This program of three works in the Art Institute’s collection represents highlights from McMillian’s work in video. In Untitled (The Great Society) I (2006), he stages a performance in which he recites President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan. By narrating this speech—in which Johnson outlined his ambitious agenda for social welfare legislation aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice—McMillian raised questions about how history and politics are themselves consistently, and repeatedly, performed. A Migration Tale (2014–15) follows a masked, black-clad character traveling on foot and via subway, a contemporary reference to the Great Migration that millions of African Americans made during the first half of the 20th century. In Preacher Man (2015), McMillian sits calmly on a chair in an empty field and presents philosophical musings by the experimental jazz composer and musician Sun Ra.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Arlene Shechet on the opening of "Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet at the Harvard Art Museums" on view through July 6, 2025.

By presenting her recent work alongside historical German, Japanese, and Chinese examples, sculptor Arlene Shechet encourages us to look anew at works of porcelain and other objects from the Harvard Art Museums. Decorative arts are typically displayed in museum galleries dedicated to the same culture and period, often in isolation from other media. In Disrupt the View, however, Shechet draws on her past collaborations with porcelain manufactory workers to speak to a larger history, recontextualizing these remarkable objects as both handmade and industrially manufactured, painterly and sculptural.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Andrea Bowers on the opening of her solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum on view through September 4, 2022.

For more than 30 years, Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.

Andrea Bowers, the first museum retrospective surveying more than two decades of the artist’s production, traces the entire scope and evolution of her work. Bringing together approximately 60 works as well as a trove of ephemera, the exhibition reflects Bowers’s embrace and experimentation with a wide range of mediums, including drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, video, and neon sculptures.

Andrea Bowers is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Darling, formerly the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant, Hammer Museum.

"Spanning video, projection, objects, and paintings, The Ritual Is for All of us offers another view into Pope.L’s legendary durational practice. Though he is often linked to his “Crawl” series — public performances that found the artist dragging his body across the asphalt of the New York City streets from one location to another — Pope.L’s practice resists categorization, flitting from theater to writing to visual art with a mischievous glee. Whether he’s using a VHS camera or found objects, his work considers the slipperiness of language and time, inviting the viewer into absurdist encounters that leave us contemplating our own perspectives and social conditions."

By Allison Conner - July 2022

"For Bowers, activism and art are inseparable. In her day-to-day life, she works with activist groups that promote environmental, immigration and trans rights, all of which feature heavily in the Hammer show. In the gallery focused on environmental activism, one miniature drawing is a self-portrait — a detailed replica of a mug shot, a token from an eco-activism-related arrest."

By Catherine Womack - 8 July 2022

"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s intimate portraiture flips the script bringing the behind the scenes into prominent display. The result of a performance between drop cloths, tripods and raw wooden benches in the light of day that heightens the interactions between the nude bodies of both the subject and the photographer—all are central figures in their own right."

By Janelle Zara - July 2022

"In the nearly 25-year survey of Andrea Bowers’ art newly opened at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Harris’ unforeseen but revealing question is enshrined in a monumental drawing made of the humblest materials. Bowers’ career as an artist is embedded in socially conscious engagement with many contentious issues, including women’s bodily autonomy, immigration, ecological disaster and human rights."

By Christopher Knight

"Enigmatic artist Pope.L works across performance, installation, and video to explore race, identity, language, and material culture. For his second solo show at Vielmetter, he has transformed the gallery into a series of sheds through which viewers must navigate. They will encounter four video works characterized by their unsettling tone, and a sculpture, I Machine, that is composed of two stacked overhead projectors and a contraption that drips liquid into a bowl, the sound of which is amplified. Also on view will be elements from “The Black Factory,” an ongoing archive since 2004 of “black objects” gathered from the public, that have been secured in compression boxes."

"Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-born multidisciplinary artist best known for her clay and bronze sculptures and collage paintings, has been going to Storm King Art Center, in New York’s Hudson Valley, since she was a student at Cooper Union, and later Yale, in the 1990s. “It calls people back and back again, like a place of pilgrimage,” she says of the open-air museum less than two hours from Manhattan, speaking via Zoom from her apartment in Brooklyn — her studio is in the same brownstone, though she also keeps a studio in Nairobi. Now, having just finished installing eight large-scale bronze sculptures on Storm King’s Museum Hill, one part of the complex’s 500 acres — which are also home to pieces by Lynda Benglis, Alexander Calder and Sol LeWitt, among others — she’s come full circle."

By Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa - 3 June 2022

"It’s difficult not to read Arlene Shechet’s vibrant mixed-media sculptures as stand-ins for the body. Many of the artist’s polychromatic forms are human in scale and even in demeanor. Take Altered State, 2020—one of the eight works featured in this exhibition at Vielmetter—an abstract assemblage of glazed ceramic, steel, and painted wood, which bears an arrangement of headlike forms in black, gold, and blue balanced atop a stocky trunk. The object seemed to be gazing down at its own image, which was reflected in a series of electroplated chrome tiles at the work’s base. Indeed, this quasi-figurative Narcissus may have been regarding its “self” in the mirror. "

By Catherine Taft - Summer 2022

"Ellen Berkenblit’s paintings are built from the lovely gaps within and between time, space, lips, metaphors, just as painting itself has been understood of late as a productively anachronistic medium. As Amy Sillman has written of Berkenblit, “Neither representations nor simulacra, these figures are displacements, emptied presences that allow something else to pour out: grief, ruins, memories, stories from old worlds…”1 And those old worlds have old words, the stuff of chivalric legends, old photographs, crushes, and Lynchian girl groups."

By William J. Simmons - May 2022

"It makes me uncomfortable when everything is totally out of control, but it also makes me uncomfortable when everything is completely in control. It’s the navigation between these poles that creates dynamism within my work. Certainly, there are strategies that I stick to when I’m painting. I like creating things that feel like a performance or an event on a stage."

By Pia Gottschaller - May 2022

"In Gut Feelings the artist takes a physiological approach to trauma and othering while drawing on her experiences of acclimating to life in Sweden as a refugee from Iraq during the Gulf War. Kahraman uses exposed, knotted intestines as a visual metaphor for trauma to explore the process of coping with the impacts of distressing events as she highlights the inalienable connection between mind and body. The show also considers links between neuroscience, the microbiome and how the body carries trauma through the artist’s work with bacteria."

By Salena Barry - May 2022