Act out your photographic fantasies: LACMA’s ‘Acting Out’ cabinet-card show
Aug
23
2021
This is fabulous. I love to ‘act out.’ (Just ask my family.) Now there is an entire exhibition dedicated to that proposition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, aka LACMA. It illustrates one of the few ways people in the late 19th Century could indulge their little dramatic fantasies — by visiting the ...
‘United States of Abstraction’: a nice way of putting it
Jul
16
2021
Shirley Jaffe, The Red Diamond (detail), 1964 So that is what we have going on here … abstraction! Life certainly feels abstract lately. When you untether from science, reason, and truth, and when the ravings of a mad man are considered worthy of the public square, never mind that children hear his rants, things are ...
Searching for Nina(s), with coffee & Al Hirschfeld
I don’t quite agree with the exhibition title that calls ‘looking for Ninas’ “a “national insanity.” Donald Trump has a lock on that. But apparently that was how the late great caricaturist/arts journalist Al Hirschfeld, whose charming shtick of inserting his daughter’s name into his cartoons in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure ...
Through the eyes of Milton Glaser 2
If you lived in America in the last half of the 20th Century, you saw the country, in part, through the eyes of illustrator and graphic designer Milton Glaser (1929-2020). So prolific and widespread was his visual sense that, for a while, almost all good design looked like his. He co-founded Push Pin Studios, the ...
Get serious, Los Angeles!
Richard Valitutto, Pianospheres Jan 14photo: Jonathan Nesteruk It’s January. So, no excuses. Clear the eggnog out of your noggin — and get ready for some serious art. In Los Angeles, it’s all around us. Artists and their presenters are hitting the new decade afresh, and with force. It does not get headier than the L.A. ...
Prop poster portrays choreographer’s bad-taste pinnacle
This prop poster from The Producers (1968) is displayed outside the theater during the premiere of “Springtime for Hitler,” and is also visible at greater length in the “Playhouse Outtake” on the DVD. It is on auction December 10 at Bonhams as part of the TCM presents: 1939, Hollywood’s Greatest Year sale. “Springtime for Hitler” ...
‘What?’ indeed! Lari Pittman’s brain-tingling artworks at the Hammer
Nov
19
2019
“Birthplace, 1984” installation photo by Susie Goodman artsmeme is delighted to celebrate the dazzling retrospective of astonishing works by Los Angeles artist Lari Pittman now at the Hammer Museum by reprinting, with the author’s kind permission, two separate interviews, one with Pittman and a second with the exhibition’s curator Connie Butler. The author/interviewer is KUSC’s ...
Erin Trefry: art works ‘hard-wired’ with intimacy
Sep
16
2019
In a Los Angeles gallery season just crammed with new shows, something caught my eye in the announcement of artist Erin Trefry‘s solo exhibition at Lowell Ryan Projects, If The Moon Turns Green. I felt drawn to the images of Trefry’s paintings; in particular, her assemblage and sculptures spoke to me, I realized, on a ...
Where are we heading? Ask artist Eric Nash
Sep
3
2019
We seem to be going sideways … some people think we are going down! So it’s nice of painter Eric Nash, in his soon-opening show at Skidmore Contemporary Art, to lend some much-needed direction. Eric Nash began his career in Chicago as an advertising art director, thus his interest in universal and iconic imagery. He ...
Get your gaze on.
Installation view of Donna Huanca: OBSIDIAN LADDER. Courtesy the artist, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles and Peres Projects, Berlin. Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com In the past we would look. And sometimes we would see. But now, in the art world, the operative word is “gaze.” That’s nothing new, the expression “gaze” has been in use ...