First, let me say that I’m thrilled to be leading Artillery, Los Angeles’ longest running contemporary art magazine — into the future and to be taking the helm from one of its founders—and an LA art legend—Tulsa Kinney.
One funny thing that happens when you decide to run a magazine is there’s an expectation you’ll be writing letters like this. You’d be rightly curious to want to know who I am and what the magazine will look like moving forward, but I’d hope you’d also be skeptical of anything I would say. I am a working artist and have been going to galleries all my life—I don’t read the press release before looking at the work and I would hope our readers don’t either.
You should know that I recognize the responsibility of running this publication and that I recognize Los Angeles has been and will be a contemporary arts and culture hub until the day it crumbles into the sea. You should know that our intent is to have this magazine act as a verb which causes and creates active discourse surrounding contemporary art and culture in Los Angeles. You should know there will be changes, but that these are, in many cases, changes that have been a long time coming. Tulsa remains as an advisor and we are in accord about our vision for how we move the magazine into a new era.
As for how we do that: you’re going to find out. Only you will be able to decide if we got it right.
In January 2025 we will be relaunching in a new format for the new year. Keep your eyes peeled for a brand new Artillery being born and thank you for your support!
—Daniela
DANIELA SOBERMAN PUBLISHER / EDITOR
EDITORIAL
Tulsa Kinney - advisor
Bill Smith - creative director
Eileen Townsend - senior editor
Cat Kron - reviews editor (print)
Emma Christ - reviews editor (online)
John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor
John Seeley - copy editor/proof editor@artillerymag.com
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Ezrha Jean Black, Tucker Neel
COLUMNISTS
Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng
ADMINISTRATION
Anna Bagirov - sales director
Emma Christ - new media
Elza Burkart - social media
ADVERTISING
Anna Bagirov - sales director anna@artillerymag.com; 408.531.5643
is an art critic, curator, and author based in DTLA. Formerly LAWeekly Arts Editor, now the writer and cofounder of 13ThingsLA, and a contributor to Flaunt, Village Voice, Alta Journal, WhiteHot, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize, the Mozaik Prize, and the LA Press Club Critic of the Year award. Her novella ZenPsychosis was published in 2020.
Tara Anne Dalbow
is a writer and critic living in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in ArtPapers, Artsy, ARTnews, Bomb, Flaunt, Frieze, WMagazine, and elsewhere.
Wyatt Coday is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a practicing financial dominatrix. Coday describes her practice as “research performance” and offers her labor as a “unique instance of Black melancholy.” In 2020, Coday was named as a columnistin-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA. Her writing has appeared in Into, The AveryReview, OpenSpace (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the LosAngelesReviewofBooks
Matt Stromberg is a freelance visual arts writer based in Los Angeles. In addition to Artillery , he has contributed to Hyperallergic, the LosAngelesTimes, CARLA, The Guardian, The ArtNewspaper , and other publications.
William Moreno is a Los Angeles native and an independent art advisor, writer, and curator. He was previously the Executive Director of The Mexican Museum, San Francisco and the founding Director of the Claremont Museum of Art. He is a consultant for the Los Angeles County Arts Department.
George Melrod started writing about art in New York, for magazines such as Art in America, Art News, Art&Antiques, and Sculpture From 2006-17, he was the editor of art ltd. magazine here in LA. His last feature for Artillery was on textile artist Diedrick Brackens.
Fall is finally here, after a heat-addled summer in SoCal. I hope we don’t have any more of those 100-degree temps, because some of us don’t have central air, and it was brutal throughout August and September. On those hottest days I told myself, autumn is coming. I’ve always loved that line in TheGreatGatsby — “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Fall is also when the art season gets a restart, and we had an electrifying one with the Getty-sponsored PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Lots of new exhibitions opened — there are over 70 slated for fall and spring, with most of the major ones opening in September. I had a couple of marathon weeks visiting many of the major shows, and here are a few of the extraordinary ones.
First off, For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability (until February 2, 2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla is a remarkably compelling and even moving exhibition despite its morbid premise. The exhibition attempts “to narrate the history of recent art, going back to the 1960s, through the lens of illness and disability,” said Jill Dawsey, senior curator at the museum, during a walkthrough. “Since the pandemic, all of us are more aware that what we share is our bodily vulnerability, our mortality.”
Yes, indeed. In “For Dear Life,” we travel through time from the AIDs crisis to the COVID epidemic, with other disabilities in between. Yes, we all get sick, and we all get old, and some of us have hereditary health issues to contend with. How artists can deal with those impairments through creative expression is a wonderment.
Take the choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer. Once when she was recovering from surgery, she filmed her hand in midair, experimenting with how it might be as expressive as her body. continued p.20 »
Luminex Redux
October 5th was a magical evening at Luminex — the outdoor art fest taking place after hours in the South District of DTLA, in its third and perhaps strongest iteration. Much of it was large-scale video projections on the sides of buildings and along an alley, and I loved how it drew people to the city streets at night. Kudos to the organizers!
Nao Bustamante recreated her “Brown Disco” with a large mirror ball spinning in the middle of the room of an industrial space, with a delirium of images projected onto and reflected from the ball. Bustamante paced around the ball, turning it with her hand. I love how her work is often low-tech, even while using bits of tech. JOJO ABOT danced before her video in her luminescent robes—some of the footage was from Africa—with an arcane sign projected on the ground, in “Re.Member.” The other artists were Refik Anadol, Alice Bucknell, Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz, Carole Kim, Alan Nakagawa, Sarah Rara and LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists). Kudos to the artists!
LUMINEX 2024, Carole Kim Photo by Koury Angelo, Courtesy of NOW ART.
The show opens with a black-and-white still from Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) that launched her filmmaking practice. The exhibition goes from Laura Aguilar to Liz Young and Constantina Zavitsanos. I was especially happy to see Young’s work included. For years I would see her at openings in a wheelchair, an active participant in the art scene. A group show at Track 16 once featured one of Young’s sculptures — a whimsical flying machine to which she could strap herself. La Jolla Museum presents her compellingly poetic The Birth/Death Chair with Rawhide Shoes, Bones, and Organs (1993) a chair but more than a chair, for at its base lie the pair of shoes of someone who might have been sitting there. One shoe is attached to a chain from which spring various bones and organs, the hardware and software of our mortal being.
While you’re down south, head to Balboa Park and the exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art and the Mingei International. At the former, Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World (until Jan. 5, 2025) includes over 200 works. The exhibition took as a springboard the 13thcentury book by scholar Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283), The Wonders of Creation and Rarities of Existence, and features illustrated manuscripts, astronomical instruments, paintings and even contemporary art by Sherin Guirguis, Timo Nasseri, and others.
A short walk away at the Mingei is Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo (until March 16, 2025), which presents the history of indigo, a plant found the world over that produces a deep blue dye after rather elaborate processing. Some 180 objects from 30 countries are included, from Japanese kimonos to Levi jeans. Contemporary artists also use the material, sometimes to address indigo’s colonial history.
An end and a beginning at the Hammer
It’s hard to believe Ann Philbin is leaving the Hammer after a most remarkable 25 years as director. She took the place from a sleepy university museum to a leading hub of contemporary art with an international reputation. I still remember when she brought a retrospective of the then under-recognized Lee Bontecou to Los Angeles, and it was a stunner, so raw and powerful that we wondered where this artist had been. The “Made in L.A.” biennial started under Philbin’s watch, and it has been as important for rediscoveries—Magdalena Suarez and Michael Frimkess among others—as for new discoveries. Then there was the two-decadelong building project, which expanded exhibition space and reconfigured the entry to make it look less like an office building and more like a museum. The Hammer is an essential part of what makes Los Angeles the art capital it is.
Philbin steps down in November, and Zoë Ryan will take over in January 2025. Since 2020 Ryan has been director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has overseen a lauded slate of exhibitions and expanded public engagement. She already has the experience of working at a museum linked to a university, and that should come in handy. Before that she was chair and curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. “The Hammer Museum is one of the most exciting museums in the country,” Ryan has said. “Ann Philbin has had an extraordinary impact in making the Hammer an internationally influential institution. I am thrilled and honored to lead this museum and be a part of the vibrant creative communities of Los Angeles.”
All the best, Ann, on your next adventure — you can’t retire yet!
BEYOND HOLLYWOOD
One of the most reported trends in the migration from LA to more affordable places involves people who work in Hollywood. While a certain number of these stories focus on moving to places that give tax breaks to film productions, the human-interest beat focuses its attention on the people who take the opportunity to reinvent their careers. A financial crisis in Argentina in 2001 caused professionals in many fields to pursue their passions in the arts, as their formerly reliable careers went belly-up. This caused a flurry of great books to be written and made for a paradigm shift in Argentine cinema, best illustrated by the film collective El Pampero Cine. Before the crisis, much of Argentina’s homegrown cinema was government-sponsored, and that came at a creative price. Certain subjects and points of view were taboo. Alternative funding for big projects often came with notes that could be as constraining as the governmental rules. The founders of the El Pampero Cine collective (who preferred to avoid funding censorship) decided that a new approach was needed. Filmmaking had become a process where finding funds and marketing finished products consumed too much time. Looking to the French New Wave for inspiration, they decided to work with small
crews (where people did multiple jobs) with equipment that they owned outright. This allowed them to work continuously on each other’s projects and led to creative solutions to low budgets. Do you need that special effect if you have good actors reacting to something unseen with good sound design? Can you establish a foreign locale with one of your actors standing in front of a landmark, filmed quickly with an iPhone without securing permits? When filmmakers adopt creative solutions, they can focus on the actual process of making films.
The collective is gaining a higher profile. Criterion Channel recently offered their four-hour opus, Trenque Laquen (2022) on its streaming service. This has caused more people to discover their 14-hour long La Flor (2018), which has turned up on YouTube. Shot over a period of ten years, it consists of six interconnected films that star the same four actresses. While it isn’t likely to be mistaken for a Hollywood product, the craftsmanship is solid. Perhaps as more people leave The Industry, the ones who are passionate about film will start their own film collectives in unlikely places. It’s a nice alternative to tentpole movies that must please foreign censors in order to exist.
La Flor , 2018. El Pampero Cine collective.
RACE
PLACE
WYATT CODAY
Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a biennal is a worthwhile form for an exhibition, I won’t attempt to answer that question here. But even after taking into account the awkwardness of the curatorial premise, Made in L.A.’s most recent iteration, Acts of Living, left me particularly disappointed.
Organized by curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez with support from Ashton Cooper, the show’s curatorial thesis drew on large, abstract ideas — “community networks,” “queer affect,” and “indigenous and diasporic histories” — while its floor plan effectively placed artists into simplified cultural groupings, especially race-driven clusters. Far from serving its stated mission, this decision obscured the terms on which the show was constructed and instead repeated the sort of myths about art that cultural institutions like to tell themselves. Worse still, the exhibition overlooked disciplines and media—most notably video-based work—that have historically held a significant presence in Los Angeles.
Entering the museum earlier this year from its west-facing rear entrance and passing Dominique Moody’s trailer, N.O.M.A.D. (Narrative, Odyssey, Manifesting, Artistic, Dreams) (2015–2023) outside, I stopped in front of Roksana Pirouzmand’s fountain sculpture Until All Is Dissolved (2023) and then made my way to the main foyer where Devin Reynolds’ mural occupied the walls. While these works were impressive, arriving at Guadalupe Rosales’ installation on the museum’s first floor cemented a feeling of cognitive dissonance that I couldn’t shake as I made my way through the rest of the exhibition. Notably, the wall didactic describing Rosales’ work suggested that her use of “baroque, gilded materials of low-riding and custom car culture” was “unexpected.” But unexpected for whom? Many artists and exhibitions have made similar references to the city’s low-rider subculture, including the duo Postcommodity in their 2023 show at LAXART, Some Reach While Others Clap. How many times must art institutions rediscover cornerstones of Los Angeles’ Latinx culture, and to what end?
On the second floor, artists were mostly clustered by their ethnic or racial backgrounds. The second-floor gallery that leads to Ishi Glinsky’s Inertia—Warn the Animals (2023), the room-sized mixed-media sculpture that depicts the masked figure from Wes Craven’s 1996 horror film Scream , primarily contains work from Indigenous artists Jackie Amézquita, Luis Bermudez, and Esteban Ramón Pérez. Instead of opening new and unexpected connections among these artists, the decision to cluster them in accordance with their cultural background isolated their work and prevented deeper resonances from coming to the surface among the broader cast of included artists. Instead of forging or revealing unacknowledged currents between these artists, the exhibition tokenized their contributions and relied on empty intellectualization to do so. The room where queer artists
Pages 22: Guadalupe Rosales, installation view, Made in L.A. 2023:ActsofLiving, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 1-December 31, 2023. Photo: Charles White.
Page 23: Akinsanya Kambon and Sula Bermúdez-Silverman. Installation view, Made in L.A.2023:ActsofLiving, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 1-December 31, 2023.
Photo: Charles White.
Clockwise from above:
Dominique Moody, N.O.M.A.D., 2015-2023.
Photo: Khari Scott.
Jibz Cameron, Me, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
Ishi Glinsky, Inertia—Warn the Animals, 2023.
Photo: Charles White.
Roksana Pirouzmand, Until All Is Dissolved, 2023. Photo: Joshua White.
Jibz Cameron, Pippa Garner, Page Person and Young Joon Kwak were presented in one corner likewise failed in that respect.
Considering the show’s tokenizing curatorial approach, the verbosity of such claims in the exhibition literature as “opening up seemingly familiar things to allow for new interpretations” and “destabilizes fixed ideas of culture and gives voice” fall especially flat. Unfortunately, this kind of hollow and abstract International Art English tends to point towards a curatorial approach more concerned with lofty ideals than material critique or art-historical research. To put it bluntly, the didactics the museum circulated in its releases and displayed on the walls described a different, less compelling exhibition than what was on view. With Miller Robinson’s two-channel video Tackle box, water filter, clothing rack (2023) and its small LCD screen being the sole video on display, it also seems that the curatorial decision to focus on racial and ethnic identities and cluster already similar works may have led to other significant blind spots.
Without didactics or explicit language pointing toward its racialized curatorial strategy, Acts of Living left viewers to piece together why its corridors are dominated by identities assumed to be conjoined, not artworks in contrapuntal formations. To borrow a musical metaphor, the arrangement lacked a melodic theme that transformed the individual works into a substantive, memorable composition. In retrospect, if the works in Acts of Living had been paired with a stronger argumentative current and language that established their shared culture, I would be more sympathetic. But it was difficult to view the exhibition’s reliance on race, culture and ethnography as intentional when works like Chiffon Thomas’s Untitled (2021), which sat alone and decontextualized in the exhibition’s final corridor, were displayed as if they had been forgotten about until installation day.
What makes matters worse is how race seems to impact where artists fall in the exhibition’s sequencing. Aside from Reynolds’ mural in the main entrance and Moody’s trailer outside, Thomas, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Akinsanya Kambon and Teresa Tolliver, all of the other Black artists included in the exhibition had their works relegated to the exhibition’s final chambers. While Thomas’ contribution sat abandoned near the second-floor gallery’s exit, sculpture by Bermúdez-Silverman, Kambon and Tolliver were grouped so closely together that it was sometimes difficult to discern which piece belonged to which artist, especially because their work responded to similar colonial histories and drew from such earthen materials as wood, clay and iron powder, giving them a shared rusted appearance.
There are many storied critiques of the survey exhibition. As a format, it promises a wide view. But with that width comes the risk of the survey losing depth and flattening its distinct pieces into a uniform slush. With Acts of Living, I worry that the exhibition became a means to signal relationships to ideas, while the artists and their artworks become fodder for a thesis that ultimately made no distinct claims.
Clockwise from top-right:
, 1998–2001.
Page Person, TheGlittering World, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Pippa Garner, HappyParking!, 1996. Courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles.
Luis Bermudez, TableOffering, 2004. Courtesy of Luis Bermudez estate.
Teresa Tolliver, WildThing
Photo, Nik Massey. Courtesy of the artist and Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles.
CAPTURING THE CASTLE
LA’s coolest apartment gallery leaves the living room
KATE CARUSO
Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure why art specifically captivated him, although collecting does run in the family: “My father has been into classic cars since he was a young kid pumping gas at the station on Fairfax on Sunset,” said Wertheimer: “As a kid I would hang out at his and his friend’s shop in West LA. I never caught the car bug, but they were very much art to him. And in my mind a collector is a collector is a collector, someone who lives and breathes their interests.”
Following in his father’s footsteps, Wertheimer approached collecting as an exercise in cultivating personal taste: “I wasn’t some massive collector, I just got works from galleries that I really loved and respected like Nonaka-Hill, Parker Gallery, and South Willard.” The first piece he acquired was a ceramic sculpture by Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (the subject of a current LACMA exhibition) from South Willard’s Ryan Conder, back when it was a store on Sunset over a decade ago. “It was this insanely soulful space, an art gallery masquerading as a clothing store. I can only imagine the amount of people it must have touched. I would go in there looking for clothes, and all of a sudden you were looking at these ceramics by Frimkess or Roy McMakin tables…It was this really approachable world that had the energy almost of a skate shop or music store.”
Now, some years on, Wertheimer’s space is the one where people congregate on a weekend afternoon. The gallery often comes up in discussions of who in LA is showing interesting work and whose program people are intrigued by. At a typical daytime CASTLE opening, you’ll find artists and collectors sipping espresso in the apartment gallery’s spacious courtyard, along with perhaps a few children and somebody’s dog. “I really want people to have a nice time and feel like they’ll see their friends at the opening,” said Wertheimer. “Not that it’s purely social, because it is very much about the art.”
CASTLE began in 2022 out of Wertheimer’s living room, joining the cascade of other Los Angeles “apartment galleries,” something of a tradition since the ‘90s. Said Wertheimer, “I had always thought that it was a really cool idea, especially after seeing Sam Parker’s gallery or Michael Werner in New York. It was burning in my brain as something that would be interesting if I was a different person.”
While a living room gallery has its appeal, there are also practical limitations. After two years of programming, Wertheimer decided to expand and took a lease on the downstairs apartment, which is the gallery’s current locale. When asked about the potential personal invasiveness of opening one’s house to the public, he tells me that he “never felt vulnerable” about it: “As soon as we decided it was a gallery, even though it was really a living room and dining room sandwiched between the bedroom and our kitchen, it became compartmentalized in my brain, like, ‘this is a gallery now.’ It almost didn’t feel like I was inviting people into my home… I felt a lot more vulnerable about taking a shot doing the shows than people actually being in the space.” Expanding to downstairs, however, became a necessity when he and his wife welcomed a child earlier this year. “There’s a reason that these domestic spaces often have a shelf life” says Wertheimer. “It can be really trying to have half of your home unusable for domestic life.”
Harley Wertheimer at Castle Gallery, 2024. Photos: Bob Coulter.
Wertheimer’s program has been very much driven by the architecture and atmosphere of the gallery space itself. “I was definitely thinking about work that would shine in that space,” he said. “There are a lot of details, such as moldings, a big bookcase, my furniture. If works could hang out together, I think they would’ve been hanging out at a party in that apartment.” He says that “there definitely is an overarching aesthetic”, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. In this writer’s opinion, the abiding aesthetic leans towards the expressionistic and theatrical, and it tends to be small scale. As Wertheimer admits, he has a real but unintentioned penchant for tiny paintings.
Further CASTLE expansions are in the works: Wertheimer opened a new location this fall in the guard house of a longvacant old art deco building once owned by Howard Hughes, a stone’s throw from Jeffrey Deitch. The space will open with an exhibition by Japanese artist Koji Nakano, which will run concurrently with an exhibition at Nonaka-Hill by Nakano’s wife, sculptor Miho Dohi.
When asked about the changing cultural landscape and the influx of galleries in Los Angeles, Wertheimer grows enthusiastic and says he can’t imagine how the city is going to look in ten years. “I am really curious. I pretty much drive around the city in a circle every day. I love to drive and I think in the car. It’s definitely different than the city I grew up in and it’s different than the one I moved back to in 2011. But if you’re really an LA person, you can find stuff you love in every neighborhood…” When it comes to neighborhoods, Wertheimer doesn’t play favorites. “I am in Beverly Hills often, West Hollywood often, Silverlake often, Pasadena often. I’m in the water often, I am on the boardwalk often. There’s great stuff to get into all over the city; it would take a long time for all of that to erode. It does always seem like there’s room to dream here, space to try stuff out.”
AN INDIGENOUS GAZE TOWARDS THE FUTURE
Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience. In her series Thunder Up Above, included in Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, at the Autry Museum, Red Star reimagines traditional powwow regalia for a future in outer space. Red Star and I met to discuss Indigenous Futurism, sewing, Crow Fair, and the moment she realized she could paint.
Tara Anne Dalbow: Can you tell me a little about the impetus behind this series?
Wendy Red Star: These works came about from thinking about final frontiers, the West and old Western films. That led me to think about outer space, which is really the final frontier for us, and how we’ll definitely encounter other beings up there and try to colonize them as well. You know everything has to be a little funny with me. Then I let myself run with the concept and started imagining these other beings living in outer space, and making outfits for them that were based on abstractions of powwow regalia.
TAD: Amazing.
WRS: One dress is based on a traditional men’s fancy dance bustles; another is made of sheepskin that’s an exaggerated version of what men wear on their ankles, then some very cool metallic jingle dresses, and another that’s based on women’s traditional, so a blue gown with billowing sleeves that, in Southern women’s traditional, would be this elaborate fringe that sways from their arms when they dance.
TAD: The regalia are astounding in their complexity and detail. Can you tell me a little more about your interest in wearable art?
WRS: I became obsessed with sewing when my daughter was born. It came naturally to me because I grew up watching the women in my community make traditional outfits. Sewing allows me to retain my sculpture background and think in 3-D.
It’s also awesome that you can make something so large but still have it be containable. I’m also drawn to this potential for activation. I like to see them not as stagnant displays at a history museum but as something very much still alive today.
TAD: The series you recently showed at Roberts Projects, Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper), was also focused on wearable art, or maybe utilitarian is the right word?
WRS: Yes, that is an incredible project involving research, sourcing and making painted studies of traditional rawhide cases. I didn’t think I could paint or draw until I found these cases and realized there is a whole art history of ancestral women of my community who have been painting for so long. I hadn’t seen anything like it in all my Western art classes. It’s a lost art now, so I’m trying to make an archive as a resource for my community.
Their patterns give the illusion of being symmetrical and perfect, but they’re not at all, so it’s an opportunity for me to paint the hand of the original maker and spend one-on-one time with her, seeing her decisions and choices. It’s also about giving her credit and bringing her work into the future—so many of the native exhibitions you see are focused on chiefs and warriors, not on native women.
TAD: Were you thinking about the emerging Indigenous Futurism movement when you were conceptualizing either of these series?
WRS: I wasn’t thinking about it, not explicitly, at least. As I understand it, Indigenous Futurism is about resisting the kinds of writing that try to capture us in amber. Or, like Edward Curtis, acting like he was photographing the last authentic native—and after that, we were all going extinct. There’s also maybe a desire to skip the present and move forward into the future. What I’m doing certainly fits with that.
TAD: What would a Crow Future look like to you?
WRS: For me, it’s just the traditional being carried forward. Crow Fair is over 100 years old, and it’s this miraculous event where people from all over the country meet in a town on the Crow Agency reservation. They bring their families, teepees and horses, and we camp, dance and parade in regalia for about a week. That’s what is vital to our future. That’s futurism for me.
Future Imaginaries: “Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology” will be on view at the Autry Museum of the American West through June 2026.
WENDY RED STAR RECONTEXTUALIZES NATIVE CULTURE IN OUTER SPACE. TARA ANNE DALBOW
Wendy Red Star, StirsUpTheDust, 2011, as part of Getty PST Art. Courtesy of Wendy Red Star and the Autry Museum of the American West.
Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right now. I can hear it too: But Western painters had never thought about light that way before! The way they deconstructed figures and elements of a scene into their millions of coups de lumiere, fusing the atmosphere to the actions such that the true subject became the physical nature of light itself! The way they involved science and mechanics, responding to the advent of the camera’s prowess for verisimilitude not by feeling supplanted, but, rather, liberated as painters to pursue a more radical expression of the true properties of perception! They ushered in modernity! They changed everything forever! All of this is, of course, absolutely true. But taste is different from appreciation— and while there’s no accounting for taste, when it comes to
Paul Cézanne, The Plate of Apples, 1877.
Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
MY FAVORITE CÉZANNE
The only Impressionist painting I actually like BY SHANA NYS DAMBROT
how Impressionism became so venerated in the trajectory of western art, there is accounting for that.
I would neither dare nor bother to try un-ringing the Impressionism bell. It was a formative and revolutionary movement, almost unquantifiably impactful in art-historical and cultural terms. I get it! But I don’t like it. I’m happier at its earlier and latter-day edges (your Manet, your Caillebotte, your Vuillard), but I personally find the core paintings of Impressionism to be untidy, in a bothersome way. What it does to faces is creepy. I am rarely curious to figure out what objects or details its ambiguities and obfuscations are concealing inside a bleary picture. I have a random loathing for its candy-store-color stories and the predominance of uppermiddle-class children in its gardens. And while it’s not their fault, subsequent generations of obsessive fans and unreasonable mimics have not helped.
But in the original movement’s heyday, Europe was on the cusp of a new century; class systems and economies were being shaken up. They were right to see that the new era would require a new art paradigm—and they made one. They were men and women of their time who felt an urgent need to figure out that the unknown that was arriving daily. What looks quaint today was radical and subversive in their time, so they were also brave. But I think two further ways in which the movement ushered in modernity was firstly, to privilege idea over technique in a way that hasn’t really worked out; and secondly, to disorient their audiences with intention and gusto (actually, I don’t mind that last bit). That is, to me, what it means to appreciate it. But I still don’t like it. Except… Well, there is this one painting… I knew I was going to Chicago, where it lives, and I decided to visit it.
The Plate of Apples, c. 1877, by Paul Cézanne lives at the Art Institute of Chicago and, when I first saw it, it was a revelation. A simple side table whose edges don’t line up juts rudely
into the space behind it—which is not really space, but an unlikely curvature or corner of wall that both flattens and forestalls and defines the space in which the table teeters. On its rumpled cloth sits a wide shallow white bowl of apples; it’s full but there’s plenty of room for the three escapees that have tucked themselves under its lip. If the table were truly as tilted forward as it’s rendered, those three cheeky fruits would roll right off into the viewer’s hand. The apples are green and red, their spots of yellow call to the dusty gold of the wallpaper; the wallpaper’s pattern of blue flowers is echoed in the cloth. All that optical balance gives the scene back its center of gravity and holistic compositional logic despite the ways in which it is undermined.
I love this painting. I’m obsessed with this painting, and the way it blends Impressionism with a prodigal embrace of conventions of clarity and balance. It is arguably not an important painting (it’s not even the most important Cézanne painting of apples in the same museum), but in its humble jumble it contains an entire art-historical journey, there and back again. It’s a fusion of classicism and mold-breaking, replete with humanity. Each apple is as fully realized as a portrait (and at least three have extra personality), but en masse they build a singular passage of color and texture, and as they touch, they fuse almost imperceptibly.
Impressionism’s messy liberties are tempered by a more careful attention and love of detail in this particular painting, even more so than in a larger, more ornate bowl of apples Cézanne painted around the same time, which hangs nearby. The work is so powerful in part because of how its relative simplicity, its uncomfortable palette, and its whisper of a code or mystery all seem to press past the boundaries of what had by then become a codified and self-referential visual lexicon that would inevitably attract its own overthrow. This one painting feels, not like a rote allegiance to a movement’s manifesto, but like a metaphor for life. That’s why it will always be my favorite.
“Well, there were many creatures in the cave. And some of them had their problems, but all of them, they were my friends.... You don’t meet friends like this every day, so I’m staying in the cave.” —Wounded Lion, “Creatures in the Cave”
I first met Brad Eberhard earlier this year when I agreed at the last minute to fill in as a DJ at an opening at Alto Beta, the art space he started in March 2022. Tucked into an Altadena strip mall between a pizza joint and performance venue, PDA (Public Displays of Altadena), Alto Beta houses a scrappy, DIY ethos within a crisp, white box format. The interior of the modest one-room gallery is bounded on one side by a large bookshelf containing hundreds of vinyl records, representing the twin poles of Eberhard’s creative life: art and music. Behind the wall of LP’s sits the makeshift DJ booth, and openings feature various cultural luminaries spinning records. A tabletop aquarium, dubbed “Aqua Beta”, serves as a kind of mini-project space, where artists — including Alice Könitz, Ric Heitzman and Nicole Belle — have created backdrops for a school of tropical freshwater fish.
Although I only met Eberhard recently, I first encountered him about 15 years ago on stage with his band Wounded Lion, an art-tinged rock group that mixed a driving rhythmic thump with thick, fuzzed-out guitar, over which his quirky, almost child-like lyrics danced. Eberhard, with his collared shirt, kempt hair and gentle giant stature made for an unlikely frontman, a bit like a young David Byrne before the big
suits. Though it could not be considered strictly a party band, Wounded Lion always seemed more concerned with having fun than being cool, which in itself was pretty cool. Art and music also mingled in Wounded Lion, which included artists Ami Tallman and Raffi Kalenderian as members. Future art star Jonas Wood designed an early show flier, while Brian Bress directed the hypnotic video for the song “Pony People.”
“I wanted to have a band with people that were really interesting rather than people who were musicians. Those people happened to be mostly artists,” Eberhard explained. “Not unlike Alto Beta, it wasn’t designed to succeed. It was conceived for fun. It was an experiment and it worked.” (His current band, Weird Symbol, is an angular, synth-driven project featuring former WL bandmate Jun Ohnuki, Eric Landmark (Numbers), and painter Liz Walsh.)
From his work with Wounded Lion, I gained an impression of an artist focused more on discovery and camaraderie than critical or monetary success. That same punk spirit — of throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks — is evident at Alto Beta, which Eberhard opened after a shift to ceramics in his practice left his painting studio available. “My rent is good, and I didn’t want to let go of the space. It was just kind of a lark. It was not extremely thought out,” he explained. “At first I thought I’d do it for a year and call it quits, but the crowd response has been really superb.”
Lark or not, Eberhard set out with a clear mandate: to showcase overlooked and underappreciated artists—those who haven’t had solo shows yet, or who haven’t exhibited in
THE SUBURBS ARE DEAD?
LA for three to five years; ceramic artists who only tangentially rub up against the “fine art” world, and those in what he describes as the “desert of being a mid-career artist.”
“I know a lot of artists that aren’t presently connected with the commercial gallery system who make great work, and so I just started asking people,” Eberhard said. He opened with a show of loose abstractions by painter Heather Brown, and subsequent exhibitions have included Lorraine Heitzman’s found-object assemblages, Tim Powers’ pop-inflected riffs on language and pop culture, and expressionistic canvases by alt-theater dynamo Asher Hartman.
Guest DJs have ranged from underground music icon Ian Svenonius (The Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Escape-ism) who showed up with a suitcase of early ‘60s soul and R’n’B 45s, writer Jan Tumlir, who stuck exclusively to the Factory Records label, and Hedi El Kholti, co-editor of Semiotext(e), whose film-soundtrack-heavy DJ set accompanied artist Carter Potter’s film leader constructions. “Sometimes there’s a conceptual connection,” Eberhard explained. “Some people just play good time rock’n’roll.”
“I like the cross-pollination,” he said. “I’ve been to so many art openings that feel kind of staid. It just felt like there’s got to be a better way to do it, a way that’s more enjoyable, and loose.”
His own visual practice also embraces trial and error, often combining unconventional mediums and subjects. Eberhard uses the term “mutant formalism” to describe his paintings, which mingle recognizable elements with abstract patterns. His
Brad
Eberhard
Makes Noise
ceramics draw on art-historical references from ancient Egypt to mid-century modernism, mixed with his own idiosyncratic take on shape and color. The intimate scale of both his paintings and sculptures give them an approachable air, inviting viewers to ponder their oddity. He counts as a mentor the late artist Steve Roden, and the two share an interest in the balance between experimentation and order, not to mention sound and vision.
Eberhard’s sensibility is native Californian: he grew up in Orange County, even working at Disneyland as a teen. He first moved to the area around Alto Beta more than 30 years ago, and notes that Culver City, Chinatown or East Hollywood may be more closely associated with the LA art scene, Altadena has long been home to scores of artists, who have chosen that corner of LA County precisely for its distance from the center.
As more cultural and financial capital flows into LA, there is genuine concern that artists — those whose labor creates the art industry — may be forced to move further and further out. He acknowledges this potential threat but is still hopeful about the aspects of LA that make creative communities here possible.
“It’s a city the size of a country. I would hope everyone could find their people here and that, whatever you’re into, you could find enough people to support your weird band or your artistic point of view, or your artist-run space that’s kind of focused on poetic, ineffable work,” said Eberhard with a laugh. “It’s all I’ve known. I’m a third-generation Southern Californian. My network is here, for art and for music. I can’t really picture leaving that.”
with Alto Beta MATT STROMBERG
L to R: Brad Eberhard at Alto Beta, 2024.
Photo: Bob Coulter. Alto Beta Interior, 2024.
Photo: Bob Coulter. Bookshelf at Alto Beta, 2024. Photo: Bob Coulter.
EXCAVATING NATURAL HISTORY
MARK DION EXPLORES THE STICKY WONDERS AND LEGACY OF THE LA BREA TAR PITS GEORGE MELROD
As an urban kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I adored the American Museum of Natural History. The low-lit museum seemed like a palace of wonders to me. In its inner chambers the glowing dioramas of exotic animals in their native habitats appeared like scenarios from a dream, at once factual, scientific and a bit surreal. So, when I first discovered Mark Dion’s brilliant, dreamlike natural history–oriented work in the mid-1990s, I was instantly enthralled. Displaying the offices of unlikely nature-oriented civic agencies or effusively baffling cabinets of curiosities, Dion’s works seemed fantastical, yet also rigorously researched, striking a tone at once critical and playful. Beyond a mere fascination with nature, his works focused on interrogating the knowledge systems we create to understand it.
Over the past 30 years Dion has become known for his extended engagement with natural history museums, their collections, and their narratives, often in tandem with excavating forays into historically resonant ecological sites. He’s had exhibitions at such prominent venues as the Tate Gallery in London (1999), MoMA in New York (2004), Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle (2006), the ICA in Boston (2017) and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth (2020). For the latter show, he traversed West Texas for over two years, collecting specimens in the footsteps of Audubon and Frederick Law Olmsted.
Dion has now set his focus on one of the world’s most metaphorically loaded natural wonders: LA’s own La Brea Tar Pits, and the nearby, ever-popular George C. Page Museum. The resulting exhibition, eight years in the making, is titled “Mark Dion: Excavations.” Created as part of the Getty’s “PST: Art & Science Collide” initiative, it turns an affectionate spotlight onto the museum itself, making full use of the artist’s ability to deconstruct and riff on the tactics of natural history museum display. While its tone might initially seem as dry as one of the numerous extinct specimens on view, Dion’s own attitude is less reserved. “I’ve always had a love for this place,” he says, standing amidst the resurrected panoply of prehistoric animals and skeletons.
Dion’s first visit to the Tar Pits came in 1986, after driving down from Expo ’86 in Vancouver with a friend purely in order to see them. He kept returning over the decades, drawn by a fascination with “the idea of tar and death, extinction related to fossil fuel consumption and petroleum culture.” He’s since employed tar repeatedly in his work, embracing its symbolism “as a material which snuffs out life, which suffocates and pollutes.” In 2016, he was invited to link up with Weiss/Manfredi, the architectural firm that won a competitive commission to redesign the 1977 museum and park over two other, big-name starchitect teams. Dion was central in ensuring that the iconic mastodon family preserved in tar was retained, after the other teams had wanted to eliminate it.
“What I’m interested in is this moment where the museum now has another job, which is not just looking at the paleontology but looking at its own history,” Dion reflects, sitting at a Starbucks on Wilshire Boulevard, just a bone’s throw from the famous mastodons. “I’m always arguing that the most interesting thing happening in any museum is what’s happening behind closed doors. And that the museum should imagine how to turn itself inside out. So, this is the first museum that tried to do that in some way,” he says, citing its trailblazing “fishbowl” display of the paleontologists sifting through the specimens. “And it escapes a lot of the colonial critiques of museums because it’s exhibiting what’s right there.”
Camouflaged among the museum’s normal displays, Dion’s installation is tucked into a space off the museum’s main hallway; confronting it, viewers might assume they’ve stumbled upon a backroom work area. At center is a 10-foot skeleton of a prehistoric pack rat set atop a tarry morass of human debris, blown up from its diminutive current species via 3D printing: a tongue-in-cheek attempt to elevate one of the more common denizens of that era to the monumental scale of the more popular giant mammals like the sabretooths and mastodons. (Dion had originally proposed a 30-foot version of the work to be installed outdoors, which proved impractical.)
Against a back wall are six infographics of prehistoric mammal skeletons, their bones labeled incongruously with various LA-oriented categories — local artists, bands, landmarks, etc. — playfully imposing our own human urge
for classification onto these ancient beasts. Nearby stands what looks like a museum preparator’s work station that depicts the creation of a work-in-progress, including a pair of sculpted sloths, amidst an array of tools ranging from hammers to Q-tips. Most dramatically, a ragged hole in an adjoining wall reveals a forgotten old diorama of a skeletal eagle and coyote facing off, like a Halloween lawn decoration from 50,000 BC, its painted backdrop draped in plastic. Peering inside, a viewer can discern the lovingly staged effect of an old-timey text panel flickering on-and-off:.
The result is not only an excavation of tar pit museology, but of the museum’s own past and process, revealing the shifting artifice behind these depictions. “I want it to indicate that the museum remains full of mystery and spaces unseen and unknown to the visitors,” Dion says. “Viewers should get the impression that their experience is highly mediated and curated. They are always accessing a very particular part of the story.”
The complex reactions that his approach evokes — interacting with historical collections, navigating an uncanny realm between didacticism and whimsy — seems fitting for someone who admires both the conceptual artist Fred Wilson and David Wilson, the eclectic visionary behind the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Indeed, excavating just beneath Dion’s decorum, one finds a tone that is often joyful, mischievous or mournful: sometimes all at once. What seems like an homage to tradition veils an impish subversiveness. What looks like an exercise in scientific methodology is in fact a critique of scientific authority and a celebration of natural complexity. Assuming the guise of buttoned-down archivist, Dion is, in fact, an apostle of wonder.
This speaks to one of the most striking aspects of his work: its refusal to lecture his audience. Even as he embraces and eulogizes the marvels of the environment at a time of climate crisis, he won’t tell viewers what to think. “I came up in the shadows of punk, where the sensibility was highly ironic,” he says. “It seems to me that many viewers today want positions to be both spelled out and sincere. I’m not interested in limiting myself to that approach. I continue to want to challenge the viewer, to slow them down and make them do part of the work.”
But although Dion’s work avoids overt messaging, he’s fully aware of its environmental context, especially given the fateful ‘E’ word — extinction — that hovers like a specter over the entire site. The fact is that humanity continues to shove new species into the metaphorical tar pits and may be next in line itself if we don’t change our attitude.
Among the elements in Dion’s room is a colorful 1977 museum mural depicting a timeline of life on earth. Humanity is but a hopeful sliver at the end of the vast ribbon. By prodding us to regard our rich-but-finite earthly ecosystem with a bit more awe and wonder, Dion’s reverent-irreverent, elegiac-celebratory installations can’t save the planet, but maybe they can help us understand our place on that ribbon a little better.
Previous spread and above:
Mark Dion, “Excavations” (installation view) Courtesy NHMLAC, Mark Dion, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Photo: Paul M. Salveson.
Left: Mark Dion at the La Brea Tar Pits, 2024. Courtesy NHMLAC, Mark Dion, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Photo: Deniz Durmus.
Linda Vallejo’s career-spanning exhibition at parrasch heijen is a homecoming of sorts. The gallery is ensconced in the center of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district, where she was born, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Sears Building — an area where Vallejo spent much of her career’s formative years — as well as the legendary Self-Help Graphics (SHG), a critical art-production and community center that has focused on social justice since its founding in the early 1970s.
Vallejo possesses a storied history in Los Angeles and is a self-described postmodern woman working in a multitude of media including painting, prints, drawings, sculpture and installation. Her artistic experimentation has afforded her a singular and idiosyncratic voice. What’s not immediately obvious is the relentless drive required to define and place herself in relationship to a ruthlessly dogmatic art world. As she noted in a 2007 interview with UCLA’s Chicano Oral Histories project: “the first bandwagon I ever joined was the Chicano movement, and that in itself has been a struggle from the very beginning…I just realized that in order to be able to get ahead, you had to have credentials…you had to have a portfolio worth its muster, you had to prove your talent…”
She accomplished that over a 55-year span, and nothing seemed off-limits. In the late 1980s, she found time to open a gallery featuring Latino artists in downtown Los Angeles, long before it was fashionable to open commercial art galleries in what is now known as LA’s Arts District.
Organized around four key bodies of work, the retrospective is a smartly curated survey of the breadth of Vallejo’s practice. Hung in a sparing, aesthetically rigorous fashion, rather than strictly chronologically, viewers are encouraged to grapple with Vallejo’s provocative narratives, which tackle themes of indigeneity, feminism and ethnic-cultural critique.
The early and surprising Anahuac, (1978), which refers to a historical, cultural region of Mexico, is composed of folded monotype sculptures and mixed media sheathed in a plastic bubble, reading as a hermetic diorama of pyramidal forms. The work feels tuned into a moment when art and technology aligned, and pop sensibilities and Conceptualism were in the ascendancy.
Vallejo’s ethereal oil painting, Eternal Seed (2000), reveals Vallejo’s embrace of indigenous tradition via a lyrical symbol of mother earth. Solitary Cloud I (2007) part of the Los Celios series, is a meditative reflection of Native landscapes. With the Data Sagrados series, she pivoted into creating socio-political data landscapes and portraits. In one work, National Latino Physicians and Surgeons: 6.3%, (2016) Vallejo utilizes a stippling effect with colored pencil and archival marker. The work illustrates a rather thorny truth: the dearth of a robust Latino medical workforce.
Taking center stage in the main gallery is Make ‘Em All Mexican: Justice (2017), composed of repurposed resin, acrylic and metal flake. The allegorical replica of Lady Justice serves as an ostensible moral beacon of the judicial system — but for whom? Vallejo transmuted the work by sheathing it in chocolate-hued paint, which raises the question: What if all cultural and social icons were just a little bit browner?
But by far the most powerful expression of Vallejo’s conceptual acumen is the hanging sculpture The Impotence of Violence (2024). The red-and-white mixed-media, sewn fabric of AK-47 long guns is an intellectual coup de grace, a distillation and convergence of multiple contentious points of view. Notions of masculinity, impotence, femininity and violence all intersect in this seminal work.
Maneuvering through the exhibition, one can’t help feeling a bit of aesthetic whiplash, but Vallejo presents a sweeping and frequently sublime vision. And it doesn’t end in the galleries: A garden gnome, transformed with her signature brown hue, perches in the gallery’s Zen-like garden, giving one pause and a bit of amiable respite.
Above: Linda Vallejo, pieces from left to right: Anahuac, 1978. Microcosm/Macrocosm III, 1978. Coral, 1990.
While many of the contemporary art world’s basic assumptions have been challenged in recent years, one that has remained remarkably constant since at least the 1960s is the collective verdict on appropriation: It’s fine! Andy did it, so it must be—and too many foundationally (and financially) important artists—from Roy Lichtenstein to Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine—built their entire careers on pieces whose visual impact derives largely from the power of images made by other artists.
It’s safe to say that the current art world could barely exist if it hadn’t been decided long ago that changing the context of someone else’s image determines an important part of whatever it is that the fine-art viewer is supposed to care about. As the recent verdicts against Richard Prince show, the legal situation hasn’t changed in decades either—the right of an artist to avoid being appropriated by another artist still entirely depends on whether the appropriated can afford to sue the appropriator, and if a judge decides that the second work is “sufficiently transformative.” Fighting back succeeded in the case of photographers Donald Graham and Eric McNatt (appropriated by Prince), although it took almost ten years and untold legal fees. Many other photographers appropriated by Prince haven’t yet decided to gamble the thousands of dollars and years out of their lives necessary to find out if they’ll have the same luck.
However, the tables may be turning. Not only is the art world increasingly willing to recognize the consanguinity
IS THE IDEA OF WHAT AND WHO IS APPROPRIATABLE CHANGING?
D. SOBERMAN
of art made by fine and commercial artists (KAWS and his Hypebeastable kin being perhaps Exhibit A) but artists operating outside the gallery system have proved to be increasingly capable of developing devoted and sincere followings despite having sources of income outside the sale of unique objects in white rooms—followings they are willing to leverage to avoid being treated as one more daisy for pop art flâneurs to pick out of the cultural landscape.
Recently, a work by neo-pop painter Gabriel Madan prominently featuring Gage Lindsten’s “Screwhead” design was shown at Gattopardo in Glendale. Although the painting consists of multiple layered images, it would be difficult to ignore that most of what the viewer sees was originally designed by another artist. It would also be difficult to ignore that Lindsten—who works in a style that updates classic fantasy, comic, psychedelic and skate art imagery with a dreamy, DayGlo sheen—has about 30 times as many Instagram followers as Madan. According to documents acquired by Artillery , once Lindsten called Madan out on social media, he quickly agreed to pay Lindsten half his profits from any sale of the painting. Do agreements like this suggest that—in an age where AI is an increasing threat to the livelihoods of the illustrators that fine artists so often shared dorm rooms with at art school— the idea of what and who is appropriatable is changing? Or perhaps this is just an example of the oldest art world laws at work — the one who controls an image is the one with the power to enforce that control?
Art by Madan, left, Lindsten, right.
LARRY JOHNSON/CURATED
BY LARRY JOHNSON
REENA SPAULINGS/O-TOWN HOUSE
By M. Charlene Stevensz
In two exhibitions spanning galleries some twenty-minutes apart depending on traffic, Larry Johnson presents his own work alongside that of two other gay artists of a certain age and a certain generation, who lived through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s—a traumatic period that not only shaped their lives but reshaped our society and culture. The works look to a common era, bending and queering found text and image. The work does not explain as much as it encourages contemplation and critical thinking.
At O-Town House, “Died and Gone to Hollywood,” an exhibition curated by Larry Johnson of the work of his friend and peer Joe Mama-Nitzberg, takes its name from a story about a gay man, hospitalized and dying of AIDS-related complications at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. Sporadically conscious, he once woke up to a visit from Elizabeth Taylor. Later, when asked what it was like to awaken to an iconic movie star standing over his bed, the patient replied, “I thought I’d died and gone to Hollywood.” This act of snatching joy from the jaws of death sets the tone of an exhibition full of binaries.
In Gay Semiotics: a photographic study of visual coding among homosexual men, theorist Hal Fischer writes, “In the gay semiotic the body is divided into sides, the left representing the aggressive, the right the passive. Any sign placed on the left side indicates that the wearer will always take an active role during sexual activity.
Conversely, a sign on the right side of the body indicates passive behavior.” Mama-Nitzberg’s bifurcated compositions suggest the binaries of the AIDS epidemic: joy and pain, hope and fear, mass death and an outpouring creative output. They had had (2021) is a nod to John Baldessari’s use of dots; here they suggest bullet holes, obscuring the faces of two underwear-clad men. The composition is a split screen that flips the image horizontally, resulting in four figures. Pink dots obscure the men’s faces on the left side, while blue dots cover their faces on the right. The text superimposed on the left side of the image reads (in dots): “They had had joys ...” The right side reads: “just as they had had fears”. While Fischer used the binary to articulate different means of signifying sexual preference, Nitzberg’s bifurcation defines the complexity of experience and emotions during the AIDS crisis.
Larry Johnson continues this theme of binaries via a visual conversation with Hedi El Kholti in a two-person show running concurrently at Reena Spaulings. Five of Johnson’s paste-up text works are exhibited alongside El Kholti’s collages. The press release describes the work and process in violent terms such as “surgery” and “dismemberment,” which makes the work seem less benign and more like savagery with an X-ACTO knife.
Yet for the suggestion of violence in these works, Johnson gets nostalgic with his subject matter and the return to the analog techniques he employed in the 1990s, adding to the retro vibe of these artworks. They all look back to queer history—especially queer Hollywood—whether it’s an obsession with true crime and murder houses in Untitled (Do Not Demo), 2024 or a double entendre referring to 1930s actress Kay Francis’s speech impediment that inspired the nickname
“Wavishing Kay Fwancis” and also subtly references “gayspeak” in Untitled (Pasteup For Old Gay Men), 2024. While the work alludes to implicit signifiers of queerness, Untitled (Baskerville vs. Caslon) (2024) harnesses the explicit power of words via repetition, presenting the sentence TOM CRUISE DID NOT ATTEND GAY ARTIST PARTY WITH GAY COWBOY (an allusion to the numerous times the actor has denied being gay on record), first in Baskerville typeface and then in Caslon, resulting in a denial that uses the word “gay” four times, underscoring rather than refuting it.
In contrast to Johnson’s stark, text-only works is a series of colorful pop-culture-reference-filled collages by Moroccan-born semiotician Hedi El Kholti. The most imposing work, Untitled (Conquest), (2017) is a large-scale editioned image printed on vinyl that fills the entirety of a free-standing wall depicting a group of three men in swimsuits walking arm-and-arm into a hellscape, reminding me of the dualities of Mama-Nitzberg’s work at O-Town House. In a series of retooled book covers, the artist adds an image to a found travel guide to make a reference to his country of origin—also a legendary location for gay sex tourism—in Untitled (Fodor’s Morocco), (2013).
The binary code described by Hal Fisher was originally meant to enable gay men to function under a layer of secrecy. The AIDS epidemic was a period of exposure, forcing people to come out and become vocal and visible. Codes are still used for nostalgia and to reinforce group identity. The coded text and images found within the works by these three artists facilitates an ongoing conversation between the artists across two exhibitions about a shared experience that cannot be fully defined by historical accounts. The era needs to be felt, and the feeling is most effectively transmitted through art.
ARIA DEAN CHÂTEAU SHATTO
By Diva Corp
In her still-young career, Aria Dean has shown a remarkable knack for giving the institution exactly what it wants: shrewd work that stings the nerve of the moment without quite stabbing it. In activating the virtual as a conduit for Black radical thought, Dean’s interests dovetail nicely with the art establishment’s current (though fading) focus on political and identity orientation, as well as its recent (though tepid) embrace of post-internet work.
What Dean gives us in “Facts Worth Knowing,” however, is a significant departure. What she gives us is an artist on strike.
Up to this point, Dean’s output has been explicitly tied to Blackness, Afropessimism, and racial capitalism. Yet there’s no mention of any of that here, which is curious given the show’s association with Intolerance, D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic. (Yes, that Griffith of Birth of a Nation notoriety, once the father of American cinema, now its maligned racist uncle). Instead, Dean, via the show texts, tells us to consider minimalism and form and the perception of sculpture in space and time (recalling Robert Morris’s 1966 “Notes On Sculpture”). These currents crested in importance in the Minimalist era with artists almost exclusively white and male, now old or dead.
Opposite page: Joe Mama-Nitzberg, TheyHadHad, 2021.
Above: Aria Dean, installation view at Château Shatto, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Dean’s omission of Blackness from her own show—at least in its expected, explicit form—is the nexus on which things turn. In other words, Blackness is (drumroll) the elephant in the room, and Dean acknowledges this by fragmenting, warping, and melting an elephant out of a discontinuous montage of black steel and bronze. She models her elephant, or the sum of its parts, off of portions of Griffith’s monumental (and notoriously abandoned for years on an East Hollywood lot) Intolerance set, using blueprints from the set’s appearance in the 2011 video game L.A. Noire to help accurately render her forms. Notably, that video game takes place in 1947, almost thirty years after Griffith’s set was razed. To add it all up, then: We’ve got a deconstructed representation of an elephant, modeled off of a digital facsimile of a replica of a statue of an elephant, from a time in which it never existed in a place that doesn’t exist (or exists only virtually).
Remember, though: You’re here to think about material, the text says, and temporality, and space. So, you try. You think about steel which structures, bronze which historicizes, both of which are certain and fixed. You note that the titles of the first three pieces, the Duchampian Bottle Rack-esque sculptures near the entrance, all mention armature or infrastructure or both, and, naturally, you wonder what exactly they’re armatures and infrastructures for. They’re implied frames, supports for real, true sculpture—the everlasting—yet within the frame of the gallery they exist as real, true sculpture themselves, simply because they’re here. Thus, the negatives that affirm the absent positive become the positives themselves, and the distinction between object and subject begins to slip, as does the consensus on which that distinction is built. Dean echoes this in the formatting of her exhibition essay, printed with a conspicuous border around the text, leaving the title of the show outside that frame, yet within another, hinting that the facts worth knowing in “Facts Worth Knowing” exist both ex- and in-frame.
Primed to think about the impossibility of the frame, we can read this work as Dean denying the establishment the conveniently packaged, readable show it wants, while alluding loudly to its absence. There’s a chance “Facts” is still on some level cynically catering to museum boards, the institutional darling engineering a rebellious streak. Or maybe it’s more of a newfound artistic obstinacy, an inversion of, say, Mike Kelley’s sardonic embrace of the apparatus’s expectation. More likely, though, Dean just came to realize that the work was starting to produce her, and she wanted out. No matter, the institution will happily devour this show, just as capitalism devours its discontents only to respawn them as commodities. It’ll find a frame, as it always has done—a frame that will, once again, limit the work, as it has always done.
Dean’s project here—the larger one, the strike—is a gesture at unlimiting. By questioning the productive relations of the art world, and in trying to avoid becoming synonymous with herself, she reminds me more of Michael Krebber, the (white) German conceptual painter, than anyone else. Krebber’s current show at Greene Naftali comes accompanied by a text that argues in favor of artists who seek rather than find. The latter is more passive, at times intuitive, and certainly yields fine results, but the text stresses that seeking—through its almost unsexy manifest of the attempt, of the unfinal—opens us to ideas about “where [art] comes from and what it is after.” Measured this way, Dean’s show reads an expansion of the field of art for art’s sake, an insistence on the uncertain terms that make art art.
ECHOES OF VOYNICH: CODED SYSTEMS IN CONTEMPORARY ART WONZIMER
GALLERY
By Lane Barden
This show at Wonzimer Gallery, organized by contributing artist Marcie Biegleiter, is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a work that constitutes a parallel exhibition to the show she curated. The Voynich is a mysterious codex from around the year 1410 by an unknown author—possibly an Italian, possibly a woman,—whose text is written in a script that no one in the past 600 years (including linguists and A.I. bots) has been able to decipher. There is a copy of it in a glass box at the front of the gallery accompanied by a pair of white cotton gloves so that viewers may browse its content.
The intricately mute calligraphy of the text, the strange drawings of unknown herbs, and the unassuming sketches of women (or one woman, repeated) bathing in flower-like vessels and botanical funnels are inscrutable and yet galvanizing. The scope of the manuscript and the language used to write it appear to be fully developed and mature so the viewer is left to surmise that the author was addressing an audience who understood this language and the logic of the illustrations accompanying the text. Yet you will never know who they were, what they understood, or how they, or the author, escaped the historical record. This not-knowing becomes the strange attractor and unexpected content of the work.
The works in the gallery were selected because Biegleiter saw in them “echoes” of the Voynich manuscript, which has drawn a consistent and growing audience in the six centuries since its creation. One aspect of the echo is the magnetic power of the code in the withholding of its contents. The other is that of the artist inventing scientific systems on the fly to resolve and articulate its mysterious ideas.
We are told that Linnéa Spransy’s intricate abstract paintings are inspired by ancient spiritual texts but not how the translation of spiritual phenomena by the artist emerges on the canvas in what appear to be scientifically crystallized forms, occurring in both rhythmic and fractured geometric patterns. She accomplishes this in an iterative sequence governed by her own set of rules.
Christina McPhee says her drawings are “made as a site for figuring out the incommensurate and infinitely parsed movements in vision.” I’ve no doubt that she knows what this means, but it doesn’t give away how she arrives at her delicate, intelligent skeins of line, algebraic figures and shaped textures, nor clarify what appears to be the mapping of a mass of green organic matter onto a tangle of blood-red smoke. Those are the secrets of her practice, amping up the intrigue of her method.
There are many other works in the show that are powerful in what they conceal, and then there are some that read clearly enough without code while still inventing compelling new systems. We can parse the construction of Blue McRight’s steel ocean buoy linked to inverted funnels made of fishing nets and grasp their creator’s intention, because the catalog tells us they are comments on the detritus-filled ocean. No mystery there. Biegleiter’s own work invents imagined “future” flowers determined by a system that delivers a mutant, uncomfortable shock. These pieces are interesting for a different reason, mainly that the anthropocene is upon us and this is but the beginning. The facts are out there, but there are mysteries beneath them you’ll likely never know.
Aria Dean continued
Christina McPhee, Score, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Wönzimer Gallery.
DUNCAN HANNAH
THE JOURNAL GALLERY
By Isabella Miller
In the early years of cinema, actors were treated as crew members working the conveyor belt of industrialized studio systems. But by the silent-film era of the 1910s, the star system had begun to take hold, with close-ups articulating a visual language of desire onscreen. Offscreen, studios deliberately cultivated actors’ personas, fueling a collective fixation on their bodies, faces, expressions and ways of being—a fixation that escalated in the 1930s and ’40s, and further from there. Enter Duncan Hannah, whose decades-spanning exhibition “Flesh and Fantasy” was on view at The Journal Gallery this fall. Emerging from the 1970s and ’80s New York art scene and cavorting with scene fixtures like Andy Warhol, Hannah developed his own distinctive, sometimes outré visual language, steeped primarily in nostalgia for midcentury golden-age and New Wave European auteur cinema. His pared-down oil paintings of modern and contemporary film stars, often set against monochromatic or plain backdrops, are contemplative, quiet, and unironic. Dozens of these portraits fill the gallery walls, alongside a few more narratively charged scenes — a train racing through a sweeping mountainous landscape in Alps (2020), a car perched cliffside in Thriller (n.d.) — that convey a cinematic quality of their own. The figures in Hannah’s paintings are not intimate portraits but representations of stardom itself, in which actors are hyper-visible yet necessarily distant.
Hannah positions his film stars in a liminal space between accessibility and inaccessibility—they are often partially turned away from the viewer or shown in various stages of undress. In Regarding Rosemary (2009), a woman sits on a bed, holding a sheet up to cover her breasts, while in Cinema Nuovo (2020), a woman stands in a dress shirt with no underpants on. Their body language makes plain the dual nature of stardom—celebrities are, by design, both symbols of glamour and objects of desire that are ultimately unattainable. Rather than focusing on the individual actresses themselves, Hannah’s work explores the aggregate effect of how we construct and engage with the actors we idolize, what scholar Richard Dyer has called “star texts.”
Much like how we might idly doodle stars (the celestial kind that glow at night) on scrap paper, Hannah paints human stars as though drifting in reverie. Strikingly, Hannah’s portraits of stars like Monica Vitti, Twiggy, Jean Seberg, and Sylvia Sidney express little fascination with the individual behind the image. We witness the stars stripped of most environmental contexts, sometimes appearing on minimally decorated film industry magazine covers. These compositions are imagined, as are some of the publications themselves. As such, they have a dreamlike lack of specificity and an absence of evident psychological complexity: Their faces are often blank, if distant or seductive. Take, for example, Anne Hathaway (2012) Hannah depicts Hathaway in three-quarters profile from the shoulders up against a green backdrop. Her eyes are relaxed and her lips are slightly parted, as though she were staring absently into the middle-distance. Such portraits are abundant across the exhibition, training visitors to reflect upon the act of looking itself rather than the identity of the star being regarded.
In contemporary celebrity culture, we are growing increasingly accustomed to seeing stars in purportedly raw, unguarded, and unromantic moments—tearful apologies on livestreams, posts with no makeup, proclamations of emotional distress. As the parasocial demand for authenticity and accessibility increases, Hannah’s portraits feel increasingly hagiographic, presenting his figures, even those still living, like saints from a storied past. This reverence feels refreshingly out of step with our own demystified, or differently mystified, view of fame, even as the underlying mechanisms of desire and fascination remain.
Duncan Hannah, RegardingRosemary , 2009. Courtesy of the artist and The Journal Gallery.
THE HARRISON STUDIO [NEWTON AND HELEN MAYER HARRISON]
SURVIVAL PIECE #1: AIR, EARTH WATER, INTERFACE OR ANNUAL HOG PASTURE MIX (1970-71) VARIOUS SMALL FIRES
By Ezrha Jean Black
Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s subtitle “Art and Science Collide”) than the convergence of the two. The Harrison Studio, a collaborative team that encompassed Newton (1932–2022) and Helen Mayer (1927–2018) Harrison, and later including Gabriel Harrison and other artists, approached its subjects with an ethos that was — beyond their environmental character and scope — above all social.
Moving past a superb and beautifully complementary exhibition of work by another gallery artist, Sarah Ippolito, the viewer is confronted by the Hog Pasture in its raised redwood planting bed (or “growth box”), roughly eight feet across and extending twelve feet into the main gallery space — and by engaged viewers mingled around its perimeter. The dimensions approximate those of its original incarnation — at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1971 (a 2012 iteration at MOCA here in L.A. was slightly larger). Suspended approximately five feet directly above is a lighting truss studded with LED grow lights configured to the measurements of the planter.
The planter is filled with topsoil, compost and other planting media more or less comparable to previous iterations (also 5,000 European
night crawler worms), from which various grasses—the product (as in the original) of R.H. Shumway Seedsman’s Annual Hog Pasture Mix—are already growing abundantly, albeit not to the density seen in prior installations. (The VSF team had far less than the many weeks of advanced growth prior museum iterations were afforded.) Still, it is something that a pig might conceivably pick at. And that was precisely the objective—not to sustain or nourish a pig necessarily (though at least one museum “pasture” installation did just that), but to get the human viewers looking and talking about it.
“All of a sudden, people are looking at the environment in one way or another, and they’re looking differently. In other words, it’s bringing their attention in a way that is meaningful.” The comment comes from Helen Harrison herself; a video loop taken from the closing of the MOCA 2012 Land Art exhibition runs on a monitor directly behind the viewers as they enter the gallery. This is exactly the sort of conversation the installation engendered. Setting to one side the dire condition of topsoils globally (consider the disastrous deterioration of the Amazon basin), through the “Survival Pieces” and indeed the entire body of their work, the Harrisons sought to press forward discussions among humans about the larger conversation of the human species with its natural and built environments and the global biosphere generally.
Press materials for the show reference Donald Judd and Dan Flavin as influences for the Harrisons’ design templates, but the more pertinent influence here is Robert Smithson. Unlike Smithson, the Harrisons’ focus was the environment; but as quintessential “nonsites,” “the Survival Pieces” (Hog Pasture through Full Farm) present closed-off arrays of “determinate uncertainty,” placing the ecological in a deeper dialogue with the cultural—with a view towards reconciliation, restoration, and sustainability.
The Harrisons, Survival Piece I: Air, Earth, Water, Interface: AnnualHogPasture Mix, 1970–1971 (Installation view). Exhibition planned in alignment with PST: Art & Science Collide Image courtesy of the artist, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles / Dallas / Seoul.
CAI GUO-QIANG AND CAI™
LOS ANGELES COLISEUM
By Anna Gaissert
At dusk on September fifteenth, nearly 5,000 spectators gathered on the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum to view WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, a monumental daytime fireworks display by Cai Guo-Qiang1 and his custom artificial intelligence model cAI™. Commissioned and presented by Getty in collaboration with the University of Southern California, the half-hour opening event to “PST ART 2024: Art & Science Collide” celebrated a blue-chip artist planting his flag in generative AI.
Calling cAI™ a vanity project may be too on the nose. The AI model bears the artist’s name and is trademarked and branded with its own logo, which appeared in the sky in a constellation of drones equipped with pyrotechnic devices. Trained on Cai’s archive, cAI™ applies deep learning to reflect the artist’s interests and biases. Employing the AI model as a mouthpiece, Cai narrated the event in Chinese, his project manager translated his words into English, and cAI™ spoke her translation, its voice simulating Cai’s timbre and accent. The accompanying fireworks, which exploded in the stands and the airspace above the stadium, and the content simultaneously presented on the stadium’s mirrored display screens were cAI™’s response to the artist’s question “What is the fate of humanity with AI?”
Structured in five acts, cAI™’s forecasts resembled those of a Magic 8 Ball. In one sequence of explosions, the AI model proposed a mathematical formula followed by a lengthy explanation that leaned heavily on mystical abstraction. In another, cAI™ offered a series of portmanteaux it had coined—echoanta, synthview, altcog, logicloom and humavisor—spelling the words out in the stands in monochromatic puffs of smoke.
cAI™’s allusions, which Cai often called out in his narration, further muddled its answer. The name of ACT I DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION refers to a common method for enhancing machine learning models. In ACT II WE ARE , a snaking line of explosions traveled rapidly through the stands, a nod to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. ACT III THEFT OF FIRE featured a lightning-bolt formation followed by an eruption of skyward bursts of red and orange pigments, referencing the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole lightning from Zeus to give man fire. In ACT IV BIRD OF PARADISE, colorful bouquets of smoke that were launched along the perimeter of the stadium formed a ring in the sky, representing the floral emblem of Los Angeles. ACT V DIVINE WRATH pointed to Zeus’s retribution against Prometheus and God’s punishment of Adam and Eve, or so I gather.
In the final act, we found ourselves directly in the fallout zone as shell fireworks launched overhead in a dense and roaring barrage of explosions. Surrounded by a tumult—sharp cracks and thundering booms that surpassed the threshold of discomfort, sparks flying above, plumes blossoming and dissipating around us, cardboard and clay debris falling from the sky—spectators covered their ears, noses, mouths, heads, and eyes with nowhere to seek cover. Given his mastery of fireworks, Cai would have been certain of this outcome.
The finale was a breach of trust, its aggression revealing the limits of intelligence and an extraordinary loosening of permission structures. Under Cai’s direction, cAI™’s inherent combination of knowing without feeling is dangerous. Under the auspices of Getty, USC, and PST ART, Cai is too.
1 Cai pronounced like the word sigh with a t in front of it, Guo like gwuh, Qiang like cheeahng, the sound of its last three letters bearing a closer resemblance to the -ong in Cheech & Chong than the ang- in angle.
WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, 2024. Photo by Kenryou Gu.
NATE LOWMAN
DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY
By Eileen Townsend
I’ll admit that before attending a press walkthrough for Nate Lowman’s “Parking” at David Zwirner a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with Lowman’s oeuvre. The paintings first appeared to me thumbnail-size, attached to my iPhone invitation. I noted glowing, riparian swaths of grass-green oil paint seeking equilibrium with terraformed earth tones—visually rich abstractions with a bit of attitude. It took until I was in the space with Lowman himself (...he materialized from whatever unknowable tunnels connect the gallery’s enormous ultra-white cube campus, dressed in one black Air Force One and one white Air Force One sneaker with relaxed-fit pants and a quaff of silver hair, to speak deferentially to the corps-de-presse for half an hour, just enough to leave the impression of a mid-career aging bad boy on the raw edge of his zaddy era, before dematerializing back into the white walls…) that I even realized I was looking at abstractions of aerial views of golf courses. Lowman explained that the paintings were not landscapes but rather pictures of landscaping, and that they weren’t intended as critiques or tributes to the sport but as neutral meditations on the rising cultural supremacy of the gentleman’s game in the age of Mar-a-Lago. I liked these paintings a lot, so I’ll get my objections out of the way before I explain what is good about them. My first objection: a rather bland bronze sculpture modeled to resemble a hollowed out snowman that is neither good nor bad nor seemingly related to the rest of the show. Also, the inclusion of a salon-style wall of other tangentially related smaller works (including a green version of his trademark oversized air-freshener tree-shaped cut-outs) that, while individually compelling, take a bit of the coldness out of the show’s curation. That salon wall feels like an acoustic guitar interlude in a show that is otherwise pretty techno, and coldness suits these paintings better. My third objection is not to the show itself but to an experience that kept happening to me after the show, where I’d mention to various art world denizens that I really liked this Nate Lowman show and I got the impression that I’d violated some kind of art world decorum. Um, everyone seemed to be saying, don’t you know that we don’t like that sort of thing right now? I pried deeper and learned that that sort of thing meant the ghosts of 2005 Lower East Side Manhattan, where an artist might do cocaine with Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley and one of the Olsen twins, back when irony was king and lads were cool and the art market was booming. I have nothing to say about this except that I believe we should release artists from the shackles of whatever they were doing in their twenties.
Despite Lowman’s insistence that his paintings aren’t landscapes, they play into a history of landscape painting and the form’s intrinsic questions of perspective. Aerial images are melded, flipped, painted sideways, enough to destroy the one-to-one feeling of the images as data. Lowman renders sandpits as floating craters defined by shadows that visually push them at once forward and backward, optical trickery that destroys any allegiance to foreground, middle ground, and background. We are left with weird physics, an inside-out
golf course that looks like what the world feels like—at the beginning of an impossible future and end of an unspeakable past. As for the subject of golf: I had my doubts. Are giant paintings of golf courses merely the easiest paintings in the world to sell, since it seems inevitable that a large percentage of blue-chip art collectors might also be the type to tee off? But while I write this, the front page image of TheNewYorkTimes is an aerial image of the golf course, a visual explainer for a recent act of failed political violence. I see a green river and a black pond, a blankness of sand. I see it from the POV of Nate Lowman, thank god.
341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031 / Opening: 5 pm-10 pm, Friday December 6th, 2024
Dates of Show: December 6th, 2024 - January 10th, 2025
FAME
There are some people who can barely be tolerated in person but are beloved as fictional characters. One reads about them in a book or watches them on a screen, and one feels special because one recognizes their beauty. But when one meets them in person, one dismisses them, unless they are already famous.
—John Tottenham
IN OUR SHADOW
Innocent as infants, we curl up in our beliefs.
We dream that our milk watches us from the sofa in the dark. Under the sofa rests a ball we thought would never stop rolling. Here are my fingers, dusty with what covered that ball. Then a swarm of bees grows close and loud behind us.
The river is many miles from here. We’ll reach it by dawn if we leave right now.
— James Cushing
ASK BABS
BABS RAPPLEYE
Dear Babs: I’m an artist who uses industrial materials like spray paint, epoxy and fiberglass in my oil paintings. I use a respirator and my studio has decent ventilation, but I know it’s not the best. Recently, my doctor raised concerns about potential long-term health risks. I’m hesitant to switch mediums because I know my work will suffer. How can I balance my art with my health?
—Chemical Concerns in Cincinnati
Dear Chemical Concerns, Throughout history, artists have often unknowingly sacrificed their health for their craft. Van Gogh’s leaded paint may have enlivened his skies and sunflowers, but it also likely played a role in his unfortunate mental and physical decline. Eva Hesse’s groundbreaking sculptural work with fiberglass and resin probably contributed to her untimely death at age 34. You need to know what you are getting into, now and further down the line.
Remember, the industrial-grade chemicals you are using were originally developed for manufacturing environments with strict safety protocols. Using them in a studio setting, even with basic precautions, can pose real risks. Prolonged exposure to hazardous chemicals can lead to serious health issues, including respiratory problems, neurological damage, even cancer. And the danger is even greater for immune-compromised people, kids or pets who might frequent your studio. Be responsible, and don’t put yourself—or anyone else—at risk.
At a minimum, get yourself a copy of TheArtist’sCompleteHealthand SafetyGuide by Monona Rossol, which has lots of info about how to use, store and dispose of art materials and maintain a safe studio environment. Treat your studio like a real job site. Would you pass an OSHA test? Consider exploring safer alternative materials that allow you to achieve similar effects in your work without compromising your health. Sure, the perfect finishes you love are satisfying now, but what’s the point if you’re too busy coughing up a lung to enjoy them?
If you continue to use hazardous materials, you must invest in necessary protective equipment, ensure proper ventilation, and maintain a safe workspace. Put simply, if you can’t afford to make your art safely, then don’t make it. No matter what, listen to your doctor and schedule regular medical check-ups to monitor for early signs of chemical exposure. Remember, your ability to create art long-term depends on you BEING ALIVE. Stay safe!
Oh, and keep the National Poison Control Number handy at all times! It’s 1-800-222-1222.
Artists: The London Police, Kayla May & Sandra Chevrier | Photographer: Nika Kramer Courtesy of Wynwood Walls
HOLIDAY CONCERTS AT
SUN DEC 1 7:30PM Leslie Odom, Jr. The Christmas Tour
2 PERFORMANCES
SAT DEC 14 11:30AM & 2:30PM Holiday Sing-Along
Melissa Peterman, host John Sutton, conductor
WED DEC 18 8PM Jennifer Hudson The Gift of Love
4 PERFORMANCES
SAT–SUN DEC 21–22 2PM & 8PM Home Alone in Concert
Hollywood Bowl Orchestra David Newman, conductor
2 PERFORMANCES
TUE DEC 31 7PM & 10:30PM
New Year’s Eve with D-Nice & Friends
Johnny Gill • Big Daddy Kane • Next Case • Kenny Burns • Tweet • Jon B Estelle • Nice & Smooth • Lady London
Mike Phillips
Come early to hang out in our NYE lounge, complete with photo booth— and a free glass of champagne!
TUE DEC 17 8PM Chanticleer
MON DEC 23 8PM Arturo Sandoval Swinging Holiday
STARTING DEC 1
Winter Wonderland
Arrive early and visit our Winter Wonderland! Enrich your holiday music experience—drop by BP Hall for plenty of fun.
