Featured Events in Los Angeles in May 2024 (May Updated)

Our rapidly changing climates and expanding populations have challenged the pre-existing structures in place for meeting the demand for food and water. One solution, hydroponic farming systems, allows for accelerated agricultural production within compact urban centers, but these self-enclosed systems separate us from the land. Stitch Field offers an alternative to the plastic-filled warehouses of plants associated with hydroponic systems by using knitted sheep’s wool as substrate and replacing engineered crops with locally occurring plants. Alice-Marie Archer hand-knits fiber sculptures that are each embedded with seeds, creating patterns suited to the needs of each seed species—whether it grows best in a divot, pocket, or row. For this site-specific installation at the Benton, the artist has chosen seeds of locally occurring California plants with either edible or medicinal properties. Archer connects new technology through age old techniques with her sculpture. As an aid to her practice, she uses Midjourney AI visualizations to imagine her work in new spaces and forms. In these images her sculptures morph into home-like structures or walls of cascading plants that fit into imagined urban landscape modelling how this work can be implemented in daily life. Visitors will be able to see, smell, and feel the installation change daily as the seeds germinate, sprout, grow, and decay throughout the course of the exhibition. Archer’s sculptures will eventually be returned to the earth, completing the natural cycle of growth and death, and contributing once again to the local ecosystem.

With a minimum of means—often just a pencil and paper—artists have created drawings that open infinite worlds to us. They have used the practice of drawing to express their aspirations and anxieties, ask questions, raise concerns, and translate their inner experiences into physical form, whether in 20th-century New York, 18th-century India, or 16th-century Rome. The drawings in Infinity on Paper are prisms through which audiences can reflect upon the numberless outcomes of the creative process and even the nature of representation itself. This exhibition emerged from the Benton’s AllPaper Seminar, a professional development program designed to introduce graduate students and young professionals from all backgrounds to the field of works on paper. In the seminar, these emerging scholars engaged with the history of drawing and its practitioners, methods, and materials. The AllPaper Fellows were generously allowed access to the exceptional drawing collection of Jack Shear, artist, collector, and executive director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. That rigorous engagement with drawings in the Shear collection as well as the Benton’s own holdings formed the basis of Infinity on Paper, comprising 70 drawings by more than 50 artists that offer a dynamic exploration of drawing in its various media, methods, and techniques. With its vast scope, the exhibition brings together works on paper by artists from the past and present such as Lee Bontecou, Vija Celmins, Mary Evelyn De Morgan, Gustave Doré, Torkwase Dyson, Maerten van Heemskerck , Jasper Johns, Alice Neel, Edvard Munch, Rita Ponce de León, Kurt Schwitters, Tiepolo, and Francesco Zuccarelli. Their works—at times intimate, at times bombastic—invite visitors to reflect on drawing as a major form of expression and revel in its infinite possibilities.

On view will be The Huntington’s Head of a Boy (ca. 1928) and monumental carved redwood Organ Screen (1933–34), which was created for the auditorium of the California School for the Blind in Berkeley, California. In this exhibition, the screen—which had been out of public view from 1980 to 2011, when The Huntington acquired it—will be reunited with the other parts of Johnson’s California School for the Blind commission for the first time in over four decades. Johnson’s work speaks volumes about the fragility of our shared cultural heritage and the critical role that institutions like The Huntington play in safeguarding this heritage for future generations. With this exhibition, The Huntington is making the full range of Johnson's work accessible to the artists, researchers, and audiences of today.

As a child, artist Karla Diaz would often get in trouble for drawing on walls. “Wait ‘til your mother gets home!” her aunt would exclaim. Diaz still loves to draw and paint. Karla Diaz: Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home features recent works on paper and canvas that focus on American Mexican identity from the 1970s to the present, emphasizing a cultural context of social upheaval and justice through the artist’s explorations of recollection and imagination. Diaz’s vivid, narrative paintings and works on paper depict portraits and landscapes of people and places that inform her memories growing up in Los Angeles and México.

Curated by California photographer John Divola, "Hollywood: John Divola and Robert Cumming" showcases the work of two artists who reference or use studio continuity photography as art material. In an extension of his Continuity (1995-) series, Divola presents four new arrangements of found stills, organized and grouped thematically. In a selection from his 1977 Studio Still Lifes, Robert Cumming’s photos of the backlot of Universal Studios capture film production materials and locales as surreal scenes and sculptural tableaux.

Though vast and diverse in their creative queries, the artists share a fusion of vernacular and industrial techniques with installation, painting, photographic and sculptural practices and are active in incorporating inherited skills, trades and practices that include, hand sign painting, car customization, truck detailing, adobe construction and small-scale ceramics. Introducing these modes of making within their practices allows them to pay homage to and build on the legacies of generations of artists that have been generative in and expanding the bounds of cultural production. In the last year, the artists have met regularly to discuss and plan how to shape an exhibition that could reflect not only their individual practices, but make visible connecting threads by harnessing moments of convergence that elucidate a history of collaboration, support and camaraderie amongst the group. In addition to the exhibition, the artists have sought out peers that include designers, filmmakers, writers and photographers that will contribute to the expansion of the show beyond the gallery walls. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book with an introductory essay by Dr. Rose Salseda featuring interviews and photos with the artists. The artists participating in the exhibition are: Diana Yesenia AlvaradoMichael AlvarezMario AyalaKarla Ekaterine Cansecorafa esparzaAlfonso Gonzalez Jr.Ozzie JuarezMaria MaeaJaime MuñozGuadalupe RosalesGabriela RuizShizu Saldamando

In the main space, a new body of work invites visitors to attune with bodies and forces on air. Encountered through a re-coding of color and temperature, Saraceno’s cloud and foam sculptures propose complex geometric systems of fractal color through which light illuminates in myriad constellations. From the nacreous glow of spider/webs, to the energetic heat evidenced by a star’s celestial color, the artist has long sought to make visible the spectral hues and synesthetic vectors that shape the cosmic web. A series of infrared photography suggests an era beyond the use of aerodynamics; here, temperature measurements rendered in colors reveal the thermodynamic vitality in the bodies of “lighter than air” aerosolar flight. In suspended sculpture, the allure of iridescence—the phenomena of luminous color produced by a particular intersection of light and viewing angle—becomes an allegory for a rapidly warming planet. The front gallery features sculptures in tones that reference the Earth’s flora and fauna, reflecting seasonal difference and interspecies vernacularity. Developed in consultation with ornithologists and wildlife organizations, some of these sculptures can be placed outdoors providing functional habitats for a range of animals, as meditations on biodiversity and interspecies cohabitation. Their modular structures are inspired by cumulonimbus clouds and form part of Saraceno’s long-standing project Cloud Cities—a proposal for an alternative form of urbanism and assembly that might emerge when large cities are not only built from a human perspective. Ownership of these works requires an agreement of co-ownership and shared stewardship of the environment. The exhibition will also feature Fly with Pacha, Into the Aerocene, a film that portrays the long-standing relationship between the artist, the Aerocene community he founded, and the Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in Jujuy, Northern Argentina. The film documents the communities’ struggles to protect their land against industrial lithium mining, driven by the demand for batteries in the name of a so-called ‘green transition’. In reality, these efforts are depleting water resources in the region and contaminating the Earth. The film follows the 32 world record-breaking flight of an aerosolar balloon over the Salinas Grandes. Lifted only by the heat of the sun and carried along the rivers of the wind, Pacha was recognized as the most sustainable flight in human history by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), carrying the message “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium” written by the communities. Visitors to the gallery’s reading room are invited to participate in a collective, inter-generational artwork for the benefit of the Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc. Renewing the practice of reading messages drawn in the sky through the phenomenon of pareidolia—the impulse that leads us to recognize significant patterns in ‘random’ information—visitors can draw upon cloudscapes and in turn become part of a community for the free circulation of water, information and life. A new signed Aerocene edition is also made available for purchase, the entire proceeds of which will support the communities’ ongoing legal and stewardship efforts. A final gallery will contain works that delve more deeply into Saraceno’s collaborative work with spiders. Beginning almost two decades ago, this project has led to the formation of Arachnophilia: an interdisciplinary, distributed and intercultural community that syncretizes artistic, scientific and situated knowledges through a shared affinity to spider/webs. This darkened gallery includes works woven in authorship by and with spiders that live alongside the artist at his studio in Berlin, Germany. By showcasing the meshwork of spider webs the artist hopes to encourage those who experience a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) to move toward a love and wonder of them (arachnophilia). More importantly, this ongoing exploration functions as both model and metaphor, celebrating extra-human technologies of sensing, and settlement, offering a more sensitive, collaborative way of life on Earth.

Korean Treasures presents 35 artworks recently donated to LACMA by Drs. Chester and Cameron C. Chang (M.D.), selected from the largest gift of Korean art in the museum’s history. Chester Chang (Chang Jung Ki) was born in Seoul in 1939 and first moved to the United States as a child with his family in 1949, when his father, Chang Chi Whan, was appointed General Secretary to the first Consul General of Korea in Los Angeles. The bulk of the Chang family collection has been intact for over a century. This introductory exhibition presents traditional Korean paintings, calligraphic folding screens, mid-20th century oil paintings from both North and South Korea, and ceramics of the Goryeo (918–1392) and Joseon (1392–1897) dynasties.

Central to Goodman’s artistic process is the act of drawing directly from life, a practice she has maintained every day for decades. This unwavering commitment to drawing underpins a deeply intuitive mode of artmaking that combines her outward physical observations with sensations pulled from her inner imagination and memories of specific places or experiences. Often working across multiple canvases at once, Goodman sees her painting practice as a means of inhabiting the moment. As such it holds a uniquely restorative potential where the imagination can process and renew itself. The substantial physical presence of her paintings, with their thick impasto, materialize the psychological depths and complexities encountered in the process of their making. Goodman finds inspiration in the work of such 20th-century filmmakers as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Wenders and Erice, as well as Renaissance master painters like Titian and Veronese, often incorporating their creations as subjects in her observational drawings. For decades, Goodman has maintained a regular practice of drawing from films, pausing a film for six minutes and completing drawings using ink, pastels and watercolor. The resulting sketches inform the imagery and mark-making of her paintings, including her new abstract canvases on view in the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. ‘Night beekeeper II’ (2023), takes its inspiration from the 1973 film ‘The Spirit of the Beehive,’ directed by Victor Erice. A recurring motif in Goodman’s work, the beekeeper represents mutually nurturing relationships marked by attentiveness and care. ‘Night Beekeeper II’ is among the latest paintings produced on a dark ground, a technique only recently introduced into Goodman’s work as a means to better explore the nocturnal realm. A maelstrom of vivid red, blue, orange and green, ‘Night Beekeeper II’ expresses and distills Goodman’s observations while navigating nature on dark winter evenings, contemplating both the beauty of nature and the perils facing our ecosystem. Consistently translating such experiential insights, Goodman manifests in her paintings the delicate balance between outward expression and intense introspection. About the Artist Born in London in 1961, Catherine Goodman CBE lives and works in London. Goodman studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, London, and the Royal Academy Schools, London, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Goodman’s lifelong commitment to social justice through education forms a critical aspect of her artistic identity and approach to making. In 2000, Goodman established The Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III to deliver subsidized and free education to thousands of young and disadvantaged people in the UK. Today, she continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member. For many years, Goodman organized drawing classes for individuals dealing with homelessness and disabilities, and she continues to offer refuge classes to young people with mental health issues on a weekly basis. She is also the primary caregiver of her sister, Sophie, who was born with multiple health conditions and has always been a subject of Goodman’s practice. In 2014, Goodman was awarded Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for services to The Royal Drawing School, and Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) in 2024 for her services to art in the UK. Goodman has served as the Artist Trustee at The National Gallery, London since 2019. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Rothschild Foundation, and the Royal Collection Trust.

In the early 1990s a generation of artists in the United States were using exhibitions to draw attention to real-world crises: by the time Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, AIDS was officially the #1 cause of death for men aged 25 – 44 in the country; the Los Angeles uprising had been declared the most destructive period of local unrest in US history; and the Culture Wars were in full force, after the Robert Mapplethorpe ‘obscenity’ hearing marked the nation’s first criminal trial over content in an exhibition. Terms such as multiculturalism, identity politics and marginalization signified spaces of contestation, while in art, the market had collapsed following a global recession, causing an unprecedented number of galleries to shutter. It was in this context that artist Charles Gaines developed the exhibition ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism’ for the University Art Gallery at the University of California, Irvine, in close collaboration with the gallery’s director, Catherine Lord. Presenting works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Adrian Piper, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Williams and Fred Wilson—all little known artists at that time—‘The Theater of Refusal’ intended to ‘reveal the strategies of marginalization and to propose an alternative,’ as Gaines described his approach then. Integral to the show was a reading room, for which Gaines accumulated articles and reviews about the participating artists that he highlighted to reveal limitations in the discourse of marginality and its instrumentalization by mainstream criticism. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of ‘The Theater of Refusal’—in a social and political context that bears many similarities—this exhibition in downtown LA looks back at that seminal project and continues the theoretical investigation to understand its resonances today. Co-curator Homi K. Bhabha has called this process ‘retroaction.’ He suggests, ‘A conventional retrospective looks back from the summit of the present to synthesize the past by giving it a culminating shape. In contrast, ‘RETROaction’ brings forth the legacies of ‘The Theater of Refusal’ in the early 1990s to interact with the lessons and lesions of art today. It takes a view of the present in all its decolonizing tumult—racial violence, pandemics, climate catastrophe, migration and displacement—pinpointing a critical moment of transition in the ‘90s from which to move forward.’ ‘RETROaction’ presents works from the early 1990s by Charles Gaines, Lorna Simpson and Gary Simmons, who all participated in the original ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,’ as well as a new iteration of the exhibition, this time subtitled ‘Black Art and Reconstitution,’ presenting the work of ten artists who all embrace abstraction and materiality in their practice, selected by art historian, Ellen Tani, together with Gaines. ‘We speak less now of marginalization and refusal than of the world systems—historic and ongoing—that undergird those processes: capitalism, colonialism, racism. We consider Bhabha’s description of the way we can think of past work and its relation to the present moment through an investigation of strategies of marginalization from the ‘90s and how it has transitioned into a critical space—30 years later—now dominated by the issues of decoloniality, which in turn gives representation to those suppressed ideas of the ‘90s,’ says Gaines. ‘We chose to undertake an investigation of abstract art produced by Black artists to show that the controversies around representation—a significant context for the marginalization of their practices—continues today. Like the original project, ‘Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Reconstitution’ rethinks structures of artistic knowledge and the critical discourse that surrounds it.’ About RETROaction and the New York presentation: RETROaction is a project initiated at Hauser & Wirth with the prominent Harvard academic, Homi K. Bhabha, to explore the ‘nowness’ of art and critical concepts from the recent past in dialogue with artists who work with the gallery: it posits that our current time is one for retroaction more than retrospection. The first iteration of the project created a smaller presentation of the ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Reconstitution’ and also explored the Whitney Biennial in 1993—a show that has subsequently been recognized as establishing many terms that underpin our current cultural debates. Artists included: Ida Applebroog, Charles Gaines, Mike Kelley, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman, Gary Simmons and Lorna Simpson with Kevin Beasley, Torkwase Dyson, Leslie Hewitt and Rashid Johnson. About the curators Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English Department and Comparative Literature Department at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art and cosmopolitanism. His works include ‘The Location of Culture,’ which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic, and the edited volume ‘Nation and Narration.’ Bhabha has also written articles on contemporary art for Artforum and essays on the work of William Kentridge, Anish Kapoor, Taryn Simon and Matthew Barney, amongst others. With the support of the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations, Bhabha has led a research project on the Global Humanities. He is a Corresponding Fellow at The British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Critic-in-Residence at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, Freie Universität Berlin and Stellenbosch University. Charles Gaines is a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art. His body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. The concept of identity politics has played a central role within Gaines’ oeuvre, and the radical approach he employs addresses issues of race in ways that transcend the limits of representation. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Gaines is also exhibiting as an artist in ‘RETROaction.’ Ellen Tani is an art historian and curator based in Rochester NY, where she is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and her museum career includes curatorial roles at the ICA Boston, Whitney Museum and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. As a specialist in contemporary art’s intersection with critical race studies, with a particular focus on conceptual- and performance-oriented practices, Dr. Tani uses methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of power, gender, race and ethnicity from the 20th Century to the global present. Her writing has been published in Art Journal, Panorama, American Quarterly, Art in America and other outlets. Kate Fowle is curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth. Prior to joining the gallery in 2023, she was director of MoMA PS1; chief curator at Garage Museum in Moscow; and executive director of Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York. She was also the first international curator of UCCA in Beijing and co-founder of the first Masters Program in Curatorial Practice on the West Coast. Fowle started her museum career in the UK, where she initially trained as an artist. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions internationally and initiated numerous institutional programs to support artistic research and collective practices. Publication In summer 2024, a new edition of the 1993 publication ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism’ will be released by Dancing Foxes Press with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and LAXART, marking the 30th anniversary of Charles Gaines’ and Catherine Lord’s exhibition and publication ‘The Theater of Refusal.’ Coedited by Rhea Anastas, Charles Gaines, Jamillah James and Eric Golo Stone, this publication reprints in facsimile the eponymous 1993 publication that documented the show, which contained essays by Maurice Berger, Gaines and Lord, as well as the transcript of a roundtable that included a range of artists and writers. Reproducing images of the exhibition for the first time in color, the new edition augments the original publication with an essay by poet and scholar Fred Moten; recent conversations between Lord and Gaines and between Moten and Gaines; a roundtable discussion that echoes the first, moderated and edited by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax and Jamillah James; and an afterword by Rhea Anastas. Supporters include Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Max Hetzler, the Rennie Collection and a Teiger Foundation Director’s Award.

Complementing her paintings on view in West Hollywood, Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles art center will feature a special presentation of Steir’s limited-edition prints, produced in collaboration with Crown Point Press, highlighting the artist’s longstanding explorations with printmaking and its importance within her practice.

Since 2007, JANM has partnered with Eric Nakamura, founder of Giant Robot, to produce the Giant Robot Biennale, a recurring art exhibition that highlights diverse creative works celebrating the ethos of Giant Robot—a staple of Asian American alternative pop culture and an influential brand encompassing pop art, skateboard, comic book, graphic arts, and vinyl toy culture. Giant Robot Biennale 5 will feature artists Sean Chao, Felicia Chiao, Luke Chueh, Giorgiko, James Jean, Taylor Lee, Mike Shinoda, Rain Szeto, and Yoskay Yamamoto, among others.

“ART A to Z” is a particularly wide-ranging exhibition from the gallery’s holdings in its mission to further introduce the gallery to its new local audience. While Pasadena and San Marino boast two of the nation’s major museums, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is the first gallery focusing on contemporary and modern art commensurate with those exhibited in its museums. Artists such as Edgar Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Kaethe Kollwitz, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Francisco Zuniga, Hans Burkhardt, Karel Appel, Hannelore Baron, Arman, Claire Falkenstein, George Herms, Sam Francis, Patrick Graham, Llyn Foulkes, and other formidable names of modern and contemporary art make up just some of the gallery’s holdings, so presenting a comprehensive view of the gallery’s holdings is impossible. The answer to that limitation of space is addressed in a novel curatorial approach – “ART A to Z” will be a revolving exhibition, and as works of art are sold, their new owners will be allowed to take their acquisitions home, and the exhibition will be re-installed as required, encouraging visitors to revisit the gallery on multiple occasions. With the initial 30 works spanning nearly 100 years on view in the initial installation of “ART A to Z,” no fewer than three times that number of works in the que, covering the entire alphabet, but Jack Rutberg bemoans that the collection has no artists whose names starts with the letters “I, Q, and Y.”

Between November 1982 and May 1984, Basquiat produced approximately a hundred paintings, numerous works on paper, and six silkscreen editions in Venice, California. For an artist closely affiliated with the New York art scene of the 1980s, Basquiat was extraordinarily prolific in Los Angeles. Made on Market Street reflects on this consequential era by bringing together nearly thirty works—several of which are among his most important paintings. Larry Gagosian notes, “Los Angeles has always been a great city for artists and Jean-Michel seemed to find it a refreshing change from New York. While the immensity of his talent was immediately apparent, it was nonetheless a highlight of my own career to work with him, to introduce him to Los Angeles, and to witness the amazing impact that his art and legacy have made on our culture.” After first meeting Basquiat in 1981, Gagosian invited him to Los Angeles. Basquiat’s solo exhibition with Larry Gagosian Gallery in LA—the first time his work was presented on the West Coast—opened in April 1982, immediately following his first solo show in New York at Annina Nosei’s gallery. The Los Angeles exhibition was seen as the arrival of a significant voice by the public and collectors alike. In November 1982 Basquiat returned to California, living and working at Gagosian’s residence on Market Street, a three-story structure with an interior courtyard open to the light and air from the beach nearby.

What does it mean to be altered? Like clothes are altered by a tailor to fit the wearer, so too are the records of history. Fragments of histories crafted, maintained for specific purposes, often silenced. The suppression of histories has shaped ideologies, social systems. The alteration of history has altered the fabric of society. Interrogating archival photographs and objects that centre a Western history of decolonialisation through alteration, the artists Ffion Denman, Nelly Ating, Audrey Albert, and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay consider the role that galleries and institutions play in the public discourse and interpretation of history. Specifically, the contortion of history regarding the Welsh Patagonia colonisation, the South African Afrikaans occupation, the Chagossian Islands under British colonisation, and the occupation of Palestine by Israeli forces are reinterpreted by the artists in the gallery space. As Conrad (2016) points out, global history aims to come to terms with the connections of the past. Therefore, from image circulation to the use of these material objects, the artists aim to draw from similar historical alteration as a marker that connects levels of distortion. What has this got to do with the gallery as an institution?

The exhibition features a group of his latest Tondo works, alongside his iconic Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings, and Shellac Paintings. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, March 16, from 5-7 pm. The artist will be present. At 6pm, Callum Innes will be in conversation with writer and curator, Hunter Drohojowska-Philip. The talk will be followed by a signing of Innes’ newest publication produced by Sean Kelly Gallery. From the onset of his career, Innes has created lushly painted and subtly nuanced canvases in a rectilinear format. In 2022, the artist added a striking new format to his repertoire, the Tondo. The catalyst for this transformative shift occurred when Innes was asked to paint the end of a whisky cask for a charity event. With these works, the artist mastered an entirely new set of technical and aesthetic challenges, confronting a format rich with art historical resonances. While his working methodology remains consistent—the repeated addition and removal of pigment in the Exposed Paintings and Split Paintings and the interaction of two different substances in the Shellac Paintings— the Tondos have necessitated a number of important evolutions in the way that Innes makes the work, both psychologically and formally. The materiality of the plywood panels accelerates Innes’s practice, providing a quick, firm surface. He also uses a smaller, rounded brush which introduces a completely different physicality, offering more fluidity and enabling a more direct interaction with the work. In contrast, his previous works on canvas offer a slower, softer surface, inviting a more meditative way of working. The exhibition also includes rectangular Exposed and Split Paintings. The rectangle, with its rational four points and sides, symbolizes elements, seasons, and reason itself, while the oval, with its earthier, sensuous nature, signifies unity and balance. This exhibition makes evident the expansion of Innes’ language and his mastery of technique, materiality, and emotional resonance throughout his acclaimed body of work. Callum Innes’s new publication, extensively illustrated with images from the Tondos series and installation views of key exhibitions, explores how the artist has challenged traditional perceptions of shape and form to create dynamic and immersive visual experiences. A pivotal essay by art historian Éric de Chassey, traces Innes’ encounter with the tondo and its progenitors in the history of art, firmly cementing his breakthrough in the pantheon of important works rendered in this distinctive style. Callum Innes lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland and Oslo, Norway. In 1992, Innes had major exhibitions, at the ICA, London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 1995, he was short-listed for the Turner Prize and was awarded the Nat West Prize in 1998 and the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002. His critically acclaimed museum exhibition, From Memory, traveled throughout Europe and Australia from 2006-2008. In 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective survey exhibition and accompanying monograph, I’ll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands. In 2018, his first major solo exhibition in France, In Position, took place at Château la Coste in Provence, with an accompanying publication. Innes will have an exhibition at Kode – Lysverket Museum, Bergen, Norway in 2024. His work is included in major public collections worldwide including: the Tate Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland; the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; The Dallas Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Hilti Art Foundation, Vaduz, Lichtenstein; and Deutsche Bank, London, and Sydney.

Founded in 1921 in Laguna Beach, Women Painters West (WPW) is a non-profit membership corporation with educational, benevolent, fraternal and charitable objectives. Originally created under the name of The Woman’s Art Club of Southern California, the organization saw two name changes before officially becoming Women Painters West in 1983. In recent years, Women Painters West has been composed of some 200 dedicated women artists working in all mediums, committed to the practice of art. Women Painters West includes among its members art instructors in all levels of art education. Many members exhibit individually in galleries, museums, and universities and have been recognized and honored nationally and internationally. Membership is by application and juried selection.

Ripley's artistic approach embodies the essence of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, particularly in its rejection of figurative representation and emphasis on spontaneity and gesture. Like his predecessors such as Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky, Ripley's process is deeply intertwined with music, allowing rhythmic brushstrokes to translate into bursts of color that dance across the canvas. The use of black gesso as a base provides a stark contrast against which Ripley's vibrant colors can truly pop. The visible splatters and drips serve as tangible reminders of the artist's physical engagement with the canvas, capturing the energy and dynamism of the creative act itself. Ripley's paintings are not mere visual compositions; they are multisensory experiences that evoke emotions and sensations akin to poetry. His work transcends strict interpretation, inviting viewers to engage with the paintings on a personal level and to find their own meaning within the layers of color and texture. Through a process of wiping out and repainting, Ripley achieves a sense of depth and movement within his compositions, creating an ever-evolving visual narrative that invites exploration. Each layer of paint contributes to the overall richness of the work, resulting in paintings that are timeless, poetic, and full of life.

An art history savant with an uncanny ability to recall and connect an encyclopedic wealth of information, Johnson made work that conveys the vast nature of the human experience as viewed through the pinhole of the artist’s own dynamic life. The works on view here are emblazoned with the artist’s celebrated “moticos”—the term, an anagram for osmotic, that Johnson coined for the deconstructed, black glyphs that function as signifiers in the artist’s widely referential visual language. Initially brought forth from the clutter of pop culture’s runoff—such as promotional images of James Dean, Elvis Presley, or department store models—Johnson would cannibalize his early works by cutting them up and reworking them, often referencing his art-world contemporaries in the work's final title. In this exhibition, the artist has paid homage to members of his cohort, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, and more. The exhibition’s two sculptures, Untitled (Paddle with Bunnyheads and Mickey (1986–c.1994) and Untitled (Block with Bunny and Screw) (not dated), will make their first-ever public debut here. Bearing the artist’s signature drawing of a bunny head—the image that the artist used as a universal portrait or catchall to depict and unite otherwise disparate individuals—these objects can be understood as anointed by Johnson’s symbol and, thus, brought into the fold of the artist’s trove of meaningful things or ideas. An early practitioner of performance art akin to the style of Fluxus or Allan Kaprow’s happenings, Johnson would use objects such as cardboard boxes, wooden spools, or hotdogs to create temporal performance events that he called “nothings.” In what many later considered his final performance work, on January 13, 1995, Johnson was witnessed diving off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and backstroking out to sea. His body was later found, and it was determined that he had drowned. After his death, an extensive archive of Johnson’s work was found, meticulously organized in his home. Due to the unconventional and secretive nature of the artist’s practice during his lifetime, larger-scale exhibitions exploring and situating Johnson’s practice were near impossible. Posthumously, with exhibitions such as this one, Johnson can be understood as one of the major artistic innovators of the second half of the twentieth century. Ray Johnson (b. 1927, Detroit, MI; d. 1995, Sag Harbor, NY) was a seminal pop art figure in the 1950s, early conceptualist, and mail-art pioneer. He studied at the Detroit Art Institute, MI and spent a summer in a drawing program at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, MI, an affiliate of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL before matriculating to Black Mountain College, NC. Johnson has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at museums and institutions, including The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (2022); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2021); School of the Visual Arts, New York, NY (2019); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2015); The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, NY (2014); Berkley Art Museum, Berkley, CA (2012); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2003); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1999), and many more. Johnson’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Berkley Art Museum, Berkley, CA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and many more.

The Shigaraki tradition of ceramic making as we currently conceive of it can be charted back to the eighth century with the production of extravagant tiles for the Shigaraki Palace. Since the late 1300s, Shigaraki pottery has been distinctively popular for use during tea ceremonies among tea masters and cultural tastemakers. In Japan’s Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, Shigaraki’s ceramic vessels were used as containers to pack freshly picked tea leaves. Ueda himself grew up on a tea farm in the Asamiya area of Shigaraki. As such, many of the works in this exhibition convey Ueda’s own regional history and personal origins, making reference to these old, local tea vessels. Naturally occurring compounds—which the artist adds to his clay and glazes to create some of his signature effects—are inherent to the region’s soil, determining the nature of Shigaraki-made ceramics for generations. Ueda has amplified this look and its required ingredients in his practice—the dynamic, eruptive motions of his forms and glazes hyperbolize otherwise traditional qualities. Feldspar, which is both found in the region’s soil and occasionally additionally supplemented in Ueda’s studio, is what creates the glass-like effect in the glaze while the resin found in the region’s red pine allows for a precise temperature when burned for firing. It can take three to six months for Ueda to collect, from the local area, the amount of firewood required for a single firing. Once the artist’s tradition anagama kiln is started, he will attend to it for as much as seventy-two hours straight, adding firewood every ten minutes. While Ueda has extensive knowledge of and utilizes the aforementioned traditional practices, he also amplifies them to the point of subversion. With a clay-building process that creates an explosion-like effect in the glaze that pours out of each work’s final structure, the artist’s vessels are carefully frozen in the moment of their own combustion so as to undercut the Platonic function found at the core of the ceramic medium’s craft-based origin. The artist has implemented new techniques that he has developed through his own experimentation. For his recent assemblage works, Ueda pours melted copper into a large bowl of stones to create the metal portion of the sculpture. The final shape reflects the negative space amongst the stones and immortalizes the process of its own making. Ueda captures the ineffable beauty contained within the imperfect. Utilizing traditional materials to catalyze otherworldly chemical effects within his inventive works, the artist composes transportive objects that would be right at home in settings both prehistoric and futuristic. Heightening the legacy that he has inherited, Ueda bridges the worlds of art and design, maintaining and expanding the discipline’s process while investigating and going beyond the bounds of its functionality. Yuji Ueda (b. 1975, Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture, Japan) comes from a family of award-winning tea farmers in the Shiga Prefecture town of Shigaraki. His work was presented in a two-part group exhibition curated by Takashi Murakami at Blum & Poe Los Angeles and New York in 2015, and a solo exhibition at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2023.

This new series of colorful abstract paintings continues the artist’s exploration of memory - delving into those aspects of life that can be controlled and those that cannot. “I often perceive my painting practice as a series of letters, or messages to my inner self or the past, and that my paintings are a letter to myself, a record of a moment in life, merging a lived experience I’ve had with the present moment”, DeJesus says. In these fluidly inventive paintings, DeJesus employs additive and subtractive gestures to elicit complex, visual tensions. Fragmented compositions mirror the complexities of memory and the elusive nature of self-understanding, as the artist seeks to unravel the interconnectedness of memories and the disjointed nature of personal narratives. Using layers and washes, removing material or occasionally cutting up paintings, DeJesus often merges old and new paintings to tell a new story and explore how memories connect. Utilizing a process that embraces both the intentional and the accidental, the paintings evidence an ongoing conversation between artist, material and image. The spontaneity of colorful washes stand in contrast to the intentionality of overlaid marks and added materials. Fields of color are manipulated to move, but complete control is not always an option, nor the point. Discussing her palette, DeJesus says, “I gravitate to using bright colors - pastel or even neon hues. These colors have an intensity that chimes with my inner world. I use them in a chaotic, often optically dissonant way, or in a way that I wouldn’t always expect. For me, it is not about the beauty of the colors, or their attention getting qualities, but their fantastical intensity. I feel in tune with their dreamlike qualities and the memory experiences they inspire. These childlike hues reflect the nostalgic essence of childhood experiences, serving as a reminder that the child within us never truly disappears.” Explaining further, the artist states; “While my work is purely abstract, and non-representational, gestures often suggest forms that repeat and I’ll begin to categorize them. Portal motifs have emerged in my work over the years and in this body of work, I have come to see them as mirrors and caves. A mirror symbolizes a surface of reflection and containment, while a cave is a geographical formation you can physically enter. Both represent portals of transformation, femininity, and spiritual transcendence and for me become gateways to inner exploration.” Letter to a Memory suggests a personal and intimate journey through memories, reflecting on experiences and emotions in an exploration of self and DeJesus’ relationship to the past.

Jackson’s paintings combine the emotive gestures of abstraction with the artist’s signature figural forms. Jackson achieves his characteristic abstract marks through a series of highly calculated and repeatable circumstances that have come to comprise his process. He lays the canvas or panel flat so as to approach the surface equally from all sides; this condition also permits Jackson to achieve specific, desired effects with the paint. Leaving moments of reprieve in his compositions, he consistently exposes his initial markings on the canvas as essential elements of the work, allowing the viewer a glimpse into every aspect of the structure of his finished painting. As the exhibition title Machines for the Spirit implies, Jackson’s oil-based paintings act as mechanisms that are meant to prompt an experience in their viewer. The artist states that, like a machine, every part of a composition must work together to function in unison. As Jackson loads each composition with dynamic interplays between figure and field, the artist’s work provokes a process of leisurely and assiduous looking as the eye takes in a sense of space, illumination, figural forms, and the abstract marks signaling the artist’s hand. Working at a scale that encourages onlookers to imagine entering the work, Jackson prefers this intimate visual reciprocity between individual and composition to some of art’s more esoteric quandaries, saying of the latter, “They are trying to make a process that is dynamic stand still.” The earliest of the twenty paintings in Machines for the Spirit was made in 1983, although the majority of the exhibition represents Jackson’s new works. Consistent themes are found throughout the artist’s expansive oeuvre, including the recurrent figure of the saxophone player which can be seen in Painting (7.14.23), 2023 (2023). This imagery is representational of Jackson’s close associations with musicians throughout his life, as well as a deep love for jazz that the artist developed while growing up during what is now considered a cultural renaissance for the American Midwest. The likeness of shoes also recurs in Jackson’s paintings—notably appearing in Painting (12.4.23), 2023 (2023)—as a way of indicating to the viewer that they are stepping into another world, thus harking back to the exhibition’s title and the transportive impact of the artist’s work. Jackson grew up in St. Louis, MO and began to exhibit his work in the mid-1960s, developing close associations with the Black Artists Group (BAG), and has since generated a prolific practice, notably with a recent solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 2019. Jackson’s painting style lends itself to a certain multiplicity, reflecting on the ideologies of many movements and experiences over the course of six decades, as well as projecting its own distinctive singularity. Maintaining an emphasis on process and composition, Jackson aligns himself with the past while paving the way for painting’s future. A public program with Jackson in conversation with Harry Cooper—Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC—will be presented on Saturday, March 16 at 2pm. This event is free and open to the public. In 1982, Jackson relocated to Oakland, CA, continuing his prolific practice that has been presented in numerous solo museum exhibitions including: the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2021); di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA (2021); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2019); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012); Harvard University, Cambridge MA (2002); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (1993, 1984, 1977); Seattle Art Museum (1982), and others. Honors and awards include a 2023 Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement from the Pollock Krasner Foundation; Award in Painting and Sculpture, Awards in the Visual Arts, Flintridge Foundation, Pasadena, CA (2003/2004); Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (1993); a grant from Art Matters, New York (1988); Nettie Marie Jones Fellowship (1984); and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980-81). His artworks are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA and many more.

Fernberger is pleased to present “La Fiaca,” a solo exhibition of recent paintings and a new installation by the multidisciplinary artist Alina Perkins. In her native Argentina, “la fiaca” is a term used to describe a blissful, nourishing idleness—an introspective pace and productive space that she embraces to pursue intellectual meditation and creative invention. Her resulting artworks are portals into alternate, though familiar, realities—resisting the literal and functional, welcoming the surreal and sensorial.

The Touch, the Amulet and the Saltation ruminates on a triad of interrelating conceits: the desire for connection, the need for safety and the want for an expansive change in how we experience and communicate love. Referencing evolutionary biology, the word saltation signifies sudden and large scale mutations from one generation to the next—though the term is invoked here more poetically with regard to transformation, imparting questions around what is required to sustain lasting and profound advancements in the way we care for and honor one another while on earth—and also after death. Through an experimental process which Benning has developed over the past two decades, these wall-mounted works transgress the singular categories of painting, drawing and sculpture. The manipulation of materials occurs through stages of translation: going from a digital image to a projected transparency to an outline drawn by hand on wood, to the final, three-dimensional result, which is cut out with a jigsaw, coated with aqua resin, sanded, painted, buffed and fit back together. Benning imbues each work with their touch and thought processes—an embodied, ever sentient, quality emanating from each finished painting. The Touch, the Amulet and the Saltation is comprised of brightly colored abstract works which center on points of contact, and white figurative works, some of which are imbedded with jewelry and other talismans—as if to suggest how we assign poetry to objects in order to communicate desires for protection and remembrance. The figurative works also endeavor to imagine how people uncannily infuse matter with their personal energies, and how these energies persist, ghostlike. At turns playful and deeply serious, Benning explores the transformative function of grief—who we are compelled to remember when they are gone—that is, when they are no longer seeable or touchable and must be accessed internally—and how intimacy with loss expands our capacity for love. The power of these works cumulatively is such that transformation itself becomes an amulet—a form of protection grounded in metamorphosis through true reverence and tenderness.

Track 16 presents Los Angeles-based artist Galia Linn in her solo exhibition Resurgence curated by Emma Gray, founder of Five Car Garage. The show runs in the 10th floor exhibition space from March 23 to May 25. This new body of work explores the themes of internal landscape and play through both sculpture and work on canvas. The canvas pieces are a continuation of the theme that Linn often expresses in her practice: sanctuary. In previous works, the artist created sanctuary spaces where people might come and reflect together, paving way for a resurgence. Now, the sanctuary turns inward, and the works reflect individual, inner landscapes, yet still sanctuaries, nonetheless. An internal landscape, for Linn, is not simply a fanciful location, but contains a map of the self, populated with past memories and projected hopes–a site for bubbling the unconscious: an internal sanctuary. Linn’s interest in natural landscapes pushed the artist into years of experimentation with watercolor landscapes, focusing on trees because of their ability to grow in areas razed by human activity. Trees equal rebirth. She eventually began to abstract these landscapes by using the same techniques she uses for her sculptures: heavily textured and liquid layered glazing. Organic colors are layered while wet, allowing the paint to mix in its own way. When glazing clay in the kiln, the process becomes the catalyst–or alchemist–that bonds the layers of glazes and the clay together. In these new paintings cracked surfaces bleed color, with marks concentrated towards the bottom, allowing for a sense of luminosity towards the top. The works transform through this process to quiet meditations full of stains, smudges, and soft marks. Linn states that she does not control this process, but only offers guidelines. Also featured in the show are beach ball sculptures, which stand in contrast to the contemplative nature of the works on canvas. Sculptures based on the concept of play, the work originates from beach balls. Linn inflates and wraps the balls with clay, creating roughly textured and layered, undulating, organic surfaces with natural hues. When the sculptures are finished, the artist simply deflates the ball to use again. This act of deflation and transformation reflects the cyclical nature of creation and renewal, yet, too, the beach balls are an escape, a way to make something joyful, playful, and reminiscent of summer. For Linn, these notions of both inner landscape and play work as part of the art-making process, along with being open to what one’s unconscious is saying. Galia Linn is a sculptor, painter, and site-responsive installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. Linn’s childhood and early adulthood was spent in Israel surrounded by relics and ruins of civilizations, from ancient archeological artifacts to the contemporary remains of armed conflicts. This instilled in her an intimate connection to past and present civilizations, as well as the understanding that each place is filled with complicated stories and relationships. Her work is currently on view at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA through April 14, showing a 20-year survey exhibition of her work titled “Vessels and Guardians” and at Emma Gray’s Five Car Garage through March 30 in her show titled “Strength and Vulnerability.” In 2025, she will exhibit a project for the Archeology Research Center at USC. Additionally, she has collaborated with UCLA’s Fowler Museum in workshop interventions. Her site-responsive installations, an ongoing series since 2014 titled “A Place,” evoke the basic human need for sanctuary and safety. Linn has shown nationally and internationally, including such venues as the Brand Library and Art Center (Glendale, CA), Descanso Gardens (La Canada-Flitridge, CA), and Galerie Lefebvre and Fils (Paris, France). She has been commissioned to create site-responsive installations at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library (La Jolla, CA), 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica, CA), and LAXART (Los Angeles, CA), among others. Her work is included in numerous private collections in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. Linn’s projects have been featured in LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Art + Cake, and KCRW’s Art Talk. Alongside her studio practice, she builds support structures for artists and creatives. Linn is the founder of Blue Roof Studios (BRS), a multidisciplinary art hub located in South Los Angeles. Informed by the core themes of her own studio practice, BRS offers a place for artists to work in an environment that fosters creativity and community. In 2020 Linn founded Arts at Blue Roof (AaBR), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Through studio residencies, mentorship, and public programs, AaBR seeks to build long-term relationships with artists and audiences to support accessible arts programs and meaningful arts experiences.

L.A. Louver is proud to present sculpture by Luis Bermudez (1953-2021). This survey exhibition of work made between 1986 and 2014 demonstrates the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the interconnected nature of place, identity, and materiality, and the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Entitled Sobre La Vida, which translates to “About Life,” the presentation celebrates the creative developments of a beloved cultural figure, who was an influential force in the lives of artists both within and outside of Los Angeles throughout the course of his career as an artist, educator, and curator. Bermudez’s aesthetic and philosophical vocabulary is embodied by the artworks of the La Caja series. Though differing in their unique textures and colors, the conceit of these works is the same: two complimentary forms poised on the cusp of interlocking engagement. Made from Bermudez’s distinctive, bespoke castable refractory – a material between cement and clay – these sculptures conjure a sensorial experience through their gritty, scaled, surfaces, and earthen coloration. The La Caja works consist of one ‘negative’ and one ‘positive’ element, evoking tension through a feeling of anticipated contact left unsatisfied. Moksha, M-10, a mossy-textured work from 1986, literally builds upon these engaged forms, crowned by a stepped vortex. Weighty and architectural, these works display sophisticated engineering of material and form. Existing as objects of positive and negative space, the sculptures evoke physical and metaphysical forces that evade language – a common thread throughout Bermudez’s oeuvre. Vulnerable Offering and Ultimate Offering similarly embody tension and contrast as gentle, unglazed porcelain bowls balance atop winding reptilian bodies. Redolent of Pre-Columbian iconography and objects of religious ritual, these works emit a mystical aura. Other sculptures like El Caracol, C6 of the Sacred Structures series illustrate the same reliquary quality: a delicate vessel (formed from a modified sake bottle) stands as a metaphor for the human figure, protected by a larger, stronger covering; every surface exquisitely textured. Bermudez intended for these works to be viewed from all sides, their physicality encouraging a performance of circumambulation. In Othila (Separation) (2013-2014) of the Runes series and El Cenote, C-3 (2006) of the Sacred Places series, Bermudez’s invitation to view from all angles endures. In addition to offering unique and phenomenological experiences, these sculptures present a metaphor for nonlinear time and narrative. Drawing on philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern outside of the Western perspective, Bermudez subverts the notion of prescribed interpretation and interaction despite their specific forms. Finding inspiration in both the natural world and his Mesoamerican heritage, these works are simultaneous representations of environmental sites and objects of transcendent, ancestral contemplation. The ultimate fulfillment of Bermudez’s interests in negative space, spiritual symbolism, experiential architecture, and environmental importance is accomplished in the immersive, room-sized Sobre La Vida (1993-1994). The installation is made of multiple facets including four walls punctuated by ceramic portals and paneless windows, a suspended yoyo-like luna, a tree fashioned in castable refractory and steel, and a human-scaled guardian figure whose silhouette is echoed in the doorway of the structure. Through its semi-abstracted forms and interactive nature, Sobre La Vida recreates and reframes our subjective experiences of perception and interaction through the presentation of a multiplicity of perspectives. Bermudez’s persistent quest to portray the interstitial seam of the subjective and universal is further demonstrated in the La Cueva and La Cabeza series. Wall-mounted, these works confront their viewer with faces existing at varying degrees of abstraction and representation, ranging from the melting, viscouslooking La Cueva, C-5 to the mirrored, iconographic symmetries of La Cabeza (Duality) to the zoomorphic states of Pre-Columbian deities seen in La Cabeza (Alter Ego) and La Cabeza (Seeking). Perhaps the most striking of these mysterious, cephalic sculptures are those entitled La Cabeza (Self Portrait) in which Bermudez’s head emerges from the mouth of a sharp-toothed creature. It is within these self-portraits that Bermudez lays explicit claim to his heritage, inserting himself within a lineage of artistic creation that gives form to the immaterial fabric of reality. About the artist A revered teacher and advisor, Bermudez held positions at several California Institutions including California State University, Northridge, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art and Design. He was as professor at California State University, Los Angeles, a position he held from 2002 until his untimely death in 2021. He is remembered by his students as a mentor who struck a potent balance between generosity and rigor, guiding them to hone their own skills and passion. Bermudez was recognized for his curatorial projects, notably the UCLA Ceramics Invitational of 1992, and worked with the Consulate General of Mexico to present NEPANTLA DREAMS: Cal-Mex State L.A. (2004-2005). Bermudez’s work has been shown at the Everson Museum of Art, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (today the Museum of Art and Design), and the Armory Center for the Arts, among others. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Scripps College Ceramic Collection, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Most recently, Luis Bermudez received acclaim for his inclusion in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 biennial exhibition Made in L.A.

Featured Artists: Tim Hawkinson, Alicia Piller, Matthew Brandt, Iva Gueorguieva, Paul Paiement, Olivia Sears/Earl Flewellen, Cheyann Washington, Aline Mare, Gary Brewer, Ernie Lee. The latent potential that is inherent in matter, and its material vitality has played a part in giving shape and inspiring the vision of many artist’s imaginations. It is an agent that acts in a sense as a catalyst and collaborator, giving new possibilities to create artistic form, language, and meaning. Early humans, who discovered that fire transforms clay into a hard durable and water-tight substance developed this knowledge into the complex artistic medium and science of ceramics, creating a new material whose potential has had an enormous impact on art, society and the sciences. Paleolithic artists, medieval alchemists, 19th-century Enlightenment scientists and contemporary chemists have all pursued materials with which to create new pigments. These novel mediums have enlarged the potential of the art of painting, introducing colors that have shaped the vision of painters from Turner to Matisse: the alchemy of matter transforming the mind of the maker. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, political theorist Jane Bennett suggests the idea of “vital materialism”, and articulates how non- human ‘things’ have agency that can affect and shape the outcomes of human endeavors. Nobel prize-winning scientist Gerald Edelman proposes a novel theory of consciousness. He believes that our brain is not a fixed and unchangeable biological structure. In his book Bright Air Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind he articulates the idea that the mind is nimble and shape-shifting; the brain literally rewires itself in response to new experiences. It is shaped by the changing world around us. The exhibition is a poetic homage to these thinkers and a reflection of how our physical interaction with materials shapes the visual language that we create and its meaning.

With the publication of Clique: West Coast Portraits From the Hood [Hat & Beard Press] followers of Merrick Morton’s over four decade career of street photography are reminded that, whatever its location, the real substance of a neighborhood is made of people, of individual and group personalities, of circumstance and shared modes of expression. Morton’s camera has served both as a passport and portal, bridging cultural differences as he has gained the trust and, in a sense, artistic partnership of subjects. This solo exhibition includes documenting the Barrio and Inner City, incarcerated men and women in America’s prisons, locked wards within the walls of a California state psychiatric hospital, portraits from cities, towns, and villages in Mexico and Cuba, and “Life of a Cholo” a special collaboration of poetry and photography with actor/poet Richard Cabral. The SOLO show will include an art installation by Richard and he will be performing spoken word at a later date during the exhibition. In counterpoint to the street scenes, Unrehearsed includes portraits of actors with whom Morton worked with on film sets. Behind Morton’s lens, the performer dissolves but the subject remains. In the directness with which Morton’s subjects greet the camera, Morton earned the trust of people because he showed up for people who want to be seen –often ambivalent or challenging, usually intense - with people who feel their story is worth recording, if only in a single moment.

As concerns and expectations of AI begin to dominate the narrative in our increasingly technologically dependent society some artists reply with the personal mark, risk taking, chance, the unknown endpoint, the illogical, the mystery…to produce a reflection of a living, very human, experience PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Nick Aguayo, Sharon Barnes, Michael Bauer, Fatemeh Burnes, Galen Cheney, Mark Dutcher, Barbara Friedman, John Goetz, Zachary Keeting, Robert Kingston, Christopher Kuhn, Annie Lapin, Michael Mancari, Ali Smith, Vian Sora, Marie Thibeault, Liliane Tomasko, Chris Trueman, Suzanne Unrein, Audrey Tulmiero Welch.

Won Ju Lim is a Korean American artist whose multimedia practice is grounded in the interactions of sculpture and architecture. It revolves around the play of real and fictional spaces in the construction of memory, longing, and fantasy, drawing upon both empirical and imaginary constructs that we rely on to move between multiple scales of interiority and exteriority. The conceptual and formal elements in her work draw from sources ranging from Baroque architecture, the urban landscape to the domestic space.