Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite

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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…]

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years: 1970-1983

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Archive Project No. 1
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
           –-Lyrics: Stephen Sills/Buffalo Springfield
              “For What It’s Worth”

Annie Leibovitz has combed through her enormous archive of negatives to personally curate and print these 4,000 (yes, that’s right) mostly black and white photographs for this poignant and profound exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition chronicles the turbulent late sixties, the “me decade” of the seventies and the beginning of the prosperous early eighties. Printed in various sizes with some as small as 3”x5” straight from a contact sheet to later work that is printed much larger with an irregular black border (that echoed both Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two photographers that she admired), they are push pinned to a hemp wall in a precise grid in a sometimes curiously casual looking installation meant to evoke a kind of walk-in scrap book. These pictures are truly an amazing visual history of the way we were, while clearly indicating where we were headed. [Read more…]

La Raza And The Onetime Voice Of Chicano Activism

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at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (through February 10)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
–Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana

The sixties was a tumultuous decade, filled with assassinations, race, student and antiwar riots. This traumatic and dangerous time, when the social fabric was being torn apart, also gave birth to many civil rights movements for marginalized people such as women, gay/lesbian/transgender and people of color. This exhibition at The Autry Museum focuses on the Chicano movement specifically and on La Raza, a newspaper/zine that was crucial to exposing, through text and image, the Chicano movements struggle for social justice from 1967-77. [Read more…]

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

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Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
at Getty Center, Los Angeles (through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide!  –Hymn

Sally Mann’s haunting black and white photographs are a hymn to the South she loves so ferociously, with all its troubled, tangled, twisted history filled with bitter defeats. The charismatic photographs of her children, of her own black nanny Virginia, who also cared for her children, and of the Civil War battlefields are poignant, bittersweet narratives examining the complexities of race, place, family and faded memory. [Read more…]

The Riveting Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile

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at LACMA (through June 9, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner       

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”
–Pablo Picasso

 “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting”
–Robert Rauschenberg

Run, don’t walk to see the revelatory exhibition entitled Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile, at LACMA. The large-scale, enormously ambitious work shown here (together for the first time) as one long piece was done over seventeen years and is a joyful trip through Rauschenberg’s absolutely pristine craftsmanship, complex imagery and his many cultural touchstones. These works were started in 1981 when there was a Rauschenberg retrospective in Europe and clearly the artist is ruminating on his previous bodies of work such as his iconoclastic “Combines” from the fifties and sixties and his “Spreads” series from 1975-83. [Read more…]

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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at The Guggenheim Museum, NYC (through April 23, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The Hilma af Klint retrospective, currently at The Guggenheim Museum, is a game changer. This astonishing exhibition alters the way one must view the trajectory of abstract painting (almost always male dominated) in the early twentieth century. The mystery of how a classically trained female painter in Sweden at the turn of the century moved confidently away from realism to large-scale abstraction before any other painters did (and kept it secret) is a fascinating tale. [Read more…]

Willard Hill: Untitled Works From 2016-2018

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at The Good Luck Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Imagination is greater than knowledge.” –Albert Einstein
“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” –Frank Zappa

Willard Hill exhibits his exuberant mixed- media (mostly painted masking taped figures and animals) sculptures at The Good Luck Gallery. Hill was a sixty-two year old cook and avid fisherman who suddenly started making his objects as a way to rehabilitate himself after a hospital stay. He just grabbed whatever materials were around, such as masking tape, garbage bags and toothpicks. That was twenty years ago. Then two years ago, the 82 year-old Hill had his first solo art show at The Good Luck Gallery. [Read more…]

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s The Chiefest Of Ten Thousand

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at the new Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (through November 3)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner                                     

   My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.
—King James James Bible

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s exhibit, entitled The Chiefest of Ten Thousand, at the sparkling new Nino Mier Gallery is as complex and open to interpretation as the Bible passage that the title comes from. Dupuy-Spencer (who is half Jewish and half Catholic) explores the mysteriousness of religion, friendship, love and sex in her large-scale paintings. [Read more…]

Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain

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at The Autry Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face…” — I Corinthians
“In today’s world, love, art and magic are greatly needed” — Fritz Scholder

Things You Know But Cannot Explain is the poetic title of the exquisite Rick Bartow retrospective at The Autry Museum. A heady brew of neo-expressionist drawing, painting and sculpture with lashings of Bacon, Basquiat, Kitaj, Scholder and even Nathan Olivera, this is a show not to be missed. Beautifully installed, with small videos strategically placed around with the artist candidly talking of his life in illuminating ways that enhance the viewer’s understanding of his work. No art jargon here. Just plainspoken words by the artist himself, who had struggled with alcoholism, PTSD and, towards the end of his life, two strokes (from which he would recover). It seems, upon further examination, that the title of the exhibit is more specific than poetic. After his strokes, Bartow knew “things” that he could not explain. [Read more…]

Iranian Art, Past and Present: In The Field Of Empty Days

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at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.”  Rumi, 13thcentury Persian Poet

The poetically entitled In The Field of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art is a dense yet sprawling exhibit that features compelling images from artists whom we may not have seen before. A hallmark of these modern and contemporary Iranian artists is their ingenious blending of images related to myth, history, social disruption, political upheaval and religious restriction in their work. They, like so many contemporary artists, are mining the past for re-presentation in the present. [Read more…]

The Triplets of Belleville Cine-Concert

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at The Barclay Theater, Irvine
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The Triplets of Belleville (2003), a French-Canadian, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic animated film with no dialogue (just sound effects and simulated speech) has an exuberant original Oscar-winning soundtrack (more on that later). The plot is ostensibly about a boy, a dog, a grandmother and a bicycle, but it is really about the passing of time, aging, resilience and persistence. At the same time, it hints at a social critique of America while clearly a love letter to early Disney animation as well as a paean to those kitschy American gangster movies from the 1930’s. Add in a love affair with Hollywood’s movie musicals and you begin to sense the complexity here, as all this is served up with a dash of whimsy and with a deeply sardonic Gallic sense of humor. [Read more…]

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

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at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”

A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1975

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at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The body never lies
–Martha Graham
Art is a lie; it is an interpretation of reality…
–Veronica Vera
Your body is a battleground
–Barbara Kruger

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1975, as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time at The Hammer, brings together artists (some known to us, some unknown) from fifteen countries, including the United States. Their work was experimental: much of it was photo-based documentation of public or private performances or actions/rituals that often feature the female body (frequently nude) and the face. [Read more…]

Hollywood in Havana: Five Decades Of Cuban Posters Promoting U.S. Films

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Part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
at The Pasadena Museum of California Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner                 

“Necessity is the mother of invention” —English language proverb

“Hollywood in Havana: Five Decades of Cuban Posters Promoting U.S. Films” is a small but potent exhibit, part of Pacific Standard Time/ Los Angeles/Latin America (PST/LA/LA) at The Pasadena Museum of California Art until January 7, 2018. The posters in this exhibit were produced by The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC) or the Cuban film Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry from 1961-2012; all of them are silkscreened and are uniformly 29 ½ inches by 20 ¼ inches. [Read more…]

Carlos Almaraz, Playing With Fire

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Part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
at The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Pacific Standard Time/LA/LA (Los Angeles, Latin America) is the second installment of a widespread series of exhibitions sponsored by The Getty. This incarnation involves over 70 institutions (art galleries, museums, and other cultural venues) from all over Southern California, including Palm Springs, to showcase Chicano and Latino art — ancient through contemporary.

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community. [Read more…]

Jim Shaw’s The Wig Museum

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at The Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The new kid on the block is the The Marciano Art Foundation, which showcases the art collection (some 1,500 pieces strong) that the brothers Paul and Maurice have collected since 1980. Instead of building a new structure, the Marciano brothers (of Guess fame) chose to buy and remodel the striking Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on Wilshire, which was designed by Millard Sheets. [Read more…]

Material as Metaphor

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at Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“What I am trying to get across is that material is a means of communication.”
Anni Albers

An exhibition entitled Material as Metaphor, currently at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, brings together eleven contemporary West Coast sculptors (Lloyd Hamrol, Victoria May, Lisa C Soto, Joel Allen, Miyoshi Barosh, Mary Little, Phyllis Green, Christy Matson, Senga Nengudi, Kay Whitney, May Wilson) who mostly use non-traditional materials such as industrial felt, vinyl, pantyhose, found thrift store crocheted blankets, rubber inner tubes, and other organic or manufactured items to create the predominately soft, sensuous, and idiosyncratic free standing and wall pieces. [Read more…]

Betye Saar’s Keepin’ It Clean

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at Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Oh, wash-woman
Arms elbow deep in white suds,
Soul washed clean,
Clothes washed clean,–
I have many songs to sing you
Could I but find the words

“A Song to a Negro Wash-Woman”
by Langston Hughes

Wall text of the first (above) and last stanza of this Langston Hughes poem, an elegiac ode to the over worked and unappreciated Negro wash-woman, coupled with ten of Betye Saar’s own vintage washboards, set the tone for this poignant, powerful, and political show entitled Keepin’ it Clean. At 90, the venerable Betye Saar still clearly has plenty of “fire power,” as demonstrated by this quietly explosive body of work—about half from the mid to late 1990’s (Saar began collecting washboards in the 1990’s) and the other, more recent pieces are from 2015-17. [Read more…]

Dubuffet Drawings, 1935-62

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at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“The voices of dust, the soul of dust: these things interest me many times more than flowers, trees, or horses because I sense they’re so much stranger.”
Jean Dubuffet

The Hammer Museum’s exhibit entitled Dubuffet Drawings 1935-62 is, according to their literature, the “first in-depth exhibition of Dubuffet’s drawings.”

I’m not sure if they mean in the United States or perhaps even world -wide. No matter. It is an extraordinary grouping of almost 100 works on paper – many borrowed from France – and the sheer volume is not only a treat for the viewer but provides important insights into Dubuffet’s idiosyncratic technique. His “backstory” – as we say here in California – is quite unusual. Apparently, he showed early artistic talent and had many significant artist friends, but for twenty years was a wine merchant. Not until 1942, at the ripe old age of 41, did he finally commit to being a full time artist. He had his first solo show in Paris two years later. [Read more…]

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World

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at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“I am poor and I am naked, but I am the chief of the nation”
Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota Sioux

The Hammer Museum has mounted a massive, sprawling and entertaining retrospective (the first in North America) of the multi-faceted sculptor, poet and activist Jimmie Durham. He is little known in the United States since moving abroad 30 years ago. In 1990 the United States government passed the Indian Arts and Craft Act requiring Indian artists to register in order to protect the consumer. Durham refused to register and wrote the following tongue in cheek statement:

I am a full – blooded contemporary artist, of the subgroup (or clan) called sculptors. I am not American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India. I am not a Native ‘American’, nor do I feel that ‘America’ has any right [Read more…]