print April 2020

Helène Aylon

In 2012, Helène Aylon published Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, which gives some indication of both where her life started (she was born in 1931, raised within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn, and later married to and widowed from a rabbi) and where she has ended up. In between, Aylon produced significant series, process-oriented material abstractions that gave way to, among other things, large and fiercely accusatory installations stemming from her antinuclear protests. As was true last year in

print March 2020

Sylvia Fein

Born in 1919 in Milwaukee and engaged early on with a circle of artists associated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sylvia Fein moved to California in the late 1940s after a yearslong stay in Mexico and received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. She has long since been based in and associated with the East Bay (where she still resides, in Martinez, cultivating an orchard of olive trees that appears in some of her paintings). Yet her work has willfully eluded such paradigms as Abstract Expressionism or, closer to home, Bay Area Figuration. Instead, her

print February 2020

Christine Frerichs

Christine Frerichs’s “interior portraits” are diminutive, closely observed paintings on paper that frame her home and studio, sites of domesticity and labor. They are much smaller than the canvases on which she has often worked, whose larger scales summon landscapes and climates as well as emotions. Indeed, she began making the pieces shown here under the exhibition title “Viewfinder” in 2018 as interim compositions of light and mood, adjacent to the other work; they are now a project of their own, an ongoing chronicle of place and a mnemonic device for the things—often exterior—that come to be

print January 2020

Kevin McNamee-Tweed

For his solo debut in Los Angeles, the Iowa City–based artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed clustered dozens of objects—many small enough to hold in your palm, and all solicitous of visual if not tactile intimacy—into wall-mounted vignettes. Shelflike relief sculptures made of found wood braced diminutive glazed ceramics. Alongside these altar-like installations were carefully considered arrangements of his earthenware paintings (flat panels the size of a book or a tablet), acrylics on muslin with bilateral symmetry (hence their designation as the “Butterfly Series,” 2019–), drawings, and ephemera. Despite

picks December 06, 2019

Franklin Williams

Franklin Williams recently retired from the California College of the Arts, where he taught for more than half a century and earned the honorific in this exhibition's title: “The Inimitable Professor Emeritus.” The ten fantastic paintings on view are collaged with past work and family mementos (sea shells and a Welsh love spoon among them); dotted with acrylic and so many swarming, glistening beads; laced with cherry-red yarn; and visually pieced together with tight sutures that become dimensional fringe-like extrusions. Several were completed after his tenure at CCA, and they evince his having

diary December 02, 2019

High Water

THE RAINS WERE BIBLICAL, justifiably accusatory. In a remarkable occurrence, the lagoon overtook most of the city, flooding the chamber on the Grand Canal where Veneto’s right-wing regional council had, minutes before, just rejected measures to fund renewable energy sources and minimize plastic use, among other climate-change proposals. Images of waterbuses beached near a drowned Saint Mark’s Square made the rounds, with some vessels conspicuously bearing bubblegum-pink ads for the fifty-eighth edition of the Venice Biennale: “May You Live in Interesting Times.” The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

print December 2019

Allison Miller

The six paintings in Allison Miller’s “C A P R R I U S,” her second solo outing at the Pit, preserve certain elements of her earlier work, spindly tracery and webs chief among them. Drips, black on black and goopy in the upper-left corner of Sister (Gemini) and in the upper right of Sister (Capricorn) (all works 2019), are a hallmark. So are arrows: Two, registered in thin black contours and ending in sharp tips, hold together the overlapping rectangular color blocks of Curl Arch like looping seams or the rings of a spiral notebook. Others—such as those that fill the round cartoon thought bubble

picks October 14, 2019

Jacinto Astiazarán and Veli-Matti Hoikka

The Queens program template involves a larger show accompanied by a modest presentation in a flat file set into a gallery wall. This fall, Jacinto Astiazarán’s Red Saturn, or Images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it, 2019, a two-channel video, holds the main space, cycling through cosmic and cellular imagery, pictures of homegrown tomatoes and emergent life, scenes of the Los Angeles sky fading into flashes of color with a propulsive force. It literally casts its light across the blacked-out space, edging toward the files.

There, each of the five wide and

print October 2019

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

In the span of a year, San Francisco–based designer and writer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon unveiled a new mural commissioned by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and was the subject of a solo presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Another large show, appropriately titled “Breaking All the Rules,” opens at the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center in California this month. Solomon was born in 1928, and her current West Coast visibility represents a recognition of her years of practice, the context of which is now being

previews September 2019

“THEASTER GATES: ASSEMBLY HALL”

Curated by Victoria Sung

For his most significant US exhibition to date, Theaster Gates promises to transform the Walker galleries into a sprawling, monumental Gesamtkunstwerk: an immersive aggregation of objects that Gates gathered over the past decade through his work with his Dorchester Projects, 2009–, in Chicago. Fifteen thousand books, periodicals, items of furniture, and other ephemera from the Johnson Publishing Company Archives & Collections join some sixty thousand slides of art and architectural history from the University of Chicago collection of glass lantern slides, as well as a

print Summer 2019

Sam Gilliam

“Starting: Works on Paper 1967–1970” was a rare chance to see sixteen of Sam Gilliam’s early, never-before-exhibited works, shown alongside a typeset poem, ca. 1965. Each piece was small in size and expansive in metaphoric scale. The palette ranged from deep and muddy in the 1967 “Rock Creek” series to full-on electric in others. Untitled, 1968, seemed to figure an aurora borealis in an already Technicolor sky, its expansiveness belied by the modest physical dimensions of the vertical page. The overlapping splatters of blue, brown, and yellow in “Rock Creek,” especially in Untitled, 1967, were

picks May 24, 2019

June Edmonds

Jasper Johns famously attributed the origin of his iconic painting of the American flag to a vision he had at night; likewise, June Edmonds arrived at her first stroke-by-stroke reconstitution of a flag through a dream she had in 2017, after she returned to her home town of Los Angeles from a residency in Paducah, Kentucky. In her case, though, it wasn't about the same stars and stripes; during her residency, while driving to Memphis, she had seen a wall-size Confederate flag—a looming, unapologetic beacon still standing on the Southern hillside—to which she later responded in a series of

print May 2019

Nancy Shaver and Emi Winter

“Gathering texture, following shape” featured Nancy Shaver’s sculptures and Emi Winter’s woven rugs and paintings. While the works’ vocabularies did not always rhyme, their joint installation set up a visual call-and-response that made itself at home in the many rooms of the Parker Gallery, located in a house. Both artists also share a sympathy for what Shaver has called “collective history,” perhaps more broadly understood as the lives and works of others, and the circumstances of their coming together.

One especially eloquent room contained Shaver’s sandbox-like Blue Pool, 2018, a horizontal

passages April 2019

ROBERT RYMAN

I MET ROBERT RYMAN IN 2003, when I was a graduate student seeking out the would-be subject of my nascent dissertation. I had been curious, mostly, about the man whose ostensibly minimal paintings had already irrevocably altered my understanding of the medium. I was shocked to discover my West Village apartment was only a few blocks north of his studio, which was located in a tall, skinny building next to a then-empty parcel that I had long walked past without really noticing it. When I rang the buzzer, Bob appeared, bespectacled and well-groomed, framed through the window grille. I was a nervous

print April 2019

Gary Hume

Spread across the Matthew Marks Gallery’s two locations in this city, Gary Hume’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in more than twenty-five years revealed the tenacity of certain long-standing concerns and the emergence of others. Among the eight recent paintings (enamel on aluminum or paper) and three painted-steel sculptures on view, a giant trompe l’oeil of vertical boards crisscrossed with super-glossy white x’s suggested the flattening of a barn’s side and the sliding plane of its door. Titled U.S.A., 2018, it recalled Hume’s other portals, the big rectangular slabs of the “Door”

print March 2019

Vanessa Maltese

For a 2016 show at Cooper Cole in her native Toronto, Vanessa Maltese referenced the story of Zeuxis, painter of grapes so luscious that birds were wont to peck at them. At Night Gallery, for her first solo show in Los Angeles, she continued the theme with Duped by the grapes (all works 2018), a wryly fragmented scene that exuberantly plays up the fruit’s fictive status. As in the other six flatly graphic geometric oil paintings on view that evoked the bright, interlocking compositions of Memphis design, she employed trompe l’oeil drop shadows and visual cues for recession (space in her work is

print February 2019

Sara Gernsbacher

Last spring, Sara Gernsbacher showed hanging sculptures of silicone, acrylic, and canvas at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York. In her home base of Los Angeles, she offered a new group of the slippery-looking cutouts, which appear to be remnants imbued with purpose through lavish care. This set was colored with pigments and spray paint and set into interlocking plaited or abutted configurations. The represented shapes—including cavities (plugged with black silicone or open to the supporting wall); petals; and spindly, rodlike sticks—felt elemental, ever malleable, even as they were fixed

print December 2018

“3D: Double Vision”

The mechanics of binocular vision—the method by which a single three-dimensional image emerges from the brain’s synthesis of two perceiving eyes—subtend human perception. In the 1830s, the process was, in effect, operationalized with the invention of the stereoscope, in which technological means were employed to harness biology in the service of illusionism (within the same decade, Louis Daguerre’s camera likewise debuted). “3D: Double Vision” is apparently the first survey of this nearly two-hundred-year history of 3-D objects and their apparatuses to be shown in a North American art

print November 2018

Jay DeFeo

Despite having had a full-dress retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2013, Jay DeFeo is still best known for a single work, The Rose, 1958–66, on which she labored in a monumental and duly mythologized process, regularly applying pigment and scraping it off, carving a ground that had long since thickened into a sculptural relief. Measuring approximately ten feet by eight feet and weighing nearly a ton, the behemoth was finally extracted from her apartment via forklift, an outside wall sliced open for the occasion. If this remained one’s image of DeFeo, the smaller

slant October 31, 2018

On the Ground: Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH IS A CITY OF THREE RIVERS and many more bridges, the latter cutting across steeply rising banks verdant and overgrown from a year of record rainfall. In many ways this is still Andrew Carnegie’s Appalachia, with the Carnegie International—this year sited exclusively in the institution if not the actual building that he opened in 1895—an emphatically historical bequest. Ingrid Schaffner, a Pittsburgh native, suggested as much in her opening remarks to the fifty-seventh edition, which she helmed, calling the show “august” and everywhere relating it to its place of becoming.

Suzanne Hudson