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…]

The Extraordinary Fast Color Breathes New Life Into The Superhero Genre

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

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…]

Awakening the Spirit in Motion: Christina Quarles

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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…]

Proxy Among the Spiders: An Imagined Louise Bourgeois In Now, Now, Louison

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Reviewed by John Biscello

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…]

Art At The Crossroads: Artists Addressing The U.S./Mexico Border

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by Ellen C. Caldwell

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

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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…]

Matthew Shipp Trio’s Signature

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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…]

Alice Neel: Freedom

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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…]

Teen Spirit Has More Heart, Better Bangers Than A Star Is Born

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

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…]

Van Gogh and Britain

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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…]

Technology Killed The City

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by Barrett Martin

“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…]

Stuck Together Repurposes And Becomes Richly Subversive

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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…]

Future Gaze And The Dystopically Rendered Face

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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…]

Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)

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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 StarTrek, 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…]

The Storm of History: Sergei Bundarchuk’s War and Peace

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By Alci Rengifo

The movies now give us an “epic” nearly every week of the year. Digital technology, corporate budgets and the public’s own current thirst for shallow escapism have paved the way for visions both ludicrous and wondrous. Chiseled, tattooed ruffians bestrode kraken-like monsters in Aquaman, cyborgs levitate from futuristic cities buried in trash in Alita: Battle Angel. But what do these films have to say? As we wallow in popcorn excess, Janus Films restores and re-releases the grandest, deepest epic of all, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Made in 1967, it shames everything, and I mean absolutely everything, playing at the ArcLight today. Slated for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection, it is touring various arthouse spots and must be seen on a proper, wide canvas. Your humble correspondent was lucky enough to catch such a screening at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. It will grace the Egyptian in Hollywood on April 27. [Read more…]

The Wind Is A Savage And Insightful Horror-Western

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Tales of the Wild West often focus on cowboys who conquer tough terrains and ruthless foes with their glistening guns and macho bravado. Bucking convention with The Wind, screenwriter Teresa Sutherland and director Emma Tammi dust off a forgotten and frightening real-life phenomenon that terrorized the pioneering women of the west. And the result is a horror-western as savage as it is insightful. [Read more…]

The Literal Sounds Of Plastic On Matmos’s Plastic Anniversary

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Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne

In music, in general, combining high conceptual aims with what we call accessibility (a troublesome concept on its own) is not an easy thing to pull off. My no doubt annoyingly subjective list of musicians who’ve achieved a balancing in this equation (ear-friendliness + modernity) would include, say, Robert Wyatt, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terje Rypdal, Annette Peacock, Diamanda Galás, Coil and the Velvet Underground. This varied bunch shares the notion of basing the work on musical or thematic ideas, and in so doing not skimping on the soul; the goal is a kind of beauty. [Read more…]

Hew Locke: Here’s the Thing

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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…]

Transit Offers Old-School Romance And Timeless Tragedy

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The cruelest twist of history is how it mercilessly repeats. As the dust of World War II settled, German author Anna Seghers wrote Transit, a novel that centered on a concentration camp escapee fleeing Nazi forces. While headlines and political propaganda might paint refugees are invading swarms, Seghers’ book aimed to restore the personhood of these people, sharing their stories to display their humanity. 75 years later, the debate over refugees still rages regularly. Which might explain why German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s adaptation of Transit is obliquely placed, making its setting as timeless as its harrowing tale. [Read more…]

Andy Warhol: By Hand

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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…]