Featuring Megan Fox Kelly, Founder of Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Susanne Vielmetter, Owner and Director of Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Alain Servais, Collector and Founder of Servais Family Collection—moderated by Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor of Artnet News.

Tectonic shifts are being felt across the art market. From the expansion of digital mediums and the movement towards ultra-contemporary art, to new generations of buyers and the ascent of mega-galleries, the arts landscape is undoubtedly undergoing rapid and monumental change. This panel will discuss the future of the art market in broad strokes, considering key forces behind these major movements.

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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 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

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.

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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“Using found materials and mesmerizing structures that unearth deep-rooted emotions, Wangechi Mutu’s visual creations celebrate our collective history and explore how art communicates into the future. From ancient rock carvings in the Sahel to her own chimeric abstractions, she shares her journey of self-discovery and reminds us all that we already speak the most ancient language of all.”

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Dave McKenzie’s “Listed under accessories,” 2022 by The Whitney Museum of American Art!

Dave McKenzie’s two-channel video, Listed under accessories, was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin and was acquired by the museum for the permanent collection.

The New Museum presents “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” running from March 2 through June 4, 2023 a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu.

Representing the full breadth of her practice, the presentation will encompass painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. Mutu first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is happy to announce the recent acquisition of John Sonsini's 2009 painting "Francisco & Raul" by the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

This acquisition was made possible through the generous support of Cheim & Read.

Bari Ziperstein's installation "Domestic Choices" at The Wende Museum Guardhouse Project opens November 13 and runs through March 2023.

Conceived specifically for Wende Museum’s original East German Guardhouse, Bari Ziperstein’s Domestic Choices (2022) is a set of painted and embroidered curtains encircling the interior of the guardhouse, which is lit from within to generate a warm glow. Rather than face inward, the curtains in Domestic Choices face outward, confusing not only the orientation of inside and outside but also the very purpose of curtains in general and the guardhouse itself, a tiny piece of architecture intended for privacy’s opposite: surveillance.

The curtains in Domestic Choices are inspired by the hundreds of textile patterns Ziperstein has encountered through her extensive research in the Wende Museum archives. Though this research has informed her work in ceramics for many years, this is the first time she has worked in textiles herself. Made in collaboration with artist Jill Spector, the curtains were first block printed with celery hearts and sponges to suggest a petaled flower pattern. Then, using hand cut stencils and spray paint to achieve a misty effect, Ziperstein added abstract shapes. Next, she painted leaf and dot patterns in free hand. The final layer is embroidery depicting Soviet war planes, done by Spector. The pattern synthesizes themes Ziperstein has noticed over and over in her research: benign imagery such as florals and repeated abstract patterns combined with symbols of military might.

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True Believers: Benny Andrews & Deborah Roberts provides a historic and contemporary view of the Black experience in America through the work of two artists from different generations. This exhibition explores the deep connections between the work of these two artists in relation to formal similarities, specifically the utilization of collage, as well as their shared interest in themes of activism, racial injustice, family, and religion.

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Congratulations to Sarah Cain whose site-specific painting is included in "13 Women" opening The Orange County Museum of Art on October 8th!

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"Stand in the Stream" captures the rise of the internet and social media as tools for political organizing while simultaneously exposing their evolution into powerful sources of surveillance and marketing. Edited with precision and intensity, the film’s footage (all shot by Kahn or screen-recorded by Kahn in real time) moves globally and locally through the wild, the streets, the home, and online, in a visceral, phenomenological reflection of life, power and uprising in late capitalism.

Articulating a powerful personal dynamic to political movements, the narrative arc of the film is shaped by the decline of Kahn’s mother to dementia, and the birth and growth of her son amid the shift of political and digital landscapes over time. An activist and former shipyard worker, Kahn's mother speaks candidly about unions, NAFTA, the dangers of politicians in the pockets of lobbyists, how she wouldn’t want to get dementia like her mother before, even as she deteriorates. Her illness and death are woven with lo-fi clips of Kahn’s home life raising her son, caretaking, repairing, working, always from the POV of a camera. Interspersed and ongoing, is Kahn’s persistent screen recording of live streams on the internet. 

"Stand in the Stream" mimics our screen-saturated perspectives, hinting at questions of accountability, acknowledging our participation in a sometimes voyeuristic and alienated consumption of the world through images. In Kahn’s massive collection of footage—edited with an operatic sense of sound’s power to draw the epic from the mundane—we experience capitalism’s acculturation of our very personhood and the blooms of resistance and resilience.
 
Kahn’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and the musician/composer Alexia Riner.

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On view September 16 – December 4, 2022

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works on paper and on canvas combine found images, sourced from the Internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons.

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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.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Genevieve Gaignard's installation "Family Tree" by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston! The work is currently on view in the Kinder Building.

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.

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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.

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Southern California-based artist John Sonsini and Laguna Art Museum’s Curatorial Fellow Rochelle Steiner will be in conversation about the work of artist Francis de Erdely, the subject of the museum’s major exhibition Striking Figures: Francis de Erdely.

Saturday, June 11, 2022
6:00 p.m.

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Congratulations to Sarah Cain and Yunhee Min who are selected for the Purple (D Line) Extension Transit Project with Metro Art. Sarah Cain is commissioned for the Century City/Constellation Station and Yunhee Min is commissioned for the Westwood/UCLA Station.

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Congratulations to Ellen Berkenblit who is the 2022 recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters!

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Artists Yunhee Min and Linda Besemer are 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipients for Fine Art.

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"The Storm King exhibition will feature bronze sculptures installed in the indoor and outdoor spaces of the centre that will aim to emphasise Mutu’s interest in the natural world, something that has “been present but not at the forefront of conversations around her work”, according to Nora Lawrence, the centre’s artistic director and chief curator.

“Mutu’s work is rooted in the idea of karmic power, or a future where humans have reconnected with the environment, where human and non-human elements merge and create a greater force because of their union,” Lawrence tells The Art Newspaper. “The landscape at Storm King is an ideal platform for understanding this facet of her work.”

The commission includes a monumental fountain spanning 15 ft. in length that will flank an area known as “museum hill”, a focal point of the sculpture park that offers panoramic views of the grounds and houses another iconic sculptural fountain, the work North South East West (1988/2009/2014-15) by Lynda Benglis. Mutu’s work will take the form of a water-filled canoe holding anthropomorphic female figures that are intertwined with tendrilous roots resembling mangroves."

By Gabriella Angeleti – 15 March 2022

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Genevieve Gaignard's solo exhibition “This is America: The Unsettling Contradictions in American Identity” curated by Karen Comer Lowe is on view through May 15, 2022 at the Atlanta Contemporary.

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“Deborah Roberts: I’m,” features the artist’s mixed-media works and will be on view at Art + Practice from March 19 through August 20, 2022. In tandem, the artist’s figurative mural “Little man, little man,” 2020, will be installed on the walls in the California African American Museum's expansive lobby, encouraging viewers to travel between the two sites.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates gallery artists Dave McKenzie and Rodney McMillian on their inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Biennial curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards.

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Deborah Roberts and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists" at the Blanton Museum of Art on view through May 8, 2022.

"Assembly includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a monumental print, all produced between 1980 and 2019. Although diverse in style and subject matter, many of the works have ties to Southern history and reveal what scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the long afterlife of slavery.” For example, the shared surname of two—unrelated—quiltmakers in the exhibition, Arie Pettway and Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, is that of the plantation owner their enslaved ancestors were forced to serve in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Kevin Beasley’s resin sculpture incorporates raw cotton from his family’s farm in Virginia. Nari Ward’s immersive installation honors overlooked places, people, and traditions in Savannah, Georgia. Cauleen Smith made her recent neon work in memory of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop in Waller County, Texas.

The title of the presentation, Assembly, embraces the heterogeneity of work made by Black artists, refusing generalization, essentialization, and definitive interpretation. As theorized by the late British cultural critic Stuart Hall and expanded on by American philosopher Paul C. Taylor, with “assembly” comes the potential for disassembly and reassembly. In this gathering, we encounter acts of representation, resilience, reclamation, and resistance."

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"The National Gallery of Art has acquired Sarah Cain’s Self-Portrait (2020), an exuberant, mixed-media abstract painting. The non-representational self-portrait is the first work by this original artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.

Self-Portrait features a dynamic whorl of hard-edged colored bands creating curvilinear forms that alternate between foreground—for example, the large black band with drips that descend throughout the lower register—and background, as illustrated by the black translucent ground of smaller organic shapes. Cain incorporates an abstract vocabulary of form, color, and materials in this painting to create speculation about this painting’s meaning as a self-portrait. She sewed prismatic beads, given to her by her mother, into the center of the canvas as a kind of supportive, light-filled spine—an example of the personal symbolism in this work. Cain’s Self-Portrait painting brings the tradition of abstract painting into the present and continues a rich dialog with countless works in the National Gallery’s collection, including abstract works by artists Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Frank Stella, and Richard Tuttle."

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