L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When photographer Larry Sultan was growing up, his mother hired a decorator to “cozy up” their new San Fernando Valley home with its marble floors and 12-foot fireplace. The decorator had red hair, tight pants and lipstick that always spread beyond the limits of her lips. She brought in shag carpets, candelabras,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley I am in Wisconsin this week. My uncle picked me up at the airport Monday, and, within minutes, had reminded me that Madison was filled with nothing more than zombies and liberals—I’d come in to the Madison airport, but he and my grandmother live an hour’s drive out—and had asked me if[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Over Thanksgivings, which my sister and I spent with our aunt and grandmother in Atlanta, all of us used to go to the Atlanta Christmas House. It’s always a big, newly renovated or newly built Victorian-style mansion in which everything is up-to-date and in its place. A local designer has decorated and[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley York Chang always wanted to be a Latin American artist. The complication with this was that he wasn’t: wasn’t from Latin America, hadn’t grown up there, didn’t have family from there. As he described Wednesday, at Paper Chaser’s X-Ten Biennial, an evening over which arts professionals talked for ten minutes each about[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Junior year of college, I made a plaster carrying case for my favorite coffee mug. The mug wasn’t mine. At least not legitimately. I’d borrowed it from a guy who ran a Vegan co-op, and loved it too much to give back. It was extra-tall, square-shaped—who has a mug with four corners?—and[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley As a kid, I lived in a Seattle suburb for a year. We could see Mt. Baker out the living room window – the whole, majestic mountain was right there, nearly always in plain view. Before that, my family had lived in Chicago and Minneapolis, where there are hills and “bluffs” but[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Artist Craig Kauffman had been living in Europe and was on his way home to L.A. in the early 1960s when he stopped in New York and saw the work of former friend and neighbor, Billy Al Bengston, on view at Martha Jackson Gallery. Bengston, one of L.A. cool motorcycle-savvy surfer artists[…..]
