Closing May 25th at Night Gallery, U.K.-based artist Laura Lancaster’s Running Toward Nothing is absolutely heading toward a highly fluid “something.” Perhaps it is the passage into a void we cannot control or fathom, perhaps it is the way through or into a dream, or just possibly, it is the outcome of memory and a passage through this life. [Read more…]
Bereavement Of The Felled: New Works By Trisha Donnelly
at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read more…]
Artists As Keepers Of Radical Thought In The Weight of Matter
at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through June 15)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
The Weight of Matter, on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, takes as it central premise the idea that artists are the keepers of radical thought, of dreams and incongruities, of nightmares and deepening schisms, and that these ideas are worth each and every dissection, no matter how minute or painstaking. On the surface, the exhibition appears to expand on the theme of materiality – how artists utilize their materials in new and inventive ways, yet if we look more closely, all the works included here begin with materiality as a central subject, and then deliberately and systematically subvert the process by which the works are imagined. [Read more…]
Nari Ward: We The People
at The New Museum, NYC (through May 26)
Reviewed by John Haber
When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are everywhere in his retrospective at the New Museum, fleshing out the sonic landscape amid (and from) the multiple installations. A tanning bed, for instance, made from oil drums, calls out not the work’s title, Glory, but an insistent “Hey, come on over here.” Sons recite their Miranda rights, in a muffled audio, to their very own father, in full dress as a retired policeman. Mahalia Jackson sings “Amazing Grace” over empty baby carriages in the outline of a slave ship. Just three words from the Constitution supply the show’s title, “We the People,” with every one of those people aching to be heard. In each case, the voices call attention to the silence that they can never quite break. And Ward has one listening to that as well. [Read more…]
Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30)
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Despite a couple of career retrospectives and a small handful of books, the late photographer Roy DeCarava is one of the most overlooked photographers of his era. His photos are among the few photographic equivalents to sound. Somehow, in spite of this majesty, his obscurity persists. But this spring, across Los Angeles, his work is being well served. DeCarava is represented by 21 photographs in the Broad Museum’s Soul of a Nation show, where the late photographer is one of many voices. While several of his disciples are part of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Contact High show dedicated to the documentation of hip hop, it is the Underground Museum’s Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, on view until June 30th 2019, where DeCarava gets the best chance to imprint his genius upon the next generation. [Read more…]
Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again
at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 19 – September 2)
Reviewed by Jill Conner
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set to open Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again, a stunning retrospective that presents the artist’s large-scale compositions, installations, portraits, sculptures and films. The title of this exhibition suggests something relational about Warhol, which sounds odd at first because he had been so well connected. Since moving to New York City in 1949, he became the most sought-after commercial illustrator in advertising design, where images and their subsequent repetition in print bridged perfectly with popular culture. [Read more…]
An Interview With Activist Photographer Nick Brandt
This Empty World, the latest exhibition by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt (at Fahey/Klein, Los Angeles, through 27 April), is a captivating account of wildlife colliding hard against an endless tide of human encroachment and unchecked corporate development. Once roaming free upon endlessly expansive and entirely majestic lands, these now endangered animals find themselves wandering amid stands of cement walls, their destinies perilously disrupted by ditches, bus stations, construction sites, highways, dried river beds and, of course, people. So many people. Everywhere, locals — whose mere presence carries with it an indeterminable fate of doom — stare away from these gorgeous creatures, grounded as they are in their own sense of isolation and despair. When their eyes do seem to meet, at least in Brandt’s photographs, the encounter is altogether fruitless, for the two are equal victims of a global environmental destruction that churns-on despite local action. [Read more…]
Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite
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…]
Awakening the Spirit in Motion: Christina Quarles
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…]
Art At The Crossroads: Artists Addressing The U.S./Mexico Border
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…]
Soul Of A Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power 1963-1983
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…]
Alice Neel: Freedom
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…]
Van Gogh and Britain
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…]
Stuck Together Repurposes And Becomes Richly Subversive
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…]
Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)
at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through May 4)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Priss has captivated the artworld with her mischievous antics since she first appeared in Kim Dingle’s artwork thirty years ago, dressed in her Sunday Best and ready for battle. Dingle’s imaginary character split and replicated, like a Tribble on Star Trek, into a bi-racial pair, Fatty and Fudge, and then into a wild pack, the “Priss Girls.” These ornery tots run amok: causing mayhem, having fights, raging temper tantrums, and destroying things. Priss and her gang of rambunctious pre-pubescent girls inhabit a world with no adults, no men, and no rules. [Read more…]
Future Gaze And The Dystopically Rendered Face
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…]
Hew Locke: Here’s the Thing
at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK (through 2 June)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
Hew Locke makes art to discover things. This is the sense you get. It explains why there is so much texture and variety throughout his work. For the viewer, being with an artist who seems to be in the act of turning over a dozen stones at once, it is a rewarding experience.
Open-eyed, critical but not dogmatic, Locke comes across as an artist who is happy to reveal his anxieties. Much of his work is a personal response to the history of European colonialism and especially to Guyana, a country with a long history of colonial subjugation. First from Dutch imperialism and then under the British Empire in the late 18th century, Guyana finally gained its independence in 1966. [Read more…]
Andy Warhol: By Hand
at The New York Academy of Art
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
We are so accustomed to seeing Warhol as a seminal game changer that it’s easy to forget that like most artists, he started out in a much more conventional vein, as evidenced by his junvenilia and other early works on display at the Whitney’s wonderful major Warhol survey. The New York Academy of Art’s recent exhibit, Andy Warhol: By Hand, running somewhat concurrently with the Whitney retrospective, offered a rare opportunity to sample Warhol’s seductive skills as a draughtsman and illustrator—apart from such well-known commercial work as his I. Miller shoe ads and album covers. [Read more…]
The Timely Call of Revolution from Without…
at The 8th Floor, NYC (through May 4)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
Revolutionary Cycles is an expansive two-year series of art showing at The 8th Floor, a New York exhibition space run by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. The series will feature different themes such as issues around surveillance, gender, and media. Curated by Sara Reisman, Revolution from Without… kicks off the first installment of the series focused on the topic of resistance, with this exhibition featuring art from Tania Bruguera, Tony Cokes, Chto Delat, Raqs Media Collective, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Dread Scott, and Mark Wallinger. [Read more…]
Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years: 1970-1983
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…]