Viewing Laguna Art Museum’s “Tony DeLap: A Retrospective” is like being in the audience of a magic act. Not because of the repetitious images of floating ladies and card tricks placed throughout the show. Not even because the artist has been an actual magician most of his life. Rather, it’s because, as with any decent […]
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The Well-Curated ‘LA ATTITUDE’ Show at Sue Greenwood Fine Art Captures the City’s Intimidating Spirit
One of the most important talents a curator can possess is corraling artists in one place and making it seem as if their works belong together. Sue Greenwood has done just that, bringing a trio of Los Angeles painters—William Wray, Scott Yeskel and Danny McCaw—into her Laguna Beach gallery, with the resulting exhibition, “LA ATTITUDE,” […]
A Ghost Is Resurrected at the Bowers With ‘American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times’
I.F. Stone once described John F. Kennedy as “simply an optical illusion,” and nowhere is that more evident than in “American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times,” the curated showing of Kennedy photographs now at the Bowers Museum. Tracing the life of the 35th president of the United States from his privileged birth to […]
OCC’s ‘Jim DeFrance: A Retrospective’ Is a Graceful Ode to Life’s Release
The deep emotion in curator Tom Dowling’s voice is palpable as he slips on his glasses and leans in to examine his late friend Jim DeFrance’s work. As his hand runs over the graceful curves of the rippling carved-wood sculpture Rainbow, his fingers touch here, there and down under, highlighting the spots, scrapes and gouges […]
Our Man In Malta on His Semi-Annual Theatrical Pilgrimage
Every two and a half years over the past decade, I’ve had the opportunity to go to Malta and direct a play. After more than 25 years in the business, I rarely direct locally because most local theaters don’t pay; they’re too busy chasing audiences to do anything adventurous, so there isn’t much opportunity to […]
Crucial Basement Projects Inhabits the Lower Level of the Santora Arts Building in Santa Ana
“I don’t have time to go to LA,” admits Christian Ramirez, by way of explaining that curating is a “selfish” art. “Managing a gallery, I can curate shows for the work I want to see here in Santa Ana.” Ramirez is speaking about Basement Projects, the gallery he runs in the lower level of the […]
Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Inspires New Display at Beall Center for Art + Technology
Beall Center for Art + Technology’s “Drawn From a Score” is inspired by the work of avant-garde musician John Cage, who is best known for 4’33”, in which musicians walk into a performance space, then don’t do anything for four minutes and 33 seconds, with the shuffling of feet, people coughing, the hum of air […]
Female Victimization and Childhood Trauma Inform a Muddled Show at Grand Central Art Center
Deipnophobia is the fear of dinner conversation. Deipnophoroi are women who prepared food and offered a sympathetic ear to young boys and girls during ancient Greek celebrations commemorating the ritual slaughter of young people by the Minotaur. Maya Gurantz’s Deipnophoroi has nothing to do with food preparation. Rather, it’s about food for thought, tackling subjects […]
The 10 Best Art Shows of the Worst Year Ever
It’s early in the morning. Everyone else is asleep. I’m drinking my coffee and contemplating the explosion of great art this past year in Orange County. The beauty of corpses, the poetry of abstraction, social conscience, mentorship, celebrities, new looks at the places where we live and the things we throw away: 2017 was a […]
Unlike Our National Political Climate, Yorba Linda’s Nixon Library Gets Better and Better
The last time I visited the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum was in 1990, protesting its opening. I was 30 and pissed about the state of the world. Orange County was overwhelmingly Republican—so much so it was celebrating Yorba Linda’s most successful, and humiliated, son by dedicating a new building to him. Twenty-seven years […]
A Controversial German Philosopher Inspires a UC Irvine Exhibit’s Exploration of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’
Stepping into the dark hallway leading to Omar Mismar’s film installation, “Schmitt, You and Me,” at UC Irvine’s Room Gallery, you see a paper target peppered with seven bullet holes, each hit in areas that would devastate vital organs. It’s difficult to view with perfect clarity, but in the upper-right corner, there’s a complimentary, handwritten […]
Bradford J. Salamon’s Paintings Turn Cultural Detritus Into Destination Artwork
Los Angeles artist Bradford J. Salamon paints junk. An accomplished portraitist, his move to create likenesses of things such as old toys, faded technology and the detritus we toss in the can when it starts to misbehave is the artist’s Proustian elegy to time passing. It makes a certain sense that if we capture the […]
Fullerton’s Magoski Arts Colony Raises Cash for Fellow Artist’s Chemo
During the three hours on Sunday I sit at the Magoski Arts Colony in Fullerton, more than 200 people show up to deliver their art, all of it on 5-inch-by-5-inch wooden blocks. Paintings, collages, mixed media, photography, carvings, pyrography, drawings and sculptures all make an appearance, each piece being donated to “Small But Mighty,” an […]
Ten Works Worth Seeing at Irvine Fine Arts Center’s All Media 2017
There’s always been something worth noting in previous All Media exhibitions at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, but the open group show, limited to Southern California artists vying for $1,300 in prizes, was often cluttered, any diamonds buried among a whole lotta coal. With a $20 entry fee coloring the proceedings, a cramped space filled […]
‘The Dead: The Photography of Jack Burman’ at Begovich Gallery Is Stomach-Churning, But Worth It
You don’t walk so much as float through curator Jacqueline Ann Bunge’s exquisite, ethereal exhibition “The Dead: The Photography of Jack Burman.” Time slows down inside the Nicholas & Lee Begovich Gallery, and the half an hour it should take to examine the 19 troubling, confrontational photographs of skeletons, mummies, anatomical specimens, and cadavers easily […]
Long Beach City College’s ‘Drawn From Clay’ Searches for Lost Shards of Hidden Meaning
Part of the Sur Biennial, as well as the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA series, Long Beach City College Gallery’s “Drawn From Clay” can’t be entirely encapsulated into one artistic medium or another. In a show containing paintings, sculptures and art performance, clay may be the most common factor, but it doesn’t really unite the […]
Great Park Gallery Highlights Local Female Abstract Painters in Exciting Exhibit
The process of understanding abstract art is like learning how to swim by being thrown into the deep end. The experience forces a way of thinking and seeing that isn’t natural for most people. The recognition and acceptance of absence, lack of linearity, and the stripping down of the everyday to its poetic bare bones […]
Jacques Garnier Is the Star of This Year’s Laguna Festival of the Arts
Photographer Jacques Garnier rented a booth at Laguna Festival of the Arts for the first time this year. He didn’t expect much. He knows his art is an acquired taste. A visual maverick, he only photographs places and things that he cares about, that catch his eye, that have some meaning; it’s never about the […]
The Bowers Celebrates the ‘Stark Beauty’ of Edward Weston’s Work
Edward Weston once said he saw no reason for recording the obvious, and his picture of a bedpan in “Stark Beauty: The Photography of Edward Weston” proves that point. On loan from the Capital Group Foundation to Bowers Museum through Sept. 17, Bedpan is one of 72 gelatin-silver photographs representing some of the best of […]
‘2017 California-Pacific Triennial: Building As Ever’ at OCMA
Considering the death of the Orange County Museum of Art’s recent attempt to move from Newport Beach to Costa Mesa, it’s apropos that the art leading into the 2017 California-Pacific Triennial is an open grave chiseled from the museum’s concrete floor. The title of Mexican artist Santiago Borja’s This Is Architecture is taken from architect […]
Modern Detritus Takes Center Stage in Irvine Fine Arts Center’s ‘You Have No Sound’
Kim Kei has a Dr. Frankenstein approach to creating her art. Whether rescuing it out of the gutter or creating it in her studio, she manipulates otherwise forgettable detritus with fabric and paint, molding it with wax and glue and fibrous material, so that the piece holds its wrinkles and twists. Stiffening into a sculpture, […]
