OVER THE FOUR YEARS of its existence, Made in L.A. has developed into a reliably exciting biennial—capitalizing on the city’s rapidly expanding coterie of local emerging and midcareer artists. But the biennial’s third edition, on view this past summer, broke with convention to highlight older artists with long-standing but relatively unknown practices rather than the bright young things who usually dominate such group shows. Curated by Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, the show was titled “a, the, though, only”—the amorphous, somewhat confusing string of articles and conjunctions serving

Over the past forty years, Elaine Reichek has employed handworked and digitally stitched embroidery alongside photographic and printmaking techniques to comment upon the endless process of interpretation and the ways in which myths (both ancient and contemporary) shift, overlap, and intersect. Titled “Minoan Girls,” her recent exhibition was a complex pastiche of literary and art-historical citations. Reichek ruminated on the dark fates of the two daughters of Minos, King of Crete, splicing classical Greek myths and pairing the sisters with symbolic iconography. She deployed the motif of the

“3 Women,” which takes its title from Robert Altman’s 1977 film in which three characters merge into one, reached across divisions of time and circumstance to draw connections between the practices of Lenore Tawney, Loie Hollowell, and Tanya Aguiñiga, each of whose work mines the intersections of craft and fine art. Perhaps in a nod to the titular trio, three of the late Lenore Tawney’s elegant open-warp woven forms greeted viewers near the gallery’s entrance. Recalling hanging obelisks, they were freely suspended above flat, white rectangular plinths that enhanced the works’ vertical orientation

If press releases have largely become baroque exercises in obscurantist prose, the text announcing Benjamin Carlson’s solo show in Los Angeles was refreshingly straightforward, even laconic, in its description of “five paintings depicting still lifes in front of a window.” And indeed, the titleless exhibition offered exactly this, five variations on its theme, one of which was installed between the apartment-gallery’s actual windows (a decision both pragmatic and conceptually rich), while another was inserted into an empty closet. Situated in the proximity of apertures to the surrounding

It is a middling insult to be denied a plot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After all, inductees (or, more accurately, their agents, production companies, and fan clubs) must pay the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce $30,000 to have their names inlaid on one of the pink terrazzo stars that line Hollywood Boulevard. While Godzilla, the Rugrats, and Lassie all have stars, a number of well-regarded actors have declined theirs. As many industry magazines have noted, the Walk of Fame is not really a cultural monument, but rather a gnarly tentacle of the Hollywood hype machine.

One person who takes the