What’s happening? Where to begin? Some say it is a bit safer out there. Come to think of it, the best way to enjoy art is in an empty gallery and so that is what you will mostly find. Happy Fall!
IN THE GALLERIES
Karen Schifman
California State University, Northridge Art Gallery presents a memorial exhibition: Weaving Together: In Memory of Bee Colman. The exhibition organized by Erika Ostrander & Betty Brown will feature works by many of Bee’s former fiber arts students including moi. November 15 –December 10, 2021. Join us for the artist reception and remembrance: November 20 from 12-4pm.
SeenUnSeen curated by Alison Saar is a group show at LA Louver Gallery that looks to be a fascinating show. The ten featured artists seem to conjure their images from another plane, giving form to something heretofore unseen and immaterial. Artists include JOJO ABOT, Rina Banerjee, Vanessa German, Kathy Grove, Julia Haft-Candell, Keisha Scarville, Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz, Kenyatta A.C. Hinckle, Arthur Simms, and Saar herself. SeenUNseen builds its energy around the idea of Spirit Portraiture. The belief that spirits can be captured in visual form predates ancient history, but emerged forcefully around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of popular photography.
November 11, 2021 thru January 9, 2022.
Keisha Scarville
Blum and Poe Gallery presents Sonia Gomes, When the Sun Rises in Blue. Gomes, who lives and works in São Paulo, is recognized for her vibrantly hued, abstract sculptures. She sews and ties together textiles and objects. The resulting works are at once elegant, ethereal, and organic, and odd, curious, and contorted. They rise from the floor, extend from walls, and suspend from above.Her sculptural creations “reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history,” She has worked with found furniture, purses, and even a 50-year-old wedding dress. “I always work with materials that I appropriate—things that exist before I make the work.” She continues “My work is Black, it is feminine, and it is marginal. I am a rebel. I never worried about masking or stifling anything that might or might not fit standards of what is called art. I always sought nonconformity with things that are established. I had to overcome a lot of obstacles because I’m Black, because I was too old to be considered one of Brazilian art’s young talents. … My work is Brazilian.” Thru December 18, 2021.
Before The Wilt curated by China Adams features the work of painters Renee´ Fox and Mary Warner currently at Porch Gallery in Ojai. Both accentuate the flower through dramatic scale, rich color and Realism (in places verging on Hyper-Realism). While Warner paints her Sunflowers and Zinnias weathered and windblown, exuding a kind of elegant maturity, Fox’s Orchids, plump and nubile ooze fertility and new birth. Poised at either ends of the life-cycle spectrum, seen together, the work of Fox and Warner act symbolically to suggest a kind of bookending to the compressed floral life-cycle. Thru January 3, 2022.
Renee Fox
Blum and Poe Gallery presents Sonia Gomes, When the Sun Rises in Blue. Gomes, who lives and works in São Paulo, is recognized for her vibrantly hued, abstract sculptures. She sews and ties together textiles and objects. The resulting works are at once elegant, ethereal, and organic, and odd, curious, and contorted. They rise from the floor, extend from walls, and suspend from above.Her sculptural creations “reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history,” She has worked with found furniture, purses, and even a 50-year-old wedding dress. “I always work with materials that I appropriate—things that exist before I make the work.” She continues “My work is Black, it is feminine, and it is marginal. I am a rebel. I never worried about masking or stifling anything that might or might not fit standards of what is called art. I always sought nonconformity with things that are established. I had to overcome a lot of obstacles because I’m Black, because I was too old to be considered one of Brazilian art’s young talents. … My work is Brazilian.” Thru December 18, 2021.
Sonia Gomes
As the World Turns is the current exhibition of works by Leigh Selgado at Launch LA. Known for her intricate, meditative process of cutting, painting and collaging paper to create objects of depth and beauty, these examples are exquisite. Salgado investigates ideas of the feminine as an act of female empowerment. Thru November 12, 2021.
Leigh Selgado
Vielmetter Projects presents Monique Van Genderen: Afterimages. “Continuing her explorations in the field of abstraction and painting’s relation to spatial contexts, van Genderen’s latest project takes up the task of monumentally scaled horizontal paintings. The two thirty-five-foot-long paintings, entitled “A side” and “B side, are inherently related, yet slightly different, speaking to concepts of origination and genesis, one painting describing the other. Hanging on walls opposite each other they create a visual dialogue between abstract fields that are reflective in their compositions. Working simultaneously on the two large surfaces, van Genderen directed the painting through replication and repetition, references and shapes confirming each other into existence and culminating in a composition that is at once underwater and on the street.” (VP) Thru November 20, 2021.
Monique Van Genderen
Some wonderful paintings and works on paper by Vanessa McConnell are exhibited at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery. Thick impasto surfaces and intense colors abound. McConnell experiments with a range of tones and techniques, including masking, acrylics and watercolors and, sometimes, found objects, often working on a single painting for months at a time. The bold aesthetic of McConnell’s work is also, in part, determined by the physical limits of her medium, as the artist continues to use her brushes until they are too heavy with paint to be manipulated. The dramatic, expressive nature of her mark-making, which sometimes leads to tears and rips in the paper, evinces the artist’s powerful compulsion to paint. Thru December 12, 2021.
Vanessa McConnell
Beverly Semmes
Geneva Costa
Perceive Me is the current exhibition at MOAH: CEDAR. “Who are we in the eyes of other people? Does it matter? Should it matter? What do you look like? Are you beautiful, ugly, weird, crazy, sad, frumpy, glamorous, fabulous, dirty, depressed? Why do we take other people’s opinions of ourselves so seriously? Why should we care? Does it change our opinion of ourselves? Does it affect our daily lives?” – Kristine Schomaker. To answer these questions, Schomaker asked 60 artists to create nude portraits of her. The artists responded in a variety of media resulting in a one-of-a-kind display of images of her in the nude. Thru December 12, 2021.
The entire Geffen (MOCA) Contemporary is filled with a survey of the Swiss media artist, Pipilotti Rist. Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor is comprised of installations that explore relationships of video and the body; exterior environments and interior psychological landscapes as well as reason and instinct. The exhibition surveys more than thirty years of the Zürich-based artist’s work, encompassing early single-channel videos, large-scale installations brimming with color and hypnotic musical scores, and sculptures that merge everyday objects, video and decorative forms. Thru June 6, 2022.
Pipilotti Rist
Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, A Retrospective continues at the Museum of Latin American Art and is a “must-see”. . The exhibit is divided into 2 parts. The first is Baca Public Art Survey, exploring her pivotal and career-defining work through the Social and Public Arts Resource Center,. Next is the history of Baca’s first masterpiece, the Great Wall of Los Angeles. This half mile long mural occupies the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley. The mural tells the story of California from prehistoric times to the 1950s and takes special care in presenting the lesser-known histories of the ethnic groups who inhabit this state. To understand the immensity of this project, viewers are invited to participate in an immersive audiovisual experience of the monumental piece. Thru January 2022.
Judy Baca’s Great Wall
Hung Liu
Helen Lundeberg
Helen Frankenthaler
