"Before he staged his rendition of the tragically misunderstood 1981 performance, Arceneaux spoke to Ben Vereen himself. “I was brought to tears during the call,” Arceneaux said, imagining how Vereen must have felt having his work so taken out of context. “I could sense from [Vereen] that, he knows there’s people out there that care now about what he tried to do 30 years ago. Maybe now is that time.”

By Caroline Goldstein - 9 July 2020

"I learned to love Juneteenth long before I became aware of the emancipation of enslaved Black people. As an adult, I certainly understand the significance of this day and why it is vital that we celebrate and remember Juneteenth, particularly in light of current circumstances. My father is no longer with us, but I think of him fondly on this day and smile when I light my first charcoal briquette."

By Deborah Roberts - 21 June 2020

"“WTF AMERICA?” wrote the artist Genevieve Gaignard on Instagram on May 27, two days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. With it she shared an image of her 2020 collage titled Fantasia, a piece that examines police brutality, innocence, and the white gaze.

“I was obviously angry,” said Gaignard, whose work blends mixed media, sculptures, domestic installations, and self-portraiture to explore race, beauty standards, consumption, identity, and accountability. When collaging, Gaignard—the daughter of a Black father and a white mother—focuses on Black strife and Black beauty by using images from old issues of Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines arranged over vintage wallpaper, a material she remembers from her childhood home in Orange, Massachusetts."

By Jessica Herndon - 17 June 2020

“It’s about receipts really,” Sepuya told Hyperallergic. “I’m not alone amongst black artists who want to see the receipts from non-Black curators, gallerists, museum directors who put up public-facing language in exhibitions about representation, justice, inclusion, diversity, whatever those words mean. I want to see receipts from non-Black collectors to know their interests in Black bodies aren’t salacious and that they are putting their money to defending Black lives.”

By Valentina Di Liscia - 3 June 2020

"'Environmental grief' describes mourning the loss of nature and its creatures. Coined as early as twenty years ago, the term describes the feeling of bereavement experienced by those who either witness or anticipate the loss of landscapes, plant or animal species, or entire ecosystems as a consequence of human-induced climate change and other intervention. The notion of environmental grief has circulated widely in recent years, steeped in evidence that the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event is already underway, that our global ecosystem is growing weaker and weaker and that the entire biosphere is being irreparably destroyed by human activity."

"It doesn't seem imaginable today, with travelers largely avoiding airports due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, but in a few years passengers departing flights through Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport may not be in such a rush to leave the aviation facility. Instead, they may just want to have an impromptu curbside dance party.

Their desire to turn the sidewalk into a dance floor will be inspired by seeing a series of disco balls greeting them overhead surrounded by an elaborate neon artwork lighting up inspirational quotes from Milk, the first LGBT icon to have an airport terminal named in their honor."

By Matthew S. Bajko - 20 May 2020

"In fact, while a strong sense of nostalgia runs through No Go Backs, the longing does not appear to be for some vague return to nature. Flashbacks pepper the film: the boys skateboarding in a driveway, visiting a food truck. One of the protagonists is played by Kahn’s son, and in one flashback we see this character sitting in his bedroom, with a photo on the wall of Kahn holding him as a child. The film’s nostalgia, in the end, is for the world that we live in today, the one we seem determined to destroy."

By Travis Diehl - 14 May 2020

"Galleries are seeing this project as an opportunity to pursue new ideas and directions. Luis De Jesus, for example, is “really excited to use it as an alternative space where we can do one-off projects with artists that we don’t represent.” The gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles said, “we are aiming to promote some of our younger LA-based artists to help keep the focus on supporting our local art scene.” Other galleries, like Shulamit Nazarian, plan to showcase artists who had exhibitions canceled or postponed due to COVID-19."

By Elisa Wouk Almino - 14 May 2020

"The quarantine selfie is but the newest genre of self-portraiture to emerge in our contemporary age. In this moderated chat, Janine DeFeo, a teaching fellow at the Whitney, will explore how artists including Ana Mendieta, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Adrian Piper have used self-portraiture as a means for expression from the isolated spaces of their homes or studios. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions via the chat function."

–Katie White

"Multidisciplinary artist Stanya Kahn will discuss her latest short film, No Go Backs, with Wexner Center curators Lucy Zimmerman and Jennifer Lange in conjunction with the artist’s (now-paused) exhibition at the institution. The dreamlike, dialogue-free film—which is available for free online viewing through May 15 via Kahn’s dealer, Susanne Vielmetter—follows two teenagers as they leave behind a collapsing civilization to trek into the California wilderness, where they attempt to forge a new life with others they encounter along the way. Shot on 16mm film and scored by original music from artists including super-producer Brian Eno, the late emo-trap pioneer Lil Peep, and Kahn herself, No Go Backs bridges the faded past and the tenuous present in search of a better future."

—Tim Schneider

May 11

"The acute intimacy of the small paintings establishes an ironic distance from Abstract Expressionist heroics. Digitization focuses our gaze on their exposed ground and subjects Fishman’s methods to visual deconstruction. It is as though the viewer can revisit the self-scrutiny involved in her transition from stained grid paintings, like the 1971 Untitled, into gestural works that “came out of my own experience.” She harkens back to Cézanne and Soutine. Here, while the online format amplifies their context, it ultimately leaves out the works’ mute, material presence, so reliant on touch—an absence that adds poignancy to today’s enforced remoteness."

By Hearne Pardee - May 2020

Alexandro Segade's "The Context: Distance" a special artist project commission is in the May issue of ArtForum. The four-page project coincides with the release of the artists graphic novel "The Context" published by Primary Information and now available for pre-order. "The Context: Distance" features the characters from Segade's graphic novel to illustrate the first 10 days of quarantine and social distancing in New York City.

"Artists Nicole Eisenman and Sam Roeck just launched a sticker pack on Apple, titled “Banandemic,” featuring anthropomorphic banana peels enacting COVID-related safety precautions, like wearing latex gloves and masks, bumping elbows with peel-arms, and washing their peel-hands while singing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” “Bananas are just funny,” says Eisenman. “They’re funnier than, say, a peach. A peach is sexy, but it’s not funny; a pomegranate is mysterious, but it’s not humorous.” The stickers do more than lighten the mood during a difficult time: Each $2.99 purchase goes to The New York Community Trust’s NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund, which offers aid to city-based nonprofits that provide health care, housing, and access to food for those in need."

By Hilary Reid - 23 April 2020

"The work is laced with homoerotic visual culture, and pulls the curtain back – often literally – on the function of the studio. Tripods are often in shot, while orange peel, used coffee cups and Post-it notes add to the mise-en-scene. Black velvet backdrops and mirrors serve as a way to reflect images and bodies at surreal angles, with it often being hard to tell whose limbs belong to whom."

By Lanre Bakare - 28 April 2020

"For Eisenman, who is both gay and Jewish, historical memory sometimes works like a blunt instrument. Against the many crises her painting and sculpture insistently refer to – climate collapse, the imbroglio of electoral politics, the dilapidated conditions of migrancy – we receive, unequivocally and without restraint, the gamut of the artist’s own experience saturated with the calamity of our collective present."

By Shiv Kotecha - 28 April 2020

"The performance complicates the notion of an easy understanding and reading of history, race, and, thus, identity.
The discourse of identity politics presents race as a fixed entity, but how is it
that a category
that identity politics takes to be a fixed essence turns out to be so indeterminate?
Obviousness might be one feature of ideology:
there was no obviousness in Hanging with Clarence.
McMillian—who kept changing characters during the performance—
between the speech of a former civil rights movement activist who is today a conservative Associate Supreme Court Justice and, between songs like “Miss Lucifer’s Love” and others of his own composition,
McMillian as a writer, speaker, performer, singer."

By Philipp Farra and John Story - 15 April 2020

"That resolve is finally paying off. At age 57, Ms. Roberts is about to have her first solo museum exhibition — a big deal for any artist, but especially gratifying for one who, four years ago, was working in a shoe store to pay the bills.

“She’s worked for so long without any institutional recognition,” said Hallie Ringle, the curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art who helped organize "Fictions,” the 2017 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that included Ms. Roberts. “What she hasn’t done, though, is let that stop her.”'

By Robin Pogrebin - 12 April 2020

Now available though our new online shop at shop.vielmetter.com is Paul Mpagi Sepuya's monograph recently published by Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of his first major museum survey exhibition. The monograph includes an interview with the artist by curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as well as contributions by Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt, and Grace Wales Bonner. Check it out by following the Link below.

"The artist’s installations frequently explore issues of identity and belonging and often employ the signifiers of girls’ popular culture — black and white. (Gaignard is the daughter of a black father and white mother.) The installation above, titled "Be More" imagines a young woman’s bathroom cluttered with aspirational beauty products, many of which are toxic."

By Carolina Miranda - 11 April 2020

"With an intense emphasis on color, the multi-tiered, often column-like structures achieve a fresh synthesis of painting and sculpture. This is more than it may at first seem: Shechet has long been interested in ideas from the West and the East—both Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching—a practice that allows for the invention she excels at to encompass non-formal factors, or rather to integrate idea, desire, and process."

By David Rhodes - April 2020

"I’m a walking craft show. It’s such a misunderstanding. What’s not crafted? Society gives craft all this meaning. I feel there is a spectrum in which we can celebrate making things with our hands, and that’s what we do as artists. I think address the issue head on: craft or art, what difference does it make? People have been arguing this forever. Honestly, one of the reasons I started using clay was because it was so marginalized and denigrated as an art material. I felt it had gigantic opportunities. If you work on the margins, it’s not crowded there."

By Jacoba Urist - 5 April 2020

"Sturm und Drang, a solo show from Nicole Eisenman that’s on view at The Contemporary Austin through August 16, features representative examples of her art. You’ll find a mix of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper ranging in size from a room-filling grouping to individual pieces you can hold in your hand. Almost everything is of recent vintage, with three exceptions dating from the 1990s. The exhibition celebrates the artist being a recipient of the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAGG Art Foundation prize. Based on what’s gathered here, Eisenman, 55, could have won this latest honor for her paintings or sculpture alone, or even just for her works on paper. From this sampling of her career, she emerges as a wily overachiever. No matter the medium, she excels. Besides her skill at making things, she forcefully expresses herself with aplomb, conviction, empathy, bravado, and a gift for visual storytelling."

By Phyllis Tuchman - April 2020

"The incognito images, ironically, compel you to come face to face with the subjects that stipple Sepuya’s life. His manner of disclosing who they are is intentionally as overt as it is subtle. “The thing that I’m intrigued about is intimacy. They are not anonymous if you know them,” the Los Angeles-based artist says, mentioning the familiarity of a tattoo, a gesture. “It is about positioning the viewer along that boundary of recognition or not knowing.”'

By Jonathan Kendall – 3 April 2020

"There is something wildly provocative and beautifully defiant about the work of LA-based artist Genevieve Gaignard. Whether it is posing in somewhat satirical photographic self-portraiture or composing mixed-media installations of contrasting realities, Genevieve's work explores race, class, and femininity with a humorous, pop appeal." ⁠

By Krystal Owens – March 2020

"In what now looks like a very prescient work, Kahn offers a vaguely post-apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles and the mountains that surround it. It is a world without dialog and inhabited solely by teens and tweens. As the film unfolds a narrative of sorts takes shape. Backpacks are hastily packed. Two teenage boys traverse an urban landscape (whether they’re running from something or to something is never explained). As they continue their journey, the landscape slowly transforms from concrete to open grassland and then to an epic wilderness. Civilization eventually recedes and the earth’s natural landscape takes center stage."

By Jeff Regensburger – 23 March 2020

Dear Friends,

In response to the rapidly changing public health crisis we have made the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily close the gallery to the general public as of tomorrow, March 14. Our exhibitions by Elizabeth Neel and Paul Mpagi Sepuya will be open by appointment only. To arrange for a viewing please call or email the gallery at [email protected].

All gallery operations will continue remotely and our exhibitions are viewable on the gallery webpage and via social media. Our staff will continue to be available during normal gallery hours to help you with questions - we can be best reached via email as listed on the gallery webpage. In the next few days we will prepare images and digital tours of our beautiful exhibitions by Elizabeth Neel and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. We look very much forward to staying in touch and to hear your response via email, phone or text and we hope to celebrate the artists with you at a later date.

We will continue to evaluate and update you as the situation changes. In the meantime, we thank you for your support during these challenging times and wish you and your loved ones good health and we look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery again soon.

Best wishes,

Susanne Vielmetter and the Team at Vielmetter Los Angeles

"Is this the cruelest optimism of all? That we can forever amble happily toward the ever-receding horizon of progress? For a lucky few, the horizon no longer glimmers in the distance, and they make do in the dark. For most of us, the sun still winks from the great beyond, drawing us ever closer to the brink."

By Christina Catherine Martinez – March 2020

"The densely detailed, intensely chromatic landscape views in Reflections on the Anthropocene are political, semiotic, assertively symbolic and narrative works whose deliberate citations of art history serve as the structures on which to hang not only a discourse of aesthetic agency and modern styles but an incisive commentary on humanity’s oppressive, fetishized, destructive imperialism toward nature."

By Shana Nys Dambrot – March 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Edgar Arceneaux on his solo exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal (April 9–June 14, 2020), presenting two works by the artist: the video installation Until, Until, Until… (2015-2017) and the sculptural environment The Library of Black Lies (2016). Curated by Lesley Johnstone.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on Sturm und Drang, a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin–Jones Center and The Contemporary Austin–Laguna Gloria (February 27–August, 16 2020).

Encompassing a wide range of media including drawing, painting, and sculpture, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s anti-monumental and enigmatic three-dimensional work, and will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue.

"And in a time where black art is being celebrated, Gaignard emphasized that 'we’re more than just a moment. We’re actually completing the dialogue or the conversation because we’ve been excluded for so long. It’s hard for the majority to process that. We have to make very straightforward statements sometimes.'"

By Makeda Easter – 14 February 2020

"As the art world turns its eyes to the West Coast for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles—held at Paramount Pictures Studios, February 13–16—make sure to save some time after the fair for these shows across the city.

Drawing on the history of “view paintings” made by artists before the dawn of photography, Whitney Bedford’s “Veduta” series aim to illustrate the effects that mankind has had on the natural landscape. It’s a savvy way of using art history to underscore the unavoidable reality of climate change."

By Sarah Cascone – 10 February 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley on their appointment as the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professors in the Department of Fine Arts for the 2019 – 2020 Academic Year at The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Mary and Pat will work with graduate students and will give a public lecture at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Spring 2020.

Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are included in the exhibition The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (May 19, 2019 - Jan 27, 2020). The exhibition is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.