That Glenn Ligon’s most recent paintings are so seductive is as disconcerting as it is revealing. Thirty-three of the thirty-six radiant text-based paintings in his recent show, from the series “No Room (Gold),” 2007, are verbatim transcriptions of a joke delivered live by the late, great stand-up comedian Richard Pryor: I WAS A NIGGER FOR TWENTY-THREE. / I GAVE THAT SHIT UP. NO ROOM FOR / NO ROOM FOR ADVANCEMENT. Pryor was renowned for his ability to objectify race relations in his routines, using irreverent, profanity-laced comment to foreground otherwise taboo subjects. Ligon, for his part,

In the past five years, Los Angeles has become a privileged site for seeing and thinking about the amazing work of Ree Morton. This is due in no small part to a coterie of younger artists—including Evan Holloway and John Williams—who have channeled her wayward sculptural and installational innovations, and to the revisionary critical research and writing of Kristina Kite. It is both thrilling and fitting that Kite, who was a graduate student when she first undertook her research into the artist, and is now a gallerist, should have been in a position to present one of two great recent

Though wildly diverse, Susan Silton’s works of the past decade nonetheless share elements of formal experimentation and aesthetic choice, and employ coded imagery and iconography to deliver socially and politically charged messages. Recently, Silton has made a series of works playing on stripes, including a project currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art for which she covered the museum’s exterior in the sorts of striped tarpaulins used on houses undergoing fumigation, and another in which she filled an interior space with found objects unified only by their striped surfaces.

In his confident solo debut, elliptically titled “She Takes These Pictures of His Wife Silhouetted on a Hillside,” young Los Angeles–based artist Elad Lassry subtly intimated an understanding of the differing codes of commercial and fine art photography and played along the complex contours of that border. Most of Lassry’s photographs seem overly familiar—if difficult to place precisely—and in fact several works in the show are found images. In Joanne and Trace, No Distractions, B2 (all works 2007), for example, a double-page spread of a mother and baby from Life magazine from 1970 is