Among obsidian stones, an upturned police barricade, a beat-up refrigerator, and cow vertebrae, the detail that lingers longest in Jimmie Durham’s retrospective, on view at the Hammer Museum, is Durham’s absence. Born in Arkansas in 1940, Durham left the United States thirty years ago for Europe and has largely refrained from exhibiting in the U.S. since, giving a provocative tone to the retrospective’s title, At[…..]
Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, Kush Is My Cologne, lifts its title from a track on Gucci Mane’s 2009 major label debut, The State vs. Radric Davis. The allusion is one of many in Huffman’s exhibition that indicate his fixation with the popular nodes that drive contemporary cultural production, particularly, the profundity and cultural insistence of hip-hop in a world that often refuses[…..]
Journalism is experiencing a crisis of confidence as of late, with long-running mainstream sources being labeled “fake news,” while extremist propaganda mills are hailed as harbingers of the truth. Although this specific quandary may be unprecedented, the concept that the news should be viewed with a healthy skepticism—considering from where and whom it comes—is nothing new. People living under regimes that lack a free press[…..]
#truth #history #narrative #Afropolitan #multiculturalism #future In an age when fact and falsehood are often indistinguishable, The Ease of Fiction is a title that gives pause. The exhibition, now at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, was curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having been invited to participate in the exhibition’s collateral programming as a speaker[…..]
As part of our ten-year anniversary celebrations, we’re considering the best of a decade of arts criticism. Today’s selection comes from the editor in chief of our sister publication, Art Practical: Kara Q. Smith opines, “It’s not easy to write about three shows in 1,000 words, but what I love about this review by Matt Stromberg is his ability to nod to the [California] art history that[…..]
We’re looking back over a decade of Daily Serving’s greatest hits, and today’s selection comes from Shotgun Reviews editor Emily Holmes: “The column L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast was started in 2010 by Catherine Wagley, who wrote about the multifaceted Los Angeles scene from an approachable, personal voice. One of her finest pieces in that first year explored masculinity and the politics of gendered[…..]
#privatization #gentrification #immigration #violence #history #freedom At the time of this writing, Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy installation at the Brooklyn Army Terminal feels like a relic of a bygone era. Just one week after the project’s close, it is difficult for this writer to remember what it felt like to laugh at a funhouse of political horrors, featuring privatized national parks, designer oxygen boutiques, anti-abortion pep rallies, and[…..]
