by Andy Brumer Regen Projects , Los Angeles, California Continuing through October 25, 2025 Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#25-25),” 2025, oil and spray paint on canvas, 63 1/8 x 63 1/8 x 2 1/8”. All images courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles. [Editor’s Note: Brumer and his family joined thousands of victims of the Altadena fire in January. The recovery of some semblance of normal life has been a shared struggle in the months since. Mr. Brumer’s review of Rebecca Morris’ exhibition lends testimony to our resiliency and also to the fundamental importance of visual art to human experience and the discourse that takes place in that special, I dare say privileged realm of existence. So welcome back Andy, we hope it’s the beginning of a new start for you.] L.A.-based artist Rebecca Morris has titled this exhibition “#34,” a number that marks that many one-person shows over the course of her 30-year painting career. Such a numerical title might serve to discourage us from devising pat, discursively based associations with the paintings. Such a prosaic interpretation of Morris’ paintings could only stifle their spatial life source and protean power. Propelled by the imagination alone, these abstract works aim at the heart and the psyche. This is in part due to the playfulness of the images. Add the organic tensions that blossom into fully felt forms; it’s an interesting mix. Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#06-25),” 2025, oil and spray paint on canvas, 80 1/4 x 80 x 2 1/8”. Morris is associated with Casualism, a 21st-century trend that uses bold color schemes in (often) unbalanced compositions that challenge conventional notions of finished or “beautiful” art. The work here, however, is anything but casually wrought. Her canvases display their own coherent musculature united ironically through clunky components. Yet the canvasses never fail to resolve themselves into soft, graceful compositions that both challenge and please the eye.   A musical analogy might link Morris’ visual improvisations with the seductive off-kilter piano playing of the legendary jazz musician Thelonius Monk, while poetry lovers could associate Morris’ quilt-like stitching together of uneven fragmented sectionals to the lapidary shavings and palimpsest-like erasures of Robert Creeley’s poems. Morris has stated her preference to work on several paintings at the same time, laying each flat out on the studio floor. As each work evolves, she notes and nurses one painting’s influence upon or bleeding into another. Morris has also stated that she chose sizes that she felt took advantage of each sun-lit gallery wall in mind. The show turns the entire exhibition space into a glimmering architectural jewel box. Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#04-25),” 2025, oil and spray paint on canvas, 94 x 83 1/8 x 2 1/8”. The often awkwardly shaped components of each painting push and pull at each other in different directions with a kinetic energy suggestive of living organisms, of the random swirling of stormy weather, of a ballet dancer’s leaps and catches, or of the unscripted sprints, tackles, throws and tumbles of a football game.  “Untitled (#06-25)” centers a large silver egg shape, filled as if a snow globe with cell-like splotches surrounded by pieces of cell-shaped units intent on fertilizing it. Other works point to more geologic and cosmic-zodiacal spaces.   “Untitled (#04-25)”   is laced with gold-leafed paint built up into impasto lines and then layered in a broken grid, itself layered over a night-black backdrop that is populated in turn with white cloud-like puffs and a grayish, nebula-like film. The scheme playfully connects the sections of the work into fanciful “constellations”, while the gold leaf (and silver leaf paint elsewhere) spiritualizes the painting as if it were a Medieval or Renaissance altarpiece. Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#27-25,),” 2025, oil and spray paint on canvas, 98 1/4 x 88 x 2 1/8”. Crafty and soft, calming and child-like, yet also opulent, sharp and sophisticated, Morris’ work resonates with a very mature sense of animated joy. Many of the small squares and rectangular sections painted within the artist’s larger canvases serve as compact proscenium-like stages upon which fancifully masked inhuman characters vigorously converse and dance. Like pieces of large jigsaw puzzles struggling to coalesce into pictorial wholeness, Morris’ pictorial elements subversively pull themselves further apart in explosive fissions that embrace and honor the ongoing frisson of life. Andy Brumer  is a poet, book reviewer and art writer, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, Artweek, Artscene, Visual Art Source and many other publications. His latest book of poetry, with drawings by Joseph Slusky, is Below Understanding. He also writes about golf.

Commentary by Bill Lasarow "We like to say we gave artists 'the freedom to fail.' Good research requires failure. All too often, market concerns prevail over experimentation. My mantra has been to always choose artists over art! Art is a precious product of human experience, not a commodity. And, artists are keepers of an elusive fire. ” —Griff Williams, Gallery 16 , San Francisco Alison Saar, “Uproot” exhibition installation view, 2023. L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California. We do mourn the occasional closure of a gallery whose exhibition program we have respected and covered. Two recent closures in Los Angeles, Blum Gallery and L.A. Louver Gallery, took place for very different reasons, neither of which was due to business failure. In the first case owner Tim Blum cited the rigors of sustaining an elite international program as leading to personal burnout. L.A. Louver announced that it is wrapping up fifty years of exhibitions in its iconic Venice beach location (Private showings there and at its Adams district warehouse will carry on for a time) Louver’s founder, Peter Goulds, 77, is not, by his own account, retiring, although he is well past retirement age. But in the art world a normal retirement age does not apply. Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery closed this past spring because at age 91 Hoffman felt it was time. But her hand is still in the game. Her knowledge and connections in and well beyond Chicago’’s art world will keep her busy enough. All have cited the expense and stress of an art fair driven environment, one that forces emerging galleries to strive to reach the top echelons of the art world and then work tirelessly to stay there. Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1970, acrylic on canvas, 79 x 98 1/8 x 1 5/8”. Courtesy of Blum Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Walsh. A different case is San Francisco’s Gallery 16, which lost its lease after 32 years in operation. This may or may not signal the end of the road for owner Griff Williams’ gallery career, but it has allowed him this moment to encapsulate the ethos that drove his … business. I would not count Gallery 16 as imposing like any of the three examples cited here, but it has long been a credible and, in many quarters, esteemed player. Ever since Visual Art Source partnered in the relaunch of SquareCylinder, we have argued that it is this very ethos of honesty and devotion that offers the Bay Area its best art world strategy as the international art market continues to focus on art fair sales — and networking — and art auction prices serve as the yardstick for success. Virtually no one in the art world will insist that aesthetic quality and price are direct corollaries of one another. But immersion in the international art market, saturated as it may be with high quality art, creates that clear impression. Jacob Hashimoto, “Nothing seemed to anger them anymore,” 2021, bamboo, acrylic, paper, wood and Dacron, 54 476 x 8 1/4”. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Creativity draws a straight line to experimentation, and experimentation in visual art is not scientific, it is aesthetic. Aesthetic innovation is the ongoing result of a process that is intuitive in a way that scientific innovation cannot be (intuition plays a crucial role in the scientific process as well, but in a very different way, as many articles and books attest). Points of reference narrowly drawn from art history are also broadly drawn from virtually any discipline you care to name. Such points frequently appear to have at most a tangential relation to the objects we see on exhibit, and that is an approach that we celebrate even when we critique much of it as too obvious or too obscure. To belittle that process as lacking in the rigor and purpose of scientific or scholarly research is to fail to recognize the beating heart of what it is to be an artist. The required discipline and refinement belies this misunderstanding. The problem for the Bay Area and a handful of other important second-tier cities around the world that play similar roles in the art world is that they figure at most only marginally in the international art market. The Big Money in art is most clearly seen in that system of art fairs and auction houses whose numbers are often what produce headlines in the mainstream media and prompt the first conversations at exhibition openings. The exhibitions presented at a gallery’s bricks-and-mortar home base are still necessary to its success, but today are insufficiently important without those other pieces to be successful on their own. Williams is also correct to peg artists as “keepers of an elusive flame.” Aesthetics is by definition elusive. It is personal for a serious artist to strike out in a given creative direction. But any who are committed to exhibiting new work must accept that the personal at some point becomes public. At that point the enterprise is transformed from private reflection to public communication. The onus of personal experience is transferred to everyone that attends an exhibition. Rex Ray, “Acroposwa,” 2013, painted and cut paper on oil on linen, 50 x 76”. Courtesy of Gallery 16, San Francisco. In science and other disciplines, as progress is made questions of effectiveness and accuracy narrow. With art the opposite is true. As we progress more new possibilities open up, and what the receiving eye takes in becomes property of the viewer. That transaction is not explained by sale prices or the names of institutional and individual collectors according to an industry hierarchy. It is explained by the connection between the artist and the viewer, a connection that is catalyzed by the work of art. And that is where the elusive fire lives. Bill Lasarow , Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the  Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles  (1987); and  Visual Art Source  (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain . In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder  with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.

by Liz Goldner UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology , Irvine, California Continuing through October 11, 2025 Great Park Gallery , Irvine, California October 26 to December 28, 2025 Various installations at UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology, 2000–2024. All images courtesy of the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, California. The Beall Center, founded in 2000 at UC Irvine, has blazed a path into digital media art in the United States and beyond, all the while engaging visitors with a variety of non-traditional approaches. Its exhibitions embrace computational media and the impact of technology on society, among other hi-tech topics. Exploring the relationship between the arts, science and engineering, the Beall’s shows address how technology can be used to create new forms of art. Considering the depth, complexity and variety of the dozens of exhibitions mounted at the Beall over 25 years, the curators of the show — longtime Center director David Familian and frequent Beall curator Gabriel Tolson — included detailed, artistically wrought posters for every show held there. That daunting, yet well-executed task provides more than 15,000 words of text and numerous photos, affording techno geeks the opportunity to delve into the vicissitudes of tech-driven interdisciplinary art. R. Luke DuBois, September 29, 2018 to February 2, 2019. The Beall’s inaugural exhibition, “SHIFT-CTRL” (2000), examined the culture of video and computer games and other new technologies that were then helping to alter social systems. The show included artworks created specifically as games, those that appropriated game-like metaphors and design principles, stand-alone games and networked games. But the exhibition went further, displaying a plethora of surprising gaming effects, including the convergence of games with fiction and art, shifts in representation and the deployment of games, the rise of cheating and hacking, the reevaluation of the win-lose dichotomy, and the emergence of immersive role-playing and cooperative relationships as central to gameplay. “SHIFT-CTRL’s” examination of games and their effects on our lives 25 years ago has proved to be prescient today, considering the sometimes-dark internet world that so many Gen Z’s appear to inhabit. Eighteen years later, “R. Luke DuBois: Music into Data::Data into Music” (2018-2019) was a multidisciplinary show detailing how videos can be manipulated to sound otherworldly and/or cacophonous, thereby addressing the deluge of sensory ephemera we are constantly exposed to. DuBois, an artist-musician who works with IT platforms in music, processed sound and video to depict time-lapse photography or music (contained within videos) that is slowed down. His video “Vertical Music (for 12 musicians filmed at high speed)” featured musicians playing a chamber piece composed by DuBois, with each player recorded separately. The videos were then slowed down, resulting in nuanced concentration by the performers, along with a sound that borders on the surreal. The poster of the exhibition explains that Dubois’ interest in language manipulation and his intense political reflection adjoin his approach to translating images into sounds and sounds into images using what were then technologically advanced tools. His works helped redefine what is considered interactive art. Ian Ingram, October 9, 2021 to March 5, 2022. “American Monument” (2019-2020) was a profoundly political exhibition, related to explosive times in our county during the first Trump administration. The show explicitly “examined the cultural conditions under which Black Americans lose their lives to police brutality." The display began on the grounds outside the Center, where an installation was imprinted with the names of 22 African Americans who had lost their lives to police brutality since the late 1990s. The grounds also included wind chimes, representing flowing water, and a ground cover of various red hued plants.  In the galleries, 22 turntables on pedestals formed the core of the exhibition, with each turntable featuring an audio recording, representing one murdered victim, while containing police reports, court transcripts, witness testimonials and audios of bystanders. A second gallery displayed 22 large metal boxes containing legal documents, one for each murder. Visitors were welcome to open the boxes and read the documents. “Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art,”January 28, 2023 to April 29, 2023. Another compelling show, “Ian Ingram” (2021-2022), featured work that the artist referred to as “animal morphology, robotic avatars, interspecies communication and technology in natural environments.” The 21 pieces in the exhibition involved 14 robots — all appropriating animal forms and behavior — that Ingram built and filmed over 20 years in the high, desolate landscapes of treeless arctic terrain; in city streets, parks and ponds; and in back-country lakes and mountains. Indeed, much of his work focuses on synanthropic animals, or on those most closely tied to ourselves and our habitations. As wall labels in the show explained, “Ingram’s robots were often designed to function similarly when their subjects appeared on the scene …The result was a collection of robotic objects that get excited when they sense a rat.” “Objects of Wonder,” October 03, 2015 to January 23, 2016. Presenting this compilation of past exhibitions makes for a wide-ranging exploration of the evolving field of art as it intersects with technology. This retrospective look at the Beall’s first quarter-century sets a high bar and a helpful starting point for the coming years’ aesthetic investigations. 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 Dallas Museum of Art , Dallas, Texas Continuing through January 18, 2026 Yayoi Kusama, “All the Eternal Love I have for the Pumpkins” (detail views), Infinity Mirror Room, 2016, wood, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED, 115 1/8 x 163 3/8 x 163 3/8” Images courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, and © Yayoi Kusama. For well over seven decades Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) has reinvented herself time and again. Up to the present day Kusama has engaged with major currents in post-war art that range from painting, cinema, fashion, performance art and sculpture, to the fabrication of hermetic installations aimed at a totality of vision. The centerpiece of this exhibition is an installation titled “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins,” one of her perception-challenging infinity rooms lined floor to ceiling with mirrors that activate whatever she chooses to place within the space. Of course, she understands one thing from the beginning: the conceit that completes the work always remains with the viewer, who must step inside to activate it. The exhibition includes a timeline outlining Kusama’s career, along with archival documentary photography that forms an overview of her varied artistic practice, complete with milestones in time that augment our total experience.  Dated 2016, “All the Eternal Love I Have for Pumpkins” piece entered the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art the following year, and is the only pumpkin themed mirror room in a North American museum.  Kusama’s first Infinity Mirror Room, “Phalli’s Field,” debuted in 1965 during a seminal moment where she expanded upon her performance-based practices through engagement with perceptual experience itself. This, combined with her investigation of the pumpkin motif in the late 70’s, ideally inform the design of the infinity room on view here. For Kusama, pumpkins are a psychic regression related to feelings of comfort experienced as a child during the war. They reference fields of kabocha pumpkins in Japan that the artist believes radiate calm, serenity, and a spiritual infinitude. Over the years they have also assumed a status in her work akin to a self-portrait.     Each of the over seven hundred acrylic pumpkins inside the room is painted yellow and adorned with black polka dots. Not only do they reference her early abstract paintings, the dots underscore her obsession with pattern and repetition as something meditative and soothing. The infinity room amplifies this quality with the mirrors that line every square inch of the box-like interior of the piece, propelling the imagery into a limitless space with no hint of a vanishing point.  From the outside, the room is a white cube, around the size of a small storage shed, with a single door on one of the sides.  There’s only room for two people at a time, plus a museum attendant wedged in as an annoying security measure. Upon entering the space one walks into a rectangular pathway that reaches the center of the room such that a horseshoe surrounds it. Reminiscent of a stage proscenium, this is the area occupied by the pumpkins. Here one becomes a lone observer taking in Kusama’s visual pleasure show like a kaleidoscopic head-trip.  This piece is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre. Most of her other infinity rooms are larger in scale so as to allow us to walk around freely. Sometimes these other pieces feature an exit at the other end, so the flow operates on both an interactive and kinetic register. However stimulating this may sound, the experience inside the room is still and calm, and one comes away with the wonder and joy of an astronomer who has just found a new galaxy. John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Jody Zellen The Brick , Los Angeles, California Continuing through September 20, 2025 Nancy Buchanan, “ Fallout from the Nuclear Family” (detail), 1980, installation with book of excerpts and archival photos. All images courtesy of the artist and The Brick, Los Angeles. Photos: Natalie Weis/Hyperallergic. I first encountered Nancy Buchanan's work in 1985 in “The Family as Subject Matter,” a group exhibition curated for The Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC by its then-director, Jock Reynolds. Buchanan exhibited work about her father, the nuclear physicist Louis N. Ridenour who passed away in 1959 when Buchanan was just 13. After inheriting the family archives she investigated both the public and private life of her father and created the multi-volume work, “Fallout from the Nuclear Family” (1980). Through redacted texts from FBI files and personal documents, Buchanan elucidated the complicated and contradictory aspects of the life of a nuclear scientist during the Cold War.  Text, image, history, personal artifacts, narrative, storytelling and collage have continued to be at the root of Buchanan's nuanced career, and in this retrospective exhibition “Truthfully,” we experience the full breadth of her practice. Refusing to be pigeon-holed as this or that kind of artist, Buchanan has never been wedded to a single medium. Throughout her six-decade career she has worked in performance, video, digital art, and installation, in addition to creating collages, drawings and paintings. She has also collaborated with numerous artists, including Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara T. Smith, Chris Burden, and Paul McCarthy earlier in her career, and more with Carolyn Potter, Cynthia Maughan, and Laura Owens. Owens co-curated this survey together with The Brick’s Catherine Taft. Nancy Buchanan, “Security,” 1987, installation with file folders, photos, map pins, and documents. The disparate subjects that Buchanan has explored are often culled topically from what was happening locally and globally at the time. She was not only involved early on with the women's movement, but also was (and still is) politically active in the anti-war movement, as well as in Black Lives Matter. Aesthetics and political concerns intermingle throughout her different projects and are almost always filtered through a personal lens. A statement on her website makes this explicit: "Buchanan uses various media to bring social realities into view, while grounded in the observation of a lived history." Given that, an atmosphere of celebration surrounds the diverse aspects of her practice. With over 100 pieces created since the late 1960s, the show is loosely divided into sections: early years, hair, interiors, bestiary, consumption, development & ruins, the state & the self. It also includes a reading room. Early works are presented in vitrines as ephemera and documentation, when the young artist explored themes of intimacy and sexuality.   Nancy Buchanan, “Wolfwoman.” Image courtesy of artist. Buchanan’s skills as a draftswoman are apparent in pieces like “Hair portrait white on black” (2013), a close-cropped delicate white pencil on black paper drawing that focuses on strands of flowing hair on the back of a faceless head. This work is presented alongside “Untitled (Hair Room)” (1973/2025), a work first conceived in 1973 but presented here for the first time. It consists of a closet-sized room from which strands of synthetic hair dangle from the ceiling. Buchanan delights in the sensations evoked when the faux strands touch one’s skin. What is most satisfying about the exhibition is how the different materials and processes of working come together to define her as a complex individual, not just a complex artist. Her drawings of dog toys (something of an homage to Mike Kelley) and her portraits of endangered species become a meditation on loss. Collages like “Saving Time” (2017) or “Time Out”  (2017) are about excess. Drawings and paintings such as “Art in the Park 2” (2024) and “Gaza” (2025) speak to the urgency of destruction and ruin. Still from Nancy Buchanan, still from “These Creatures,” 1979, single-channel video, duration: 1 minute. Nancy Buchanan, Page from “Criss Cross Double Cross,” Issue 1, 1976. Buchanan looks to the past as well as the present. Her pieces investigate dreams, disasters, nature, and the changing urban environment. She is dead serious about the current political climate, whatever it happens to be, as in “American Dream #6 Media Nightmare” (1987). Yet her works also display a keen wit. It is hard not to smile at the toy lips and teeth that appear in the “Mouthpiece” photos of 1985. “Security” and the aforementioned “Fallout From the Nuclear Family” are installations from the 1980s that juxtapose the personal and political, as Buchanan confronts her ancestry and the work of her father in these pieces. There is a reading room and a video room to further engage some viewers. But, despite her reputation as a “new media” artist, they are not the main focus of the exhibition. Rather, it is the works made by hand — Buchanan's many drawings, paintings, sculptures and collages — that are not only a surprise but also a clear testament to the depth of her conceptual thinking, her artistic skills, and love of the process of making. Nancy Buchanan, “American Dreams #3: Sweet Dreams,” 1981, pastel and pencil on paper. 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 Matthew Kangas Winston Wächter Fine Art , Seattle, Washington Continuing through October 18, 2025 Ethan Murrow, “Housekeeper,” 2025, acrylic on panel, 16 x 12 x 2”. All images courtesy of Winston Wáchter Fine Art, Seattle. It makes perfect sense that Ethan Murrow has had almost as many exhibitions of his work in Paris as in New York — or Seattle. His seventh show here is composed of 11 large acrylic paintings and six large graphite drawings. Despite the valiant efforts of numerous critics to place Murrow within the context of contemporary American art, few have identified his debt to postwar French Surrealist art. Yet this is the hidden key to understanding his bizarre imagery of implausible landscapes with humans, animals and birds. Ethan Murrow, “Analogy at Rest,” 2025, graphite on paper, 56 x 50”. Rather than older war-era avatars of American surrealism such as Peter Blume, Dorothea Tanning or Pavel Tchelichew, we should look to more recent and less well-known French artists such as Roland Cat (1943-2016) who provide startlingly precise parallels to Murrow’s consistently surreal imagery. Humans possessing animal heads, spacious landscapes, vast bodies of water, and what one French critic described as Cat’s tendency to be “less Surreal than Fantastic.” Murrow is an American Fantastic artist. All of the paintings here consist of mixtures of human and animal relationships, snowy peaks in the distance, and nearby bodies Ethan Murrow, “Bell Ringer,” 2025, acrylic on panel, 66 x 96 x 2”. of waters, some with icy crags. Visual puns are set within other puns in some cases, as in the large drawing (56 by 50 inches) “Analogy at Rest.” This ambitious work depicts a Flemish tapestry draped over the back of a long-horn steer and a hunter in a toga with his dog in the background. The painting is a picture of a hunting scene within a hunting scene. Like Roland Cat, the meaning is enigmatic, resistant to easy unraveling, better left to our curiosity. Each picture hovers in a territory of fantastic imagination and meticulous technical construction. Such detail of brushwork and execution reinforce the Surrealist roots of the Massachusetts-born painter, anchoring him in an impressive legacy of other enduring School of Paris surrealists, paramount among whom stands Max Ernst. His animal headdresses and floral bouquets atop human bodies are all borrowed by Murrow.  Much of the enjoyment — and perplexity — of Murrow’s art lies in its ambiguity and stupefying defiance of realistic logic. Similarly, the artist’s popularity in Belgium point toward another kindred maître, René Magritte. Like the Belgian, Murrow has incorporated ordinary settings with quietly alarming figures trapped in unlikely worlds. “Housekeeper,” “Chauffeur,” and “Bell Ringer” set bucket-heads in domestic architectural environments with attendant dogs and in the latter, a complacent sheep perched atop a pile of books. Beautifully painted skies, placid lakes, and ominous mountain peaks provide the backgrounds. With each painting crammed with symbols of musical instruments, floral bouquets, or books, another art-historical precedent comes to mind: 17th-century Dutch allegorical or “vanitas” paintings. Seen this way, even Vermeer is a distant cousin right up to their shared mysterious, indecipherable meaning.  Ethan Murrow, “Bell Ringer,” 2025, acrylic on panel, 66 x 96 x 2”. Still set in the present, however, each male figure is attired in casual clothing with colored basketball shoes. Rooted in a past of irretrievable meaning with their distant 19th-century-like landscapes and art-historical clues, Murrow’s paintings speak to the present. Several canvases have a leaping figure inspired by Yves Klein caught mid-air. For example, in “Interpose,” he jumps across a lotus pond before a Chinese-like mountain landscape. A giant paper tiger’s head obscures the jumper’s vision. Is this a pun on modern-day China as a “paper tiger”? The jumper runs in the other direction while reading an open book in “The Gifter.” His head is replaced with a long trailing bouquet. Ethan Murrow, “The Parliament of Fowls,” 2025, acrylic on panel, 60 x 60 x 2”. In “The Parliament of Fowls,” another reader is standing in a black suit surrounded by black crows. The reader’s head is a big bird with open eyes, the whole recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “The Birds” (1963), another allegory about ecological catastrophe. The title, drawn from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1381 poem about courtly love, suggests a human-bird dialogue, but one fated to incomprehension, as in so many of Murrow’s juxtapositions of animals and humans. This kind of repeated motif, with its broad hints of inter-species conflict, comprises the only tension in Murrow’s otherwise tranquil compositions. 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 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 .