Artillery Sept-Oct 2022, Volume 17, Issue 1 by artillerymag

SEP/OCT 2022 L.A. Ltd.

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY 2525 Michigan Avenue E 1, Santa Monica, CA 90404 info@williamturnergallery.com 310.453.0909 www.williamturnergallery.com October 8 - December 3, 2022 Jimi Gleason, JJK/Brooklyn, 2022, silver nitrate & acrylic on canvas, 30”x 24” JIMI GLEASON

StreetImperial2050&Street16thEast2276 info@nightgallery.ca90021CAAngeles,Los MIRA DANCY Madonna Undone September 24 November 25, 2022 Dancy,Mira ReversalImmaculate 2022,

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES Lavaughan Jenkins Weight of Things September 17 - November 5, 2022

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1206 MAPLE AVE LOS ANGELES, CA 90015 213 627 BENDIXBUILDING.COM@BENDIXBUILDING3754 FOR LEASING WWW.BENDIXBUILDING.COM/LEASINGINQUIRES: THE LEGACY OF THE BENDIX BUILDING ENDURES AS AN ICON IN THE ART AND CREATIVE WORLD. IT IS A RENOWNED AND INSPIRING HOME TO MANY OF L.A.’S MOST PASSIONATE ARTISTS AND CREATORS, GALLERIES, PHOTOGRAPHERS, FASHION DESIGNERS, PRODUCTION STUDIOS, AND PERFORMERS, BRIDGING A PRESTIGIOUS PAST WITH A BRILLIANT NOW.

Get tickets at thebroad.org Current upcoming+ARTISTTALKtheun-privatecollection:HankWillisThomas+RobinD.G.Kelley September 18, 2022 | 2:00 p.m. Oculus Hall at The Broad + Livestream

William Kentridge, Stereoscope, 1999. 35mm animated ﬁ lm, transferred to video and DVD

The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles © William Kentridge. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

November 17–20, 2022 directed by WilliamPERFORMANCEKentridge The Broad + REDCAT present the world theatrical premiere of the performance Houseboy Generous support provided by Brenda R. Potter and Marian Goodman Gallery Get tickets at thebroad.org OPENS NOVEMBER 12

Closes SeptEMBER 25

Hank Willis Thomas, America, 2021. Mixed media including US ﬂ ags. The Broad Art Foundation. © Hank Willis Thomas. Photo by Joshua White.

NESANET ABEGAZE RENEE AMITAI KATHY AOKI JOHN BABCOCK PETER BACZEK NINA BARNETT SANDRA BEARD SUSAN BELAU ADELAIDE BLAIR LISA BULAWSKY ELIZABETH BUSEY GINO CASTELLANOS LIZ CHALFIN KRIS CHAU JENNIFER CHEN PHILLIP CHEN ESTHER DELAQUIS-BAIDOO BETH DORSEY TALLMADGE DOYLE KIRSTIN DUNLAP JESSICA DUNNE APRIL FLANDERS BETTY FRIEDMAN CONNOR FURR DONALD FURST ROZANNE HERMELYN DI SILVESTRO VIVIAN HORDES BETH HOWE ANN JOHNSON JOYCE WATKINS KING CHRISTOPHER LATIL AMANDA LEE EDDY LOPEZ LINDA LYKE COLIN LYONS POLI MARICHAL KATHERINE MCDOWELL JOSEPH MOORE JAMESON MULAC JENENE NAGY INDRANI NAYAR-GALL GAIL PANSKE DORA LISA ROSENBAUM ARIC RUSSOM SARAH SANFORD CATHERINE SOLLMAN BROOKE STEWART TORU SUGITA DAVID TIM NICHOLAS TISDALE NORIHO URIU CATHY WEISS DONNA WESTERMAN LINDA WHITNEY Celebrating 60 years, Los Angeles Printmaking Society presents the 22nd National, a state of the art survey of printmaking 1419 East Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90011 Opening Reception: October 15th, 2022, 2-5 PM, Betye Saar and Alison Saar, 22nd National Honorees Kenturah Davis, Juror of the 22nd National Artist Talks Saturdays October 22nd & 29th, 2-5 PM October 15th to November 12th, 2022 Scan for details

MUSEUM Los Angeles Free Admission hammer.ucla.edu HEAD OF A BULL, VALLAURIS, 1952. BLACK CHALK ON CUT PAPER. 19 5∕8 × 13 1∕16 IN. (49.8 × 33.2 CM). FUNDACIÓN ALMINE Y BERNARD RUIZ-PICASSO PARA EL ARTE, MADRID. © 2022 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.

Edgar Alwin Payne, Rockbound, 1921, Oil on canvas. Gift of the Class of 1921.

Sept 17 - Nov 12 Palos Verdes Art Center pvartcenter.org

From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer & His Family Foundation What is the shape of this problem? SEPTEMBER 6, 2022 – DECEMBER 3, 2022 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY PARK CAMPUS 823 EXPOSITION BLVD LOS ANGELES, CA 90089 HTTPS://FISHER.USC.EDU | @FISHERMUSEUM LOUISEBOURGEOIS

Luis A. Sahagun Linda Sormin Lien Truong INAUGURAL EXHIBITION PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY ▫ LOS ANGELES 1700 So. Santa Fe Avenue 3rd patriciasweetowgallery.comfloor 3 September – 15 October Lien Truong | The Maiden | oil, silk on canvas | 72” X 72”

FEATURES Njideka Akunyili Crosby - by annabel keenan 36 Mark Steven Greenfield - by clayton campbell 40 Daniel Hawkins - by doug harvey 46 Zoe Walsh - by olivia fishman 48 The Cheech - by william moreno 50 LA Fall Previews (Highlights) 76 COLUMNS ART BRIEF: Fake Basquiats? - by stephen j goldberg, esq 25 THE DIGITAL: Epic AR Murals - by seth hawkins 44 DECODER: Always About Kayla - by zak smith 56 BUNKER VISION: Tableaux Vivants - by skot armstrong 72 SIGHTS UNSCENE: Norton Simon - by lara jo regan 74 ON THE COVER: Zoe Walsh, Night remembers other nights , 2020, (detail) signed, titled and dated verso, acrylic on canvas-wrapped panel, 48 x 72 in.; see page 48. ABOVE : Daniel Hawkins, Desert Lighthouse , 2017–present, structural steel, polycarbonate siding, solar powered electrical system, fresnel beacon led lights; 50 x 14 x 14 feet, photo by Daniel Hawkins. RIGHT: Comic by Susan Butcher and Carol Wood, Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera , 2022; Yabba Dabba Doo! NEXT PAGE, Top: Mark Steven Greenfield, Moses Williams , 2022, (detail) gold leaf and acrylic on wood panel, 20 X 16 in. Bottom: Adam Parker Smith, Apollo of Belvedere , 2022, white Carrara marble on stone pedestal, sculpture dimensions: 36 x 36 x 26 in., image courtesy of The Hole L.A. CONTINUED » LA Ltd. 62 40 VOLUME 17, ISSUE 1, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022 Table of Contents

I’m sure the new kids on the block aren’t strangers to big cities though, and we’re only too happy to show them around. Our cover artist, Zoe Walsh is interviewed by newcomer Olivia Fishman. Their complex stunning pool painting series seemed apt for a typically sweltering LA September. Con tributor Clayton Campbell profiles stalwart local artist Mark Steven Greenfield, whose work continues the much-needed dialog surrounding racial tension. Doug Harvey steps in with a piece on desert artist Daniel Hawkins—his light tower in stallation is having its fifth-year anniversary. And there’s much more: Ask Babs confronts Larry Clark; our comic-strip duo knock it out of the park with their spoof on LA architecture, plus reviews of summer shows.

REVIEWS

DEPARTMENTS

Alternate Realities @ Norton Simon Museum 71

LA is the most vibrant art city in the country. This isn’t exactly a revelation, so why focus on LA—yet again—in this current issue? Because we felt it was worth revisiting the subject in order to help all the high-end inter national and New York galleries that are moving here to settle in and feel secure that they did the right thing.

ANDREA BOWERS: Hammer Museum - by anne martens 66

From the Editor

Sergej Jensen @ Regen Projects 69

FEATURED REVIEW

POEMS by james cushing; john tottenham 60

ASK BABS: My Larry Clark Photo by babs rappleye 60

COMICS: LA Architecture by butcher & wood 62

COMMENTARY: All Artists? by john tottenham 58

Pope.L @ Vielmetter Los Angeles 68

Adam Parker Smith @ The Hole L.A. 69

Warren Neidich @ Museum of Neon Art 70

Russell Crotty @ Porch Gallery Ojai

SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng 20

Working Together @ The Getty Center 67

As I’ve been saying since the dawn of Artillery (16 years ago now):

Dear Reader,

A Cy Twombly exhibition found us at an early evening preview and reception amid the marble and fountains on the Getty Plaza as we sipped wine and watched the sun set over the Pacific. Then there’s always The Hammer. Everyone loves the Hammer openings (sometimes affectionately known as “the Hammered”). The opening celebration was for Andrea Bower’s powerful survey exhibition, which felt eerily prescient and poignant considering that Roe v Wade had just been overturned. However, we were a bit nonplussed by the scene of caterers whisking away the VIP spread promptly at 8 pm when the hoi polloi arrived. Uh, let them eat breadsticks?

Galas and benefits aren’t the only show in town, of course. There are still tons of gallery openings to go to—and drive to, unfortunately. Getting to and from all these events is a huge inconvenience in such a sprawling city. Attending a Getty event means leaving a few hours early, and begrudgingly having to stay sober for the drive back. Going from opening to opening can be a drag—parking counting for most of the discontent. There can be a lot of ground to cover if you want to fit in several openings—and this is the biggest drawback to living in this great metropolis.

I made a point to get out more this summer and was reminded how exciting LA’s art scene really is. Our recent transplants might be happy to know that we celebrate summer in a big way, with glamorous alfresco galas held in spacious plazas on balmy nights. This season, my art expeditions took me to The Cheech gala benefit in Riverside, a surprisingly quaint and dusty city about an hour’s drive from LA, while Night Gallery held their Sexy Beast Benefit Auction for Planned Parenthood at their newly expanded space. A stage was set up in the spacious outdoor area for the emcee and various comedians; local vendors served duck tacos and vegan croquets, and there was plenty of wine. Both events—filled with mirth (and hopefully deep pockets)—were for worthy causes.

So, if you’re new in town, get out there and see LA’s best for the beginning of the art season (check out our Fall Previews). And if you’re not new in town, get out there anyway. Happy Fall Art Season Art Lovers! Aren’t you glad you live in LA?

Melanie Willhide @ Von Lintel Gallery 68

Theodore Svenningsen @ Torrance Art Museum 70

4071 Table of continuedContents 69

John Seeley - copy editor/proof

Anna Bagirov - print sales

EDITORIALEditor/Publisher

ARTILLERYMAG.COM

the only art magazine that’s fun to read!

Anna Bagirov - sales

Rocie Carrillo - production intern

Doug Harvey is an artist, writer and critic, independent curator, and ed ucator who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is currently editing the next volume of the ‘patacritical In terrogation Techniques Anthology (AC Books, NY). Other activities may be monitored online at www.dougharvey.la.dougharvey.blogspot.comwww.and

Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

In the last 25 years Clayton Campbell, an artist and writer, has contributed numerous reviews, essays, and features to Flash Art, Artillery, Art Voices, ArtPresse, Res, Contemporary Magazine, THE Magazine, After Image, and DART

Max King Cap - senior editor

William Moreno is a former muse um director and currently principle of William Moreno Contemporary, an art advisory and consulting firm providing advice for collectors. He is also a curator, writer, executive coach and consultant for arts or ganizations and artists focused on issues of sustainability, marketing and management practices.

FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS STAFF

ADMINISTRATION

Mitch Handsone - new media director

Susan Butcher and Carol Wood met in Perth, Australia, and now live in the mountains of Central Victo ria. They have been making comics together for 25 years, participated in Melbourne’s underground comix scene, and have done Artillery’s comic strip since 2006. Art Is A Lie, a collection of their strips, won a 2016 Ledger Award.

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Olivia Fishman is an aspiring gal lerist from Los Angeles. Her expe rience includes interning an auc tion house and artist-run space. She is currently pursuing a BA in art history at Occidental College with a minor in interdisciplinary writing. Olivia interviewed Zoe Walsh for this issue as part of her internship with Artillery

VON LINTEL GALLERY ROSEMARIE FIORE SKYWRITING SEP 10TH TO NOV 5TH, 2022 OLUWATOBI ADEWUMI HEADLINES SEP 10TH TO NOV 5TH, 2022 BERGAMOT STATION 2525 MICHIGAN AVENUE, UNIT A7 SANTA MONICA, CA 90404 WWW.VONLINTEL.COM

20 SHOPTALK BY SCARLET CHENG

LonnieVisitsHolleyLA

Gaetano Pesce, My Dear Mountains , 2022, Aspen Art Museum, courtesy the Artist, photo Adrianna Glaviano

For the first time the annual Tom of Fin land Art & Culture Festival takes place both in Los Angeles and in London the same weekend (October 8–9), in Second Home workspaces in both cities. The fes tival brings together artists, galleries and patrons to network, and to buy and sell works of queer erotic art. Second Home Hollywood has a large garden and a pa vilion for art installations, performances and presentations. Second Home Hol lywood is located at 1370 N. Saint An drews Place, while Second Home Spit alfields is at 68 Hanbury Street, London. Get your tickets for single days or the whole weekend at https://www.tomoffin land.org/artfair/

Holley is getting credit now, being repped by a major gallery (this is their first show of Holley’s work) and featured in The New York Times last year. How ever, he finds that the world has gotten into a perilous state. “It’s hell that we are facing,” he said.

has been enjoying a major collaboration with Italian designer and artist Gaetano Pesce, whose vinyl rendition of sunrise in the mountains now covers the entrance side of its fa cade. There’s a gallery of his whimsical sculptural work inside, and a tabletop version of mountain peaks in different colors is for Meanwhile,sale.Aspen galleries have put on special shows to coincide, and one of the best things, especially if you come from LA’s urban sprawl, is that nearly ev erything is within walking distance. There is also some symbiotic overlap between museum and galleries: certain ArtCrush artists were also featured at galleries, where the art stays up much longer. Two of my favorite shows were Alison van Pelt at Casterline/Goodman Gallery and preparatory drawings by Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Hexton Gallery.

ArtWeekAspen

One of the best gallery shows this year was the self-taught artist Lonnie Holley’s solo show at Blum & Poe, and one of the hottest tickets was a recent Saturday af ternoon talk between Holley and Jane Fonda. That may seem an odd pairing, but as the actor and activist explained at the start, “I lived in Atlanta for 20 years”—that is, when she was married to you-know-who. During that time she met Bill Arnett, a major art collector and supporter of what he called “vernacu lar art,” art by Black artists of the Amer ican South. Through him Fonda met a number of artists, including the Atlan ta-basedWell-preppedHolley. of course, Fonda asked astute questions about Holley’s life and work. Holley, in his own ellipti cal way, often responded by addressing something bigger. He had had a tumul tuous childhood, ending up at the noto rious Alabama Industrial School for Ne gro Children, where he was brutalized. Fortunately, his grandmother was able to get him out when he was 14. ”I think I was chosen to go through the whole nine yards to be a witness to the ways of life,” Holley said. Much of his work reflects the poverty and pain he has ex perienced and seen. Take the series of early sculpture made of a sandstone-like material he salvaged from a foundry; he began to use the material when he had to make a tombstone for his sister’s two young children killed tragically in a fire. Later he created figures of others he wanted to remember or commemorate, including mythical ones. Holley’s assem blage pieces touch on themes of slavery and inequity. “No Negro was given the title of artist,” he says, “but they were creating, creating... When do we get credit for being who we are?”

Tom FinlandofFest

I never expected Aspen to be so beau tiful—it’s a low-rise town lying in a ver dant valley, though the rainy season lasts six to eight months here. It also happens to be booming with billionaires. This is fortunate for the Aspen Art Museum which holds an annual ArtWeek every August, a week punctuated with an art auction and gala to benefit the museum (ArtCrush); art talks, performances and tours; an art fair (Intersect Aspen); lots of cocktails and some very swanky din ners. The special honoree of ArtCrush this year was LA’s own Gary Simmons, and one of his paintings was part of the live auction, which took place during the August 5 gala. ArtCrush, the museum’s biggest fundraising event, raised over $4.3 million this year from both live and silent

Theauctions.museum

Lonnie Holley talks with Jane Fonda at Blum & Poe

—Tom Knechtel

Carole’s work was honored with many awards, including the Guggenheim, a Gottlieb award, two NEA awards, a Cali fornia Community Foundation Fellowship and a COLA grant. She had a long exhi bition history, beginning in 1972, and her work was included in many public and pri vate collections. Her art was examined in two mid-career surveys: 1983 at Cal State Northridge, and 1998 at Otis, where she was a beloved teacher for many years.

Often,themes.there’s a lot of posted text—to give the experience an educational tone, I think. The Klimt immersive had about 20 panels of text before you entered the fun part, and I especially liked the excerpts of letters between Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo in the van Gogh lobby. The Banksy immersive was most like an exhi bition, divided into thematic groupings of his work with intro panels like “Banksy and the World Artistic Culture.”

The Cantankerous and the Lovable

But this dry recitation of facts does not catch what was so marvelous about Car ole. She was a complex amalgamation of the cantankerous and the lovable. As Cliff Benjamin, her long-time dealer and close friend said, “She dared to live as she de sired.” Her appearance was striking: Ava Gardner wearing a Cramps T-shirt, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. She was deep ly loyal, fierce in her opinions, generous in her studio visits, convinced that every man was in love with her (and much of the time she was right). She had a wonderful sense of humor and took teasing well, dishing it right back out. No one could match her personal style, either artistically or in terms of self-presentation. She was sui generis and leaves a great vacancy in the artistic community.

Carole Caroompas, an artist and widely admired teacher whose work encom passed painting, drawing, collage, prints and performance, died on July 30, 2022.

In July and early August, San Francis co gallerist Jessica Silverman tested the LA waters with a pop-up gallery on North Robertson featuring paintings by Clare Rojas. Some work delighted with pure geometrical abstraction, while others, like The End of the Road at the Edge of the World , 2022, seemed part of a fairy tale. Silverman is happy to re port that the show nearly sold out. Will she be coming back to LA in one form or another? I hope so, as I’ve enjoyed my two visits to her SF gallery. Patricia Sweetow, another Bay-Area dealer, has made her move permanent, settling in the Santa Fe art complex shared with high-end galleries Vielmetter and WildingSadly,Cran.Bridge Projects has closed its Melrose gallery, as of July 30. I saw some excellent work there, but it was never clear to me whether they were a profit or nonprofit, as they also showed some quite quirky and esoteric work. Turns out it was actually a commercial gallery, with some underwriting from a collector cou ple. The projects will continue though, and first up is a reiteration of a show that opened during the pandemic, “To Bough and to Bend.” Check it out at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, from now through March 26, 2023.

In my spare time, of which I have surpris ingly little, I’ve been catching up with im mersive exhibitions popping up all over town—the ones based on works by art ists, such as the multimedia exhibitions of van Gogh, Klimt, Banksy and Glenn Kaino. Most of these exhibitions have you walking through very large rooms with 360 degree projections of artwork morphing into other artworks or graph ics. The Kaino one is quite different— mostly installation, with sculpture and animatronics, and focused on environ mental

ComingsGoingsand

Appreciation Carole(1946–2022)Caroompas

andStewartAllisonbyBoubolina,LaskarinaasCaroompasCarole MatildaResurrectingprojecttheirfromPomonis,AnnaMary

Some also have a VR component, where you fit a heavy helmet with gog gles over your head. The one for Banksy was especially good—a joy ride going through a complex of abandoned ware houses, as if you were on a train. His art work appeared on the left and right on walls, just as his street art does in real life.

A Forest for the Trees installation, photo by Aaron Mendez

Immersed Immersivesin

22 SHOPTALK BY SCARLET CHENG

CharlesOctSculptureDickson9-Nov6,2022 Matter Studio Gallery 5080 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 323-697-4988 www.matterstudiogallery.com

Basquiat Paintings Seized by FBI

I had a firsthand lesson a few years ago when asked by a dealer to assist in finding a buyer for a handful of small Basquiat paintings. I am certainly no expert on Basquiat, and prior to a buyer search I brought in an art consultant, who concluded that the works somehow looked “too perfect.” But it was the stories of their provenance that made me shy away from providing any assistance to the dealer—they were prepos terous tales of acquiring the items from Basquiat for what amounted to chump change.

The story of the works’ genesis would have us believe that Mumford had forgotten about a virtual goldmine in his storage unit—by 2012 Bas quiats were selling in the millions at auction! None of Mumford’s friends or family ever heard him say he owned Basquiat artworks.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warrior , 1982. Courtesy of Christie’s.

The provenance story for the Orlando “artworks” is even more fan ciful, including a Hollywood connection. Apparently, we are to believe that Basquiat created these works—all on scavenged cardboard—in a studio below mega-dealer Larry Gagosian’s LA home in 1982 at the time he represented the artist (Gagosian has publically expressed doubts about the veracity of the story). Basquiat then allegedly sold the lot to LA television writer Thad Mumford for $5,000. Mumford (now deceased) supposedly placed the paintings in a storage locker and forgot about them for decades.

The owners claimed to have a $100 million appraisal for the Bas quiats from Putnam Fine Art and Antique Appraisals. However, it looks like it may be a while before the owners are either indicted, or the FBI returns the “artwork” to them. It’s highly unlikely the suspect “artworks” will ever hang in a museum again.

Basquiat forgeries have plagued the art world since his tragic death in 1988. The Basquiat Foundation ceased authenticating artwork in 2012 af ter being dragged into costly litigation concerning issues of authenticity.

On June 24, 2022, the FBI raided the Orlando museum and executed a search warrant seizing all 25 of the Basquiat works.

At least one of the “artworks” was painted on the obverse of a piece of FedEx labeled cardboard. The Times went so far as to consult with a brand expert who used to work for FedEx—and told the paper that the style of the FedEx logo on the cardboard wasn’t used by the company until 1994, six years after Basquiat died.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, some say, was an artistic genius. His paintings’ auction values now equal or exceed those of his friend and mentor, Andy Warhol. A couple of top-notch Basquiat shows wowed New York City this past summer, including a major exhibition sponsored by his family members. But it was another show at the Orlando Museum of Art, “Heroes and Monsters,” that is the subject of several meticulous investigative stories by The New York Times, questioning the authen ticity of the show’s 25 purported Basquiat works.

BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

The storage unit’s contents were auctioned to two buyers for $15,000 after being seized for nonpayment of rent in 2012. Both buyers have criminal convictions for drug dealing and one of them also had a stock swindle rap in which he was accused of forgery. Well-known entertainment litigator Pierce O’Donnell also got in on the act by purchasing a share in six of the suspect paintings. O’Donnell said he brought in experts who authenticated the work, including one who wrote a book on Basquiat. However, that expert, University of Maryland art professor Jordana Saggese, told the Times nine of the works could not be authenticated.

The affidavit of FBI special agent Elizabeth Rivas, attached to the Bu reau’s search warrant, is damning. Rivas said she interviewed Mumford in 2014 and was told he never purchased a Basquiat work. The Times reported, “Mumford also told Rivas that one of the artworks’ owners had ‘pressured him to sign documents’ claiming that he had owned the collection…even offering in an email to give him a ‘10 percent interest in the net Saggeseproceeds.’”isalsomentioned in the FBI affidavit as having been paid $60,000 for her opinions. She said she tried to get her name disasso ciated from the exhibition, but was bullied by the museum’s director, Aaron De Groft, to keep quiet.

ART BRIEF

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OPENING RECEPTION

TWO PERSON EXHIBITION

4:00-8:00 P.M.

The first-ever Metro Art Bus brings portraits of Metro riders to the streets of Los Angeles Learn more about the artists, the Metro Art program and art opportunities: metro.net/art metro.art.lametro.art.la

CANTOS OF THE SIBYLLINE SISTERHOOD APRIL THEMAI-THUMARIKOCHITRABEYGANESHMORIPERRETREVOLUTION SCHOOL LEZLEY SAAR ERICA RYAN STALLONES MOLLY SAYAMARNIESURAZHSKYWEBERWOOLFALK THROUGH NOVEMBER 23 ALYCE DE PASADENA1700WILLIAMSONROULETGALLERYLIDASTREET VICTOR ESTRADA: PURPLE MEXICAN OPENING OCTOBER 8 PETER AND MERLE MULLIN GALLERY 1111 S. ARROYO PARKWAY PASADENA ARTCENTER EXHIBITIONS EXHIBITIONS@ARTCENTER.EDU@ARTCENTEREXHIBITIONSARTCENTER.EDU/EXHIBITIONS

For some memory or some land

SPIRIT OF THE LAND

Saturday, Oct. 1, 2-4 p.m.

BOTH EXHIBITIONS

Exhibition tours and opening receptions

Caption

Preview receptions

Thursday, Sep. 29, 5-7 p.m.

Sep. 26 - Dec. 1, 2022

info: Jackie Castillo, Untitled (Turning No°2), 2022, laser print, transfer medium, reclaimed brick A group exhibition of Chicana/o/x artists recapturing and reconstituting concepts of nature, featuring Jackie Castillo, Juan Gomez, Álvaro D. Márquez, Narsiso Martinez, Ayninaneth Ortiz, Jynx Prado, Gloria Gem Sánchez, Christopher Anthony Velasco, and curated by Dakota Noot. A group exhibition of local, regional, national, and Indigenous artists who honor the history, culture, and natural wonders of the Mojave desert landscape south of Las Vegas, in light of the recent proposal to permanently protect the area as Nevada’s fourth National Monument. Curated by Kim Garrison, Checko Salgado, and Mikayla Whitmore. Exhibitions organized by Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion. Major support for programs at The Doyle provided by The Rallis Foundation, John & Yasuko Bush, Sylvia Impert, Orange Coast College Foundation, and Associated Students of Orange Coast College. (714) 432-5738, www.orangecoastcollege.edu/DoyleArts

M A S H M U S E A S O L O E X H I B I T I O N B Y H A L E H M A S H I A N 8 1 2 N L A C I E N E G A B L V D W E S T H O L L Y W O O D , C A 9 0 0 6 9 7 : 0 0 1 0 : 0 0 P . M . S E P T E M B E R 1 0 W W W M A S H G A L L E R Y C O M m a s h g a l l e r y

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is having quite the year. Her figurative paintings are on the walls of esteemed museums and institutions across the country, often featuring portraits of herself, friends and family. Crosby’s unique style consists of painted, drawn and collaged elements that she blends with a distinctive photo-transfer technique. She uses imagery sourced from magazines, cata logs and her own photographs.

Crosby tells personal and collective cross-cultural stories in paintings that are captivating and contemplative. In November 2021, the Metropol itan Museum of Art commissioned the artist to create a wallpaper that has become an exemplary case of how she addresses complex issues. Made for Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, she conceived of Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…) (2021) a gor geous green vinyl backdrop. The Afrofuturist installation is one of the Met’s “period rooms,”—recreations of domestic spaces intended to be studied as representations of a specific time.

The Afrofuturist Room addresses the history of the land upon which the museum was built. Called Seneca Village, the area was home to a flourishing community of landowners and tenants who were mostly Black. The city seized the land in 1857 to create Central Park and displaced the residents. The new installation recognizes this history and imagines what a period room might look like if Seneca Village had remained. In doing so, the room shifts from the tradition of focusing on one specific time and celebrates the African and diasporic belief that the past, present and future are connected.

Embracing the layered history told through the installation, Akunyili Crosby’s wallpaper includes images of an archival map of Seneca Village from 1856, which are blended with 19th century photographs of Black New Yorkers, as well as contemporary African diasporic representations. Weaving through these images are verdant okra plants, a crop with significant history as it was carried along with enslaved people through the Middle Passage from Africa to America.

As is common with Akunyili Crosby’s large-scale installations, the wallpaper was originally created as a painting on paper. Previously unseen pub licly, the painting is now included in the artist’s current solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Just four works make up the show, all of which were made during the pandemic, giving a glimpse into the artist’s life at home in Los Angeles.

The Diaspora According to Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983, Akunyili Crosby grew up between Enugu and Lagos, and moved to the US when she was 16. Now living in Los Ange les, she brings together these varied influences, seeking spaces where they diverge and intersect. Since earning her MFA from Yale in 2011, she has had exhibitions in major institutions nationally and abroad. She received the highly coveted MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2017, and the United States Artists’ fellowship in 2021. Historic, cultural and diasporic references are at the core of her work. She touches on issues that speak to many different people, places and times, all elegantly woven together in layers of visually stunning imagery.

BY ANNABEL KEENAN

These new works underscore Akunyili Crosby’s interest in plants, including the aforementioned okra. Having studied biology in college and grown up with parents heavily involved in science and academics, she often features the natural environment in her work. In addition to the painting now adorning the Met’s wallpaper, the other three works in the Blanton show focus closely on plant species found both in Los Angeles and Lagos. The largest work is Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2020), a self-portrait holding her young

Left: Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens , 2021, ©Njideka Akunyili Crosby, courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner, photo by Jeff McLane.

BEAUTYFUL MIGRATIONS

child on a porch surrounded by plants. The artist looks straight at the viewer with calm, assured and loving eyes. Her child wears a shirt adorned with the words “black is beautiful.” The pair are a ideal representation of the relationship between mother and child.

In January of 2023, Akunyili Crosby is set to kick off the exhibi tion program for David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles outpost. As LA begins to feature more of her work, she celebrates the similarities and differences between her African heritage and new home. Visually stunning, captivating and laden with significance, she always tells complex, transnational stories and underscores the beauty of embracing multiple cultures.

In addition to her work as an artist, Akunyili Crosby is a ded icated climate activist. She is a founding member of the Envi ronmental Council at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the first of its kind for a major art museum in the US. The council provides funds for the institution’s commitment to carbon negativity and carbon-free energy and supports exhibitions and educational programs that address climate, conservation and environmental justice.

Above: Dwellers: Native One , 2019, ©Njideka Akunyili Crosby, courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner, photo by Jeff Mclane.

In another large-scale installation, Crosby showed her sup port of climate activism by contributing to the visual campaign A Cool Million. Founded by three artist-led collectives: For Free doms, Art + Climate Action and Art into Acres. The campaign launched in April and turned pieces by leading artists into largescale public works that were displayed on billboards and in mu seum spaces across California. The goal of the initiative was to raise climate awareness and funds for the conservation of one million acres of forest that is crucial to supporting the state’s hydrological system. Crosby’s work, Dwellers: Native One (2019), was transformed into a window vinyl for the Museum of the Afri can Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. The installation, on view through mid-September, features lush, dense plants indigenous to Nigeria layered with photographic transfers of the artist and her sister in their ancestral village, as well as an image of a wom an advertising African wax-cloth fabric.

Returning to her alma mater, Akunyili Crosby’s work will also be the subject of a solo show opening in September at Yale Uni versity’s Center for British Art. The exhibition is the third and final in a series curated by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als. The show focuses on her ongoing series The Beautyful Ones, a reference to the debut novel of Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah from 1968. Titled The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the novel follows a man as he navigates postcolonial Ghana in a formative period of unrest, loss and political awakening. The series, begun in 2012, features portraits of Nigerian children from her family photographs, as well as images she took on trips to Nigeria.

LAD DECKER LADDECKER.COM HOSTILE WITNESS LADDECKER

Mark Steven Greenfield, Califia , 2022, acrylic and gold leaf on wood panel, 30 x 56 inches.

BY CLAYTON CAMPBELL

42 RACIAL RECKONING Mark Steven Greenfield Illuminates the Black Experience

Above: Escrava Anastacia , 2020, acrylic and gold leaf on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches. Opposite page: Lesson , 2002, inkjet print, 37 x 28 inches.

Raised a Catholic and a long-time practitioner of meditation, Greenfield infuses his work with allusions to ritual, ceremony and spirituality. Painting images of Black and brown persons on gild ed panels in a meticulous narrative, representational style, “Black Madonna” and “HALO” become symbols of empowerment and unification. When Greenfield alludes to the protective and healing purposes of traditional religious icon art, he suggests his work is also meant to offer similar forms of protection. Both his series clearly respond to the killings of African Americans by the people who are supposed to keep our communities safe. Green field says of his recent paintings that they “conjure up memories of the church and the reverence once paid to statues and images of saints,” but are now redirected to those who have taken up the struggle for social justice. He adds, “I made the choice of honoring those little known heroes, martyrs and personages from whose stories we might gain strength.”

In Greenfield’s work, each series has developed its own sty listic approach. For example, his 2007 exhibition “Incognegro,” at the 18th Street Arts Center, consisted of appropriated pho

was exorcising the demons that these images have conjured up; without that, he says, “We’ll never really be free. “Incogne gro,” while problematic in 2007 for some segments of the Black community, is starting to impact whites, compelling some de gree of introspection on their part. It has brought into focus the responsibilities associated with social justice and allyship. Both “Black Madonna” and “HALO” expand this conversation and engagement with a larger audience that is willing to listen and learn from the social reckoning occurring globally and locally. At a moment when many younger artists of color are gaining national attention for their identity-based work, Greenfield has always been creating conversations about racial reckoning, both as an artist and cultural producer. His unswerving commitment to self-examination and community has made him a change-maker in the best sense of the word.

Greenfield’s art practice explores and illuminates the Black experience, focusing on the effects of stereotypes on Ameri can culture. Always provocative in an unexpected way, his work stimulates a much-needed and often long-overdue dialog on issues of race. His recent summer exhibition, “HALO,” has cre ated another conversation. While “Black Madonna” played with the idea of role reversals—revering and worshiping a Black Vir gin Mary and a Black Baby Jesus as symbols of love; what if white supremacists were the victims instead of the oppressors— “HALO” evolved as a next natural progression, highlighting his torical Black figures. They have been chosen from the period of the slave trade during the 1400s–1800s. He wants his subjects— often legendary in their time yet now overlooked—to be redis coverd. Greenfield’s use of gold as a material connotes value and importance, but also currency. Most of the people depicted in the series were enslaved and treated as commodities. His fig urative painting is particularly striking. Greenfield explains,“The figures are rendered in ‘ultra-black’ in keeping with their political designation and not so much for their degree of melanin. It is the element in these paintings that unifies, regardless of associ ation, wealth, class or prestige.” Almost all of the paintings have circular glyphs, a visual device that is a through line in much of Greenfield’s work. These evoke the mantras he uses as a vehicle in his daily meditations.

tographs. They are mainly of white people in black face, who in turn were appropriating African American culture. For this body of work, he made Iris prints and lenticular photographs. The mirror effect of lenticular photography heightened Greenfield’s intention to expose and dramatize the complexities surround ing issues of race, identity and perception. With the photos of turn-of-the-century black-face performers he superimposed a subversive message that looks like a optometrist’s office eye chart. They contain direct, challenging statements and ques tions about race and identity. “Incognegro” caused a stir about the use of Black stereotypes and whether they were helpful or hurtful. Mark says of this experience, “Work dealing with the indignities associated with black face has always been a messy proposition.” He believes that black-face images have haunted communities of color for a long time. His intention with this series

A native Angeleno, Greenfield is receiving well-deserved recognition. Besides being a full-time artist, he has had an extraordinary career as a significant cultural producer in the roles of arts administrator, curator, juror and teacher in Los Angeles. Like many artists who have a hybrid career in the arts, Greenfield worked as Art Center director at the Watts Towers Arts Center and director of the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery for the Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles. His associations with over 25 cultural and service organizations are a testament to his ethos of service and support for artists and community.

In 2020, Mark Steven Greenfield unveiled a new body of work, “Black Madonna,” followed by “HALO” in 2022, both at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. Gallery owner William Turner told me in an email that the “Black Madonna” show was a natural progression of Greenfield’s career of investigations into race and racial identity. “It was a sensation when we opened it in the fall of 2020,” Turner says. “It was purely coincidental, but after the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, our show became a catalyst for people discussing these issues.” Turner witnessed viewers staying nearly an hour in the gallery studying Greenfield’s intricate paintings. “We have never had a show that had that kind of depth of impact.”

Sheer scale and visual aesthetics only scratch the surface of what this artwork is. Take out your smartphone, scan a QR code, and then everything gets interesting as the artwork begins to manipulate the viewers spatial understanding of the world around it. In physical reality we are confronted with this beautiful and dominating structure, but gaze through the phone in any direction and what you see is no longer that. As the first 360-degree AR mural, portions of the art remain in augmented reality, but the world has taken on a Tim Burtonesque feel with the occasional giant catfish passing while the bustle of the street has transitioned to a serene ocean.

From what I gathered, this is just the tip of the iceberg of where this duo plans to push their real world/digital world art practice. With a mul titude of public works in line that are awaiting formal announcement, it seems likely that we will see some new boundaries being pushed by YANOE X ZOUEH. Will a robot walk out of the mural in AR and trip over a real-world bronze sculptural element, stand up, shake itself off and hand (transfer) you a custom NFT based on the angle of the sun when you scanned the QR code? With these two artists, it doesn’t seem a stretch.

44 THE DIGITAL

The Journey, Columbus, OH , (AR); photo by Jessica Miller.

The two artists now exclusively collaborate to work on a scale that others must struggle to comprehend. Originally setting the record for largest AR mural in the world in 2019 with the 11,000 square-foot piece The Journey in Columbus, OH, the duo has subsequently one-upped themselves during COVID with the new mural The Majestic. Encompassing 15,000 square-feet and wrapping around the façade of the Main Park Plaza garage in Downtown Tulsa, OK, The Majestic stands alone as a formidable art piece in our version of perceived reality.

YANOE ZOUEH’s Massive AR Murals

What do we imagine when we think about art in the most primal form that it has taken throughout the ages? It is easy to pick out important sculptural works or historic paintings on canvas—but often overlooked is the pureness of paint on a wall. Whether looking back to the age of smearing berries, ash or pigment on a cave wall to the ba roque fresco paintings that dominated the Renaissance church walls or contemporary Shepard Fairey graphics on LA building facades, muralistic wall painting has and will continue to domi nate large-format art making. The advent of the giant concrete building facilitating urban sprawl coupled with beautifying our urban spaces—plenty of structures exist to be covered with con temporary murals. But how do we actually make those murals contemporary?Wheredoes our obsession with the digital world overlap into the hard urban landscape? Easy: augmented reality. With the ad vent of AR and the access we each have to tiny supercomputers in our pocket, a classic wall painting has the potential to be so much more. A handful of muralists and artists are beginning to use these digital techniques, but artistic duo YANOE X ZOUEH is both originator and current world-record holder for the largest AR Whilemural.the collective’s name is a mouthful, it echoes the graffiti backgrounds of the two artists, Ryan “YANOE” Sarfati and Eric “ZOUEH” Skotnes, who sharpened their artistic chops as street writers in opposing Los Angeles graffiti crews. Their public art now embodies cooperation and facilitates a global reach.

During my LA interview, the team mentioned a change on the hori zon—an embracing of both the physical and the digital in experimental ways. Painting, AR, digital and physical sculpting—nothing is off the table. The 2021 work Rise Above in Inglewood, CA, began to embrace this transition by introducing digitally produced sculptural elements to complement the painting. Large acrylic components were engraved and cut from computer files and used to cover portions of the mural. They create an aesthetic component and also function as digital lighting to facilitate night viewing of the AR elements of the work.

BY SETH HAWKINS

Now placing artists in our gallery store and across a network of display spaces. Artlounge.co liveuniquely@artlounge.co323-272-4684 Artlounge Collective 145 North La Brea Ave. #F Los Angeles, CA 90036 Artlounge Collective

HARVEY

BY DOUG

46 LET THERE BE LIGHT Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse Turns Five

Oct.PRJCTLA1–Nov. 5, 2022

It’s a relief on several counts—for one thing, the pictorial aspect of Hawkins’ Land Art installation will return to its Minimalist de fault—with the remains of the town of Hinkley (think Erin Brokov ich) the only filigree on the horizon. Secondly, reports of ominous dark-tinted high-end off-road vehicles monitoring the activities of Desert Lighthouse pilgrims have pretty much evaporated.

“It looks like the unlicensed pot farms have ceased operations.” Daniel Hawkins is surveying the Mojave Desert landscape sur rounding the hill on which he built a fully functioning 50-foot solar-powered lighthouse in 2017. Below us, an elaborate com pound of white tents has begun to disintegrate. “There’s another over that hill, but it’s gone too. Maybe the sheriff came by.”

A poignant memorial to a local young woman popped up at one point and is still occasionally maintained. “I guess she used to just like hanging out here,” says Hawkins, “and when she died, her church wanted to do something special.” The nearby Fort Irwin military training center strangely recommends a trip to the DL as an edifying use for soldiers’ free time. Then there’s the Stargate Hinkley group, who seem to sincerely believe that an cient astronauts left the lighthouse as a calling card in the longago pre-COVID times. About the only crackpot community that hasn’t noticed the Desert Lighthouse is the mainstream art world.

“I have to repair all these missing panels first,” says Hawkins, squinting up at the towering steel and plastic edifice, “and make sure the fresnel’s [an led lens] working properly.” With his longish hair, glasses and survivalist desert clothes, Hawkins can resemble a central casting rendition of a ’70s land artist, albeit one who has invested money, energy and more than a decade of his life into the realization of an image that came to him in the middle of an agoraphobic panic attack while speeding through the trackless void of the I-15 outside Barstow. “If only there was a lighthouse!” he thought. The rest is history.

Not that Hawkins hasn’t been working on other projects. Since completing the lighthouse, he’s produced public sculptures, ex perimental music and films—while incrementally whittling away at several major works. There’s the long-gestated piecemeal actual-size replica of the Hoover Dam. Then there’s the Radical Mountain project, which sometimes manifests as an exercise in so ciological esthetics—basically starting a cult to man an expedition to scale a topographically flat mountain somewhere in Nevada.

All the while he’s kept the Desert Lighthouse burning. As the high desert wind picks up and the sun sinks below the richly mot tled horizon, he takes a last look around. He’ll be returning over the summer, braving the 120ish temperatures to get the light house back in pristine condition. “I’d be really happy to get some kind of art institutional recognition for the Desert Lighthouse,” he admits, “But the really important thing is that Wonderhussy feelsDesertsafe.”Lighthouse: V

pleted to make the lighthouse happen. Oh, and possibly some chartered bus trips from Downtown LA out to the Hinkley site.

Opening reception: Sat., Oct. 1, 3–6 pm

Opposite page: Desert Lighthouse at night , 2017. Above: Makeshift memorial created by visitors at the Desert Lighthouse , 2019. Photos by Daniel Hawkins.

47 Desert Lighthouse , 2017–present. Structural steel, polycarbonate siding, solar powered electrical system, fresnel beacon led lights; 50 x 14 x 14 feet.

Still, it’s just another aspect of the peculiar theatrical narrative layer the DL has generated over its first five years. Several vloggers specializing in oddball travel adventures have stumbled on the site—“Death Valley–based adventuress and explorer” Wonder hussy is a standout. “The beacon from this lighthouse,” she ob serves in her YouTube critique “made me feel weirdly safe.” Other locals have developed theories ranging from UFO landing pad signal to PG&E toxic groundwater plume warning to secret gov ernment marker of where the post-apocalypse coastline will be.

That could all change in October, when PRJCTLA hosts “Des ert Lighthouse: V,” the latest in a series of DL-themed solo shows that include Hawkins’ MFA thesis show at UC Irvine, and a spec tacular museum-scaled show at the UC Riverside Culver Center for the Arts. But DL:V is the first show since the lighthouse was actually erected. Hawkins, a quintessential postmodern multi media artist, will include sculptures, paintings, photographs, film and video, etchings, holograms, modified lighthouse detritus, and two publications—one, a catalog of the show; the other a compendium of the byzantine paperwork that had to be com

At other times Radical Mountain is identified as a fictional mountain-climbing adventure movie—with a seemingly endless proliferation of spinoffs, including a quasi-documentary detailing Hawkins’ extended, absurdist campaign to get actor Val Kilmer involved in the project. In his spare time, he’s collaborated with LA artist Marnie Weber on her last several film projects, and curated her recent survey “Unreal Paradise: Collage Works from 1992 to 2022.”

I am immediately struck by the vibrant colors in your work. You use color in an obscure manner. Can you describe what thought or system goes into choosing colors for a piece?

How does technology play a role in your practice?

A central theme of your work is queer subjectivity. When some one comes across your paintings, how do you hope they inter act with them?

In your early work, you incorporated images from Westerns and action films. Now you draw photos mainly from adult films. What contributed to this shift in subject matter?

LAYERING SUBJECTIVITY

ZOE WALSH: One link between Linda’s practice and my own is that we each construct paintings by stacking discrete layers of paint on top of and adjacent to prior layers, which is an approach that owes a lot to printmaking logic. The gestures of making are distributed through technologies ranging from squeegees to screens and spackle knives. Linda’s playful and rigorous exploration of the plas ticity of acrylic paint is a continued source of inspiration.

One of the guiding color principles for my series of pool paint ings is to work towards the quality of light that exists during the

Q&A with Zoe Walsh

transitional hours between day and night. Those times when the contours of one’s body and the distances between yourself and another are more difficult to discern. A super-bright passage in a painting might not clarify, but dazzle and disorient.

A common thread from my very early work to my current work is my interest in using spectatorship to talk about dis/identifica tion and desire. While pornographic images are interesting to me because they evoke complicated physical questions, I think the more intentional shift I’ve made is towards using material produced by and for queer people. As a result, I am more emo tionally engaged with the complex set of issues that come up over the course of a long project.

I hope that viewers spend time with and get close to my paintings and that each viewer brings their own subjectivity to their experi ence of my work. I believe that the dialogue that art can generate is transformative. Regarding queerness, it’s so rewarding if my paint ings open up space for a viewer to recognize themself in the work.

BY OLIVIA FISHMAN

Zoe Walsh is a Los Angeles–based painter originally from Wash ington D.C. They received their BA from Occidental College and Masters from Yale University. Represented by M+B Gallery, Walsh has exhibited their work in group shows around the world. In 2019, they were nominated for the prestigious Emerging Artist Grant from Rema Hort Mann Foundation and were the Al Held Foundation Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2015. I asked Walsh the following questions to gain a better understanding of their artwork.

ARTILLERY: I know you studied under Linda Bessemer during your time at Occidental College. To me, there is a connection between how each of you experiments with paint. Can you comment on this?

Walsh in their studio, photo by Isabel Osgood-Roach

I use digital technology such as Blender, Photoshop and Illustra tor to develop compositions and then employ screen printing to print the first layers of each painting. My process entails shuttling back and forth between the analog and the digital as I develop each piece with additive layers of stencilled acrylic glazes. The paintings that emerge from this exchange reveal a hybrid form.

“I BELIEVE THAT THE DIALOGUE THAT ART CAN GENERATE IS TRANSFORMATIVE. REGARDING QUEERNESS, IT’S SO REWARDING IF MY PAINTINGS OPEN UP SPACE FOR A VIEWER TO RECOGNIZE THEMSELF IN THE WORK.”

Knuckles on the equinox , 2021, acrylic on canvas-wrapped panel, 48 x 48 inches.

“I first learned about art in a public library,” says the name sake collector Marin over a Zoom call: “It was part of a family assignment.” This new visual “library” resonates with a vibrant urgency unlike any other museum in Southern California. The Cheech—an adjunct of the Riverside Art Museum and housed in an understated mid-century building—outwardly belies the permanent collection and rotating exhibitions that it now hous

CHEECH MARIN’S NEXT MOVE An Explosion of Chicano Art in Riverside

BY WILLIAM MORENO

How apt that the new Cheech Marin Museum for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California should open in a repurposed public library. Libraries are historically accessible spaces for learning and intellectual research. Museums, on the other hand, still struggle to make themselves approachable—not to mention equitable. Not so with The Cheech, as it’s affectionately known.

es. Since its opening it has been hosting 2,000 visitors a day, virtually at capacity Marin, the actor and comedian known for his marijuana pranks in the infamous Cheech & Chong films with former partner Tommy Chong, is animated and enthusiastic during our Zoom call. By the mid-’80s, he tells me, “I was beginning to make money.” The first works he collected were three small paintings by Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz and George Yepes—and the buying continued with a vengeance. Figuration is a hallmark of the collection; he collected what he liked—not as an academic exercise, but rather as an attempt to raise awareness of the Chicano art narrative. Over time his trained eye acquired some masterful works, and the collection now reads like an essential who’s who of Chicano

Above: Joe Peña, 1:15am, Final Stop , 2016. Opposite page: Jeannette Herrera, This is the End , 2013. Images courtesy of the Cheech Marin Collection and Riverside Art Museum.

Herrera’s work This is the End (2013) is, as she comments, “somewhat older, but significant; it was done at a difficult time in my life.” The picture portrays the artist’s imminent marital breakup. Preoccupied and unsettled, it is a tableau of an uncer tain future. Peña spent time in New York working in galleries and was influenced by Modernist inclinations. His work 1:15am, Final Stop (2016) is an atmospheric painting that has a less dramatic backstory than one might assume. “My wife was pregnant, it was late, and she suddenly sent me out for tacos to the local truck. When I arrived, it was shrouded in darkness—as if hover ing in space” says Pena. “It’s important to me to capture these moments of local culture.” The picture is a masterful vignette of mood and light—a kindred spirit of Edward Hopper.

Ever malleable, the definition of Chicano is born out of the activist period of the 1960s. Not confined to California, the movement and concomitant art was also notably manifested in Texas and New Mexico, as well as other states. Scholar and artist Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains observed: “The DNA of the Chicano term—social justice—is still embedded in its meaning and, while there is no conclusive definition, it remains more relevant and expansive than ever. The museum has propelled ‘Chicano’ back into the forefront—ultimately, it’s American art. I think he [Marin] assembled preeminent representations of the genre.” Cheech amplified this vision, concurring, “Each generation builds on the original intent: Latino, Latinx, Chicanx and others.”

artists—admittedly with some gaps. But this doesn’t pretend to be a historical narrative, or an all-encompassing survey of Chicano art. Marin is considered the foremost collector of the genre. He has amassed over 700 works and continues to acquire more.

Artistic Director Maria Esther Fernandez was hired from Northern California’s Triton Museum to head The Cheech’s cu ratorial program. Her plan includes ratcheting up research schol arship, in-depth presentations of solo artists, and establishing an advisory committee to help craft an art-acquisition strategy. In a recent post-opening walk-through, I asked Fernandez what the key objectives were for this new museum: “Our hope is the center will reflect the complexity and richness of the community which has been historically underrepresented in mainstream cultural institutions.”

It’s hard to imagine a more rousing and auspicious museum debut.

Vincent Valdez’ Great Grandfather (1999) is a self-portrait of pensive memories painted in an emerging classical style—using house paint. The artist is foregrounded with the image of his great grandfather in the background surrounded by cultural icons. “My great-grandfather was an artist and an inspiration. I painted this in my junior year at the Rhode Island School of De sign. I was the only Chicano there and this helped me adjust,” says Valdez. These works share moments of human sentience— love, loss, pain, remembrance—the universality of the mortal condition.Aseparate installation of Einar and Jamex De La Torre’s retro spective, guest-curated by the Getty Museum’s Selene Preciado, is a sensational visual spectacle that occupies the second floor, a designated display gallery that will rotate Latino/Chicano artists with the next exhibition by Judithe Hernández.

The inaugural opening has already had an impact on National and International art circles. “The response has been immediate and global,” says Marin. As for his continuing collecting aspira tions, “There are gaps and I want to fix that.”

She has her work cut out for her: raising awareness at a na tional and international level, bringing recognition to work that has so often been ignored. Long overlooked by the traditional academic canon and art gallery consiglieri as “folk or margin al art,” Chicano artists’ profiles and viability will be greatly en hanced by the existence of The Cheech.

The existing Riverside Art Museum had previously mounted an exhibition of Cheech’s collection with a record-breaking pub lic response—something the city and museum leaders, head ed by Executive Director Drew Oberjuerge, wisely took note of. They just happened to have an empty library that needed a new purpose. After some negotiations and an offer to house Cheech’s collection—an offer he couldn’t refuse—a public/ private partnership emerged. With considerable heavy lifting and fundraising, the renovated library was transformed and completed in a record five years; Marin gifting 500 objects from his collection to the center. The city will assist the muse um with ongoing operating funds—the kind of stability that is crucial to a budding institution and support that bodes well for its What’sfuture.clear

as you walk into the museum is its commitment to the Inland Empire’s (as Riverside County and its surroundings are known) local community artists, who are featured in a rotat ing display in the breezy ground-floor atrium. During my visit, multi-generational families crowded around the exhibit and lin gered while discussing the works with respect and admiration. I can’t think of another museum that’s made its commitment so conspicuous and permanent. The museum’s footprint includes rotating galleries dedicated to 95 works from Cheech’s 500-plus gifted collection. Included are well-known artists Vincent Val dez, Carlos Almaraz and Margaret Garcia—and there are many revelations, such as standouts Jeannette Herrera and Joe Peña of Texas and Carlos Puma of Riverside.

ALBERTO LESCAY MERENCIO

Photo Credit: Anabelen Torrelanda

Proyecto OSALON Sep 21 - Nov 30, 2022 For exhibition requests, press and sales related rodneydmillar@gmail.compleaseinquiriescontact

www.lunaanais.com @lunaanaisgallery (323) 474-9319 Pastel in.24x30linen,onmarkerpaintandoil2022,, Luna Anaïs presents a solo exhibition by Daniela García Hamilton Sundays in Lake LA Sept.11–Oct. 30, 2022 Opening Sept 11, 1-8 p.m. Artist Talk Oct 2, 5 p.m. presented at IVAN Gallery 2701 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034 Smithsonian A liate Museum of Latin American Art FROM AUGUST 14, 2022 RETHINKING ESSENTIAL molaa.org This exhibition is in collaboration with The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The educational programming of this exhibition is thanks to the support of the California Arts Council. / Esta exhibición es en colaboración con el Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego. La programación educativa de esta exhibición es gracias al apoyo de California Arts Council. 628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90802

No Ideas but in Things Richard Turner Sept 12 – Nov 19, 2022 Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery M–F 12 – 5PM, Sat 11AM – 4PM Artist reception & catalogue presentation Oct 23 3PM – 7PM Follow the daily evolution of the exhibition at guggenheimgallery.net

1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, pla tonically Asian, platonically a performance art ist, dressed in an all-white so crisp it might be paper, in a great glass box surrounded by a re spectfully quiet audience, surrounded by an un obtrusive low-noise soundtrack, surrounded by an art gallery, painting with a pale wooden-han dled brush. Slowly she’s painting the inside of the glass box white.

10. “I have like thousands of confessions, boxes of them. Like, they’re horrible, I mean like people are talking about like murdering peo ple. Like why do I need that in my house? Do you know what I mean? But it was like I wanted to collect the most I possibly could to develop some understanding of humanity ...I don’t know that I could do these pieces again.”

6. Children and old people using sticks to draw in the sand filling a white frame on a gallery floor. Each drawn line revealing a glow from underneath because the sandbox conceals a lightbox below. On YouTube, we see Kayla in a could-be-couture arrangement of translucent and artful black-and-white fabric kneeling over, and writing in, her own box; then, in another stylishly asymmetrical outfit, talking about heal ing. Cello music.

4. I’m in the back of the Uber, heading up Ver mont, watching her 2017 piece Dear Mother, which is a video-letter to the birth-mother who

11. Something alien and elegant, a figure in a glittering gown, far too tall with a glowing blu ish-pale sphere beneath a veil for a head, hold ing feather fans. There is music from one kind of club, and then a different kind. Before it’s over the creature will reveal itself to be Kayla, again, basically naked. Kayla calls the version of herself who does this “Coco Ono.”

It can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self.

3. Something indescribable. A sculpture, some thing like a volcano of nail polish and something like a universe forming, impossibly glossy, ooz ing, unformed, fountaining, very red over a dry white base. Barigongju Entry Ritual, 2021, un fired clay, acrylic. About the size of a saucepan.

12. “I was like how am I supposed to make ob jects? I have nowhere to put them, I don’t have space to make them ...I found my way into per formance from like stripping and stuff because like I just needed a bag of clothes.”

she never met. Who refused to meet her. I’m crying. Because of a goddamn piece of perfor mance art. On a phone.

8. Kayla in a sky-blue-and-white hanbok framed in front of a window which itself frames a daylist section of a Los Angeles street. Lifting colors from bright upright bottles of yellow, red, pur ple, etc she smears them on plexiglas while the art audience watches her and also the projec tion to her left, showing an abstract film of the painting she paints in real time.

5. “I did a show that Luka Fisher and Tristine Roman curated called ‘A Golden Fool’—the cops came, and everyone ran out. I was naked, running across the street, robe barely hang ing. It was so fun—‘Remember that time that we were in this warehouse—there were people covered in glitter and jewels jacking off in the rafters, it was wild.’”

13. “I just feel like: maybe I want to seduce. So why not say something also?”

13 Ways ofatLookingKaylaBYZAKSMITH DECODER SmithZakbyIllustration

9. Kayla as a sex-nun in latex, crawling, col lecting anonymous confessions on scraps of paper, which become the raw materials for the next piece.

2. “I’ve straight-up given lap dances on a La-ZBoy boy that was duct-taped or like they’d say ‘People were murdered outside yesterday’ and you’re just like ‘…cool?’ Back in the day there was a place in the valley called Bob’s Classy Lady. I mean come on, the name alone—so bad but so great! Sometimes I’m like I think I just worked at these places because—well, besides needing the money there was something relat able for me about it. I was equally attracted and appalled by seedy clubs.”

7. Kayla in nothing but a blonde wig and white underwear, winking over an asymmetrically dropped shoulder back at the audience, in a cellphone photo I’ll draw a picture of. That pic ture will be published in an art book.

With the lack of quality control in the digital age there is no escape from essentially talentless people playing at being artists. Most of them are wasting their time, and everybody else’s, by assuming they have anything of value to contribute. And forget about style or orig inality: that all went out with the manual typewriter. It is now impossible to stop this torrential influx of vanity art and unchecked mediocrity. The doors have been flung open and it’s a free-for-all of col lective narcissism that has spread into the fickle realm of galleries and publishing houses. If one commands enough of a social media presence— if one has enough friends—the powers that be will be much friendlier towards one. I would cite examples of this all-too-pervasive phenomenon but I’m on cordial terms with some of the people whose careers have benefited from it and don’t want to risk upsetting their fragile egos. Time will shake them out. Or will it? Maybe this sorry state of affairs could go on forever. Maybe it could get even worse. There’s no reason to think it won’t. It has been getting worse for years.

“THERE IS NO ESCAPE TALENTLESSESSENTIALLYFROMPEOPLEPLAYINGATBEINGARTISTS”

Stop Being Supportive

BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

It might come as a shock to some young people but there was once a time when not every single person was an artist.

To exist on social media is to exist in a realm of constant unan imous, reciprocal admiration, surrounded by yes-men and women who unreservedly validate one’s aspirations and pretensions. If somebody likes you as a person, or wants you to like them, they like your work. That’s all it takes. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Bad artists always admire each other’s work.”

58 COMMENTARY

What a felicitous turn of events it is that you happen to like the work of all of your friends, and that all of your friends like your work in return. One posts one’s poems, paintings (or, worst of all, one’s photographs) online, one’s friends like them, and this means that one is some sort of artist. The more friends one has, the more of an artist one is.

How are these punishers, pretenders, poetasters and Renais sance dabblers going to realize they’re getting away with murder if nobody ever tells them? On a personal level, even if it is for their own good, it is difficult to criticize the work of an acquaintance whom one likes as a person, who is talentless but essentially harm less. As is the work itself: harmless. These days it often presents itself as being dangerous, subversive, transgressive, etc., but it is completely harmless: Transgressive is the new harmless. Anyway, nobody takes it very seriously, including the artists themselves: the work usually serves only as an occasional cerebral adjunct to the socialArtistslife. that can’t draw or paint, writers that have no command of language, singers who have no voice of their own. That’s the new art world order, and the role of the artist in the digital age should be to take a stand and actively discourage people who (shouldn’t) call themselves artists from producing and disseminating their worth less works. We can all do our part, either by ceasing to produce ourselves, or by discouraging others from doing so. The time has come to Stop being Supportive.

“Dictatorship in the arts, democracy in everything else.”—Dave Godin

People are always talking about “the role of the artist in the digi tal age,” as if it’s an entirely different game these days, and, it’s true, things are very different: The art world has become both less and more competitive now that almost everybody thinks of themselves as being a writer and/or an artist owing to the mass delusion of ar tistic credibility facilitated by the dubious freedoms of the internet.

skinny arms, tall

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A blissful grind along a powdery track, a delivery system into a black hole. The destination lies straight ahead, wrapped in warped warmth, outweighing desire and assuming control. This sinister sweetness nullifies the usual consolations and makes light of agency, so that you’ll go to any length to make weakness a strength; and when life becomes too stark again, and you want to turn the lights down low again, you’ll always go that extra mile to let your willpower crumble into a flaky white pile.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

Poem April 3

The language? Rinse your hands in its shapes, lift up your eyes, accept its disobedience and its habit of separating the human body from the lilacs it desires. And of burning any habit into the present moment.

—JAMES CUSHING

The language you are now reading will be born tomorrow morning when the sun that resides in each one of us turns back into music.

I wonder how Clark’s photo interacts with the other art in your house. Is it next to a family portrait? An abstract painting? A mirror? Is it in the living room, bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen? If you move the Clark photo, shouldn’t you consider moving ev erything else? Maybe it’s time to consider if and how you might rearrange your collection to best shape the conversations you want to have with your grandkids now and in the future. Or don’t change a thing; it’s your house after all, and you get to put what ever art you want in it. If it were me, I’d want to be the badass grandparent with the famous Larry Clark photo, even if it means I have to have some awkward conversations along the way.

Clark’s other photos in this pioneering body of work are much more explicit, including teens shooting up and full-on fucking. The picture you have is comparatively tasteful and far from por nographic. It’s an image that echoes Egon Schiele’s drawings, Manet’s Olympia , and many classical sculptures. I don’t think it’s going to corrupt your grandchildren. It’s art, and they’ll see it as art. If anything, I bet they’ll ask why the car’s backseat has no seat belts.

You and I will be in transit, as usual, rolling along the new roads, practicing our stories in case we’re asked about our adversaries.

Do It Again

60 POEMS

Dear Babs, I follow your column and thought your answer to the question concerning censorship of art in one’s own home for the sake of one’s grandchildren was spot on. I’d like to take this issue a bit further. I own a Larry Clark photo that I proudly display on my walls. It’s the cover of Clark’s Teenage Lust book showing teenagers engaging in sex, with the man’s penis ex posed. I now have young grandchildren and I’m wondering if you think this photo might be too much for them?

ASK BABS

Bad-AssGrandmaArt-Collecting

—A Larry Clark Fan

Dear Larry Clark Fan, Thanks for reading my column (and the compliment). I think your scenario is a bit different because it revolves around a specific work of art, so allow me to elaborate on your description: The untitled photo from 1981 is of a naked couple French kissing in the backseat of a car. The young man’s hand modestly covers the woman’s genitals, and while she does hold his penis, it’s not necessarily erect; her hand covers its shaft, and the camera captures only the tip.

MAX HERTZ

SPY Projects

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December11am,ChristinaGalleryOctober6–9pm,Publicucrarts.ucr.edureceptionSaturday1,2022tourwithFernandezSaturday3,2022 Christina Fernandez Multiple Exposures02.05.202309.10.2022California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS

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Andrea Bowers, Disarm Rapists

Set in the decade prior to the landmark legislation’s birth, other artworks tell Roe’s backstory. The installation Letters to an Army of Three, Displayed (2005), with its 1960s sherbet-hued wallpaper, bliss fully evoked an era of limited options. Through emotionally tinged letters interspersed between the colorful patterns, young women appeal to an activist group to seek illegal abortions. In Make My Story Count, Letters to Planned Parenthood (2011), writers express gratitude for reproductive healthcare, their stories revealing the cruel policies that harmed them.

Warrior,Sexism,”Rapistsillustration,(Original“Disarm/SmashbyBetsy1971) , 2017.

Andrea Bowers’ art embodies a multitude of timely issues. For decades she has amplified causes from human rights to protecting

Andrea Bowers, Letters to an Army of Three , 2005 (still). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

the environment. Activist chants ring throughout her work: as col orful, neon-lit slogans; as huge drawings made of black marker on collaged cardboard inspired by vintage agitprop; as signs held by demonstrators who are singled out from a crowd and drawn small on large paper, encouraging us to see the individual behind the collective; as silence, embodied in a sculpture made with shredded wood from a clearcut forest, gathered after the protests failed.

FEATURED REVIEW

By Anne Martens

Andrea Bowers, My name means future , 2020 (still). Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

In swirls of citrus yellow and lipstick red, a neon sign just in side the entrance proclaimed: My Body My Choice, Her Body Her Choice. The words of protest—framed by recycled cardboard to echo the font’s curvaceous forms—seemed to flash a prescient warning the day the exhibition opened. By the end of the week, Roe vs. Wade was struck dead.

Andrea Bowers Hammer Museum

Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy the Hammer Museum.

Andrea Bowers, Trans Liberation: Beauty in the Street (Johanna Wallace) (in collaboration with Ada Tinnell), 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Draper and the Kamoigne Workshop” is a pho tography exhibition on view at the Getty Museum that chronicles the history of an extraordinary partnership of Black photographers.

It’s astonishing how Bowers can find the perfect visual metaphor and precisely apply it, even across varied subject matter. But the greatest strength of her work is in how she links symbolic imagery to the mythologies of America; all those broken promises of equality and freedom.

Founded in 1972 by Louis Draper, the Kamoigne Workshop was a collab orative comprising African-American photographers. Draper is singled out in the exhibition’s title because he was the founder of the workshop who was able not only to supervise all his colleagues, but to assign to each the project best suited to his talents. He characterized the world in which they were all living as having the room—and a need—for them to work together. Their home base was Harlem, a place that Draper described as “Hot breath streaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.” His urgent view of the workshop’s mission was not just an exclamation but an inspiration.

A similar visual element, razor-wire fencing, re peats across a series of floor-to-ceiling drawings called No Olvidado—Not Forgotten (2010). Only up-close do you realize that the relentless chain-link pattern is comprised of names of migrants who died crossing the US-Mexico border.

“Kamoigne” is word drawn from Kikuyu, a native language of Kenya. Literally translated, the word means “a group of people acting together.” At the end of the workshop’s first year, an annual portfolio was published, which became a tradition. One of these even caught the attention of Henri Cartier Bresson, a photographer who had also been a founder of the co-operative for photographers called Magnum. The influence both he and Magnum had on the Kamoinge photographers can be seen here and there in mid-1960s photographs by Draper and some of the others.

67 REVIEWS

Barboza, Kamoinge Group Portrait, 1973.

Bowers’ art speaks both subtly and loudly. Sub tle, in the ways she communicates through activism, as an observer. Loud, because through her practice, she hands over the proverbial megaphone to those who are outspoken. This is evident in videos she makes about activists she admires, like forest de fender John Quigley, whose tree-occupying tactics convinced Bowers to join in; and Indigenous rights activist Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Stand ing Rock Sioux tribe, whose youth and ebullience belie a determination to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. One understands how personalities shape movements.Bowersis fascinated by women activists of today and in history. Her female subjects are often larger than life—literally. There’s Betsy Warrior, a 1970s activist against domestic violence, whose own art work of a young woman performing a kick boxing move inspired Bowers’ depiction of her in Disarm Rapists (2017). There’s a series of photographs of trans women, also shown in superhero mode. In Trans Liberation, Beauty in the Street (Johanna Wal lace) (2016), a dark-haired woman strides toward the camera in bright red shoes, framed by palm trees and dramatic light. It takes a moment to notice the brick in her

Sometimeshand.Bowers employs “women’s work” materials, like fabric, to make a point. Soft Blockade (Feminist Blockade) (2004) is a quilt with a chainlink fence pattern stitched across it. In the exhibi tion it hung like a barricade between galleries. The piece evokes civil-disobedience tactics—protestors interlocking bodies as a means to resist and dis rupt—but also the barriers that shut them out from contested sites.

DeCarava had been the most productive member of the workshop after Draper himself in the early days, so Draper tried hard to talk him out of his resignation. But DeCarava wouldn’t budge. The reason was that being a re porter with a camera didn’t permit him to fulfill his true ambition, which was to be an artist. Though he and Draper remained friends, DeCarava became the widely respected and inventive artist he had always dreamed of being.

In My Name Means Future (2020), we see Tokata Iron Eyes in the land of her ancestors. We look down from the sky in an overhead tracking shot and watch herds of buffalo sweep across grasslands, the scene ending with a single, standing beast. In Bowers’ art, we’re repeatedly reminded of what’s lost, but also what’s worth fighting for, even when the odds are stacked.

That said, Draper and the members of the workshop all stayed close to home with photography of life as lived by Blacks. Their work (mainly blackand-white prints) ranged from candid shots of the ever-flowing life on the streets to the stilled presence of a portrait photograph. But despite the success that Draper had earning the trust and rewarding the ambition of the workshop’s members, there was one prominent exception—Roy DeCarva.

Over time the purpose of the Kamoinge Workshop shifted. In 1992, a new generation with different backgrounds were enlarging the way photog raphy was represented. While Draper remained a force in the organization he had founded, he also yielded recognition to this new generation whose members were college-educated and whose goals were more aesthetic than editorial. One result was that the word “workshop” was dropped from the organization’s name. By then, Draper’s own work in the medium had expanded in ways that encouraged him to welcome what the organization he had founded was to be called.

Working Together The Getty Center

By Colin “WorkingWesterbeckTogether:Louis

Using a camera and a hand scanner, Willhide captures the colors, shapes and textures of the flowers and then digitally combines them, breaking them apart, trac ing, extending and reshaping their various parts. These fragments are placed into unrecognizable envi ronments filled with ambiguous shadows and heightened colors that suggest undersea worlds or ce lestial expanses. Her constructed images are dynamic compositions that interweave actual flowers with facsimiles. The inevitability of wilt and decay of the real, is emphasized through her manipulations as the plants are reduced to off-colored pixels.

By Jody Zellen

Also included are some of the colorful and crudely lettered text works on paper for which the artist is best known. They are mounted daintily, almost as an afterthought, and seem embarrassed by the lack of subtlety and depth in the rest of the exhibition. Some of them are missing, leaving only an illuminated empty bracket on the gallery wall; a deliberate escape should be presumed. The exhibition’s entry work is a pedestal with a Plexiglas box atop it, stickered carelessly with saran wrap, giving it the look of a Halloween decoration. Inside the box is a schematic of the sheds. Its revelatory dimensions add nothing to the exhibition.

Melanie Willhide Von Lintel Gallery

The flowers within Thread the Dews all Night (2022) and Whether by Day Abducted (2021) have been transformed into seductive, albeit uncharacteristic shapes and colors that reference natural forms abstracted through Willhide’s skilled digital manipulations. She carefully layers what appear to be painted gestures with black shadows as well as delicately traced lines. The floral forms in Shroud of Stars (2021) have been transformed into flat areas of color, again emphasizing the abstracted aspects of the composition. In the center of The Quiet Persistent Rain (2022), it is possible to make out the delicate forms of the light purple/pink flower with its translucent white pistil. In this image she surrounds the original with enlarge ments of different opacities to create a sea of floating flower parts combined with delicate white outlines of the plants, all atop an opaque dark gray background.

Pope.L Vielmetter Los Angeles

In 2011, Melanie Willhide experienced the theft of her computer and back-up drives. Once these items were recovered, she discov ered her files had been corrupted. Rather than abort the project she was working on, she embraced the glitches now embedded in her images and used these distortions and fractures as the basis for a new body of work that engaged with the space between abstraction and representation. In her latest digital images, “Elegy of the Gar den” she continues these investi gations, now using flowers, some real, others artificial, to comment on climate change and the pend ing environmental crisis.

In Dull Drought Distanced Dear (2020) Willhide uses faux flow ers. This distorted arrangement sits above a deep gray background surrounded by vertical streaks that suggest movement, in addition to red/green/blue and cyan/magenta/yellow artifacts that invade the composition and as digital glitches. While the flowers in Dull Drought Distanced Dear are obviously artificial, the white petals and purple buds with differently hued green stems in Our Sighs Into Nothingness (2020) are combined to create a vertiginous landscape that extends both horizontally and vertically across the composition like an alien reflection in murky waters. The disjointed flowers feel both drawn and blown apart as they hover in digitized space.

In Willhide’s digital constructions, the more one looks, the more one sees. These photographs are not the expected depictions of flowers in nature, rather they suggest rogue environments that have undergone perplexing transformations. Though beautiful, they allude to seemingly inevitable climate dangers as the artist infuses the work with an uncanny and unsettling aura. Within her “Elegy of the Garden,” there is both hope and foreboding.

Pope.L, Black Factory Sainsbury’s Bean Can Under Pressure #1 , 2005–20. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles.

The former beating heart of this sideshow, a single final shanty, seemingly dismembered, appears as a wizard’s rubbish-strewn lair, exploded and abandoned until so much byzantine effort is realized as a fool’s errand. The projector is feathered with Post-it notes and stands outside the three-walled open shack like a broken-down kinetoscope; vinyl tubing lies on the floor. The rubber-masked actors, the bee-keeper-suited ex perimenter, the fortissimo audio, are all more than a viewer should be forced to endure. But there’s more, in the form of beans: lowpriced Sainsbury baked beans.These beans litter the gallery walls as well as the huts and bear the signature and seal of the artist. Their vitrines—resembling minia ture bank vaults—are spot lit, as if ready for their closeup. If so, much patience will be required. Their shape has a familiarity, much like the “Break glass in case of fire” alarms that once dotted the halls of mid dle schools. The cans are misshapen, suggestive of spoilage, as if their gas eous interior breakdown threatens to overwhelm their metal seals and escape in a vitrine-soil ing explosion. Such a result would have been welcome, giving some life and interest to the repetitive and underwhelming array.

This edition of Pope.L ’s thinning theatrics presents a series of immaculate white shacks, their size of a two-holer, containing a car peted bench, where viewers may test the limitations of their endur ance. An unsuspecting and luckless couple may sit together in one of these dark and claustrophobic huts and view a bizarre rendition of themselves that makes Edward Albee’s Martha and George seem frothier than Ozzie and Harriet. It will leave the viewers nonplussed and ears aching, for the videos presented in these cramped and darkened sheds are willfully eccentric and the audio overwhelmingly loud. The back of the shacks reveals the black mechanical side of the video monitors. This aspect is far more peculiar, in its technical necessity, and far more intriguing than the hut and the films shown within. The rear end of a TV is the hands-down winner in the exhibi tion, in that it retains mystery and is not overbaked.

Melanie Willhide, This Quiet Persistent Rain , 2021, Archival Pigment Print. Courtesy Von Lintel Gallery.

REVIEWS

By Max King Cap

The gesture here may be both artist’s and subject’s. Consider a pair of mascaraed shut eyes (in Pink Dog) worked over as if for a fashion runway, the charcoal bonbon of a nose wedged be tween those waves of white fur and an embankment of paws. There are suggestions of that other Jensen in a flourish of pale pink (like a ghosted bird) scraped away from the deeper rose-amber of the background. Blue Dog takes a slightly more transitional approach, the dog’s undercarriage lost between crisscrossing brushstrokes scarcely differentiated from the blue surround, the eye a mere slit echoing figures in Jensen’s more straightforwardly abstract work. That ‘slit’ recurs else where—most prominently in one of two much larger (by at least 30 inches in height and 20 in width), almost forbidding works with the presence of bronze doors (both Untitled). The seams are pronounced in both, but fewer in the more deeply coppery of the two, where the slit intrudes from the left like a blade. In its darker companion, the seams are em bossed-welded into a cage-like grid, as if in black cast iron. Heavy vertical brushstrokes of crimson fingers or flames seem to lick at the grid as if from within this cage, with the associations one would expect given the state of the world.

Sergej Jensen Regen Projects

Here are Augustus of Prima Porta, once supine, now cast in an impossible twisted yoga-like pose; Venus and Amor, with Venus’ beauty hidden, face pressed down, as if mourning, comforted by Amor. Even in what appears the depth of despair, her perfect fingers still clutch her apple. David is likewise bent and twisted, face cast down, unready to take on Goliath. Rock and rope remain in hand but clutched now like a child’s blanket. Cupid Triumphant is no longer so, wings compressed, turned inward, unavailable for flight. He is essentially standing on his head, bent double like a crushed butterfly. Apollo of Belvedere is likewise in a convoluted state, foot and hand nearly parallel.

Adam Parker Smith

By Genie Davis

The Hole LA

By Ezrha Jean Black

forms. Making these figures vulnerable allows the viewer to witness them more personally, to realize that even within their perfection there is struggle, and alongside their strength is the weakness of being alive. Smith takes these classic forms and locates them in our relatable present.

In his current show, “The Adult Light,” Sergej Jensen seems intent upon demonstrating his capacity for conventional, gestural painting (and for that matter, chromatics), as well as the subtle auto-construc tions of stitched and collaged fabrics and pigments he is already known for, though he does this (naturally) in a slightly perverse way. The viewer was immediately confronted with two similarly scaled oil paintings on linen (as distinct from the sewn linen—where an approximate grid of irregular fragments of linen or other fabrics are stitched together in some fashion to construct the finished support). Here, Jensen builds up thick brushstrokes of variously pale or bright, light or leaden hues into furry textured specimens we may be per suaded are a Pink Dog (all works 2022) and Blue Dog. The subject simply confirms the fact of the painting-image.

On more familiar terrain—here, a ‘ghosted’, vaguely architectural silhouette (a UV-printed image) in eliding shades of rose, lavender and mauve, fading behind a scrim of white, Jensen conveys a sense of impatience with his own repertoire of both subject and technique, titling the work, Inachevé—less a description of its finished or un finished state than a suggestion of what lies beyond it. As it turns out, that’s a lot. Jensen moves between dense, richly pigmented, almost neo-expressionist studies, to Rymanesque maximal-mini malist (e.g., what looks like a bone-scan sunk into roughly gridded white stippled linen with glimmers of rose or mauve underpainting), to a slightly Richteresque Abstraktes Bild progression of ridges and washes in half-tone grays and whites. For several of the works, the

In his current exhibition, the artist’s fifth at this gallery, Adam Parker Smith employs classical sculptural forms in a fresh new way, featuring six large sculptures, approximately 35-feet or one cubit diameter.Working in white Carrara marble on a stone pedestal, Smith’s fig ures (all works 2022) are resting, seated or standing, but regardless of position, startlingly compressed. The result is beautiful, strange and compelling work that resonates with our fraught present times. Beset by climate change, wars, inflation and other global problems, as well as America’s innate political and cultural stressors, a viewer might well feel as if the weight of the world was compressing body and soul much as these images are constrained.

Sergej Jensen, Pink Dog , 2022. Photo by Sergej Jensen, Courtesy Regen Projects.

Courtesy of The Hole L.A.

REVIEWS

Orchestrated and realized as a team effort, Smith conducted this grand rendition working with master carvers, a robot and museum digital research teams. The artist used 3D modeling programs to compress and recreate Hellenic and Baroque sculpture compacted into a cube. This work is homage and emotional statement; where once fine figures stood proud or reclined at ease, these same re shaped figures are confined, changed, altered, and thus redefined.

These beautifully rendered figures are forced to fit in the marble boxes they were chiseled from. They amuse and confound, requiring the viewer to decipher not just what figures they are reimagined from, but to become reacquainted with their characters. One cannot view fearless David in quite the same way after seeing him here, in his redefined, agonizingly twisted shape. If this is what we have made of our heroes, our gods long past, what are we to make of ourselves, our futures? For Smith, the humor inherent in reshap ing takes precedence over angst and cultural anxiety. Having previously used resin and pasta noodles to reconfigure Greek urns and Meissen vases, his true pur pose is engaging viewers to reconsider how they look at these classic beautifullyanointedwithadoreseefiguressuggests,ingsculptureswe’veandRemovingforms.thedistancereverencewithwhichendowedtheseovertime,crushitastheexhibitiontitlewecanviewthemorepersonally,theminafreshlight,notthehighregardwhichtheyhavebeenbutrathertheirrealistichuman

Adam Parker Smith, Apollo of Belvedere , 2022.

Having earned BA and MA degrees in philosophy in his youth, Svenningsen approaches painting much like a philosopher would, by asking questions. Specifically, his position is that our universe is composed of more that we don’t know than that we do know, and he represents this idea metaphorically or allegorically by making works that appear in some way illogical or quixotic. In Structure (1985), the earliest painting of the series, three details suggest that there is more than meets the eye and thus impel us to want to know more. In the center of the compo sition, the continuity of a purple cage-like structure is broken where a connecting strip has either come loose or was never finished. In the lower background, light visible through a pointed arch-shaped crevice in the wall suggests that some thing mystical or ritualistic is occurring behind it, while a similar effect is achieved at the top of the painting by the presence of a hang ing thread that simulates lightning.Inagroup of shaped paintings from 1986, Sven ningsen forsakes elabo rate details in favor of a more minimal approach, with three of the paintings themselves trapezoidal and another resembling an hourglass. In shaping the paintings as such, Svenningsen transforms each into an artifact from an unknown time or place. For the two examples painted in color, he employs the greens and oranges of popsicles or Kool-Aid, causing the contents of their interiors to seem liquefied. In the orange version, a caged funnel suggests a scientific experiment is taking place.

artist identifies the re-sewn linen as “moneybags.” Without verifi cation, it occurred to me that Rihanna (a photograph from one of her concerts provides the image for one of the paintings) would appreciate the specificity.

The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose non-physical indefinability is connected, although unclearly.

Theodore Svenningsen Torrance Art Museum

The connection between these brightly lit works and these much broader themes is particularly evident in one work; it is in a smaller gallery and illuminated by black light. The fluorescent paintings that are activated in the space are illustrations of the brain, or stud ies for the installation. Just inside the entrance, one of the works shows fragments cut from newspapers and collaged alongside the glowing patches of paint. Political figures and writing about

Warren Neidich Museum of Neon Art by John David O’Brien

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Warren Neidich, “The Brain Without Organs: Aporia of Care,” detail, 2022. Image courtesy of the Museum of Neon Art. .

The chart of line drawings on the wall function as a kind of glossary or index. They have been identified by the artist, Warren Neidich, as correspond ing to the shapes mapping the folds on the outer layer of the brain. These glyphs, quasi-let ters and jotted lines are used in combinations both painted and in the form of neon lights as a kind of nonliteral explora tion of the mind as transcribed brain lines. The rationale for creating these installations and paintings goes far beyond their physical presence, reaching out to induce the viewer to consider philosophical and conceptual questions about the accumula tion of information and use of that accumulation by capitalism. Sometimes the connection is lit erally beyond a viewer’s theoretic grasp, yet the experience of the exhibition is intense.

By David S. Rubin

As reflections of the instability of the present-day zeitgeist, the newest black-and-white paintings offer a particularly effective wake

Since 1985, Theodore Svenningsen has been working sporadical ly on “Primitive Structures,” an ongoing series of paintings, mostly black and white, that are seductive at surface level, yet purposefully unsettling upon closer inspection. When viewing the 12 works from the 36-year survey at the Torrance Art Museum, we are immediately drawn into each composition by quiet bursts of atmospheric light filled with tiny flecks of paint that suggest mist, fog, smoke or water, the presence of which serves to establish a mood of mystery and intrigue. Within these enigmatic settings, Svenningsen has staged a variety of ominous scenarios, most of which are seen behind ar chitectural grids that bar us from entrance and thereby turn us into witnesses rather than participants. In some examples we seem to have stumbled upon strange apparitions of floating objects or anthropomorphic statues, while others provide encounters with abandoned ritualistic structures, the most recent of which house volcano-like eruptions.

Neon light and color has always existed in darkness. The way it pierces the dark with its deeply saturated colors is shocking yet physically engaging. Neon is normally viewed in animated progres sion, and the installations in the exhibitions avail themselves of lights flickering both on and off, and multiple reflections of those lights in mirrored surfaces, as well as light moving inside the glass tubing to ensnare the viewer’s attention.

The hanging sculpture Brain Without Organs (all works undated) is comprised of white neon tubing that mimics the folds on the outer layer of the brain. These sulci, grooves and gyri flicker, illuminated in a space containing stenciled words and reflective walls. The words are neologisms that range from relatively comprehensible to less decipherable. It is through this language that the artist brings the viewer into contact with the larger picture which has been dubbed by the artist, neuroaesthetics. This approach works with the accel eration of information technology that is pumped into our mind through our eyes, and the artist wants us to consider how that effects the brain development.

up call. Painted in 2021 during Covid lockdown, The Lighted Tower and The Lighted Structure both contain a central image of a conical tower within which an explosive emulsion is tumultuously rumbling as its fumes permeate their surrounding environments. In the latter, the turbulence is enveloped by a petrified forest of brittle vegeta tion stripped bare, a haunting reminder of current threats posed by climate change, political unrest and constantly mutating viruses.

Theodore Svenningsen, Structure , 1985. Courtesy of the artist.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of John Altoon, who in many ways is the star of the show. Known for his large gesture paintings, particularly from the “Ocean Park” series, Altoon was a consummate draftsman, able to support himself through illustration, and his prodigious drawing skills can be seen in the many arresting works on paper in the exhibition. Jim’s Fancy (1966), a wacky, spirited work in airbrushed watercolor and ink, conjures the bright light of SoCal, as well as links to surrealist automatic drawings.

Frank Lobdell (American, 1921–2013), Figure Drawing Series No. 33 , 1966. Courtesy Norton Simon Museum.

Russell Crotty, NOCTURNES: Refrains from the Backcountry, 2022, installation view. Courtesy the artist.

Richard Diebenkorn, who like Altoon was a very accomplished draftsman, is represented by two large oil paintings, but it is the small sketchbook paintings that are such a delight in this show.

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Russell Crotty Porch Gallery Ojai

The exhibition was orga nized by Chief Curator Emily Talbot, who makes the pertinent point that these artists did not completely reject figuration for abstraction but “instead they forged a productive dialogue between the two modes.” Despite the pre

A myriad of unbound sketchbook pages are shown in frames and on pedestals in sheets of plexi; the formal inventiveness and extemporaneous nature of the small works makes for a compel ling compendium that benefits from being able to be seen as a

Alternate Realities Norton Simon Museum

The writing is nearly always an element of texture, encapsulating the geological surfaces upon which the viewer stands, in the picto rial space and in the world. Unique equatorial ridgelines divide the spheres roughly in half, at the horizon; bands of crepuscular light peek from behind the crags, launching upward toward a vaulted sky populated with long-studied astronomy, organic but intentional. Receding stacks of hills and mountains in incremental tones and hues create space and scale between the viewer and the distances. It’s impossible to ever see these drawings in their entirety at once; you must move, to be in motion, to, in fact, orbit them, mimicking the gliding tracks of heavenly bodies themselves.

By David DiMichele

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vailing formalist rhetoric about “pure” painting from the 1950s and ’60s, this dialogue seems to have produced some of the most en during art of the period, as evidenced by this handsome exhibition.

Crotty’s drawing style itself is an impossible amalgamation of unfathomable thousands of flicking strokes of ink, the subtle hombres of color radiating, like the light, from prepared gouache grounds. The mark-making is thick and thin and layered like the terrain itself, evocative, optically onomatopoeic. In the case of the spheres, the whole of the scene is executed after the paper has been mounted, so that the drawing takes place on the globe, taking its curvature into account, and thus is at one with the orb and sits comfortably on its surface like a skin or the weather. A nocturne is a study of night built from swells of repetition and contrast; it’s a dreamy, pensive form of music — in this case, literally the music of the spheres.

The handwriting is a visual de vice of drawing, its tight places and wide-open spindly architec tures create and frame moments of colored grounds, which are the ground. The scrawl in Extreme High Desert Boulder Problems (2022, 12-inch diameter; all works: ink and gouache on paper on fi berglass sphere,) endlessly repeats its eponym, like a mantra or mad man’s obsession; its depiction of the landscape contains the widest variations in color, brightness and boulder contour. Far North (2011–22, 24-inch diameter) offers a litany of things that are different, unique or absent about the top of the world — “doomsday preppers, enterprising clam-diggers, seaweed chaos, a flannel paradise, mill towns, fog and rain, more coffee, few postmodern critics.” Some of it is outright funny, anecdotal almost, clearly culled from direct observation; more often it’s semi-obscure and delicately emblem atic, like poetry.

politics are contrasted by the quality of the patches laid out almost like a swatch sampler. It is the most overt attempt in the exhibition to directly correlate the physicality of the brain and thoughts that include politics. It is also prophetic, the link is readily apparent but defies interpretation.

“Alternate Realities” at the Norton Simon Museum presents the work of four California painters from the mid-20th century: John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and Emerson Woelffer. These artists formed part of the California version of Abstract Expressionism, a New York-based movement that had connections to art in other locations. While similarities to the New York painters abound, it is really the differences that stand out in this exhibition. The work of the west coast painters is characterized by a lightness, lyricism and playfulness that is often not evident in their New York counterparts.

group.Sharing the center gallery with Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell is the most “controlled” expressionist in the group. Lobdell’s work, represented mainly by lithographs and one large canvas, seems somewhat against the grain of the more spontaneous work of the other artists. Yet the processes evident in the surfaces of the finished prints betray an inter est in the “life of the artwork” aspect in common with the otherLastly,artists.Emerson Woelffer shines as perhaps the most contemporary looking artist in the show. Also represented mainly by prints, Woelffer’s comparatively minimalist works have more in common with the work of Ellsworth Kel ly than with the gestures and mark makings of the Abstract Expressionists. The flatness, simplicity and even the seem ingly torn edges also suggest the late work of Henri Matisse, surely a strong influence on all the artists exhibited.

Works on paper by Russell Crotty are a mix of travel journals, celestial cartography, landscape sketches, stream of conscious ness narration, auric cross-hatched impressionism, and sculp tural installation. Their palette is that of desert and the night; their imagery of constellations and rock formations are those of both the world and the imagination. In both long works on paper that unfurl in scrolls and in suspended spherical drawings, “NOCTURNES: Refrains from the Backcountry” continues and expands Crotty’s hybrid interest in the phenomenology and inter pretation of the natural world.

Tableaux Vivants BY SKOT ARMSTRONG BUNKER VISION Maestà, La Passion du Christ , 2015

The Maesta by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1308) is a giant 26-panel altarpiece that por trays the passion of Christ from the entrance of Jerusalem to the road to Emmaus. Any sin gle panel of this work could make for a full evening of Tab leaux. The filmmaker recreated the background of each panel on stand-alone sets reminis cent of Japanese screens. The sets are stitched together dig itally. Sometimes people will move from one set to another, and in other cases they will vanish when they walk out of the frame. The cast is attired simply in vividly colored tights and black socks, simple tunics and carefully draped pieces of fabric. These actually cause them to seem less three-dimensional against the gilded backdrops. The way that the action moves from one panel to the next might bring to mind players on a board game. By way of anchor ing the action, two characters spend the movie in the upper two right hand panels building what ap pears to be a tomb. Characters will fill a panel with action that looks like a scene being naturalistically acted out. When they reach the moment where the figures match those in the painting, they all freeze in place. Then they carry on the rest of the scene that leads to the next panel.

Back in the days before television, radio and mov ies, a popular form of entertainment was the Tab leau Vivant. People would pose in costumes along side elaborate props to reenact historical events, or to mimic paintings and statues. If you have ever encountered the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, you have witnessed the modern-day ver sion. Tableaux Vivants offered a way for people to be onstage without any special talents or having to learn any lines. Over the years films have often referenced paintings, at times only subtly, where it may or may not be intended for viewers to notice. Andy Guerif’s 2015 film Maesta La Passion du Christ takes this concept to the next level.

Once all of the frames have filled and emptied, we are treated to a final look, with all of the pan els filled with people interacting, and then frozen in unison. This bookends nicely with the opening scene which focuses on the single crucifixion pan el. It is fully acted out before the title appears. In addition to its function as a storytelling device, it gives us a closer look at the details that create the illusion that this is a painting come to life. Without seeing this close-up, look at the details that give the illusion of a painting; one might conclude that what we are watching is some interesting CGI. The preci sion of the choreography that allows the camera to freeze on a still shot without carefully posing each cast member to match the painting makes what you see look deceptively simple and natural. This would work beautifully as a gallery installation. Watch it on the biggest screen that you have access to.

Collidoscope

was developed in partnership between The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino. This exhibition received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. Additional support provided by: Cal Humanities, Assemblymember Jose Medina, and Unidos. Image: Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Oxymodern, 2002 Part of The Cheech Marin Collection Image: Frank Romero, The Arrest of the Paleteros, 1996 Part of The Cheech Marin Collection This exhibition is made possible in part by: Unidos June 18, 2022–January 22, 2023 Cheech Collects June 18, 2022–June 18, 2023 The Cheech Center opens June 18, 2022. Purchase your tickets at www.thecheechcenter.org.

UNSCENESIGHTSREGAN’SJOLARA CAPasadena,Museum,SimonNortonNails,RedwithWorkerBoothInformation 2022,

Home to LA Artists Since 1993. Now Accepting 2023 Membership taggallery.net/membershipApplications. TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.297.3061 • taggallery.net • @taggallery

November 12, 2022–April 9, 2023

Art 13

Get ready for the big 2022 Fall art season. This is traditionally the biggest show of any other time in the art world where most galleries put their best foot forward with their September and October exhibitions. We’ve selected a few highlights coming this Fall in Southern California.

November 6, 2022–April 30, 2023

October 8, 2022–October 1, 2023

Is Mine

Orange County Museum of Women

Judith F. Baca: World Wall

September 9, 2022–February 19, 2023

The Gee’sHuntingtonBend:Shared Legacy

The InWilliamBroadKentridge:PraiseofShadows

September 17, 2022–September 4, 2023

Hammer Museum Bob Thompson: This House

October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023

FALL 2022 PREVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los HenryAngelesTaylor: B Side

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

September 15, 2022–January 29, 2023

Nancy Holt: Locating Perception

Cindy Sherman: 1977–1982

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape Of This Problem?

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

August 2–October 30

Roberts KehindeProjectsWiley

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla

TBD

October 27–December 30

USC Fisher Museum of Art

October 28, 2022–January 14, 2023

Henry Taylor, Cora, (cornbread) , 2008, acrylic on canvas, 62 5/8 x 49 7/8 x 3 1/8 inches; courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; photo by Jeff McLane. Cindy Sherman, Untitled , 1981,chromogenic color print, 24 x 48 inches; © Cindy Sherman, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Ed Ruscha, Annie , 1965, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches; collection of Orange County Museum of Art, © Ed Ruscha. William Kentridge, Drawing for the film Other Faces , 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 221⁄2 x 31 inches; courtesy The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Loretta Pettway, Remember Me , 2007, color softground and hardground etching with aquatint and spitbite aquatint, 28 3/4 × 28 3/4 inches; courtesy The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Bob Thompson, Bird Party , 1961, oil on canvas, 54 3/8 × 74 1/4 inches; collection of the Rhythm Trust. © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York. Cy Twombly, Head of Emperor Marcus Aurelius , Roman,about 161–180 CE, marble, 19 5/16 x 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 inches; collection of Twombly Family, Rome; photo by Alessandro Vasari.

The Getty Center

September 6–December 23

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

Alexis Smith: The American Way

Sprüth Magers

OCTOBER 15 & 16 A FREE EVENT! Exceptional Art in its 49th Year | Food Trucks | Wine & Beer Garden 225 artists on 4 blocks in Beverly Gardens Park 1300 Park Way, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Beverly Hills Art Show FOR MORE INFORMATION: 310 285 6830 | beverlyhills.org/artshow #bhartshow #bhartsandculture

August 23, 2022–January 8, 2023 CONSTRUCT. ERASE. REPEAT. REINVENTING THE AMERICAS ´

Image: The Celebration of the Lizard (detail), 2022. Denilson Baniwa (Amazonian and Brazilian, b. 1984). Digital intervention on “Columnam à Praefecto Prima Navigatione Locatam Venerantur Floridenses” (Column in Honor of the First Voyage to Florida), from Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (French, ca. 1533–before 1588), Brevis Narratio Eorum Quae in Florida Americæ Provincia Gallis Acciderunt (Frankfurt, 1591), pl. 8. Getty Research Institute, 87-B24110. Courtesy the artist. Text and design © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust

Featuring European illustrations and prints from the 16th to 19th centuries and artistic interventions by Denilson Baniwa, an Indigenous contemporary artist, this exhibition counters the European views that shaped the image of the American continents.

Artillery Sept-Oct 2022, Volume 17, Issue 1

Articles inside

BUNKER VISION: Tableaux Vivants - by skot armstrong

ART BRIEF: Fake Basquiats? - by stephen j. goldberg, esq

DECODER: Always About Kayla - by zak smith

The Cheech - by william moreno

Zoe Walsh - by olivia fishman

Mark Steven Greenfield - by clayton campbell

Daniel Hawkins - by doug harvey

Njideka Akunyili Crosby - by annabel keenan

THE DIGITAL: Epic AR Murals - by seth hawkins