by John Zotos Nasher Sculpture Center , Dallas Continuing through January 4, 2026 Antony Gormley, “Quantum Cloud XX (tornado),” 2000, stainless steel, 91 3/4 x 58 5/8 x 47 1/4”. All images courtesy of Antony Gormley and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Photos: Kevin Todora. Over the last forty-five years British sculptor Antony Gormley (b. 1950) has remained a consistently major figure on an international level. His work centers on a critical investigation of bodies in space and how we, as human beings, seek to share and expand our perception beyond the confines of our own bodies.  “SURVEY:  Antony Gormley” brings together sixteen sculptures on loan with two pieces from the collection, along with models from the artist’s studio that represent sixty projects, some unrealized. These, in turn, are augmented by his workbooks, a collection of drawings and ideas going back to the 70’s that together form a kind of Gormley “codex.” Antony Gormley, “Three Places,” 1983, lead, fiberglass and air. Lying: 12 1/4 x 81 1/2 x 19 5/8”; Sitting: 39 3/8 × 22 1/2 × 52”; Standing: 74 3/4 × 19 5/8 × 13 3/4”. The earliest works find Gormley trailing on the heels of the “new figuration” movement. Both “Three Places” (1983) and “Field” (1984) are examples of his fully recognizable male, free-standing figures based on casts of his own body, from a period when his career first took off. Using a meditative technique learned during his time in India, Gormley would stay still for hours inside the plaster until it was cut away and used to create these lead-coated figures.  On the outside they are anonymous, everyman likenesses without the slightest hint of portraiture. On a conceptual level, their inside is an exact replica of their maker at that time, so the pieces speak to an interior identity that interacts with the space of the world surrounding them through an exterior barrier that acts as a translation device. The space around Gormley’s sculptures and how people interact with them is his main concern. In “Three Places” three figures, one lying down, one supine, and one standing, each face the same direction and look toward the sky. They beckon us to ponder a place beyond the space they occupy.  Antony Gormley, “Shift,” 2023, concrete, 22 5/8 x 24 5/8 x 82 1/2”. In the balancing act titled “Field” the arms of a standing figure become an eighteen-foot wingspan. The elongated arms reach for either end of the gallery. The hands are raised upward like fins, sustaining the figures’ position with a strong sense of precarity that amplifies the anxious feeling of reduced stability. As his career progressed Gormley always held to the figure. When it seems to disappear one can find it hidden within an abstracted, fractal-induced set of wires as in “Drift VI” (2010), or in the fascinating “Quantum Cloud XX (Tornado)” (2000). Stainless steel “T”-shaped bars read like a whirlwind of pins through which a human form is just discernible. Antony Gormley, “Field,” 1984-1985, lead, fiberglass, plaster, and air, 77 1/4 x 217 x 16 1/2”. In “Shift” (2023) the figure lies on the ground, only this time Gormley used blocks of concrete mixed with fibers to create a cuboidal body, perhaps a modern version of Cubism. It looks like it’s trying to do a stomach crunch; the head and feet sections are off the ground as it balances on its central backside. In a compelling piece done specifically for this exhibition, “Implicate IV” (2024), Gormley uses Cor-ten steel bands that radiate from a central axis. They proceed on a ninety-degree register to circumscribe an elaborate geometry that conceals a figure in the center. The artist refers to the steel strips as “ribbons” that extend the figure outward into the space of the gallery. This newest piece aesthetically ties the exhibition back to the earliest works. As throughout the exhibition, the work reveals Gormley’s consistent concern with our physical bodies and the spaces we occupy within the social sphere, where relationships are formed and meaning is established.  John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Matthew Kangas Foster/White Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through December 20, 2025 Julie Himel, “Glitch,” 2025, oil on board, 12 x 12”. All images courtesy of the artist and Foster/White Gallery. Canadian artist Julie Himel presents four paintings measuring at around 4 feet in tandem with nine small oil and mixed-media paintings in her current show, “Awe Struck.” The works obliquely tackle the current issues of climate change, but from the safe, time-honored Canadian tradition of landscape, a heritage dating back at least to the Group of Seven painters of the 1920s and 30s who addressed specific regional locales from all across the dominion. Himel confronts and challenges her predecessors’ devotion to pastoral themes and fetching geographical identity. Julie Himel, “Your Heart Was a Goldmine,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30”. By tightly focusing on specific vistas in the tiny canvases, the artist draws us into an intimate encounter with the image, executed with vigorous i mpasto and palette knives, slashing color and emphasis on diagonal trails and riverbeds or, as she puts it, “experiences of rupture.” That rupture is cosseted by bright colors, often within one hue per painting, such as the pink in “Glitch” (all works are 2025). Downplaying the variety of colors in nature, each image — from a sunset to a swooshing pond — could be the product of a polluted chemical after-spill of mining. Once one grants the vivid colors a sinister register, the pictures take on a deeper content beyond their masterful decorative and soothing qualities. For instance, “Your Heart Was a Goldmine” posits a poisonous sky above a ravaged ravine with tall trees that appear shorn of leaves and branches, and in “The Future is a Moment” red lightning streaks through a darkened sky. These paintings convey the exhibition title of “Awe Struck” to the extent that they jolt us simultaneously into a conventional appreciation of landscape painting and the discomfiting state of nature gone wrong. Julie Himel, “The Future is a Moment,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 12 x 12”. Himel’s vigorous gestural brushwork is evident throughout, and provides a large part of the exhibit’s appeal. Going beyond the harmonious celebrations of nature associated with the Group of Seven, she annexes the current moment of planetary decay and the battles between natural wonder and industrial harvesting of nature through mining and timber, an even bigger national issue in Canada than in the U.S. Julie Himel, “She Remembered Blue,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48”. All of this is perhaps too heavy a rhetorical load for Himel’s elegant slabs of paint with their contrasting grounds and skies. However, the urgency of the artist’s brushwork could symbolize the clock ticking on public access to underfunded national parks and provincial land preserves encroached upon by mega-corporate landowners eager to expand their purview. In this sense, Himel’s claim that she “seeks to capture that collision — where perception is pierced and the veil of apathy is torn” is the quiet revelation of the exhibition. That said, the four larger works are overshadowed by the memory of somewhat larger works from Himel’s prior exhibition. These expanded the sense of grandeur and vista through aggressively expressive paint-handling and abbreviated compositions. In “She Remembered Blue,” a rising mountain in the background is lost in a blue afternoon shade with a yellow and green foreground of shrubbery and stubble. That vista is flipped in the forlorn grandeur of “Edges Sweetly,” with its high vertical drama of sunset in all shades of pink and smudged black and blue foreground at its base, like a glistening oil slick or muddy pond. Julie Himel, “Edges Sweetly,” 2025, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 40”. With these two works, Himel convincingly joins a global cohort of artists re-inventing landscape in light of global warming. The artist’s challenge now is to emphasize such real-world dangers while retaining her brilliant powers of assertive execution and chromatic experimentation. 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 Bill Lasarow December 24, 2025 Doris Salcedo, “Installation at 8th International Istanbul Biennial,” 2003, 1,550 wooden chairs. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. The Art World is by its very nature unstable, and in that lies much of its value and strength. It thrives on its dual handmaidens, individuality and freedom. If creative originality is a simple ideal, novelty and eccentricity mark its charming failure. It is not consistent with democratic governance, which is better left to lawyers and bean counters. In a sense it is a closer sibling to the Fascist Party of America and its family-driven racketeering because they both are driven by an impulse to transcend convention and law. It pretty much ends there, as art is in good part a search for ethos despite the knowledge that final answers are not forthcoming. The power of art comes from the liberation fostered by free expression and the exercise of imagination. The power of fascism (and crime in general) is a small-minded pursuit of advantage and the false (not to mention fleeting) comfort of material gain. Sarah Sze, “Slice,” 2023, multimedia installation, 15’ 5” x 21’ 2” x 27’. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo: David Heald. In typical mafia family, yes such as that of Trump34, you extract an oath of loyalty that is not returned. To such people that is real power. In the moral universe that is mere corruption, and it is small no matter the façade, the brittle shell of power or wealth. In the aesthetic realm it is even worse: the absence of integrity. That doesn’t mean that we, as artists, turn to progressive political leaders because they know the right answers to managing a mass society. In fact, that is not the reason for the near universal liberalism of artists (the few exceptions tend to be more extreme in their ideologies). It’s that conservatism in its common form is simply too restrictive of individual conduct. When the old Republican Party conservatism transforms into fascism, controlling social norms are enforced by increasing coercion and violence. What we think of as First Amendment rights suddenly come only with a pledge of loyalty that utterly negates the necessary condition of creativity. When only one form of speech is permitted, no speech is free. Alan Rath, “Vanity,” 1992, vintage medicine cabinet, aluminum, custom electronics, CRT, 48 x 44 x 25”. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco. Progressive leaders must be fired up by public service and self-sacrifice. There is an obvious satisfaction in the social amplification that this implies, and it is a far more wholesome exercise of power, the exercise of public benefit and honest collaboration within a sprawling organization. Politicians, be they progressive of fascist, must necessarily deal with the real world of many interests, of lots of individuals coming and going, of change as a constant. The art world deals with a unique commodity — namely creativity, as distinct from the artwork or performance per se. God forbid when any organization should get it claws into that commodity, as so frequently happens. This is a great argument to keep the art world small. The freedom is more likely to be unencumbered by the lack of material reward. For many, perhaps most, and maybe nearly all real artists that will be met with a sigh of relief. In progressive politics the goal is to establish a solid floor of stability and affluence, and that provides enough space for creativity to thrive. In post-war America and much of the rest of the modern world it has thrived for the last century in a way that it never has before, the long history of elite art notwithstanding. Louise Bourgoise, “Janus Fleuri,” 1968, bronze and gold patina, 10 1/8 × 12 1/2 × 8 3/8”. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. I’m personally a born liberal because I reject the racist, xenophobic wing of any political party precisely because it is exclusionary by intent, by emotion, and by policy. My creed is that the continuing growth of inclusion, I might say the relentless expansion of middle-class confidence, is the correct aspiration. The validity of that aspiration strikes me as plain as day when you read America’s founding documents in their plain language. That the last several generations bear this truth is made evident by the many thousands of professional creatives alive today. Only a few depended on the kind of privilege that enabled dedicated creativity, or the exposure to suffering and deprivation that those who were creative by their nature were usually forced to endure. When the Founders rejected the millennias-long model of a monarch enthroned by God, which Washington then certified in practice when he rejected the title, they only had the vaguest of intuitions as to where that would lead. If the Civil War and the current ownership of the federal government by a mafia operation represents the two lowest points in our still young 250-year-old experiment, we have also enjoyed long periods of advancement. Christian Boltanski, “It’s a jumble out there,” 2010, multimedia installation. Courtesy of the Grand Palais, Paris. Photo: Didier Plowy. With the conclusion of 30 years of war during the first half of the 20th-century, and the needless loss of over 130 million live and the disruption of hundreds of millions of others, much of the 19th century’s most durable infrastructure lay in ruins. A gleaming new America fortuitously, but not accidentally, stood very tall for the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st. It was a formula that had worked, was working, and with seriousness of purpose on both sides it would have continued to steer us toward that better future that most of us wish for. Looking back of the last century, the expansion of art, of all creative culture, of its sheer breadth of creative product, along with an economic infrastructure to support it, is unsurprising. And yet it is a new thing in the tale of civilization. Ori Gersht, “Flower 02 (Rijiksmuseum),” 2021, photographs, archival pigment print, 46 1/2 x 35”. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson, New York. Suddenly, in 2025, we are supposed to forget about the Founder’s ideas about personal liberty and freedom and be “nice” to a fascist mafia boss? I ain’t doin’ it, and I do not know anyone in the art world that I have worked in for five decades who does. Yet here we all are, by virtue of this product of deceit and the worst kind of self-aggrandizing greed. Our own votes put us here, we were not forced. Now that we are here, the best we can do is bend the destruction towards another new renaissance. Many previous generations have borne the same burden, we are only unique in terms of what has been given up in relative terms. There will come a future that regards our miracles as in fact quite modest. You can’t script history, it writes itself. You can script after history and noodle around it as much as you like. Enter the creativity of art and all of its related discourse and conversation. If you choose the best tasting among ten brands of mustard, you are more likely to truly enjoy your choice than if you just accept the basic yellow stuff as good enough to reach no further. I deal, and have dealt with a large number of creative people as a tenet of my art and publishing career. To people like me, the question of which among ten landscape paintings or sculptural figures are the best, rather than the first one you see that is competently painted, carved, or assembled is vital. Inclusion in a field free of distraction, let along catastrophe, itself is not the answer but a necessary condition to raise important questions and to speculate. Paula Rego, “The Family,” 1988, acrylic on paper on canvas, 84 x 84”. Courtesy of the Tate, London. The question was once raised, and widespread discussion resulted from the question: Why are there no great women artists? The answer was in effect: well, have at it. The conditions existed for women to seize opportunities that have grown exponentially, and the talent pool just naturally enlarged to fill many exhibition halls. Today the late Linda Nochlin’s question, half-a-century ago so impertinent and so bold, has been obliterated. Thank goodness, due to women’s inclusion, and that of so many others, it is the freedom of creativity that won. And so, like the Republic itself, now that we have it … can we keep it? 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 Matthew Kangas Blackfish Gallery , Portland, Oregon Continuing through December 27, 2025 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 . What is the difference between self-taught artists, folk artists and outsider artists? In his current exhibition Mae Al-Jiboori provides some answers — and further questions — about the increasingly complicated status of all three categories. While the exhibit is titled, “Settling In,” one wonders exactly into what the 28-year-old Tulsa native is settling: American culture? The Pacific Northwest? Urban society? Regardless, the nine works on view readily defy such categorizations. They appear to be rehabilitated figurative Abstract Expressionist paintings with debts to Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, but the latter is an artist with Al-Jiboori poses no familiarity. Similarly, having only begun painting four years ago, Al-Jiboori’s growth is that of an emerging unknown. However, he lived in London for a considerable period of time and visited numerous galleries there and elsewhere during his travels, Al-Jiboori agreed in an interview that an artist who makes more sense as an influence is Francis Bacon. Al-Jiboori’s sophisticated international sojourns preclude folk artist or outsider art status, but expose the artist’s slow and exacting development. He has not yet found his own distinctive artistic style or voice. All the same, the pictures on view are compelling, even magnetic. Their assertive brushwork, advancing and receding spatial compositions, and close-value colors show promise, however derivative of prior art-historical movements they may be. It’s tempting to put Al-Jiboori into that catch-all silo of “global modernism,” which characterizes so many postwar artists in South Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Artists such as Tyeb Mehta and Etal Adnan have only recently received critical and curatorial attention for their affinities to abstract painting in the West, engaged with their own unique cultural expressions. Al-Jiboori, whose paternal grandfather is Iraqi, is a distant cousin to the movement. Mae Al-Jiboori, “Alone together,” 2025, acrylic, oil pastel, 53 x 42”. In this sense, the painting “Staring into the fireplace” serves as an example of the artist shifting in and out of identifiable imagery. With its penetrating gaze and see-through skull, the four-foot-tall canvas introduces the rest of the series. Mae Al-Jiboori, “Full of Disdain,” 2025, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, 39 x 47”. “In between breaths” repeats the single-figure motif but isolates it in one plane and posits a bald circular head indebted to Paul Klee, among others. It lacks the interesting compositional shifts of the other paintings here, but presents the unavoidable gaze seen in “Staring into the fireplace.” “Dolor” is more anguished, a stooping figure about to wretch or submit to pain. At first it seems alone, with its references to political torture or submission and surrender. If Al-Jiboori were to intensify this direction, his work could take on greater power and contemporary relevance. “Alone together” doubles the figures, entwining them in an erotic hold with broad diagonal slashes of blue against a bright yellow background. Their embrace is locked in by the confining blues and lifted up from the base of oranges as if fleeing a fiery fate below. Mae Al-Jiboori, “spectators who don’t intervene,” 2025, acrylic, oil pastel, 48 x 48”. A parallel vision, “Full of Disdain,” could be a wrestling scene. Two interlocked figures, legs spread apart, battle on a pale white background with little indication of victory or outcome. Gradually, the artist’s consciousness of his own past or heritage home-country issues emerge. Elsewhere they appear in appealing bright colors against ominous dark backgrounds. Seen in this context of turbulent aggression and human interchange, the rest of the paintings underscore multiple figures in increasingly complex compositions. For instance, “spectators who don’t intervene” doesn’t literally reflect its title but functions as the most successful among his abstract paintings. Splayed diagonals burst out of a combustible center of reds, greens, and blues. “Slow descent of closing time” comes closest to a dismembered version of Bacon, with heads and limbs dangling, bloodied in the possible aftermath of an interrogation or torture scene. Mae Al-Jiboori, “Greed around our necks,” 2025, acrylic, oil pastel on wood, 48 x 96”. Calmer colors and splashy brushwork provide a coda to the sequence in “Greed around our necks,” the largest work here at 4 by 8 feet. More dependent upon black outlining than any of the other paintings, it sacrifices modernist color affinities for stretched-out subliminal drawings of elongated figures in an angry pastoral scene, the closest thing to a landscape within the series. Seen alongside the other works, the artist’s world is expanded beyond his interior psychological visions to the outer world where such scenarios play out in real time. Al-Jiboori’s work displays promise and challenge; culmination and conclusion are yet to come. 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 GW Contemporary , Laguna Beach, California Continuing through January 4, 2026 Salomón Huerta, “Night Pool,” 2025, oil on canvas, 54 x 36 x 1 1/2”. All images courtesy of GW Contemporary, Laguna Beach. Genevieve Williams, owner/curator of this five-month-old gallery, is enchanted by art that reveals abstract aspects of our atmosphere. As curator at the Laguna Beach based Honarkar Art Foundation (now closed), she mounted “Luminaries of Light,” displaying several translucent paintings and sculptures from California’s 1960s Light and Space movement. Jeff Peters, “Monday Misses Sunday,” oil on canvas, 18 x 20”. “ The Space Between: First Light, Last Light,”  with work by several artists from California and around the country, “explores the threshold between night and day.”  Paintings, lithographs and photos bring to light our environment in darkness, shadow, light and reflection. The exhibition invites meditation and what Williams calls “quiet illumination.” Williams began putting this exhibition together after viewing two lithographs by the late, multi-talented Peter Alexander. “Gardena” and “Palmdale” (both 1990) from his “LAX Series” were created from his nighttime helicopter flights over Los Angeles, particularly over airports, when he perceived the city’s grids as geometric abstractions. He photographed the airfields to capture the lit-up grids, then painted the scenes and created lithographs. The resulting images with their tilted horizons capture the feeling of suspension above a luminous night-time city. Sandrine Jacobson, “The Rose of the Morning,” 2025, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 x 1 1/2”. Salomón Huerta’s “Pool Paintings” are inspired by his youthful experiences assisting his gardener father as they manicured the grounds of luxurious Southern California homes. Mining those memories and adding elements of surrealism, Huerta creates paintings that transform the private pools and their surroundings into enigmatic settings against darkened backgrounds. These are psychologically charged paintings that explore atmosphere, restraint and memory. “Night Pool” (2025) is an interminable body of dark bluish-grayish water, bordered by speckled lights peering from buildings in the distance and a shimmering night-time sky. Jeff Peters contributes two large canvases, “Waiting For You To Pick Up,” and “The Line That Outlives Empires,” plus the smaller “Monday Misses Sunday,” (all 2025). They all play to the artist’s ability to capture dreamy scenes of radiant night skies and afternoon vistas. Using numerous layers of paint to achieve luminous surfaces, Peters constructs ephemeral scenes with slight images of figures gazing languidly into space, towards the horizon. Peters explains that his guiding interest is to, “explore the slippage between memory and invention, image and ideal.” Katie Shapiro, “Blue Moon,” 2025, inkjet on glass, Amazonite, 5 1/2 x 4 x 3”. Sandrine Jacobson’s “The Rose of Morning” (2025) is a luxurious rose-colored, non-figurative meditative exercise that captures the essence of a glorious morning. Her heavily layered oil painting connects and traverses the mysteries and reflections of the human experience with the natural world. The artist’s “She Is The Storm Rising” (2025) is a menacing image, depicting a burgeoning evening storm with clouds and rainfall descending on an ominous landscape. The contrast between these two paintings expresses the artist’s embrace of how the evolving state of humanity is mirrored by the ever-changing weather. Tessa Greene O’Brien, “Blue Moon, Addison,” 2024, oil, bleach, dye wax resist on dyed canvas, 60 x 48”. Katie Shapiro contributes six small sculptural works, each composed of inkjet photos of moons on small pieces of dark glass, all embedded into swirling abstract jet-black obsidian glass. Titles such as “Wedged Moon,” “Three Moons,” and “Moon in Rock” (2024-25) heighten the evocation of the beauty and mystery of the nighttime sky. Tessa Greene O’Brien’s “Blue Moon, Addison” (2024), despite the “moon” of the title, comprises an entirely different artistic technique and environmental aspect. Her large canvas, colored and textured with oil, bleach, dye and wax resist, abstractly illustrates a moon during a time of weather-related turmoil. She deftly combines figuration with abstraction. By contrast, “Dusk Skies” (2021) by Mara De Luca is nearly as pitch black as a moonless night sky. The artist brings together in her work elements of illusionism, romanticism and modernism. Depicting dawn to dusk to night-time as it does, “First Light, Last Light” demonstrates how each passing hour brings a new atmosphere, new aesthetic possibilities, and a new opportunity to open our eyes and start afresh. 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 USC Fisher Museum , Los Angeles Continuing through March 14, 2026 Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles California Continuing through December 20, 2025 Ken Gonzales-Day, “Ramonacita at the Cantina” from the “Bone-Grass Boy : The Secret Banks of the Conejos River ” series, 1996, C-print, 22 1/2 x 34 1/4”. All images courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Ken Gonzales-Day's mid-career survey “History’s “Nevermade"” moves us through three decades of work. While the investigation of race and queer identity is core to Gonzales-Day's pursuits, he also looks deeply into history and politics from a theoretical perspective, which is not surprising given his role as an educator and writer. Seen together, the works speak to cultural memory and how we see the present in relation to the past. Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Wonder Gaze, St. James Park (Lynching of Thomas Thurmond & John Holmes, Santa Rosa, 1933 ),” 2006, from the “Erased Lynching” series, inkjet print on vinyl, 8 x 19 feet. While still in high school and later as an undergraduate, Gonzales-Day made representational figurative paintings and drawings. Many of these pieces are installed salon style to the left of the entry room. These early works illustrate both a trajectory and a continuum of his interests in the male figure and his skills in eliciting trust and compassion between artist and model. Ken Gonzales-Day, “Tadareious Johnson,” 2020, from the series “Pandemic Portraits,” archival ink on rag paper, 40 x 30”. Continuing chronologically through the exhibition, the installation includes a significant early series, “The Bone Grass Boy” (1993-1996) This work consists of both a suite of photographs and a historical fiction written by Gonzales-Day set in the 1800s illustrating and describing the life of Ramoncita, a transgendered, two-spirited figure who is purported to be an ancestor of the artist. In the photographs created between 1994 and 1997, Gonzales-Day dresses up to play the various characters in the fictitious narrative, clearly delighting in rewriting and reinterpreting history.  In his haunting “Erased Lynching” series begun in 2006, Gonzales-Day researched the history of lynching in the America West, specifically focusing on vigilante violence against Latinos, Chinese, and Native Americans in California. Printing on both a small and mural scale, Gonzales-Day digitally removed the victims and seamlessly filled in the background trees to highlight the white spectators while creating an eerie absence. An abiding interest in landscape and memory led to another series, “California Hang Trees.” Gonzales-Day traveled around California documenting the trees used for hangings and their locations. The black and white photographic mural “The Wonder Gaze, St. James Park (Lynching of Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, Santa Rosa, 1933)” (2006), here spans nearly 20 feet. A crowd lingers, illuminated in front of a deep black background. A single barren tree extends from the ground toward the sky, the two hanged men erased from the image but left to our imagination. Twenty-one postcard size images from the “Erased Lynching” series are presented in a grid emphasizing the enormity of these injustices against men of color. Ken Gonzales-Day, “Afterlife (Digital composition with Mexico, Effigy of Death, National Museum of Anthropology (MNA), Mexico City; Leonard Wells Volk, Abraham Lincoln, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG); Mexico, Aztec, Figure of Xipe Totec, LACMA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, George Washington, NPG;  Houdon, Benjamin Franklin, NPG; Adelaide Johnson, Susan B. Anthony, NPG; Mexico,Scull Mask, MNA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, Flayed Man; Sculls, Museum of Criminal Anthropology, Turin; Rosenborg Tapestries, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen),” 2025, archival ink on rag paper, 40 x 80”. In addition to using found imagery as a point of departure, Gonzales-Day also makes photographs of friends and acquaintances. These are often shot in a studio against neutral backgrounds. In “Anthony” (2007), from the “Memento Mori” series, and “Tadareius Johnson” (2020), from the “Pandemic Portrait” series, he celebrates queer bodies. Among the most interesting images are examples from the “Dysmorphologies” and “Profiled” series. In “Dysmorphologies #94” (1999), Gonzales-Day compares and contrasts different skin types by digitally assembling grids of fragmented body parts evocatively arranged by tones and shapes. For the images in his “Profiled” series, he photographs antique statues from museum collections and represents them en masse  against black backgrounds. This series examines race and racial profiling within museum collections. “41 Objects Arranged by Color” (2016), is an impressive mural covering an entire wall in which Gonzales-Day digitally juxtaposes statues that vary in tone from back to white. He removes their settings, isolating the individual shapes against a black background. He standardizes the size of the statues to allow us to compare and contrast these representations as a way to understand historical bigotry. Ken Gonzales-Day, “Guardian I (Digital composition with Mexico, Jalisco, Seated Male Figure; Mexico, Colima, Figural Vessel of Hunchbacked Male Drinker; Colombia, Middle Cauca, Caldas, Figure with Ligatures; Mexico, Nayarit, Seated Female Figure; Mexico, Jalisco;  Standing Male Figure; Mexico, Colima, Seated Male Figure; Mexico, Nayarit, Standing Female Figure; Mexico, Tlatilco, Seated Figure; Mexico, Guanajuato, Acámbaro Valley, Chupícuaro, Standing Female Figure; Mexico, Colima, Standing Dog; Mexico, Colima Dog with Human Mask, All LACMA),” 2025, archival ink on rag paper, 40 x 30”. In conjunction with the USC Fisher Museum show, Gonzales-Day also exhibits new works at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. “Afterlife” includes more than twenty-five digitally composited photographs, many depicting groups of statues from LACMA's collection. “Guardian I (Digital composition with Mexico, Jalisco, Seated Male Figure; Mexico, Colima, Figural Vessel of Hunchbacked Male Drinker; Colombia, Middle Cauca, Caldas, Figure with Ligatures; Mexico, Nayarit, Seated Female Figure; Mexico, Jalisco; Standing Male Figure; Mexico, Colima, Seated Male Figure; Mexico, Nayarit, Standing Female Figure; Mexico, Tlatilco, Seated Figure; Mexico, Guanajuato, Acámbaro Valley, Chupícuaro, Standing Female Figure; Mexico, Colima, Standing Dog; Mexico, Colima Dog with Human Mask, All LACMA)” (2025) is a carefully composed arrangement of gray-toned Pre-Columbian figures combined with a single statue that retains its original color. In many of these images Gonzales-Day creates a colorful halo around individual figures and sets the composition against a colored background, frequently blue, mustard yellow or green. The addition of these colors reinforces the idea that the photographs are fabrications and not museified displays.  “Afterlife’s” highlight is the enormous collage “Afterlife (Digital composition with Mexico, Effigy of Death, National Museum of Anthropology (MNA), Mexico City; Leonard Wells Volk, Abraham Lincoln, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG); Mexico, Aztec, Figure of Xipe Totec, LACMA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, George Washington, NPG; Houdon, Benjamin Franklin, NPG; Adelaide Johnson, Susan B. Anthony, NPG; Mexico, Scull Mask, MNA; Jean-Antoine Houdon, Flayed Man; Sculls, Museum of Criminal Anthropology, Turin; Rosenborg Tapestries, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen)” (2025). In this work, Gonzales-Day arranged busts of famous figures including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and Susan B. Anthony with skulls and Mesoamerican artifacts. They sit in a long triangular jumble in front of a brown-hued composited illustration appropriated from a tapestry in the Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen that celebrated the brave deeds of European monarchs. The effect is chilling and speaks directly to Gonzales-Day's commitment to reveal the misdeeds of colonialism and to expose the ways museums have created and maintained racial hierarchies within their collections. Gonzales-Day's simultaneous presentations showcase his impressive achievements and illustrate the myriad ways — be it through photographs, drawing, painting, public art or writing — he has communicated and refined his ideas for more than three decades. 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 George Melrod Rajiv Menon Contemporary , Los Angeles Continuing through December 13, 2025 Rajni Perera, “Primitive,” 2025, acrylic gouacher, aluminum, glass and semiprecious stone beads, mother of pearl beads, and charcoal on polyester, 60 x 84”. All images courtesy of Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles. Born in Sri Lanka and based in Toronto, Rajni Perera draws from traditional and contemporary influences to create her own strikingly immersive personal mythology, inviting viewers into what the artist calls “a charged, mythic ecology.” Titled “Dhum Lōkaya (Smoke World),” Perera’s first solo show in the United States runs an ambitious gamut of mediums, while hairlike markings made directly on the wall weave among the disparate works in wispy strands to conjure the vaporous dominion of the title. But it is Perera’s lush, bodily lexicon that really unites and defines the show, imbuing it with an earthy elegance that offsets hints of feral abandon couched within its cryptic feminine narratives. Approaching the female form as a vessel for adaptation, growth and transformation, the work feels at once delicate and visceral, a dichotomy that the artist employs to often potent effect. “Primitive” is the exhibition’s signature work, as well as its most disarming. It depicts a squatting naked woman specked with flies against a washy pink field. Her head is encased by (or transmuted into) a lavish bulblike flower, which extends behind her like a wake. The woman’s face is obscured by a knot of tiny elements sewn onto the flower’s base, including bits of wire and semiprecious stone beads. Its shiny black and green coloration suggests a tactile gathering of flies, an effect at once startling and frankly pretty unnerving. Turning its verdant floral iconography into something far more menacing, the work posits the female body as a site of fecund natural overgrowth but also decay, captive to an untamed nature. Rajni Perera, “Dark Matter,” 2025, acrylic gouache, polymer clay, polyester thread, glass pearls on polyester, 84 x 120”. The large horizontal painting titled “Dark Matter” depicts a woman with a basket on her back, leaning forward in a diving pose against a muddy maroon field, while her rump is transformed into the glaring face of a beast. All around her, a large python-like snake curves through the frame. Only on drawing up close to the painting does one notice that its many orange, diamond-shaped scales are separate elements that have been hand-sewn to the surface, along with numerous milky pearls punctuated by a single sculpted orange rose at the top of the figure’s head at the center of the painting. Adding to these works’ tactile immediacy is the fact that they are painted on thin, translucent polyester, which allows us to see through them to the wall and supporting armature. The effect is subtle but transformative, puncturing the illusory nature of Perera’s scenes. Instead of seeing the paintings as representations on a two-dimensional plane, one also confronts them as hybrids, with textured real-world elements affixed to the surface of delicate membranes. The extra hint of bodily self-awareness they evoke only adds to the works’ corporeal frisson and enhances their destabilizing vision. Rajni Perera, “Artifact 2,” 2025, charcoal on metallic marble mulberry stock, 30 x 20”. Several works on paper lure us deeper into Perera’s elegant miasma, overlaying charcoal drawings of sensual abstract elements variously recalling vulvas, jewels or hairpins projected onto sinuous metallic marble stock. Conflating references to sexuality, decoration and spirituality, they exude totemic stature despite their indeterminacy. A set of three works on blue marbled paper offer studies of her “Swampgirly” sculpture: a segmented, serpentine entity that bobs across the concrete waterline of the gallery floor in scaly humps, finally emerging with the face of a female amphibian. In “Durian” a standing female figure is merged with a spiky durian fruit; in “Be Prepared” a nude woman poses cheerfully with a teapot for a head, as if ready for service. Perhaps the most dramatic hybrid is a sculpture titled “Bittergourd,” made of glazed terra cotta and set outside the gallery. The image posits a hollow female figure striped and stippled like a vegetable, holding up two incense bowls, suggesting a more benign and docile type of fungal transmutation such as might frequent the dystopian HBO series “The Last of Us.” Rajni Perera, “Swampgirly,” 2025, foam with steel armature, coated with a layer of polymer clay paint, an additional layer of wax, and beads, dimensions variable. Melding images or narratives derived from stories from her childhood in Sri Lanka along with others culled from science fiction and her own personal mythology, Perera’s works may well include nuances or motifs that elude the grasp of Western observers, myself included. Yet for all their specificity, the works remain both relatable and compelling in their yearning to discover new models of identity that transcend or subvert proscribed roles and labels imposed on women in contemporary culture — whether Western, Eastern or that vast multicultural cross-current in between. Rajni Perera, “Bittergourd,” 2025, terra cotta, under glaze, incense, 35 x 35 x 40”. A kindred counterpoint might be the Baghdad-born Kurdish-Swedish painter Hayv Kahraman, whose elegantly stylized depictions of women often address issues of women’s roles, gender politics and migrant identity in a highly precise ritualistic language. But unlike Kahraman, Perera displays no deference to polite society. Instead she embraces a ‘running with the wolves’ sensibility that derives a sense of liberation from throwing off the shackles of social decorum and reverting to some primitive, even monstrous state — or perhaps, ironically, evolving into one. And yet despite their liminal, at times abased condition, Perera’s characters always seem to embrace a biological imperative, to adapt, to survive, perhaps even thrive. Like her sinuous snaky mermaid, Perera’s vision is distinguished by its embrace of fluidity, freely blurring the lines between fact and fiction, past and future, civilization and wilderness, comfort and menace (and not least, between animals, vegetation and humanity). Alternately hopeful, rueful and bountiful, her works repeatedly straddle boundaries in unexpected ways. Whether or not you want to make that leap with her, you can’t help but appreciate their fierce, inventive spirit. George Melrod has written hundreds of articles on contemporary art and culture for such publications as ARTnews, Art in America, World Art, American Ceramics, Details, and Vogue, among others. In the 1990s, he was the New York critic for Sculpture magazine, and wrote a regular contemporary art column for Art & Antiques, for whom he worked as a Contributing Editor. A native New Yorker, he moved to LA in 1998, and has since contributed to websites such as artcritical and artillery. From 2007-2017 he served as editor-in-chief of art ltd. magazine.

by Margaret Hawkins MCA Chicago , Chicago, Illinois Continuing through February 22, 2026 Clay Perry, “Yoko Ono with Half-a-Room,” 1967. All images courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono Yoko Ono is one of those artists whose persona overshadows her artwork, which never quite reemerged publicly in the U.S. after the 1980 murder of her husband, John Lennon. But all along she has been making new work. “Music of the World” is a comprehensive show highlighting seven decades of creative productivity. Ono, now 92, was a serious and widely recognized artist before she ever met Lennon, and continued to be one after he died. “Yoko Ono's Secret Piece,” 1953, from typescripts for “Grapefruit.” Courtesy of Yoko Ono via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The show is roughly chronological and the works are mostly conceptual. Beginning in the 1950s, it foregrounds ideas over objects. The best work combines them. I found myself smiling the whole 90 minutes it took me to traverse the show. I’d forgotten how sweet Ono’s art is, how earnestly instructive. The earlier pieces capture the mood of the 1960s. Seen at the time as provocative, dangerous even, the work feels rather polite now. Then, most people didn’t like Ono. They thought she was abrasive. She was an outsider in America, with a distinct Japanese accent. She threatened people’s sense of gender appropriateness, as an equal, sometimes dominant partner to her famous, adored husband. She made dissonant recordings that sounded ugly and vaguely sexual, and not in a titillating way. She wasn’t a tall silent Barbie doll with smooth hair. She talked too much. And she broke up The Beatles — or so it was widely believed. (More recently music historians have pointed out that she in fact encouraged Lennon to remain with the group). She was regarded strident, but now her work seems more beseeching than scrreching. Still from “Bed Peace” interview video. Newly-weds John Lennon and Yoko Ono kick-off a bed-in for peace on Mar. 25, 1969, in their suite at the Hilton Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Keystone/Hulton Archive—Getty Images. Much of Ono’s work looks remarkably uncontroversial in retrospect, even corny in some cases. She was advocating peace in a time of war, collaboration in a time of polarization. She vaunted the power of imagination to make things better. Some of Ono’s best works are her “Instructions for Paintings,” from her 1964 artist book, “Grapefruit.” Short sentences direct readers to make something, usually in their minds but sometimes in the physical world. “Painting to Shake Hands” tells us to punch a hole in something and thrust an arm through to shake hands with somebody on the other side. What a perfect image. A punctured canvas was set up in the gallery and, when I was there, two noisy fourth-graders on a field trip obliged. Yoko Ono, “Add Colour (Refugee Boat),” 1960/2016. © Yoko Ono. Courtesy of the Tate Modern, London. Photo: Margaret Hawkins. I was struck by how understandable Ono’s work is. Unlike much conceptual art that followed during the early 60s, Ono’s work doesn’t offer — or require — wordy explanations. “The Blue Room Event” (1960) consists of an empty white room with handwritten instructions posted at eye-level telling viewers to imagine that the room is blue, tat it glows in the dark while they sleep, that “This is not here.” And of course some of the work is funny. The “Bed Peace” (1969) video shows Yoko and John being interviewed in bed by a stodgy journalist who declines their invitation to climb in with them. Clearly embarrassed, he congratulates them on proving to the world that they have pubic hair. John and Yoko are kind to the guy, but I felt sorry for him, dressed as he was in his suit. This is a time capsule, totally of the 60s, pitting the cool kids against the (stuffy old white) man. Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece,” 1964, photograph of performance at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, NY, March 21, 1965. © Yoko Ono. Photo by Minoru Niizuma. Much of the work is participatory. The last gallery, which is the most visually stunning, features “Add Colour (Refugee Boat)” (2016). In this piece an empty boat sits in an empty, formerly white room. Viewers are invited to write their hopes and beliefs anywhere, with markers in shades of blue. And they have. Scrawled graffiti covers every reachable surface. The idea — empathy, refugees are just like us! — is clear and beautiful. The most powerful piece in the show, a 1964 video of one of the first performances of “Cut Piece,” is still edgy 60 years later. Ono sits motionless the spotlit onstage as audience members approach and snip off pieces of her clothing. One by one they remove chunks of fabric. Then a young man climbs onstage and begins to cut her slip. The scissors pass close to her skin. He continues, moves to her other side and cuts more, removing her slip, exposing her bra. This seems like more than his share of cutting but after a pause he leans in again, snips her bra straps. The bra falls; she raises her arms and clutches her breasts. Yoko Ono, “Wish Tree for Stockholm,” 1996/2012, installation view. Courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2012. © Yoko Ono. Photo: Moderna Museet/Åsa Lund. Though Ono has invited this, it feels like assault. We watch her face; surely that is a flicker of fear we see in her eyes, the twitch in her jaw a flash of anger. Ono has said that the piece is about giving and taking. But mostly it feels like taking, a pointedly feminist statement on being used, exploring the blurry lines between vulnerability, passivity, and complicity. The piece invites the audience to do as they please, and the young man does, illustrating a fact of life for women that couldn’t have been better performed if it had been scripted. Ono’s work is all about vulnerability. She tells us to wish for things, imagine them, create change through belief. But “Cut Piece” enacts the other side of that virtue. This show won’t feel groundbreaking to anyone who has walked into an art museum in the past 50 years. Conceptual art has moved on, and at times Ono’s work is pointedly naïve. But I loved the defiant innocence of this show, its idealism, its humor, its accessibility, its sweetness and, in the case of “Cut Piece,” a little taste of bitterness. Margaret Hawkins  is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. Visit  Margaret Hawkins’ website.

by David S. Rubin   Shoshana Wayne Gallery , Los Angeles Continuing through January 10, 2026   Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice,” installation view. All images courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Since 2009, when Sabrina Gschwandtner acquired a collection of archival film footage that had been deaccessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, she has been making geometrically patterned “film quilts” by sewing together filmstrips and exhibiting them over light boxes. They essentially combine the formats of Jeff Wall, who revolutionized photography by mounting transparencies over light boxes starting in 1978, and Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), who created her first story quilt in 1980. Whereas Wall’s intent was to imbue a photograph with cinematic grandeur, and Ringgold’s aim was in great part to tell stories using a craft technique traditionally associated with women, Gschwandtner’s art effectively achieves both. Whether in color or black-and-white, her film quilts appear jewellike in a darkened gallery space through their sheer luminescence. The stories embedded within each are the tiny frame-by-frame narratives of her source material, archival filmstrips with a feminist bent in that they are usually from movies by and about women. Such content is the focus of “Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice,” which is centered on the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the history of representations of pregnancy in motion pictures. Specifically, the new film quilts are all constructed from archival film footage used in making a time-based “video quilt,” an expanded approach Gschwandtner introduced into her oeuvre in 2017. Playing in a separate gallery space on a continuous loop, Gschwandtner’s video “Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice” weaves together fragments from two female-directed films depicting pregnancy that the artist found while looking for examples made prior to the 1934 Hays Code, which among other censored subjects banned childbirth and abortion from movies for nearly three decades. Along with these Gschwandtner included sections of a vintage documentary explaining the rules of the code and an interview with her mother, who had an abortion in 1967, six years before it became legal. Linking the different segments together are hand painted text frames with words implanted within diamond-shaped modules that replicate the patterning of the film quilts. Some sections of the appropriated film footage are also presented using the same patterned matrix. Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice,” 2025, video, color, sound, 9 minutes, 9 seconds. The video opens with footage about the Hays Code. This is followed by the first archival film, Marvin Breckinridge’s 1931 documentary, “The Forgotten Frontier,” about the Frontier Nursing Service. The film includes scenes of midwives traveling on horseback to Appalachia and preparing for the delivery, as well as of the new mother holding her newborn. The second film is Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 short, “Madame’s Cravings,” which shows a pregnant woman sucking a lollypop, drinking absinthe, and smoking tobacco, while her partner tends to their other child. All of this culminates with her giving birth in public. Using colorful text frames, Gschwandtner then explains that the overturning of Roe v. Wade made her realize that she had taken her bodily autonomy for granted. Next, the artist’s mother candidly reveals the circumstances of her abortion, which she had done in complete secrecy at a cost of $1,000. The film ends with a question about what reproductive agency might look like when the artist, who is in her forties, reaches the age her mother is today. Sabrina Gschwandtner, “The Forgotten Frontier (Kentucky Star),” 2025, 35mm black-and-white polyester film, polyester thread, LEDs, 27 3/8 x 27 1/8 x 3” While the issues that unfold in the video are troubling, especially in light of the current political climate, there is nevertheless a tenor of joy that is expressed through the cinematic aesthetics. For one thing, Gschwandtner is a master of cut up. Additionally, the wall mounted film quilts in the adjacent gallery literally glow with pride over the heritage of the American folk quilt. Viewed from a distance, they also resemble geometric abstractions by high modernists such as Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). Each work has been handcrafted with care; the contours and positioning of the filmstrips are slightly jagged, like the patchwork of an actual quilt, and stitching is visible. Additionally, the stories embedded in them, while minuscule in scale, reveal that there is more to the imagery than initially meets the eye. Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Madame’s Cravings: Sweet, Bitter, Smoky,” 2025, 35mm black-and-white polyester film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs, 19 x 19 x 3”. For the two film quilts that were sewn together using footage from “The Forgotten Frontier,” Gschwandtner chose the “Kentucky Star” pattern, an eight-pointed star that is based on traditional Native American designs and which became popular in the early 1930s, around the time that the film was made and the Hays Code was soon implemented. In the other quilts, all of which employ filmstrips from “Madame’s Cravings,” the artist employed variations of the “Log Cabin” rhombus-filled pattern, which can be traced to the Civil War era and was a popular staple by 1906, the date of Guy-Blaché’s film. Additionally, Gschwandtner hand-painted several of the filmstrips according to a system of coding, using green for those depicting the protagonist consuming absinthe, and yellow, red, and blue for passages where she is shown with the lollypop. Beyond relating to the content, the addition of color significantly enhances the form. Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Madame’s Cravings (color),” 2025, 35mm black-and-white polyester film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs, 45 x 68 1/2”. Taken together, Gschwandtner’s video and wall works maintain a thoughtful conversation about relationships between technology and craft. Ultimately, however, they pay tribute to the strength and endurance of women through the generations, even in times like the current moment, when rights and liberties are once more being restricted. 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 Lynn Trimble Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum , Mesa, Arizona Continuing through January 4, 2026 Yuko Yabuki, “Beast,” 2019, mixed media on paper, 62 x 52”. All images courtesy of Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. Imagine a cosmos swirling in dualities, where the interplay of opposing forces creates a constant state of personal, ecological, and metaphysical balance. That’s the expansive, ever-changing reality presented by Yuko Yabuki, an Arizona-based artist born and raised in Japan, where her initial creative forays focused on graphic design and fashion. Having shifted from commercial endeavors to exploring spiritual realms, Yabuki has spent more than two decades blending the visual culture and philosophies that undergird the dualities in her own experiences and creative expressions. In monumental paintings and smaller works in various media, the artist sets a cosmic stage with a cast of mythological characters. With her futuristic humanoids, commanding creatures, and potent natural forces from wind to water, Yabuki invites us to feel the energies within and between them, all interacting to shift our accustomed trajectories of time, space, and existence. Yuko Yabuki, “Alchemy of the Universe,” 2025, acrylic paint on stretched canvas, 50 x 30 x 1.5”. Seventeen of Yabuki’s works created between 2002 and 2025 comprise “Duality,” in which discrete segments are displayed in pairs. “Magician/Creator” and ”Beast/Destroyer” (2019), depict dragons embellished with blocks of gold leaf that signal the central role of this ontology. Ink drawings of dragons titled “Duality” (2019) are all black and white save for a single gold orb positioned near one of the dragon’s talons. These dragons, among other things, are a collision between the dramatic realism of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and the modern-day pop culture phenomenon “Game of Thrones.” Between the flawless draftsmanship and implied narratives, Yabuki’s fantasy world draws us in as the show progresses. Among the strongest works are “Alchemy of Universe” and “Movement of Energy” (both 2025), which are about monumental shifts in the global order and America’s own political landscape as well as the extreme ravages of climate catastrophe from wildfires to flooding. In the former, a small red salamander is positioned atop a tree-shaped form that is rooted in a red pool of fire. It’s all surrounded by a dark sky with columns of descending gold squares that transition into white tears or droplets of rain after passing through a white expanse of water or clouds. In the latter, a blue dragon is curved above the white expanse, and a red dragon is curved below it. Their tails are loosely intertwined to form the number eight, which can represent growth and the expansion of prosperity in Japanese culture. Blue and white diamonds in the upper part of the composition become white rain or teardrops below. With their delicate curved lines and bold colors having different meanings in various cultures, the imagery and its execution inspire us to imagine our own narratives.  Yuko Yabuki, “Duality (Ink Beast),” 2019, ink on paper, 20 x 15 x 1”. Beyond dragons — a mythological creature often associated with wisdom, strength, and protection in Japanese culture, but also commonly aligned with chaos or evil attributes such as greed or lust in Western culture — Yabuki’s cosmos includes an array of creatures that populate land, water, and sky. Octopi, jellyfish, cats, mice, pangolins, birds and other animals each carry their own symbology. It adds up to a meta-narrative of divergent forces working against or in tandem with one another to propel forward universal energies and the collective unconscious. Yabuki renders fantastical humans as well, but here they are presented in smaller scale artworks. In that respect these humanoids actually counter the anthropomorphism common to Western ideologies. “Black Orchid” (2023) depicts a figure embracing a black swan surrounded by seven purple orchids and two green totems of stylized cactus. The image channels Yabuki’s identity as someone rooted in two cultures. Yuko Yabuki, “Magician/Creator,” 2019, mixed media on paper, 53 x 64”. Four of the larger works suggest an evolving cosmos that undergoes an infinite repetition of cycles rather than movement towards a terminal point in time. “World” (2003) is a dark, chaotic scene anchored by a black octopus with glowing yellow eyes surrounded by a miasma of red liquid. Below the octopus, an eye weeps. In one tentacle, the octopus appears to hold a yellow Manji , a common Buddhist symbol associated with peace, harmony, and good fortune, but more familiar to us as the Nazi swastika. The meanings could hardly be more different, but the recent history of the latter corrupts our perception of the former. Sea creatures in “Transition” and “New Beginning” (both 2012) are rendered with lighter colors and a delicate touch. For “Successor” (2025), an enormous eagle in flight holds a snake in its talons — the national symbol of Mexico — though it’s not clear which, if either, will prove triumphant. Yuko Yabuki, “Love Warrior,” 2022, acrylic paint on wood-board, 30 x 24”. Taken together, the paintings of “Duality” prompt reflection on climate crises and shifts in geopolitical power. Yabuki’s animal-based symbolic language includes an array of eyes, stars, teardrops, and a DNA helix covered in thorns. Gold tritons appear on the body of a jellyfish. Elsewhere, the Roman numeral “XV,” or 15, appears. As a whole the exhibition embodies Yabuki’s gradual construction of her own unique visual alchemy. Beyond the intriguing nature of her iconography, there’s another compelling element that recommends this exhibition. The dragon scales, bird feathers, and snake skins are rendered in precise, meticulous detail that conveys a gentle strength and meditative quality. Throughout the exhibition, Yabuki’s disciplined line work is replete with movement that transmits the very energy she assigns to the cosmos and its inhabitants. Although in Yabuki’s universe epic battles that threaten to undo the delicate balance of the cosmos are clearly underway, the artist’s style conveys a sense of optimism about their ultimate outcomes. In “Pangolin Forever” (2023), she paints the profile of a person holding a small anteater. The presence of this animal serves as a symbolic reminder that mass extinctions are not inevitable. In “Love Warrior” (2022), a figure with long red hair is surrounded by blue birds and monarch butterflies atop a unicorn poised to descend a stairway much like a warrior might storm a citadel. One imagines the artist herself assuming that role, using line, form, and color as her weapons of choice. But the presence of weapons and weaponized objects is not meant to advocate for violence and war. Rather, throughout her art, Yabuki works to move our vision of the cosmos towards harmony, balance, justice, and peace. Lynn Trimble  is a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter  @ArtMuser  or Instagram  @artmusingsaz .

by Michael Shaw David Zwirner Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing through January 10, 2026 R. Crumb, “Rabbit … Is My Dome Too Dominant?” 2019, gouache ink, and graphite on paper, 7 x 9 1/2”. All images courtesy of David Zwirner, Los Angeles. Spoiler alert: R.Crumb is an anti-vaxxer. And a conspiracy theorist. But Crumb’s probing, self-critical dive into why he’s gone down this path, including some very specific re-creations of conversations he’s had (one with a doctor friend of his particularly stands out), is drawn in his inimitable cross-hatched style. Now 82, that celebrated draftsmanship has been developed and honed over the course of a long career. It makes for a disorienting but well-wrought trip. Crumb is his own harshest critic when it comes to evaluating just how paranoid he is — about vaxxing, 5G networks, and yes, the Deep State — and is nearly as comprehensive questioning his own motives and sanity as he is marshaling his fierce anti-authority tendencies towards his many targets. Given that, his anti-vaxxer posture feels almost forgivable. He’s always been a consummate crank. I’m still disappointed, even a little disconcerted, that Crumb has become this particular kind of crank … but then, it certainly helps keeps his comics — his art — as vital as ever. Aline Kiminsky-Crumb, R. Crumb, and Sophie Crumb, “ Crumb Family Covid Exposé,” 2021, ink and correction fluid on paper in ten parts, 16 7/8 x 14” The works here are for the most part original drawings, framed and hung in clusters such that each has the potential to make up a complete comic book. I happened to begin my viewing — which in this case entails a good amount of stand-up reading — mid-exhibit, with the series “The Very Worst LSD Trip I Ever Had” (2023). It’s an immersive recounting of a bad trip he had in Cleveland in 1966 with his first wife, Dana. Their bad trip was overseen by the individuals who gave them what may or may not have actually been LSD. He and Dana, alerted by a blood-curdling scream down the hall, rushed over to witness a young man curled up in the fetal position, “in an abject state of extreme fear …” with one of the drug givers hovering over him. Crumb’s recounting, in which the young man’s experience feeds into thoughts of his own, is a beautiful mixture of fear, empathy, and rage. It’s storytelling at its best. Much of the rest of the show has Crumb grappling with the powers that be (aka, “Authority!”). They run the gamut from “Deep State Woman” to Dr. Anthony Fauci to all the other co-conspirators attempting to poison him with their bogus drugs and even more bogus information. R. Crumb, “The Very Worst LSD I Ever Had,” 2023, ink and correction fluid on paper in eight parts, each 12 x 9”. Amid all this, there’s the light and amusing patter he maintains with his late wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who was his collaborator on several works on view and served as the voice of reason and refuge to buffer Crumb’s incessant Questioning of Authority. She draws herself into many of Crumb’s sequences in a way that merges their two very disparate styles (hers much looser and more folksy, verging towards ‘Bad Drawing,’ if that old label still applies). One great panel of thought bubbles reads: (him) “The problem is, maybe I Am crazy … crazy people usually don’t know they’re crazy;” (her) “Maybe he’s not crazy ... Just obsessive compulsive and his Aspergers makes him paranoid an’ alienated … But what the hell! I’m no picnic either.” I can’t help but wonder why Crumb remains one of the few comic-book artists to acquire this level of canonization from the art world. His representation by one of the world’s elite galleries, where he’s shown since 2007, accounts for most if not all of it. Indeed, the entire far wall, opposite the entrance, is dedicated exclusively to the show’s title, painted rather luridly in black text on a yellow background. There’s also a state-of-the-art lightbox that allows us to thumb through pages of Crumb’s sketchbooks digitally without having to bother with archival-friendly gloves, or otherwise risk tainting the valuable drawings. “Crumb,” the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary, went a long way towards building his reputation as a massive record collector and music aficionado, his fetish for full-figured women, and his childhood in a deeply dysfunctional family environment. But when it comes right down to it, he’s simply the Original and the Best. R. Crumb, “Cover: Tales of Paranoia,” 2025, ink and correction fluid on paper, 14 1/8 x 10”. His black ink drawings (all of which the checklist readily acknowledges include the use of correction fluid), are profoundly strong objects of craft, as well as art, each with its own aura. It’s hard to think of another living artist whose drawings display more hand-drawn mastery. Pair that with Crumb’s seven-decades-long pop-cultural legacy (“Keep on Truckin’”), his vaunted eccentricities, his dandy-ism, and his quirky charisma. It’s simply hard to find another comic artist who’s as robust a candidate for canonization on the art world’s radar, despite his carefully cultivated old-white-cranky-male persona. The late Christopher Hitchens, whom Crumb draws and quotes in the final panel of one series, sums it up best: “My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass .” To which Crumb adds below Hitchens’ portrait: “I don’t agree with everything this writer ever said but I’m with him on this.” Michael Shaw  is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was recently included in the exhibition “ Meshuganah ” at A Very Serious Gallery in Chicago, as well as the exhibitions “ Sociality ” at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House!  at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Culver City Arts grant in 2023, a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. Visit Michael Shaw’s website .

by Matthew Kangas Portland Art Museum , Portland, Oregon Continuing through January 4, 2026 Yoshida Chizuko, “Shoreline,” 1950, oil on canvas, 31 3/16 x 25 9/16 x 1 1/16”. All images courtesy of the Portland Art Museum and the Estate of Yoshida Chizuko. This retrospective of Japanese painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (1924-2017) coincides with the museum’s acquisition of 80 works by the postwar artist. Accompanied by an international symposium in October, a full-length color monograph, and related educational activities, the exhibition manifests a broad effort to place Yoshida within American art history, Japanese modernism, and the global phenomenon of contemporary printmaking. The museum’s curator of Asian art, Jeannie Kenmotsu, has researched the artist thoroughly and makes a strong case for her significance on a number of levels. There is her pioneering role as a woman artist in a male-dominated art culture; her presence in a dynastic printmaking family that she married into, the Yoshida clan (whose works are included); her ties to international modernism, including European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism; and her achievements elevating complicated printmaking techniques which often overlapped with her abstract paintings in the early 1950s. Later, she confronted Pop Art and Op Art. Examples of all of these facets are included. Yoshida Chizuko, “My World,” 1949, oil on canvas, 25 9/16 x 31 1/2 x 7/8”. It is hard to overstate the challenges and prejudices Yoshida faced as a female artist, especially once she began to be admitted to formerly all-male competitive exhibitions that were made co-educational with the introduction of Japan’s post-war constitution. Prizewinning led to membership invitations in the Pacific Painting Society, an important avant-garde group of painters and printmakers, and the Vermillion Leaf Society of women artists. However, Yoshida had to face continued affronts such as the vandalism of one of her exhibited paintings, “Thaw” (1950). Curator Kenmotsu discreetly suggests that the defacing might have been due to the work’s abstract quality, not just the gender of the artist. As a teenager Yoshida wanted to become a dancer, but health concerns pushed her toward art classes instead. As the earliest works here, “Song of the Sea” (1948) and “Shoreline” (1950), suggest, she was completely comfortable combining representational views of nature with geometric and abstract imagery, a development that placed her at odds with many traditional art groups at the time. Fortunately, her marriage to Yoshida Hodaka in 1953 gained her entry into his elite, wealthy family with in-laws who were artists and innovators in woodblock printmaking. Before that, however, she had committed (in her 1948 diary) to following the “path of the avant-garde.” For the next 60 years she remained committed to this course. Yoshida Chizuko, “Rainy Day, Blue,” 1954, color woodblock print on paper, 9 7/8 x 14 3/4”. In 1957, with her husband and mother-in-law, Fujio, Yoshida’s first trip abroad took her to the University of Oregon, where she was exposed to lithography. “Things I Picked Up in the Desert” dates from their residency in Eugene. Its scribbles and impressions of cactus and long-horned cattle confirm her affinity for the varied American landscape, something she would return to repeatedly over the years. While the earliest, pre-Yoshida clan paintings might appear derivative of European modernists such as Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky, this is no less true of work from this time by other continental American artists who, in lieu of traveling, took their cues from esoteric art publications. Nonetheless, “My World” (1949) and “Title unknown (Rainy Day)” (1954) are bold formal constructions with spontaneous, improvisatory marks and striking color combinations. Yoshida was a quick study who left oil painting behind to pursue the woodblock discipline of the family she had married into. Yoshida Chizuko, “Jama Masjid,” 1960, color woodblock print on paper, 18 5/8 x 13 1/2”. After Eugene, the couple, along with Fujio (who acted as translator) continued on a year-long trip around the world, touching all the bases and world capitals still popular with Japanese tourists today: Paris, Rome, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India. Many of the artist’s color woodblock prints (some of which combine collagraphs, lithographs, and photo-etchings) recalled the artist’s stays in Seattle, Southwest Arizona, Venice (“Lido—Venice”), Greece (“Mediterranean Sea”) and India, especially vivid abstractions of “Red Fort,” “Jama Masjid” and “Impressions from India” (all 1960). While Yoshida’s most commercially successful artworks involved variations on her butterfly imagery, more challenging works that were daringly subjective such as “My Inner Self No. 2” (1961) and “Red Whirlpool” (1964) strengthen the case for her stature as an artist who crossed the hyper-traditional boundaries of Japanese printmaking. One need only regard her father-in-law Hiroshi’s 1931 print of the Taj Mahal to see the distance she had to travel as an avant-garde artist, as a woman artist in Japan, and as the daughter-in-law within a family of well-known artists. Later works that attempt to emulate Pop Art, Op Art, and Minimalism are less convincing visually but commendable for their valiant efforts at transforming the tightly structured medium in which she chose to work. Areas left uninked, called “blind embossing” or intaglio, do their best to accentuate the basic starting point of Yoshida’s work: the blank page about to enter the press. 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 .