The award wining PBS series Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century recently released two new short video featuring artist Kerry James Marshall addressing ideas related to the “Black Romantic” and “Being an Artist.” These topics relate to recent paintings by Marshall featured in a show titled Black Romantic, which were exhibited at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City this summer. The artist is well known for his broad references of art history and his ability to critically examine the role of the African American culture within that history. For his recent exhibition, Marshall examines the use of romance, sentimentality, and the overt usage of love employed by black artists within a particular genre of painting that portrays a more ‘charming’ view of African-American culture. Marshall argues that this type of work is uncritical by nature, and as an artist, his urge is to not distance himself from the genre, but embrace it in order to find its weakness. Once identified, Marshall exploits the weaknesses, as he breaks down the genre and examines it from the inside out.

Opening last night at LAXART in Los Angeles is a new exhibition titled RANK by LA-based artist Kori Newkirk. The artist has produced a series of diverse art works that is centered on ideas and practices connected to ‘political theater.’ A podium with highly reflective microphones resting upon it serves as a device to create dialogue in the realms of sculpture, the spectacle, and our current political climate. Newkirk received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1997. Recent exhibitions include a 10-year retrospective that is currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and solo exhibitions at The Project, New York (2006), MC, Los Angeles (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2005), and Locust Projects, Miami, Florida (2005).

On July 19th, Found Gallery in L.A. will commence the first portion of their next installation exhibition, Spacial Reconstruction. The exhibition, which lasts until August 10th, allows four artists to spend one week each in the gallery space to transform the interior beyond recognition. One artist comes in after the other, making this a transformative and dynamic show.

Sarah Dougherty (the first of the four artists) will spend five days working on her installation, The City of Mexico. Upon completion, there will be a 36 hour open house where viewers are encouraged to attend at atypical hours for gallery-hopping. Once the open house closes, the next artist enters the space and works with materials left over from the previous artist’s work, constantly injecting new life and creativity into the space. C.L. Meisinger will open The Default Project on July 26th, Morrisa Maltz (whose work is seen above) will open Pretend Behavior on August 2nd, and Meranda Walden will open Mother Board on August 9th.

The Box Gallery and the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a non-profit arts organization, are exploring the narrative history of L.A.’s infamous skid row. The downtown streets and alleys that make up the row might house an estimated 10,000 on any given night and city officials have grappling with what to do with drugs, homelessness, and violence that characterizes the row for decades.

Skid Row History Museum honors the row’s history, highlighting the successful projects and people that have changed the face of L.A. poverty over the years. On the gallery floor, a map of skid row connects places to stories and visitors are invited to contribute to the ever-morphing Skid Row Walk of Fame in the back gallery space. The map, the Walk of Fame, and the videos and images included in the exhibition are the initial strains of the Skid Row History Museum project, something the Poverty Department hopes to grow into a thread of permanent public artwork.

The exhibition opened on June 28th with reflections from key players on the Skid Row battle front, music by Ron Taylor and Oscar Harvey, and performances by Ibrahim Saba and Kevin Michael Key. Public conversations, featuring representatives from organizations including Lamp Community, Hippie Kitchen and Dome Village, will be hosted in the gallery on July 18th, July 26th and August 2nd.

The acidic British duo has been making fantastic cultural commentaries since the late ’60s and now Gilbert and George’s traveling retrospective is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The two artists met as sculpture students at St. Martins College of Art in London and began working together soon after. Their breakthrough endeavor, The Singing Sculpture, in which Gilbert and George performed as living, business suite clad sculptures, debuted at Sonnabend Gallery in 1969. Since then, they’ve aimed to break down art’s elitism, using pop culture references, found images, and loud splashes of color to make their work both visually delicious and provocative.

The duo has had solo shows at major museums before, including the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and they were shortlisted for the first Turner Prize in 1984. But, despite their already glowing past career, this current exhibition, organized by the Tate Modern, shows how relevant their work still is to contemporary art. Their bold graphics and iconic culture references, mixed with intimate personal nuances, dynamically interact with the art-technology-mainstream-personal-politic discussions that define the current climate.

Perhaps their relevance continues simply because their work is driven by a respect for contemporary culture. “We’re great believers in the force of culture,” Gilbert says in the above clip. “There is a gap inside of everyone which can only be filled by reading, listening to music, writing poetry, making art, looking at art. We are not just bones and flesh and skin; we are cultured people.”

Dustin Michael Pevey creates large-scale graphite drawings that confront the viewer and comment on our contemporary cultural convictions. To the artist, these include “the ideas of disillusionment, distraction, competition, obsession, and progress.” The above image, entitled The End Ad Nauseum, is composed of several smaller images referencing war, pollution, death, and violence. A hastily scribbled (and partially erased) question, “Why won’t my fucking drug dealer text me back?”, provides us with another, more personal way to enter the work. This assortment of imagery forces us to address our own feelings regarding the state of humanity today. Are we disillusioned, distracted, competitive, and obsessed?

Pevey attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for Drawing and Painting and has exhibited at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and Angstrom Gallery in L.A. He has an upcoming show, Bad Moon Rising, at Boots Contemporary in St. Louis, curated by Jan Van Woensel. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Los Angeles based artist Holly Williams paints images based on photographs of the city of Los Angeles, mixing her interest in the concepts of painting with the inherent mythology of film and television. Her blurred and ambiguous settings (taken from a city known for its ability to manipulate the truth) are captured and given their own significance. Williams’ nebulous compositions create narratives for the sidewalks, corridors, balconies, and tunnels of Los Angeles. Her paintings include typical L.A. imagery such as the iconic palm trees lining the streets, light posts, and the glowing orbs of street and car lights. Occasionally, anonymous figures inhabit her settings, their actions remaining as mysterious as the space itself.

Williams transfers the photographic images into paint by using a multi-layered dry brushing technique that mimics the signature qualities of film photography. The blur effect is created through a slow buildup of paint, as oppose to the diminishing effect of dragging a brush through wet paint, for it is important to the artist that “the areas of color be built up rather than homogenized.” With the increasing malleability of digital photography, the photograph loses its authenticity and is no longer purely a source of documentation. By painting the images, Williams takes from her own experiences and creates new and unique handmade objects. Each painting then has a tangible connection to the maker, lending a certain authenticity.

Williams received her B.F.A. from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and her work is held in various collections, including the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly HIlls.