The Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader toiled in semiobscurity throughout his career and then, in 1975, disappeared from the face of the earth. His last show, exhibited at the Claire S. Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, was delivered in three parts: a photographic travelogue that shows him wandering through the nocturnal cityscape of Southern California, his adopted home, toward the shore; a program of sea chanteys, sung by a student choir; and a projection of the choir’s performances in the gallery. The trip that led to the eighteen-part photographic travelogue was intended to be followed by another journey,

A United Nations report on global biodiversity and ecosystems confirmed this past May what many in the science community had long claimed: Not only is the earth’s biosphere deteriorating at a rate unpre-cedented in human history, but humans are the main drivers of this rapid decline. Approximately one million animal and plant species are expected to face extinction over the next several decades, at a speed tens to hundreds of times faster than that of the past ten million years. The Harrisons, as the artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are called, addressed this existential crisis

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

Hanna Hur’s meticulously crafted geometric paintings and handwoven chain mail are generated through repetitive, often laborious processes essential to her spiritual practice. Making a work can become a ritual in itself, as with her recently completed chain-mail sculpture The Gate iii, to which she had been adding since 2014. The piece reveals its age through the contrast between dull and shiny clusters of metal links. Hur’s two-dimensional works are elaborate as well—often so detailed that, when looking at them from afar, the eye glazes over subtle shifts in tone and mark-making, simplifying