by George Melrod Official Welcome , Los Angeles Continuing through February 21, 2026 Beverly Semmes, “Body Shop,” installation view at Official Welcome, 2026. All images courtesy of Official Welcome, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Bedford It’s now been over thirty-five years since Beverly Semmes first emerged in New York as a trailblazer in the use of clothing as a sculptural material — and as metaphor. And she did so in a memorably big way, presenting giant grey coats with their arms connected in a loop; vast streaming dresses of indigo velvet and billowy pale blue organza which flowed off a wall as from an opened flood gate; expansive lakes of brilliant royal pink or blood orange velvet that pooled from a single gown. Blending issues of bodily representation and feminist themes with postmodern formalism and critiques of consumerism and gender roles, her approach was rooted in the exhilarating dynamic of the early 1990s. With their lavish textures and lush materiality, her works felt both saggy and sensual, an aesthetic stepdaughter of Eva Hesse and Meret Oppenheim. She also shared themes with Robert Gober in the form of her haunting bodily allusions; Charles Ray for her playful exaggerations of scale; and Janine Antoni with her repurposing of ostensibly feminine materials. Beverly Semmes, “Fur & Bit,” 2025, faux fur, canvas, slippers, epoxy, 28 x 34 x 5”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Beneath their seductive surfaces, the works were always cagey and pointed. Over the years, Semmes has organically expanded her practice to embrace such disparate mediums as ceramics, photography, video and performance, which have pushed her work beyond the realm of easy expectations. Her painting incorporates a vibrant hodgepodge of patterns and colors, while her fashion explorations with Carwash Collective paraded a funky patchwork aesthetic — more like a collaboration between Betsey Johnson and Jessica Stockholder than Christian Dior. A recent retrospective last fall at Tufts University (Semmes’ alma mater) testified to the breadth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre. As if in counterpoint, her current solo show, archly titled “Body Shop,” flaunts her ability to condense her sprawling plus-sized visions to a compact scale. Works are created specifically to accommodate the gallery’s limited square footage. Whatever they might lose in spectacle, these playful studies more than compensate for in intimacy, approachability, and sheer witty weirdness. Beverly Semmes, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” 2025, faux fur, ink, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, Vesace slippers, epoxy, 16 x 22 x 5”. Photo: Chris Kendall. “Body Shop” offers one larger work and eight mixed media wall pieces suggesting sleeveless bodices composed from fabric, painting, drawing, photos and notably, an array of women’s slippers, amplifying the Cinderella symbolism flowing through the work. While her fabric fantasies have previously implied a consumerist critique, here it becomes overt, focused on the ideals of shopping for comfort, luxury, and style. A new persona adds up to a better you. Despite their concision, the works glean freely from some of the artist’s most iconic themes and strategies. Among them is the “FRP (Feminist Responsibility Project),” in which she attempted to negotiate a feminist response to pornography by painting over photos from old porn magazines, replacing the overt imagery with a subtler iconography that felt more acceptable to a feminist eye. While “correcting” male-oriented porn, the works remained open to the shared motives of pleasure, temptation, and consumption. And although oblique, the intimations of sex and luxury lining these new works add a sense of cheerful titillation. Beverly Semmes, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” 2025, faux fur, ink, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, Vesace slippers, epoxy, 16 x 22 x 5”. Photo: Chris Kendall. “Fur and Bit” offers a pair of fur-lined Gucci slippers, with their little gold clasp, on a bodice of golden-brown faux fur, with its hints of upscale equine sophistication. As with all these works, it’s pinned directly to the wall, an allusion to their origins as textiles, but the effect here is unnervingly sharp. The protruding slippers are placed roughly where a woman’s breasts would be, as substitute symbols of gender-oriented comfort and desire. Mounted on the wall, the work feels reverential, but laid on a floor it could be a mistaken for a throw rug. The most opulent piece, “Two Legs, Two Pitchers, Two Shoes,” sets a pair of ornate Versace slippers atop a small painting melding curtains, patterns, and a woman’s splayed legs in knee boots — a motif repeated from her “FRP” series — atop a chartreuse faux fur bodice. The gold and black circular pattern of the pricey slippers suggests nipples, making it her sexiest evocation of foot-focused fetishism. Here it’s the slippers that you’re tempted to slide into. Beverly Semmes, “Hat,” 2025, velvet, canvas, fur, hat, stuffing, 27 1/2 x 34 x 5”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Several works highlight her painterly patterning. “Medusa” sets a pair of fuzzy lavender slippers on a small rectangular painting with splayed legs, while the gray faux fur bodice is adorned with vertical blue stripes. “Curly” sets bright pink Balenciagas atop a scumbled black line drawing and a gray faux fur bodice with an oddly similar look. “Checkers” conjures retro-styled domesticity with plain blue slippers set with glittery pale green discs, atop a black-and-white checked bodice. “Flowers and Dots,” while lacking slippers, resembles a gauzy Impressionist field of florid green and carmine, bedecked with numerous sewn pink flowers and circles, imbuing her decorative patterns with what could be a profusion of nipples or uneasy allusions to bodily injury. In “Hat,” a round fur hat occupies the center of a pink velvet bodice; despite its assertive symmetry and luxuriousness, it seems mole-like and out of place. Beverly Semmes, “Flowers and Dots,” 2025, velvet and polyester, 30 1/2 x 36 x 1/4”. Photo: Evan Bedford. Harking back to Semmes’ larger works, “Duck Slippers” (originally part of a single installation with “Hat”), mounts a plush skirt-like curtain of fabric off the wall, so it spills across the floor. A peculiar mud-brown pattern suggesting hoof prints, it glows lustrous gold in the refracted afternoon sunlight. Its base serves as a place mat for a pair of old-timey men’s slippers depicting mallard ducks. In this case, the slippers are actually in position to be worn, not just ogled, while the plush brown plume suggests a magic carpet pathway ascending to another realm, albeit in style both strange and ironic. Given how renowned Semmes is for her large-scale work, it’s a treat to be able to experience her works in a format that’s so playful and intimate. Although eclectic and challenging, they’re also undeniably inviting: enticing enough to rope you in and mischievous enough to make you puzzle over them. Merging body and consumer fetishism with a healthy dose of surrealistic pillow talk, her obscure objects of desire continue to fascinate, tantalizing with their quirky visions of class, comfort and couture. Pinned to the wall in tactile immediacy, they remain at once saucy and seductive and forever out of reach. George Melrod  has written hundreds of articles on contemporary art and culture for such publications as ARTnews, Art in America, World Art, American Ceramics, Details, and Vogue, among others. In the 1990s, he was the New York critic for Sculpture magazine, and wrote a regular contemporary art column for Art & Antiques, for whom he worked as a Contributing Editor. A native New Yorker, he moved to LA in 1998, and has since contributed to websites such as artcritical and artillery. From 2007-2017 he served as editor-in-chief of art ltd. magazine.

by Lynn Trimble Vision Gallery, Chandler, Arizona Continuing through March 21, 2026 Luke Watson, “A Vista,” 2025, oil on canvas. All images courtesy of Vision Gallery, Chandler, Arizona. Arizona-based Luke Watson draws us into his world immediately upon entering his exhibition, “Land Valuation,” with a large-scale concave painting that echoes the panoramic views often sought by tourists in national parks or other iconic settings. Soon enough it becomes apparent that Watson’s landscapes have little in common with those postcard-style perspectives. “A Vista” (all works 2025) is a layered landscape that directs our attention towards not only the physical forms replete in his body of work, but also to the different levels of meaning he intends them to convey. Watson paints a wide swath of sky sitting atop a row of clouds that float just above multiple layers of rocks comprising expansive land formations. Green plants with crystalline forms dot the landscape, their stylization offering a glimpse at the ways Watson often veers into surrealism. Luke Watson, “Aspen (Glen),” 2025, oil on canvas. Nearby, another large-scale painting, “Aspen (Glen),” introduces more fantastical imagery marked by excursions into vivid colors and stylized shapes. Conical trees resembling green tutus stacked on tall poles stand amid other foliage. Purple lines conjure pathways created by the movement of water or snow. Short green structures that resemble corrugated cardboard suggest walls — not man made, as one might expect, but implicitly by the creatures who reside in this forest. The natural environment, as Watson visualizes it, may be built, but is not merely the product of human hands. Throughout the exhibition, which includes nearly three dozen works, are references and similarities to several Southwest contemporaries, including Ed Mell’s (1942-2024) angular abstractions and Steve Yazzie’s (Diné, Laguna Pueblo, and European ancestry) abstractions marked by movement and flow. The more distant echoes of Georgia O’Keefe, Vincent van Gogh, and Grant Wood, are among others the artist pays homage to. Luke Watson, “SBBT,” 2025, oil on canvas. The geometries of Watson’s mesas, rocks, rivers, mountains, and trees are rooted in three-dimensional puzzle pieces and pop-up children’s books. As noted in his statement, that process often involves “crafting paper models of landscapes and translating them into paintings that flatten complexity into planar simplicity.” The result both channels and counters forms found in nature, implying that what we see around us is always filtered through our own experiences and memories. Then he goes beyond that, speaking in paint to the ways our interactions with the environment change it. His aesthetic mission is to express how the natural world is in a constant state of transformation. The absence of human figures highlights Watson’s rejection of anthropomorphism. Instead, he center our attention on the land and its other cohabitants. When they do appear, the human subjects are mainly engaged in leisure activities such as camping, cross-country skiing, and birdwatching. They sport the types of gear you would expect, from binoculars and bike helmets to tents and backpacks. This alludes to the fact that we ordinarily mediate our experience of nature by protecting ourselves from its overwhelming forces in order to exert a semblance of control over it, or passively to assume the role of observer. Luke Watson, “Campsite,” 2025, oil on canvas. Some of the figures in Watson’s paintings have a subtle cartoon or caricature quality, proportions slightly askew, such as a head that’s too large for its body, implicating the ways that self-perception is at odds with reality. When placed near foliage or clouds whose circular shapes resemble the iconic silhouette of Mickey Mouse ears, these people appear as humorous foils to the way experiences of nature are packaged and sold as leisure.  At times we see only what humans have left behind, such as the all-terrain vehicle track marks in “SBBT,” its cloudy sky suggesting a gathering storm. In “Land Exploits,” with its tree trunks evocative of logging, and “Mine,” with its heavy equipment, Watson turns his attention to the impacts of industry on the environment. But the subtle tone of his imagery falls short of critiquing the damage wrought by extraction and exploitation. Luke Watson, “Camp Fire” 2025, oil on canvas. The exhibition’s most intriguing works are “Campsite” and “Camp Fire.” In the former, an owl is poised near a yurt-styled tent and given a glow that imparts the feel of an alien spacecraft. Tree branches have a robotic appearance that connects the impact of technology on nature itself, and the relationships between us and our environment. As to the latter, campers sit amid trees with foliage shaped much like megaphones, implying that the trees are somehow calling out or listening to the stories being told around the titular campfire. A dozen or so small oil on panel paintings depict a bird such as a cactus wren, turkey, or kestrel against a simple backdrop. Despite their beauty, these works fail to animate Watson’s interrogation of geological and manmade forces that persistently change the landscapes they inhabit. Luke Watson, “Fire Cycle,” 2025, oil on canvas. Such questions are addressed more forcefully in “Fire Cycle,” a stunning panorama that fills an entire gallery wall. The artist conveys the resiliency of nature by combining imagery of post-wildfire devastation, new green forest growth, and the return of flames. Whether the fire might have originated with lightning or another natural cause, or with human actions such as building campfires, is left to the imagination. Watson’s reimagined landscapes prompt reflection on the ways that infrastructure created to support interaction with what’s sometimes called “the great outdoors” favors those with sufficient economic means. But it also calls on all of us to recognize that those systems fail to build upon the full depth and breadth of historical and contemporary culturally-driven relationships with the land. Lynn Trimble  is a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter  @ArtMuser  or Instagram  @artmusingsaz .

by Andy Brumer We are posting Andy Brumer's final exhibition review for VAS with sadness. We take some pride in the relative handful of relationships that VAS, and for many years prior, ArtScene maintained with our contributors. Relationships and projects is such an important dynamic, more so for visual artists than most. It applies equally to writers. When Andy Brumer filed his review of Patrick Graham's current show nobody knew this would be his last. For many years he published original poetry and wrote about golf for Sports Illustrated . ArtScene and later VAS served as an outlet for him to express his interest in visual art. He brought a polished and distinctive voice to his art criticism. Like so many of us, he was always deferential to the creative process. In his own particular way he became an exemplar of it. So the news of his sudden passing (due to cancer) felt unexpected and unfair, seeing as how he and his wife Adelaida Lopez had just recently moved back to L.A. following the traumatic loss of their Altadena home last January. So there would no doubt have been some late chapters, now left unwritten. That is the preferred epitaph for any writer or artist. Works and essays left started but unfinished and unpolished drafts at our passing. ---- Jack Rutberg Fine Arts , Pasadena, California Continuing through April 18, 2026 Patrick Graham, “Deposition #6,” 2009, mixed media on board, 32 x 44”. All images courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc., Pasadena. Although Ireland has produced some of the world’s best late-19th and 20th century writers and poets, its roster of well-known visual artists during this same period is sparse in comparison. Both the father and the brother of William Butler Yeats, the country’s best-known poet, were successful professional painters, but remain obscure next to their famed family member. Many art historians, looking beyond the isolated example of Francis Bacon, concur that 82-year-old Patrick Graham deserves much credit for opening Irish visual arts to the world. Like Bacon, Graham is recognized for his role in moving Irish painting out of a stale, academic Anglo-centric style. Both their bodies of work took on the raw idiom of German Expressionism and (in hindsight) the Neo Expressionist movement in America and Europe during the late 1970’s and 1980’s. This partially explains why Graham attracted and continues to enjoy a strong international profile. Patrick Graham, “The Lark in the Morning VIII,” 1996, mixed media on board, 31 7/8 x 44 1/8”. The symbiosis between poetry and painting in Graham’s work is immediately evident in a small piece titled “Deposition #6.” All of the artist’s output presents haunting explorations of his psyche and soul. This little gem does so with a masterful blend of drawing and painting media. Graham’s “Deposition” series plays a game of hide and seek with the artist’s own visage and identity, much as John Ashbery’s iconic poem, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” references the Italian Mannerist Parmigianino’s rendering of a distorted reflection of himself. Yet, as in this line from Ashbery’s poem, Graham’s drawing also “has shut itself out/and in doing so shut us accidentally in …” Deposition in Christian terminology refers to Christ’s descent from the cross, and has long stood as a symbol of suffering and rebirth. Each work in the “Deposition” series presents a faint, smudged, primitively rendered image of the artists face and body. Bruised and fragmented, they simultaneously step forward and recede as if to hide from both his self-analytical gaze and the probing eyes of the viewer. The ink and paint of each drawing float over pieces of milky-white paper that form a subconscious sea. Handwritten words and notes surface and surround many of the fragmentary portraits. At times resembling a Rorschach ink blot test, these pieces represent a psychoanalytic self-accounting (that is, a deposition), each work functioning as both an inventory and a manifest. Patrick Graham, “Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill,” 1998-99, oil and mixed media on canvas diptych, 72 x 132”. While these fragile palimpsests pack disproportionate power into small spaces, Graham’s larger works free the artist’s expressionistic impulse into lyrical flights, especially as they are structural experiments enlivened by Irish mythologies and narratives. The sensual yet ethereal “A Lark in Morning” is industrial-looking to the eye yet painterly at its core. It shows Graham literally turning his back on aesthetic conventions, as he has executed the work on the reverse sides of two stretched canvases. The paint-splashed stretcher bars become frames that function metaphorically as doors through which the painting seems to enter and exit. In Irish folklore the lark symbolizes the joy, hope and optimism of the break of day, yet this piece challenges us with far more than melodic birdsong. On the left panel is built up a molded mass of crumbling cloth and paint into a visual blend of a vagina and a crucifix. Wax-coated strips of Plexiglas flap like disembodied wings across both panels, infusing the work with an evocation of fecundity at once sacred and earthy. Another large oil and mixed-media diptych, “Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill,” forges an apocalyptic image that may haunt viewers after they have left the show. At first glance the diptych suggests medical x-rays or a computer data print-out. Looking more carefully across a scratched and streaked field of flat black paint one perceives a forest of small blue gravestone crosses dotting the entire picture plane. Under a sickly pewter-colored night sky the artist places child-like drawings of airplanes dropping bombs on the landscape below. Patrick Graham, “The Blackbird Suite,” 1992-93, mixed media on board, 31 7/8 x 44 1/8”. Signs label places of importance in Graham’s life. Other lines of text reveal plaintive messages directed to God, akin to those left in Catholic churches and shrines around the world. It is a strange cathexis of disparate geographical locations and innocently rendered scenes of violence. The totality of “Notes from Ireland” raises and then responds to the often-posed question whether one of the lifelines left to humanity is art. # # #

by Matthew Kangas Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon Continuing through February 28, 2026 Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #9559,” 2025, oil and pencil on linen over panel, 10 x 8”. All images of Turner are courtesy of Adams and Ollman, Portland. In a tiny alcove near the back of the exhibition is a projection of a three-and-one-half minute videotape titled “Spanish Dance” (1973), choreographed by Trisha Brown for female dancers in her company. This proves to be the key to understanding Lynne Woods Turner’s new work, twenty thin-line abstract drawings on a variety of papers. The quiet simplicity of Turner’s small format works on paper (rarely exceeding 12 inches) releases a variety of linear combinations that distantly echo the movements of Brown’s dancers, often linked together sideways, shuffling their feet to the music. They reveal the breadth of the artist’s imagination — each one is completely different — underscoring the wide approbation of her oeuvre since her debut in 1976. Now 75 and based in Portland, Turner’s dedication to a strict yet personal abstraction stresses the inexhaustibility of abstract art at a time when representation dominates much of contemporary art. One reason for her particular durability may be seen in the “Spanish Dance” series: almost all, each in their own way, bear a figurative association to the female body. Parallel curves, winding hemispheres, circles and floral outlines can be seen as abstracted legs, buttocks, heads and breasts. Differing types of pencil color, paper backgrounds, and configurations of patterns are inspired by the collective movements of the dancers’ bodies as they cling to one another, twisting and turning. Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1871,” 2024, pencil on paper, 8 x 5 3/8”. Turner’s response to the dancers’ bodies is stripped down to basic outlines lent expression with a pleasing mixture of red lines, green lines, grey and black strokes, all repeated in patterns within each drawing. Both breasts and buttocks are evoked in “Untitled #9559” (2024) while tall bodies in tight profile are implicit in “Untitled #1130” (2014). Each image obliquely emulates the corporeal formations to be seen in the video of Trisha Brown’s choreography. Both breasts and genitalia amusingly punctuate a hidden grid format in “Untitled #1871” (2024). On another level, tic-tac-toe-like grids are completed with filled-in random numbers as in “Untitled #1676” (2023), which is enriched by ink as well as colored pencils and graphite. With such apparently mathematical systems, Turner’s approach recalls the British artist Christopher John Watts, who was influenced by the original Systems Group (1969-1976) of English artists who valued “constructivist, non-figurative and mathematically driven art.” Watts has taught at Washington State University since 1988 (he has since retired) and exhibited widely in the Pacific Northwest. Turner’s drawings, with their numbers, signs, lines and grids, are close to Watts’ although in his painted-wood sculptures he takes numerical systems further. Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1676,” 2023, pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 4 3/8 x 4 3/8”. Nevertheless, the tiny size of Turner’s number drawings forces an intimate encounter that renders them more subjective than Watts’ constructions. They beg to be deciphered while they delight the eye with pink lines and numbers appearing at the intersections of the grid boxes. Turner’s work is thus more enigmatic, even as it lacks Watts’ intellectual heft. They remain more mystery than formula. A 2017 essay by Sarah Sentilles, written as part of the Oregon Visual Arts Ecology Project, is titled “Abstract Art as Political Art: Lynne Woods Turner.” Despite her condensed, ambitious argument, she fails to convince us of Turner’s political content and raises the wider question, “Can any abstract art be political?” Sentilles argues that Turner’s hidden allusions to the female body and such women’s work as textile weaving and embroidery constitute political subjects. Maybe so, but I’m not buying it. These insights may provide biographical background for Turner, but they do not add up to political content for her blessedly ambiguous drawings, even when they abstract women’s bodies. Subjectivity alone is an ample aesthetic defense, one not in need of political or social justification to justify its existence and its quality. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Liz Goldner UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art , Costa Mesa, California Continuing through May 24, 2026 Sophie Calle, “Room 43” from “The Hotel,” 1981. Courtesy of Siglio Press Commentaries about this exhibition barely prepare viewers for its depth, expansiveness and especially for its sheer fearlessness. The show by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) presents projects that she calls “The Spy,” “The Sleepers,” “The Protagonist” and “True Stories,” among others. The several galleries are inundated with photos and extensive text that reveal her voyeuristic perspective. These pieces compel the adventurous inquisitor to peruse every photo and the thousands of words on the walls. Calle’s projects are seductive, challenging our normal personal boundaries, springing from her intense desire to explore the vicissitudes of human nature. Her body of work, created over the course of five decades, probes humanity’s relationships, emotions and frailty, with the artist serving as a key component of the ventures. Each detailed written description is as essential a feature of her larger oeuvre as her photos. Sophie Calle, “The Sleepers (Gennie Michelet, thirteenth sleeper),” 1979, 11 black and white photographs, each: 6 x 7 7/8”, overall: 12 x 47 1/4”. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. “The Spy” is a decades-long project in which she assumes roles and spies on others’ personal lives. She has worked as a housekeeper in classy hotels, opening visitors’ drawers and suitcases, looking at their clothes, shoes and underwear, examining the beds they sleep in, the toiletries they leave in the bathrooms, and even the trash the throw out. She obsessively photographs and writes about her findings. By exhibiting the fruits of her discoveries in galleries and museums, she invites us to become co-conspirators in her secretive scenarios. Sophie Calle, “In Memory of Frank Gehry's Flowers,” 2014, pigment print with hand-cut edge, accompanied by eleven two-sided photographs & vase designed by Frank Gehry, 78 x 54 1/2 x 9 1/2”. Courtesy of the artist and Gemini G.E.L. As part of this project, she surreptitiously follows people on the streets. One of her ”Spy” sketches reads, “Concealing my emotions, I determinedly cross the piazza, circle around the monument, and pretend to study it. I feel his eyes on me. I walk along the hospital’s right wing. There’s an alcove. Finally, I’ll be out of his sight.” This and many other sketches reveal Calle’s relentlessly self-observing nature, which she mines for the resulting text and photo-based art. “The Protagonist” series, begun in the 1980s, is centered on her own life. As she goes about her daily activities into the evening and early morning, visiting the Louvre, a café, talking with strangers on the street, some of whom take her picture, attending a movie, a party, taking a taxi home in the early morning hours, she serves as her own archivist. It is difficult to imagine living an endlessly interesting, glamorous life while writing down nearly every detail, but Calle does just that. The catalog explains that these sketches can be curious, moving, embarrassing, funny, or a combination. An example: “At 2:10 p.m., I move on. I cross the Pont Royal and head for the Louvre. At 2:20, after walking quickly through the museum, I find myself in front of Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove.’” Sophie Calle, “Room with a View,” 2003, pigment print mounted on aluminum, 67 x 51”. Courtesy of the artist. “The Sleepers,” begun in 1979, is among the most curious of Calle’s series. The artist is seen asking various people, many of whom she has just met, to sleep in her bed. Surprisingly, several people agree to do so — perhaps because this project happened in Paris when mores were looser than they are today. She wrote about one participant: “He goes to bed without changing the sheets. He regrets not having brought his cat, of not finding someone in the bed at his arrival since he likes coincidences and sly looks. He says he was sleepy when he arrived, he yawned when he saw the name of the street. But he doesn’t sleep.” Observing a person, particularly one of the opposite sex inhabiting one’s own bed, and writing about it, invites us to superimpose our own fantasies — sexual and allegorical — onto the piece. “The Razor Blade,” an individual work in her “True Stories” project, relates Calle’s brief gig posing nude for a drawing class. She tells of a male student who drew her for three hours every day for 12 days. At the end of each session, he brandished a razor blade that he used to slash his drawing to pieces, left it on the table as evidence and left the room. Apparently disenchanted by his performance, Calle made the 12th day in class her last one. Sophie Calle, “Mother-Father,” 2018, pigment print, embroidered woolen cloth, wooden box, 16 7/8 x 222 5/8 x 2 5/8”. Courtesy of the artistr and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. As her fame and notoriety spread, Calle met architect Frank Gehry in Los Angeles in 1984. He offered to be her impresario and sent her flowers on the opening days of her exhibitions, all of which she photographed. These photos, along with a picture of the dead flowers, are displayed as a memorial to Gehry, who died at age 96 in December. There are those who regard Calle as an exhibitionist who transformed her bizarre adventures into amusements for the well-heeled. By the 2000s she was a celebrity performance artist. For “Room with a View” (2002), from her “Autobiographies” series, she spent a night in a room set up for her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. For eight hours, this free spirit lay in bed up there, welcoming hundreds of strangers, each of whom spent five minutes at her bedside telling her a story. The project concluded at 7:00 a.m. when she returned to earth. She wrote, “As if to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt it all. I asked for the moon and I got it.” Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Matthew Kangas Harris/Harvey Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through February 28, 2026 Gary Faigin, “Outpost,” 2025, oil on panel, 22 x 28”. All images courtesy of Harris/Harvey Gallery, Seattle. The Gary Faigin memorial retrospective is not a museum survey, but a highly selective scan of earlier works and his final series, “Colony.” It gives his considerable audience a chance to consider his evolution as a painter and ponder the cumulative effect of his peculiar vision. Faigin, who died last year at the age of 75, was a polymath who combined his extensive studio activities with co-founding an art school, conducting art tours in Europe, and freelancing as an art critic for newspaper and radio. He was an indefatigable worker, perhaps overcompensating for his lack of an academic degree in art, substituting a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, another year in New York at Parsons and the National Academy, and most formatively, two years under the legendary Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League. The Gage Academy of Art, which he formed with his widow, Pam Belyea, is located in the heart of Seattle’s tech corridor, South Lake Union, modeled on the League in New York, has been a big success. It’s hard to detect any one art historical movement from which the artist’s vision emerges. Rather, it alludes to a multiplicity of influences that include Surrealism, Magic Realism, fantasy art, and science-fiction illustration. Faigin worked in depth on each series for the 20 solo exhibits during his lifetime, seen from Seattle to Santa Fe to New York and Coos Bay, Oregon. Consistent and cohesive, each series explored Faigin’s struggle to combine such varied sources into an individual style. Sometimes he succeeded, other times the struggle overwhelmed the result. Gary Faigin, “Evolution,” 1994, oil on panel, 36 x 48”. For example, the earliest work on view, “Evolution” (1994) is a bit of an in-joke, with a fruit still life of apples, pears and bananas at its center but accompanied in the upper-left corner by a monochrome depiction of a sphere, a cone and a pyramid. The juxtaposition summons up Paul Cézanne’s classic description of all art as “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in perspective.” Faigin was nothing if not erudite. His teaching was memorable, remembered and hailed in many posthumous eulogies. Besides “Evolution,” “Cliff Dwellers” (1998) suggests future directions which took Faigin years to realize. Tiny improbable houses are perched atop enormous geological pillars he might have visited in Utah. It demonstrates the grandeur the artist aimed for, too often reduced in size for images of comparable ambition. Gary Faigin, “HOT,” 2000, oil on panel, 44 x 72”. Perhaps pointing tragically to a future series that did not occur, “HOT” (2000) foretells the terrors of climate change and the necessity of urban energy economies. The skyline resembles New York but with a fiercely burning rectangle in the middle, the word “HOT” at its center blazing like a giant movie screen. The largest work on view at 44 by 72 inches, it could be Faigin’s masterpiece: prophetic and visionary indeed. Averaging 30 by 40 inches, the steam locomotive images better capture the relationship between subject and size. “Emergency Exit” (2023) has a train implausibly crossing an icy link between a pair of icebergs. Similarly, “Counterbalance” (2005) juxtaposes a still life of vases, fruits and vegetables with a blue-green mountainous landscape. It is more convincing than other attempts to place oversized still lifes against ragged urban settings (“Station Stop,” 2013) or another set above a gushing waterfall titled “Fall Group Picture” (2009). Gary Faigin, “Station Stop,” 2013, oil on panel, 30 x 40”. Although the final series is more diminutive than “Cliff Dwellers,” it better coheres into compelling vistas that draw us in, if only in taunting disbelief. The pictures also reinforce the artist’s bitter sense of humor as he was dying. Tiny midcentury modern houses are placed in otherwise uninhabited planetary settings, with neighboring planets or moons set in darkened night skies. They focus tightly on the subjects at hand right up to and including suburban lawns, water towers, and, as in “Outpost” (2025), a spaceship ready for return to Earth as though it is a commute. “Forever Home” (2025) shoves a bungalow beneath gigantic stalactite-like rock formations, a companion to “Nocturnal” (2025) with its house trapped in an ominous valley. Each title reinforces the absurdity of space colonization fantasies, Elon Musk’s declarations notwithstanding. They conclude a lifetime of formal explorations on a high note, combining an impeccable execution with a subject that rises to the level of the artist’s skills. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Jody Zellen Billis/Williams Gallery , Los Angeles Continuing through February 14, 2026 Josh Dorman, “Peardog,” 2025, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 12 x 12”. All images courtesy of Billis/Williams Gallery, Los Angeles. Josh Dorman's idiosyncratic, encyclopedic paintings traverse time and space. They are intricate works that demand our undivided attention. Over the years, Dorman has collected a wide range of printed ephemera, culled from books, maps, magazines and technical manuals, as well as player-piano scrolls, and uses it as pictorial source material. His layered works combine these paper documents with ink and acrylic to create narratives that weave through time.  “Peardog” (all works 2025), one of the smallest paintings in the exhibit at 12 by 12 inches, is also one of the best. Just left of the center of the composition is a "pear-dog" made by collaging a vintage image of a dog's body with an antique diagram of a sliced pear that becomes its head. In the image, the pear functions as eyes. This creature rests in a colorful but ambiguous space that contains both urban elements — geometric shapes representing buildings — and natural ones such as imagined seashells and stalagmites. Along the bottom of this packed painting is an elevated roadway that passes over tree-lined hills. Dotted throughout the composition are collaged fragments of both words and animal imagery. Josh Dorman, “A Golden Age,” 2021-25, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 32 x 42”. In a larger painting, “A Golden Age” (32 by 42 inches), Dorman creates a dreamscape filled with inventive creatures that are amalgamations of animal skeletons with human heads and arms juxtaposed with tools like pliers, as well as parts from antique watches. These creatures wander through a deeply textured red-purple landscape filled with architectural fragments. Dorman bombards us with imagery, making it difficult to construct a coherent narrative. But telling a story is not the artist's intention. Dorman wants us to get lost in his worlds enough to begin connecting the various elements into our own interpretation. Josh Dorman, “Arctic Ice (Dodo),” 2025, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 9 x 12”. During residencies above the Arctic Circle and off the coast of Ireland, Dorman observed glaciers and other features of the natural world he had not previously encountered. These impressions fill works like “Arctic Ice (Dodo)” and “Arctic Ice II,” which are, uncharacteristically, more painting than collage. In both these pieces, Dorman brings together swirling bodies of water, jagged rock formations, and trapped animals, clearly a comment on our changing climate. “Fever Dream” is a hauntingly surreal work that recalls Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Two Masks” (1926). Central to the composition is the upper body and head of a figure submerged in a magenta-hued body of swirling water. The figure has a hollowed-out head. Emanating from where the face would be is a stream of sea creatures and plants flying into the polluted water. Typical of Dorman’s signature style, he weaves painted areas around and has delicately colored and collaged various paper clilppings. Fragments from maps and pieces of historical ships and antique depictions of fantastical creatures complete this dizzying and engaging imagery. Josh Dorman, “The Long View,” 2004-25, ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 48 x 52”. Dorman is a master at creating new contexts for found materials. Through recontextualization he refreshes much that is old or familiar. The works function as complex puzzles in which Dorman draws from the past to comment on the present and project into the future. Figures and animals from a wide range of sources and time frames in varying scales and opacities follow roads, cross bridges, populate seas, climb mountains and peer through architectural facades. Each work creates its own unique story that ingeniously links disparate elements from then to now. Jody Zellen  is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit  www.jodyzellen.com .

by Lynn Trimble ASU Art Museum , Tempe, Arizona Continuing through February 15, 2026 Michelangelo Lovelace, “No Justice No Peace,” 1993, mixed media on wood panel, 54 1/4 x 48 1/2”. Courtesy of the Michelangelo Lovelace Estate and Fort Gansevoort Gallery. The streets of Cleveland burst to life in paintings by Michelangelo Lovelace (1960-2021), a self-taught artist who professed that “art saved my life.” It was a keen observation, reflecting on the experiences he had growing up in the city he captured with loose, textured marks in bright colors that convey a vibrant kinetic energy. This first retrospective survey of his work, organized by the Akron Art Museum, embodies themes that resonate in the current political climate, from racism to community care. Lovelace paints the best and worst of us, informed by his own experiences as a Black man living in an urban ecosystem where faith and joy intersect with danger and despair. Michelangelo Lovelace, “Katrina Aftermath,” 2006, acrylic on textured canvas, 48 x 51”. On loan from Steve Stoute and Lauren Branche. The exhibition fills three galleries, each with a different focus, an approach that equips us to expand our understanding of the artist’s identity and intentions. Before entering the first gallery, where most of the works highlight social injustice and are hung on bright red walls (the first of three primary colors used as backdrops, a nod to the role of art in Lovelace’s personal journey), viewers encounter introductory text highlighting the artist’s biography. Most notably, it recounts Lovelace’s own memories of drawing in earnest as a 19-year-old arrested for marijuana possession. The judge before whom he appeared asked what he was good at, suggesting that he turn to that if he wanted to avoid future encounters with the law. Painted between 1991 and 1993, a series of mixed media on wood paintings with collaged text and imagery are distinguished by their brick-like-texture, graffiti influences, and frames bearing the artist’s marks. For the “Rodney King Series” Lovelace embedded newspaper clippings and found photographs in works addressing the high-profile case of police brutality and community uprisings in Los Angeles. Police vehicles and uniformed officers appear often in Lovelace’s work, but these pieces in particular punctuate the ways violence against Black bodies intersects with law enforcement. With “Crips & Bloods” (1993), Lovelace counters stereotypes of so-called Black-on-Black crime with themes of Black love and solidarity. With “Amerikkkan Just-us” (1992), the artist calls out the white supremacy and racial disparities that the dominant culture calls “the criminal justice system.” Michelangelo Lovelace, “Black Super Man,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, 43 x 48”. Courtesy of the Michelangelo Lovelace Estate and Fort Gansevoort Gallery. Lovelace documents specific acts of injustice, speaking to the experiences of individuals and communities, but also to the wider systems undergirding them. We can follow Lovelace painting his way through his own life, but also diving into the social, economic, and cultural issues of the day. While drawing us into a particular time and place, the artist prompts us to consider our own life and times and our complicity in perpetuating cycles of poverty, war, and addiction. In Lovelace’s “City Paintings,” such as “40th and Hood” (1994) and “Block Party” (2018), color and movement explode in scenes of people across generations and cultures taking part in the daily activities, from shopping to dancing, that bring them out into the street. But he also explores tragic themes, such as the school shooting depicted in “Streetology” (1999). Many of these works are mounted on blue walls, a color associated not only with the wide-open sky but also with the trappings of law enforcement. Considered with the red walls of the nearby gallery, they reinforce the sense that Lovelace essentially created an illustration of modern-day America, with all its complexities and contradictions. Lovelace makes generous use of text, a choice rooted in the prevalence of signs and billboards in his urban environment. The approach allows him to insert phrases he finds meaningful and powerful, ranging from excerpts from the Bible or the Constitution to slogans such as “Black Lives Matter.” Likewise, roadways figure prominently in his city-themed works, where they sometimes appear as unifying factors in community spaces and other times as dividing lines. Where these roads lead, or whether it’s even possible to escape these city streets, isn’t clear, and the pictures are better for it. Michelangelo Lovelace, “Race for Justice,” 2014, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40”. Courtesy of the Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection. Even as Lovelace tackles racism, he also prompts reflection on the specter of sexism and misogyny in both art and society. Women with babies and signs advertising sites of sexualized performance abound on the city streets he brings to life in acrylic on canvas, alluding to the Madonna-whore complex that runs throughout so much of art history. “Genesis” (2018) features Black subjects while quoting “The Creation of Adam,” painted by the 16th-century Italian Renaissance master whose name Lovelace adopted early in his art career. That same year Lovelace also drew on popular culture with his caped “Black Super Man” (2018) as a counter to the white savior complex. Michelangelo Lovelace, “The Deportation of 11 Million Immigrants,” 2016, acrylic on textured canvas. Courtesy of the Michelangelo Lovelace Estate and Fort Gansevoort Gallery. Among the works curated into the final gallery are several inspired by topical news events, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Covid-19 pandemic. Dozens of pairs of eyes peer out from a brick wall in “The Deportation of 11 Million Immigrants” (2016), one of the most powerful works in the show by virtue of the borderland issues impacting the region where it’s being exhibited and the broader spectrum of terror currently being waged against immigrants by the Trump administration in targeted communities. Michelangelo Lovelace, “Self-Portrait,” 1996, acrylic on textured canvas, 50 1/2 x 37 3/4”. Courtesy of the Michelangelo Lovelace Estate and Fort Gansevoort Gallery. Works mounted on a bright yellow wall, many containing American flag iconography but with stripes that run vertically like prison bars, speak to the intersections of racism and patriotism. In some works Lovelace sets people in front of these bars rather than behind them. Works referencing post-9/11 warfare, including “What Happened to World Peace?” (2001) and “Casualties of War” (2003) examine the local and global impact of America’s military-industrial complex. “Art Saved My Life” reveals how Lovelace’s oeuvre ranges from hyper-individual to global. The large narrative scope he is able to address is juxtaposed with a group of intimate portraits drawn using marker, pen, or colored pencil on paper (primarily in 1993) which depict people Lovelace encountered in the rehabilitation unit of a medical center where he worked. Mounted on a bright pink modular wall, they suggest this was a setting where the artist found great joy in the midst of hardship. Lovelace’s own humanity, with its deep connections to artmaking, is the focus of five paintings anchored by “Self-Portrait” (1996), which depicts Lovelace reading a book by a window overlooking the city. The roughly thirty years covered by “Art Saved My Life” lends significant insight into the creative impulses and life experiences that Lovelace channeled into vibrant explorations of personal and collective histories and expressive critiques of social injustice. Lynn Trimble  is a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter  @ArtMuser  or Instagram  @artmusingsaz .

by T.s. Flock ANTiPODE , Seattle, Washington Contact gallery for closing date Any artist who ventures to address the slippery subject of intimacy always risks succumbing to sentiment. The domestic, the everyday, the emotional: these are all subjects that naturally invite tenderness, and art history is littered with versions so saccharine that they no longer say anything about real life. But the artist who refuses such complacency understands that the domestic realm and the bodies that inhabit it are places of friction and micro-catastrophe. Intimacy is not a montage of charming vignettes. It is the primal scene of our vulnerability, where life is inscribed in things through wear and care. Rachel Dorsey, “Internal Maintenance (first go),” 2024, conte crayon, graphite, and charcoal on photo backdrop paper, wood, 94 x 54 x 1”. To subvert sentimentality, Rachel Dorsey introduces this rough dimension in “Careworn,” her aptly titled solo show. She paints and draws directly on unstretched fabrics and blankets subtly stained and patinated with natural dyes. The technique successfully evokes a bodily sense of age even while being a bit more sanitary and archival than actual human sweat and rot. There are charming elements, but “charm” is not what Dorsey explores in domesticity. She is after its more corporeal nature: the lingering smudge, the uneven light, the awkward compressions of our personal space. No two surfaces are alike. Some are meant to hang loosely, while others are made to hang flat. Some are opaque, while others are murky scrims with permanent shadows when viewed from behind against the light. Some come attended by other objects, like a chair leaning impossibly beneath or what looks like a crank handle protruding from the thin bar suspending the painting. The latter case is found in “ Basin Baby I and II”  (a single work). The quilted surface is especially scrappy, such that the lower half of the eponymous baby appears divided among variously patterned and colored scraps. The green rickrack trim does not rejoin itself in the lower left corner; it hangs down to the floor. The infant is twisting its upper body and reaching out toward the left edge of the fabric, where the suspensory bar of the artwork terminates in a wooden handle. To the right of the infant, an almost monstrously large adult hand scoops up the head. The overall effect is that the bottom half feels disturbed and divided, while the upper half has a smooth rhythm of hands and bodies curving over each other. And yet, even given this rhythm, one is reaching towards the other, and the other seems determined to get away. Rachel Dorsey, “Gather / come as u are (shaped canvas 3 / bench piece),” 2024, charcoal, conte crayon, molding paste on canvas stretched over custom wood support structure, 84 x 68 x 30”. Photo: Jacob Chung. “ Three’s Company, Two’s a Crowd (after Albertinelli) ” does not explicitly reference Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515), but the adult figures in Dorsey’s larger works often feel evocative of classic portraiture through composition, posture, and the vagueness of their attire, which tends toward cloaks and shawls that give the bodies volume without a distinct edge. They provide a sense of timelessness rather than suggesting an historical period. Thus, in “ Careworn ” both the material dimension of the works and the drawn and painted figures direct us toward a confrontation with the messiness of creating lives together rather than nostalgia. And like the formal quality of Dorsey’s surfaces, the figures are emotionally raw and evocative in a way that also asks to be inhabited. Despite their messiness, the works feel very harmonious in this regard. Dorsey’s works seek multiple avenues to reintroduce the body beyond merely representing it. Not an idealized body, but the real body, the one that sweats, that fails, that falls, that repairs itself, that starts all over again. And with the body comes community, for this human condition is precisely what we share most intimately. Art that embraces fragility and wear and tear de-dramatizes what, in isolation, might seem shameful or repulsive, and places it back within the normal continuum of existence. The piece most illustrative of this is “Attendant (for MVK and MJK).” At a distance, it appears to be a deathbed scene, with the recumbent figure obscured by so many bodies and faces surrounding it. Walking along its nearly nine-foot length, one must take one’s time discerning the various faces sketched sensitively to evoke peace, acceptance, pleading, or sorrow. This would be gratifying enough, but then one steps back slightly and looks down and discovers that “Attendant” renders not one moment in time, but several. Rachel Dorsey, “Wind Down Routine,” 2024, charcoal, conte crayon, acrylic, molding past on machine sewn canvas nailed and tacked to reclaimed cedar spacers, 90 x 108 x 2”. Photo: Jacob Chung. To the lower left, among the turned backs of the figures above, is an embedded scene from another time and place: a woman wearily gazing off to one side and a young girl resting her head on her crossed arms over the edge of some ambiguous barrier. The whole scene is rendered in vivid turmeric orange, as if they were illuminated by a single dim lamp. Surrounding them, more indistinct and ghostly figures are bowing and leaning through the shadows. Following them to the right are two ghostly little dogs. One seems to be staring curiously at the face of a more completely sketched sleeping infant. Move your gaze back up, you are back at where one would expect to find the head of the unseen figure at the center of the composition. In its ambition and complexity “Attendant” is the apogee of the exhibition. Not all of Dorsey’s works compress time and space so explicitly, but this refusal to reduce the subject to a decorative staging is thematic in “Careworn.” And this brings us to the space itself, for it, too, plays a part. Dorsey’s work would have suffered in a pristine white cube. This gallery’s rough-hewn stone walls tell their own stories. In fact, as I was descending the stairs from the sidewalk to the gallery entrance, someone was conducting a walking tour of the Pioneer Square neighborhood and telling the attendees about the long history of the building, and how ANTiPODE’s space in particular sat fallow off-and-on in the nearly two decades since the landmark Elliott Bay Book Company departed the neighborhood. Rachel Dorsey, “Basin Baby I and II,” 2025, charcoal, conte crayon, walnut ink, turmeric ink, acrylic ink, extra heavy molding paste, fabric scraps, lace trim, cotton rickrack, thread, 43 x 36 1/2 x 4”. The gallery shares an entrance with the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, so that you cross between the bar and performance area before reaching the exhibition space. In short, the gallery itself shows its layers and seams, so Dorsey’s work feels right at home in this environment. This is not a condemnation of white cubes, but the closer our spaces and appearances come to being impeccable, the more inhospitable they become. Smooth, sterile, immutable: These are places designed as stages, where art and visitors all perform the most controlled version of themselves. Under such conditions, to truly inhabit a space would mean risking contaminating it, introducing disorder and the indelible mark of human presence. As the most attentive observers of our modernity have noted, a quest for flawlessness fuels shame. It reveals the gap between who we are and who we are instructed to be. This gap is a powerful factor in isolation: We minimize social interaction so as not to expose our space or our bodies to scrutiny. We withdraw. We sterilize ourselves. In this context, Dorsey’s art points to the true substance of intimacy and proposes a far different logic of acceptance. The familiar becomes solidarity. By showing these traces, the artist says: These traces are universal. Accepting this is a way of drawing closer to one another, for we cease to fear that others will see what we hide. And if art can dispel this fear, then it does more than simply reflect reality. It participates in the possibility of a less constrained connection, of a community more compassionate toward itself. These reflections perhaps seem more poignant and urgent to me at this time because, beyond the walking tours at ground level, the federal government has begun expanding ICE operations here in the Seattle area. Reports have come to me from my network that ICE had begun aggressive door-to-door operations in nearby Redmond. This week, multiple schools in Seattle have moved to shelter-in-place formats to avoid the pattern of kidnappings by ICE we have been viewing in Minneapolis. That ANTIPODE is run by immigrants from Tehran, with their focus on immigrant perspectives, is thus of special relevance to Dorsey’s work. While “Careworn” is not explicitly political, it is timely. Many of us are assessing our lives and duties to each other as we seek solidarity in the face of violent cruelty and inhumanity. It’s all very messy, but to rephrase my opening remark: Care and wear are not the unintended consequences of life; they are its inscription. T.s. Flock  is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of  Vanguard Seattle .

by Matthew Kangas Arte Noir Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through February 22, 2026 Sasa Aakil, “Joy is a Revolution,” fired and unglazed terra cotta, various dimensions. All images courtesy of Arte Noir Gallery and the artist. The twenty-five artists  in the “Black Clay” ceramics invitational hail from Washington, Texas, District of Columbia, California, Illinois, Tennessee and elsewhere, but trace their heritages to Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, and other lands. As a result “Black Clay” offers a mixture of contemporary art themes — colonialism, racial injustice, Black pride — and conventional ceramic techniques that encompass pottery, figurative sculpture, and wall-mounted functional shapes and masks. Overall, the artists represent a wide spectrum of professionalism, bringing together self-taught folk artists with academics, some using clay along with other materials to convey their intentions. Although the collective effect of the group is impressive, the installation, crowded as it is into a small corner space, is not. Pedestals of varying heights compete with sightlines for wall-mounted works, reinforcing the second-class status so often assigned to ceramics. Regardless, the artists rise above the limitations of the display and offer considerable pleasures and contemplations of aesthetic and socio-political issues, sometimes both in the same artwork. Tammie Rubin, “Always & Forever (ever, ever) No. 9 CD TX,” 2021, pigmented porcelain, underglaze, 14 x 48 x 10”. Photo: Hector Tednoir. Sasa Aakil’s two works present both conditions. “Joy is a Revolution,” a wall installation of 16 unglazed cup and bowl shapes in half-relief, emphasizes both pan-African firing methods and village shapes. The more politically explicit “Memory” consists of 15 small rectangular medallions impressed with the names of African-Americans attacked or killed by law enforcement officers, including Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor. With their darkened background and varied color overlays, the lettering on the memorials is difficult to read, but gradually the meaning becomes clear; they are mini-tombstones. Esther Ervin deals with the history of slavery. Her “Enslaved Trades People” drapes a golden chain around a vase with figurative imagery of slaves as wrap-around decoration. The work reminds us of the origins of African-American ceramics, as curator Hassan Kirkland points out in his statement. Slave potters were long unidentified but were able, like David Drake (once known simply as “Big Dave” by the way he signed his pots), to defy bans on literacy by writing directly on each pot. Del Bey, “Twisted Galaxy Portal #$529,” 2025, hi fire stoneware/glaze, 9” diameter x 2”. Photo: Del Bey. Similarly, Darius Scott’s “Wayfinder||North Star,” a wall-hanging male face, alludes to “Ghanaian artisanal masks,” according to the artist, with its closed eyes and facial expression of resting, ”acknowledging the inherited trauma of enslavement.” Over one foot high, it has a brooding presence that, mounted high as it is, oversees the entire exhibition. Two portraits offer contrasting visions of Black femininity. “Weeping Willow/Tangled Dreams,” a large bust by Willow Vergara-Agyakwa has a powerful, if pleading, facial expression. Dreadlocks are reinforced by the darker color of clay and glaze. In a remarkable amplification of the female face, two other busts by Ebony Watts — one glazed, one painted — express joy and radiant humor in their drenched, painterly surfaces. In “Gae Yah,” Watts inserts golden earrings. They join the colorful appearance of other figurative works, such as the smaller statuettes of Lea Cook. The animal heads of Sierra Bundy, “Shadow Work” and “Guide #2,” may allude to human-animal relationships assigned to enslaved peoples on plantations. These are among the most materially virtuosic works on view, with complicated firing techniques that emulate animal skin color and exposed flesh. Angel Ohome, “Blood-Stained Paths,” 2025, porcelain clay, wire, thread, yarn, newsprint, 16 x 16”. “Mirror, Mirror” (2024) by Myla Crawford of Memphis uses melted marbles for its interior to great effect. Also hung high, it casts an unusual aura on the entire display. Nearby on the same wall, “Twisted Galaxy Portal” (2025) by Del Bey inserts metal chains around its squashed oval shape, symbolizing the confines of enslavement, but with greater restraint and less ideological explicitness. These subtle, abstract sculptures are the most powerful and appealing works of “Black Clay.” Willow Vergara-Agyakwa, “Tangled Roots Weeping Willow / Tangled Roots,” 2023, mixed media, portraiture, 18 x 12 x 24”. Tammie Rubin and Angel Ohome push the limits of ceramic expectations the farthest of all. In the former’s “Always & Forever” series, conical blue porcelain shapes are lined up on a single shelf. They operate on two levels: one in which they are simple, beautifully speckled forms, the other in which they ominously allude to the headdresses of Ku Klux Klan members. Rubin cancels out the violent presence of the KKK with her exquisite treatment of the blue porcelain. In a highly formal grid format in the tradition of Minimalism and the Bauhaus, Ohome’s “Blood Stained Paths” and “In Search of River and Sun” are given titles that refer to painful racial histories. But seen on the wall, they present architectural decoration and substantial formal issues such as color relationships and complex compositions which extend beyond the initial impulse of their titles. So it is with much of the other work in “Black Clay:” the material strengths and fashioning reinforce substantial resistance and outrage, but such executions and handling guarantee repeated viewing and endurance. The medium carries the message regardless of urgent sincerity. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewin https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Matthew+Kangas&ref=nb_sb_noss g for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Liz Goldner Hilbert Museum of California Art , Orange, California Continuing through May 30, 2026 Emigdio Vasquez, “John the Prophet,” 1985, oil on canvas 24 x 36”. All images courtesy of the Hilbert Museum of California Art, Orange, CA. This largest ever retrospective of 50 paintings by Emigdio Vasquez (1939-2014) is long past due. The Orange County artist’s works from 1967 to 2007 feature compassionate portraits of OC barrio residents and their neighborhoods. These day laborers, fellow residents, and his own family and friends reveal the artist’s empathy and admiration for his subjects. These are social realist paintings are infused with intimacy. Many of his subjects look out intensely from their canvasses, as though engaging us in conversation. Historically, Vasquez began his storytelling oeuvre before a new generation of now better-known Chicano artists, such as Frank Romero and Gilbert Luhan, blazed an artistic path during the later 20th century. These artists, employing bright colors and energetic brushstrokes to evoke the sweep of East Los Angeles with its lowrider cars and freeways, usurped the limelight from their older peers. Vasquez saw people and landscapes that tell stories of dignity and humility within congenial neighborhoods. “John the Prophet” (1985), for example, captures a homeless man leaning against a trailer and expressing his religious beliefs to the barrio locals. Three shadows on the trailer’s side establish the presence of neighborhood men listening to John’s prophecies. “El Viejito Del Barrio” (The Old Guy from the Neighborhood) (1975) depicts an old man with the weathered face of someone who picked oranges under the sun for decades, and is living out his later years with quiet, respectful modesty. Emigdio Vasquez, “Pachucos on 4th Street,” 2000, oil on canvas, 15 x 12”. “Pachucos on 4th Street” (2000) presents five audacious zoot suited men, all decked out wearing long jackets with wide lapels, patterned ties, baggy trousers tapered at the ankles and long watch chains. These proud Chicano men from decades ago, with their ducktail hairdos and mustaches, were effecting an early version of performance art. Of particular note is “La Bolucha” (1965), the oldest piece here. The title translates loosely as “The Harvest.” Four day laborers on their lunch breaks are telling stories of life in Mexico and the Mexican Revolution. Vasquez had accompanied his father to these “harvests,” and became fascinated by the men’s’ stories. The day laborer remained as subject and symbol in many paintings throughout his career. Vasquez’s several urbanscapes of run-down barrio buildings and scenes are equally compelling. In the book “The Boy Who Painted the Barrio,” by his daughter, Rosemary Vasquez Tuthill, he is quoted: “As a young artist, I was groping with the problem of finding meaningful subject matter to paint. His [mentor, Mr. Robert Braden] advice to me was that I need not look any further than my immediate environment. He felt that the area contained a wealth of subject matter which could provide me with the material to work for years.” Emigdio Vasquez, “The Shack,” 1974, oil on canvas, 30 x 24”. With this inspiration, the highly motivated artist carried his paints and canvasses all over the barrio, elevating dilapidated sites into compelling landscapes. “The Shack” (1974) shows a rough-hewn shed in the backyard of his mother-in-law’s Anaheim home. “La Carucha De Johnny” (1972) is a humorous illustration of a broken-down 1950 Chevrolet parked alongside a decaying house. Vasquez wrote, ”The physical element of this blight and decay which captivated my eye were the corroded, weather-beaten wood, the jungle-like vegetation, the rusted metal, chipped paint, dust and shattered glass windows of old cars, and the variety of discarded objects.” Vasquez turned piles of junk into fascinating, harmonious works of art. “Junque de Barrio” (“Neighborhood Junk”) (1978) jams together an orange crate, a box that held Budweiser beer, discarded paper plates, and soda cans, mere garbage that for the artist recalled and was inspired by a large joyous family celebration. “Backyard Junk Still-Life” (1981) illustrates a different aspect of the artist’s life. His father Santiago was a miner and carpenter who was often working on a house project. Here he has left tools, shoes, pieces of wood and other clutter against an old fence. Vasquez saw harmony in the setting, presenting all of it as a reminiscent slice of life. Emigdio Vasquez, “Revolutionaries,” 2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 24”. The youngster who grew up hearing stories of the Mexican Revolution from his elders painted several scenes from those events out of his imagination. “Los Revolucionarios” (1967) depicts three Mexican soldiers playing music, singing and drinking as a respite from the battles of the Revolution. “Revolutionaries” (2009) shows four fierce key figures from the Revolution, 1910 to 1920, dressed with a casual elegance that makes them appear as movie characters. They are Felipe Angels, General Pancho Villa, General Emiliano Zapato, his brother Eufemio and an unknown kneeling soldier. “Villists” (2007), features four stalwart fighters with Pancho Villa leading the troupe on horseback. The artist did not limit himself to depicting the people inhabiting his neighborhood or the historical narratives he picked up from elders. Several detailed still lifes and the elegantly attired bullfighter “El Pundohonor” (1972) demonstrate Vasquez’s versatility. Emigdio Vasquez, “Packing House, Circa 1948,” 2015, oil on canvas. The most recent painting here is “Packing House, Circa 1948” (2015), a diagonal composition of a row of orange packers. The painting was begun by Vasquez and completed after he died by his daughter Rosemary. The portraits of six ladies include two who were Vasquez’s sisters and Rosemary’s aunts. Vasquez, who has been referred to as the "Godfather of Hispanic artists," visually documented the Chicano barrio experience in a manner that has aged well. His many thoughtful portraits, landscapes of gritty street scenes, slice of life illustrations, and Mexican Revolution scenes add up to an exhibition that celebrates the dignity, heritage, and humanity of the Orange County Barrio and its people during a time that must be recognized and recalled. Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by David S. Rubin The Broad , Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 5, 2026 Robert Therrien, “This Is a Story,” installation view showing late 1970s/early 1980s keystone and coffin-shaped sculptures. Courtesy of The Broad Foundation, Los Angeles. All photos: David S. Rubin. Although the early paintings and sculptures by Robert Therrien (1947-2019) are simple and elemental in form and have at times been associated with Minimalism, this forty-year retrospective reveals that reductive art was influential primarily on Therrien’s formal vocabulary but was not his primary source of inspiration at all. Rather, his ideas were generated mostly by personal memories, often from childhood. Robert Therrien, “No title (stacked plates, white),” 1993, ceramic epoxy on fiberglass, 94 x 60 x 60”. Courtesy of The Broad Foundation, Los Angeles. While monochromatic sculptures like “No title (keystone)” and “No title (bent cone relief)” (both 1982) share a block-like structure that was common to Minimalist works by Donald Judd and others, Therrien’s surfaces are modulated with gestural markings and subtle color gradations comparable to similar treatment in paintings by Color Field artists such as Robert Ryman (1930-2019) and Brice Marden (1938-2023).  Additionally, Therrien’s works are referential — a taboo for Minimalists — with the keystone shape representing an element of architecture and the bent cone whimsically evocative of a wizard’s hat that is partially folded over. In this regard, his works of the 1970s and 80s are closer in spirit to Joel Shapiro’s (1941-2025) geometric sculptures based on human figures, or the semi-abstract figurative forms by 1970s “New Image” painters such as Susan Rothenberg (1945-2020) and Robert Moskowitz (1935-2024). In terms of process, Therrien could be aligned with Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) in that both would investigate a particular shape and explore its many variations. Yet, whereas LeWitt worked according to rule-based systems that were conceptually restrictive and mathematically precise, Therrien approached the metamorphosis of his visual lexicon more intuitively, as if responding to a Rorschach personality test, welcoming ambiguity and multiple interpretive possibilities. His keystones, for example, evolved from slicing laterally through an image of a coffin, while the bent cone is closely connected to similarly shaped Therrien objects such as a tea kettle or a bird’s head. Broad curator Ed Schad deserves credit for directing attention to these relationships by installing many of the early sculptures and paintings in illuminating groupings. Robert Therrien, “No title (room, pots and pans I),” 2008-15, metal and plastic, 106 x 66 x 80”. Courtesy Artwork Holdings. While Therrien’s earlier works may be contextualized in terms of various art movements of the time, the artist found his unique voice in the 1990s, when working with a fabricator led him to considerations of scale. This shift resulted in works that address the space or architecture of a room and the viewer’s physical relationship to the object, factors that increase the potential for narrative and metaphoric content. Robert Therrien, “No title, black Dutch door,” 1993-2013, mixed media on wood, 114 ¼ x 45 x 49”. Courtesy of the Robert Therrien Estate. With larger-than-life-sized sculptures such as “No title (stacked plates white)” (1993) and “No title (room, pots and pans I)” (2008-15), Therrien sparks a sense of wild adventure down Alice’s rabbit hole while emphasizing the ubiquity of banal kitchen objects in our daily lives. The former sculpture, which stands almost 8 feet tall, has a somewhat dizzying effect as the stack of dishes seems to be spinning and about to topple. As for narrative implications, the unstable dish pile brings to mind scenarios from vintage cartoons wherein a waiter attempts to balance an overly tall stack of plates. The pots and pans in the latter work, by contrast, can only be peered at from outside a closet-sized room into which they are stuffed, with the incongruity of their oversized scale leaving us pleasantly befuddled: Do they belong to an alternate universe of giants? Such scale distortions are especially effective in Therrien’s installations of mammoth-sized furniture, which dwarf us such that we seem to have become inhabitants of microscopic civilizations like those in a couple of episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”   Examples of works that we can physically stand under include “No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown)” (2007) and “No title (table leg)” (2010), as well as “Under the Table” (1994). One of the points articulated in the exhibition’s helpful didactic panels is that Therrien’s studios were routinely evolving installations in their own right. His fascination with architecture is strongly apparent in two of the most elegant and provocative works. One is abstract, the other decidedly representational. Sleek and sumptuous in form, the all black wooden structure “No title (black Dutch door)” (1993-2013) is based on actual doors from the artist’s childhood home. But he has removed all details such as knobs, hinges, or keyholes, and affixed it directly to the wall, with the upper and lower sections positioned at different angles in a way that makes us want to view it from multiple vantage points. While superficially resembling a Richard Serra (1938-2024) steel work, it is much more approachable in the sense that it supplants Serra’s cold industrial aesthetic with one that feels soft and poetic. By comparison, “No title (room, panic doors)” (2013-14) elicits a more cerebral reaction. A large rectangular structure that resembles the freight compartment of a moving van and houses a replica of a brightly lit hallway and doors, the installation resembles a movie set that fills us with anticipation. We could easily imagine the doors busting open and an emergency care team racing towards us with a patient on a gurney. Robert Therrien, “No title (large telephone cloud),” 1998, steel, enamel, telephones, 68 x 124 x 47”. Courtesy of the Robert Therrien Estate. Therrien’s versatility is also expressed in the subtle humor that shows through in a scattering of works, such as the charming collage “No title (devil wallpaper)” (1983), where he cleverly undermines the lyrical tone of patterned wallpaper by silk-screening the devil logo from Underwood deviled ham onto the preexisting floral motifs. Also noteworthy for its whimsy is “No title (large telephone cloud)” (1998), a monumental cartoon bubble/cloud formation constructed from old telephones and wires that evoke the millions of connections and talking voices that permeate the world’s telephone lines. Although serious in vision and intentions, Therrien was an avid fan of vintage comic books and was himself quite adept at making art that leaves us smiling. David S. Rubin   is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous  exhibition catalogs , and his curatorial archives are housed in the   Smithsonian Archives of American Art . For more information: www.davidsrubin.com .