Join Rodney McMillian and artist Jacob Mason-Macklin in a moderated conversation organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem on February 27th at 1:00pm EST. Discussing the exhibition It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22, they will consider the possibilities of experimentation within and parallels between contemporary painting and sculpture.

The dialogue will follow presentations by each artist and conclude with an audience Q&A. 

Live CART captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided.

Click here to register

Art Production Fund’s ‘Now Playing’ brings together a series of artworks that shine a light on the often-overlooked elements of everyday life in Los Angeles; the vehicles, street food, sports, aircraft, construction sites and deeper histories that blend into the background. The artists featured in ‘Now Playing’ provide a lens through which we can see these quotidian details anew; ever present but unseen, that make Los Angeles a city both complex and beloved. ‘Now Playing’ receives support from Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. Participating artists in ‘Now Playing’ include Autumn Breon, Chris Burden, Jose Dávila, Basil Kincaid, Divya Mehra, Ruben Ochoa, Alake Shilling and Jennifer West.

Ruben Ochoa pays tribute to the street vendor community, connecting his personal narrative to his art making. 

At Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Stanya Kahn will create the newest iteration of the R.U.in.ART Commission: an annual initiative that invites a Californian artist to realize a commission in the Ruinart lounge at Frieze Los Angeles.

Kahn’s commission, titled Understory, takes the form of an installation in which elements of the natural world frame paintings and sculptures depicting lone animals in imagined wilds. Drawing on her 2022 exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Forest for the Trees, the installation references forms of life that dwell between the forest floor and the canopy.

In the latest episode of Art Basel’s ‘Art in Action’ series, we visit Hugo McCloud in his Los Angeles studio. There he takes us through the origin and creation of his artworks using plastic bags as the primary material. In these works, McCloud depicts scenarios – the transportation of goods, construction, landscaping – that are common across the globe to tell the stories of the laborers who often go unnoticed. The pieces presented in the film are part of a series McCloud informally refers to as ‘the burdened man.’ It is an homage to the anonymous men and women whose daily subsistence is an extraordinary act of resilience. ‘The stories of these individuals and the strengths they carry is something to look up to,’ he says.

In 2012 I started working in ceramics (again.) By again I mean I did it in high school and before that, like many did, as a child at a local community center. First I made porcelain animal figures and then started throwing on the wheel. The pieces pictured here were made during the pandemic, between 2020 and 2022. They were shown in the solo exhibition Forest for the Trees (2022 at Vielmetter Los Angeles), installed with stumps and rocks and paintings. I thought it would be nice to show them “up close” since you can’t touch the art in an art show and pick them up.

"Themes of representation also appear in a gorgeous show, "It’s Time," at Vielmetter Los Angeles where the work of artists Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are in conversation with the portraiture of Kwame Brathwaite, who is widely known for his photographic documentation of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and '70s. The exhibition title, "It’s Time," is a nod to the 1962 jazz album by Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln. It not only refers to the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the period, but also suggests that now is still “the time” to prioritize the movement and efforts towards true liberation and representation for all."

By Dominique Clayton - February 2023

"There are historical moments that transform the industry standard, and sometimes they have deep, traceable roots. An opportunity to understand this process is provided by an exhibition of artist Nicole Eisenman’s work opening in March at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, the show, especially its revisitation of startlingly explicit lesbian works from the 1990s, will allow viewers to enjoy Eisenman’s beautiful, widely appreciated, and highly valued artworks. The fifty-seven-year-old, French-born, New York–raised painter, sculptor, and creator of wild, passionate murals and drawings has taken a bad-boy, oppositional, and sometimes dramatically risky path to becoming one of the world’s most successful living artists. Somehow, the seas parted and—at times in spite of herself—Eisenman has thrived, has been approved of, and is now in some ways iconic. Beyond the quality of her work, how did it happen that exclusionary criteria that kept a range of lesbian imagery out of the mainstream were lifted?"

By Sarah Schulman- Februa

‘I am grateful for the opportunity to show work I care about, to make new things and to show work at the fair for out-of-town visitors who may have missed my recent show (which was unlike anything I’ve made before). Ruinart describes a commitment to sustainability and understanding of biodiversity which seems crucial, [and] mandatory if we’re to survive,’ Kahn tells Wallpaper*. 

By Harriet Lloyd-Smith, January 27

"Across Gaignard’s works are themes of beauty. Without looking closely, you could become swept up in her delightful pastel palette, romantic floral motifs, and swanky style. But the artist uses this to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race and cultural identity. Likely best known for her self-portraits, Gaignard makes installations and mixed-media collage, creating her own visual language that illuminates racial injustice. She unabashedly centers Blackness and cleverly entices us to consider the most unsettling parts of American culture and anti-Blackness. Look What We’ve Become takes the object of a vintage hand mirror, used to beautify and adorn, and asks us to take this quiet moment to really look at ourselves. Who is impacted by an intrusive gaze? Who has the freedom to look away?"

By Shaquille Heath - 19 January 2023

"In the opening essay of filmmaker Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she reflects on the experience of getting older in her signature, cleverly confessional style: “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight.” Few would disagree that Ephron, as a perfector of the rom-com and the personal essay, is as sharp-eyed an observer of women’s experiences as they come. But rarely has her name been invoked in relation to feminist art of the 1980s, with its emphasis on deconstructing “woman as image.” Nevertheless, as I was walking through Mary Kelly’s show at Vielmetter—an installation of her work Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85—the comedienne, to my own surprise, immediately came to mind."

By Ashton Cooper - January 2023

VIEWING PLEASURE: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA by Michael Anthony Hall, Photography by Courtney Coles

As the sun rose, revealing a white light that illuminated everything it could touch, 19th-century European and North American photographers captured their subjects in Daylight Studios—what many consider to be the inception of portraiture. Subverting these beginnings with diverse, nude subjects and revealing the frame in full—including the camera and photographer—Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio is artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s series that pays homage to the original Daylight Studios while examining the qualities that compose each image. [...]

V MAGAZINE, November 25, 2022

Questionnaire — In Pursuit of the Masquerade My Barbarian in Conversation with Jazmina Figueroa
“We were born Generation X, officially, which is embarrassing to admit but true,” says interdisciplinary artist and member of My Barbarian Alexandro Segade, speaking about the collective similitude within the group, which includes performer and writer Malik Gaines and actress and artist Jade Gordon. Some of the defining characteristics of those born in Generation X have to do with burgeoning youth cultures amid the AIDS epidemic and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc — those who were strongly affiliated with underground, outlier, and/or queer scenes alongside major cinematic and music franchises. [...]

FLASH ART #341 WINTER 2022-23

Andrea Bowers — An Ethos of Resistance by Jessica Simmons-Reid
[...] Andrea Bowers, whose work has long plumbed the methodologies of social justice movements, culls from this archive for a series of works entitled Letters to an Army of Three (2005) (works that, crucially, predate both the Trump era and the cataclysmic collapse of Roe). She displays the gathered correspondence, which she learned of during a visit with Maginnis, at the meeting point of two walls, with the printed letters emanating outward from the crux like an open book. A single-channel video of various people carefully reciting the contents of specific letters plays on a monitor suspended from the ceiling above; underneath, a large-scale book of additional correspondence sits splayed open on a plinth. [...] (November 2022)

Opacity and the Spill — The Photographs of Clifford Prince King, Shikeith, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya by Allison Noelle Conner
[...] Like King and Shikeith, Sepuya turns away from the photographic impulse to dissect and profit. Born and raised in Southern California, Sepuya pulls apart the mechanics of photography and the artist studio— composing his frames with smudged mirrors, velvet drapes, tripods, lighting equipment, intertwined figures, test prints, and hands pressing camera shutters. [...] (November 2022)