What do Tide detergent boxes, Ronald McDonald, cute pictures of kittens and the marginally dressed little girl from old sunscreen commercials have in common? They are all part of contemporary culture and made a sparkling appearance in Eric Hibit‘s Picture Cohesion. Doug McClemont of Daily Magazine once wrote Hibit is “one to watch”. And, Hibit’s return to the city of his undergraduate alma mater, Corcoran[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When Marsha Norman began her play ‘Night Mother, she gave her protagonist Jesse one ominous line of dialogue: “We got any old towels?” It sounds utilitarian, but it actually dives right into the core of play’s tragedy. As playwriting instructor Richard Toscan has pointed out, if Norman let all the implications of[…..]
Sometimes we come upon an exhibition that reminds us that there are intersections between different kinds of collections. One might think that the worlds of paleontology, mineralogy and art are separate but a recent exhibition of works by the Dutch artist Ruth Van Beek at Okay Mountain Gallery in Austin shows us otherwise. Included in the exhibition are a series of paintings, photographs and collages[…..]
TBA is Portland, Oregon’s Time Based Art festival, a group of performance, dance, music, and visual happenings hosted by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. The visual portion of the festival is held at what the institute refers to as “The Works,” an abandoned circa-1910 redbrick former high school. It’s an iconic building: if you grew up in the 80s watching after-school specials (or if[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Leslie Hewitt’s Grounded is a staircase that goes nowhere. I saw it at the California African American Museum last winter in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, a show about the ripples of the year a jailed Huey P. Newton said “we’re hoping the master dies” and Joan Didion[…..]
All things considered Work of Art: The Next Great Artist was not nearly as bad as it could have been. In fact, the descriptor benign springs to my mind. I’m not going to lie, though – it was touch and go at the beginning. The first time I heard that a reality television show along the lines of “America’s Next Top Artist” was in the[…..]
One of the worst things about summer is also one of the best: it’s transitory. Like an awkward first love affair, that fact that it’s all over so fast is exactly what makes summer such a mythologized season. In the art world, summer is the spiritual home to the group show, a time to test out new ideas or bring together artists still in an[…..]
