The Museum of Modern Art‘s current exhibition is a chromatic extravaganza. Color Chart includes an impressive span of artists, from ready-made deity Marcel Duchamp to young digital artist Cory Arcangel. Ann Temkin, who was appointed Department of Painting and Sculpture Curator at MoMA in 2003, is a curator with a penchant for early appropriation artists and seductive, culturally resonant mark-making. Temkin organized Color Chart, trying[…..]
Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement is a breakthrough exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Despite the heavy Latino and Chicano population in Southern California, LACMA has never before featured the Chicano art movement. Organized by filmmaker and curator Rita Gonzales, LACMA’s Contemporary art curator Howard Fox, and LACMA’s adjunct curator of Latino and Chicano Art Chon Noriega, the show attempts[…..]
Tony de las Reyes first re-imagined Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in 2006, with an exhibition at Carl Berg that drew the attention of national critics. Ahab’s America, the continuation of de las Reyes preoccupation with Melville’s classic novel, is now on view at Carl Berg Gallery. De las Reyes uses red bister to make lush stains on paper. At first glance, these stains seem unassuming.[…..]
Anna Sew Hoy, a young artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, makes work that sometimes seems therapeutically lyrical and sometimes seems tongue-in-cheek. Her current solo show Pow! once again straddles the line between lyricism and banter. At LAX Art in Los Angeles, Pow! includes two oversized casts, one for a giant ankle and another for an arm. Sew Hoy invites[…..]
Wangechi Mutu will never experience the heated backlash that Kara Walker experienced. No one will call Mutu the “patsy of the white art establishment,” accuse her of selling fellow black artists down the river, or launch a letter-writing campaign to keep her artwork from being shown. There are good reasons for this: unlike Walker, the Kenyan-born Mutu does not share the slavery lineage of African-American[…..]
Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt makes beautifully crafted work, but his exceptional craftsmanship is only a tool for exploring the ways in which African Americans have been represented throughout history. An exhibition of Pruitt’s new work, titled Two Tears in a Bucket: Considering The Alcubierre Metric, is currently on display at Mary Goldman Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition presents a series portraits on Kraft paper.[…..]
At Gagosian Gallery’s New York location, an all-star cast of appropriation artists have joined forces to present a haven of prefabricated art objects. Prefab includes work by Richard Prince, Rudolph Stingel, Rosmarie Trockel, Sherrie Levine, Martin Kippenger, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Richard Artschwager, and Alighiero e Boetti. Together, the often tongue-in-cheek work of these nine artists begins to look surprisingly serious, especially since all the[…..]
