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Dennis Hopper’s The Lost Album, a collection of the late actor’s poignant black-and-white photography on view now at L.A.’s Kohn Gallery through September 1, was made possible by two key actors: his Rebel Without a Causecostar James Dean, who encouraged him to try his hand behind the camera (albeit as a director), and his first wife, Brooke Hayward, who bought him a Nikon mirror flex in 1961.
Read MoreSimultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington’s complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments from 18th and 19th Century prints.
Read MoreJoe Goode, Milk Bottle Painting 229, 2015, acrylic on board with milk bottle, 42 x 42".
I WAS ALWAYS AWARE THAT MY WORK WASN’T POP. And Walter Hopps knew it too, even though he included me in the Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” in 1962. I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me. It’s not very often I choose to revisit a series I’ve done before.
Read MoreDean Byington's work references religious conflict and terrorism in the Middle East and Western Europe alongside the damage wrought by human processes such as climate change and urban sprawl into previously uninhabited regions. On view at his new solo exhibition at Kohn Gallery will be the painting, Theory Of Machines (Grand Saturn), the third and most complex version of the Saturn series, which engages with issues of humanity’s impact on the world
Read MoreOne of Joe Goode’s fond memories of the New York art scene of the '60s was when the great Andy Warhol invited him to dinner at “my favorite restaurant.” Goode, who was then so poor he had hitchhiked to Manhattan, was dazzled. Would it be Grenouille or maybe the Cote Basque, where Truman Capote nestled among his entourage of millionaire fashionistas?
Read MorePart Kubrickian, part Wilsonian (as in Robert), with a nod to Isadora Duncan, Lita Albuquerque’s “hEARTH,” a performance installation created with her daughter Jasmine Albuquerque and composer Kristen Toedtman, on view at Sunnylands Center and Gardens (the former Annenberg Estate in Rancho Mirage), served as a kind of prequel to outdoor exhibition Desert X 2017.
Read MoreMark Ryden is on something of a sugar high. Backstage at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the painter giddily navigates a luscious candyland of his own creation — something he’s now seeing fully realized, onstage, for the first time.
Read MoreWith her gaze turned skyward, Light and Space artist Lita Albuquerque draws inspiration from the cosmos.
Read MoreSo much art wants to move you. Lita Albuquerque’s art, on the other hand, wants to ground you, align you to the cosmos, and connect you to a world bigger and deeper than the one you know.
Read MoreThe desert has long exercised its fascination over the minds of artists, architects, musicians, writers, and other explorers of landscape and soul. From the theological cast of the Biblical desert wilderness to the secular observations of Joan Didions Holy Water, it is a place of scarcity, of stark contrasts, crude survival, mystery and transformation.
Read MoreIn an onstage conversation Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Directors’ Circle donors were previewing “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” it was emphasized that Conner, “the quintessential artist’s artist” by museum director Neal Benezra’s description, was a man of paradox.
Read MoreThere are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospective with an image ofBombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at once, “Bruce Connor: It’s All True” is a marvelous look at a figure whose gleefully anarchic work called for the end of culture as we know it.
Read MoreIn 1963, Bruce Conner decided to find himself. He was back in San Francisco, after a year in Mexico documenting his search for mind-altering mushrooms (Timothy Leary has a flickering cameo in the resulting short film).
Read MoreArt reviews from art critics Edward Goldman and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp.
Photographers as Magicians and Tricksters on Art Talk.
Read MoreDeparting from the stock footage that characterizes Bruce Conner’s earlier films, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) is his first color film and consists of footage he shot while living in Mexico in 1961–62, as well as some earlier shots of him and his wife, Jean, in San Francisco.
Read MoreThis show is on the radio so if you are listening, even reading, you may know about the existence of that life transforming invention, the transistor radio. Small and portable, it meant that you could listen to the ball games as they happened.
Read MoreAt Kohn Gallery, “Wallace Berman: American Aleph” paints an intimate picture of the legendary artist who was at the center of the scene when Los Angeles came into its artistic own.
Read MoreToday, I want to talk about a few artists whose art made me stare, think, and wonder. I'm talking about artists whom I got the chance to meet in the last couple of weeks and ask some questions. And all of them are smart, eloquent, and courageous women. That's why I prefer to think about them as "Ladies Who Dare."
Read MoreInspired curatorial efforts are rare these days, so even the idea of pairing still lifes by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) with nearly monochrome abstractions by Robert Ryman (b. 1930) excites the imagination.
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