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Lisa Yuskavage / Jody Zellen
David Zwirner, Los Angeles, California Continues through April 12, 2025 March 22, 2025 Lisa Yuskavage, “Endless Studio,” 2024, oil on linen, triptych, 12 x 31”. All images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, Los Angeles. © Lisa Yuskavage. Naked women, the artist's studio, lurid colors, dynamic but thoughtful compositions are all elements closely associated with Lisa Yuskavage's paintings. Yuskavage packs each work, large or small, with quirky

Jody Zellen
Mar 26, 20253 min read


Davey Whitcraft, “To Those Who Create the Future” / DeWitt Cheng
Themes+Projects, San Francisco, California Continues through March 29, 2025 March 22, 2025 Davey Whitcraft, “Altiplánico,” 2025, color photograph on Dibond panel, 60 x 60”. All images courtesy of Themes + Projects, San Francisco. The admiration for paintings so ultra-realistic that they simulate photographs is given a witty reversal in Davey Whitcraft’s conceptual abstractions comprising “To Those Who Create the Future.” Whitcr

DeWitt Cheng
Mar 26, 20253 min read


Gustave Caillebotte, “Painting Men” / Liz Goldner
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California Continues through May 25, 2025 March 22, 2025 Gustave Caillebotte, “Paris Street, Rainy Day,” 1877, oil on canvas 83 9/16 x 108 3/4”. All images courtesy of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The central work of “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” is “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877). The immersive life-size painting features a well-dressed couple, walking confidently across a city plaza paved with

Liz Goldner
Mar 26, 20254 min read


Shilpa Gupta, “Some Suns Fell Off” / David S. Rubin
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, California Continuing through March 29, 2025 March 15, 2025 Shilpa Gupta, “100 Hand-drawn Maps of USA,” 2008/2023, table, fan, book, 48 x 42 x 24”. All images courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. In this deeply thoughtful exhibition, Mumbai artist Shilpa Gupta explores a topic that has become even timelier since the election of Donald Trump to a second term: the fragilit

David S. Rubin
Mar 17, 20254 min read


Artists on the Stickiness of Social Media, Part 2 / Michael Shaw
March 15, 2025 r/aiArt, Norman Rockwell’s “Connected iKids,” generative AI art. Before sharing a range of more artists’ thoughts on their use of social media (you can read Part 1 here), a few notes: 1) I do not mean to suggest that Instagram, or social media in general, offers no value. It can be and is a place for artists to not just connect but also to obtain cultural sustenance. Although thus far no respondents have described it that enthusiastically, I imagine that it is

Michael Shaw
Mar 17, 20259 min read


The Creation Circle: Aboriginal Art and Time / Matthew Kangas
ArtX Contemporary, Seattle, Washington Continuing through March 22, 2025 March 15, 2025 Jaclyn Holmes Nangala, “Collecting Bush Seeds, Bush Desert Flowers,” 2023, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12”. All images courtesy of ArtX Contemporary, Seattle. A Seattle couple, an attorney and a law school professor, is responsible for introducing contemporary Australian aboriginal art not only to Pacific Northwest collectors and ethnic art enthusiasts, but also to significant institutions suc

Matthew Kangas
Mar 17, 20254 min read


Su Yu-Xin, “Searching the Sky for Gold” / Liz Goldner
Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Costa Mesa, California Continues through May 25, 2025 February 22, 2025 Su Yu-Xin, “Searching the Sky for Gold,” installation view. Walking into Su Yu-Xin’s exhibition is to enter a magical display of dozens of large, colorful semi-abstract paintings. Yet look closely and the works evoke a variety of ephemeral scenes, including clouds moving through the sky, sunlight reflecting large landscapes, volcanoes in action, rain-soaked mountain sce

Liz Goldner
Feb 24, 20254 min read


Elizabeth Sunflower Lenn Keller, Darcy Padilla, “A Strange Vibration” / Caroline Picard
SF Camerawork, San Francisco, California Continuing through April 22, 2025 February 22, 2025 Elizabeth Sunflower, San Francisco topless dancer Lola Raquel getting ready to fly to LA in a Rudi Gernreich designed topless dress with pasties. She was arrested in the airport when she landed in Los Angeles, 1969/1970. Courtesy of the artist, © Retro Photo Archive. “A Strange Vibration,” including Lenn Keller, Darcy Padilla and Elizabeth Sunflower, is comprised of three black and wh
Caroline Picard
Feb 24, 20255 min read


Artists on the Stickiness of Social Media / Michael Shaw
February 22, 2025 I came across a couple of Instagram posts promoting an action called “Lights Out Meta,” a targeted boycott of all Meta platforms (including the biggest: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) for the week of January 19th through the 26th. I appreciated the challenge, both to stick it to the man (or men) and do a little social media detox simultaneously. Instagram has clearly become a destination app for so many industries, contemporary art (along with modern, hi

Michael Shaw
Feb 24, 20255 min read


Samantha Fields, “Portents” / DeWitt Cheng
Traywick Gallery, Berkeley, California Continuing through March 15, 2025 February 8, 2025 The British Romantic landscapist John Constable (1776-1837) once declared, “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.” Samantha Fields, “The Path of Totality,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 27”. All images courtesy of Traywick Gallery, Berkeley. Samantha Fields’ exhibition of recent pai

DeWitt Cheng
Feb 10, 20254 min read


Mayme Kratz, “Sleeping in the Forest" / Lynn Trimble
Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona Continuing through February 22, 2025 February 8, 2025 I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before…. Mayme Kratz, “Everything That Rises After the Fire,” 2024, resin, globe chamomile, snake ribs on panel, 60 x 108". All images courtesy of Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix. So begins the Mary Oliver poem one sees when descending the stair

Lynn Trimble
Feb 10, 20254 min read


Jeanne Silverthorne, “They Will Be Like Shadows” / Jody Zellen
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, California Continues through March 22, 2025 February 8, 2025 Visiting Jeanne Silverthorne's exhibition “They Will Be Like Shadows” as the recent Los Angeles wildfires burned influenced my response to and interpretation of the works. Silverthorne’s platinum silicone rubber and mixed media sculptures — some figurative, others referencing the body — alluded to the death and destruction of real time events. Seeing “Banshee (Self-Portrait at 73

Jody Zellen
Feb 10, 20254 min read


James Leong, “A Retrospective Parts I and II”
James Leong, “In and Out,” 1972-73, mixed media on canvas, 45 x 57”. All images courtesy of Chatwin Arts Gallery, Seattle. James Leong (1929-2011) moved to Seattle in 1990 after a storied career in San Francisco, Oslo, Rome, and New York, and boasting a raft of awards including Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Whitney fellowships. By then, Leong’s saga mirrored that of other postwar American artists of color who had exiled themselves to Europe — James Baldwin, Miles Davis — as a re

T.s. Flock
Jan 24, 20254 min read


“Turistas: King Charles III of Spain,”
Iván Argote, “Turistas: King Charles III of Spain,” 2013, C-print, 63 x 47 1/4”. All images courtesy of Perrotin Los Angeles. Born and raised in Colombia in a family of political militants, Paris-based Iván Argote has spent more than a decade enacting performative inter ventions that question the rationale behind public monuments of powerful historical figures. It’s a timely topic in the United States and abroad, where statues steeped in the legacies of colonialism or slaver

David S. Rubin
Jan 24, 20255 min read
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