with a conscious gaze akin to the Mona Lisa Malaska’s fantastic stories remind us that metamorphosis will always be vitally relevant because being on the most fundamental level means existing in a constant state of flux that is relational and situational. Imagining metamorphic processes allows us to experience cycles of mutation, fragmentation, growth and decay in a more productive and regenerative way. As we wade through life’s metamorphic currents, magical thinking acts as an agent of change that helps us become more adaptable and compassionate, allowing each transformative tidal wave to alter the self: drifting, colliding and hatching in endless permutations.

Friedrich Kunath

Blum & Poe

by Jody Zellen

It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant shoes and other incongruous objects. His latest exhibition “I Don’t Know The Place, But I Know How To Get There,” fills both floors of Blum & Poe. In the upper gallery, nested against the back window, is a glassed-in faux storefront where Kunath has installed pieces from previous exhibitions, including older paintings and sculptures, musical instruments, books, tennis rackets and balls, written notes and furniture. This quasi-studio/living space is presented as a sealed off display. It begs for close-up scrutiny, as it serves as the key to the exhibition by providing context to many of the other works, yet no access is permitted.

Kunath’s large-scale oils often take their point of departure from 18th and 19th century Romantic landscape paintings, but rather than explore man’s blissful relationship with nature and the sublime, the works are sardonic investigations filled with irony and wit. Many of Kunath’s titles are reminiscent of melancholic song lyrics, and in the upstairs installation there are numerous albums, as well as references, to the pop singer/songwriter Morrissey. In paintings with titles such as Looking Back, I Should’ve Been Home More; I Should’ve Left A Long Time Ago; In Memory Of My Memories; I Think I’m Going To Stay For A While; Return To Forever and Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away (2022-23), he juxtaposes realistic depictions of mountains, seascapes, rivers, sunsets, rainbows and billowing clouds (some in the shape of guitars) with cartoon characters, snippets of text from song lyrics scratched into the wet paint and other references to popular culture, to create a visual and emotional disconnect that unleashes a sense of unease and dislocation.

This is most evident in Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away (2022) which, at first glance, appears to be a large mountain peak surrounded by pink and orange hues as it juts up into the sky above the clouds. Upon closer examination, the triangular shaped foreground is transformed into the wing of a large airplane flying through the sky. Handwritten black words spelling out the paintings title follow the contour of the side of the wing and float off the edge, disappearing into the sky. Return To Forever (2022-2023) is a huge horizontal painting spanning 12 feet. In it, a rainbow arches across the top portion of the painting above a lush green field bisected by a narrow receding road. A line of crops parallels the horizon, and when it crosses the road it becomes a tennis net, somehow evoking awe, confusion and humor.

Hastily scrawled words and phrases are often embedded into Kunaths’s paint surfaces, either suspended in the sky or etched into less impastoed areas. It is not unusual for him to combine carefully rendered sections or swaths of thick color that bulge from the surface with flatly painted cartoon characters who appear both at home and out of place in his landscapes. Cars, as well as bits of imagery culled from advertisements and popular culture, often disrupt beautiful and majestic settings, prompting viewers to puzzle out why. Kunath’s juxtapositions are as interesting as they are surprising, and inject a new narrative direction into traditional landscape painting that otherwise might be construed as banal or obvious.

Lorraine Heitzman, Monica Wyatt, Raghubir Kintisch

Launch Gallery

by Genie Davis

Using a swirl of varied mediums, “Re•Iterate” is a fiery, highly textural exhibition curated by Lorraine Heitzman and featuring works by Heitzman, Raghubir Kintisch and Monica Wyatt. The viewer’s eye darts between textures, colors and patterns, finding a focus both in the meaning of individual works and their cumulative presence.

Like the notes in a symphony that build to a crescendo, the reiterated patterns on display create a rising dynamic of visual excitement and exploration between and among the three artists.

Wyatt’s work often repurposes metal and plastic manufacturing materials into something lustrous and magical. Here she uses zip-ties to shape her works, which are primarily monochromatic with moments of ruby red. Replication of a Relic (2023) includes circular red shapes placed among a massive, grape-like cluster of inky black balls. Some feature protruding spidery nails; others are conjoined with red and silver wire. Whether we are seeing a nest of just-opening creatures emerging from eggs or a mysterious alien fruit, her repetition of form creates meaning. Suspended in the gallery’s center, Gosssamer Flight (2023) is the stuff of dandelion seeds and caterpillars from space. The graceful ballet of Cactus on Mars #2 (2023) is created with silver wire forming dendrite branches which bloom spiky, white zip-tie blossoms tipped with liquid red.

Heitzman uses found materials as an integral part of her mixedmedia paintings and assemblages on wood panels. Geometric but abstract patterns spring from materials such as roofing tile.

“Re•iterate” group show installation view. Courtesy of Launch Gallery.

Whatever the media, she transforms discarded bits of the modern world into art with an exciting grasp of motion. Using a quilt-type pattern, Steeples and Peoples (2023) presents shapes that recall lighthouses, lifeguard towers and cityscapes. Enigmatic Roof (2023) uses her glinting roofing material to create thick, leaning brown lines that recall both tire treads and obscurely typeset Greek letters. Stagecraft (2022) is a witty tour de force in three separate sections. A face peers forward, toward a grid of lines that could be scrim or screen in the top two sections; the lower third presents blue facades that recall chess pieces, positioned before a backdrop door, beyond which stand a fragment of stairs and a yellow wall.

Kintisch has the most number of works in the exhibition—bright paintings on paper that resemble both hieroglyphics and tomb paintings, all strongly referencing the mystical. While each small, vivid work could stand alone, hung side by side in salon style, they form a spiritual and transcendent language. A blue, white, pink and brown bird cocks its head toward the viewer, arising from a series ient child that may defy conventional description. The Quarantine Body has the haunting gaze and the bodily contortions of a Francis Bacon bathhouse vision so disconcerting that a peeping tom would turn away. The last and by far the best of the billboard series—The Black Male Body—is fragmented and suggestive of a figure already transitioned as constellation and waterway, figure and ground, past and present; a transformation wishfully reminiscent of Juliet: “and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine, That all the will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.” This work is much more inviting, far less direct than the previous images and allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the possibility of magic and transformation, no matter how far-fetched, in such wonderment.

Inside the new museum is an equally new artwork that has a lengthy title but a succinct message—My knees getting weak, and my anger might explode, but if God got us then we gonna be alright (2021). The message is old and unforgettable while being simultaneously brand new, speaking another language that is equally understandable and tragically memorable. The figures here constitute a mortal pile suggestive at first of the horror and desperation in Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa, but more readily and evocatively reveals itself as a recognizably 20th-century horror. It draws to mind a writhing cone of naked humans, old and young, mouths screaming wildly and flesh scrumming hopelessly, climbing upon one another toward an empty, frightening, breathless salvation in a death chamber.

Luis C. Garza Riverside Art Museum

By Liz Goldner

of patterned squares in Wild Bird in Hand (2022). Multi-colored fish bob on a grey sea as red and green flowers float by in the lush Lily Ponderosa (2022). In Protector of Children (2022), a woman balances on one leg on the back of a surprised russet cat, the outline of a tiny baby pressed into her body.

Exuding a sense of wonder, each artist’s work reveals within that wonder a glowing, playfulness and power.

Wardell Milan

Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

by Max King Cap

A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children abroad, hoping that they should one day become captains of industry and richly reward their alma mater. Scattered across campus this collection of pictorial billboards—drawn, collaged and photographed imagery of figures in hiding, torment, labor or desire—demonstrate an intentional contrast to their location; the meticulously manicured lawns and well-kept streets of the pristine village bear the names of posh and aspirational institutions of higher learning: Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard. One is directed through the campus by map or compass toward Milan’s large billboard imagery. However, Milan’s work is anything but posh.

The Migrant Body (all works 2022) illustrates fieldworkers toiling among the rows of produce that will soon garnish our tables, The Trans Body is a human/bird transformation that suggests escape and rebirth as a swan, and The Female Body is a pile of indeterminate refuse beside a transformed split-gender figure cradling an incip-

Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his Mexican-American heritage.

Two years later, the Chicano populace on LA’s east side were discovering their Chicanismo, their newfound sense of ethnic and cultural pride, while organizing for civil and political rights. Garza identified with the movement, calling it his razon de ser. He began photographing the civil rights movement for the socially conscious Mexican-American newspaper (later magazine) La Raza . As he documented the activists his artistic eye empowered him to also capture the faces and gestures of the local citizens—the workers, shoppers, school children and street preachers—as they pushed toward greater equality.

Garza was also a film and theater arts student at UCLA, then a producer/director for Emmy-award winning documentaries and primetime shows and for films. (He has subsequently curated many Chicano-themed productions and exhibitions, including La Raza for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, 2017 to 2018.)

The Other Side of Memory is notable for its documentation of Garza’s East Los Angeles community in the1960s to 70s, along with photos of his South Bronx neighborhood and women demonstrating in New York back then, as he visited his hometown frequently. Also on view are images from Budapest’s 1971 World Peace Council where Garza met muralist David Siqueiros. The show comprises 66 black-and-white silver gelatin prints, brings up memories from 50plus years ago and calls to mind the work of Chicano artists Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Frank Romero and others.

Exhibition curator Armando Durón, a Chicano art collector, selected and paired many photos to conjure up these memories, while encouraging viewers to construct from them their own narratives. In Raza Gothic (1974) an old, poorly dressed Chicano couple, evoking Grant Wood’s American Gothic, is paired with Joyeria Mexicana (1979). The latter shows a younger, well-dressed, coiffed and bejew- eled Angeleno couple—the man wearing an elegant three-piece suit, heels and rings. The woman beside him dons a flowing, printed dress and a fashionable blond shag hairdo.

The equally fashionable Uptown Girl (1968) in New York displays a young mod Latino woman wearing a mini-skirt, boots and hairdo adorned with a scarf, staring pensively into the distance. Soledad (1974) from LA, depicts an old woman with a deeply lined face, also wearing a scarf, staring into the distance. While the girl looks hopeful, the old lady’s face reveals hopelessness.

Perhaps the most dramatic pairing in the exhibition is Feminestrations (1970) in which a crowd of women in New York march for their feminist rights, alongside Junto (1971) which depicts Chicano teenagers marching for freedom and equality in Los Angeles; it recalls the National Chicano Moratorium demonstrations of the1970. Both photos bring to light the activist fervor throughout our country in the 1960s and 70s, an era worth remembering—and perhaps emulating.

Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen

Geary Contemporary, Millerton, New York

By Annabel Keenan

At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually minimal and consist of two components: repurposed heating pads covered in used, mainly white, terrycloth towels and hand-built terracotta vessels. Gill’s mixed-media still life paintings contain more colors, patterns and materials (transferred found imagery, acrylic paint and marble dust emulsion). Individually strong, the works on view seem to constantly interact, challenging the viewer to take a closer look.

Though not readily apparent, parallels between the artists emerge. Elements of one body of work slowly reveal elements of the other, providing a new context and expanding the viewer’s understanding of both artists. Taking materials as a starting point, subtle visual connections unfold. The color of Jensen’s ceramics draws the eye onto Gill’s canvases and her vibrant red flowers. Made with marble dust emulsion applied with a cake piper, the thick, raised outline of the flowers pulls the viewer in and draws the eye across the surface to discover additional textures. Her flowers are transfixing; the raised outline of each petal contrasts with the flatness of the paint within.

Looking away from Gill’s work, the rich color of Jensen’s vessels commands the viewer’s attention once again, asking for the same careful consideration of the surface. A closer inspection reveals smooth indentations in the thick ceramics, evidence of Jensen’s hand-burnishing technique. Arduously rubbing the dense surface, Jensen slowly creates a beautiful sheen. This burnishing method further links Jensen with Gill, who sands down the paper pulp of vintage magazines and other found imagery, leaving behind only the transferred images that adorn the vessels in her own work. For both artists, the potentially destructive act of rubbing reveals something beautiful in the surface.

The origins of the materials further connect the artists as they embrace existing connotations of their repurposed items and found imagery. Jensen sources her materials from friends and strangers, sometimes finding heating pads on eBay. Using towels, Jensen taps into our intimate relationship with certain items. Often purchased for their function—to clean a body—rather than aesthetics, towels stand in for private aspects of our lives. Combining these with palliative heating pads, also associated with personal care, Jensen creates a bed of nuanced meaning for the ceramic vessels to rest. Gill’s found imagery is similarly layered with references, inspired by matriarchal heirlooms. The archaeological and art-historical shapes of her vessels, as well as the domestic settings, each have their own significance in material culture and relate to the places and people who used them. thecheechcenter.org

Viewing Gill and Jensen’s work together is an invitation to look deeper into both artist’s practice. Their use of ephemera in the style of surrealist assemblage highlights the value and meanings we give to objects and offers new perspectives on familiar materials. The closer one looks, parallels between the artists slowly unfold in an exciting process of discovery. The exhibition shows the power of thoughtful curation.

Now–April 30, 2023

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 Photographer: Zeynep Dogu riversideartmuseum.org

February 25-May 28, 2023

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.

This 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.

January 28 – July 9, 2023

Known for conveying her prophetic take on contemporary life through playful and witty narratives in ceramics, this exhibition celebrates the sculptural and functional work of Joan Takayama-Ogawa. Ceramic Beacon is the first significant survey of this respected Pasadena born-and-based artist’s work thus far.

Takayama-Ogawa tackles the key issues that define our contemporary society, from the political, to the historical, social, and environmental.

This exhibition is organized by Craft in America.

Vincent’s Blackberries

Buying blackberries, you held out on me in Hollywood Erewhon.

Tonight is Friday, Christmas lives on and on.

Vincent was out in Aries eyes and feeling good, wanting to meet people: other people who buy blackberries

I was by myself in mascara and behind myself in false eyelashes, at the Dry Cleaners of Black Hearts

I will always hold it against you that you, Camille Waldorf and Vincent Gallo went to Cactus Bar Taqueria without me

On Vine, not La Brea in 2005

—NIKOLA ALEXANDRIA PEPERA

Belated Start, Premature Conclusion

Life doesn’t work out for some people: that sounds fine when you say it theoretically. Until you realize you are one of those people.

The cream doesn’t necessarily rise to the top: It curdles, at the bottom, into bitterness. And all that longing for grace and sweetness culminates in a foul-mouthed kiss.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM