Review: Toba Khedoori, detailed draftswoman, at LACMA

Visual arts
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If you love drawing, please run, don’t walk, to see LACMA’s exhibition of Toba Khedoori’s work through March 19. It covers two decades of the Los Angeles artist’s practice with 25 stunning works. Usually drawings would be dwarfed by the voluminous spaces of the BCAM building, but Khedoori’s manage to occupy the space beautifully. That ...

Exhibit spawns critical reassessment of West Coast-rooted pioneers of post-modern dance

Dance · Visual arts
The place to be in the dance world this past weekend was splendiforous Santa Barbara, California, for the opening of “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Offering toasts, in photo above, to five years of research and writing, ...

Los Angeles in freeze frame, courtesy of photographer Michael Grecco

Visual arts
Michael Grecco, an award-winning purveyor of commercial photography, fashion spreads and film direction is exhibiting, as part of LA’s month of photography, a new body of fine-art photography at the Leica Store LA. Printed larger than life, the viewer feels as though they can step into the photographs, and thus, into another realm into Los ...

Get good weather in a painting @ Pasadena Museum of California Art 1

Visual arts
It’s crappy and cold and rainy out and I don’t even recognize the weather in L.A. anymore: the whipsawing temperature, the nasty edge we rarely felt even in rainy season. That is your arts·meme weather report. Whiny. One solution might be In the Land of Sunshine: Imaging the California Coast Culture at Pasadena Museum of ...

Lichtenstein’s lingerings in Los Angeles

Visual arts
Pop for the People: Roy Lichtenstein in L.A., an art exhibit now running at The Skirball Center through next March, explores how the artist, a vanguard of the Pop Art movement buoyed by a renaissance in printmaking, made fine art accessible to the American public in ways that had not been achieved before. The Skirball ...

Dance on, three nymphs, at Hollyhock House! 2

Architecture & Design · Dance · Visual arts
Don’t these girls deserve a rest? Apparently not! We recently announced the joyful homecoming of a reaaaaally old work of art — a first-century Roman bas relief still in stunning condition. A high-tech replication of an original tableau of three dancing girls lives once more on Olive Hill, a hilltop retreat dedicated to the arts ...

Aline’s nymphs to prance once more on Olive Hill

Architecture & Design · Dance · Visual arts
It’s the thing I most love, except for my relatives. I need this marble when I arrive home from a day of shopping or business. And I recover immediately when I look at those three maidens. They sooth me with their rhythm, that balance of movement, so charming, so pitre … This marble is already ...

Nasty women, nasty men dance with ‘Two Hags’ sculpture: Susan Marshall & Co.

Architecture & Design · Dance · Visual arts
An upright metal grid of cut steel pipe bisects a table, and steel rods — sharpened to a spike — are prepared in rows. The dancers of Susan Marshall & Company pay careful attention to speed, force, and precision, while navigating dangerously sharp edges of Martha Friedman’s new sculpture, Some Hags.  The spikes are pushed into ...

Terence Donovan, British photog who chronicled sixties

Fashion · Film · Music · Visual arts
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Photographer David Bailey (born 1938) is said to have given us a visual vocabulary with which we remember Swinging Sixties London. But he didn’t do it alone. Though not as celebrated, Terence Donovan (1936-1996) and Brian Duffy (1933-2010) did groundbreaking work in their own right. All three triangulated fashion photography with movies and pop culture ...

Print pioneers of Los Angeles: Gemini G.E.L. 1

Visual arts
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It’s no surprise anymore when an American artist of any discipline or media turns out prints. Painter, sculptor, installation specialist, conceptualist, land mover—all find something in their trick bags that will fit on a piece of paper with a high-rag content. It wasn’t always so. None of the Abstract Expressionist vilde chayas who dominated 1950s ...