Women Around Town, June 2019

This art historian/artist has had an art-filled weekend. I attended a course at LACMA on the Bauhaus, an important and highly influential center of education and ideas that existed in Germany from 1919-1933. (Note that a comprehensive exhibition Bauhaus Beginnings in celebration of the 100^thanniversary of the opening of the school will be at the Getty Museum from June 11-Oct. 13.) I was extremely fortunate that it was the LACMA prints’ curator who gave the talk along with a tour of some special prints at the Rifkind Center and the museum’s recent Bauhaus exhibition (now closed). I was reminded that if anyone wants to look at some amazing prints up close that they can make an appointment. I am satisfied for the moment after getting a close-up of 2 out of the 80 prints by Kathe Kollwitz in their collection. After that, I strolled over the Resnick Pavilion to see the fantastic Charles White exhibit. I was overwhelmed by his pencil and charcoal drawings and the powerful images he created to speak out about civil rights. He had the “Black Lives Matter” message long ago articulated through his magnificent skills.

To top off the weekend I went to the artist’s talk for the Inherited Memories exhibit at Castelli Art Space with the 3 artists, Shula Singer Arbel, Dwora Fried, and Malka Nevidi. To hear their stories about their childhood and their mothers (all holocaust survivors) was emotional. The work is outstanding and their personal grief and memories are so potent. Hoping to see that this very poignant exhibit travels to other venues across the country.

IN THE GALLERIES

Works on paper, artist books, sculpture, and a site-specific Supergraphics comprise Relax into the Invisible: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at LAX Art.  These works build upon the artist’s signature design sensibility while cleverly playing with language, feminism, symbolism, technology, mass media, politics, and personal narrative. 6/02-7/27/19.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

Honor Fraser gallery presents Victoria Fu: TÉLÉVOIX. Starting with film and photography, Victoria Fu’s practice has grown to include installation, performance, and sculpture. Her ongoing exploration of the ways in which light creates a sense of space, whether printed, digital, or projected, addresses our haptic relationship with images. TÉLÉVOIX will feature the large-scale moving-image projection Télévoix 2 (2019) and the window installation Sky 2 (2019) that premiered in the Deutsche Bank VIP Lounge at Frieze LA. Thru 7/27/19.

Carol Coates: Minds Eye at Lois Lambert Gallery is an exhibition of mixed-media works by the well-known artist. She begins her work with original drawings, paintings, and/or photographs, then combines, manipulates, and prints them on archival substrates. Her traditional and technologically-equipped studio reflects skills in the use of many different materials and approaches to layered imagery. Thru 7/06/19.

Carol Coates

Craig Krull gallery is featuring work by 3 artists. Works on paper by Rachel Rosenthal (1926-2015) reveal a little known part of her early career when she studied engraving and etching with the English artist, Stanley William Hayter. Hayter founded his printmaking studio in Paris in 1927 and, after moving to No. 17 rue Campagne-Premiere in 1933, it became known as Atelier 17. In Paris, Hayter worked with artists such as Picasso and Giacometti and when he moved to New York during WWII, he worked with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others. The circle of artists studying with Hayter with whom Rosenthal became friends included, Terry Haass, Wifredo Lam and Pierre Courtin. These artists exhibited their etchings and engravings together at the IX Salon de Mai in Paris in 1953. The exhibition will include Rosenthal’s works from this period, as well as works by those of her circle with whom she traded prints. Nude paintings by Chrissy Angliker feature the human form amidst various bodies of water created through a thick application of paint. Angliker explains “the human body and the banks of a river, are both vessels for the same element. Water is an essential component of their composition, and also the intermediary between these vessels.” Finally, there is An Ever-Shifting World with monoprints by Kelly Berg.  Berg records her immediate impressions of Hawaii’s craters, lava fields, and jagged formations in oily ink spread on a metal plate. Thru 6/13/19.

Chrissy Angliker

Kelly Berg

O, Magnify is an exhibition of work by conceptual artist/sculptor Lynn Aldrich at Denk Gallery. This artist is inspired by everyday household objects and “specimens” she’s amassed on expeditions to local hardware stores. “Aldrich’s transformations of lowly, even empirically worthless, materials through ingenious though minimal, low-tech means, evoke everything from natural phenomena and commercial consumerism to spiritual longing. The exhibition will include nine new sculptural works, including a fourteen-foot Sonotube structure containing an optical environment inspired by the phenomenological theater James Turrell.” Thru 6/06/19.

Lynn Aldridge

Duncan Miller Gallery is exhibiting Untold Stories, photographs by Jacqueline Woods.Woods carefully selects, manipulates, tears, adds dimension and composes small dialogs by placing found vintage snapshots photographs together in ways unintended by the original unknown picture-takers. The results are unique works filled with intimate stories. 6/08-7/20/19.

Keystone Art Space is pleased to announce So What: Photography 1965-2015, a retrospective of 50 years of black and white photography by California artist Shelly Vogel.The photos in this series show the subjects for who they are while also simultaneously occupying the form of a whirling dervish, a super model, an antique rug, or a great intellectual. 6/22-7/01/19.

Also at Keystone is AGGLOMERATION.  Kim Marra and Christine Rasmussen are two oil painters who share a studio at Keystone Art Space. Both artists collect visual information from the world around them, combining memories of past surroundings to illustrate spaces tangential to, but divorced from, reality. Marra’s paintings are abstract explorations of textures and geometry, combined to create spaces and environments reminiscent of her past. Rasmussen recreates scenes of architecture around greater Los Angeles. 6/22-7/01/19.

Donna Huanca

Opening at the end of the month at the Marciano Foundation is Donna Huanca: Obsidian Ladder, the first large-scale solo exhibition in the United States by Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca. Huanca’s site-specific installation for MAF’s 13,000-square-foot Theater Gallery will reveal a new topography of triggered senses, combining sound, scent, and live performance. These elements will be experienced together against a constellation of carved steel sculptures and skin paintings. Skin and the body—its presence and absence—lay at the core of Huanca’s works. 6/28-12/01/19.

Haleh Mashian

Luster is an exhibition of action paintings by Haleh Mashian opening later this month at Mash Gallery. The artist explains “Luster represents abundance, joy, and the poetry of nature. I added three-dimensional qualities where you might lose yourself in the composition. I wanted the viewer to have the opportunity to explore each piece, much like a Zen moment you may have experienced while taking a walk into the forest appreciating all of her gifts.”

6/29-8/10/19.

IN THE MUSEUMS

Sarah Lucas

British artist Sarah Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel reveals the wide range of the artist’s practice in this exhibition at the UCLA Hammer museum. It features more than 130 works in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation. 6/09-8/31/19. Public tours of the exhibition are offered every Saturday at 1 p.m. through August 31, 2019.

Sarah Lucas

The current exhibition at the California African Art Museum is Adia Millett:Breaking Patternscurated by Mar Hollingsworth. Millet’s focus is on the history of African Americans, particularly women through a wide range of materials.  She creates quilts for example from discarded clothing, sheets, other quilts, and curtains, these allude to domesticity and craftwork. Miniature houses offering a deep exploration of memory and loss and her collages in turn utilize fragments of her photographic prints, and her mixed-media constructions reuse model-making supplies from the miniature houses. Thru 8/25/19.

Adia Millett

Continuing at the  Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow. The exhibition of work by this ground breaking artist brings together both her CARVING series, a new self-portrait, and a related serial work from the 1970s, provoking reflection on discipline, vulnerability, and the passage of time. Thru 7/07/19. Director’s Series Lecture: Eleanor Antin and Michael Govan: Tuesday, 6/18; 7:30 p.m.; complimentary tickets are required: https://my.lacma.org/events/17376. 

Eleanor Antin

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-82 continues at the Broad Museum. The exhibit is a brilliant overview of the vital contribution that Black artists made during this potent time period. The exhibition examines the influences, from the civil rights and Black Power movements to Minimalism and developments in abstraction, on artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas and more. Thru 9/01/19.

Carolyn Lawrence