"A new exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, speaks to this moment. A concerted effort to decolonize the museum as it reopened this week after a Covid-induced hibernation, it consists of recent works by the Kenyan-American artist situated throughout the Legion’s galleries, rather than in one or two rooms. There, her works exist in dialogue with the Legion’s Eurocentric permanent collection, a reflection of the sensibilities of the industrialists who endowed it a century ago. In all, I Am Speaking is a pulse of transgression throughout this staid secular temple."

By Peter-Astrid Kane - 8 May 2021

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Wangechi Mutu on the opening of I'm Speaking, Are You Listening, a survey of the artist's work, curated by Claudia Schmuckli, at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Franciso.⁠
⁠
"Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies—the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes—Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation." 

"Born in 1962 in Austin, Texas, Roberts makes work that can be understood, from one angle, as a reimagining of the Black twentieth century through mixed-media art on paper. Her art centers the social worlds of Black children. Through the use of an ever-expanding range of materials, Roberts animates the still figures of these young people set against a sharp white background in more ways than one: they throw up peace signs, they strut and dance, stand defiantly with hands in pockets, sit on the floor with palms locked in front of their shins, defend one another by placing their arms between the body of a friend and the world of the viewer."

By Joshua Bennett - 4 May 2021

"Trained in printmaking, McKenzie is undaunted by the rote repetition of ordinary tasks, or by a confrontation with the same. In these works – both of which are now on view as part of ‘The Story I Tell Myself ’, the artist’s solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York – recursion is a conduit through which McKenzie articulates his semi-private realism: moments that, to evoke the writer Samuel R. Delany, come ‘blaring in through the five senses’ (Dhalgren, 1975), and so resist easy consolidation. McKenzie’s elegiac form is a reminder of the debts of our cultural and political ancestors, which we do not inherit, but that we become. "

By Shiv Kotecha - 19 April 2021

"ArtYard is pleased to present, Girl You Want, curated by J. Vanessa Lyon and featuring artists Genevieve Gaignard, Julia Greenburger, Jen Liu, Josh Rabineau, Wendy and Beatrice Red Star, Karinne Smith, Ivy Stewart, and María Vargas Aguilar.

What’s a girl? What do you expect from a girl or want girlhood to be? How are girls un/made? Are they pieced together, imagined, constructed? This exhibition examines what girling looks and feels like through a range of representational strategies, from portraiture to speculative narrative; from dress to interiors and the prettified materials of commodification and colonization. In this show “girl” and “girly” are not offered as stable or essential but are rather understood as shifting states untethered to “sex” or even age."

"This month, “Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself” opens at the Whitney. Curated by Adrienne Edwards, the exhibition pairs McKenzie’s videos with a selection of works from the museum’s collection by, among others, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown, and Pope.L. On Fridays and Saturdays, McKenzie plans to be on-site to “wash” the exterior of the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows with a viscous mixture that will do more to obscure the view than clear it up, recapitulating how “squeegee men” used to soap up the windshields of cars stuck in traffic before a Giuliani-era crackdown in the mid-’90s."

By Colby Chamberlain - May 2021

In celebration of Ruben Ochoa’s project for LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, view a short documentary series that follows street vendors as they unpack the history of the vending economy in Los Angeles, their efforts to organize and build sustainable businesses, the challenges and threats they face in this work environment, and the great impact the pandemic has had on this community. 

Join us for a FREE virtual conversation with Suzanne Hudson, Math Bass, and Christina Quarles (via Zoom) on April 30 at 5 pm PST! ⁠ ⁠ In her forthcoming book "Contemporary Painting" (Thames and Hudson, April 2021), Los Angeles-based art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson considers painting as a vibrant and sometimes contentious critic of a dynamic global society.

During this talk, Hudson is joined by two esteemed painters, Math Bass and Christina Quarles, featured in the book.⁠ ⁠ This event is moderated by curator James Glisson from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Alexandra Terry from the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. ⁠ ⁠

"An enormous piece of Mexican street corn, slathered in chile powder and Cotija cheese, is soaring over MacArthur Park on Tuesday morning. A runaway orange bounces in the foreground; fruit carts with rainbow-colored sunshades float in the sky.

The augmented reality artwork, “¡Vendedores Presente!” by Ruben Ochoa, is one of five virtual monuments debuting Tuesday, geolocated to sites across the city in a project from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat."

By Deborah Vankin - 13 April 2021

"In this regard, “Keeping Time” is a stroke of mastery. Wilson’s frame within frame style always manages to keep you on your toes as the works, never culminating, constantly build and subtract within themselves. We can see this effect in a work titled Afternoon Breeze (2020). A patch of blue, in one place vibrant, melts into the red background with a mild transparency, and is harshly bisected by a think pink frame. Nearby, a pink and orange frame overlaps a field of subtly gradating maroon and sienna, capturing on one end a shred of the hot pink background. Finally, the offset canvases abutting at a hard right angle throw the entire work into a rectilinear staccato."

By Cole Sweetwod - 31 March 2021

"Kahraman depicts a feminine self which is not one but a fragmented “subject” formed from a network of cultural discourses. “She” embodies the weight of history, injuries, invisible scars and traumas female survivors carry around until they can heal and build a bridge from the past into the future. Because Kahraman uses her personal memories of trauma to address collective trauma, her paintings have a universal relevance. Although her mnemonic paintings are disturbing, they are concerned with the art of mending physical and psychic wounds. "

By Lita Barrie - 31 March 2021

Wednesday, April 7 — 4:30 PM PDT

Through documenting contemporary activists focused on women’s rights, migrant justice, workers’ rights and climate justice, Andrea Bowers is committed to an intersectional feminism that dismantles gender privilege and builds community. Her multivalent art practice documents and honors the activists whose everyday actions forge meaningful change. Bowers is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Capitain Petzel in Berlin, Kauffman Repetto in Milan, and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. 

To register please follow the link below.

"‘I’m’ demonstrates the range of ways the artist explores underrepresented narratives. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are welcomed by three of Roberts’s text-based works: La’ Condrea is a noun. (2020), We ≥ They (2020) and Anqwenique is mild as milk (2020). The titles of each work correspond to text silk-screened on sheets of paper, roughly the size of picket-signs. Both La’ Condrea is a noun., and Anqwenique is mild as milk, bear a red spell-check squiggle under the girls’ names – an indicator of how even these girls’ names are policed by computer software."

By Lise Ragbir - 19 March 2021

Congratulations to Steve Roden whose work has been acquired by The Frances Young Tang Teaching⁠
Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College as part of a gift from Michael O. and Sirje Helder⁠
Gold. ⁠
⁠
The gift includes works created in the 1990s⁠
and 2000s by a diverse group of leading and⁠
emerging artists, including Louise Bourgeois,⁠
Sean Duffy, Naomi Fisher, Iva Gueorguieva,⁠
Michelle Grabner, Carol Hepper, Steve Roden,⁠ Jonathan Seliger, Glen Seator, George Stoll,⁠ Beverly Semmes, and Barbara Takenaga.⁠

"For more than four decades – across painting, drawing, animation, zines and an increasing corpus of writing – Sillman has combined a dialectics of intimacy and awkwardness, self-deprecation and prowess, figuration and abstraction. She has developed a pragmatic philosophy of painting that mobilizes doubt, treating mark-making not as a grand testament to an artist’s skill but as an invitation for us to follow and think alongside her."

By Tausif Noor - 23 February 2021

"Eisenman, who is fifty-five, constructs figurative, narrative images filled with angst, jokes, and art-historical memory. Her work tells stories of broad political inequity—“Huddle” (2018) conjures a surreal and sinister gathering of white men in suits, high above Manhattan—and, more intimately, of solitude and of solidarity, at the beach and in the back gardens of bars. Partly because Eisenman’s creations often trouble to notice how the world looks now, and won’t look forever—a man in Adidas slides; a laptop on the train—they seem likely to survive long enough to carry into the future a clear sense of our present. "

By Ian Parker - 22 February 2021

"I’m features all new work, including figural collage with hand-painted elements and two firsts for the artist: an interactive installation and a grand-scale mural on the building’s exterior. COVID unsurprisingly postponed the show’s opening from September, a strange silver lining which meant more time in the studio. Roberts has acknowledged that the extraordinary events of 2020 began pushing their way into the work. Portraits of Black children took on new meaning after months of lockdown and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. Half a year later, her “kids,” as she calls them, finally occupy The Contemporary’s first floor, challenging a dominant society that all too often denies their beauty and humanity."

By Barbara Purcell - February 2021

"I visited Math Bass Echo Park studio in the last days of 2020 as they were finishing a new body of work for their solo show, “Desert Veins,” opening a few weeks later at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Over the past six months, I had been receiving texts from Math with images of their paintings in stages, beginning with the faintest underpainting and then building up over weeks with layers of richly colored oil. These paintings becoming paintings arrived to my phone like precious gifts that I viewed over and over again. One week brought the severed head of Anubis and a white gloved hand reaching towards it (what Math calls “anthropological imaging”), the next a snake body wrapped around a pile of eggs. A few weeks of silence followed, and then, as the isolated winter set in, dozens and dozens of paintings of a field of graves began appearing, almost like prayers."

By Isabelle Albuquerque - 15 February 2021

"From the start of her 15-plus-year career, Cain tells me on Skype, “people always give me the weird spots that they don’t know what to do with.” I’m on the East Coast, and she’s in her Los Angeles studio, surrounded by eight-by-seven-foot canvases that will come together as one painting on a very large, temporary construction wall. “I was really excited about the project. I thought, Okay, I’ll go there and make a massive work on-site.” Part of the fun would be supplanting the “old dudes,” the male 20th-century masters who have always occupied the atrium, and this thought contributed to the show’s title: “My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy.”"

By Dodie Kazanjian - March 2021

"In 2019, the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included three of her sculptures, and across town the Metropolitan Museum of Art prominently inserted her caryatid sculptures into the niches on the exterior of its building. The show at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will be among her most significant exhibitions to date, and Mutu and the curators have taken an unusual approach. Instead of dedicating a few spaces to the artist, they will strategically place the 18 works in the museum’s courtyard and throughout its first-floor galleries. The arrangement—meant to offer a critique of colonialism, with African culture asserting itself in multiple Eurocentric spaces—makes it as much an intervention as an exhibition."

By Ted Loos - 4 February 2021

The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the National Gallery of Art's permanent collection. On June 15, 2020, Kelly presented an overview of her career and discussed her artistic practice with Shelley Langdale, Curator & Head of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

"Roberts’s new show, I’m, which debuts at the Contemporary Austin January 23, is her first major solo museum exhibition in Texas. I’m features her paintings, signature collages and an interactive sound, text and video sculpture. The museum also commissioned Roberts to create an ongoing installation, a mural on one of its buildings. Titled Little man, little man, a tribute to James Baldwin’s children’s book of the same name, the mural depicts a young Black boy in six different poses of dance and celebration."

By Lane Florsheim - 23 January 2021

"Watson’s matter of fact, colorful and simplistic style shares affinities with folk artists like Grandma Moses. Her process is to document the everyday, that which surrounds her and is simultaneously banal and in these dire times, disconcerting and unusual. The pieces are at once familiar, stemming from observation, yet also surreal. Her “Pandemic” paintings were created quickly and together create a narrative that traces the uncanny spread of the virus and how it affects the individuals, students, families and communities of Los Angeles."

By Jody Zellen - January 2021

"Deborah Roberts is making some of the best work of her life—just ask the artist herself. In “I’m,” a solo exhibition opening this weekend at The Contemporary Austin (her first at a museum in Texas, her home state), Roberts’s interrogations of Black bodies—how they’re seen, and when prejudice diminishes them—have a new urgency. Her figures loom larger in the frame than they used to, claiming more space for themselves. And if Roberts can’t easily explain that shift, what she does know is that it’s working. “I’ve always allowed the work to lead me,” she tells me. “It’s not always been down the right path, but it’s been an exercise, you know? And the work is getting better as it gets larger.”

By Marley Marius - 21 January 2021

"Most of the works were made in 2019, before any notion of the pandemic infiltrated our daily lives. Yet, looking at these large scale works that encompass one’s field of vision, the process of being deconstructed, ripped apart, and then stitched back together again feels familiar. The show, titled “This is Real” might provide a reminder that the “normal” we came from certainly won’t be the one we return to, and perhaps we will arrive on the other side of this more colorful and dimensional than we were before. "

By Lindsay Preston Zappas - 12 January 2021

"Esther Pearl Watson finds a way to channel the surrounding strangeness of this period — and our collective adapting to an unprecedented time — in Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings at Vielmetter Los Angeles. In more than 100 paintings, the artist froze mundane moments that she observed during the pandemic, which collectively catalogue larger shifts like social distancing, racial uprisings, and economic uncertainty. "

By Eva Recinos - 12 January 2021

"Bass’ work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man’s jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor. And then, eventually, you reach the lighthouse, where the water crashes up against the shore, and there you lie, naked, hoping the droning illumination will project you into yet another narrow strip of land filled with memories."

By William J. Simmons - 5 January 2021

"Coming of age at the tail end of Abstract Expressionism, the painter went through a number of styles (some of her early works employed language) before distilling her influences, from Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell to feminist politics, into a potent vocabulary that plays with space in a sometimes languid, sometimes jarring, but always graceful way."

By Hilton Als - December 2020

"Watson started the body of work that became Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings in March in the early days of the shelter in place orders in Los Angeles, and the series spans the timeline of the pandemic right through to the days before the show opened at Vielmetter Los Angeles in late November. In a still ongoing series of nearly 200 paintings, each no bigger than a laptop, Watson processes the subtle and cataclysmic changes wrought by a season of public health crises, civil unrest, and political volatility. But she does this through a lens as intimate as the work’s scale, with street views of urban and suburban blocks, one frame at a time."

By Shana Nys Dambrot - 10 December 2020

"McMillian’s works feel grounded––historically, physically, ideologically––in an arresting and visceral manner, beyond the white cube of Vielmetter. His small paintings are complemented by human-sized cells, constructed from cardboard, fabric and acrylic. These modular, darkened masses are suspended from the walls, implicating viewers in their murky, iconic depths. Motionless, yet organic, these forms serve as manifestations of the lost “accursed share” suggested by McMillian’s constellation of quotations. Juxtaposed with the paintings’ brutal abstraction and panoply of voices, these cardboard assemblages function as doors opening onto  a distorted body."

By Josh Wagner - December 2020

"Walking into the exhibition’s installation room, with its dark green motif wallpaper and midcentury wooden furniture, feels like taking a step back in time. Icons of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy are prominently featured on the walls, and vintage luggage, frames, and rag dolls are strewn about the room."

By Lana Nauphal - 2 December 2020

"Stanya Kahn’s current outing at ICA Los Angeles consists of just three filmic works produced over a ten-year span. Anyone hoping to grapple with a greater breadth of the artist’s considerable output, will have to wait. That said, the curatorial choices here are pointed and vividly bring to life the artist’s core themes. Foremost among these is an abiding concern with the problem of language – that part of communication which structures human experience and renders it meaningful, yet by the same token can serve to limit, and even undermine existence as such. All three videos would seem to take their cue from an acute premonition of communication breakdown, which is seen to rebound, with mounting force, between continually marginalized human actants."

By Jan Tumlir - 17 November 2020

"For Body Politic, his latest exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, McMillian continues working in an additive manner. The White House Painting, II (2018–20) is made from the physical remnants of the 2018 version, while works on paper such as An Abbreviated History in Abstraction (2019–20) reflect a history of violence against Black individuals, contextualized by writings such as Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2007)1 and Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (2000)."

By Jennifer Piejko - November 2020

"Rodney McMillian’s new show at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Body Politic, springs from such histories of the medical exploitation of Black people in the United States. His bright paintings and huge black sculptures of body parts, which together assess American Abstract Expressionism, are inspired by the groundbreaking work of scholars Dorothy Roberts and Harriet A. Washington. The former wrote about the eugenic controls of Black people and the latter authored the 2006 book Medical Apartheid, which sets forth the above story about Mr. Yeagin and also documents research conducted on Black prisoners."

By Yxta Maya Murray - November 2020

"The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) presents a trio of Kahn’s films in the exhibition Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs, which runs through January. In addition to the world premiere of No Go Backs, curator Jamillah James complements the film with Stand in the Stream, filmed between 2011 and 2017, and It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010). The films capture Los Angeles throughout the last decade, a landscape that remains consistently familiar even as civil rights, climate change, and Kahn’s personal relationships rapidly evolve. "

By Renée Reizman - 3 November 2020

"Rodney McMillian’s Body Politic at Vielmetter Los Angeles builds on themes the artist has long engaged with: racial and socioeconomic injustice, and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

The exhibition is comprised of collages with text and semi-abstract sculptures, as well as one wall-sized installation. McMillian’s strategies are not novel, but he has rigorously honed his craft. His grasp of nuance and light-handed approach coax viewers in before confronting them with the history of racism in the United States."

By Natalie Haddad - 30 October 2020

"Stanya Kahn has always been politically engaged. Recently, on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, she has consistently posted and reshared vital information for people protesting police murder, brutality, and structural racism. Moreover, she and her son Lenny were out in the streets of LA protesting after the murder of George Floyd; and they, like many of the other protestors, were physically and mentally vulnerable in the face of a militarized police force. "

By William J. Simmons - 26 October 2020

"“A Consequence of History,” a 2020 collage-and-text work by Deborah Roberts made exclusively for T and inspired by the art of Barbara Kruger. Both artists use found imagery in their work — though Roberts generally does not combine her images with text, as she does here in tribute to Kruger’s style. They also both attended Syracuse University, at different times. In an interview, Roberts said that in Kruger’s art, “There’s no room to not understand what she’s talking about.”

By Megan O'Grady - 19 October 2020

"Who is in for a couch conversation with Kennedy Yanko and Kimberly Drew? The former’s Vielmetter exhibition in Los Angeles, “Salient Queens,” is up now providing juicy fodder for a discussion surrounding a new body of work that deals in scrap metal and the juxtaposition of competing narratives. “After I pull metal and other materials from salvage yards, I sit with them in a formal dialogue. I have to understand their physical stance before I can comprehend their presence conceptually. In time, the objects’ stories reveal themselves to me. From there, I can begin to transition the material away from its previous circumstances and reposition its atomic particles (literally, and metaphorically) such that their compositions may be perceived differently and thus newly defined,” says Yanko. To accompany the opening of the exhibition, photographer Mike Vitelli captured Yanko in avant-garde fashion pieces surrounded by the work on view."

- 16 October 2020

"Checkerboard tiles, circular tables, soup bowls, and other interior details are transformed into ecstatically abstract elements under Dingle’s deft brush. In several paintings (including “Full Service,” above), unaccompanied toddlers are seen sharing a meal, suggesting an antic portrait of socially distanced dining and pandemic parenting."

By Andrea K. Scott - October 2020

"One can easily understand Wall’s point upon seeing a piece like Disinfect Our Politics (2020), which includes an image from a vintage advertisement that features a blindfolded white man, who resembles a politician, centered between mirror images of Black women sporting face masks and cleaning spray against a backdrop resembling an inverted confederate flag.Something in the milk isn’t clean and the imagery of Black women cleaning it up speaks volumes, not just in relation to politics, but to corporate America and the home."

By Dominique Clayton - 13 October 2020

"Many of the new paintings seem moderately askew, arranged around an axis maybe 10 degrees off-center. That’s a form of painterly organization she’s used in the past, though here the slant feels more like wobbling, careening. “I really believe in the politics of improvisation,” she says. “On its good side, it’s about contingency, emotions. Tightrope walking.”

By Jason Farago - 8 October 2020

"This exhibition comprises three works by Kahn produced over the past ten years, including her latest short film, No Go Backs (2020), marking its Los Angeles debut. Together, these videos present an urgent reflection of our times, foregrounding global concerns such as climate change, racism, state power, and rebellion with the artist’s singular humor and embrace of experimental time and narrative."

Free drive-in screening October 7th, more info here.

"For the site-specific project, the artist looks at ideas of representation, media aesthetics, and domesticity in collage works made of vintage wallpaper and magazine clippings—like one reading “We Are More Than a Moment” in neon, and another featuring cutouts of women, flowers, and logos from an old issue of Life. Within the vitrines, visitors will find elements of photography and everyday objects like sunscreen, garden hoses, and flip-flops make up 3D installations that encouraging a closer look into Gaignard’s universe."

By Pearl Fontaine - 10 September 2020

"The cool, analytical postmodern tradition has been shot through with the warmth of naked bodies touching. Sepuya doesn’t simply include the camera in the image but rests it tenderly in the crook of his subject’s neck. He doesn’t just show the artist’s hand but places it gingerly on his subject’s back. The images allow the viewer to take pleasure in the surface as well as to look for meaning below it. The photograph’s soft lines and the visible smudging on the mirror add an almost paint-erly texture to a photographic print."

By Ashton Cooper - September 2020

"Eisenman has lately funneled much of her perversity into raucous sculptures that answer exactly to the tenor of our ghoulish, carnivalesque politics. But political life and social life are not exactly the same. There is a difference, for instance, between a rally, where people shout slogans, and a salon like Ariana’s, where people read, and listen, are witty and perverse, and expose their vulnerable inner lives, and where everybody is watching to see what happens next."

By Sebastian Smee - 19 August 2020

"Throughout Kahn forms contemporary layers over historic land contestations: the boys travel by bikes instead of carts, northbound rather than along the southerly inroads formed by westward expansionism during the 19th century; they carry plastic water bottles that must be constantly replenished and skate the dusty half-pipe of the Los Angeles River over which surface waters scantly flow. Albeit subtly, ‘No Go Backs’ never loses sight of the fact that scarcity has been purposefully etched into this landscape."

By Gabriella Beckhurst - 20 August 2020

"Los Angeles-based dealer Susanne Vielmetter started out with a simple idea for her business: reflect the culture that you see around you. With that in mind, she opened her gallery in 2000 with a diverse, gender-balanced stable of artists at a time when white male conceptual artists were dominating the West Coast scene.

Now, as she marks her 20th anniversary in the business, the world is catching up."

By Kate Brown - 6 August 2020

"Pope.L’s I-Machine (2014–20) has a handmade, provisional appearance that conveys a sense of a thing in a state of ongoing and perhaps hopeless becoming. The artist describes the work as a 'self-blinding contraption… self-blinding because its function is to encourage unknowledge or ignorance or, at best, reflection on ignorance and doubt. by encourage, i mean, when one is in the presence of this assembly, one should feel prodded toward opacity, uselessness, dumbness and incompleteness rather than transparency, smarty-pantsness and wholeness.'"

By Artforum - July 2020