by Matthew Kangas Bainbridge Island Museum of Art , Bainbridge Island, Washington Continuing to September 17, 2026 James W. Washington, Jr., “Democracy Challenged,” 1949, oil on unfinished masonite, newspaper collage, 18 x 48”. All images courtesy of Dr. James W. Wasington, Jr. and Mrs. Janie Rogella Washington Foundation. Photo: Dasha Moore. One of the factors that makes assessing James W. Washington, Jr.’s contribution to America’s art history difficult is his multifarious life, which spanned the 20th century. His interests embraced social activism, religious conviction, and an ancillary role in the Northwest School of art (best known for its four principals, Guy Irving Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey). In this retrospective, curator Greg Robinson simplifies the historic task by focusing on a limited number of works, but also complicates it by including a plethora of biographical memorabilia. Meanwhile, Washington’s posthumous influence can be seen through the artist-in-residency program at his former home in Seattle. There is plenty to absorb and contemplate. His youth and early manhood were spent in Jim Crow Mississippi, where he initially worked as a cobbler. The fourth of a Baptist minister’s six children, he worked as an art instructor during the Great Depression under the Works Progress Administration. Washington curated the first all-Black WPA exhibit in the state; another WPA show there excluded Blacks. James W. Washington, Jr., “Portrait of Jomo Kenyatta,” carved stone. The second, and more significant, half of his life began in 1944 when he moved to Seattle, attracted by defense jobs. There he worked as an electrician at the Bremerton Navy Yard. Following the war’s end, Washington attracted the attention of Tobey, who saw his paintings in a show at a downtown department store. He subsequently studied privately with Tobey. The exhibition includes numerous examples of his Seattle-era paintings, most of which are recollections of the Deep South. A few works address wartime issues. It was in these works that Washington reached an individual maturity which eventually led to his best-known works, carved stone sculptures of animals. The paintings, in particular “Democracy Challenged” (1949) and “Making of the United Nations Charter” (1945), look more timely than ever. They are simultaneously explicit and symbolic images, featuring lynchings and ropes in the former work and eerie bayonets, skeletal hands, and pertinent newspaper clippings in the latter. James W. Washington, Jr., “Life Surrounding the Astral Alter in Matrix,” 1987, carved granite on walnut pedestal, 22 x 13 x 12”. Photo: Dasha Moore. Other paintings depict Seattle and other cities, notably “Viaduct (Vicksburg, MS)” (1938); “Rummage Sale (Pike Place Market)” (1952); “Wight Avenue and High Street (Little Rock)” (1942); and “Mexico City Market #2” (1951). Other paintings, such as a series on Black cowboys, are sadly missing, as they would have presented Washington’s chronicles of African American life even more expansively. It was in Mexico, at the base of a pyramid, that the artist achieved what he called his “epiphany,” which led to his shift to carving stone sculpture. Picking up a piece of lava stone, he had a spiritual vision of the life within the stone. Upon returning to Seattle, Washington embarked on a long series of forlorn birds, which he was already painting (perhaps under Graves’ influence), and figurative heads. The heads range from seminal Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (not on view) and Kenya’s first elected president Jomo Kenyatta, to biblical personages such as “Simon of Syrene” (1961) and “Abraham’s Father and Torah” (1989). Among the birds, “Phoenix Offering Itself on Altar” (1989) is the most abstract, with its charred lava stone midway between death and fiery resurrection. Others combine hieroglyphic inscriptions that refer to the artist’s membership in the Freemasons. “Field Bird” (1966), “Wounded Eagle #10” (1963), and “Bird on Nest” (1960) capture the emerging forms of life in the rigid granite. James W. Washington, Jr., “Wounded Bird Form,” 1963, granite, 9 1/2 x 13 x 10 1/2”. Photo: Korum Bischoff. More varied and allusive, “Eve’s Friend” (1970) depicts the Garden of Eden serpent wrapped around a female figure, while “Kingdom of God Within You” (1974) combines human and animal images, including a pregnant woman, slowly converging within the rock. By the late 1980s, Washington’s stature was secure, but it was left to Paul J. Karlstrom, a Smithsonian Institution scholar with a specialty in art of the Pacific Coast, to place the artist in the wider context of American art, comparing him to William Edmondson and William Zorach. James W. Washington, Jr., “Wounded Eagle No. 10,” 1987, carved granite on walnut pedestal, 9 1/2 x 13 x 10 1/2”. Photo: Elizabeth Mann. As to the artists-in-residence at the Washington home (now being restored), 27 out of 48 are represented in the exhibition. Among them, a vivid abstract painting by Romson Regarde Bustillo, “Lightning (What Becomes of Sorrow)” (2020) commands the side gallery, joined by photo-transferred dye-on-aluminum passport photographs of relatives by MalPina Chan. While the selection is highly varied in both style and material, one work, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by Christen Mattix, best echoes the older artist’s themes: a large black-and-white image of Dr. King is composed of affixed, stacked hardbound books that symbolize knowledge of the past and present, a fitting tribute to the slain leader and the revered sculptor.   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 Laguna Art Museum , Laguna Beach, California Continuing to September 7, 2026 Donna Schuster, “The Black Hat (Self Portrait),” c. 1912, oil on canvas, 21 x 23”. All images courtesy of the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach. Donna Schuster (1883-1953) excelled at painting portraits of confident, beautiful women, relaxing, dining, enjoying the outdoors, taking care of business and playing instruments. These paintings, many created during the suffragette movement, reveal Schuster’s admiration for females who had the independent spirit that she was also known for. The show’s subtitle, “An Independent Brush,” conveys Schuster’s progressive, multi-faceted approach to artmaking. She became known for her use of rich colors, expressive brushstrokes and bold experimentation with watercolors and oils. Her work was notable for its incorporation of new modernist styles, including Impressionism, Cubism and abstraction. Donna Schuster, “On the Beach,” 1917, oil on canvas, 29 1/8 x 29 1/4”. An independently wealthy native of Wisconsin, Schuster never married, devoting her life to creating and teaching art and promoting her own work. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and graduated with honors from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. William Merritt Chase was a mentor whom she accompanied on a painting tour of Belgium in 1912. Her early arts education emphasized the impressionist style, particularly the work of Claude Monet. In Southern California during the late 1920s she studied with Stanton MacDonald Wright, co-founder of the Synchromist movement, which sought to evoke emotions and musical sounds through visual art incorporating cubist and abstract elements. “Le Petit Dejeuner” (1912) is an early work painted in a lightly colored impressionist style. It depicts a young French woman enjoying her breakfast. Two other paintings from that period are “The Black Hat (Self-Portrait)” and “Self Portrait with a Cat” (both 1912). Each work is dark in tone, with the former impressionistic in style, and both reveal the budding artist’s profound figurative skills and confident manner. Donna Schuster, ““O’er Waiting Harp Strings” 1921, oil on canvas. After moving to Southern California in 1913, Schuster celebrated the sunshine and the beach in works such as “On the Beach” (1917), a classic portrait of a beautiful woman holding a large parasol, her eyes focused to her right. Painted with bold colors and strong contrasts of light and dark, it has a contemporary feel. Also noteworthy is “Girl in a Hammock” (1917), of a young woman relaxing in the late afternoon, gazing languidly at the artist. “Summer Idyll” (1922) is a close-up of a young woman in profile, also in a hammock, reading a book, all lit by California’s golden light. Each painting individualizes emotion and generously depicts the SoCal lifestyle. Another notable portrait is “O’er Waiting Harp Strings” (1921), whose subject is an attractive woman of privilege passionately playing her harp. The dark tonalist-style shadows playing on the woman’s body, face and hair contrast with the golden hues of the harp strings and the sunlight streaming through a large window. As Schuster had traveled to Northern California in 1914 and 1915 to study with Chase and to participate in San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, she undoubtedly became acquainted with the tonalist art movement, which emphasized a richly colored atmosphere. Donna Schuster, “Evening, Los Angeles Harbor,” ca. 1929, painting, 34 x 35”. At the Panama-Pacific Exposition, Schuster painted scenes of buildings under construction. One of those paintings, the gouache “Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Fine Arts Pavilion” (1915), graces this exhibition. Writing in the Los Angeles Times  at the time, Antony Anderson noted that these paintings caught the spirit of San Francisco, including its joyous lifestyle and glamorous sunshine. Schuster was also a member of the Group of Eight who, from 1921-28, were known for their free use of color and their figurative work that embraced elements of early modernism. As Schuster progressed in her development, she segued to illustrating indoor and outdoor scenes, with each painting combining various art styles. ”Evening, Los Angeles Harbor” (1929) expresses the movement of the boats and water. “Checking the Nets” (no date) draws our attention to several sailboats lined up, with sailors checking the nets, the artist’s brush conveying the vibrancy of life at the harbor. Donna Schuster, “Lily Pond, Capistrano Mission,” ca. 1928. Schuster employed Impressionist technique frequently. “Lily Pond, Capistrano Mission” (1928), with water lilies alongside the mission gardens, pays homage to Monet. She used this style in several other bucolic canvases, including “The Mission Bells,” “On the Veranda” and “Houses, Silver Lake” (all undated). Several undated still lifes, including “Gourds and Russet Pears,” “Samovar on the Table,” and “Still Life with Blue Bowl” demonstrate Schuster’s knowledge of modernism, expertise in figuration, aggressive use of color, and skill in creating harmonious designs. By the time Schuster passed away in 1953 (due to an accident), she had produced an abundance of magnificent paintings emphasizing the special qualities of the California lifestyle and tracing the progression of art styles during the first half of the 20th century. 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 Jody Zellen Louis Stern Fine Arts , West Hollywood, California Continuing through September 6, 2025 Cecilia Z. Miguez, “The Smile is the Last Thing to Go,” 2025, bronze, concrete, resin, gold leaf, glass microbeads, and oil paint, 39 1/2 x 10  10”. All images courtesy of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood. In her evocative exhibition “A Thousand Years in One Night,” Cecilia Z. Miguez laments the loss of her Altadena home and studio in the Eaton fire. Like so many Los Angeles artists, Miguez was forced to confront the destruction of her home/studio and possessions. Because she had an upcoming exhibition, she needed to rebound quickly and got to work transforming objects not completely obliterated by the conflagration into new creations. Culling from the rubble, Miguez used fragments and remnants of sculptures made from bronze and wood as well as found objects as points of departure for a new direction. Her latest sculptures evoke survival and the courage to continue while overcoming devastating obstacles. Miguez is a figurative sculptor whose career spans five decades. Her previous mixed-media pieces were celebrated for their intriguing depictions of the female form and the way she examined its beauty and associated mythologies. They were well crafted, intricate and seductive. In this new work, she embraces bodies with missing parts as well as the scars and the imperfections resulting from the flames. The new pieces have a rawness and vulnerability that distinguishes them from her prior sculptures. Cecilia Z. Miguez, “Fantasy by Fire,” 2025, bronze, gold leaf, glass microbeads and oil paint, 18 x 4 x 7”. “The Smile Is the Last Thing to Go” had a golden patina and modest scale before the fire. It portrayed a curvaceous woman with a gracefully posed arm and an elaborate headdress. In a pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition Miguez writes, "This sculpture's exquisite torso was the first piece to be salvaged from the ruins. As if she had attracted the real thing, a chaotic splash of melted bronze separated her feet, her legs, and one arm, which was never recovered. She is now kept frozen in time, witnessing her own inevitable destruction." The new work is missing an arm, so the hand is attached to the torso at the hip. The figure stares down at an awkwardly colored and positioned hand holding a pile of melted bronze as if to ask, what happened to me? “Fantasy by Fire,” just 18 inches high, features a standing female figure with its own missing arm. Surrounding the woman's head is a halo of fire. From the back, the gold plated amoeba-like shape grows from the base of the skull and branches up and out in multiple directions, its pockmarked surface dotted with red glass micro-beads. Seen from the front, this charred halo encircles the woman's head. The red beads that outline the shape allude to blazing flames. Cecilia Z. Miguez, “Fantasy by Fire,” 2025, bronze, gold leaf, glass microbeads and oil paint, 18 x 4 x 7”. Miguez refers to the waist-high sculpture “The Golden Piece” as a queen. When the upper portion of the body was retrieved after the fire, one arm was missing and the bronze head had melted. For the new work, Miguez attached another head that was similarly culled from the debris, painted her lips red and gave her expressive eyes. A disembodied hand was adhered to a wooden base that resembled a lectern or a column, yet functions as a body. Much of the original work’s charred remains are covered in golden beads that transform ruin into newfound hope. A large bow covers the back of the work, effectively restoring glory to the queen. Among the smaller pieces is “A Thousand Years in One Night.” In the pamphlet, Miguez speaks of how the pre-burned sculpture had a face resembling a mask with painted blue eyes that peaked out from a mysterious wooden time machine covered with found gears and knobs. Now it is presented as a relic. The ruin of a head is now inset into a wooden frame and surrounded by empty glass bottles. Miguez describes the new sculpture as being entombed like a mummy "… buried not with material wealth but with the riches of imagination …" “Daydream” is another, smaller work consisting of two heads fused to a dilapidated wooden support with a crackled surface, something at once complete and unfinished. Cecilia Z. Miguez, “A Thousand Years in One Night,” 2025, cement, wood, glass, and plastic, 11 7/8 x 12 x 2 1/4”. The female figures that populate this exhibition are mostly bald and initially have the appearance of undressed manikins. Yet as we take them in, they reveal themselves to be elegant, stoic and poised. They appear in different degrees of disrepair, missing limbs, hands and feet. That destruction imbues them with a haunting demeanor, and they assert their presence with a sense of determination. Cecilia Z. Miguez, “The Silver Nest,” 2025, bronze silver, glass, white gold leaf, glass micrbeads, wood, canvas, and oil paint, 24 5/8 x 18 1/2 x 3 3/4”. Miguez wrote of wanting to guide her unfinished works down new paths after the fire struck, and of being forced to confront the unexpected. Rather than give in to despair she rose to the occasion to create evocative and meaningful new art. She gathered what she could find from what remained and lovingly gave them a new life. These sculptures have emerged from the cocoon of fire to become assertive forms that channel spirits of healing and hope. 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 Jody Zellen CMay Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing through August 16, 2025 China Adams, “Crisscross,” 2025, micron-pen, graphite, 8 3/4 x 8 3/4”. All images courtesy the artist and CMay Gallery, Los Angeles. In “Poles, Walkers and a Black Sheep” China Adams presents two distinct but related bodies of work: black and white drawings of utility poles, and sculptures made by bedecking geriatric walkers with brightly painted canvas fragments that have been twisted and molded to suggest human forms. Adams talks about the poles as utilitarian yet outdated — they represent an antiquated but still necessary way of delivering electric power to businesses and residential buildings. Such poles can produce sparks (as evidenced by numerous Los Angeles fires) and the wooden versions can even burn themselves. As ubiquitous as they are, they often go unnoticed, but Adams notices them. She studies, photographs, and then draws them with precision, emphasizing their graphic qualities, the filigree of the wires they support, and the shapes they create when viewed against backgrounds of sky. Some have bulbous extensions — transformers — while others appear as elegant grids of black lines. Adams focuses on the relationship between positive and negative space in her drawings, representing the poles and wires as segments of an ongoing continuum. China Adams, “Sky Frame III,” 2025, gouache, graphite, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2”. In “Crisscross” one is drawn to the T-shape of the silhouetted pole just left of center in the square composition. From this anchor, numerous lines flow left and right against a pointillist ground made by tapping a Micron pen against the white paper. Curved and rectangular transformers are intermingled with the wires. In these modest-sized square and rectangular pen and graphite drawings, Adams calls attention to how these sculptural forms interact with the sky as two-dimensional abstractions. In an accompanying suite of drawings, Adams zooms in on a fragment of a pole and focuses her attention on detailing a small section where wires meet transformers. These are rendered in graphite against a light yellow gouache background. In “Sky Frame III,” for example, the shapes are depicted in varying tonalities according to depth and placement, which gives the abstracted work a more realistic and nuanced aura.  The pole drawings explore the relationships between point and line by calling attention to their subtle differences. They are rendered as graceful artifacts of the urban landscape. Less graceful but perhaps more intriguing are Adams' sculptures. Painted in vibrant hues of orange, yellow and pink, crumpled pieces of canvas festoon geriatric walkers. While at first appearing casually arranged, the precisely placed canvas pieces obliquely suggest human forms. In “Lean,” “Drag,” “Hinge” and “Brace,” the walker is displayed upright, whereas in “Sprawl” it is on its side. Walkers aid the elderly or infirm. They are designed to provide support. As such, they are sturdy objects, yet Adams presents them as personified and dysfunctional.  China Adams, “Lean,” 2025, canvas, acrylic paint, unwaxed dental floss, geriatric walker, tennis balls, 40 x 33 x 30”. The amorphous shaped canvas in “Sprawl,” surrounding two legs of an overturned walker, alludes to a person reaching out and calling for help. In the pink hued “Drag,” it is easy to imagine a limp body dragging itself across the floor while leaning on the aluminum walker with its fluorescent yellow tennis ball-covered feet for support. This image is at once tragic and comical. “Brace,” its canvas painted a dark gray, is the "Black Sheep" of the exhibition's title. All of the walkers reference a slumped and headless body that Adams imbues with expressive pathos. They serve, unsurprisingly, as a reminder of our eventual frailty and need for support. China Adams, “Sprawl,” 2025, canvas, acrylic paint, unwaxed dental floss, geriatric walker, tennis balls, 56 x 31 x 28”. Thinking about the less than obvious relationship between the poles and the walkers brings up further notions of fragility and strength, vulnerability and stoicism, and the aging mechanisms and infrastructures that transport our bodies and our electricity. As metaphors for cultural, physical and societal stasis, both bodies of work express decline and collapse.  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 David S. Rubin Marc Selwyn Fine Art , Camden Annex, Beverly Hills, California Continuing through August 9, 2025 Rodolfo Abularach, “Espacial Verde,” 1980, oil on canvas, 24 x 24”. All images courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills. The late Guatemalan artist Rodolfo Abularach (1933-2020) is widely recognized in Latin America, but he is not well known in the United States, where he lived and worked for forty years. In 1955, he left Guatemala to study at the Art Students League in New York City, where he maintained a studio until returning to his homeland in 1998. As revealed in “Aparición (Apparition)” (1962), he was familiar with the Abstract Expressionist style that dominated American art in the 1950s. The orange sphere at the composition’s center recalls Adolph Gottlieb’s “bursts”, while also emitting a hazy atmosphere of light that suggests the rectangular formations of Mark Rothko. Nevertheless, with the presence of a smaller orb in the distance, “Aparición” cannot be mistaken for an Abstract Expressionist painting, as the resemblance of the imagery to the sun and the moon in alignment is undeniable. Rodolfo Abularach, “Túnel — Entrada (Tunnel — Entrance),” 1970, ink on paper, 30 x 30”. It was actually in Los Angeles, while a resident printmaker at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1966, that Abularach introduced an image into his oeuvre that would preoccupy him for much of the remainder of his career: the human eye. The imagery seems to have morphed from his depictions of celestial orbs. The transition can be observed taking place in “Aparición – Nacimiento (Apparition – Birth)" (1964-67), which is also the exhibition’s showstopper. While still a depiction of a celestial body, the painting was completed a year after he produced the Tamarind lithographs. The drawing “Centro Negro” (1966) is a black-and-white composition in which rings of concentric circles suggest a pupil, cornea, iris, and sclera. In the drawing and painting, hatched lines create rays of energy that emanate outward towards us from the centermost circle, causing the imagery to pulsate, suggesting a supernatural presence. Within this context, the imagery may be associated with the Mayan and Buddhist mandalas with which Abularach, who was of Mesoamerican heritage and practiced Tantric Buddhism, was familiar. Additionally, the mandala in the painting is ascribed magical powers, having given birth to another spherical astral object. Rodolfo Abularach, “Centro Rosado - Ojo (Pink Center — Eye),” 1968, ink and acrylic on paper, 33 1/4 x 33 1/4”. In “Centro Rosado — Ojo (Pink Center — Eye)” (1968), the transformation from celestial orb to ocular vessel is complete. Here, Abularach combined elements of both the solar system and the anatomy of vision. While the parts of the eye are clearly delineated, a pink disk with a ring of light around it reflected in the pupil beautifully encapsulates the idea of a direct connection between visual perception and limitless spirit. Additionally, a speck of light shown moving towards the pupil suggests something otherworldly. Put simply, the work refers to the visionary who possesses a metaphysical consciousness. Art historical precedents for this approach to portraying the seer include Odilon Redon’s “ Eye-Balloon ” (1878), where an omniscient “third eye” is depicted as an apparition in the form of a hot air balloon, and Jay DeFeo’s “ The Eyes ” (1958), where the artist’s own eyes look into cosmic space, represented by vertical and diagonal linear striations. Rodolfo Abularach, “Aparición — Nacimiento (Apparition — Birth),” 1964-67, oil on canvas, 50 x 50”. From the late 1960s onward, Abularach embraced the eye as a primary image. He moved back and forth between transforming eye imagery into abstract structures that suggest mandalas and celestial orbs and more representational renderings that include details such as lids, lashes, and brows. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he experimented with a variety of figurative eye compositions, such as “Floating Eye” (1968), a grayscale work in which the eyelid of a partially closed eye resembles a lampshade suspended in an amorphous atmosphere. “Selena No. 2” (1970) repeats the concept developed in “Pink Center-Eye,” but with more attention given to details such as eyelashes. Rodolfo Abularach, “Floating Eye,” 1968, ink on paper, 22 1/2 x 28 1/2”. Aside from his concerns with spiritual content, the more abstract compositions reveal Abularach also to have been interested in formal considerations, as the circular shape of the pupil lends itself to explorations in concavity and convexity. In “Túnel — Entrada (Tunnel — Entrance)” (1970), the colors of the usually black pupil and white iris are reversed, as they might appear in an X-ray, and the lower lid is truncated to create the illusion that we are looking into an open orifice. By contrast, a streak of light painted on the ocular shape in “Espacial Verde (1980) turns the image into a mysterious sculptural object protruding into the gallery space. Ultimately, Abularach found pleasure in making art that could stimulate both meditative and aesthetic modes of contemplation. 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 .

by Liz Goldner Oceanside Museum of Art , Oceanside, California Continuing through August 3, 2025 Nicholas Kontaxis, “Meant to be,” 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72 1/2 x 102”. Most artists we observe and read about, past and present, are far from conventional in their thinking and approaches to life and art. Due to their atypical thinking, they are able to extract from their environment abstract, surreal and/or impressionistic visions, and they turn these visions into creations that can stir viewers to new levels of understanding about the world. Displaying this kind of out-of-the-box thinking and execution, the nearly two dozen artists represented in the “Art of Autism” sponsored by the San Diego-based non-profit of the same name, contribute colorful, humorous, thoughtful, well wrought artworks. Nicholas Kontaxis, a self-taught Greek painter based in Palm Springs, presents colorful large-scale, abstract canvases, composed of acrylics, ink, oils, gouache, spices, ash, coffee, dirt and more. Working in several styles of abstraction, Kontaxis includes in his paintings striated strokes of paint, circular blobs, and a grid system of different colors with pointillist strokes and hieroglyphic markings. “Meant to Be” (2019), a large acrylic, is a garden of multi-colored squares. Jeremy Sicile-Kira, “The Greatly Beautiful Colors of My Future Life,” 2020, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”. The paintings of Jeremy Sicile-Kira, also abstract and colorful, are built up from broad strokes of paint. Immersing oneself in the personal visions of the artist is to experience the manifestation of his dreams, which he describes as the foundation of his work. Sicile-Kira’s inspirations include seeing peoples’ faces not as expressions, but as the colors of a rainbow. Listening to music and hearing people’s voices also stimulate his creativity and become the genesis of his canvasses, which he paints with the intention to give his viewers hope. “The Greatly Beautiful Colors of My Future Life” (2020) features colorful starbursts that beckon us to engage his unusual world. The painterly figurations of Carissa Mordeno Paccerelli are childlike phantasmagorical impressions of children, school kids, faces both happy and sad, spiritual figures, robotic figures and teddy bears. Paccerelli began developing her artistic skills because she had difficulty talking to people, but conveyed her feelings through artmaking. “Nostalgia” (2020) is a composite of several favored images, including teddy bears, toy shmoos and a small ghost, all floating in an abstract heavenly space. Austin John Jones uses his traditional art training (he earned a degree from Art Center College of Design) to create a variety of thoughtful digital and acrylic paintings. His humorous renditions of faces, children, animals, imaginary creatures — seemingly inspired by cartoons — appear to regard the world from curious, adventurous and bemused perspectives. His adult-focused paintings of people and animals combine sardonic wit with a more serious perspective. “A Cruel Mind” (2024) depicts a sarcastic face laughing at something outside the canvas, while a drawing within the face’s brain reveals a boy shielding himself. As a personal image, the sarcastic face is an outward attempt to hide the fears within. Brendan Kerr, “Breaking Waves Triptych,” 2025, metal photograph, Saori weaving and oil on canvas, 36 x 40”. Other notable work here includes fiber art by Brendan Kerr, an abstract self-portrait by Alex Nichols, humorous plastic toys and paintings of toys by Joel Anderson, and a photo of a surfer by Spencer Brown. The art in this exhibition compares favorably in theme, vision and technique to much mainstream work seen in local galleries and museums. The depth of the artists’ humanity illustrates how people on the autism spectrum can thrive in this world, and thereby give to others, especially when nurtured by family and community. 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 J. Rinehart Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through July 26, 2025 Cable Griffith, “Return to Sender,” 2025, fabric dye4 and acrylic on canvas, 57 x 81”. All images courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle. In his current exhibition, “Return to Sender,” we immerse ourselves imaginatively in Cable Griffith’s alien landscape paintings. Griffith recently completed a series of mosaic murals at the new Sound Transit Light Rail station in the affluent Seattle suburb of Redmond. Having seen those murals in reproduction, I can only surmise what effect they have had on Griffith’s mostly mid-size easel paintings. What the new work evidently shares with the murals is the imagery of his own forest world, trampled countryside, deep garden spaces, and long mountain vistas. Executed with repetitive strokes and dots, they share a vision of nature as cartoon or caricature instead of the grandeur of the sublime. This is nature as a projection of consciousness, providing destinations for us to contemplate relative to the nature we live in and allowing us to mentally travel to a recognizable but still exotic land. Cable Griffith, “The Procession,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 60 x 45”. Griffith endows “Return to Sender,” with the deepest perspective space in the exhibition. It is a cultivated garden clotted with veils of colored lines distributed to simulate a perforated screen that we gaze through, as we roam over a nearly seven-foot-wide canvas. Shimmering as a result of the artist’s power over the colored line, “Return to the Sender” memorably pulls you into its space and makes you want to stay there and explore. Elsewhere, the artist’s vision is alternately more abbreviated or extended in complexity and formal encounters. In some works the space is flattened; others deepen it with flickering dots and dabs of color that lure the eye into variously direct and complicated sites. Among the smaller works, in “Waypoint” and “Outpost” the scene is abruptly frontal. The latter image, with its rainbow band and looming upright pole behind, is not strictly speaking a landscape. “Outpost” sets itself apart by being at least suggestive of a built location. “Waypoint” is an abstract blizzard of dashes and curves that make it among the exhibition’s most abstract works. I’m now anticipating that Griffith will push toward completely abstract paintings based on what we see here. Cable Griffith, “Day Trip,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 30 x 22”. Until then, “Haunted Garden,” “The Procession,” and “Day Trip” operate as straightforward, imaginary landscapes that place us in deep natural spaces. The latter painting focuses our attention on the artist’s version of a waterfall, placing us within a daunting mountain-hike pathway in “The Procession,” and “Haunted Garden” sets us in its dark forest as we are about to emerge into a glowing, light-saturated meadow with a view of the mountains beyond. In quirky ways they also echo historic forerunners like the Yellowstone School. Refusing to denote specific sites, Griffith’s paintings insist on a psychological plane of meaning. They are emphatically imaginary places defined by a variety of chromatic approaches as well as clustered imagery, painterly marks, and comical references to the grandeur of Romantic-era nature painting with their high peaks and distant vistas. Two small black-and-white depiction of mountains and lakes, “Rendezvous” and “Timeout,” act as points of origin for the larger works. Executed in acrylic paint, they function as drawings devoid of the artist’s usual chromatic attack. Cable Griffith, “Waypoint,” 2025, fabric dye and acrylic on canvas, 29 x 30 1/2”. If there is a mannerism or fallback position on which Griffith relies too much, it is the insistent black line in every painting. This device acts as pictorial outline and underlying compositional strategy, a habit the artist may have picked up from his late mentor, Robert C. Jones (1930-2018). For Jones, a one-time student of Hans Hofmann, colors are notable for their vaunted “push-pull” qualities. They complement one another, but also set up tensions and conflicts. In Hofmann’s method, black was seen as a co-equal color. However, for Jones, black acted not as a co-equal so much as a crutch, bolstering other colors he was unwilling to let act on their own (as with Hofmann or Matisse). This is happening to Cable Griffith, too. When downplayed, black is a filigree or scatter of lines distributed throughout. At their worst, as in “Intermission,” they set up an irregular grid awaiting the fill-in of colored areas. Cable Griffith, “The Interloper,” 2025, acrylic on paper, 30 x 44”. Maybe “The Interloper” points another way. In this black and white painting, two hairy legs descend into a trampled garden scene. The humor is welcome, and the lack of color becomes irrelevant. The prospects of abstraction are here set aside. In lieu of complete abstraction, Griffith might be well served to engage what is currently missing from the landscapes: the human presence beyond formal and chromatic decision-making. 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 T.s. Flock Museum of Flight , Seattle, Washington Continuing to January 26, 2026 Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The AK-47 Project” from the “Weapons of Mass Production” series, installation view. All images courtesy of Ralph Ziman. Ralph Ziman’s “Weapons of Mass Production” series began with AK-47s rendered as glinting totems of global violence in the glass beadwork of mostly South African and Zimbabwean artisans. Ziman followed this with the up-armored absurdity of a full-size, still beaded “Casspir Project” (a military vehicle). Now his “MiG-21 Project” — the most mass-produced fighter jet in the relatively short history of aerial warfare — makes its debut. Ziman, a South African-born film director, is not wielding the needles and glue gun here. His is a producer’s eye — conceptual, logistical, curatorial. He orchestrates, others embellish. And while the production team bends over backwards to highlight the labor and skill of the bead workers, there's an unresolved dissonance in the distinction they draw between artist and artisan, one that smells faintly of colonial hierarchy, no matter how well-meaning. Set aside, then, the circular debates about the “artist’s hand” and authenticity. Ziman’s series is already an unabashed spectacle that renders moot much of that debate. These are cultural readymades mutated by communal craft, throwing back in the face of post-colonial power the very objects of its violence, now made tactile and extravagantly useless. Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The Casspir Project,” beaded Casspir military vehicle. As with the best agitprop, the effect of Ziman’s objects is both garish and grave: a surreal funhouse reflection of empire, staged with maximal production values. Indeed, the exhibition is incredibly well-crafted, thoughtful for its didactics, supported with abundant and polished video media, and enriched with tactile objects for a more hands-on experience. The exhibition includes a lot of documentation related to previous iterations of Ziman’s “Weapons of Mass Production” series, providing not just context for the “MiG-21 Project,” but also the historical background that threads all three projects together. The “Ghosts” series served as the genesis of the “Weapons of Mass Production” project. It began as a battalion of beaded AK-47s, lovingly crafted in translucent glass and then photographed in the arms of the men who made them. These portraits, staged on dusty Johannesburg streets and loading docks, depict local artisans and informal traders in militant poses. The imagery is crisp, stylized, cinematically lit and oversaturated — Robert Capa by way of GQ. Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The MiG-21," 2025. Photo: Mauricio Hoyos. There’s no denying the pageantry of these images, but their politics are knottier than the glib anti-violence message they purport to advocate. Ziman doesn’t hide his aesthetic attraction to these weapons. “They’re beautiful objects,” he has said, an adolescent confession that threads through the entire project. The photographs leverage precisely the kind of iconography they claim to critique: the heroic pose, the swaggering soldier, the lone gunman romanticized in global pop culture. They never satirize the fetish so much as they revel in it. It’s more Gen-X irony than camp. I found it all a touch grotesque. Recasting AK-47s in beads does not rob them of menace so much as aestheticize that menace, refashioning death into décor. The artisans striking the poses are real men, with histories far more complex than these images allow. They are enlisted in a visual narrative that oscillates between homage and exploitation, not unlike the warlords and revolutionaries whose images once circulated with similar iconic mystique. That the guns are nonfunctional is irrelevant; their symbolic firepower remains intact. The second iteration of this project, the “Casspir Project,” escalated the critique by leaning harder into spectacle. The beaded mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle becomes more flamboyant, the production more mythic, and the original tension remains unresolved: Can you deconstruct a fetish, cultural or otherwise, by reproducing it in wire and beadwork? This is where the “Casspir Project” moves beyond ironic détournement and into the terrain of haunted archaeology. If the AK-47s and the “Ghosts” photographs flirt with aesthetization, the “Casspir Project” — beaded bumper to bulletproof window — is where the full imperial circuit becomes visible in lurid, irrefutable detail. The weapon-as-talisman is replaced by the system-as-monster. Ralph Ziman and The Team, “MiG-21” a close-up view of the MiG-21’s beaded cockpit. Photo Mauricio Hoyos Designed in apartheid-era South Africa to patrol and brutalize Black townships, the Casspir vehicle was a symbol of racial domination cast in steel and elevated on massive tires. That the United States, decades later, acquired these very vehicles for counterinsurgency during its ultimately failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, then trickled them down as military surplus to domestic police departments, is more than just historical irony. It’s what Aimé Césaire called the "boomerang effect" of colonial violence: What is tested on the periphery returns, mechanized, to the core. Ziman, to his credit, captures this recursive horror not through didactics, but through spectacle so garish it can’t be ignored. The beaded “Casspir Project,” unveiled outside a gallery in Brooklyn in 2018 forced a confrontation. Viewers were drawn in by its jewel-toned allure, only to be gut-punched by the realization that this exact model had recently patrolled Ferguson and other Black communities under the pretense of "keeping order." In this context, the beadwork ceased to feel like decorative camouflage. It became funerary. The vehicle, adorned with thousands of hours of communal labor, was not neutralized so much as embalmed. It symbolizes a tomb for the myth of Western innocence, proof of the continuity between colonial policing abroad and racist violence at home. So yes, Ziman’s work traffics in spectacle, but it also operates, yet more directly, as bait. The glitter invites you, but what you encounter is the soft underbelly of empire: a pattern of exported repression returning to selectively devastate its own citizens. In this light, the “Casspir Project” is more than an “awareness campaign.” It is a Trojan horse of memory, rolling uninvited into the very streets that still don’t want to reckon with what they’ve inherited. Ralph Ziman and The Team, Afrofuturistic flight suits. Which brings us to the exhibition of Ziman’s beaded “MiG-21 Project” at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. This choice of venue is not just poignant, it’s surgical. If the “Casspir Project” was a ghostly return of colonial violence onto American streets, the “MiG-21 Project” installation functions more like a grinning reincarnation slipping quietly into the belly of the war machine itself. To house this encrusted relic of the Cold War just beyond the corporate sanctum of Boeing — a company whose tech has delivered everything from napalm to "precision" drone strikes in the name of democracy — is a masterstroke of silent confrontation. For added irony, I was told during the press preview that some guests were asking the crew during installation if the rainbow-colored warplane was in honor of Pride month. My radical queer forebears are no doubt spinning faster than a jet turbine in their graves. And of course, Boeing doesn’t stand alone. It is simply the most visible cog in a system where industrial-scale killing has been so successfully aestheticized, bureaucratized, and distanced from its potential and actual effects that even its museums become family-friendly. The Museum of Flight is a cathedral to American aerospace glory, from early barnstormers of the 1920s to the Space Shuttle era, with tidy plaques and awe-struck schoolchildren tracing the lineage of flight as if there were no payload, no consequence, no meat and bone on the receiving end. Drawn in by the “MiG-21 Project’s” spectacular craft and color, we are left standing before the polished carcass of a killer, one whose DNA is so reciprocal it cannot really be considered foreign at all, despite being made by “the other side” during the Cold War. The MiG-21 was the Soviets’ counterpart to the American military-industrial sublime. Its deployment across Africa, Asia, and Latin America mirrors the same extractive logic, the same imperial gestures, if with different flags. Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The MiG-21 Project.” The problem is no longer personal. It’s cultural. It’s systemic. It’s the lethal banality of a society that has made war its subtext and entertainment its delivery mechanism. In that sense, the “MiG-21 Project” is less memorial than memento mori. Not just for the Cold War dead, but for the very belief that spectacle can remain separate from consequence. What initially looks like a glimmering critique of power curdles into something more damning. Not of Ziman, not even of the spectacle itself, but of the system that requires it. Ziman, to his credit, isn’t hiding the scaffolding. This is not a cynical enterprise. He’s not auctioning war kitsch at Basel for seven figures. If anything, “Weapons of Mass Production” is a gesture of desperation masquerading as pageantry, a sincere attempt to revalue labor, history, and violence by giving artisans both platform and pay. In its early stages, the project was a way to redirect money toward craftspeople. Now, through a foundation, it formalizes that commitment. And that’s the unbearable part. Because even this earnest, collaborative attempt to confront empire and elevate the people it crushes is still only possible if the trauma is dressed up, adorned, neutered, rendered into spectacle. Still only viable if it draws clicks, tickets, donors, curators, museum boards. Still subject to the grotesque economy of attention that governs art in the Global North. The bead workers themselves are primarily migrants, survivors of economic collapse who live precariously in Johannesburg and beyond, and I daresay they are not naïve. They understand that they are being asked to decorate the very forms that had hunted or exiled them, and it is clear that they have made something joyful of the labor. Layer on that the bitter irony that Trump’s administration has twice refused their visas to accompany their handiwork. Meanwhile, refugee status has been granted to white Afrikaners based on a revisionist history grounded in naked white supremacism. Ralph Ziman and The Team, Afrofuturistic flight suits. The “MiG-21 Project” workers also understand, with ruthless clarity, that this is how the world listens: not to testimony, not to truth, but to beauty, such as it is. They must reconstitute their pain in glass and wire, to be consumed under track lighting by people who will leave the exhibition and pass by a Boeing billboard on the way to brunch. So the final indictment is not of Ziman, whose faults are visible and navigable, but of the moral economy of the art world. An economy that tends not to see the very objects of artists’ critiques until the suffering is made beautiful. That insists the colonized must perform their wounds as objects of wonder. That forces resistance into the shape of seduction and calls it “dialogue.” In this sense, “Weapons of Mass Production” is an accidental documentary of what the system demands in order to acknowledge the harm it continues to administer. A funeral where the corpse must sing. T.s. Flock  is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of  Vanguard Seattle .

by David S. Rubin Nazarian/Curcio , Los Angeles, California Continuing to June 28, 2025 Wendell Gladstone, “Passion Premonition,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 49 x 71”. All images courtesy of Nazarian / Curcio. Known for quirky allegorical figurative paintings that explore human relationships, Wendell Gladstone now exhibits a new body of works about the complexities of love, which the artist views as having the “capacity to support, entangle, and transform.” The series title, “Lover’s Knot,” refers to the use of knotted forms as metaphors for bonds of love, a symbolism found in art dating back to antiquity, as well as in literature and music. In all paintings but “Passion Premonition,” which functions as a prelude to the other works, three figures — a man and two women — are shown amidst undulating vines and floral motifs that are intended to signify the human connections to one another, as well as to the larger universe. Beyond that it is unclear what is taking place. The cast of characters could be a throuple, but the multiple women depicted in a single composition could be the same person in two separate moments, or two women from different relationships over time. Wendell Gladstone, “Head Over Heels,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 71 x 59”. “Passion Premonition” pays tribute to the power of human touch. Seated before a fireplace, a man and woman feel a spark as they gaze at their touching fingers. Immersed in the flames behind them is an apparition of the two kissing. Meticulously rendered in a warm palette that integrates matte and glossy surfaces, the painting radiates a sensual energy. Subtle details imply that what lies ahead may not be an easy road. Burning candles on the mantle, for example, suggest that the relationship may be temporary, while the presence of a cat and several mice hint at games of control and deception. Considerably more agitated and ambiguous in meaning, all of the other scenarios are staged on a balcony or ledge, with frenzied figures falling downward in a manner that recalls the nightmarish 1980s paintings of Robert Yarber. But, whereas Yarber’s angst-ridden figures are shown descending into vast cityscapes at night, Gladstone’s lovers are presented in daylight and at close range. Wendell Gladstone, “Between Worlds,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60”. The compositional pull is particularly forceful in “Head Over Heels,” where the rapid movement of a falling couple is reinforced by the undulations of vines that entangle them interacting with the rope from a pocket watch loosely tucked into the man’s pocket. Narrative intrigue is established by a woman peering through the window at the top. She appears to be controlling the action, pinching the watch’s rope with her right hand like a puppeteer. The fingers of her left hand gently tickle the heel of the man’s boot, which is incongruously cut off at the painting’s lower edge and relocated to the upper right corner. In having his instigator just barely touch the objects, Gladstone calls attention to the potential for sensuality in moments of physical contact, as well as to the transmission of one person’s energy to another. Gladstone’s new paintings are technically and aesthetically accomplished without sacrificing emotional charge. They also gain in potency as we attempt to decode what we are seeing. Yet what we see and feel may not always be consistent with the artist’s stated intentions. According to the press release, the architectural elements in this series are supposed to be “extensions of the figures themselves, echoing the energy of the relationships they contain.” To some extent, this is applicable to “Between Worlds,” because the balcony railing and trapezoidal brick patterns effectively merge with the vibrantly swirling movements of the vines and foliage, which are undeniably animated. Wendell Gladstone, “Both Sides of Me,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 71 x 59”. In “Both Sides of Me,” however, the volumetric geometry and tactility of the wall surface seem to negate the idea that the structure is metaphorically pulsating. Rather, they emphasize that it is a solid, static entity. In interpreting Gladstone’s work, along with much of today’s narrative art where the storylines are coded or obscured, the question we should be asking is not “What does it mean?”, but simply, “What could it mean?” When answering that question, it is always you the viewer who completes the circle. 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 .

by Matthew Kangas PDX Contemporary Art , Portland, Oregon Continuing to May 24, 2025 Christian Abusaid “Double Circle,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2”. All images courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art, Portland. Christian Abusaid’s “Art for a New Consciousness” is an intricate collection of pictographic images impressed onto raw linen with thick cobalt-blue dye. Inspired by an archaeological site in Colombia (where the artist lives), the 17 works on view all share a pseudo-textile-weaving appearance but are remarkably varied in their representations of the original rock paintings found at Chiribiquete National Park in the Amazon River area. Indeed, with over 70,000 such paintings at the site, the Bogotá-born artist who trained as an architect had plenty of source material from which to choose. In this sense, this survey takes on issues of personal and idiosyncratic choice regarding the purported symbolic readings of the enormous murals by the spiritual guides of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Like early Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, who were drawn to ancient Pacific Northwest native imagery, Abusaid picks and chooses fragmentary images to represent and symbolize information he sees as crucial to our own era — ecosystems, biological continuity, and environmental warnings. Not so much the “tragic and timeless” qualities invoked by the New York School, Abusaid’s indicators act more as alarm clocks in the form of two-dimensional signifiers. Christian Abusaid, “Birth,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2”. The works are divided into two categories: geometric codings and frontal abstracted nature. Both act as virtual calendars or timelines, as well as flags or messages that convey the artist’s urgency. Midcentury modernist artists are further invoked as conveyors of abbreviated symbols. Optical art of the 1960s receive gets a nod in the form of Josef Albers (Abusaid’s “Square”) and Richard Anuszkiewicz (Abusaid’s “Double Spiral”). Early Judy Chicago is invoked in “Flower,” and Marcel Duchamp is repurposed in “Orb.” Nor should we overlook the deep tradition of Latin American geometric and optical artists such as Jésus Rafael Soto and Omar Rayo. All carry somber meanings of biological and agricultural import. Another hard-edge work, “Double Circle,” pairs two collar shapes which could be the attire of Indigenous priests. Another, “Birth,” integrates four curves folded together to comprise seven light- and dark-blue waves surrounding a diamond-like vulva. Similarly, “Union” symbolizes sexual congress with its two intertwining curves that act as “legs” around a central void. Crisp, slick and physically materialized, the work’s thin blue dye stains the raw linen so as to glisten and give off a scintillating glow in the gallery’s natural daylight. Christian Abusaid, “La Mano,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 31 1/2 x 24”. With other, more representational pictographs, the dye is applied thickly in emulation of ceramic glaze — or the inks and paints used at Chiribiquete Park. Not apparent in photographic reproduction, their inky presence also recalls the myriad threads in Andean textiles. The artist has gone to great pains to explain the original mythical readings of his selected themes: sun, moon, hands, plants, humans, jaguars. Rather than intentional guides, however, they read more as tour maps to the archaeological site. Such background knowledge is not necessary to grasp such associations, but does add more helpful frosting on Abusaid’s cake. “The Sun” centers a triangular tepee shape beneath a 12-pointed star surrounded by eight figures and two trees which comprise an entire community. At the corners and the base, dots, x-marks and parallel diagonal lines could be forests, gardens, and the flowing Amazon River. Sharing the same agricultural motifs, “La Mano” (the hand) faces us, palm facing outward in a gesture of welcome. Christian Abusaid, “El Ser,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 31 1/2 x 24”. All the remaining thickly dyed pictographs use the same motifs in differing proportions as borders. Within each is a central message of ecological import. “La Ayahuasca” is a native plant used in often hallucinatory shamanic rituals. Here the schematic human has up-stretched arms that continue above and below the central figure, as if the figure is undergoing personality transformations. “The Moon” is more abrupt, its horizontal crescent above a pyramid, all situated beneath an inverted U-shape of three parallel lines that may be read to symbolize the embrace of the Amazon. Speaking of transformations, “El Jaguar” is schematically posed with its four legs around both sun and moon symbols. Its presence in Amazon basin cultures combines shamanic powers as a being who can travel between the physical and the spiritual world, and also act as a guardian, a warrior, or a deity. With or without the mythic meanings, Abusaid’s “Art for a New Consciousness” possesses considerable optical power packed into its reductive forms, ensuring the impact of its aesthetic as well as cultural context on a new continent, one primed for its own visions of a new consciousness. 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 California Museum of Photography , Riverside, California Continuing through August 17, 2025 Gail Rebhan, “Living,” 2022, archival pigment print mounted on aluminum, 33 x 22 1/2”. All images courtesy of the artist the California Museum of Photography. While art is often autobiographical, Gail Rebhan’s photographic work in “About Time” is like an open book. For more than 40 years the Washington, D.C.-based photographer has depicted some of the most personal aspects of her life. She recently completed close-up photos of her unclothed aging body in the series, “Living,” physically revealing a woman who regards her entire being as source material for her art. Rebhan conceived the “Living” series, alternately titled “Reflections on An Aging Self Still Capable of Anger and Surprise,” in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using intense light to capture the details of her flesh, she illustrates her face in semi-profile, her neck, the bottom of her thighs, knees, arms, elbows, feet and hands, all against black backgrounds. To view these large, intense pictures is to recognize a woman who listens to her own voice, shutting out media messages about maintaining youthful perfection. Gail Rebhan, “Gray Hair,” 1995 (printed 2022), archival pigment print, 8 1/2 x 11”. Indeed, this exhibition is a bold, direct accounting for the artist’s last four decades, with forays into her childhood, often through collaged photos. “About Time” is about more than the perpetual passage of time on the body. Images feature many people who she has maintained bonds with, along with a range of prosaic and profound scenarios and events. The earliest series in this exhibition, “Sequential Still Life” (1981) includes intimate domestic photos of Rebhan’s home life early in her marriage, recording her in-laws, husband, friends and two sons. These include shots of her husband just waking up in his PJs, of her mother-in-law serving him, of her family unglamorously dining together, along with pictures of her babies. One photo of her mother-in-law, “Lill showing off her grandson at the Golden Age Senior Center” (1985), resonates with pride. Gail Rebhan, “What questions do we ask?,” 2024, archival pigment print mounted on aluminum, 22 ½ x 33”. This series, conveying Rebhan’s interest in small changes occurring in the domestic sphere over time, includes four images of a dish rack on sequential days, “Gail’s and Mark’s Dishrack, January 13, 14, 15, 16, 1981.” Two sets of three photos each of her son’s room are both titled, “Room” (2007), taken when he had come home from college. These photos, shot from above, depict a domestic disarray of laptops, computer mouses, cords, disks, pictures, a squirt gun, and trash strewn about. The image is more than just an anthropological in-joke for the parents of adolescent boys. Gail Rebhan, “Macedonia Baptist Church, 5119 River Rd, Bethesda, Maryland,” 2019 (printed 2024), archival pigment print, 33 x 23”. Her series “280 Days, 1983-84,” consists of 280 self-portraits of her ever-growing pregnant self, with some images of her standing in a doorway and others looking in mirrors. These sequential shots, culminating with Rebhan showing off her about-to-give-birth belly, display what was, 40 years ago, a startling boldness about the shape of late pregnancy. It’s a case in point about how what we see literally changes with time. Rebhan also overlays many photos with text that records her personal thoughts. Over her image, “Gray Hair” (1995), of her long unruly hair against a black background, she writes in red, “I am starting to get gray hair. Why does it bother me? Because it makes me look older. What’s wrong with looking older? If I dye my hair I will be giving into what culture dictates about female beauty. Yet I don’t like the way I look with gray streaks. I start looking at other women’s hair color … After much agonizing I decide to dye my hair. No one notices.” Dr. Karen Wilson-Ama’Echefu holding sign designed by Gail Rebhan at the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition rally on the United Nations Day to Eliminate Racism, March 20, 2021, Bethesda, Maryland, 2021 (printed 2024), archival pigment print, 33 x 18 1/2”. Here also are compassionate photos of her elderly father, for whom Rebhan served as care-giver. These include collage-like photos of the many accoutrements of the trade: Depends, a TV remote, various pills, a phone, chocolates, a package of Hebrew National Salami. In this series, titled “Can’t,” the artist also includes text about what her father can no longer do:“Shave, dress himself, take his medication unaided,” and much more. Another series titled “What questions do we ask?" goes right ahead and poses at least some of them. Several large photographs of American flags are overlaid with census questions asked, sequentially, for more than a century, revealing how much our world has changed in 200 years. Questions address disability, education, what language is spoken at home, housing, and race. The 1790 census on race asks, “Number of free White males under 16 years, Number of free White males over 16 years, Number of free White females, Number of other free persons, Number of slaves.” Rebhan’s penchant for activism led her to photograph the project known as the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC). Members of the 105-year-old Macedonia Baptist Church in Bethesda, Maryland have been protesting, along with white supporters, to have the church’s old cemetery dug up from beneath a cement parking lot and building. Brian Farrow wearing t-shirt designed by Gail Rebhan at Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition rally, Bethesda, Maryland, April 28, 2021, 2021 (printed 2024), archival pigment print, 33 x 18 1/2”. A January 8, 2024 Washington Post  article explains, “A long-running dispute over a historic Black cemetery buried beneath a Bethesda parking lot went before the Maryland Supreme Court on Monday … The area was home in the late 19th century to Black families who had worked on Montgomery County’s farms and tobacco plantations since before the Civil War.” (This is just one of many projects nationwide focused on unearthing Black cemeteries and protecting them from development.) The relentless Rebhan has seen her BACC photographs become widely circulated on social media and appear in Black Agenda Report, Black News Tonight, "Montgomery Magazine” NBC News and WTOP news. As she extends her creative interests to the world beyond her personal life, her photos take on a more visible sense of urgency, addressing her need to expose the growing inequities in the world. 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 Lynn Trimble Phoenix Art Museum , Phoenix, Arizona Continuing through July 20, 2025 Charles Gaines, “Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1, Tree #3, Agua Caliente,” 2023, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts, 95 1/8 x 132 1/2 x 6”. All images courtesy © Charles Gaines and Hauser & Wirth . Photo: Keith Lubow. A trio of stainless-steel trees stand within a circular 12-by-16-foot enclosure, where periodic bursts of smoke or fog and light in different colors infuse the interior with vibrant mystery. This ambiguity exudes from Charles Gaines expansive body of work spanning more than five decades. Gaines’ “Greenhouse” (2003-2023) anchors the exhibition, causing the gallery to reverberate with energy created by the artist’s distinct amalgamation of text, color, form, movement, and space. Eight large-scale triptychs from “Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1” (2023) are mounted on the surrounding walls, where they draw us into two worlds, that of the cottonwood trees prevalent in the Arizona landscape, and the rule-based grids that are central to Gaines’ conceptual art.   Approaching the transparent “Greenhouse” from any angle one sees not only the leafless sculptural forms placed inside, but also what lies beyond it. Thus it includes Gaines’ cottonwoods as well as other people making their way through the space, which emphasizes the communal nature of human experience and interdependence within the natural world. Nearby, two monitors convey historical and real-time information on environmental conditions, transforming the installation into a data-driven meditation on climate change while also speaking to the ways technology shapes systems of power. Charles Gaines, “Greenhouse,” 2003-2023, wood, metal, UV printed polycarbonate, stainless steel, electronics, polyester, software, monitors, lights, installation dimensions variable. © Charles Gaines. Photo: Zachary Balber. Beyond the lure of episodic explosions of color and light tied to this data, there is a textual element in the piece that appears more prominent with physical proximity and alludes to the intersections of climate concerns and social justice. Brief selections from W.E.B. DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” appear in black text on several panels of the enclosure. The essay was published in 1935, a few years before Gaines’ birth in Charleston, South Carolina. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, the artist had queries from early childhood, queries that would evolve into deep examinations of representation in society and art.   With “Numbers and Trees: Arizona Trees #1” Gaines continues his work with various species in the context of particular locations, such as pecan trees in the southern U.S. and baobabs in Tanzania. In each region, the trees play a significant role within the ecosystem and additionally have deep connections to history and culture. For the Arizona series, Gaines worked with photographs he’d taken of individual cottonwood trees growing near the San Pedro River close to Sierra Vista, a city just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. As elsewhere, the artist plotted the trees with specific colors and a numbered grid before creating his sequential overlays. Charles Gaines, “Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1, Tree #3, Agua Caliente” (detail), 2023, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts, 95 1/8 x 132 1/2 x 6”. Photo: Keith Lubow. Each work in the “Arizona Series 1” series is titled after a river, creek, wash, or arroyo in Arizona or Utah. Typically found near water, cottonwood trees are known for being adaptive and resilient within a complex habitat that also sustains desert wildlife, including birds that migrate through the region. The trees are also featured in a variety of Indigenous cosmologies. By bringing these cottonwoods found in the borderlands into the museum space, Gaines elevates conversations around federal policies and actions that harm immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and the land.   The recently concluded “Charles Gaines: 1992-2003” overlapped at the museum for several months with the current exhibition. Together the two shows provided a more expansive window into the scope and significance of the artist’s oeuvre. Even so, this intimate glimpse into Gaines’ conceptual and aesthetic rigor and his resulting social and political incisiveness is a compelling entrée into the intersections of social justice and conceptual art. 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 .