The reviews of Jo Harvey Allen’s one-act play about a would-be evangelist, Hally Lou, like those of last year’s Counter Angel, are sprinkled with the words “real,” “genuine,” and “authentic.” Hally Lou brings to the art world a kind of person, particularly a kind of woman, who seldom appears in that locale. And, the reviewers note, the artist shares her origins and her accent: like Hally Lou and Ruby Kay, the truck-stop waitress of Counter Angel, Allen hails from where Charles Kuralt goes “on the road” and where NBC finds “real people”—that is, from where authenticity and genuineness are a

The around-the-house-and-neighborhood narratives Steve Rogers draws into and sculpts out of clay in his shallow wall-hung bas-reliefs are modest, masculine affairs. In three of the best of the 13 pieces that made up this show, mostly from 1983, he portrays himself, alone, working; in another he shows himself partying in the studio. The majority of the remaining, more crowded and complex situations—on the boardwalk in Venice, or at the boxing ring in downtown Los Angeles—are depicted through Rogers’ spectatorial eyes. His is something of a solitary world, and nice and old-fashioned in its limited

A vital and long-lived tradition of reductive abstract painting has existed in Los Angeles since the ’50s, though it has seldom attracted national attention. John McLaughlin is perhaps its most distinguished founding father, and his work has been widely appreciated by young Los Angeles painters. Robert Ackerman’s work is rooted in this tradition of reductive abstraction, but it is much too sensuous, too physical and open to tonal variation and antigeometric curves to be a strict interpretation of the reductivist canon.

In his second one-man show, Ackerman gives evidence of a maturity and complexity