Art. Word. Thought.
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Margaret here has struggled with her addiction to crack cocaine. She tells me she entered into one of the Midnight Mission programs to help her get clean, but she still lives on the street. [Read more…]
From Little Simz’s Grey Area
on Age 101 / AWOL
at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Nancy K. Turner
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities
–Maya Angelou
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite, is an intimate in scale, personal in scope, potent exhibit. It documents through photographs, ephemera, and fashion, Kwame Braithwaite, his wife Sikolo, his brother Elombe Brath and their circle of musician and artist friends as they built a movement based on the philosophy of cultural empowerment, dignity and affirmation originally espoused by Marcus Garvey. [Read more…]
Superhero origin stories typically center on a hero coming into their power and realizing the responsibilities therein. In studio-made films, this arc is accompanied by flashy costumes, super-villains, and elaborate action sequences. But as the superhero genre evolves, inventive indies are pushing their tropes into thrillingly unexpected new realms. In Fast Color, writer/director Julia Hart uses the superhero origin structure to explore the struggles and glory of becoming a mother. [Read more…]
But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles (through May 9)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Christina Quarles’ dazzling But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same transports viewers into a lush and seductive world, a world that takes viewers on a brilliantly motion filled ride with contorted figures that veer between narrative and abstract. We struggle to understand the image, yet we intuitively know the seemingly impossible, terrible and wonderful positions relationships thrust us into. [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
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Suitcase Joe is a Los Angeles photographer who lives anonymously in our amongst. His Instagram page is an important document of our times. @suitcase_joe
Now, Now, Louison, by Jean Frémon
New Directions Publishing, 112 pps. $13.95
There once was a little girl named Louise. Sweet, endangered, watchful and tragic, this little girl, who in her permeable nomenclature was also referred to as Lousion, bore the embryonic shadow of the son and heir that her father desired. Louise and her mother, Louison and her father, a baleful diet of scissors and stones, a garden overgrown with weeds. Here is where the myth begins. [Read more…]
With the threat of closing the U.S./Mexico border looming, people whose lives do not intersect with the border on a regular basis are thinking more about the border than usual. But before this recent wave of attention, artists have been drawn to the border and have been drawing attention to the myriad issues it raises through performances, street art, public art, photography, and augmented reality (AR). [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Sarah, the one cutting hair here, came down from Portland Oregon a few weeks ago to join a friend in a t-shirt bootlegging venture, but things didn’t pan out. In her past she went to school to learn how to cut hair. Seen here she is doing a fix job on her neighbor, after he attempted to cut his hair himself. She tells me I should’ve seen it before she got to work on it. Apparently the guy in the photo is not great at being a self barber. [Read more…]
from the Time For Us ep
on Wolf + Lamb Records
at TheBroad Museum, Los Angeles (through September1)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman
There are many ways to look at the passionate and very earnest Soul of A Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, at The Broad Museum. It is foremost a show intended to be experienced in the context of American politics during the tumultuous decades of the sixties and seventies when, for the first time, many Black artists were emboldened to question and re-imagine their place in a society steeped in racism. The strongest of the overtly political works are rooted in a sense of urgency or despair yet reveal universal conditions that transcend their times. There is an arc to the exhibit that is somewhat like the five stages of grief. The show starts with awareness, moves toward anger, then acceptance, and ends with work that is largely unconcerned with the initial problem altogether. The focus moves from civil rights to questions of personal, artistic and cultural identity. Is that progress or the illusion of progress? [Read more…]
on ESP-Disk’
Reviewed by John Payne
The rather prolific Matthew Shipp is the most relevant jazz pianist of the last few decades. With more than 85 releases of bold ‘n’ brave music as a solo performer and in duo/ trio/quartet formats alongside the avantish jazz likes of the David S. Ware Quartet, Ivo Perelman, Sabir Mateen, Darius Jones, Joe Morris, Jemeel Moondoc, Mat Walerian and two tons of others, he hasn’t had time to take a vacation. Several years ago Shipp told me he was thinking of retiring from recording, because, he said, there was just too much music out there in consumer land. I’m glad he didn’t, because his recorded output since spouting such balderdash has only grown more profound — and truly electrifying. [Read more…]
at David Zwirner, NYC (through April 13)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
In a sense, Alice Neel’s portraits are always naked, at least psychologically; Neel brilliantly stripped her subjects down to their bare essence. As Joseph Solman, a fellow artist and old friend from her Socialist Realist days, once put it, “She turned a person inside out. If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her. I never did pose for her.” Or as another old friend, artist Benny Andrews said, “I always said she was looking at you like an X-ray…” [Read more…]
The rise to fame story’s moves so familiar that audiences can dance it blindfolded. Enter the undiscovered talent, raw but passionate. Their circumstances are grim. There may be poverty, family tragedy, and/or abuse. Still, they cling to the hope that music might save them. They find that one person in the room who believes in them. They rocket into the spotlight. But fame is not easy. Sex, drugs, and rock star decadence comes hard on the heels of glamorous makeover that turns them from ordinary to icon. Then–somewhere amid the glitz and grit–they trip through an important life lesson that gives the audience a cozy — even smug — sense of satisfaction. In his directorial debut Teen Spirit, actor turned writer/helmer Max Minghella plays off clichés, offering a drama that is as surprisingly intimate, beautiful, and bittersweet. [Read more…]
at Tate Britain, London (through 11 August)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
Judging from the crowds and the advanced ticket sales, the magnetism of Vincent Van Gogh shows no sign of diminishing. It’s hardly a surprise. We come to empathise with the optimism of a man whose dreams of an art colony in the south would come to nothing. We respond to him because he kept on painting, his canvases getting brighter and brighter as his days got darker. [Read more…]
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
“Technology Killed The City” is from Martin’s forthcoming book,
The Way of the Zen Cowboy: Fireside Stories From A Globetrotting Rhythmatist
on Sunyata Books
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.“
—Bill Gates
I think I first noticed it back in about 2000. I was pretty slow getting into the whole technology thing, but I remember that my first cell phone had been one of those legendary Nokias. It was flat black, indestructible, and everyone was getting one, but the monthly bill was astronomical and I eventually gave it up because I really didn’t use it that much. Most of my calls came through my landline anyway, which of course was back when people still talked on the phone—now it’s just text messages and emoticons. Landlines were nice in that you could just sit in a chair and have a chat with a friend or business associate without worrying about the radiation of the cell phone going into your brain. [Read more…]
at Track 16 (through May 11)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Stuck Together is a conjoining of images, all fascinating, most anthropomorphic. The visually rich exhibition re-purposes images through collage, assemblage, and a sometimes-surreal approach to turning the ordinary into extraordinary. There’s a touch of whimsy, however dark, in the work of all three LA-based artists exhibiting: Marsian De Lellis, Simone Gad, and Debra Broz. Each artist is reinventing the objects and images they present, bringing them new life, renewal, and a gloriously subversive yet redemptive turn. [Read more…]
at Coagular Curatorial, Los Angeles (through March 30)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’ into the future…
House the people / Livin’ in the street / oh, oh there’s a solution…
–Steve Miller Band
What do you see when you look into the future’s face? That is the question posited and replied-to at Future Gaze, a two-person exhibition at Coagula Curatorial. [Read more…]