Artillery, Issue 1, Volume 18, 2023

Systems of Power

Patrick Martinez. Weeping Warrior, 2022. Stucco, neon, mean streak, ceramic, acrylic paint, spray paint, latex house paint, banner tarp, rope, stucco patch, ceramic tile, tile adhesive, engraved mirror and LED signs on panel. The Broad Art Foundation, © Patrick Martinez

June harwood paintings

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

June Harwood Untitled, Loop series, 1966. Pomona College Collection. Gift of the June Harwood Charitable Trust. © June Harwood Charitable Trust.

Joey Terrill, Painted by Her Brother, 1983 (detail). Acrylic on canvas. Frame 25¼ × 31¼ in. (64.1 × 79.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon

Theo Ehret (1920-2012), Mil Máscaras and Ernie Ladd at the Olympic Auditorium, c.1970s, black and white photograph, courtesy of Theo Ehret Estate©Theo Ehret Estate. Used with permission, all rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME 18, ISSUE 1, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2023

Systems of Power

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

ON THE COVER: Martine Syms, still from i am wise enough to die things go, 2023, actress

Leslie Bamou, © Martine Syms, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. • OPPOSITE PAGE, clockwise from top left: Malka Germania; Andy Warhol’s Prince screenprint for Vanity Fair; Mercedes Dorame, installation; Fin Simonetti, My Volition 6, 2021, Photo: Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist; Mònica Subidé, The yellow room, 2023. © Mònica Subidé. Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery. Reginald Dwayne Betts, © Mamadi Doumbouya; Glenn Kaino, still from The Store, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery; still from i am wise enough to die things go, 2023.

FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader,

Seventeen years—that’s a long time. Most relationships don’t last that long. That number has now outlived all my other jobs; I’m referring to my relationship with Artillery. I started this magazine with my late husband in 2006, who warned me: Once you begin, you can’t go back. Boy, was he right about that. I can’t call in sick, never take a vacation or even a personal day during deadline. This is one of the most committed relationships in my life.

Even though it’s a huge responsibility, like any relationship, things can change throughout the years. Hopefully one improves with age, develops other new relationships, changes one’s look—maybe even get a facelift? (We are in Hollywood!) Well, it seemed like it was time for that makeover, and you’ve probably noticed right away that this editor’s letter looks different. Keep turning the pages (after you’ve read my letter!) and you’ll see our splendid new redesign throughout the entire magazine. Creative Director Bill Smith headed the new look and did a great job, along with designer Dave Shulman. They put in long hours in collaboration with Publisher Alex Garner and me. We’ve changed our body text, hopefully for more legibility, and added some new subtle bells and whistles. We’ve expanded our layouts to highlight more visuals—we are an art magazine, after all.

Besides the new look, we’ve added a new column, “Peer Review,” which looks at the practices of two artists. In each issue, a contributor will invite an artist whose work they admire to talk about the work of another artist, one of their peers, that they are drawn to. For this issue, Alex asked New York–based artist Fin Simonetti to participate, and she chose Ambera Wellmann, who recently had a show in Turin. Be sure to check out Simonetti’s impressive marble sculptures and stained-glass works in an upcoming show in Los Angeles this fall.

Our theme, Systems of Power, features artists whose works are politically and socially engaging, questioning and challenging the system. Can art change anything? This has been an ongoing discussion in Artillery since day one, and by now it has almost become a rhetorical question. New contributor Cat Kron talks with Martine Syms about her autobiographical films. Longtime contributor Christopher Michno writes about artists who deal with the environment, specifically climate change. East Coast reviewer Sarah Sargent gets her hands on the powerful book Redaction, co-authored by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts, both of whom are prepared to take on the systemic racism in our penal system. And Bianca Collins talks with Indigenous artist Mercedes Dorame about her latest installation at the Getty Center.

We hope you’ll enjoy our September issue as we celebrate our 17th anniversary, with a new look and our stalwart regulars mixed in with new writers and reviewers. It seems hard to believe we’ve been around this long, but I guess some things never grow old.

Alex Garner is a writer, editor and the new publisher of Artillery. A former reviews editor at Artforum, she also previously worked in the publication’s production and archival departments. For the MoMA’s expansion, she worked on the wall texts for the new galleries as an editor. She is writing an online weekly pick, “Publisher’s Eye” for Artillery on the LA art shows that stand out to her.

Cat Kron is a Los Angeles–based writer, editor and cultural critic whose work foregrounds the practices of female artists. In her essays and criticism, she looks at the cultural, contextual, and personal subtexts that underpin contemporary artworks. She has published monographs on the artists Ellen Brooks, Suellen Rocca, and Maija Peeples-Bright, and is working on her first novel.

Christopher Michno is an art and culture writer. His work has appeared in Artillery, Artbound, LA Weekly among other publications. He has been an editor at Artillery and DoppleHouse Press and he is the Exhibitions and Communications Manager of Pitzer College Art Galleries.

Bianca Collins amplifies the work of female, nonbinary, trans and BIPOC artists. Previously, she was the editor of KCRW’s “Art Talk” during “All Things Considered” with Edward Goldman. As a queer woman of color and the director of public programs for Zócalo Public Square, she produces public art experiences in, with, and for historically marginalized communities.

STAFF

EDITORIAL

Bill Smith - creative director

Emma Christ - associate editor

John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor

John Seeley - copy editor/proof

Dave Shulman - graphic design

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

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

COLUMNISTS

Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Seth Hawkins

CONTRIBUTORS

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

NEW YORK: Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

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TULSA KINNEY EDITOR • ALEX GARNER PUBLISHER

Melrose Hill or Bust

We now have critical culture-mass in the area of Western Avenue between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard: half a dozen galleries have settled in, to be joined by LAXART any time now (the latter was supposed to have opened last year). This area has been dubbed “Melrose Hill” in some announcements, although Melrose Hill is actually elsewhere. That aside, the biggest boy on the block is David Zwirner from New York, with two adjoining buildings and a third under construction. The inaugural show in the north building was strategic and well-timed—“Coming Back to See Through, Again,” Njideka Akunyili Crosby in her first show with Zwirner. She’s one of LA’s most gifted artists, and her large works on paper are wonderfully layered—both narratively and literally—with patches of photo transfer juxtaposed with painting.

From left: “Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Coming Back to See Through, Again,” installation view, courtesy of David Zwirner. •

Grand Avenue’s Art Stars

Another hotbed of art is currently on Grand Avenue in DTLA—remember, you can now get there by the Metro and not worry about the exorbitantly priced parking. There’s the stunning Keith Haring show at the Broad, “Keith Haring: Art is For Everybody” (up through Oct. 8). There’s the very smart look at art in LA before the building of Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–’80s” at MoCA Grand (up through March 10, 2024). Then there’s the “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” immersive (up through Oct. 15) in the building across from Disney Hall. For art aficionados the latter is quite worthwhile, as it includes around 200 drawings and paintings from Basquiat’s short but meteoric career. Some are displayed in replicated rooms including his studio, where his work covers the floor and walls. Another section recreates his childhood

At the cinema it’s been the summer of Barbenheimer, so it would be amiss not to opine on the two movies that opened the same weekend and have throngs streaming back into theaters. In case you have been living under a rock or in deep isolation, Barbie, directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, is based on the ultra-skinny, femmy doll that girls have been playing with since the late 1950s. Oppenheimer, directed and written by Christopher Nolan, is about physicist Robert Oppenheimer who assumed a god-like aura when he became “father of the atomic bomb” in 1945, but was subsequently brought down during the Red Scare of the next decade.

Let me just say, Barbie is the winner. Not only because it’s a blockbuster hit, bringing in over a billion dollars, Barbie is also one of the funniest and most inventive films you will see this year—and the most political—playing on our notions of

continues on next page continues on next page

Jean-Michel Basquiat in LA, photo by Brad Branson. • Still from Barbie

Barbie vs. Oppie

Melrose

“I’m Nigerian, I’m American; you can be both,” she said in a recent New York Times interview: “I think places are richer for having difference.” In one painting, Still You Bloom in the Land of No Gardens, a mother staring directly out from the picture plane lovingly holds her young daughter in a backyard, while beautiful green fronds and vines swirl up and around them. Another, New Haven (Enugu) in New Haven (CT), is an interior still life, the left half taken up by a closet full of colorful clothing, while our eye is drawn to a small table on the right with its teapot, plant and a framed photograph of a young girl in a white dress. These are portraits of intimacy and tenderness, while the interlaced photo-collages reference a wider world; they are taken from her own archives and from Nigerian magazines.

Art Stars

home, with the living room on one side and dining room on the other. It’s very ’60s middle-class Brooklyn. Basquiat was born into a well-off family, although he had to deal with his parents’ separation and his mother’s mental illness, and became a rebel, taking drugs and quitting school.

Much of the art is hung like a regular exhibition, according to chronology and themes in his art. These are accompanied by pithy, well-written text panels. This loving tribute to an artist who died far too young—it’s still shocking to think he died at 27—was curated by his two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux. So naturally it feels personal—very different from what one usually sees at a museum.

These immersives are not cheap—admission prices for the Basquiat show range from $28 to $35. Museum prices have been creeping up too, but here in LA the trend has been toward free admission. That includes the Hammer, MoCA and The Broad (although the Keith Haring show requires a special ticket which costs $22 for adults). You can even get into LACMA for free on weekdays after 3 p.m. if you are an LA County resident—something I only found out this year.

Barbie

the Barbiedom (whether you love it or hate it), hyper-consumption and patriarchy.

Margot Robbie plays a pitch-perfect stereotypical Barbie in Barbieland, a confectionary fantasy with lots of pink and lots of feel-good. Until one day during a pool party, with 100 of her closest friends, she begins to have thoughts of death and the Real World. To repair the rift in the fantasy-reality continuum, she travels to the Real World—with Ken (Ryan Gosling) as a stowaway—where men look at her lustfully, as an object, while Ken finds himself admired just for being a white guy. Insert a visit to Mattel headquarters, an LA high school and Santa Monica Beach, and Barbie gets an education she brings back to Barbieland. So does Ken, who finds patriarchy very appealing indeed.

I just went to see Barbie again out in the burbs, and it was packed on a Tuesday night, despite running at what looks like three theaters in the multiplex. There were lots of girls and women, of course, but there were also lots of men, who also laughed heartily at the jokes about patriarchy. We’ve learned something about toxic masculinity this past decade, and Barbie so very cleverly plays on how ridiculous, even crippling, our traditional definitions of male and female behavior can make us.

THE POWER OF LUST

SKOT ARMSTRONG

If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a builtin component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from the top down. It is a rigid system that is built to keep power in the intended hands. But as with all systems that rely on human nature, there are factors that can subvert any system of control. One of the most reliable of these is desire. No matter how rigidly an officer enforces the rules, their heart still wants what their heart wants.

Claire Denis doesn’t suffer fools. She spent her formative years in Africa where her father was a civil servant. He was more sympathetic to the local population than the colonial powers that placed him there, and made a point of changing his post every two years, so that his children would learn the geography of the continent. The lack of cinema in the places that Denis grew up in caused her to come to her craft later than most filmmakers. When asked why she chose cinema, she explained that she is unfit for anything else. She got her start as an assistant director to filmmakers Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Jacques Rivette. When an interviewer called her a

protégée of these directors, she asked them if they’d use that word with a male assistant director.

Beau Travail is set in the French Foreign Legion outpost of Djibouti. It is loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name appears in the soundtrack), in which a soldier becomes wildly beloved by his fellows, causing his superior officer to view this adoration as a threat to his authority.

Denis’ depictions of Legionnaire exercise regimes are based on observations of actual training. They might be described as the section of a Venn diagram where Vanessa Beecroft and Tom of Finland intersect. As Denis stated: “Cinema cannot exist except through eroticism. The position of the spectator is like a kind of amorous passivity and hence highly erotic.”

Aside from the officer’s suppressed lust, the film mostly depicts soldiers going about their drills, ironing their uniforms and generally killing time. The contrast between the urgency of the officer’s lust and the soldiers’ languid routines makes many of the power plays of the officer seem even more irrational and hysterical. The sum of its parts makes this film a perfect study of power dynamics.

Ironing in unison, scene from Beau Travail (1999).

SUPREME COURT LEVELS

The 2022–23 term has been a disaster for the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. disgraced himself by spurning demands from Congress and the public that the Court adopt a code of ethics similar to the one covering all other federal jurists. If such regulation had existed, it may have prevented the dishonorable conduct of Justice Clarence Thomas who was Pro Publica exposed as a boughtand-paid-for tool of a right-wing billionaire.

The court’s conservative supermajority flagrantly ignored the prerequisite of standing to sue in overturning President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and in permitting a woman’s proposed marriage planning website to state that she would not accept business from same sex couples.

However, amidst all these controversies we should not lose sight of May’s major Supreme Court ruling on the fair use doctrine in copyright infringement cases. As predicted in my column a year earlier, the court upheld the Second Circuit Court’s ruling that the Andy Warhol Foundation infringed the copyright of rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince. My forecast was based on the likelihood that, with the departures of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the court’s

experts on copyright law, SCOTUS would uphold and rely on the Second Circuit’s opinion, especially in view of that New York court’s history of issuing important copyright rulings.

The Second Circuit’s majority opinion was notable in emphatically stating that judges should avoid acting as art critics in determining whether a derivative artwork was sufficiently transformational of another artist’s underlying work of art to qualify for the fair use exception to copyright infringement.

SCOTUS, putting aside ideological lines, ruled 7 to 2 in Goldsmith’s favor, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing for the majority. The dissent was penned by liberal Justice Elena Kagan and joined by conservative Chief Justice Roberts. The ruling was even more unusual for the overt sniping between Sotomayor and Kagan.

In 1984, Vanity Fair licensed Goldsmith’s photo of Prince for $400 for a single use to illustrate an article titled “Purple Fame.” Vanity Fair hired Warhol to produce his take on the Goldsmith photo and he created 16 silkscreens in a variety of colors—they went with a purple version. On Prince’s death in 2016, a special issue was printed and the Warhol Foundation was paid $10,250 for a license to use the orange image of

Andy Warhol’s purple version of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph for Vanity Fair, 1984

THE PLAYING FIELD FOR ARTISTS

Prince on its cover. This time Goldsmith received no compensation for the use of her photo.

Goldsmith sued the Foundation in federal court for infringement. In its defense, the Foundation’s lawyers argued that the fair use exception applied. Several elements must be proven for successful fair use determination. The two most important are that 1) the artwork must be “transformative” of the underlying work and 2) an assessment must be made of the of the derivative artwork’s impact on the on the original work’s commercial value in the marketplace. Not clear to me—an assessment is an opinion, not something “proven.”

The SCOTUS majority found that not only was the Warhol work not sufficiently transformative of the photo, but more importantly, that Goldsmith and the Warhol Foundation were competitors in the marketplace. Sotomayor wrote, “Such licenses, for photographs or derivatives of them, are how photographers like Goldsmith make a living. They provide an economic incentive to create original works, which is the goal of copyright.”

Sotomayor also rejected the Foundation’s argument that

STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

Warhol sufficiently transformed the Prince photograph by cropping, shading and coloring it.

The upshot of the majority opinion is to deemphasize the transformative element of fair use and focus more on the commercial impact the unlicensed usage had on the original work. The impact in this instance was glaring—Vanity Fair only paid Goldsmith for the earlier use of the Prince photo, and only paid the Foundation for the 2016 issue.

Justice Kagan in her sneering dissent wrote: “All of Warhol’s artistry and social commentary is negated by one thing: Warhol licensed his portrait to a magazine, and Goldsmith sometimes licensed her photos to magazines too. That is the sum and substance of the majority opinion.” Kagan added that the majority opinion reduces the editors of Vanity Fair to choosing between the Goldsmith and Warhol images with a flip of a coin without regard to artistic merit.

By my reading, Kagan’s dissent seems to exalt Warhol as an art god, while brushing aside Goldsmith as a mere mortal, but that is not fair to the myriad of artists who are copyright holders. Indeed, as the Supreme Court majority makes clear, artists are to be treated as equals under the law for purposes of copyright.

DREAM BIG:

Memory is a funny thing. Do you remember skinning your knee when you were a kid, or do you just look down at the scar and think of the stories you’ve heard? As you drive down the first street you lived on, do you remember the market on the corner where you would get ice cream on hot summer days? What is the difference between a memory and a story? Does one have more value than the other? Are either based in reality or does that even matter?

As I stood in a nearly empty room at the Japanese American National Museum and interacted with Aki’s Market (through oculus googles), I didn’t see someone’s quickly assembled CliffsNotes. I saw a rediscovered defining chapter in a family’s/nation’s history. It was a place torn somewhere between a dream and a memory, a place of value to JapaneseAmerican history, to Southern California history, to East LA history. A once-forgotten corner store that now exists digitally again—thanks to its re-creator Glenn Akira Kaino.

The original Aki’s Market existed in both a time and locale within American history that some may wish to forget. Shaped by the experience and memories of an entire ethnic population imprisoned by the US government (including the future owners of Aki’s Market) and set in an East Los Angeles area better known at that time for homicidal gang activity rather than for members giving, building and uplifting the community, there existed Akira Shiraishi, “Aki.” By all accounts Aki (Kaino’s namesake—whom he never met) was a formidable man both in stature and heart, yet the stories were few and far between as Kaino grew up.

In conversation with Kaino after viewing the exhibition, I began to understand that the show was not at all about the objects (whether physical or digital) but more about the conceptual nature of memories, both personal and communal. It was an exploration of family, community and the unknown stories you have been told. We often share the least with those the closest. We hold our fears, our mistakes and many of our

Glenn Kaino, stills from The Store, 2023, VR equipment, mixed-media installation, courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

REMEMBER WHERE YOU CAME FROM SETH

HAWKINS

triumphs from those we claim to love the most. What does it mean when we look deeper into what we are told? What trauma is found, what perseverance is exposed? If you look closely, if you ask the right people, if you search for the spirit that you’ve heard of—sometimes the facts are so much more inspiring than you could have dreamed.

What was manifested for the exhibition was simply an extension of the exploration of Kaino diving deeper into relationships with family, community members and historical documentation to learn more about Aki. To be clear—the art was great. It does exactly what it should. It takes you to that intrinsically special place only profound art can do. It doesn’t try to be more than it should. It doesn’t try to put you in a place of true VR, of interacting like some first-person video game. That’s not what Aki’s Market does. Rather, it puts you in the confusingly beautiful moment where you wake up from a dream and struggle with whether it was a memory or a dream.

With assembling communal memory, we think about what we have been told, by our moms, by our uncles. By someone that just passed through 25 years ago and had an opinion because everyone has an opinion: “That’s not how it was. I was there, It was like this. “The Donuts were over there. The Levis were here. The Coca-Cola display was there.”

In reality, there wasn’t any Coca-Cola. The store sold Pepsi. So, who remembered it correctly? More so, does it matter? It may matter to some—to me, it matters less and less. I am a writer; I love a well-told story. I remember bringing my daughter home for the first time. I remember skin-to-skin before leaving the hospital. I looked at that picture today. Do I remember bringing her home? No, I don’t. What I do remember is taking her out of the hospital and not knowing how to put the car seat in. Do I remember turning onto our old street in East LA and passing by Aki’s Market less than two minutes from unloading my precious cargo? I do not remember it, but now it is a part of the story I will tell moving forward.

FIN SIMONETTI ON

A stone sculptor and stained-glass artist (among many other things), Fin Simonetti approaches demanding classical mediums with cultural critique and tender ambiguity. The New York–based Canadian artist has become known for her stone carvings of canine body parts—such as muzzled busts, paws and jaws—as well as her stained-glass structures, which include bear traps and sanctuary-like miniature houses. Honoring her creativity and dedication to her painstaking craft, Simonetti shows something different with each of her exhibitions; her upcoming show at Matthew Brown Los Angeles, which will involve new materials, opens in October. In this first iteration of “Peer Review,” we invited Simonetti to talk about the work of any artist of her choice.

I was excited to see Ambera Wellmann’s recent exhibition “Antipoem” at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin since the works remind me of one of my favorite genres of historical painting—Doom paintings. Medieval depictions of the Last Judgment, Dooms typically portray heaven and hell, packed with figures, demons, angels and animals—all collapsed into a dramatic, dense narrative. The paintings in “Antipoem” feel like they could be vignettes taken from one of these works, maybe Hans Memling’s 15th-century triptych

The Last Judgment.

Fin Simonetti, My Volition 6, 2021, calcite, 11 x 16 x 12 in.

Photo: Ed Mumford, image courtesy of the artist.

AMBERA WELLMANN

My favorite work in the show, For you beautiful ones my thought is not changeable (2023), has swirls of bright color in the background that I imagine as an incoming apocalypse, ready to swallow the arena of animal figures in the foreground. If the show were a sequence, this painting would be the first scene, as if a hellacious bomb has only just detonated, but not yet engulfed the landscape. While the other paintings are completely immersed in a hellworld, here you can see the chaos approaching—it’s only beginning to infringe on the space.

I’ve always admired the way Wellmann handles paint. Somehow she is able to depict hard objects with soft blurry brushstrokes and capture narrative and melodrama without any specificity. I love that her works are rich with allusions to art history; the name “Antipoem,” along with work titles drawn from Sappho, imply a collage of art and literary references.

Like Wellmann, my work sometimes includes religion and animals as subjects. Seeing work that approaches these themes in ways that are materially and conceptually very different from mine allows me to experience my interests more like a consumer—that distance allows me to be more of a pure viewer, which is a treat.

—As told to Alex Garner

Ambera Wellmann, For you beautiful ones my thought is not changeable, 2023, oil on linen, 114 x 200 in. Courtesy of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

ON TOP OF

At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all.

“Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yang’aro (Looking Back),” the inaugural installation for the Getty’s Rotunda Commission series, marks the museum’s first solo presentation by an Indigenous Californian from the Los Angeles basin and the southern Channel Islands, the ancestral land on which the Getty Center was erected in 1997.

Growing up in Tovaangar (Los Angeles), Dorame heard many times while up at the Getty, “On a clear day, you can see Catalina Island!” The invitation to create an installation inspired by the site got her thinking about the ways humans hierarchically place themselves above other beings and plants, and how she could encourage a reversal of that assumed power structure to privilege the information that other beings can teach us.

In “Looking Back ,” high above visitors’ heads as they move through the threshold of the entrance hall, five sculptures of abalone shells as tall as 12 feet rotate slowly—like wise gentle giants swaying underwater in a slowly moving current. The ear-shaped shells’ iconic motherof-pearl innermost layers catch sunlight streaming in from the rotunda’s tall, second-story windows, as filtered through bright pink iridescent material, adding dappled light to the underwater effect. A four-panel panorama view of the Tongva coastline looking back from Pimugna (Catalina Island)—painted from memory as it appears in Dorame’s mind’s eye after many research trips— encircles the top of the rotunda. A tranquil, peaceful energy fills the space as it is transformed by the monumental presence of these spiritual guides.

Dorame’s successful reversal of our external relationship to scale and power begs us to reconsider our loyalties to the social structures built by humans in an attempt to rule the world. When we look out from the Getty to Catalina Island, where abalone still live and thrive naturally, perhaps we should consider the returned gaze of the island, looking back at the museum, and the sacred knowledge that abalone have to teach us.

Perhaps only art can sweet-talk us into subverting our biases in such a way.

American museums, especially those like the Getty, the world’s wealthiest art institution, haven’t historically been representative and inclusive of the global majority when it comes to what

MERCEDES DORAME REVERSES POWER STRUCTURES WITH SPIRITUALITY BIANCA COLLINS

art is collected and which audiences are cultivated. A culture of ignorance inevitably builds around communities least represented in public presentations and interpretations of beauty and history. This is understandably distressing to those of us from those communities.

For example, Dorame noted, “Abalone and white sage have lost their citation.” Consider their increasingly ubiquitous presence in spiritual shops, their mere presence glaringly out of accordance with the Indigenous tradition of gifting such sacred materials. A surge in popular demand for materials used in the pan-spiritual practice of smudging, or cleansing with the smoke of sacred herbs, is in part to blame for their over-harvesting. “That’s so devastating to us as people,” Dorame explained, because “there’s been so much erasure around who we are, and what our culture is—while, simultaneously, things [like sage and abalone] have been appropriated into mass culture.”

While the Getty has much more ground to cover if they aim to repair audiences’ underexposure to and misunderstanding of the communities that they historically ignored, “Looking Back” is a step in the right direction.

“I know a lot of people of color, in general, have a hard time feeling comfortable in big museum institutional spaces,” said Dorame. “How do you get people to come to a museum? Well,” she laughed, “you show people of color. From my experience, the intention was there to acknowledge that there hasn’t been [Tongva] representation in this institution prior to this.”

The Getty smartly invited Meztli Projects, artist and organizer Joel Garcia’s Indigenous-based arts and culture collaborative, to curate the opening celebration. Throngs of visitors in their most festive attire marked this seminal occasion by enjoying food prepared from the Chia Café Collective cookbook, flower arrangements featuring native plants and blessings offered by Dorame and her father—a powerful demonstration of how successful a global museum’s local community engagement can be when it leads with inclusion.

THE WORLD

Installation views: “Woshaa'axre Yang'aro (Looking Back).” Courtesy of the Getty Museum; Above, Mercedes Dorame.

COMMITMENT TO

A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both Black, decided to produce a book version of the same name, published by W. W. Norton, to attain wider distribution, particularly among members of the poorer Black communities.

Redaction focuses on the way this demographic is victimized in both state and federal courts because they can’t afford bail, traffic tickets or court fees. If they don’t pay, they are thrown in jail even though they haven’t been tried or convicted of any crime—a flagrant violation of the Eighth Amendment, which states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

For Betts and Kaphar, this is personal. Kaphar’s father was often in prison during his childhood, and Betts spent more than eight years in jail, including 14 months in solitary confinement, for a carjacking he committed when he was 16. Books saved him, and when he got out, he went to college, graduate school and, in an amazing feat of transformation,

received his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he is currently pursuing a PhD. He has accomplished so much, climbing out of a very deep hole to reach the very heights of the legal profession. And yet, despite all his achievements, the shadow of those incarcerated years still looms over his life.

Kaphar’s ascent in the art world is almost as dramatic. This bona fide art star, with work in major museums and representation by Gagosian, used to help his family make extra cash by carting trash to the dump. The two men have rightfully been honored with a wealth of prestigious awards, including MacArthur fellowships.

Paired with Kaphar’s artwork in the book, Betts’ poetry uses the actual text from Civil Rights Corps lawsuits filed on behalf of jailed people whose constitutional rights have been violated as its basis. He employs the process of redaction to hide words and phrases, but he turns it on its head, revealing the most provocative and obscuring the rest, adroitly wresting poetry out of tedious legalese.

Kaphar is known for his galvanizing work (paintings, sculptures and installations) that reassesses history, taking figures from notable historical and art-historical paintings out of their idealized vacuum and exposing them to a contemporary retell-

From left to right: Titus Kaphar; Reginald Dwayne Betts, © Mamadi Doumbouya.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

REDACTION BY REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS AND TITUS KAPHAR SARAH SARGENT

ing in both a visual and historically accurate manner.

Kaphar’s series of portraits of those unfairly jailed are simply beautiful. His delicate lines and spare compositions produce likenesses of great authenticity and power. Despite the sadness and frustration, all the subjects appear serene. Kaphar finds the dignity and nobility in them and amplifies it.

Stunning etchings in white ink on black paper combine Kaphar’s portraits with Betts’ poetry and lines of redacted text, overlaid with eye-catching gunmetal. The lines resemble prison bars; they also recall the bars on the US flag that represent the original 13 colonies—all of which benefited, directly or indirectly from slavery. In either case, the faces of the incarcerated individuals are separated from us (and their freedom) by those bars.

Reading Betts’ trenchant language is an experience that leaves no doubt in one’s mind that while the 13th Amendment may have abolished chattel slavery, it continues within the walls of our prisons where racist hierarchies are maintained and free labor is extracted.

Betts and Kaphar’s commitment to social engagement extends well beyond their creative practice, with each establishing important nonprofit organizations. Kaphar’s NXTHVN

(nxthvn.com), founded with Jason Price and Jonathan Brand, is in New Haven’s historical African-American neighborhood of Dixwell. A vibrant arts incubator and fellowship program, NXTHVN supports individual artists and curators through education and access to a lively arts-centric community. NXTHVN helps further the careers of young artists, helping them navigate the art world and providing opportunities for professional artists, while enhancing the larger community of New Haven. Betts, meanwhile, is the founder and director of Freedom Reads (freedomreads.org), which places books into prisons via its Freedom Libraries—movable wood shelving units that hold 500 books—in the hopes of uplifting incarcerated individuals and maybe even helping them conceive a positive way forward. As of this writing, Freedom Reads has installed 172 prison libraries in 10 states.

In concert with the MoMA PS1 exhibition, Kaphar and Betts commissioned a typeface that could serve as an alternative to such fonts as Times New Roman, the norm for US legal documents, and New Century Schoolbook, which is used by SCOTUS. Now an ongoing statement, the use of the Redaction font, along with the book itself, protests the unconstitutional and racist practices of these institutions.

Redaction, by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar | 160 Pages | Norton.

FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE FILMS OF MARTINE SYMS CAT KRON

How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017, where the then 29-year-old artist debuted her first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice , as part of the exhibition “Projects 106.” The show was arranged so that the viewer navigated multimedia collages around the centrally placed three-channel film. Describing the experience of walking around “Projects 106,” New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix observed, “I had the sensation that the artist had planted coded messages for me, and for other black female viewers—messages that others might walk right by.”

i am

This granular specificity is a key feature of Syms’ practice—there is nothing general in her work, despite her penchant for ironized hyperbole (see The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, published by Rhizome in 2013) and her abiding fascination with the broad, slapstick humor of Old Hollywood animation studios (which infuses everything she’s done). To write about Syms’ sprawling oeuvre entails a considerable amount of back-catalog research into her bibliography, and the works themselves are inundated with references to pop and literature. The effect is that of a challenge for the viewer to either bone up or miss it. In an early interview for the Baltimore zine Video On Paper in 2012, she explained, “I’m interested in storytelling, but I’m obsessed with how we share our stories” (emphasis mine). In a moment when every writer

Still from

wise enough to die things go, 2023. © Martine Syms. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

and content creator seems to be hastily revising their job descriptor as “storyteller,” her insistence on turning the camera back on the messenger resonates 12 years on from that first assertion.

Incense Sweaters & Ice follows 20-something Girl as she navigates a fits-and-starts romance with WB (White Boy) as well as the LA to Mississippi trajectory required of her in her job as a nurse, itself an inverted reference to the Great Migration made by Black Americans during the 20th century. Like all of Syms’ work, the film gives inanimate messengers equal billing with its cast. Much of the dialogue occurs in text threads between Girl and White Boy, which are superimposed on the film in real time. Also, like all of Syms’ work, it borrows from experience, here drawing on interviews with her mother, who worked in nursing.

Saddling an artist with the “autobiographic” descriptor is necessarily fraught, in that it presumes both a right and an ability to “know,” and that this knowledge is relevant to the work. When I asked her during our phone interview about how she thinks about autobiography, Syms responded, “I think self-reflexiveness is a bit more interesting to me. There are obviously things taken from my life, but it’s usually pretty constructed.” She qualified, “I like the idea of fucking with autobiography. In a recent piece I did, called My Life Story, I’m using stuff from Lil Nas X’s TikTok but I’m presenting it as my autobiography.” The protagonist of Incense Sweaters & Ice at one point tells White Boy, who is recording her, “I don’t really like posing, like this is so strange … Okay, I’ll pose I guess … If you’d stop that’d be great. Thanks.” It reads as a nod to the incessant surveillance and patrolling of Black women, often by white men, as well as the performativity expected of them.

Syms’ The African Desperate, released in theaters in 2022, is a study in affect and performance, lofty artistic ideals and the mundane tasks that fill studio days, even in the rarefied air of a pastoral summer MFA program. In it, Diamond Stingily, Syms’ longtime friend and collaborator, plays a masters candidate on the cusp of graduation. Stingily is a seasoned and virtuosic performer of Black female subjectivity, adept at subtly amplifying the visual cues that signal contemporary Black womanhood. Syms had already showcased Stingily in her 2015 video Notes on Gesture, in which the artist performs a looping string of finger wags and waves, palming the air in gestures copied from recordings of famous Black women. In

The African Desperate, Stingily is seen simmering under the scrutiny of the almost entirely white program as she wrestles with the question of what she will and won’t do, whether she’ll play their game or refuse it.

Syms’ most recent video work, i am wise enough to die things go (2023), pays homage to the crucially personal reference of 20th-century animator Chuck Jones. From 1933 to 1962, Jones created now-canonical animated shorts for Warner Brothers, where he developed the iconic personae of, among others, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Like Jones, Syms is a covert minimalist intent on conveying her characters’ interior worlds with as little extraneous detail as possible, adhering to predetermined rules (motivations) that drive them. The video is the centerpiece of her recent exhibition, “Loser Back Home” at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, and responds to a 1953 Jones animation, Duck Amuck, which is a notably meta (for the time) twist on the usual trials and tribulations of Daffy. The premise is that the cantankerous duck is plagued not by another toon but by the brush of the anonymous off-screen animator intent on messing with him— constantly switching out his backdrops and costumes, erasing all but his beak.

I am wise enough to die things go copies Daffy’s travails gag for gag, with the notable difference that her actor, Leslie Bamou, is performing in live action. Bamou, who Syms met at an acting class, captures both the blustering Daffy and the affectations of a pretentious Hollywood star: “I always wanted to do a sea epic,” Daffy exclaims as the animator paints him in a (short-lived) sailor’s costume. Meanwhile Bamou enthuses, “I am a water creature. I think it’s because my north node is in Pisces.” It’s tempting to see the self-righteous outrage of Daffy Duck and that of the star of i am wise as at odds, to project onto the latter a commentary about the external constraints placed on Black female bodies. But the more relevant constraint here is that of translating an animated work to film. Rather than funny, the jarring quality suggests a displacement or fracturing of self. And yet the original is unsettling in its own right—one sympathizes with the duck’s frustration.

People want a lot from this work, and at a certain point Syms says no. Responding to my follow-up query to check her statement on My Life Story, she responded, “I think the question of autobiography is generally extremely boring, and I said as much during our interview.”

is a bit more interesting to me. There are obviously things taken from my life, but it’s usually pretty constructed.”

“I think self-reflexiveness

Assorted stills from Incense Sweaters & Ice, 2017. © Martine Syms. Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC.

Assorted stills from i am wise enough to die things go, 2023. © Martine Syms. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

CHRISTOPHER MICHNO

CLIMATE

Art sector efforts to decarbonize have been highly visible over the past three years as galleries and artists have publicly pledged concerted action to reduce exhibitionrelated emissions: Nonprofit advocacy groups like Gallery Climate Coalition, Art + Climate Action and Julia’s Bicycle have launched campaigns and provided tools to support change in art sector practices. These developments are important steps for an industry driven by wealth and privilege that, according to carbon analyst and Gallery Climate Coalition advisor Danny Chivers, generates disproportionately higher emissions than comparably scaled market sectors.

Jenny Kendler, a founding member of Artists Commit, sees this as a critical moment. “What we need now, more than ever,” the Chicago-based artist says, “is to change culture.” The need for urgent measures is underscored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent report, which notes that the window for meaningful action is rapidly closing. In the words of UN secretary-general António Guterres: “The climate time bomb is ticking.”

Kendler, who was the first Natural Resources Defense Council Artist-in-Residence, has long made climate action a cornerstone of her art practice and, more broadly, her engagement with the world. Long before COVID and the ubiquity of Zoom, she limited her air travel, agreeing to give artist talks only when Skype was an option. “This is a systemic issue,” she emphasizes, “We need each and every artist to be a part of the global climate movement, in whatever ways they have capacity to do so.”

To be a partner for change, she says, means “making choices that benefit life as a whole, rather than working toward personal or short-term gains, status or purely economic benefit.”

Kendler advocates considering an artwork’s lifecycle at its inception. While this can mean thinking about the type of materials that compose the work—Kendler prefers working with recycled or ephemeral materials—equally important, she notes, is how it’s “produced and transported, where it goes after it is exhibited, and how capital flows into and out of the project.” Her installation Birds Watching III, for example, which was on view this summer in the Hayward Gallery’s ecology-oriented exhibition “Dear Earth,” was fabricated en-

tirely with recyclable materials. The work will travel to the London Zoo to raise awareness about the zoo’s conservation efforts with critically endangered birds. After that, she hopes to find a permanent home for it and plans to use the proceeds for climate and conservation work.

Debra Scacco, an artist, curator and organizing member of Artists Commit, believes that artists are ideally positioned to introduce climate-conscious practices when working with institutions. Gallery, museum and nonprofit staff may not feel empowered to address climate, she says, but “if we consistently present this as a serious concern and, where appropriate, a part of the work, host venues will generally sign on in some way.”

A transplant from London, Scacco moved to Los Angeles in 2012 and quickly focused her art practice on the ecology of the Los Angeles River. In 2017, she founded Air, a residency that allowed artists to pose questions about specific climate challenges and engage with “systems that require critical change.”

Air worked in collaboration with Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which hosted a series of residency exhibitions throughout 2021. Air’s culminating exhibition, “Song of the Cicada,” at Honor Fraser Gallery presented artists’ findings on research, ranging from wetlands habitats, toxic manufacturing byproducts and climate impacts on natural systems.

“In my own work, I aim to connect each exhibition or event with on-the-ground environmental justice work,” Scacco says. This past fall, she curated “Confluence,” an exhibition focused on the LA River, at Track 16 Gallery. Each artist was asked to share the work of an environmental organization supporting the LA River. Gestures like these, she says, invite viewers to engage with climate work through their engagement with the exhibition.

In October, Scacco and Joel Garcia, an Indigenous artist (Huichol) and organizer, will partner with Fulcrum Arts to present Procession, a large-scale performance and civic activation. The project reframes the history of the Los Angeles River and the violence enacted on its ecosystems through colonization. Culminating in processions along the river’s former floodplain in Los Angeles State Historic Park, Procession identifies the river by its Tongva name, Paayme Paxaayt and will gather “stories of how different cultures utilize the river and how channelization impacts culture and legacy.”

Installation view of “Debra Scacco: Confluence,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

ARTISTS ADVOCATE FOR CARBON REDUCTIONS

CONSCIOUS

Collaborative efforts to decarbonize the art sector are promising. “It is the conversations and collaborations that are happening across the sector that give me the most hope,” says Chivers, citing discussions to rethink “often over-strict” storage standards that drive energy consumption, art fair expectations for travel and shipping, and how institutions can thrive while cutting emissions by at least half.

These issues however, can’t be separated from social justice questions. Scacco makes a point that “the art world is a space of outsized privilege and waste while artists and art workers often struggle to make a living wage,” which she says makes the current moment an opportunity to create a new paradigm.

Cultural organizations have the potential to exert outsized influence in discussions over climate solutions, but this relies on credibly addressing their own emissions. In a global context in which public pledges often supersede actions, establishing credibility will also require institutions to develop transparent, verifiable protocols.

important steps for an industry driven by wealth and privilege that generates disproportionaly higher emissions than comparably scaled market sectors.”

“These developments are

Jenny Kendler, Birds Watching III, 2023. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of The Hayward Gallery.

MALKA GERMANIA

In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation, while transforming that trauma into manna.

Malka Germania (Queen Germania in Hebrew), created by Israeli native/Berlin resident Yael Bartana, features the elegantly androgynous Malka (Gala Moody) moving slowly through Berlin while attired in a long, hooded robe. She dominates the city—portrayed in the film as the locus of Germany’s draconian past—and observes people going about their lives, including soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, Hitler Youth in training, beautiful female dancers and an organ grinder. The three-channel process provides a visceral look into the German people’s awareness of their collective history. As the channels segue onward, the film encourages Berlin residents—and us—to envision images of persecution and power.

Other players in the film include fair-haired beachgoers relaxing, playing and riding in boats, until the noise of helicopters disrupts their false sense of well-being. The awareness of a warmongering past is

emphasized with sounds of marching soldiers, traffic noise, church bells and barking dogs.

A concluding scene features a computer-generated image of an imperial Nazi “Hall of the People” rising from a lake that evokes Albert Speer’s proposed design to celebrate Germany’s World War II victory. It also references the lost city of Atlantis, a fictional parable about the dire consequences of corruption and arrogance. The film closes as hordes of German citizens walk wearily along the railroad tracks, leaving Berlin, as Malka looks on approvingly from a separate channel.

While portraying the ambiguities of the contemporary GermanJewish experience, the film merges the past with the present. As a Jewish woman, my dreams, memories and current perspectives are often framed by an awareness of the persecutions and fears of my ancestors, who lived through life-threatening pogroms, the repercussions of which can be felt with my relatives today.

Malka Germania has compelled me to embark on a Jungian journey of examining my legacy as metaphor for and reflection of the larger world’s tendency toward war and domination—and to view that legacy as a stimulus and muse for creativity, as Bartana does in this important film.

YAEL BARTANA’S JUNGIAN JOURNEY INTO THE PAST AND PRESENT LIZ GOLDNER

Installation view of "Yael Bartana: Malka Germania" at Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, UC Irvine, 2022. Photo: Yubo Dong.

THE COMPLEX STUFF IS THE BEST

KEITH HARING AT THE BROAD TUCKER NEEL

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.”

—Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986

In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old son, Oscar Forbes, to get his thoughts about the exhibition.

After setting up tickets for our visit, the museum’s PR team emailed me, warning that “the exhibition contains adult themes and sexual content that some parents may deem inappropriate for children.” When I shared this information with Oscar’s mother, she responded, “I don’t think there’s anything at the Broad that’s inappropriate for him—we just watched a Studio Ghibli movie where shapeshifting raccoons use their testicles as parachutes.”

Were the Broad’s warnings in reference to Haring’s collaged newspaper headlines with texts reading “POPE KILLED for FREED HOSTAGE”? Maybe it was his depiction of a crowd worshiping a disembodied phallus or his various hieroglyphic characters engaged in cartoonish coitus (which Oscar interpret-

ed as people dancing). Or maybe the warning pertained to the most unsettling and profound piece in the show, Michael Stewart—USA for Africa, which Haring painted in 1985 as a tribute to Stewart, a young Black graffiti artist murdered by the NYPD.

I couldn’t help but see the museum’s multiple warnings as reflective of Haring’s timeless ability to shock the right people —and the issues he deeply cared about remain relevant today. While Oscar acknowledged that “some parts are more serious than other parts,” he didn’t seem surprised by the art.

Oscar was fairly quiet throughout most of the show, reluctantly answering my questions with descriptions instead of opinions. But in front of a vast canvas populated by robots, nuclear blasts and figures flying in the sky, Oscar, twisting his sun-bleached shoulder-length hair in deep concentration, turned to me and said, “Keith Haring was really paying attention to how he was drawing. He likes to draw one thing again and again, so people know what it is.” I couldn’t have said it better. The kid had summed up Haring’s practice in two perfect sentences.

After finishing our first complete tour of the show, and heading back in for another look, Oscar, notably patient after

Left to right: Red Room, 1988; Untitled, 1984. Both courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Clockwise from lower left: Humiliation Victim, 1980. Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Untitled, 1981. From the Collection of Larry Walsh. Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Pope Killed for Freed Hostage, 1980. Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

nearly an hour of tolerating my embarrassing enthusiasm, said, “The complex stuff is the best, the paintings that have a story and more than one image in them.” While unpacking this appraisal, we both agreed that works like Haring’s 1983 “Untitled (Totem)” series—towering sculptures adorned with carved line drawings of people piled atop one another— showcased his talent better than works featuring singular characters, like his neon, three-eyed, smiley face paintings from 1981.

Haring’s more iconic images are best suited for reproduction on illuminated billboards or mass-produced objects. This was evident in a display highlighting a collection of merchandise he sold at the Pop Shop, a store he opened in 1986 in New York. While looking at the array of shoes, watches and skateboard decks, Oscar assessed, “It’s just as much art as anything else.” (Cue Haring and his Pop-art predecessors smiling down from heaven.)

Standing in front of an untitled, immense black-andwhite mural that most viewers engaged with solely through their smartphone cameras, I asked my young friend what he thought about the differences between how kids and adults look at art. Oscar leaned back on his tie-dyed Crocs, paused

briefly, and responded, “Adults don’t see all of the details.” He suggested that the best way to see the art was to “start at the bottom and slowly move your way up. The bottom is bigger than the top.” He was right: Starting at the bottom meant beginning with the gravitational pull of the artist’s lines and the way he let paint drip toward the floor, a sign of the non-mechanical nature of the work—or is this simply his literal point of view?

While I was satisfied with the retrospective’s overall exhibition design, Oscar believed there were missed opportunities. He suggested, “They could have put more things in other places, like the floor and the ceiling. It would fill up the room. People aren’t looking at the ceiling.” And he was right. It was the first time in any art experience I found myself noticing that no one was looking up. Future curators take note: Installing Haring’s work on the floor and ceiling, even as vinyl reproductions, would call back to how he painted the Pop Shop’s walls, floors and ceiling, and would reflect how he filled his works with a line that could go on and on forever. Were he still with us, I bet Haring would appreciate my companion’s suggestion to take advantage of all the space our eyes can roam—maybe something the adult curators have forgotten.

“SOLID PROJECTIONS” LARDER

By Christie Hayden

Diving into the past to ground contemporary viewers in the ever-advancing here and now, the four artists in “Solid Projections” present a grouping of dubious memory objects—newlyminted souvenirs of moments alluded to rather than experienced. Beth Collar, Coleman Collins, Nevine Mahmoud and Jeffrey Stuker step into the role of revisionist historian in this exhibition that questions the lines between art and artifact, narrative history and fragile memory. Each artist’s work rebuts, ciphers or builds upon the meaning implicit within artifacts associated with antiquity, the recent past or timeless traditions, reminding us that history is just a story that we, as a culture, tell ourselves.

In the gallery’s namesake larder, or pantry in American dialect, Stuker’s Daphnis nerii caterpillar, Grand Sud, Madagascar, 1991 (from the Botanist’s Satisfaction) (2023), lit from within, presents as both a traditional column and Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic monolith. When viewed from above, this work tells the fictional story, placed in the 1990s, of a daphnis nerii caterpillar who, when feeding on a flowerless vinca (periwinkle), produces excrement that is harvested for making cytotoxic drugs used in chemotherapy for cancer. Stuker, who underwent chemotherapy in the early 1990s, uses computer renderings to wax poetic on his unlikely would-be hero. Collins, likewise, references

technology to draw the past into the present. The artist’s wall-mounted relief, Untitled (Niche) (2023), evokes both ancient stone slabs with inscriptions and the generic background of most modeling software. Emblazoned with the bust of Nefertiti, this work builds on both the initial artifact and Isa Genzken’s 2012 sculpture series of the Egyptian queen to imbue this iconography with yet another layer of meaning.

Mahmoud’s Anima (2023), an earless fawn’s head brought forth from Turkish Sivec marble and placed upon brushed aluminum, seems to float outside of time, in that it contributes to the tradition of marble sculpture that can be traced back to ancient Cyprus and the origins of Western culture. Mahmoud’s Vanity head (2023), a floral and phallic form that was 3D printed in Accura Xtreme White 200 resin, sits close by on an identical brushed aluminum shelf. One is hard-pressed to find the difference in the finished quality of Anima’s ancient medium and Vanity head’s new printing technology. Collar’s sculptures in plaster also straddle recorded time and verge into the speculative space of prehistoric studies. Molded in the form of the Liver of Piacenza, a 5,000-yearold bronze artifact and the most notable record of haruspicy, Salvation and Silence (both 2022) are adorned with pencil drawings of pterosaurs, asserting that all readings of times past—heavily supported by material proof or not—are, to some extent, conjectures.

Existing in our contemporary moment can, at times, feel like hopelessly staring

into Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library—as if everything to be written or created already has been, thus nullifying our present. What Borges offers as solace—and what the artists in “Solid Projections” also champion—is the power inherent in both annals and archive longevity. Combining precursory narratives with subtle indicators of the early 2020s, each artist advances a lineage and conveys history anew.

MOLLY SEGAL TRACK 16 GALLERY

By Ezrha Jean Black

Like many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of these works—variously satiric, scabrously funny, foreboding and matter-of-fact—function essentially as captions to her narratives. Her show, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” is the apocalyptic Anthropocene—social disintegration in the wake of the collapse of the biosphere and civilization—already in evidence everywhere from city-wildland interface to derelict patches of urban and suburban real estate.

Her approach is both technically and narratively irreverent. She stains, shadows, swipes, swirls, sponges, even salts the surfaces of the paintings. And certainly (with a built-in assist from the plastic surface)—leaving no 20th-century painting trope unexploited—she drips; but the gesture here serves the narrative first, underscoring its absurdity. Her draftsmanship occasionally suffers in her apparent haste to get the picture. In Gobble Me, Swallow Me (2023), a fire scissors down a kind of ravine and back up a hillside, billowing black smoke up a foamy backdrop of turquoise and amethyst.

In another, Make It Rain (2022), she takes a more minimalist approach, crisscrossing the paper with slashing brushstrokes, raising an embankment with a palisade of vertical black strokes, hatching out foreground and back with umber horizontals, while fiery yellows and reds bubble up against it. The Old Familiar Sting (2022) is by far the most specific—an explosion among a chain of electrical transmission towers—and, not coincidentally, the most texturally and chromatically variegated.

Her eye is drawn to the fraught and sometimes fatally flawed human intervention. In I’m Gonna Make Noise When I Go Down (2023), a dozen scattered firefighters appear

Jeffrey Stuker, Daphnis nerii caterpillar, Grand Sud, Madagascar, 1991 (from the Botanist’s Satisfaction), 2023.

with threads of hose, hiking up a smoky hillside, the terrain of which is barely discernible in the purple haze of smoke and fire. But her real penchant is for the human figure in its less-than-heroic posturings and the unrelenting ferocity of its carnal appetites. An image that looks composited from more than one source, I Am Truly Sorry About All This (2023) features human figures (male and female, but mostly male) clustered around a beached whale (not an uncommon sight in recent years), most of them with their hands clutching their crotches, which I confess made me think first of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.

She isolates a heterosexual couple in a related pair of 2023 paintings—with the titles When Smoke Changes the Color of the Sun and There Is No End to What A Living World Will Demand of You—with faces blurred, extensions somewhat crudely elided. The figures seem to literally consume themselves—mirroring, as in other works, the apocalypse as a selfcannibalizing spectator sport. As a corrective to the blithe optimism and “forward thinking” encountered in so much of the art world (and its press), Segal’s vision is refreshing in its blunt honesty. The problem here is that art demands “whispers” to be registered as dramatically as “screams.” The real-world stakes warrant nothing less.

MÒNICA SUBIDÉ NINO MIER GALLERY

By Shana Nys Dambrot

New portraits and still lifes by Mònica Subidé channel the aesthetic of circa-1906 Paris and Barcelona with such organic authenticity that they could credibly pass for

recently discovered works by an unknown genius of that era’s avant-garde—yet they are imbued with an urbane air that belongs to the present. Stylized in a schematic mode that deploys nearly abstract shapes as elements of image, her portrait subjects’ physical aspects, such as hair, facial features and anatomy—as well the garments, adornments and furnishings that surround them—are all rendered with strong, minimal lines containing chromatic pieces like the solder in stained glass. The evocation of Picasso is intentional and well met, fluently speaking the language of lofty arched eyebrows, aquiline noses flanked by pure color, bone structure by means of planar color forms, and chunky flowers in flat-fronted vases. Further, Subidé’s The red ear (2023) expresses its melding of physiogonomy with abstract gesture very much in the manner of Matisse’s 1905 woman in The Green Stripe, and there’s even a pensive Harlequin in her piece The yellow room (2023). Picasso’s portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired the exhibition title “Teresa’s wings,” as well as Subidé’s From Marie Thérèse (2023)—a painting that depicts a charming figure with a cantilevered armature set against a bruised purple background. The subject’s wide lovely face is half blue and a quarter green with her head quixotically cocked, all balanced on a strong cylindrical neck and haloed by dark sculptural tresses.

Elsewhere, a ghostly sketched-in bowl of oranges holds space for whichever of Cézanne’s you can also imagine or might prefer (I’m partial to the one in the Art Institute

Molly Segal, When Smoke Changes the Color of the Sun, 2023.

Mònica Subidé, Teresa’s wings, 2023. © Mònica Subidé. Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.

of Chicago, but those at The Met and MoMA both have their charms). It scarcely matters which particular bowl of oranges you have in mind; Subidé functions as an art-historical wormhole, an avatar for a way of painting that explores our world by going beyond realism. Subidé’s disarming oil palette of rambling rose, cornflower blue, taffy yellow, felted gray, veined black, a rather imperious lavender, disconcertingly chipper green and fruitpunch red is saturated, but not at all intense. Not quite dusty—though there is an old-soul quality to them that further speaks to their art-historical lineage—but the effect is somehow both ashy and bright.

The works have a surface texture that’s flatter than impasto, but it still speaks to the body mass of oil paint itself, occasionally augmented by elements of collage using her own drawings. This depth of surface amplifies the textural quality as an optical matter, breathing air back into compressed pictorial space. It also opens up a dimension of experiential depth and nuance, giving narrative even in the absence of context, and imparting, if not emotion, at least mood, without drama. That’s what the eyes are for. Despite their schematic nature, whether making contact, pointedly averting their gaze, or simply lost in thought, her paintings are brimming with enough feeling to make each one feel alive.

WILL THORNTON NICODIM ANNEX, LOS ANGELES

By Lane Barden

There are dark recesses of art that draw us into something we may think we want no part of: images that weave the repulsive into skeins of elegance that we do not fully understand because the understanding resides only within the artist, if anywhere. The effect is both disturbing and comforting. Disturbing because we are drawn in—though we are also kept out— and comforting because we can stare with impunity in the gallery from a safe distance.

Will Thornton seems headed to be a master of this practice, like Francis Bacon and JoelPeter Witkin, with his new show, “Hypnagogic Sex Idols.” The question hovering behind this exhibition is how Thornton got here.

A haircutter by trade, he apparently taught himself to paint, and paint well—like Velázquez even—by watching YouTube videos, and then he became a society portrait painter in Charleston, South Carolina. His portrait painting crashed during the pandemic, at a

time when he and his wife were trying to conceive. As Thornton would have it, the threat of the pandemic, the loss of livelihood, and attempts at conception all converged to yield dreams and images between wakefulness and sleep. These dreams became fertility fetishes: idols to empower the soul and calm anxieties.

“Hypnagogic” is defined as that which accompanies the act of falling asleep. The show features 25 paintings of Thornton’s sex idols, each painted from an actual object crafted by Thornton himself with obvious skill and fi nesse. The range of form and iterative invention is impressive. No two are the same, yet they all seem to be part of a very tight-knit visual language consisting of abstracted, caricatured sexual organs and parts that share a common set of properties.

Many of them seem to have internal gyro scopes allowing them to hover or balance themselves on pointed legs. (Like the Venus of Willendorf that came before them, they have no feet.) Often, they are personified like small figurines squirting and performing for an audience while simultaneously provoking the viewer with their profanity or their fertile, oozing viscosity. The breasts, the clitoris, the anus and phallus seem to fit in an uncannily natural design, following unstated laws of the logic or illogic of dreams.

With quotes from Carl Jung and Cronenberg’s character Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome (1983), Thornton locates the source of this project deep within the psyche, suggesting a portal into the unconscious mind.

Jung speaks of a little hidden door in the secret recesses of the soul. Brian O’Blivion, a less reliable narrator, speaks of emergent visions capable of causing tumors. “Hypnagogic” itself seems a word unearthed from beneath other ancillary meanings, like the soul and the collective unconscious, relative to its usefulness for the artist’s imagination. Thornton has clearly found them both relevant and useful in delivering a remarkable body of work for his first exhibition. In the end, we don’t really have to understand because we have looked, unflinchingly—possibly against our will—and have accepted that this may have been the point all along.

Will Thornton, Being Polite, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery.

Brian Cooper, Perceptions Delusion (Whoever Felt It

BRIAN COOPER

RORY DEVINE FINE ART

By David S. Rubin

Transforming the gallery into a performance space for his installation “Things Thinking,” Brian Cooper constructs an environment for contemplating the ideas of cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, whose theories posit that our perceptions of the world are mental models or “maps” of reality, rather than actual space, time or material things. Consisting of three sections, the installation includes 13 paintings hung salon-style on one wall; two soft sculptures that function as furniture in the center of the space; and a stage abutted against a grommet-lined trompe-l’oeil painting of a synthesizer shaped like a curtain, suspended on the opposite wall. Throughout the exhibition, Cooper scheduled concerts in which he and other musicians played experimental electronic music on a synthesizer set up on the stage.

Iconographically, the artist sets up a dichotomy between consciousness and physicality. The synthesizer painting is Cooper’s conceptualization of perception: titled Perceptions Delusion (Whoever Felt It Dealt It), it features a blue synthesizer with switches, dials and cords that refer metaphorically to the networks and interactions of our senses—a clever allegory for the brain and all its synapses. By contrast, the group of paintings on the opposite wall explores how consciousness affects our bodies. In the larger examples, Cooper creates biomorphic abstractions made up of elon -

gated, curvy forms that resemble folded-over gym mats, piles of blankets, pencil erasers or tongues, as well as contorted human figures in high-energy activities such as wrestling or sex. The connection to human exertion in these works is reinforced by the fact that several of the biomorphic beings are wrapped in sweat bands or draped with white towels, and their surfaces are covered with liquid droplets that could be perspiration or tears. In the smaller paintings, the “creatures” look like contraptions that hold reams of white paper—a reference to writing, language and thought, byproducts of the mind. Collectively, the paintings are monochromatic, which unifies them as a group. Painted in various shades of rust-red signifying different skin tones, they are also incredibly seductive, as their soft radiant internal lighting establishes an overall sensuous tone.

The two sculptures in the center are essentially 3D representations of the forms imagined in the paintings. During the concerts, audiences could sit on them while gazing alternately at the paintings and the performance on stage. In creating a place for simultaneous engagement with sumptuous visual art and immersion in the vibrations of electronic music, Cooper provided an unconventional and inviting vehicle for musing on the nature of being.

FAITH RINGGOLD JEFFREY DEITCH

By Richard Allen May III

Maya Angelou’s words You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise speak to Faith Ringgold’s origins—as a college student in the 1940s, she was told by her professor that she had no talent for art. According to Dr. Lisa Farrington’s 2004 monograph on the artist, such words served as a slingshot of unwavering optimism.

“Faith Ringgold: A Survey” reveals her to be a prolific, trailblazing artist, storyteller and activist whose practice interrogates art his-story. Through works on canvas and paper, quilts, sculpture and printmaking, Ringgold demonstrates aesthetic autonomy in the face of the patriarchal bias inherent within the art canon as well as early male-centric discussions about the Black Arts Movement. In fact, along with Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, Carol Blank and Pat Davis, she became a founding member of the New York–based collective “Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc.” in 1971.

Made that year, Woman Free Yourself (1971) is an offset poster that appropriates a banner style of lettering, stating the work’s

Dealt It), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and RDFA.

Faith Ringgold, Early Works: Four Women at a Table, 1962. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.

title in grape purple and taffy green. It correlates in composition, hue and text style to Unite (1971), a print created by Barbara Jones-Hogu, a founding member of the Chicago-based artists’ collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). Echoing the sentiments of Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” the work makes a direct application of the Black Power theme of self-determination.

Ringgold’s practice includes textile works known as “Story Quilts.” Tar Beach #2 (1990–92) is made of silks pieced together, upon which Ringgold printed a surreal scene: a Black family sits on a city building rooftop with a violet-blue evening against the skyscrapers. Two figures lie on a blanket staring up at the sky, while another figure, a girl, soars freely among the stars. Present in the scene is the character Cassie Louise Lightfoot from her children’s book, with whom Ringgold mixes her own memories of growing up in Harlem to narrate her-story.

In Jazz Stories: Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #8: Don’t Wanna Love You (2004), Ringgold—using acrylic on canvas with a patchwork fabric border—captures the magic of musical improvisation. At center stage is a Black female lead singer adorned with a purple and tangerine spirograph print dress. This queen—with a confident, captivating gaze and hands on her rollercoaster, brickhouse hips—eliminates any hint of competition. Orange brushstrokes dancing around a jazz band and a blue background framed with geometric shapes almost inspire the audience to foot-tap in participation.

Ultimately, “Faith Ringgold: A Survey” represents the complete version of an artist who spoke in her own voice responding to and transcending the thought leaders of her day. So, whether it is expressionism, abstraction, conceptualism, feminism or Black Nationalism, Ringgold uses her creative tools as a weapon of agency. To be sure, this retrospective is a once in lifetime experience worth playing over and over again, like Aretha Franklin’s version of Respect

JONI STERNBACH VON LINTEL GALLERY

By Jody Zellen

In much of her work, New York–based photographer Joni Sternbach experiments with historical photographic processes, specifically tintypes, direct positive images created on thin pieces of metal. Tintypes were popular in late-19th-century photography studios since the immediate results meant sitters could quickly see their likeness. To make her modernday tintypes, Sternbach carries a large-format camera all over the world to photograph surfers at the shorelines of beaches. Included in the exhibition, the photographs in her “Surf land Series” are representative of her travels to Australia, Uruguay, England, France, Hawaii and America’s east and west coasts. Sternbach’s subjects include the female body and themes of domesticity, gender, identity and feminism as well as abstract images of the ocean (seen in her series Ocean Details). That said, she is best known for later series depicting surfers and their surfboards—current-day

surf culture. While these images feel historical and antique because of the processes Sternbach uses, in actuality they represent the present.

The exhibition features a selection of tintypes from 2009–22, as well as a nineminute, two-channel projection, Making Pictures (2023), that documents her experiences in the field and the process of posing her subjects and creating the images. What is striking about this presentation is the contrast between the color film, the awkwardness of her subjects—who are required to stand still for very long exposures—and the highly detailed, small-scale, monochromatic photographs on the wall.

It is impossible not to smile and wonder what is going on when looking at 11.03.17 #3 The Mers (Kazzie + Max) (2011), an image of a man and a woman posed as mermaids at the sea’s edge. Facing opposite directions, the long-haired figures’ lower bodies and legs have become mermaid tails. For 16.08.18 #3 Georgica Line up (2016), she posed one female and five male surfers on the sand, with all but one holding their surfboards on their heads. 15.07.14 #2, 3 & 4, Dirt Lot (2015) is a triptych, the panels of which depict bikini-wearing surfers on the sand by their giant surfboards in front of miscellaneous trucks and other surfers and surfboards. Most of Sternbach’s images show surfers with their boards on the beach rather than catching waves. The work is about the pose, encapsulating a moment of stillness, and presenting it as a monochrome on a piece of coated tin, rather than about the nuances of the colors of the sea or the motion of the waves.

What is remarkable about Sternbach’s project is not only the range of subjects and locations she has visited but the relationship between the contemporary and the antique. While her subjects are immersed in modernday surf culture, her work harkens back to the 19th century. In many ways, the process is a celebration as well as a public performance between subject and photographer who engage in a collaborative moment during the making of the image.

MARIA A. GUZMÁN CAPRON

SHULAMIT NAZARIAN

By Eva Recinos

“Pura Mentira,” the title of Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s exhibition, is a statement on people’s propensity for multiplicity. Using textiles as her medium, Capron merges the figures in her pieces to-

Joni Sternbach, 15.07.14 #2, 3 & 4, Dirt Lot, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery.

gether, their bodies often winding together to create circles like a colorful ouroboros. Her exhibition reflects on queerness by playing with traditional male and female signifiers. Also inspired by the drama of telenovelas, Capron explores how lies and deception affect our beings and how we present ourselves. “Pura Mentira” asks: Which parts of ourselves do we celebrate, and which parts do we try to push down? As I walked through the show, I found myself thinking: Are the stories that we tell about ourselves really true? Are we deceiving ourselves by denying our multiplicities?

In No Soy Florero (all works 2023), the figure’s head and torso lie flat on the wall, while its legs are filled with stuffing and emerge slightly from the wall. Floral patterns abound in the figure’s eyebrows, hair and neck; its hands are placed on the cheeks in a shocked expression, though it feels contrived and slightly coy. The title, which roughly translates to “I’m not a vase,” seems to hint at the decorative—at our self-fashioning. Floral patterns do not make one a vessel for flowers; feminine, bright clothing doesn’t make one a purely feminine figure.

A sense of fluidity between genders appears throughout the show . Desátame features three figures crouched together, their limbs long and tangled. The central

figure is flanked by feminine characters. A couple of the toes in the group look more like claws, suggesting either animal or otherworldly identities. Capron uses the fabric in clever ways, giving the illusion of flowing hair and fabric unfurling in the wind, lending more drama to the unlikely trio. Capron stitches together these scenes to give her figures, in her words, the “freedom to be constantly changing and becoming.” That “becoming” might also mean giving in to our more wild instincts. Gata Salvaje features fabric with zebra stripes, and a long tail, bringing a wildness to the figures, even while their features still read as human. Each soft sculpture seems to change as you notice another detail here, another tiny piece of fabric there. These creatures are unlike any you would see walking down the street, yet they might also seem eerily familiar.

LINDA ARREOLA AVENUE 50 STUDIO

By William Moreno

Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Linda Arreola’s “Abstract Wanderings From the LA Borderlands: 2020–2023” comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings, some in multi-panel formats with varying scales, can scarcely be contained in the gallery’s unassuming space—a testament to her formidable command of form, color and bridled ferocity. Reflective of her architectural training, her techniques culminate in complex and symbolic narratives. It’s a common misconception that Chicana artists are identified with—and manifest ideas within—a realist, figurative framework. Not so—or at least, not all. Historically, abstraction, with its focus on nonobjective elements of shape, form, color and line, is frequently positioned as the purview of certain mid-20th-century artists—the West Coast established its own hierarchy with such artists as Karl Benjamin, Helen Lundeberg and Sam Francis.

Arreola’s practice is often placed within the rubric of “Chicana abstraction,” but I’m not convinced that is an appropriate descriptive. Fundamentally she breaks new ground as an alternative tradition within American hardedged painting. As the artist states: “… my interest has been in honoring the simple, the common and the elemental.” Her current series is seething with vibrant color—which is its own reward—as well as grids, text, phrases, glyphs and indigenous symbology as consequential structural elements. Her paintings often entice the viewer with a compelling elusiveness while maintaining an inherent

connection to the everyday, the communal and the contemporary social milieu.

The sentimental, if symbolically complex work, Sereno (2023) gets to the heart of Arreola’s personal motivations. An homage to her Los Angeles neighborhood, El Sereno, the picture weaves the area’s complex social dynamic with striking uses of text and color, indigenous cyphers, gang-tagging signs and cosmology, all coexisting and backgrounded by an energetic palette acting as narrative guide. It’s an alluring optical juggling act. Dump (2022) echoes the existential menace of the 2017–21 presidential administration; the picture employs a muted palette reading as a threatening military insignia. It’s a sobering take on a historical aberration. The diptych Little Gray Hairs (2021) confronts the specter of aging and mortality—something many contemplated during the pandemic. But it’s rooted in an authentic desire to embrace what is ahead of us. This is not a fatalist or somber picture, rather one with a fair degree of optimism—a poignant, universal expression. We all travel that road.

The exhibition is rife with an adventurous sensibility and skillful virtuosity, and Arreola—in full control—takes us along for the ride.

Maria A. Guzmán Capron, La Santa y Su Pecado, 2023. Photo: Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.

Linda Arreola, Sereno, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

METRO ART

Visiting the three new Downtown LA Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and to show people outside what is inside, and vice versa. It creates a certain built-in welcome to pedestrians, both those planning to hop aboard a train as well as those who haven’t yet.

The new Little Tokyo/Arts District Station is a wonderful example of transforming something functional into something beautiful, even joyful. The glass panels enclosing the entry deck bear a whimsical design by Clare Rojas. The Bay-area artist is known for her colorful, graphic style, often in a story-telling vein but also in more abstract patterns, as at this station. Here she paired tall curved, sail-like shapes with rectangular blocks that suggest skyscrapers; along the top runs a series of circles which look like the waxing and waning of the moon. The work is called Harmony; a gentle reminder of how we live in the city, but also in time—a time counted out by heavenly spheres.

Meanwhile, at the next station, Historic Broadway, the noted LA artist Andrea Bowers uses letters in different sizes and colors to spell out two phrases, which appear both in English and Spanish. These are two phrases often heard in public rallies in the ’60s, “The people united will never be divided” (El pueblo unido jamás será vencido) and “By independence we mean the right to self-determination, self-government and freedom.” Bowers has said about this work, “I seek to reflect the diverse communities that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and their rights.”

The phrases run across several panels and are divided by brackets, so a passerby might randomly pick up a word or two like “freedom” or “libertad.” They would have to pause to read the whole phrase, which is what an artist hopes for, right?—a moment of concentrated attention and, hopefully, reflection on what the work might mean.

THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY SCARLET CHENG

Ann Hamilton is a well-known conceptual and performance artist based in Columbus, Ohio, and her appetite for public art was whetted when she did a mosaic for a subway station in New York City. After learning about the Metro Art program, and submitting her qualifications for consideration for public art opportunities in the LA transit system, she was selected for a commission at the new Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill Station, specifically for the elevator banks. Six elevators go from the lower level to the street level of the station, which is sandwiched between a view of DTLA buildings and a plaza with The Broad museum and Otium restaurant—nearby is MOCA, as well as Disney Hall and the Music Center complex.

“For me the challenge was can we take something like vinyl and give it the fineness of something hand-drawn,” Hamilton said during a phone interview. Her project, under-over-under , put together ideas of urban intersections with weaving, and she began to draw by hand parallel lines that were like threads of cloth; she reminded me that in her early days she worked with textiles. The drawn lines were translated onto blue vinyl overlays, which were applied to the glass walls of the elevators and of the exteriors. “As the shaft of the elevator travels up and down, you’re literally weaving the pattern,” she added.

I mentioned that I felt a certain calming sensation as the lines crossed—maybe it was the lull of being in motion, maybe it was the blue. “That was partly was my intention,” Hamilton admitted. “How does it wrap you, you’re now inside the cloth. It’s like the feeling of that as much as the image.”

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

ABOVE: Ann Hamilton’s, under-over-under, at Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Station. Right: Clare Rojas’s, Harmony, Little Tokyo/Arts District Station - A/E Line.

September 16 - December 17, 2023

Artist Reception: September 23 at 2 PM

Charles Arnoldi

Angela Casagrande

Susan Feldman

Terry Holzgreen

Dan “Nuge” Nguyen

Douglas Tausik Ryder

Valerie Wilcox

NOW OPEN

Always Free

Lad Decker

Art & Humor for Challenging Times

Sept 25 - Nov 30, 2023

Margaret Adachi

Lalo Alcaraz

Michelle Andrade

Mark Steven Greenfield

Beth Grossman

Sandra Low

Manny Orozco

Naida Osline

Elyse Pignolet

Thur Sept 28, 5-7

Sat Sept 30, 1-4 pm

Curators:

Suvan Geer

Maryrose C. Mendoza

Sandra Mueller

JULIA BUI: The Couch Surfing Paintings

Exploring

Naida Osline, Tell US A Joke, 2018, video still

Maxwell (from France), 2017, oil on canvas

Currently Considering Consignments For Our Fall Auction

NOVEMBER 5, 2023 1pm PDT

At the center of Bergamot Station Arts Center with 39 years of auctioning, we have continuously achieved record prices on rare items at our auctions. Notably, our last auction featured the sale of the unique canvas, HOPE by Shepard Fairey, which sold for over 1 2 million dollars

David Hockney Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes signed in pencil and dated 1978-80

From the edition of 48 Estimate: $200,000-$250,000

We are pleased to announce we lowered our Buyer's Premium from 27.5% to 26%. Lower than most of the auction houses in Los Angeles

Please send any secondary market art for consideration to info@smauctions.com, include images, all important information and documentation pertaining to the art. We hope to see you at our next auction and look forward to working with you.

Luna Anaïs Gallery presents

A Separate Reality

Andrea Nakhla & Gia Rush

A duo-solo exhibition show

Opening Reception

Sunday, Sept 10, 1–8pm

Sept 10–Oct 22, 2023

Artist Talk: Oct 8, 5pm

ASK BABS

BY BABS RAPPLEYE

POEMS

COWSONG

Guide me into the depths, where the lack of oxygen intercepts the thing no human accepts. Yet here I am, alive: a joke the wind might contrive. Underneath the beat of your blood, feet in the stars, face in the mud. I can hear your brains beat and your heart thud. I see your tendered legality, your surrendered hospitality. It leaves me lost yet calls to me. The borders crossed, thanks for the liberty. I hold my heart in place. Allow me to reveal it to your face.

—Max Ferguson

YELLOW TOUCHINGS

Before you retire from this realm of delight, you bask for one last time in the tenderness of the spotlight. As you stare up at the stars, where you came from, and back down into the ocean of adoring sighs, you wipe the pride and joy from bloodshot eyes, soaking up all the love and reflected glory from the thousands who have lived their own stories through you, and the thousands more who will relive it on pay-per-view. Down through the years, your sorrow and elation have been magnified at every station. Fame is love, but the price is steep, and a well-spent life runs deep.

—John Tottenham

THE NAME GAME

Dear Babs, I’m a mid-career painter who’s carved out a decent professional career. I’m not famous, and frankly, I don’t want to be. My problem is that I have a unique name I thought would never be confused with another artist. Recently another, young painter with my exact first and last name has been getting attention in the art world. People are starting to mistake me for them. We don’t make similar paintings, but I’m concerned about what’s going to happen if people keep getting us confused. Should I change my name or should I wait it out?

—Pondering a Pseudonym in Philadelphia

Dear Pondering , If only the art world operated with the same policies as the Screen Actors Guild, which tries hard to make sure all its members work under names that cannot easily be confused with one another. Perhaps then, this younger artist would be the one considering a name change.

Giving up your given name is not an easy decision. You’ve worked to establish yourself using your lifelong name, so changing it now would be like surrendering your public identity to someone else’s success.

Consider the practical aspects of your situation: Does the misidentification you’re experiencing impact your professional life, the sale and the reception of your work? Do you honestly think your online presence might suffer if the other artist becomes a supernova in the art world, making any hopes at search engine optimization futile? Does this appellative doppelganger have any risk of sullying your name? It would really suck to be an artist named Tom Sachs, right! Just to be sure, why not reach out to your same-named peer? Get to know them, if only so they know you exist.

Ultimately, you’re probably going to be fine. I suggest using this as an opportunity to live up to the unique name you and this other artist share. Who knows? In the future, people might mistake the other artist for you!

DISCRETE SKINS +SIGNS SITES+POEMS

Juan Delgado & Thomas McGovern

On exhibition: August 20–

October 15, 2023

Get tickets! 3425

@riversideartmuseum

JUAN