Garden Group Show Features More Than 100 Female & Non-Binary Artists @ Ladies' Room In Los Angeles

GARDEN is an exhibition of more than 100 female and non-binary artists and artist teams whose work was made while in quarantine. Understanding that gardens are metaphorical utopias and sites of resilience, but principally serve as bodily nourishment, GARDEN underscores mutual aid in a moment of institutional atrophy, financial insecurity, and  cultural drought. As part of the exhibition’s commitment to the Los Angeles community, LADIES’ ROOM will donate 15%  of all sales to benefit LA Food Policy Council, Ron Finley Project, and Summaeverythang Community Center.  

The exhibition also considers art production amidst global turmoil by highlighting the linkages between gender, ecological processes, economics, labor, and power obscured by colonial histories. Beyond the narrow assumption that certain gender identities hold an innate closeness with “nature” due to some biological predisposition, this exhibition challenges us to see gender not an isolating construct, but as an expansive and illuminating guide in the realm of environmental mediations.

Participating artists include: Aili Schmeltz • Alex Heilbron • Ali Prosch • Alison Blickle • Allison Peck • Alison Ragguette • Anja Salonen • Anna Elise Johnson • Annabel Osberg • Annie Hodgin • Ari Salka • Ariel Dill • Ashley Garrett • Beth Fiedorek • Betsy Lin Seder • Bettina Hubby • Brittany Mojo • Carey Coleman • Carolyn Castaño • Carrie Cook • Cathy Akers • Cheyann Washington • Christine Frerichs • Christine Nguyen • Dafna Maimon • Dana Greiner • Delia Brown • Devon Oder • Ekta Aggarwal • Elisa Johns • Esther Ruiz • Farrah Karapetian • Felice Grodin & Linda Chamorro • Geneva Jacuzzi • Hadley Holliday • Heather Rosenman • Isis Aquarian (The Source Family Archives) • Janet Levy • Jaqueline Cedar • Jenna Ransom • Jessica Simmons • JOJO ABOT • Julie Bowland • Julie Lequin • Julika Lackner • Karen Constine • Karen Kuo • Karley Sullivan • Kate Harding • Kelsey Shwetz • Kristin Leachman • Krysten Cunningham • Laurie Nye • Lesley Wamsley • Lily Wilkins • Linnéa Spransy • Lisa Ohlweiler • Lisa Oxley • Livy Porter • Lydia Maria Pfeffer • Mabel Moore • Madam X • Madeleine Hines • Malisa Humphrey • Margarete Hahner • Margie Schnibbe • Mary Anna Pomonis • Maya Mackrandilal • Meghann McCrory • Meike Legler • Molly Duggan • Molly Larkey • Monica Nouwens • Nancy Evans • Nasim Hantehzadeh • Nora Shields • People’s Pottery Project • Rachel Kessler • Rachel Roske • Rachelle Rojany • Rema Ghuloum • Renée Fox • Richelle Gribble • Roberta Gentry • Roni Shneior • Rose Wharton • Samantha Fields • Sarah Alice Moran • Shahla Friberg • Siri Kaur • Sohani Holland • Soo Kim • Sophia Allison • Sophie Lee • Stephanie Rose Guerrero • Still Life Ceramics • Summer Cooper • Sunja Park • Tanya Brodsky • Titia Estes • Tova Mozard • Trina Turturici • Xinrui Chen • Zoe Koke

GARDEN is on view through April 30 @ Ladies' Room Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Avenue #502B, Los Angeles

 
 

Watch Rashid Johnson's The New Black Yoga (2011)

Representing the performative aspect of Johnson’s practice,The New Black Yoga (2011) is a short film depicting an enigmatic scenario in which five African-American men perform choreographed movements on a deserted beach. Their gestures alternately appear balletic, athletic, and martial, conjuring a range of potential narratives that ultimately remain elusive. Johnson’s 2016 installation Antoine’s Organ is included in the New Museum’s current exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.

Kate Mosher Hall's Without a body, without Bill @ Hannah Hoffman Gallery In Los Angeles

The look is the strangest lie God gifted us. Pointed gawks back and forth, stuck in stare, with lovers, unknowable animals and the rest of the world’s stuff. The (modern) animal is said to be locked in an interminable cycle of disappearance. Phantasmal creatures that slip in and out of view, only illuminated as symbols and pictures. To know them is to see them. To see them is to try on a battered old human conceit: the animal was the first metaphor. It’s dreadful, a thing that should never have been possible, for sight to possess such procedural power. And yet, here we are, like moths to a bulb in the twilight of our go, amid a scene that holds an audience and a stage, a spotlight and the darkness that surrounds it. In solidarity—together, beside, a cabaret of sights unseen. 

- Nicole-Antonia Spagnola

Without a body, without Bill is on view through April 10 @ Hannah Hoffman 2504 W 7th Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America @ New Museum In New York

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America is an intergenerational exhibition of works from 37 artists, conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor. This exhibition brings together works that address Black grief as a national emergency in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.

Comprising all three main exhibition floors of the New Museum, as well as the Lobby gallery, the South gallery, and public spaces, the works included in the exhibition represent cross-disciplinary approaches that incorporate methods of documentary film and photography, experimental filmmaking, performance, and social engagement alongside traditional artistic mediums like painting, drawing, and sculpture. The exhibition comprises diverse examples of artists exploring American history from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to issues of police violence in the United States in the 1990s and today. These works thoughtfully reflect upon what catalogue contributor Saidiya Hartman characterizes as “the afterlife of slavery,” as many of the participating artists reflect on the intersection of historical memory and the social and political realities of the present. Participating artists include: Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kevin Beasley, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Garrett Bradley, Melvin Edwards, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adam Pendleton, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Cameron Rowland, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Diamond Stingily, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jack Whitten.

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America is on view through June 6 @ New Museum 235 Bowery, New York

 
 

AFK: A 3D Gallery Group Show Inspired By Glitch Feminism For Coaxial Media Arts Festival In Los Angeles

Coaxial Arts is celebrating their sixth anniversary with a full month of programming. After receiving a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a media arts festival and book, they have lined up a knockout list of performances, artist lectures, drive-in screenings, and a book release covering every residency at Coaxial. Film stills and installation views above are from AFK, a 3D group show, curated by Casey Kauffman that takes inspiration from Legacy Russell’s triumphant manifesto, Glitch Feminism. Featured artists include: Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Gretchen Andrew, Rudy Falagán, Margot Padilla, Panteha Abareshi, Sydney Shavers, Paulson Lee, and Lanéya Billingsley.

Watch The Premiere Of "I Am Love" By ROOS

I Am Love is a new video by ROOS the ongoing musical project by the Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist, Ross Simonini The video is the second from ROOS’ debut album, Refrains and is a continuation of his previous video The Well. Simonini released Refrains in conjunction with an exhibition of new paintings at Et Al Gallery in January 2021. Both videos are collaborations with the artist, Rafael Delacruz and include documentation of Simonini’s mudlover performances, which have taken place annually, every winter, across California since 2018. In this video, Simonini performs in the attic of a former Odd Fellow’s Hall, in the town of Forestville, Sonoma County, where the artist formerly lived. The video’s release will be accompanied by two NFTs.

Celebrate Womxn's Day By Watching Carolee Schneeman's Meat Joy On The Anniversary Of Her Recent Passing

Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City. Via Electronic Arts Intermix
Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio.

Petra Cortright's Predator Swamping @ 1301PE In Los Angeles

In order to maintain survival, some species hatch all at once. Floods of nascent turtles, crabs, or fish will overwhelm their predator by sheer volume. This oversaturation ensures that the breed will live on. For Predator Swamping, Petra Cortright exhibits a new body of work, made during the precarious months of 2020, in which she exercises a similar survival instinct.

For her third exhibition with 1301PE and her first since the birth of her son, Cortright continues to create paintings in Photoshop and prints them on Belgian linen. The paintings incorporate images of the High Desert, Bolivia, and Patagonia sourced from the internet which function as a base layer upon which she builds expanded landscapes. For the first time in her career Cortright has also created paintings in black and white. The stripping away of color reveals an overwhelming desolation that could bear a strong resemblance to 2020, while for some including Cortright, a homebody at heart, the imagery evokes doomsday bliss.

Predator Swamping is on view through March 27 @ 1301PE 6150 Wilshire Boulevard

Read Our Interview Of Painter Anna Weyant On The Occasion Of Her Loose Screw Exhibition @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles →

AWE4.jpg

Falling, living, laughing, touching—the still, subdued, painterly fantasies of Anna Weyant sway to and fro from the warmly resplendent hues of the Dutch Masters, to the madness of Otto Dix, to the gold of an Instagram selfie’s golden hour. The work, much of it created under the shadow of a global pandemic, are prime moments of a zeitgeist suddenly hollowed by the screeching halt of life as we know it: backgrounds are blackened out, clouds obscure, and curtains drape with muted uncertainties. Everything is vague and everything is a warm oblivion, like the sand of an hourglass exploded and the grains took the shape of a world that resembled its former self. But time doesn’t stop on a dime, it lurches, chugs forward with ghostlike animation even when your foot is on the break, which is what makes Weyant’s paintings so exciting—brushstroke by brushstroke, they are full of that potential energy. In the following interview, Bill Powers and Anna Weyant discuss her upcoming show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Click here to read more.

Keith Duncan's Bayou Classic Online Exhibition @ Fort Gansevoort

Bayou Classic is an online exhibition featuring new drawings and paintings in which the artist pays tribute to a grand New Orleans tradition inextricably linked to the wider sweep of Black cultural heritage in America: established in 1974, the Bayou Classic is an annual football game between two of Louisiana’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Southern University and Grambling State University. The highlight of this event is the Battle of the Bands, a resplendent halftime show in which the marching bands of the two schools compete to deliver the most sensational performance. For Duncan, the pageantry and ceremonial elements that are hallmarks of the HBCU band performances are contemporary analogs for African American traditions. The drum majors and musicians depicted in his work in brilliant, vibrating hues, are “symbols of African warriors dancing in front of the king or the queen, like a pageantry of ceremonious splendor.” The artist further explains, “I saw them in that light and it’s part of our heritage beyond New Orleans.” Indeed, thousands of supporters of the Bayou Classic travel from across the nation to participate in the various festivities that unfold around the event; a multi-generational audience of students, alumni, and relatives gathers for this moment, paralleling an all-encompassing family reunion. For many, “the Classic” is an essential tradition that helps to preserve the mission of the HBCUs, which were established to nourish the talent and brilliance of African American people in a mutually supportive environment.

Keith Duncan: Bayou Classic is on view online through April 17 @ Fort Gansevoort

New Paintings By Brittney Leeanne Williams @ Alexander Berggruen in New York

 
 

The Arch Is A Portal Is A Belly Is A Back marks Brittney Leeanne Williams’ first solo exhibition with Alexander Berggruen. The new paintings and works on paper by Brittney Leeanne Williams take influence from desertscapes in Victorville, a city northeast of Los Angeles where Williams spent part of her childhood. Williams transforms these Southern Californian landscapes into “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties.”

The red of many of Williams’s figures might connote a rawness, a tenderness, and an emotional vulnerability. As Legacy Russell wrote: “A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and a passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.” (1) Williams’s female forms serve as conduits to viewing a dimension of Williams’s spirit. In her own words: “Her back becomes the keystone. She holds up what is above, fastening herself to what’s below, to make room so that something or someone may pass through.”
(1) Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London, New York, 2020, pp. 83-84, 101

The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back is on view through April 14 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York

Cindy Sherman Presents Tapestries @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

In her latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work. In line with Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Tapestries is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles

Pioneering Streetwear Brand Slam Jam Opens 30-Year Archive In Ferrara

 
 

Founded by Luca Benini in 1989, Slam Jam was born to serve the underground long before the term “streetwear” existed, becoming the first Italian importer of then unknown brands such as Stussy. From its HQ in Ferrara, far from the European fashion establishment, Slam Jam has honed a unique and highly distinctive style guided by art, music and clubbing, connecting tribes of like-minded people across the world. From the rural outskirts of Ferrara, in the last 30 years Slam Jam has become a globally renowned cultural institution, its name on urban subculture clothing and goods a seal of guarantee.

For the first time since its establishment over 30 years ago, Slam Jam, is opening the doors of its archive with an exclusive project devised by Nationhood. The project comprises a new location in Slam Jam’s headquarters in Ferrara, and a consultable online atlas stemming from an experimental publishing plan focused on the brand’s cultural heritage. Formerly the private collection of Slam Jam founder, Luca Benini, this ultra-refined pastiche of eighties-to-the-present-day underground culture is now a new cultural resource with its own digital platform, a long list of publishing products, and various offline off-shoot activities hinging around visual art and culture. Nationhood has designed an infinite scroll, a digital flow that unites different contents in a sequence of images which is a collision of Lo-Fi cinema and “eBay aesthetics” visual brutalism. The upshot is a new digital device collecting the anthropology of the look and underground subcultures of which Luca Benini was a founding presence: from clubbing on the Riviera Romagnola, London and early ‘90s New York, to the international hip-hop scene and Japan‘s noughties fashion neo-avant-garde. Once again, Nationhood takes the idea of the archive apart and talks of how customs are the cultural custodian of the contemporary world. And so it has designed a hyper-photographic atlas mixed with soundscapes from the around 10,000 vinyls in the collection, offering up the archive in a visual stream that confirms the potential lyricism of chaos and cyberspace as the symbolic place of a new digital romanticism.

Hollywood's Greatest Hits: John Waters Solo Exhibition @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits marks John Waters’ first solo exhibition with Sprueth Magers. Featuring a selection of works, most of which have never been seen before in LA, the series sheds light on the artist’s decades-long, wide-ranging art practice, and in particular, his humorous and irreverent takes on the movie industry. The over 30 works on view encompass videos, photographs, sculptures and installations that skewer film tropes and culture while also offering cutting, but loving, critiques of mass media, celebrity and insider art-world knowledge.

In the early 1990s, Waters began shooting photographs straight from his television screen. The results were grainy, arty-looking images that he pieced together into evocative photomontages, creating storyboard-like sequences read from left to right. These playful acts of appropriation and juxtaposition, which transform favorite or forgotten films into what Waters calls his "little movies," create condensed stories or testimonies that offer narratives the original directors never intended.

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles

James Gobel Presents Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t @ Bozo Mag In Los Angeles

BLACK SCREEN

Twenty-five lines of bright light slowly open across the screen. The lines continue to broaden, revealing that we’re looking through window blinds that are being opened. The light is from a rising sun. Handclaps fade up. Cheerleader claps. A hypervariation of the old “Wipe Out” riff. Stomping feet come in. Then a bass line. The sound is jagged and jubilant. The martial music of the suburban high school tribes. The title track surges in and we:

CUT TO

CHEERLEADERS

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t is on view by appointment through April 4 @ Bozo Mag 815 Cresthaven Drive, Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Film Director Fiona Jane Burgess →

Fiona Jane Burgess, UK-based film director specializing in music videos, commercials, documentaries and fashion films, owes much of her career success to experiencing a number of challenges. Burgess found herself having to rethink her career path at 28, a time when she was also facing the realities of motherhood and the breakup of her band, Woman’s Hour. Fortunately, her natural flare as a director, which she exercised when shooting her own music videos, determined her career segue into film direction. Since delving into the film industry, Burgess has worked on diverse campaigns that span music videos, personal projects, working with the UK’s No.1 Baby Feeding brand, Tommee Tippee and some of fashion’s most recognised names, including Gucci and Burberry. Read more.

All That Spring Promises Group Show @ Tyler Park Presents In Los Angeles

All That Spring Promises serves as a precursor to the season of spring, which will run through the meteorological beginning of spring (March 1) and end on March 20, 2021, the almanac's astrological first day of spring. Through various mediums and artists of varied practices, the exhibition includes elements of flora, animals, the body, and mysticism in reference to the season, which has long been associated with new hope, new beginnings, and inspiration. From this, All That Spring Promises seeks to point ahead that better days are on the horizon with new life and new possibilities, as winter succumbs to spring.

Featured artists include Louis Heilbronn, Daniel Ingroff, Angie Jennings, Anabel Juárez, Christina Mesiti, Paul Pescador, and Evan Whale.

All That Spring Promises is on view through March 21 @ Tyler Park Presents 4043 West Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles

Zandile Tshabalala's Enter Paradise @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery In Accra

 
 

Zandile Tshabalala’s latest series of paintings, titled Enter Paradise, places the Black female figure at the heart of her sensual dreamscapes, thereby revisiting the representation of the Black woman throughout art history. Marking the artist’s debut solo career, and the gallery’s third consecutive debut solo show since opening in October 2020, the new paintings include a selection of figurative self-portraits in which Tshabalala revisits the representation of the Black female figure.

Enter Paradise is on view through April 18 @ ADA \ contemporary art gallery Villaggio Vista, North Airport Road, Airport Residential Area , Accra, Ghana 

Static: New Paintings By Vanessa Prager @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Vanessa Prager’s recently completed series of oil paintings, Static, continues her exploration of sculptural impasto techniques and revisits 19th-century post-Impressionism in the 21st century. Prager’s new paintings pack a sensory and emotional impact, redefining perception in a high-def world. Her impasto pieces resist the quick take and allow us to discover the hidden treasure of the work itself; in these paintings, more is more. In this time of pandemic, when screens dominate as a means to work, play, connect and exist, Prager is the analog compass directing us back to the tangible. With big, heavy, drippy canvases and what can only be referred to as extreme painting, Prager rejects artificial crispness and reminds us how an abstract work can help us locate feelings so precisely.

Static is on view through April 10 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles