by Matthew Kangas ArtXContemporary , Seattle, Washington Continuing through November 15, 2025 Alan Lau, “in the peach orchard,” 2001, Sumi ink, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 3/4 x 54”. All images courtesy of ArtXContemporary, Seattle. Alan Lau’s current exhibit is both straightforward and complicated. His variously scaled Sumi paintings are based on reminiscences of and experiences in Kyoto, where he spends part of each year in the family home of his wife, art critic Kazuo Nakane. The dozen works on paper are straightforward, impressively beautiful in their variations and their implementation of the Sumi-ink technique, which Lau studied in Japan with Nirakushi Toriumi in 1972-74. Before we consider the artworks, though, it is necessary to mention the complicated part: Lau’s overwhelming wraparound of words attached to the otherwise completely independent imagery. Not only is there a book accompanying the exhibit that includes the artist’s poetry, there is a long artist’s statement in the form of a memoir, and an extensive essay by Claire Cuccio. Not content to describe Lau’s techniques — “freehand drips, marks and washes” — Cuccio extrapolates on the artist’s love of jazz and British pop music, his affinity to Chinese calligraphy, his consciousness of the slowly evaporating character of Old Kyoto, and even a detailed lineage linking Lau to an 18th-century Japanese musician, poet, painter, and calligrapher. Such an august pedigree is all very well and good, but it comes across as overkill, or over-determination, on the part of the artist and his mini-biographer to control the narrative and interpretation of his art. (His part-time job at a fruit and vegetable stand is also invoked with a straight face.) Alan Lau, “that day by the sea,” 2004, Sumi ink, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 x 53 3/4”. At 76, Lau is unquestionably an innovator with the Sumi technique. He brings more color, more gestures, more imagery to the tradition. His current work offers an illuminating glimpse into his overall accomplishment. It also raises several issues about the direction and overall character of his encounters with the historic medium. For example, with frequent allusions to the Northwest School and those artists’ affinities to Asian art, Lau has channeled the intimate scale of Mark Tobey’s prints and paintings in his seven tiny diptychs, the ”Shimogamo” series. “Typhoon Waters,” “Mountains I Can’t Quite See,” and “Moist Ground” are mostly darkened scenes of nature that transcend Tobey’s tendency toward abstraction. Lau himself struggles with abstraction to the extent that he retains explicit allusions to nature. “Small Changes,” however, with its blend of pastel, Sumi ink and pencil, veers closer to complete abstraction and is the stronger for it. Less dense and clotted, areas of the composition are allowed to breathe, enlivening the all-over image and lifting it above the mountain tops or forest floors of the others. Alan Lau, “green impression — a walk in the garden,” 2019, Sumi, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 2”. Lau’s use of color is another area of advance from traditionally black ink Sumi painting. “ That day by the sea ” (2004) is an early work with plenty of open air that is scattered and spattered with yellow, pink, blue and green dots. Its size — approximately five feet square — allows the artist a physicality of gesture akin to Pollock that is suppressed in the other paintings, most of which date from 2018 or 2019. Among the largest works, also measuring between four and five feet, churning passages better release energies that have characterized the best of Lau’s paintings in the past. “Heaven” (2018) has an ascending composition of fog and plant stems, but may be just as easily regarded as purely abstract. “In the peach orchard” (2001) is highlighted by a vivid distribution of black-and-white spots with pale green, pinks and yellows. Lau shrewdly keeps this and other compositions in motion. The strongest works are “green impression” (2019) and “ living in this city where you can never fine me ” (2018). Each offers varied treatments of black inks joined by wider palettes, although Lau never uses more than three or four colors at a time. “Green Impression” uses green to enrobe black blotches in its center, while the latter is all horizontal slabs of black intermeshing with blue, yellow and gray. Like overlooked Abstract Expressionist Bradley Walker Tomlin, Lau has here employed the rounded-corner rectangle to set up a field of activity that revolves and spins before our eyes. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Jody Zellen Sean Kelly , Los Angeles, California Continuing through November 1, 2025 Jose Dávila, “Joint Effort,” 2024, concrete, boulder, and ratchet strap, 92 13/16 x 26 1/2 x 22 5/8”. All images courtesy of Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. “The Poetic Dimension” pairs photographer James Casebere with sculptor Jose Dávila, linking them together because of their shared interests in Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán. Barragán (1902-1988) was a revered figure in architecture worldwide. His buildings, many of which are residential, are filled with light and color. He melded the traditional aesthetics of Mexico with modernist principles to create spaces that were about form, structure and the relationship between inside and out. Both Casebere and Dávila are themselves modernists whose formal practices delve into the relationships between planes of color and the spaces created between objects — both real and constructed. Seeing their works presented together under the umbrella of Barragán's architecture makes for a wonderful trio of interrelationships. Jose Dávila, “Fundamental Concern,” 2025, concrete and bolder, 75 9/16 x 47 1/4 x 26 7/8”. Dávila trained as an architect but later turned to sculpture and installation. Using a wide range of materials, he fashions objects that are simultaneously beautiful and uncanny. In the gallery are four recent sculptures that investigate structural equilibrium and restraint. “Joint Effort” (2024) juxtaposes two pale terra-cotta cuboids. One serves as a base for a rounded boulder and the other rests on top of the stone. The entire work is encircled and held together by a white canvas strap and metal ratchet. The work is sturdy, yet precarious. “Fundamental Concern” (2025) is equally playful and solemn. Four light blue concrete rectangles are balanced on top of each other, one placed at ninety degrees to the other three. The top two blocks are perched at an angle that bites down on a small cream-colored rock resembling an outstretched tongue. “Acapulco Chair Stack” (2022) combines a collection of Acapulco chairs that have been stripped of their netting so all that remains are the blue-green frames. These metal lines are intertwined to support three stones that both tumble through and anchor the interior space. James Casebere, “Vestibule,” 2016, framed archival pigment print mount to Dibond paper, 62 x 44 3/8”. On the walls surrounding Dávila's floor-bound sculptures are Casebere's color photographs. Casebere is best known for constructing and then photographing table-top models drawn from architectural and cinematic sources. The photographs here depict sculptural spaces that have been carefully lit to maximize color and shadow. Whether interior or exterior spaces, these constructions are created with exacting detail, though often designed to be viewed from the specific vantage point at which he places the camera. In “The Poetic Dimension” Casebere uses Barragán's architecture as the point of departure. He does not recreate Barragán's spaces verbatim, but rather captures the formal essence of receding corridors and the shapes of light cast across walls and floors to emphasize transcendence. “Vestibule” (2016) is a seemingly impossible space, with irregularly shaped walls that converge toward the back of the image. On the right, a light pink wall intersects with those that are off white, all in stark contrast to a dark floor. A yellow square and rectangle stand out from the white walls as random shapes that appear to be illuminated by a source beyond the picture plane. It feels evocative and welcoming, but at the same time the space is disorienting. James Casebere, “Courtyard with Orange Wall,” 2017, framed archival pigment print mount to Dibond paper, 64 3/8 x 44 3/8”. An internet search reveals an image of Barragán's actual studio that features a spacious room with a couch and table. The emphasis is on warmth, as the room is flooded with yellow light. In Casebere's rendition, “Empty Studio” (2017), the furniture is gone. The ceiling has yellow beams and the floor is made of simple wooden panels that recede toward the back wall. An evocative geometric shape created by light flooding through the window is positioned near the middle of the composition, hugging the back wall and floor. Other photographs depict exteriors: “Courtyard with Orange Wall” and “El Eco Courtyard” (both 2017) reduce Barragán's architecture to geometric shapes and flat planes of color. The blue sky in relation to a yellow column and light brown facade becomes a geometric abstraction, as do the green and orange shapes in “Courtyard with Orange Wall.” While Casebere's and Dávila's works resonate individually, shown together they become a distinctive and thoughtful homage to Barragán. The exhibition creates a conversation not only about how to interpret the built environment, but how it can be used to inspire abstract art. 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 Richard Jackson, ''The Laundry Room (Death of Marat)'' (detail), 2009, acrylic, metal, wood, linoleum, aqua resin, plastic, fabric, computer, washing machine, 47 1/4 x 224 3/8 x 224 3/8''. Photo: Stephan Altenberger Photography, Zurich. Two remarkable collections of 20th century California art are now joined together, thanks to the merger in September of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and UC Irvine’s Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art. OCMA, a venerable 63-year-old institution, has consistently collected and shown first-class modern and contemporary art by regional luminaries such as John Altoon, Joan Brown, Chris Burden, Mary Corse, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Irwin, Catherine Opie, Charles Ray, Betye Saar, Ed Ruscha and James Turrell.  The exterior of the Orange County Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of UCI/Yubo Dong. After many years of thwarted plans to construct a large, free-standing museum building, OCMA finally opened its $93 million, 53,000-square-foot museum on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa three years ago. Its future appeared to be bright. Instead, since that opening, OCMA’s path has been fraught with difficulties. Among these problems, 14 museum trustees resigned from its Board in 2024, and were quietly replaced. But there have been no official statements about how this disruption came about. Perhaps as a consequence, OCMA’s board of directors, including prominent businesspeople and philanthropists, has been dismissed, and OCMA director Heidi Zuckerman will leave the museum in December. Its permanent collection is now owned by UC Irvine, and its entire staff are UCI employees. In addition, UCI is assuming all operating costs of the newly merged institution. OCMA, with its long illustrious history , no longer exists. On the other hand, the former Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art is finally gaining a world class museum facility in which to display its extensive and important collection. Monica Sandoval, “Culture All,” photograph. Featured in the OCMA exhibition “Forms of Identity: Women Artists in the 1990s and 2000s,” 2017. Langson IMCA’s story began in 2017 when the extraordinary Gerald E. Buck Collection of 3,300-plus 20th century paintings, sculptures and works on paper was donated to UC Irvine. Soon after, the former Irvine Museum's 1,000-piece collection of prized California Impressionist Paintings was also gifted to UCI.  At that time, Dr. Stephen Barker, formerly dean of UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, became the steward of the approximately 4,500-piece collection. As UCI did not have its own museum — which had been included in architect William Pereira’s original 1962 UC Irvine campus design — Barker determined that the combined collection would become the genesis of a UCI museum to be called the Institute and Museum of California Art. He also announced that an architect would quickly be chosen to design IMCA's projected 100,000-square-foot structure. The Langson family soon donated a significant amount of money for that proposed building (thus the name change). Later that year, UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman approved the formation of IMCA and its future building. Barker also decided that, along with the new collection, UCI would offer PhDs and master’s degrees in museum studies and art conservation. Barker soon proclaimed that the Buck Collection, with art by Larry Bell, Tony DeLap, Lorser Feitelson, Gilbert Lujan, Helen Lundeberg, Agnes Pelton, Peter Voulkos and many others is, “ The greatest collection of California art that nobody has seen .” Chris Burden, "A Tale of Two Cities," 1981, mixed media installation. In the succeeding eight years, in spite of various proposals to fund the construction of the Langson IMCA building, including placing it on the grounds of UCI’s new medical center on Jamboree Road, those plans never materialized. All the while, Langson IMCA had been, and still is, showing work from its now extraordinary collection, along with borrowed work, in its 6,000 square foot facility in the Irvine Museum’s original Von Karman Avenue location. It will continue to show already planned exhibitions through next year. When the proposed merger of OCMA and Langson IMCA was first announced last June, people in Orange County’s art world reacted with surprise, along with hope. UCI will finally have its museum building, albeit a ten-minute drive from the university campus. OCMA, though essentially dissolved, could solve its personnel issues, while it will continue to show its previously planned exhibitions through next year. And during this transition period, a national search for a new director of the combined museums would be conducted, while Rich Aste, currently interim director of Langson IMCA, will lead the new entity. As the OCMA building — which will soon get new signage announcing that it is the “UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art” — is situated more than five miles from UCI, the university is planning to have direct, free bus lines between the two institutions for students and faculty. The new entity, which now owns more than 9,000 works of art, will also continue to offer free admission, a policy implemented following OCMA’s 2022 grand opening. Stephen Barker, formerly Executive Director, IMCA, at Gerald Buck Laguna Beach gallery, on-site storage, November 2017. Photo: Mark Chamberlain. Kevin Appel, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art as well as the Associate Director of the merged venue, has been working with Langson IMCA since its 2017 founding. His role, along with that of colleague Bridget Cooks, has centered on building bridges between the museum and the UCI Department of Art, connecting students, faculty and exhibition programs. “We have helped shape the museum’s overall direction and long-term vision,” he explains. Appel adds, “The merger feels like a long-awaited convergence — the moment when the collections, a new location, and the university’s creative energy came into alignment. The Gerald Buck Collection, which has lived mostly in storage for years, will have a visible public life. This is something we’ve all wanted: for these works to circulate, to breathe, and to be seen." The merger will also enable the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art to function as a laboratory for students and faculty, and as a place to engage directly with the art objects, the curatorial process, and the deeper meanings of the collections. “The merger,” says Appel, “represents a kind of collective renewal, of two institutions with long histories, joining to create something that’s both intellectually rigorous and publicly accessible. It’s an opportunity to think expansively about what a museum in Orange County can be: rooted in research, but open to 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 John Zotos Keijsers Koning Gallery , Dallas, Texas Continuing through October 18, 2025 Tamara Johnson, “Fruit Cocktail.” All images courtesy of the artist. In 1960 Jasper Johns’ now famous and groundbreaking cast sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans, “Painted Bronze” (1960), was hand-painted to resemble the original objects. Johns modified this homage to Duchamp’s readymade precedent by fabricating his own sculpture rather than merely finding a mass-produced object and adding a signature. In doing so he complicated Duchamp’s invention of conceptual art. Tamara Johnson, also a curator and educator, updates and improves upon this process. In an artistic practice that deals with mimesis, Johnson has managed to expand her sculptural approach by reflecting on personal experiences, emotions, desires, and memories. Her work is equally a critique of the apparatus of mass production and its related economics of consumption and a demystification of the middle-class American nuclear family.  Tamara Johnson, “Sample Board (Ice Cream: Blue, Green, Yellow and Red).” “Fruit Cocktail” is Johnson’s version of the canned fruit medley that was so popular several decades ago. She remembers it from her childhood as perhaps something that, once opened, meant the party was about to start. Such ironic humor permeates the piece. It was cast in pewter, and a copper sheet wraps around it like a label that’s been applied in oil paint. This label, far from pristine, is made to look like it’s torn and peeling, and the elements of the image are otherwise distorted. Rather than simply replicating the can, Johnson engages with history and memory. She channels desire by depicting sexually anthropomorphic elements among the fruit.    In a tribute to memories of her father, who was a master tiler, “Sample Board (Ice Cream: Blue, Green, Yellow and Red)” recreates something related to his work. He had various color samples of grout that in Johnson’s hands become a cement sculpture with four rows of tufts painted in varied color gradations. They look like delicious scoops of ice cream, as the title confirms, mounted on a board. The pieces are laid out on a grid, while the color scheme addresses the rigidity of color wheel theory with a free-flowing sensibility. Tamara Johnson, “Goldfish Crackers.” Other pieces that channel a culinary fetish are a medley of dozens of “Goldfish Crackers” spread across the gallery floor. A single cast gold example occupies a wall all its own. They are all the same size and shape of the popular cheese-flavored cracker known for the slogan “The Snack That Smiles Back!” In Johnson’s hands the crackers’ zeal and use value has been exchanged for an exhibition value unsympathetic to their normal role as consumable commodities. Tamara Johnson, “Chair with Napkin and Cake.” “Chair with Napkin and Cake” is the show’s capstone piece. Composed of three distinct bronze castings, it depicts a white lawn chair, with napkins and a Hostess cupcake placed on the seat. Details about the handling of the paint and specific aspects of the chair itself reveal that it’s an unfaithful copy meant to appear hand-made, as opposed to pristinely manufactured. It alludes to a suburban American idyll made ambiguous by Johnson’s ensemble. It becomes a lost nostalgic time that is here completely demystified. Many of us grew up eating those cupcakes, but the artist argues that they were never as good as our memory now colors them. John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Matthew Kangas Russo Lee Gallery , Portland, Oregon Continuing through November 1, 2025 Michael Brophy, “Infandous: Mute,” 2025, oil on canvas, 54 x 60”. All images courtesy of Russo Lee Gallery, Portland. The exhibit title, “Infandous,” is an Old English word that means “too odious to be expressed" or "unspeakable; nefarious,” which Michael Brophy happened on to describe the overall imagery of his current exhibition. He also wrote a 26-word, haiku-like poem that accompanied the press release. Neither title nor poem is necessary to appreciate the art. Long known as a painter of landscapes who delves deeply into ecological perils, Brophy’s new work is his most alarming yet, as well as his most beautiful. Each painting has a single word at its base, like a page from an old-fashioned explanatory text book. Half of them are quite large (up to 114 by 132 inches) and half are very small (18 by 22 inches), and all contain a mixture of imagery that illustrates impending ecological disasters of one sort or another. Their collective impact is emotionally powerful, yet strangely attractive. “Odious and unspeakable” content is expressed in beautiful painterly brushstrokes and often quick sketchy passages. Michael Brophy, “Infandous: Boundary,” 2025, oil on canvas, 78 x 84”. Art that is so topical and engaged with current social issues runs the risk of becoming dated once the momentary crisis passes. With Brophy, the crisis of the endangered environment not only has not passed, it has increased to alarming dimensions. Another Portland artist, Mark Rothko, called for an art that was “tragic and timeless.” Indeed, Brophy’s depictions of, for example, the aftermath of timber clear-cutting, decayed virgin forests, industrial wastelands, and, this time around, the renewed threat of nuclear proliferation, have become both tragic and timeless in the face of a very real crisis. They constitute a powerful vision of both social and political circumstances, as well as of the perils facing the natural world. Michael Brophy, “Infandous: I,” 2025, oil on canvas, 114 x 132”. To that end, in his large paintings Brophy captures multiple time elements of ongoing disasters by sectioning each painting vertically. At the side of one painting, “Infandous: Boundary” (all paintings are 2025), a verdant forest appears. At the other side, frantic monochrome sketches of flattened wooded areas with meandering rivers and darkened sky seem to have been drawn in under the duress of further cataclysm: there isn’t time to paint in a full picture. A thick tree trunk divides the two sides, acting as both dividing line and bulwark. The effect here, as in several other paintings, is both chilling and exhilarating. Brophy has managed to compress his signs of danger into compositions that allow us plenty of breathing space to take in the whole scenario. With their frequently divided vertical panels, other “Infandous” paintings (“I,” “II,” “Struck,” and “Fire”) chronicle a wide range of manmade problems, each recording a given setback or impending chaos while providing a grandeur of both scale and alarm. Their effect alludes to a long history of ambitious American landscape painting that embraced the “manifest destiny” of privileged settlement and exploitation that set in motion the whole process of unraveling and decay over 150 years ago. Michael Brophy, “Infandous: Hymn,” 2025, oil on canvas, 18 x 22”. For an artist so prolific over a lengthy career, Brophy has been a slippery topic for curators and critics. For example, his 2005 Tacoma Art Museum retrospective focused on what was titled the “Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy.” Twenty years later, Brophy has retained the vocabulary of the sublime associated with Romantic painting and poetry, but has turned it horrific by introducing nuclear bombs at a time when nuclear proliferation has become a more troubling issue than ever. Certain paintings, like “Infandous II,” “Infandous: Hymn,” and “Infandous: Strive,” have tiny mushroom clouds at their top or, in the latter, at its center. Michael Brophy, “Infandous: Strive,” 2025, oil on canvas, 15 x 16”. In this sense, two other aspects of the 65-year-old Portland native emerge. First there is the prophetic feeling of apocalypse throughout the new work. Though they may be small, the mushroom clouds’ positioning at the top of each picture epitomizes the subtlety with which the artist often conveys his warnings. The second quality that makes his frightening images bearable is their lush, painterly execution and relatively restrained treatment of content. We do not immediately apprehend the undertow of ruin, but spending time with each work reveals the powerful presence of that undertow. “Infandous: Mute,” with its faltering, shredded American flag, operates symbolically with well-determined visual coding to make its point. 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 David S. Rubin Matthew Marks Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing through November 8, 2025 Luis Jiménez, “American Dream,” 1966, cast fiberglass and automotive paint with epoxy coating, 20 x 29 x 35”. All images courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles. Luis Jiménez (1940-2006) may be best known as the only Mexican American artist associated with New York Pop art in the 1960s, or maybe for the many controversies surrounding his public art later on. But this survey reveals what Jiménez really should be best remembered for: his role as a political satirist and a champion of the Latinx working class. In his early sculptures and drawings the El Paso Chicano was already making pointed commentary on American culture. In later works, he celebrated the gritty, energetic atmosphere of border life. The son of an illegal immigrant who was a neon sign maker, Jiménez learned as a child to work with industrial materials such as fiberglass. During his teenage years, he also spray-painted hot rods. As a young artist he took advantage of his skills and turned to casting fiberglass sculptures. He painted them in several colors of automobile paint and often coated it all with epoxy. Although produced during the same time that the SoCal Finish Fetish artists were using similar materials to create monochromatic, minimal forms that affect one’s perception of physical space, Jiménez’s polychromatic works instead emphasize narrative and are sexually suggestive. Luis Jiménez, “Tank – Spirit of Chicago,” 1968, cast fiberglass and automotive paint, 18 ½ x 35 7/8 x 30”. In “American Dream” (1966) and “California Chick” (1968), which were created during the height of the sexual revolution, voluptuous nude females are shown fornicating with a Volkswagen and a unicycle. While the eroticism of these works could be considered a metaphor for the thrill of drag racing or speeding along open highways, the imagery more importantly serves as a biting response to consumer and media culture and the straight White male’s American dream of making it with buxom sex goddesses adorned in lipstick and heavy eye-shadow. These “biker chicks” parallel the sexualized women of Tom Wesselmann’s Pop paintings, while the slightly angular geometry of their faces is influenced by iconic Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Luis Jiménez, “Rodeo Queen,” 1972, cast fiberglass and automotive paint with nylon hair, 48 x 45 x 23”. Jiménez created two of his most overtly political works in 1968, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement. A direct response to the televised police attacks on protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, “Tank-Spirit of Chicago” depicts the splayed bodies of people of color wrapped around a tanker truck that has flattened them. For “The Bomb”, he merged the bulbous blonde hair and breasts of one of his characteristic temptresses with the billowing clouds of an atomic explosion. In the 1970s, Jiménez turned to the subject of the rodeo. In keeping with the tenor of his earlier work, the excitement of horsemanship is represented as orgasmic. The woman riding a rocking horse decorated with a rainbow in “Rodeo Queen” (1972), a dark-haired Latina, straddles the saddle alluringly while staring at its distinctively phallic horn. A slightly different tone, yet no less ecstatic, is seen in “Vaquero” (1978), where a Mexican cowboy commandeering a bucking bronco raises his right arm in a gesture of triumph. Jiménez once noted  proudly that it was “Mexicans (who) developed just the whole notion of being cowboys.” Robust energy is also on display in Jiménez’s portrayals of honky-tonk and fiesta dancers from the 1980s, as well as in his studies for his last public sculpture “Mustang”, a representation of a wild horse with piercing red eyes and posed in an excited rearing position. In “Honky Tonk (diptych)” (1981), a life-size, freestanding sculpture made by mounting oil pastel drawings on board, a man and woman engaged in a lively barroom dance are presented as in a stop-motion freeze-frame, their bodies animated by the gestural drawing that describes them. Similarly, vigorous drawing and brushwork, combined with bold color, suggests a sexual tension between the partners performing the traditional Mexican hat dance in “Fiesta Dancers (Jarabe)” (1989), a large-scale drawing that was one of many studies for another public artwork. Luis Jiménez, “Honky Tonk (diptych),” 1981, oil pastel on paper mounted to board, left figure: 77 x 40 x 3 inches; right figure: 76 ¾ x 48 x 3”. The two lithographic studies for “Mustang” (1993, 1997) are equally bold and expressive, yet they feel particularly ominous in light of the fact that in 2006, while Jiménez was working on his “Blue Mustang” commission for the Denver International Airport , a section of the sculpture fell on him, fatally severing an artery. Completed by his sons and studio assistants, the 32 foot-tall sculpture remains controversial due to its unnatural color, scale and ferocity. Some have perceived it as demonic. Nevertheless, the imagery seems an appropriate monument to the artist himself, who remained fearless and steadfast in his vision of the Latinx community as strong, proud, exuberant, and defiant, qualities more necessary than ever in our current political climate. 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 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 .