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 .

by Jody Zellen Charlie James Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing to May 24, 2025 Nancy Baker Cahill, “Pia Mater VII,” 2024, archival pigment on silk suspended over an archival pigment print on canvas mounted to Dibond, secured with aluminum magnet slat, 47 X 38”. All images courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Nancy Baker Cahill is a Los Angeles-based media artist known for her immersive installations, films, sculptures, digital photographs and technically complex augmented reality (AR) experiences. She came into prominence with “4th wall,” an augmented reality public art platform that "geolocates dynamic visual content to enhance viewers’ perception of historic places or social situations via immersive art experiences." An illuminating aspect of Baker Cahill's practice is how seamlessly she flows between analogue and digital presentations. Though most of her work is rooted in digital technologies, not all of it requires hardware and software to view, as the multiple series of works the comprise “Seismic” attests. The digital prints of the “Pia Maters” series combine two layers of imagery, one on silk and the other on canvas. “Distortions” are abstract collages that juxtapose static printed fragments from Baker Cahill's AR creations with drawn renderings and miscellaneous geometric shapes in a range of colors and textures. “Widows” is a series of wall-based sculptures that cluster torn pieces of painted paper. And in the basement we encounter “Slipstream,” a large-scale installation and projection. It contains organically shaped fragments of ripped graphite on paper drawings that appear like arrays of feathers extending across the wall. The effect is that of a living organism that ebbs and flows in sync with the different hues of an animated projection that maps to these sculptural forms. Nancy Baker Cahill, “Widow III,” 2025, graphite, graphite powder, acrylic, silk, holographic particles, paper, 38 x 39 x 13”. On a modest-size screen is the short video “Carbon 1” (the first in a series of six) which explores themes of "ecological collapse, digital distortion, and cultural instability" as described by the artist. Here, she films oscillating organically shaped expanses of green that echo a botanical landscape that suddenly morph into twisting flaming tornadoes. Images of water, as well as fire are interrupted by flickering pixels that eventually fill the screen to become digital noise that signifies rampant environmental destruction.    Nancy Baker Cahill, “Slipstream,” 2025, installation of torn and reassembled drawings, dimensions variable. Baker Cahill examines topics ranging from ecological concepts and brain functionality, to climate change and ecofeminism. She is a master at creating algorithms that recalibrate natural phenomena and transform them into vivid abstractions. Out of her experiments in VR Baker Cahill redefines how we visualize three-dimensional space. From that digital point of origination she began to tear apart her drawings and fashion them into sculptures, which became models for a new generation of VR. The “Widows” are examples of this process — graphite drawings that become floral assemblages protruding from the wall. Joining together in “Slipstream” they simultaneously become both static and dynamic forms. Nancy Baker Cahill, “Distortions II,” 2025, graphite, tape, holographic paper, lucite, photographs, AI-generated imagery, paper on aluminum, 24 x 18”. The seven works that comprise the series “Pia Mater,” named for the delicate innermost layer of membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, are combinations of two vibrant digital prints. Each piece is encased in custom armature where the background image — a pigment print on canvas — is overlaid with an identical image printed on silk. There are subtle differences in the images because of the materials on which they are printed. Slight as they are, these variations express the relationship between tenuous states of being and the delicate, as well as resilient nature of the brain. They convey geological associations in which interlocking colorful planes are at once atmospheric and dreamlike. The most compelling works here, the “Distortions,” also tend to be the simplest. These intimate collages unify the varied facets of her practice. In them, she cuts apart and reassembles fragments from drawings, AR generated imagery, as well as holographic paper. Though they are analog, they evoke the more dynamic aspects of Baker Cahill's virtual works. The aesthetic range of ”Seismic” follows this dynamic. While sophisticated algorithms and complex concepts drive the work, the pleasure comes from seeing the visual engulf the technological. 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 Liz Goldner Unveil Gallery , Irvine, California Continuing to May 30, 2025 Jean Lowe, “Planned Community,” 2004, oil on unstretched canvas, 120 x 170”. All images courtesy of the artist and Unveil Gallery, Irvine. In an era when reality is often contradicted by the words and actions by our so-called leaders, Jean Lowe’s “Spoiler Alert,” with its papier-mâché potted plants, books and even a fire extinguisher becomes the perfect show and tell.   Lowe grew up in the Bay Area with the freedom to explore a multitude of artistic endeavors, including sneaking into the empty Varsity Theater in downtown Palo Alta to mount improvised performances. She was also influenced by her father, a psychiatrist who, Lowe says, inspired her “to look around the back sides of issues or accepted norms.” When she told her dad that she was majoring in art at UC Berkeley, he said, “Oh darling, what for?” Her response was, “How do I make art in a way that’s not purely self-indulgent?”   Jean Lowe, “POW Carpet,” 2020, housepaint on canvas, 154 x 83”. In graduate school at UC San Diego, Lowe began exploring in her artwork “important issues.” These included “relationships with other species,” environmental concerns, hypocrisy, and pretension. As a working artist, “I’ve explored the same material consistently but from constantly shifting angles and with different formal approaches,” she explains. Self-described as a “conceptual/decorative multimedia” artist, in “Spoiler Alert” her figurative talents are on display in paintings, sculptures, and installations. Jean Lowe, “Bouquet in Shallow Basket,” 2024, casein enamel on papier-mache, 14 x 18 x 14”. One important aspect of Lowe’s work is her anti-Eurocentric perspective. She challenges centuries-old norms of how White people and their environs were depicted. The 10-foot wide “Planned Community” (2004) is a parody of 17th century Dutch landscape paintings. Rather than depicting windmills and other traditionally European scenes, she portrays our industrial expansion and suburban sprawl. That sprawl takes place beneath the kind of vast, luminous sky often seen in those Dutch antecedents. Jean Lowe, “Self Help (Rekindling Your Passion),” 2016, casein, ink-jet print on polymetal, 54 x 37 1/2”. Lowe’s red, blue, and yellow painting “POW Carpet” (2020) was inspired by decorative rugs she has seen in auction catalogs. A closer look reveals that its intricate design is created with numerous abstract images, which usurp our expectations of what a rug should look like. The viewer is also invited to walk on the painted rug, an action that would ordinarily be an act of aesthetic blasphemy. The apparently realistic “Bouquet in Shallow Basket” (2024) is made of papier- mâché, one of Lowe’s favorite creative mediums. Each of her two colorful 2025 “Nature Morte” florals (appropriating traditional paintings) are painted with casein on paper that is besmirched by its accompaniment with 100-plus years old newspaper clippings. They are titled “Swede Fleeing Fire” and “Bear Attack.”   The pieces de resistance  here are several papier-mâché books, each satirizing the ever-popular genre of self-help books. Several are humorously titled, “Rekindling Your Passion for … What Could Have Been, Meaningless Sex, Fatty Foods, Personal Growth, Perseverance and Polite Conversation.” Several others are titled, “Happiness is … A Nipple, A Cupcake, A Car, Family and a White Picket Fence, Second Chance and The Moment.” The point is that artmaking, when poking fun at our insecurities, can elevate us to a higher understanding of ourselves and our place in the world — and do so far more than the self-help books they parody.   Jean Lowe, ”Small Fire Extinguisher,” 2022, casein on papier maché, 7 x 16 x 3 1/2”. Lowe’s three-dimensional papier-mâché fire extinguisher is so realistic that we might easily pass it by. But look closely and it is covered with squiggly drawings and ersatz writings, mocking the instructions on a real fire extinguisher. The artwork thus becomes a metaphor for the message of overall protection of Constitutional rights by our government, especially while so many protective safeguards, from health agencies, to protection of our food and air, to surveillance of foreign threats are being dismantled.   Few recent art shows have so cleverly succeeded in deconstructing the paradigms of our current politics. “Spoiler Alert” not only entertains and delights, but it also offers a serious response to the brazen lies and corruption being committed in broad daylight. 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 John Zotos Ro2 Gallery , Dallas, Texas Continuing through May 17, 2025   Yasuyo Maruyama, “Ai 2,” 2021, oil on panel, 16 x 16 x 2”. All images courtesy of the artist and Ro2 Art, Dallas. “Fragments of Identity” provides a selection of Yasuyo Maruyama’s paintings executed between 2020 and 2025.  As such, they summarize her grappling with portraiture over those five years, a period bookended by a devastating pandemic and the dawn of an authoritarian regime in Washington.  Yasuyo Maruyama, “Misaki 2,” 2020, oil on wood panel, 16 x 16 x 2”. In good interpretive fashion, the notion of “identity” is as full of currently unresolvable political significance as it is suggestive of the fact that parts and fragments ultimately comprise a unified whole. This is reflected in the totality of each composite image that Maruyama assembles from numerous photographs of her subjects, resulting in a hyper-realistic representation rooted in the distillation of her source material. The artist’s aesthetic celebrates pluralism genuinely, over and above the kind of one-dimensional depiction common to both politics and popular culture.  Maruyama’s paintings are executed in painstaking detail with traditional Japanese artisanal tools. She overlays pigment and varnish in many layers in order to achieve the remarkable flesh tones and hues that are her trademark signifiers. These technical abilities are brought to bear on themes that wrestle with the ambiguity between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.  The artist’s iconography is informed by anime and manga, references to a technologically augmented world infused with virtual reality — a world heading our way fast.    Yasuyo Maruyama, “Sakiko 3,” 2021, oil on wood panel, 47 x 47”. The images are intensely vibrant and visually arresting. Each is an extreme close-up of head and neck, where the top of the image crops the head and leads the eye in with the subject’s eyes. Usually featured against a monochromatic background, the tight visual focus compresses the subject within a square frame format that always takes us straight to the sitter’s eyes. It is here that the artist spends most of her time rendering volume and depth, in contrast to the otherwise flat surfaces and clean lines that define the other facial features. This is clearly evident in “Natsuki 3,” where, in an image featuring flesh tones, a black background, and pink lips, the otherworldly eyes sparkle like emeralds. They float as if surrounded by a play of reflections that issues from somewhere beyond the frame, making the subject feel like an artificial being, a cyborg, beyond the merely human.    “Karin” is the rare exception. Here the eyes seem to suggest something beyond the frame of the image. Upon close inspection they reveal a street scene, a link to a social reality that the artist hints does actually exist beyond her usual visual puzzles. The eyes are still the most important thematic device in that they get beyond just representing individuation within the theme of identity.   Yasuyo Maruyama, “Chiemi,” 2021, oil on wood panel, 47 x 47”. Cinematic precedents suggest that the eyes signify the artificial aspect of AI, as depicted in the “Ghost in the Shell” films or by the replicants in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” More recent examples in the genre, such as the androids known as ‘hosts’ in the “Westworld” series, or the AI character in Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina,” conceal the nature of the machines by opting for a naturalistic depiction of the eyes. With Maruyama, if the eyes are too real she loses what elevates the nature of her sitter’s portraits in the first place. By intertwining both ends of the spectrum, she aspires toward redefining beauty itself, and therefore, reclaiming truth during an era intent on distorting it. John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Davis S. Rubin Blum Gallery , Culver City, California Continues through May 17, 2025 Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1949, gouache and graphite on paper, 17 1/8 x 21 5/8 x 1 1/2”. All images courtesy of © The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of The Trust and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York. Photo: Evan Walsh Growing up in a Creole family in Oakland in the 1920s and ‘30s, Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was encouraged by his mother — a descendent of African slaves whose husband was of mixed race — to pass for White. After all, he and his brother, fellow artist Warrington Colescott (1921-2018), were both light skinned, so why should they have to face the prejudices and abuses heaped upon Black folks if they could avoid them? It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, when the younger Colescott brother was in his 40s, that he began to embrace his African heritage. While this self-awareness may have been propelled to some extent by the Civil Rights Movement, his shift in identity was largely the result of encounters with Egyptian art and culture during visits to Cairo from 1964 to ’67. Since representing the U.S. at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he has been widely acclaimed for his mature large scale paintings satirizing racism and the stereotyping of Blacks. Robert Colescott, “KiNDRED ONE,” c. 1964, oil, graphite, and collage element on canvas, 71 1/4 x 47 7/8 x 1 7/8”. But that is not the focus, at least the main focus of this exhibition. It was curated by L.A. artist Umar Rashid with the intention of viewing Colescott as the African trickster god Anansi, an idea that the curator believes to be an underlying characteristic of all of the work. With only 3 of the 30 exhibited works dating later than 1978, however, the show is more, and more importantly, an art historian’s treasure trove that sheds light on the relationship between Colescott’s art and his metamorphosis. As early as 1949, in fact, Colescott was already considering race as a subject. Astutely aware of recent developments in modern art, he painted a Cubist composition in which he cleverly immersed what appear to be hooded Ku Klux Klansmen in an abstraction of geometric planes. This was about 20 years after Philip Guston portrayed a KKK member in a Social Realist painting, and another 20 before Guston would produce similar imagery in his now celebrated abandonment of Abstract Expressionism. Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1976, collaged photograph on wrapping paper mounted on backing board, 23 5/8 x 34 1/8 x 1 3/4”. Encoded racial content is also present in Colescott’s 1955 Abstract Expressionist pastel drawing, where the subject is watermelons, a common racist trope referring to Blacks. Thirty years later he painted a watermelon in one of his many reinterpretations of works from art history, “Les Demoiselles de Alabama Vestidas” (1985, not in this exhibition ). Robert Colescott, “The Siamese Twins,” c. 1976, acrylic on canvas with wooden cutouts, 100 1/2 x 73 5/8 x 1 7/8”. Photo: Josh White. Like many other artists working in the Bay Area during the 1950s, Colescott explored the blending of Abstract Expressionist brushwork with traditional figurative subject matter. This approach became known as the Bay Area Figurative School style, and is most evident here in “Cloud Watch” (1963). Its subject of a woman looking out a window was a one explored at the time by Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Additionally, the slender, elongated bodies of nude female figures depicted in “Untitled” (c. 1963) and “KiNDRED ONE” (c. 1964) display striking parallels to contemporaneous works by Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira, but with a significant distinction. While Neri and Oliveira painted human flesh in arbitrary colors, Colescott opted for a shade of tan that approximated his own skin tone. Keep in mind that he did these works some 25 years before the identity aesthetics that prevailed in the 1990s in works such as Byron Kim’s geometric abstractions based on skin colors. In “KiNDRED ONE” Colescott reinforces the idea that this woman is a light-skinned Black by exaggerating the jet-blackness of her pubic hair, and by literally nailing a Whiteface mask over her face. This not-so-subtle commentary on the racist convention of Whites wearing Blackface make-up would reemerge in iconic later works (again, not part of this exhibition) such as the hilarious “ Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White ” (1980), in which the movie stars have essentially switched skin colors. Robert Colescott, ”OLYMPiA’S FOUNTAiN,” 2000, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 x 1 7/8”. Colescott’s signature narrative format emerged as early as 1970, and is represented here by an untitled painting that shows Europeans invading Africa and confronting the natives. Other works from the ‘70s reveal a variety of approaches that are as witty as the subsequent ones for which Colescott became best known. Two standouts from around 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, are unconventional self-portraits. In one, Colescott took a sheet of wrapping paper imprinted with a grid of photographic portraits of U.S. presidents and superimposed a photo of himself over one of the modules — an omen of the later arrival of Barack Obama. In the other, “The Siamese Twins,” Colescott shows himself peering through a window at a scene involving Siamese twins (male and female). Attached to one another by their hair, they are shown struggling to move in opposite directions. While it is reasonable to assume that Colescott was identifying with the twins as an “other,” the painting may also have been motivated by his split with his older brother (the two never spoke again after Colescott declared himself African American), or by a rocky relationship with his spouse at the time. By the 1980s Colescott was concentrating on large-scale satires painted with thick gestural brushwork in the Bay Area tradition. The latest work in the exhibition, “OLYMPiA’S FOUNTAiN” (2000), is a dazzling, colorful example of his late style. It is both a reinterpretation of Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) and a variation on an earlier revision of the same art historical classic that Colescott painted around 1959. In the later version, the black-skinned maid is more prominent than the white-skinned courtesan. While metaphorically reflecting Colescott’s identity transformation, the painting is also a compelling affirmation of DEI. In that regard, it should come as no surprise if Colescott’s paintings are soon banned from federal museums as degenerate art. 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 Gallery 110 , Seattle, Washington Continuing to May 31, 2025 Li Turner, “Barbie in the Bullring,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, 30” X 24”. All images courtesy of Gallery 110, Seattle. All photos: Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction. In the blizzard of social and political turmoil we now face every day, it is not surprising that artists are increasingly turning to subjects that express protest, resistance and outrage. That being the case, it’s necessary to identify those artists who have been pursuing the topic of injustice all along. Li Turner, for instance, has long committed to social justice, as her exhibit “Facing Down Systemic Greed and Other Offenses” demonstrates. The show addresses an extraordinary range of such topics and in so doing also proves that aesthetic values need not be jettisoned to make points about wrong-headed social attitudes and long-standing tropes of prejudice and sexism. Li Turner, “Keys to Equality,” 2025, watercolor & gouache, 15 1/2 x 19”. In the Pacific Northwest, a leading beacon for Turner and many others concerned with how to reconcile aesthetic values with urgent social intentions was Jacob Lawrence. Following his 1970 move to the University of Washington School of Art (when he simply could not get hired on the East Coast), Lawrence’s use of flattened space, cubist forms, close-ranging colors, and the complete spectrum of historical and contemporary social issues became a paradigm. We see Lawrence’s influence flowering in Turner’s art, as well as in other artists such as Barbara Earl Thomas, Ronald Hall, Gene Gentry McMahon, Robert Colescott, and Roger Shimomura. Li Turner, “Laundry Day & Tanks Don’t Mix,” 2025, watercolor and gouache, 15 1/4 x 21 1/4”. Turner’s preference for small scale also echoes Lawrence, as does her use of opaque gouache and watercolor media. One Lawrence hallmark that attracted the men who hired him at the University was his intuition for perfect placement and composition. Turner’s careful positioning of her figures and their nestling of colors recall the Harlem master, but her palette is wider and more varied. Both formal qualities — composition and color — combine to reinforce her tightly focused subject matter. Turner, who began as a dancer and later studied art at the University of Utah and UC Berkeley, here assembles a panoply of current issues. She addresses the challenge head-on to artists seeking to voice strong opinions on a particular challenge: how to avoid work becoming dated if and when the issue is solved or obviated. Turner’s fresh approach to each picture gives reason to believe her overall body of work will hold up over time. Li Turner, “Annie Oakley and Friends Shoot Down Oppression,” 2019, watercolor and gouache, 18” X 18”. Subtlety and indirection are two tools with which Turner address the natural decay in interest resulting from earnest overkill. For example, in “Laundry Day & Tanks Don’t Mix” (2025) a red-and-pink brick wall separates the upper and lower halves of the composition, as well as foregrounding the woman hanging clothes on a line. At the top, in the distance, tanks encroach. With an ameliorating humor, “Annie Oakley and Friends” (2019) are shooting down corsets on a city’s outskirts, divided by a white picket fence revealing suffragettes and protesters at the base. Similarly, with their backs to the viewer, “Angela Davis, Wilma Mankiller and Gloria Steinem Bay at the Moon” (2019) encases the trio of feminist icons in a big yellow circle. As with Lawrence, real-life historical figures are honored with heroic evocations. Two large works featuring Barbie — a not-quite-real-life historical figure — place the iconic doll in unexpected settings. “Barbie in the Bullring” (2018) is both celebratory and exploitative with its howling crowd of men who may be seen as both cheering and leering. Bikini-clad Barbie is frozen in place, awaiting the release of the bull. Barbie also appears before a shop window in the similarly fraught “#Me, Too” (2018). Looking on are two men, one in a long coat exposing himself to her, the other ogling at the whole ugly spectacle while safely tucked into the lower right-hand corner. The largest canvas here is two by three feet in size. It suggests the potential benefit of expanding the size of her work, which too often feels constrained by its intimate size. Li Turner, “Mother Earth Weeps as the World Fights for Life,” 2025, watercolor & gouache, 16” x 16”. Taking on environmentalism, “Mother Earth Weeps as the World Fights for Life” (2025) is an allegorical image of a nude crouching with long hair concealing her face. She is posed astride three globes: a world map, three infants, and three nautilus seashells. Against a pale blue sky, Turner displays an ability to create visual myths of considerable conviction.  In “Keys to Equality” (2025) a reclining reader is surrounded by tall stacks of books that include titles by women authors such as de Beauvoir, Alcott, Brontë, Cather, and Dorothy Parker. They offer literary parallels to the artist’s efforts, summed up by Emily Dickinson’s directive: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In the painting’s lower left corner, veiled and kneeling Muslim women are immersed in reading books. Now banned from access to education in Afghanistan, their plight is recognized and pointed out by Turner. Thanks to simplified compositions and careful choices of subject, there is little that Turner has left out of her probing gaze at today’s world. 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 .