"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"“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

"Kirk is specifically taken with the story of Minerva—goddess of wisdom—and her pet owl, who symbolizes knowledge acquired through trial and error; cultivating wisdom through the process of making mistakes. His neon orange sunsets and sci-fi skyscraper vistas, painted with Gorilla Glue and spray paint, function as markers of time, change, and spirituality."

By Jennifer Piejko - 17 February 2023

"As part of the Frieze Projects programme at Frieze Los Angeles, Ochoa is resurrecting the CLASS: C van, exhibiting ‘Las Tortillas’, a series of bronze tortilla sculptures that pay homage to both the food and his family’s history as tortilla purveyors. In parallel, working in partnership with the fair, Revolution Carts – maker of the first hot food vending cart approved by the LA County Department of Health – and local street vendor advocacy groups, Ochoa will design the graphics for a custom ‘street legal’ food vending cart, which will be unveiled and donated to a local vendor at the fair. As well as directly benefitting this community, the gesture is intended to raise awareness of the history, contributions and ongoing ‘hustle’ of Los Angeles’ street vendors, whose economic and cultural impact on the city is, Ochoa says, unrecognized and undervalued."

By Patricia Escarcega - 15 February 2023

"Now, for the first time since 2005, Ochoa is opening the doors of his storied and rather rusty van to the public again, parking it on the tarmac of the Santa Monica airport for the run of Frieze Los Angeles there (Feb. 16-19). Its engine is shot, so this time the van, known as “Class: C” (after the standard type of driver’s license needed to operate it), will be towed into place."

By Jori Finkel - 13 February 2023

"The New Museum exhibition will be the first time the whole building is turned over to a single artist. It will trace the continuity of Mutu’s thinking over the past 25 years as well as the profound impact her part-time move back to Kenya has had on her practice, especially her shift from the complex and lush collaged-based works on paper that brought her fame in the 2000s to a more recent focus on large-scale sculpture, installation, film and performance."

By Aruna D'Souza - 8 February 2023

"Based in Austin, Roberts creates powerful collages of mostly Black adolescents. Splicing elements from varying sources – Michelle Obama’s hands, the eyes of James Baldwin – she uses heavily textured collages to explore “the multiplicity” of Blackness. “Do not think of people of colour as this monolithic idea,” she says, “but as individuals.”

By Katy Hessel - 6 February 2023

"From the couture-inflected to the conceptual, minimal and visceral, the portraiture-centered group show, It’s Time, features six artists offering urgently needed updates to our culture’s definition of beauty. Next door, painter Forrest Kirk’s landscape-shredding solo exhibition, The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk, upends pastoral quietude with disruptive materiality and a suspicious attitude toward perfection. Each of these artists in their own way takes aim at the persistently unwise restrictions imposed by conventional cultural paradigms — and they offer some compelling alternatives."

By Shana Nys Dambrot - 10 February 2023

"In 2012 I started working in ceramics (again.) By again I mean I did it in high school and before that, like many did, as a child at a local community center. First I made porcelain animal figures and then started throwing on the wheel. The pieces pictured here were made during the pandemic, between 2020 and 2022. They were shown in the solo exhibition Forest for the Trees (2022 at Vielmetter Los Angeles), installed with stumps and rocks and paintings. I thought it would be nice to show them “up close” since you can’t touch the art in an art show and pick them up."

By Stanya Kahn - February 2023

"Themes of representation also appear in a gorgeous show, "It’s Time," at Vielmetter Los Angeles where the work of artists Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are in conversation with the portraiture of Kwame Brathwaite, who is widely known for his photographic documentation of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and '70s. The exhibition title, "It’s Time," is a nod to the 1962 jazz album by Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln. It not only refers to the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the period, but also suggests that now is still “the time” to prioritize the movement and efforts towards true liberation and representation for all."

By Dominique Clayton - February 2023

"There are historical moments that transform the industry standard, and sometimes they have deep, traceable roots. An opportunity to understand this process is provided by an exhibition of artist Nicole Eisenman’s work opening in March at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, the show, especially its revisitation of startlingly explicit lesbian works from the 1990s, will allow viewers to enjoy Eisenman’s beautiful, widely appreciated, and highly valued artworks. The fifty-seven-year-old, French-born, New York–raised painter, sculptor, and creator of wild, passionate murals and drawings has taken a bad-boy, oppositional, and sometimes dramatically risky path to becoming one of the world’s most successful living artists. Somehow, the seas parted and—at times in spite of herself—Eisenman has thrived, has been approved of, and is now in some ways iconic. Beyond the quality of her work, how did it happen that exclusionary criteria that kept a range of lesbian imagery out of the mainstream were lifted?"

By Sarah Schulman- February 2023

‘I am grateful for the opportunity to show work I care about, to make new things and to show work at the fair for out-of-town visitors who may have missed my recent show (which was unlike anything I’ve made before). Ruinart describes a commitment to sustainability and understanding of biodiversity which seems crucial, [and] mandatory if we’re to survive,’ Kahn tells Wallpaper*. 

By Harriet Lloyd-Smith, January 27

"Across Gaignard’s works are themes of beauty. Without looking closely, you could become swept up in her delightful pastel palette, romantic floral motifs, and swanky style. But the artist uses this to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race and cultural identity. Likely best known for her self-portraits, Gaignard makes installations and mixed-media collage, creating her own visual language that illuminates racial injustice. She unabashedly centers Blackness and cleverly entices us to consider the most unsettling parts of American culture and anti-Blackness. Look What We’ve Become takes the object of a vintage hand mirror, used to beautify and adorn, and asks us to take this quiet moment to really look at ourselves. Who is impacted by an intrusive gaze? Who has the freedom to look away?"

By Shaquille Heath - 19 January 2023

"In the opening essay of filmmaker Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she reflects on the experience of getting older in her signature, cleverly confessional style: “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight.” Few would disagree that Ephron, as a perfector of the rom-com and the personal essay, is as sharp-eyed an observer of women’s experiences as they come. But rarely has her name been invoked in relation to feminist art of the 1980s, with its emphasis on deconstructing “woman as image.” Nevertheless, as I was walking through Mary Kelly’s show at Vielmetter—an installation of her work Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85—the comedienne, to my own surprise, immediately came to mind."

By Ashton Cooper - January 2023

VIEWING PLEASURE: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA by Michael Anthony Hall, Photography by Courtney Coles

As the sun rose, revealing a white light that illuminated everything it could touch, 19th-century European and North American photographers captured their subjects in Daylight Studios—what many consider to be the inception of portraiture. Subverting these beginnings with diverse, nude subjects and revealing the frame in full—including the camera and photographer—Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio is artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s series that pays homage to the original Daylight Studios while examining the qualities that compose each image. [...]

V MAGAZINE, November 25, 2022

Questionnaire — In Pursuit of the Masquerade My Barbarian in Conversation with Jazmina Figueroa
“We were born Generation X, officially, which is embarrassing to admit but true,” says interdisciplinary artist and member of My Barbarian Alexandro Segade, speaking about the collective similitude within the group, which includes performer and writer Malik Gaines and actress and artist Jade Gordon. Some of the defining characteristics of those born in Generation X have to do with burgeoning youth cultures amid the AIDS epidemic and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc — those who were strongly affiliated with underground, outlier, and/or queer scenes alongside major cinematic and music franchises. [...]

FLASH ART #341 WINTER 2022-23

Andrea Bowers — An Ethos of Resistance by Jessica Simmons-Reid
[...] Andrea Bowers, whose work has long plumbed the methodologies of social justice movements, culls from this archive for a series of works entitled Letters to an Army of Three (2005) (works that, crucially, predate both the Trump era and the cataclysmic collapse of Roe). She displays the gathered correspondence, which she learned of during a visit with Maginnis, at the meeting point of two walls, with the printed letters emanating outward from the crux like an open book. A single-channel video of various people carefully reciting the contents of specific letters plays on a monitor suspended from the ceiling above; underneath, a large-scale book of additional correspondence sits splayed open on a plinth. [...] (November 2022)

Opacity and the Spill — The Photographs of Clifford Prince King, Shikeith, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya by Allison Noelle Conner
[...] Like King and Shikeith, Sepuya turns away from the photographic impulse to dissect and profit. Born and raised in Southern California, Sepuya pulls apart the mechanics of photography and the artist studio— composing his frames with smudged mirrors, velvet drapes, tripods, lighting equipment, intertwined figures, test prints, and hands pressing camera shutters. [...] (November 2022)

"The section exhibited at Vielmetter is titled “Corpus” and includes images of fetish objects — boots, a purse, a nightgown — staged like advertisements. The piece is multilayered in a way that’s typical of Kelly’s work, with photographs and texts that are personal but different in tone from her writing in “Post-Partum,” less like diaries and more like fables. The stories are displayed at the scale of bus stop advertisements, in Kelly’s handwriting. There are first-person scenes set in a nightclub and in a sauna with other women, and one featuring a dying mother. Some words are highlighted in lipstick red. (“That was really sexy for me,” Kelly said.) And despite the title, one never sees an actual female body; instead, it’s conjured constantly through signs and signifiers."

By Sophie Haigney - 11 November 2022

"I have this theory that the absence of a modifier in and of itself is a kind of signifier of privilege. Only straight white men get to be artists. Everyone else is a gay artist or a woman artist or an artist of color or a gay woman artist of color, etc., not that it is anything to deny, but for straight white men, that signifier is absent. So it’s like that absence is in itself a kind of signifier. That’s something that plays into my work, absence as signifier." -Nash Glynn

By Ann C. Collins - October 2022

"Shooting nudes against a black-velvet backdrop with salon-style furniture, Paul Mpagi Sepuya explores the traditions of 19th-century European and North American photography through a queer, playful lens. In the artist’s latest photographic series, “darkroom” functions as a double entendre, where his subjects are bathed in the red light of processing film while evoking clandestine encounters. He also captures them the bright light of day, producing two opposing moods in the exhibition."

"I love the ambiguity. I love that people recognize themselves. Since 2015 I haven’t named any works after the subjects in them, but rather by the body of work or kind of work they relate to in my overall practice. So they’ll be A Portrait, Model Study, Darkroom Mirror Portrait, Dark Room Studio Portrait, and so forth. The thing about the newer Dark Room Studio, Dark Room Mirror, Dark Room Portrait and Dark Room Model Study works is that the obscuring like you mentioned is an effect of how much time it takes to take the picture. The extended exposure of the night-time works, 1 – 3 seconds necessarily blurs movement as things unfold in front of the camera. There are also works where I’ve formally set up a picture where the subject is looking at or interacting with their reflection in a mobile mirror that, because of the angle at which it’s turned to the camera, renders its surface invisible as well as blocks a view of the subject’s face."

By Adam Smith Perez - 2022 September

"Roberts’ artwork exposes the implicit racism in societal standards of beauty, decorum and value for Black children, simultaneously providing insight into what it means to grow up Black in America.

“When I was growing up you couldn’t look people in the face, you had to look down, cast your eyes down,” Roberts said. “I want these kids to look you directly in your face, have a conversation with you, be strong. You’re not lesser than. That’s why all the works have that one (eye) glare straight at you.”

By Chadd Scott - 24 September 2022

"In his recent exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio,” Sepuya presents two series of photographs that oscillate in scale, light, and technique. The Daylight Studio series depicts the mechanics of the artist’s studio, presenting the studio space as a kind of stage where images are constructed. Historically, the photographer’s “stage” has been a platform of control designed to objectify and dominate marginalized subjects. Alternatively, Sepuya’s studio is a space for play, pleasure, and empowerment where subjects have agency over their bodies and interactions. Sepuya exposes the scaffolding that divides the artist and the subject and conceals the dynamic spaces and relations that animate the studio."

By Lauren Guilford - 15 September 2022

"Arlene Shechet expands and deepens both her “embodied, intuitive” making of objects and her masterful organization of installations in architect Steven Holl’s ‘T’ Space. Built with keen awareness of architecture’s origins in Greek ritual drama, the venue is shaped like a T and is illuminated by varied windows, doors, and skylights, as trees cast shadows on its walls and floor. In five carefully engineered new works—one installed outdoors—with new formal attention to the figure, Shechet extends her unique blend of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses."

By Hearne Pardee - September 2022

"After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision."

By Jackson Davidow - 25 August 2022

"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

"One of the strangest and most compelling works in the show is a two-channel video by New York-based, Jamaican artist Dave McKenzie. Listed Under Accessories (2022) shows the artist entangled in an ambiguous but earnest struggle with curious objects. For several minutes, McKenzie performs a seemingly improvised choreography with a large sheet of glass. At first, he’s resting the rectangle on his foot and scooting around the room; later, he balances it on the back of his head and shoulders, flexing his neck to keep it level. The rigidity of the glass forces his Black body to adapt in order to handle the material safely. He’s going through something, and we feel it with him even if the parameters of his struggle are never fully explained."

By Peter Brock

"Nine of Roberts’ collage-and-pencil works on canvas at Art + Practice, plus nine from a suite of 27 Warhol-style silk-screen heads, elaborate the theme, introducing girls and kids in groups. (In a nice touch, the silk screens are hung low on the wall — kid-height.) Roberts places her figures off-center against blank white fields, her unerring design sense yielding the savvy effect of a fashion shoot. Given a larger absence of Black faces in commercial culture, these kids insert themselves — camera-ready."

By Christopher Knight - 11 May 2022

"As an installation, I’m is about empowerment. The works cry out: Look at me. I’m a person. I’m here. I’m important. In this exhibition, Roberts blends faces of children and grownups to suggest the trajectory toward adulthood and the fact that in today’s violent and racist world, they grow up too fast, if they get to grow up at all.'

By Jody Zellen - May 2022

"Just inside the entrance, the visitor is greeted by Bright Sun Cloud (2021) offset on a large floor plinth. Rising in piled chunks of wood and ceramic, these forms seem to spread out in a big yellow/green embrace. Revealing itself only after a 360° perusal, the forms are masked from one side to the next and shifts in color provide new readings from one view to the next. The soft surface is replete with both cracks and textures and the only element less heated in the ensemble is the steel plate below which strikes a more plaintive, almost whimsical note. Along with the scalar shifts, it’s impossible to survey the entirety of the work, making viewing a literal discovery."

By John David O'Brien - May 10, 2022

"We now have to defend our beauty and the way we dress. So I wanted to show the vulnerability of young children, especially boys, when that toxic masculinity appears, as early as the third grade. Most of the definitions that apply to Black boys and Black girls are very negative and not uplifting. And that’s why most of my images are floating. I’m lifting them up. I’m not grounding them—they’re moving. And that’s what I’m hoping that my art does.” - Deborah Roberts

By Emil Wilbekin - 29 April 2022

"Her bent toward nostalgic ephemera is coupled with an insatiable curiosity to mine personal and collective histories. Gaignard’s work rests uncomfortably at the intersections of portraiture, history and recent calls for justice. She masterfully employs found objects that signify. She appropriates misrepresentations—the commoditized stereotypes that historically have been used to humiliate Black people and presents them in active stances, ignited with a renewed agency."

By Angela N. Carroll - 22 April 2022

"Throughout her career, Genevieve Gaignard has sought to interrogate and protest the racial violence that plagues America through her art. In her current solo exhibition with Vielmetter Los Angeles (her second with the gallery), Gaignard harkens back throughout American history and the racial violence at the forefront, intertwined with analysis of and commentary on the American psyche in its inseparability from this violent trajectory. 

Strange Fruit, its title borrowed from the iconic Billie Holiday song, is a collection of pieces which agitate against the historical and modern-day lynching of Black Americans. An aggregate of provocative pieces, Strange Fruit aims to disrupt: to amplify alternative narratives of racial violence and white supremacy.

Flaunt spoke with Gaignard about the exhibition and her practice and intentionality behind the works therein."

By Madeleine Schulz

"One of the rare exceptions was Vielmetter’s pairing of My Barbarian’s haunting, literary masks — a couple of which adorn the ornamental specter Standelabra 4 (Cassandra as Judith) — with sweeping new erotic photographs by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Taken together, these works suggest an approach to gender, race, and sex as open questions rather than the fixed, overdetermined testimonies espoused by most figurative works at the fair. The performance group My Barbarian is fresh off a recent survey at the Whitney."

By Matt Morris - April 2022

"Adopted from Billy Holiday’s haunting song of the same name, Strange Fruit highlights that the inextricable nature of America and violence towards its own black citizens must be examined. The work emerges from a time of great historical movements in America and around the world calling for racial justice, citizens acting on peaceful protests, and violent desperations. Paradoxically, Gaignard’s photographs are tantalizing and dream-like, embodying a stunning irony as the artist heavily critiques the American Dream. In Off With Their Heads: The Gallant South (2022), Gaignard embodies Southern-Gothic elements, illuminating the grotesque features of the American-South through a farcical glamorous exterior. In the image, Gaignard herself poses in an antiquated gown before a grandiose yet old and derelict mansion, the white paint fading to brown and pillars crumbling before unkempt plants. "

By April-Rose Desalegn - April 2022

"Seeing a video made by the artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley for the first time can feel like encountering a newly invented language. How best to take it in? Should you sit? Stand? Close your eyes and listen? Take notes? In each of their black-and-white videos, usually about ten minutes long, a handful of characters, most of them acted by Mary, tell a story in rhyming verse full of off-kilter wordplay, double entendres, and semantic switcheroos. The density of the puns and the breakneck pace of their delivery, combined with the visual cacophony of the set design, might compel you to watch it on loop."

By Elvia Wilk - 7 April 2022

"The first booth you see upon entering Expo Chicago is Vielmetter’s presentation of a series of immaculate face masks aligned perfectly on a wall. Don’t worry—they have nothing to do with Covid. Instead, it likely has to do with Commedia dell’arte given their distinctive features: a rough white face adorned with a messy black wig holds a tray filled with ornamented vases in one hand and another version of its face in the other. To make this dramatic sculpture, titled Standelabra IV Cassandra as Judith, My Barbarian (a trio formed by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) pulled from their archive objects and materials used in former performances.  The collective’s 20th-anniversary show, which ended last February at the Whitney Museum, is currently in transit to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."

By Sarah Belmont - 8 April 2022

"After a year’s Covid delay, the latest Whitney Biennial has pulled into town, and it’s a welcome sight. Other recent editions — this is the 80th such roundup — have tended to be buzzy, jumpy, youthquake affairs. This one, even with many young artists among its 60-plus participants, most represented by brand-new, lockdown-made work, doesn’t read that way. It’s a notably somber, adult-thinking show, one freighted with three years of soul-rattling history marked by social divisiveness, racist violence and relentless mortality.....

Performance merges with abstract sculpture in a video by the estimable Dave McKenzie, whom we see improvising balletic encounters with stray objects in his studio, where he seems to have spent a good deal of lockdown time."

By Holland Cotter - 31 March 2022

"Gaignard’s amalgam of collage, installation, sculpture, and self-portraiture featured in the show began to take shape as the artist, who started making waves in the art world in 2013, eyed materials in her L.A. studio, particularly mammy and Royal Doulton figurines. When looking at the figurines, Gaignard remembers thinking, “‘I wish I had a bunch of these.’” So, she requested a fabricator reproduce 100 mammy statuettes. "When I saw them, all lined up, I was like, ‘Damn, they’re an army.’” Her new piece, “The American Dream is a Pyramid Scheme,” features 81 custom, headless figurines on tiers. “Someone could read it as dismembering, but the figurines weren’t something we Black people made for ourselves,” she says. “This was white people making a glorified image of what it was to serve them. I felt she was stronger without her head. Removing her head was a way to take her story beyond servant and focus on her stance, what she’s conquered, and what Black people continue to conquer.”

By Jessica Herndon - 1 April 2022

"An installation of tightly staggered mirrors on vintage wallpaper titled Do You Only Want to See What You Believe? brings to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness in their fragmented reflections. The mirrors summon Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, which tells the story of a Black girl who spends long hours looking in the mirror. Clouded by racist ideals, the girl struggles to recognize her own Black beauty. The mirrors also prompt the viewer to look at themselves—to turn inwards and ask, Do you only want to see what you believe? Viewers are encouraged to examine their own identities, values, and potential complicity. By turning to the past, Gaignard reminds us that America is still sick—with blood on the leaves and blood at the root. "

By Lauren Guilford - 31 March 2022

"Kahraman’s paintings are obsessed with the gaze — ours as viewers, but also how her subjects, trapped in vulnerable, submissive positions, return the look. Art has a way of fighting back, of implicating the viewer in the drama, these images seem to say. Kahraman used to describe her sense of dislocation and trauma through violent images: women in chains or hung from a tree. That seems to have given way to a quieter sense of horror. Her women stare back, their expressions eerie and accusatory."

By En Liang Khong - March 11 2022

"In 2009, sensitive to the ways that Black girls are under particular duress in American culture, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts began creating intricate collages of innocence and joy — “very Black Norman Rockwell,” as she described them in a recent interview. When she decided to pursue an M.F.A. in 2014 at age 48, hoping to discover ways to move her work forward, she was struck by how little research there was to draw upon to understand the lives of Black girls and the challenges they faced. “There was scholarship on Black women,” she explained, “but not on how we become Black women.”

Six years later, a lot has changed. Roberts’s own career has exploded: Her mixed-media of found photographs on paper and canvas have been lately acquired by MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, purchased by celebrity collectors including the Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) and Spike Lee, and even featured in a recent episode of “And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” reboot.

Meanwhile, the pressures that Black girls face every day — often stereotyped to be more adult, and less innocent, at a far younger age than their white counterparts, with the result that they are often sexualized earlier; overpoliced by schools and law enforcement; and held to white beauty standards at great cost to their self-esteem, for example — are being increasingly brought to light by activists, educators and researchers."

By Aruna D'Souza - 24 February 2022

"In the past 15 years she has used her painted women to investigate the refugee condition from often surprising angles. The figures have become contortionists; canvases have been sliced up and rewoven into abstract patterns, in an allegory of the fragmented nature of memory, culture and trauma. A recent Covid-centric series interrogated the martial language of immunology, in which the human fortress is seen to be “invaded” or “colonised” by foreign bodies."

By Skye Sherwin - 21 February 2022

"In the photography of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the nude body, which is its frequent subject, isn’t the most intimate part of the composition; rather, it’s the glimpse we get into the photographer’s studio: bare intermingling limbs reflected in mirrors or jutting out of sheets; equipment strewn on the floor. In his self-portraits, smudged traces of bodies are visible on the surface of the mirror, around which hang torn-up pieces of drafting paper and other art-making detritus. All of this makes it seem like the studio isn’t ready for our presence; we’d be voyeurs if it weren’t for the artist’s careful compositions."

By Marko Gluhaich - 14 February 2022

"At this solo booth, Samuel Levi Jones is presenting a powerful new series of mixed-media works in which the covers and pages of Indiana history and law books are juxtaposed in various compositions. These works are eye-catching, no doubt in part because the artist has pulped and dyed his books, lending them a material quality. Though at first glance these abstractions can seem simple, Jones is looking to contend with the many ways that recorded history can systemically perpetuate inequities."

By Maximiliano Duron - 18 February 2022

"She always cut through the bullshit. One time, I made this video and Barbara saw it and said: “Your work is usually so coherent, but I just don’t understand what’s going on here.” I loved the way she just put it out there. She didn’t soften anything that didn’t need to be softened. Some of the best advice that she offered me was to keep things simple. I think she saw this as one of my strengths and really encouraged me to keep in touch with a pared-down and concise language, which is something that I continue to do. There were some professors whose opinions I could discount because they didn’t necessarily understand what I was working on, but I really trusted Barbara’s opinion. I haven’t seen her that often since I graduated but, when I do run into her at a social event, she’s always so supportive. To me, she will always be a punk-rock legend."

By Math Bass and Chloe Stead - 14 February 2022

"Gaignard’s chameleon quality, her ability to manipulate herself and play with perception through character-driven portraiture has become the core of this phase of her artistic practice. The depictions of various western archetypes create an internal dialogue within the viewer, “How do you know she’s old?” “How can you tell she’s rich?” “What says she’s black?” Gaignard challenges the viewer. What associations do we make and why? Do those associations connote something positive or negative? The demand for introspection begs the viewer to look at how they see themselves and how they perceive others. What biases, implicit or otherwise are at work within each of us? With Gaignard’s work, everyone is on the hook to take a deeper look at each other and to look deep within. "

By Jewels Dodson - 11 February 2022

For the first time in 10 years, Ziperstein also has her own fine-art studio, where she spent much of last fall prepping for her current solo show at the Vielmetter gallery. To realize the hulking sculptures, she carved intricate patterns inspired by Soviet textiles into the clay, firing and glazing them, paint-by- numbers style. Like many of the brutalist buildings she has long referenced, the Cold War–era textiles were commissioned by the government. “They’re propaganda,” she explains. “I’m interested in thinking about our historical past and how it talks about our current state.” 

By Hannah Martin - February 2022

"For the last few years, during the course of the pandemic, Bleckner has kept his time and movement sequestered at his studio in the Hamptons. That’s where he worked on his most recent show, Sehnshuct, which recently opened to much fanfare at Vielmetter Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It’s  Bleckner’s first solo show in L.A. in more than a quarter-century and revisits some of the themes of loss and anxiety that pervaded his early work."

By Michael Slenske - 11 February 2022

"The dark black backgrounds of the three paintings from 2021, entitled After 51 Years (I), (II) and (III), offer a stark contrast to the saturated and brightly painted flower imagery in the foreground. Similar to his famous Birds Falling of 1995, the flower imagery on the painted canvas has been blurred by dragging the paint strokes while they were still wet. This distortion of imagery make the flowers seem like they are in motion, immediately bringing forth a contemplation of the ephemeral."

By Emily Babette - 10 February 2022

"At the Greenhouse, an annex in Vielmetter Los Angeles’ parking lot, Nicole Eisenman’s alarming plaster sculpture of a big, burly man with a blank face smeared in silver rides on the back of another beefy guy down on all fours, his hands and feet sullied in grime. The pointedly titled “Man at the Center of Men,” shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, is capped off by a pair of mirrored trash-can lids, held up as crashing cymbals with which the preening rider regards himself.

In a brilliant twist, spotlights reflecting off the mirrors cast the crude rider’s profile in shadow overhead on the ceiling, the dark silhouette framed by a luminous halo. Eisenman deftly topples the grandiose tradition of man-on-a-horse monuments, her “Man at the Center of Men” emerging as more a dull brute astride a subservient fellow donkey than a triumphal leader.

The sculpture resonates, dating from deep in the darkest days of the Trump administration, just before colossal White House incompetence sent deadly disease rocketing through society."

By Christopher Knight - 3 February 2022

"The artwork on the cover was created by mixed media artist Deborah Roberts, whose work grapples with notions of race, beauty, and otherness. Initially, Roberts says she attempted to create a work that would bring together all the faces of Black people who have been victims of police brutality. “I started cutting up faces and merging them together, but everyone needed their own space to exist,” she says. In producing the cover image, Roberts used a now-iconic photograph of Martin. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t already been done for him,” she says. “It’s been used for him and against him. I kind of wanted to take that away.”

Ultimately, Roberts says she hopes people will look at this cover and understand there’s still work left to be done. She wants people to ask themselves how we’re going to make space for children to be children for their entire childhood, and to remember that people can be many things at once. “We have to start seeing people as full people,” she says."

"The Shear segment of “Ways of Seeing” presented a hard act to follow. and in November the sculptor Arlene Shechet opted for an enchanting installation for “Take Two." She painted the lower half of the galleries’ walls with bands of pale brown and gray, hung the drawings at different heights and added benches of her own design whose alternately rounded and right-angled edges seemed to comment on the nature of line.

Shechet took care that her selections were linked, one piece to the next, by form or subject, creating an almost continuous chain."

By Roberta Smith - 20 January 2022

A distressed white princess in tattered clothing waves a red scarf in the air as she is abducted on the back of a white bull. The bull, she’ll soon learn, is Zeus in disguise. He is taking her to Crete, where he will rape and impregnate her, then make her his queen. This Greek myth about the defenseless Phoenician mortal Europa—after whom the continent was likely named—is dramatized in one of the most famous paintings of all time, Titian’s The Rape of Europa, commissioned by King Phillip II of Spain in the sixteenth century. Since 1896, it has been part of the collection of famed Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose museum currently displays all of Titian’s mythological poesie paintings, briefly reunited after four hundred years apart.

By Emily Watlington - December 22, 2021

"Spanning the course of Fishman’s career, from her years in the MFA program at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s through 2018, the more than one hundred works on display at the Krannert Art Museum are taken almost entirely from Fishman’s personal collection and most have never before been exhibited. Eschewing a linear, developmental structure, the show—which was organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Amy L. Powell, in close collaboration with the artist, who passed away just a month before its opening—is instead arranged according to Fishman’s formal grammar, with sections titled “Transfers,” “Grids,” “Curves,” “Flat Folds,” and “Expressions.” Within each, graphic and painterly gestures, chronologies, and materials collapse and intermingle. "

By Jessica Baran - 15 December 2021

"Self-taught with a background in industrial design, it’s obvious that McCloud is a restless experimenter. In “translated memories,” McCloud continues his practice of incorporating plastic merchandise bags to investigate connections between industrialization and the natural world. Delicate slivers of colored plastic making up pots, leaves, and petals are cut with a razor and applied with heat piece by piece — at the end of the painstaking process, the plastic looks as liquid as a brushstroke."

By Catherine Yang - 15 December 2022

"One might presume that a collection of Pope.L’s writing spanning the artist’s decades-long career would be, itself, a performance. My Kingdom for a Title enlivens the artist’s fascination with language as a core mode of inquiry. An artist known for his strenuous public crawls that often include pedestrian and volunteer participation in a mixture of rehearsed and spontaneous study, such as “The Great White Way” (2001-09) and most recently “Conquest” (2019), My Kingdom for a Title is equal parts a peek at the artist’s sketchbook and a career retrospective through Pope.L’s iterative textual analysis."

By Erica N. Cardwell - 10 December 2021

"O’Flaherty’s debut exhibition featured Kim Dingle’s “Psycho-Tods.” The opening of the show was a chaotic, vibrant mix of everyone in New York. The new, the old, the artists, the artist wannabes. The opening felt like vintage New York, before art was presumptuous. It just existed everywhere you turned. And we didn’t make a big fuss about it, we just existed in it."

"Hugo McCloud’s survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut reveals an artist who, even early in his career, can be best understood through his novel approach to materials. If you’ve only seen his art online, you’d be forgiven for thinking his images of workers are made with translucent watercolor or glossy acrylic. In fact, they’re meticulously rendered with single-use, semitransparent plastic bags, cut and layered over a white surface. Informed by an earlier career in industrial design, McCloud’s “paintings” in plastic—as well as his large-scale abstractions made with metal, tar, and other industrial materials—speak to a global system of labor, the everyday pursuit of beauty, and the resiliency of the human spirit."

By Will Fenstermaker - 2 December 2021

"Despite having painted self-portraits since childhood, Glynn, 29, abandoned the medium as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, working instead in video and performance. Things changed after graduation. “I started transitioning, and it was very intuitive to pick up a brush,” she said. “When you grow up without a reflection, sometimes you just need to make your own.”

By Arthur Lubow - 30 November 2021

"Don’t miss out on this Los Angeles-based artist’s curious and sensitive work. The exhibition is curated by one of Dingle’s characters, Pudgey Pomona, a reference librarian who appears in a blue floral shirt against a lemon yellow background in a portrait at the entrance. The 1962 lime green jaguar parked outside the gallery is also Miss Pomona’s, we are told. Inside, you’ll find a delicate marble collection, a cookie cutter in the shape of Cagliari, Italy, a world atlas of animals, and so much more."

By Matt Stromberg and Elisa Wouk Almino - 30 November 2021

"Now, a career-spanning survey has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, organized by Michael Darling, the MCA’s former chief curator, and Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, where it will travel in 2022. The largest-ever presentation of Bowers’s work, it offers perspective on a remarkable journey.

On a formal level, it presents her path from virtuoso, if spare, drawings in the 1990s to the present cornucopia of crafted objects and installations, textiles and neons, documentary videos, works on paper and cardboard, archival presentations and more.

But the deeper journey is a personal one: How a woman born in 1965, on the launchpad of Generation X, and raised in small-town Ohio, has navigated three decades of allyship — not without missteps — to become, arguably, America’s most important political artist."

By Siddhartha Mitter - 30 November 2021

"My Barbarian’s political commitments are sincere, even if they rarely read as “serious.” The group are deeply versed in capital-T theory, and their enmeshment in academia––both as art students and, later, as faculty––indexes a contradiction facing many artists of their generation, trained in a promiscuously poststudio but increasingly professionalized MFA world. Commentators, myself included, often find it difficult to characterize their work without invoking “camp.” Setting aside the long-standing debate about whether camp is a technique or a mode of reception––that is, a read––it is My Barbarian’s continual relay between intense arch knowingness and the ecstatic salto mortale that makes community theater possible (and for so many, a vulnerability to be avoided at all costs), that pushes one to reach again and again for the word. To abuse a turn of phrase from Lauren Berlant (writing on “identity”), camp is perhaps what My Barbarian are attached to but underdescribed by."

Catherine Quan Damman - November 2021

"What now stood in her place was the corpus of her work, a body of enormous heft. Louise’s very presence had always been like a force of nature to me anyway. I’d known her since the 1970s, though not that well. She was never a hangout buddy but an elder stateswoman, a serious-ass painter, a living link to the New York School stretching back to painting giants like Mitchell, Guston, and de Kooning and forward to all us wannabe-serious painters who were still in the grip of that kind of work. Sometimes I would see her in Chelsea walking around in utilitarian pants and sporty wraparound shades—and Louise was literally sporty. As a girl, she had wanted to be a professional ballplayer, and several writers since have made the connection between sports fields and Louise’s canvases, both of which are delineated rectangles of activity in which coded sets of gestures are pitched, whether baseball pitches or paint strokes. Anyway, when I saw her, I would not interrupt her because she was deep in thought—about what, who knows—but as de Kooning once said of someone, she had an abstract look on her face."

Amy Sillman - November 2021

"Juliano-Villani has said that her plan is “to show art that is not afraid of itself,” and the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, “Dingle Does O’Flaherty’s” (on view through Oct. 8), certainly meets that criterion, spanning the fifty-year career of the Los Angeles renegade Kim Dingle. The main room, strewn with cans of White Claw and broken scissors, suggests a wild party at which no one is checking I.D.s. The guests are painted porcelain figures of toddler-age girls—uncannily lifelike tutu-clad statues, from 1993, that Dingle calls “Psycho Tods.” (A photographic doppellegänger appears in the 2021 installation “Wall Smasher 2,” pictured above.)"

By Andrea K. Scott - 2 October 2021

"Last summer, the painter Sarah Cain was contemplating the biggest project of her career: a 45-foot-long painting for the East Atrium of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. Cain, 42, has been making caustically colorful, improvised abstractions since the mid-2000s and had been commissioned to hide construction walls during refurbishment of the atrium’s skylight. Nearby sculptures by Max Ernst, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Serra, too large to relocate, were protected by wooden boxes. Cain was tasked with painting on the boxes, too — each bigger than her studio. (And she needed a title.)"

By Jonathan Griffin - 30 September 2021

"The new body of work portrays the faces of young Black children as they face the harsh reality of a convoluted society that perpetually seeks to see and treat them as adults. Roberts combines sourced imagery with hand-drawn and painted elements to create arresting portraits that demand reflection. Each of her artworks brilliantly utilizes the whitespace of the canvas to allow the myriad of imagery and textures to pop off and draw the viewer into the dialogues hidden within."

By Shawn Ghassemitari - 28 September 2021

The exhibition features Watson's body of work tackling everyday scenes of the artist's life during the pandemic. Curated by Indra Lācis, Director of Exhibitions.⁠
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"Both individually and as a cohesive timeline, the artist’s Pandemic Paintings invoke active forms of reflection and remembrance, as well as a sense of mutually shared vulnerability and participation in understanding the surreal and significant events of 2020."

"In February 2019, Genevieve Gaignard wore a shirt at Frieze Los Angeles that read “Sell to Black Collectors.” Now, the artist has transferred that text into a triangle-shaped canvas that hangs in the booth of Vielmetter Los Angeles, as well as one that reads “Black Is Excellence.” These two works hang above recent photocollages by the artist on which found images from magazines like Ebony and Life are transposed over vintage wallpaper, a recurring theme in her practice. Gaignard’s forceful call for visitors to an art fair to think about how Black artists, collectors, and dealers have historically been excluded from the art market—and often continue to be—was hard to miss."

By Maximilliano Duron - 11 September 2021

"Sarah Cain is a painter living in Los Angeles. For her abstract works, she layers a wide range of paints and objects on canvas, as well as gouache on found papers, and creates projects “on-site” that are painterly responses to the architecture of galleries, abandoned houses, and, most recently, the East Building Atrium at the National Gallery of Art. On the occasion of her survey exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum, Cain published a facsimile of her Music Book (2008–21): an illuminated manuscript of sorts made from a circa nineteenth-century album of sheet music. In the conversation below, we talk about the musk of our respective houses, not fully understanding musical notion, and making impressive art out of dumb ideas."

By Maddie Klett - 9 September 2021

"What if? is an affecting experience, full of strangeness, horror, and grief, but the audiovisual components of the work still feel a little unresolved. Nevertheless, in a political and cultural climate as relentless as the one we’re in, Roberts deserves kudos for exploring such brutal content through what for her is a relatively new form."

By Amarie Gipson - August 2021

"Each piece starts with raw canvas and a primer coat of clear acrylic polymer that keeps the painting from sinking in all the way through the fabric. It also allows Neel to use white to create lighter areas against the background, many areas of which she leaves untouched, to “preserve a lot of air in the canvas,” she said.

But unlike her childhood oil painting sessions with Alice, Neel chooses acrylic paint to create her many-layered works.

“When I worked in oil, it took so long for every layer to dry that I would get out of the headspace I needed to feel a kind of continuity in the painting,” she explained."

By Sarah Cascone - August 23, 2021

"Bringing humor, absurdity, and “fresh discomfort” to the streets of Midtown Manhattan, Pope.L conceived of ATM Piece (1997) as a performance and an act of civil disobedience. Prompted by a law that banned panhandlers from standing within 10 feet of an automatic teller machine—as part of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign—Pope.L chained himself to the door of a Chase 24-Hour Banking Center with sausage links. Wearing only a pair of boots and a hula skirt made of easily detachable dollar bills, he planned to open the door and hand out money to the bank’s visitors. Via email, we recently discussed the relevance of this piece, 24 years after its making. The artist’s unedited responses are below."

By Veronika Molnar - 12 August 2020

"Silver nitrate is used in the manufacture of mirrors, but Arceneaux transforms it into a painting medium, creating reflective, fractured, and battered abstractions. The artist’s mother passed away from dementia while he was working on this series, and it reflects the painful breakdown of memory and recognition that he witnessed. Thwarting the mirror’s function to provide an accurate reflection, Arceneaux instead offers poetic sites for contemplation of loss and mourning."

By Elisa Wouk Almino - 11 August 2021

"Disturbing the View at the Whitney is a performance happening throughout the summer by New York-based artist Dave McKenzie. McKenzie uses window-washing instruments to activate the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows by repeatedly, and rhythmically, apply a chalky substance. This action indeed disturbs the view to the stunning vistas overlooking Lower Manhattan.

A small survey of McKenzie’s filmed performances over the last 20 years is staged on the third floor, and grounds Disturbing the View in the artist’s explorations into the everyday performance of moving through space. In this June 2021 conversation, we talk about grocery stores, adolescence, and the desire to make art that we want to see in the world."

By Maddie Klett - 14 July 2021

"Despite Mutu’s trenchant critique, the placement of her work suggests an equivocal answer to the exhibition title. I am Speaking, Can You Hear Me? (2020) consists of a pair of figures facing each other. Large conch shells and sections of wood function as oversized ears, as though to magnify their listening capabilities. The two figures might hear what is said, but are they paying attention? One of them enacts a deception surely familiar to anyone who has been an unwilling confidant: an ear toward its neighbor, it feigns attentiveness while peering over the other’s shoulder toward the gallery’s Flemish paintings. These works include portraits of severe Dutch courtiers resplendent in lace cuffs and winking gold rings, several of which gaze past Mutu’s sculpture onto an expanse of lilac-hued wall. The gallery is an example of self-containment—hearing without listening."

By Jess Chen - 14 July 2021

"The St. Louis-born, Brooklyn-based artist recently completed a residency at Miami’s Rubell museum, where she focused on making her paint skin work “bigger and more luscious,” she says. “I had the space and support to work at a scale that my heart’s always wanted to, which gave me the confidence to go big going forward.” Her works can stretch 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall."

By Akili King - 11 July 2021

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Beyond the Looking Glass, a group exhibition of surrealist takes by women about women. Beyond the Looking Glass is curated by gallery director Zuzanna Ciolek, one of the first members of the UTA Fine Arts team when it was established in 2015.

The ambitious exhibition fills all three gallery spaces with bold works by a cross-generational group of fourteen women-identifying artists: Firelei Báez, Tawny Chatmon, Charlotte Colbert, Kim Dacres, Florine Démosthène, Genevieve Gaignard, Sanam Khatibi, Klara Kristalova, Shannon T. Lewis, Jesse Mockrin, GaHee Park, Hiba Schahbaz, Kiki Smith, and Jessica Stoller.

“While organizing this exhibition, I enjoyed poking holes in traditional standards of beauty in art and pop culture,” said exhibition curator and UTA Artist Space director Zuzanna Ciolek. “And within that playful and provocative framework, the show aims to explore contemporary femininity and representation.”

Beyond the Looking Glass presents a new lens for representation through surreal and uncanny artworks that address sexuality, race, and identity— radically defying solely ornamental representation. Taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, the title Beyond the Looking Glass is a twist on Through the Looking Glass, moving beyond a world where women are being seen as purely ornamental. The exhibition pulls viewers into an unexpected world filled with surrealist characters such as an elephant girl, a pink “C-section” vessel equipped with breasts, and a woman riding a reptile. While disrupting traditional portraiture of the Western Canon and confronting stereotypical representations of women, the figures portrayed transcend these societal constraints. With these archaic indicators of femininity stripped away, the surreal and expressionist imagery allows her to break out, expanding beyond the body.

“Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950-2020” Parrish Art Museum

"Contemporary makers like Amy Sillman, who painted “C” (2007), and Jacqueline Humphries and Virginia Jaramillo are included, too, delineating the connections among generations."

“Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?” Legion of Honor Museum

"The Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, who splits time between Nairobi and New York, has made many museum appearances, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, but this is among her biggest solo exhibitions."

By Ted Loos - 21 May 2021

"In Deborah Roberts: I’m, the artist’s first solo show in Texas, the powerhouse artist continues investigating ideas of beauty, race, happiness and safety through depictions of Black children. Originally meant to open September 2020, the exhibition was postponed to January 2021 due to the pandemic. Roberts used those quiet quarantine months to edit the exhibition deeper and go bigger. The pandemic revealed the preciousness of human life, and fueled the collagist to heighten existing mixed media pieces. Black children needed to be seen and affirmed on a grander scale."

By Jasmin Hernandez -19 May 2021

"Through dozens of small, colorful paintings, Esther Pearl Watson (Art MFA 12) depicts a rapidly changing world in which the once mundane is juxtaposed against an unprecedented crisis. As the pandemic continued, Watson’s desire to document everyday life in its midst grew stronger. ⁠
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Watson spent the last year creating a visual diary. It’s a trip to the neighborhood grocery store, but there’s a line outside and the store is completely out of toilet paper. A family goes on a walk in their neighborhood, but they’re all wearing masks. As the days dragged on, Watson felt a growing desire to document this new normal."

By Juliet Bennett Rylah⁠ - 14 May 2021

"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

"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

"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

"‘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

"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

"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

"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 their 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

"Vielmetter Los Angeles gallery is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a group show (open by appointment) that features works by artists who are represented by or have been shown in the gallery over the years. It’s a reunion that brings together work by important L.A. artists, including Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Math Bass, Liz Glynn, Shana Lutker, Kim Dingle, Steve Roden, Ruben Ochoa and the late Laura Aguilar.

Plus, there’s a must-see backroom installation by Sean Duffy, titled “Alone Now,” that feels just right for our era: an apocalyptic man cave that features all manner of assemblage and hacked-together machinery."

By Carolina Miranda - 24 July 2020

"The series of bronze statues by Wangechi Mutu that currently adorns the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade is scheduled to be on public display until early November. But two of the four pieces, “The Seated I” and “The Seated III,” will remain at the museum long after the exhibition closes as a part of its collections, the Met announced on Tuesday.

“Sometimes when you do a site-specific commission it only works for the specific site or in that particular context,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “In regard to Wangechi’s works, it’s clear that on the facade they work as these four sculptures framing the facade, transforming the facade, but they also work as singular objects.”

When they were unveiled last September, Ms. Mutu’s caryatid sculptures — traditionally female figures carved into architectural support structures like columns — were the first artworks to be presented from the face of the Met’s building on Fifth Avenue. In Ms. Mutu’s renderings, the figures are released from their supporting role. Instead of helping to hold up roofs or balconies, they sit freely on pedestals."

By Peter Libbey - 28 July 2020

"Perhaps none of her efforts better demonstrates this than Procession (2019), a sculptural group made for one of the outdoor terraces of the Whitney Museum of American Art for last year’s Whitney Biennial and now on view in “Sturm und Drang,” a selection exploring the sculptural dimensions of Eisenman’s work in two and three dimensions from 1994 through 2019 at The Contemporary Austin (which came about when Eisenman won the newly combined 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize). Procession consists of figures that function individually but also together, lumbering in a procession—a parade, perhaps, or a protest. Eisenman had previously employed simple devices for arranging groups of figures: positioning them around a pool, for instance, in Fountain (2017), which was first seen at Skulptur Projekte Münster; an edition of that work now resides permanently at the Nasher Sculpture Center."

By Katy Diamond Hamer - 16 July 2020

"This work is about our need for self-blinding and encourages reflection on our use, as a community, of unknowledge, misinformation and ignorance. The recent controversy regarding The New York Times allowing the printing of a hot topic Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton without proper vetting is a layered example. Who, in this scenario, is the most ignorant actor? The Cotton? NYT? Or us? Is it the Senator, because he recommends killing his own? Is it the “Tombs,” because they condoned his ignorance and then claimed they did not know what they were publishing? Or is it Us’n, myself included, because, well, it’s The Times, and they stand for us all? Well. Maybe they do not. Maybe they cannot. Maybe they have not. For a while now. And we, and we were too self-blinding to admit it?"

By Pope L. - 23 July 2020

"JUST BEFORE NEW YORK issued its shelter-in-place order in March, I attended the closing of Pope.L’s exhibition “Choir” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Entertainment justice adopts a rhetoric of Black empowerment similar to that of the Black Arts Movement in the ’70s. But, as critic Aria Dean writes, Pope.L has reacted to that position over the course of his life as an artist, developing a “hole theory” that posits Blackness’s relationship to trauma as a powerful creative force."

By Taraneh Fazeli - 9 July 2020

"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

"The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation revealed the 20 contemporary artists receiving its 2019 Biennial Grants, which come with an unrestricted $20,000 for each recipient. Past recipients of the prize are a veritable who’s-who of influential contemporary artists, and this year’s class is equally impressive."

By Benjamin Sutton - 12 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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.

"I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.

That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.

Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams."

By David Pagel – 30 January 2020

"Sonsini has painted these same men over and over for the past fifty years, and one has the sense they comprehend and appreciate each other deeply. These are not only paintings but images that facilitate a deeply personal exchange between people whose experiences may be very different, but whose humanity is very much the same."

By Eve Wood – 20 January 2020