Congratulations to Robert Pruitt who was honored on September 13th by the U.S Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies with the 2023 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. The medal was presented by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden at a White House ceremony.

The Medal of Arts award was created by Art in Embassies, in partnership with the Secretary of State, in 2012 to formally acknowledge artists who have played an exemplary role in advancing the U.S. Department of State’s mission to promote cultural diplomacy. Their achievements represent those of thousands of artists who make art diplomacy possible at U.S. embassies around the world. Art serves as a bridge with other nations, encourages discussion and expression, and highlights the communal experience of people from countries, cultures, and backgrounds worldwide.

“This year’s honorees, like those before them, selflessly offer their creative talents to the mission of American cultural diplomacy,” said Megan Beyer, Director of Art in Embassies. “Artworks on display in embassies and residences are potent soft power tools of diplomacy.”

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is deeply saddened to share the news that visual artist and music pioneer Steve Roden passed away on September 6, 2023. Known for his work in painting, sculpture, sound, and video, he created a visionary and idiosyncratic aesthetic language across multiple mediums that was rooted in his interest in translating systems. Roden made connections and meaning by experimenting with visual imagery, music, language, code, translation, listening, and the amassing of various collections of objects and ephemera. Taking a particular interest in the relationship between color and sound, he focused specifically on spectrums of noise which are used to determine frequencies in sound as they relate to color. Roden then transformed this into profoundly beautiful and intellectual visual experiences. His first exhibition at Vielmetter was in 2003, followed by eight other remarkable solo exhibitions over the past eighteen years. The gallery is currently planning to present a survey of Roden’s work in the near future.

Susanne Vielmetter notes that the gallery “has lost a dear friend, a compassionate mentor, and one of the sweetest and humblest artists I have ever worked with. Steve’s kindness and his thoughtfulness were a source of inspiration for all of us.”

Roden attended two of Los Angeles’s premier art schools, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design where he received his BA in 1986, and Art Center College of Design where he received his MA in 1989. He studied with such influential artists as Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina, Gary Panter, and Emerson Woelffer. Since 1986, Roden consistently exhibited and performed his work across the United States and internationally. His artwork is held in many public and private collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, and National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.

The artist is survived by his wife Sari Takahashi Roden, his mother Susan Roden, and a loving community of friends, artists, and extended family.

A celebration of Steve Roden’s life will be announced at a later date.

"I want to make sure I do things where I’m showing a commitment.”

American artist Pope.L. has crawled through Times Square in a suit, eaten the Wall Street Journal, and painted onions in the colours of the American flag. Meet the artists who, in his own words, “make stuff.”

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Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on the acquisition of two of his works by the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina.

Untitled (For Dr. Reagan McDonald-Mosley), 2021 and Twice Painted IV, 2022 are currently on display in the CMA’s collection gallery where they will remain on view through October. The CMA is the first museum in the Carolinas to acquire McMillian’s work. On the occasion of the acquisition McMillian was honored and presented with a key to the city. 

“McMillian is one of the most thoughtful and engaging American artists working today. The paintings acquired by the CMA — one representational and one abstract — exemplify McMillian’s artistic range and the intricacy of his subject matter.” –  said Della Watkins, CMA executive director.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Pope.L’s seminal work entitled “Trinket” by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

A monumental work consisting of a 53.5’ long American Flag, "Trinket" was first presented at MOCA in 2015. During the museum’s public hours the flag was blown continuously by four industrial-grade fans creating a powerful air stream within the museum’s architecture which caused the fabric of the flag to fray and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition. The powerful image of the successively unraveling stripes of the flag, wildly gesturing like the arms of an unpredictable hydra, became a potent metaphor for the peril and disintegration of democracy, as much at the time when the work was first conceived during a time of war in 2008, as when it was presented at MOCA in a solo exhibition curated by Bennett Simpson in 2015. Timely and relevant to our current moment, the work is a powerful and urgent metaphor for our active engagement in the democratic process.

“This project is a chance for people to feel the flag,” Pope.L has said. “People need to feel their democracy, not just hear words about it. For me, democracy is active, not passive. With Trinket, I am showing something that’s always been true. The American flag is not a toy. It’s not tame. It’s bright, loud, bristling and alive.”

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles' acquisition of several works by My Barbarian!

The acquisition includes a video installation and three sculptural works which were included in the collective's 2022 survey exhibition that debuted at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022 and subsequently traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of several works of My Barbarian by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art!

The acquisition includes the collective's episodic video "Double Agency," a multimedia work comprised of four episodes, originally commissioned for the museum's fiftieth anniversary and accompanying series of masks from the "Masks of the World" series which are forgeries from LACMA's collection.

"In a way the “Double Agency” project, from webisodes to masks to live performance, is all television. The title becomes both a pseudonym for My Barbarian and a description of how we work among fields of cultural production. As black-box theatricalists who snuck into the white cube, we are double agents, serving our own idiosyncratic interests even as we collaborate with institutions to serve the “public,” a designation rife with contradictions in the museum context, one which we have designs on exceeding." – My Barbarian

It is with great excitement that Vielmetter Los Angeles welcomes Rebecca McGrew as Senior Director of Institutional Relations to the gallery.

“We are thrilled to welcome Rebecca to our team” said Susanne Vielmetter, owner. “Rebecca’s curatorial vision and her deep commitment to the artists she has worked with has long aligned with our mission at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and we look forward to our future work together.” In the role of Senior Director of Institutional Relations, Rebecca will work closely with our team and with the gallery artists to develop, nurture, and expand institutional relationships and to foster ongoing curatorial conversations with museums.

In her former position as the Senior Curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Rebecca developed an exceptional exhibition program that engaged with some of the most important artists of our time, including Edgar Arceneaux, Mowry Baden, Sadie Barnette, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Christina Fernandez, Charles Gaines, Marcia Hafif, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hayv Kahraman, Todd Gray, Naomi Rincon-Gallardo, Steve Roden, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alison Saar, Barbara T. Smith, and James Turrell, among many others. Rebecca brings with her over two decades of curatorial excellence and innovative contemporary programming, which also includes the award-winning and critically acclaimed It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973 (2011– 12, co-curated with Glenn Phillips).

She is the recipient of the Fellows of Contemporary Art’s 2020 Curator’s Award (for Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe with Irene Georgia Tsatsos), a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007), and Getty Foundation grants under the Pacific Standard Time initiatives in 2021-24, 2014–17, and 2009–12. She has previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. Rebecca received her B.A. from Pomona College and an M.A. in art history from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“I am absolutely elated about joining the fantastic team at Vielmetter Los Angeles,” said McGrew. “Our artistic visions have long complemented each other, and I’m beyond excited to be working with all the outstanding artists at the gallery.”

We look forward to welcoming Rebecca on June 30, 2023!

Travellers entering or leaving the Historic Broadway station will do so via an entrance pavilion adorned with text in different colours and languages, a site-specific work by Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers titled The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program,” La Causa) (2023). The titular phrases are frequent chants at protests, which often take place nearby as the Historic Broadway station sits near City Hall, county and federal courthouses, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and other civic institutions.

“I seek to reflect the diverse communities that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and their rights,” Bowers said in a statement.

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Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade’s “interstellar chamber opera” Star Choir will be presented by acclaimed experimental opera company The Industry inside Mt. Wilson’s largest observatory on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The opera features six singers and six instrumentalists (horn, harp, synthesizer, cello, contrabass, and percussion). Gaines, the Industry’s co-artistic director, composed the music for Star Choir and Segade wrote the libretto.

“Audiences will embark on a cosmic mission, as a starship crew seeks refuge on the hostile Planet 85K: Aurora. Once there, the colonists encounter intelligent life imperceptible to their all-too-human awareness. As the planet defends itself from their invasive presence, the humans evolve to become a part of the Holobiont, a queerly multi-species organism that covers this world. STAR CHOIR offers a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of mutual coexistence, reimagining humanity as a porous category that must transform to survive.

STAR CHOIR features an ensemble of eight singers, with performances by company members Kelci Hahn, Sarah Beaty, and Jon Lee Keenan. The Industry’s Music Director, Marc Lowenstein, leads an orchestra of six musicians, featuring board and company member Lucy Yates. Choreographer Milka Djordjevich joins the creative team as movement director and the sci-fi video elements are designed by Daniel Leyva.

Through fantasy and critique, STAR CHOIR asks urgent questions facing humanity amid our era’s confluence of natural and political crises, evoking scenes of disaster migration, fugitivity, and colonization as they are entwined with our difficult histories and our best visions of a potential future.”

Gaines and Segade are members of My Barbarian, along with Jade Gordon.

By Catherine Womack – 1 September 2023

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Genevieve Gaignard is featured on the cover of the third issue of Space on Space magazine along with a feature article “Genevieve Gaignard’s Ecosystem of Collecting” by Emily Logan.

On the cover is a new collage by Gaignard “My Funny Valentine | The Magician,” which will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” at the Frist Museum opening next month.

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Nicole Eisenman’s solo exhibition “What Happened” at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich is reviewed in ArtReview by Christian Egger! The exhibition is on view in Munich through September 10, 2023 and subsequently travels to the Whitechapel Gallery, London opening October 11, 2023 through January 14, 2024.

Eisenman’s work is currently on view at the gallery in our group exhibition “Perpetual Portrait”  through August 18, 2023.

“What Happened at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, begins with Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017). This painting, of a mandible like vessel sailing dangerously close to sending its all-male crew over a waterfall, is an appropriately scabrous starting-point for this show, with its roughly 100 works drawn from three decades of the American artist’s predominantly painterly practice and embedded social commentary. (That said, Eisenman’s latter-day recognition as a significant sculptor is attested to by the presence of Procession, 2019, a multifigure sculpture staging an ambiguous parade or protest, originally shown at that year’s controversy-shadowed Whitney Biennial and, in the present context, a kind of mysterious backdrop.) The paintings, shown across multiple rooms, are loosely organized into categories: ‘Heads’, ‘Being an Artist’, ‘Coping’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘Protest & Procession’, ‘In Search of Fun and Danger’ and ‘Screens, Sex & Solitude’. This last focuses on Eisenman’s ongoing, decade-long pictorial engagement with present-day communication gadgets: projectors, laptops, drones, iPhones, etc. That viewers are going to photograph the work, and publish it on social media, seems factored into the artist’s reflexive thinking.”

By Christian Egger – 31 July 2023

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Karla Klarin's exhibition "Big Pink" is reviewed in Artillery by Jody Zellen!

"The works that comprise “Big Pink” explore Klarin’s memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the series’ earliest paintings, Klarin combines architectural precision with broad, washy brushstrokes to depict a typical Los Angeles tract home; a one-story house with an attached garage and low-pitched roof. Klarin’s illustrations appear as arrays of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. The house’s particular pink color works as a point of departure for Klarin’s subsequent paintings.

In her later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction—allowing the planes of architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles."

By Jody Zellen – 21 June 2023

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"Breasts become weapons in less literal ways in other works. The woman in “Boob Gold,” an oil painting on wood from 2018, stares defiantly back at us as she tugs open her dress to expose a coin slot, the kind you might find on a donation box, at the center of her chest. The work addresses what Kahraman sees as the exploitative dimensions of humanitarian aid. “Your body becomes a spectacle,” she says. “But on the other side, she’s exuding this power.” Sexual objectification may be an unavoidable condition of being a woman, especially one seen as exotic by the West, but Kahraman suggests it comes with its own forms of strength."

By Zoe Lescaze – 16 May 2023

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"Drawing on Grimm fairy tales, Haitian Vodou and Catholic ritual practices, and the objectification of women’s bodies in media, each piece and collection of works tells a story. The large scale of many of her mature collages lends itself to a closer reading of all its many aspects."

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"The characters in the Mutu cinematic universe are a sexually assertive, menacing and athletic bunch. They leap, twist and spring, often backwards and in heels, like Ginger Rogers. The retrospective is titled Intertwined and, sure enough, her figures are constantly putting down roots or bursting free of them, moulting and germinating in a frenzy of tangled growth."

By Ariella Budick – 15 March 2023

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“Paul Mpagi Sepuya crafts pictures that feel as intimate and warm as they do formal and intellectual. His photos do what art does best: Offer an immediate jolt of both recognition and disorientation, and point toward a singular perspective — a voice, a vision. I’m tempted to say they are arresting images, or captivating, but then the involuntary connotations of those adjectives don’t seem to fit; better to say that Sepuya creates images that hold you. Images that give pause and invite reflection — not so much like looking in a mirror but very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror.”

By Justin Torres – 15 March 2023

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"Like Braithwaite, Sepuya, Gaignard, and McMillian work against photography’s extractive legacy, in which white men used their cameras to further harmful stereotypes, expand their colonial prospects, and otherwise reinforce systems of power. Instead­­, they sustain photography’s parallel legacy as a mechanism of collective agency and liberation."

By Erin O'Leary – March 2023

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"Hybrid creatures populate both the artist’s extravagant collages and startling sculptures, variously merging human and animal (or plant), alien and earthling, and female and male into assertive female-leaning beings. An interest in fusing opposites is suggested in the show’s title, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” taken from a 2003 watercolor collage of two dance club habitués — young, scantily clad women with the heads of wild African dogs on the second floor."

By Roberta Smith – March 2023

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"This humorously paired presentation includes glazed ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet and graphite figurative drawings by Nicola Tyson. Shechet’s gravity-defying sculptures seem to contort, tilt, bend and melt. They appear to be set in motion even while static. Her work embraces the duality of clay which is malleable yet holds still, and fragile yet strong, conveying the humor and pathos of bodily existence. Tyson describes her work as “psycho-figuration” because her misshapen figures have unexpected proportions. These amusingly freakish, androgynous figures are beyond gender identification, yet they have an obstinate individuality even without detailed faces."

By Lita Barrie – February 2023

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““It’s Time” is an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite. Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer’s influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today.”

By Mousse Magazine Staff – 18 February 2023

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