Naomi Fry

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  print October 2017

  Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth”

  THE CATALOGUE PUBLISHED on the occasion of the photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s show “Generation Wealth,” which opened this past month at New York’s International Center of Photography, is a hefty doorstop of a thing, running to 504 pages and about seven pounds. With its cover a dull gold, as if to simulate burnished bullion, this brick-like book’s arm-straining audacity feels like both a come-on and an encumbrance: Its dazzlingly tactile materiality attracts while its sheer weight burdens. This duality also lies at the heart of the show the catalogue accompanies. The

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  slant January 2017

  the GALA Committee

  IN A SWIFT, BRUTAL DEVELOPMENT, America has suddenly become the greatest reality show on earth, its inhabitants in peril of being thumped as if they were nothing more than a prop conference table on the Apprentice set. There is something both comforting and invigorating about revisiting an earlier era when television was television and real life was real life, and when in the space between the two—at least in one singular case—art blossomed.

  In 1995, the curators Julie Lazar and Tom Finkelpearl asked the artist Mel Chin to take part in “Uncommon Sense,” a group show at the Museum of

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  film April 30, 2013

  Family Guy

  MARIA DEMOPOULOS AND JODI WILLE’S The Source Family opens with an extended close-up of Jim Baker (aka Father Yod, aka YaHoWha), founder of the early-1970s Los Angeles–based cult the Source Family. Baker’s piercing eyes, craggily handsome face, and abundant gray beard peg him as a cross between a Maharishi-like sage and a rugged, post-Aquarian cocksman à la Kris Kristofferson. This impression is only strengthened when the movie segues into footage of Baker, or “Father”—as many of his former devotees interviewed in the film still call him—as he steps out of a white Rolls Royce, resplendent in

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  film June 29, 2012

  Sexual Healing

  OK, PEOPLE, YOU CAN BREATHE EASY: Your guilty summer pleasure is finally here. The new Channing Tatum vehicle, endlessly referred to in recent weeks as “Steven Soderbergh’s highly anticipated male-stripper movie,” arrives in theaters today in a whirl of smooth, muscled torsos, hooded bedroom eyes, and thrusting and grinding pelvises. Loosely based on Tatum’s real-life, pre-breakout days as a member of an all-male revue, Magic Mike centers on the titular Mike, the thirty-year-old lady-killing centerpiece of a Tampa-based male stripping crew run by the drawling, genially Machiavellian former

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  interviews June 14, 2012

  Susan Morgan

  Susan Morgan is a Los Angeles–based writer and contributing editor at Aperture. With Kimberli Meyer, she cocurated the 2011 exhibition “Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design” at the MAK Center/Schindler House in LA. Morgan recently edited Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, the first gathering of the diverse writings of Esther McCoy (1904–1989), a critic who significantly impacted cultural understandings of midcentury modern California design. The collection is the debut title from East of Borneo Books.

  I MOVED TO LOS ANGELES

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  interviews May 09, 2012

  Daniel Clowes

  Daniel Clowes is an Oakland-based cartoonist and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, known for seminal graphic novels such as Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000), Ice Haven (2005), and Wilson (2010), which have redefined the language of contemporary comics. The retrospective “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is currently on view through August 12 at the Oakland Museum of California and is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Alvin Buenaventura and published by Abrams.

  THE BAY AREA CURATOR SUSAN MILLER approached me about five years ago and wanted to organize a retrospective of

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  interviews March 28, 2011

  Sigrid Nunez

  Sigrid Nunez, a New York–based writer, has published six novels. Here, she talks about her latest book, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, in which she looks back on her years living with Sontag and her son, David Rieff, in the 1970s. On April 14, Nunez will discuss the book with Phillip Lopate at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, and on April 28, a reading will be held at the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble. Sempre Susan is published by Atlas & Co.

  THIS BOOK ISN’T A BIOGRAPHY or a critical study. It’s a memoir about a person who had a great influence on me at a particular time in my life

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  picks January 31, 2011

  “A Room, In Three Movements”

  This exhibition is pleasing not just for the freshness of the individual works on view but for the rare cogency of its aims and ambience as well. Over the course of the show’s run, the sculptures in the gallery––made by Katy Heinlein, Sheila Pepe, and Halsey Rodman––will be moved three times by the artists, changing their places and spatial relationships to one another. Even before any relocation has taken place, however, the fluidity, playfulness, and interdependence of seemingly discrete objects that the projected plan emphasizes can already be found in the works themselves.

  Pepe’s woven

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  picks April 27, 2010

  Jackie Gendel

  Man Leaving the Picture, 2010, the first painting one encounters on entering Jackie Gendel’s second solo show at this gallery, sets the tone for this gem of an exhibition. In it, a rotund man, wearing a greenish, hazmat suit–like outfit, is depicted (literally) leaving the picture plane, some sort of package tucked snugly under his arm. As he forges ahead, a ghoulish apparition of a woman emerges from the left, raising an arm as if to stop him. It seems appropriate to end this description with the word “curtain”; and indeed, what one notices initially is the work’s attachment to a scene-making

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  picks January 16, 2010

  Marlo Pascual

  The line that lies between sculpture and photography has been explored to the point of near erasure in some recent art. In Marlo Pascual’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, she joins the conversation, exhibiting work that incorporates sourced images and found objects to smart, self-assured effect. The sculptural plays a role in the work here even before concrete objects come into (or, rather, into contact with) the picture. At the entrance to the show hangs a black-and-white print of a vintage photograph, depicting the back of a young woman’s head. Her hair is elaborately curled and plaited,

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  picks September 02, 2008

  Yitzhak Livneh

  For those familiar with Yitzhak Livneh’s prolific career, it might come as a mild surprise to realize that this exhibition is, in fact, only the artist’s first solo museum outing. After all, over the past quarter century, Livneh has become one of Israel’s most influential painters, and in an art scene that is usually much swifter to grant institutional recognition to its major actors, such tardiness might read as odd. A visit to this remarkable show, though, renders this long omission a bit clearer. In works from 1985 through 2008, Livneh emerges as an artist who almost stubbornly refuses the

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  picks April 02, 2008

  Peter Hujar

  Interest in this show, which arrives just over twenty years after photographer Peter Hujar’s untimely death from AIDS, could at first glance be chalked up to something like sociological curiosity. Shot between 1969 and 1985, nearly all in the artist’s East Village studio, these thirty-one photographs make up a fascinating study of a highly specific, highly mythologized era in New York City’s cultural history. The exhibit includes intimate portraits of downtown figures such as Hujar’s lover, the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz; the stunning, wistful Cookie Mueller; and an impossibly young,