Women Around Town
Go out and “march” around this city and enjoy!
IN THE GALLERIES
Recently, I had the good fortune to see the current exhibit Alison Saar: Uproot at L.A. Louver Gallery. Saar never disappoints. She culls from history representing women carving, stitching, and cobbling. One piece, Shear’d (2023), called for the hammering of 1,000 individual nails into a bust, serving as strands of freshly “uprooted” hair. In her reconfiguring of historical portrayals of Black womanhood, the artist uses labor-intensive processes that parallel that of cotton pickers and railroad chain gangs. Subversion and counter-narratives prevail in her push towards promoting Black women’s sovereignty over suffering. Here she also uses images of the Sable Venus, who carries a shell in one hand and a sickle in the other. Here, “Saar mines the intersection of racialized gender inequality and reproductive rights, which feel particularly relevant with the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court—a ruling that disproportionately affects women of color.” Thru March 11, 2023.
Here is a link to a video of Saar at work in her studio.
Alison Saar
Reflections on a Warming Planet is the upcoming exhibit at L.A. Artcore. This is a multimedia exhibition including 20 visual artists, 13 international filmmakers, community activists and 9 video interviews with artists and scientists. The is a multifaceted exhibition that examines our environmental issues as well as celebrating our natural world. Among the many artists included are Kim Abeles, Merrilyn Duzy, Joanne Julian, Sant Khalsa, Linda Vallejo and many more. March 4-April 9.
Joanne Julian
Sprueth-Magers Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition of work by Anne Imhof, EMO. This work looks very compelling. Here is how it is described by the gallery: “It brings together several bodies of work across multiple mediums, putting each in dialogue with found objects in ways that implicate visitors’ bodies as they move through the space, at turns exalting and frustrating the viewing experience. Visitors enter and first encounter a labyrinth of industrial water tanks that snakes through the gallery’s ground floor, creating hallways, enclosures and windows bathed in a deep-red glow. The tanks’ caged armatures stretch several feet high, obscuring both the viewer’s physical path and their sight lines onto Imhof’s paintings. The artist regularly plays with the anxiety and anticipation around what can and cannot be seen, what remains hidden and in need of excavation, as well as the charged nature of empty spaces.” I was unable to obtain any images from this exhibit, so we will all have to experience it for ourselves. Thru May 6, 2023.
Karen Simon: Floating Strings is the upcoming exhibit at Lois Lambert Gallery. Simon is a German artist whose background is in Set and Costume Design. This series of paintings are created using acrylic paint, ink and string on canvas. The results are quite ethereal whether in depictions of the landscape, jellyfish, or architectural settings. March 18, 2023 – May 13, 2023.
Karen Simon
Anat Ebgi announces Falling Together, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Molly Lowe. “At once abstract and figurative, the paintings in Falling Together channel a way of observation that seeks balance within states of limbo, straddling reality and imagination. Lowe begins from assorted everyday images, combining anonymous online imagery and personal photos, she slices, dices, mixes, and mutates these sources until she arrives at scenes that expose the awkwardness of life in a human body—physically and emotionally. Unconventional assemblages of color, these oil on linen compositions emerge from a palette that skips, jumps, and flicks you on the nose. In moments she leaves behind clues to specific scenes or possible narratives, yet the overall effect of the work requires viewers to relax their gaze, untether expectations and let the pictures untangle themselves through the flow of her expressive improvisational gestures.”
Thru April 8, 2023.
Molly Lowe
David Kordansky Gallery presents Hilary Pecis: Paths Crossed. Pecis creates drawings and paintings inspired by the interior, exterior, and inter-spaces that surround her daily life. These acrylic on linen paintings are lush, saturated landscapes reflecting the mountainous, desert, and urban landscapes commonly associated with Southern California. “Many of the paintings on view begin as source images taken on Pecis’s phone on her daily runs throughout Los Angeles’s streetscapes or through the various trails she frequents in the surrounding mountains and forests. The photos are then referenced and sometimes even printed out and re-imbued with dynamic and vibrant color, becoming preparatory sketches for future paintings. This process allows Pecis to distill whatever memory she has of a space while traveling through it, as the initial phone image often loses the clarity and vibrancy cast by the Southern California sunshine and mutes the otherwise bright hues that distinguish the region. By exploring a car-reliant city on foot, Pecis further attunes herself not only to the visual elements present—streets, mountains, storefronts, plants—but also to other non-visible elements: smells, sounds, textures, and the overwhelming energies and tensions that exist in a physical space.” (DK) March 18 – April 22, 2023.
Hilary Pecis
IN THE MUSEUMS
The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) presents Metamorphosis: the Evolution of the Visions and Dreams, the art of Yolanda González. González is a local multi-disciplinary artist with a rich artistic heritage. “The artist reveals her fascination for the constantly intimate relationship between art and life through her paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and prints. It is there, in that inevitable and just as critical intersection, where the artwork invites the viewer to erase the limits. Where the elements of history, music, literature, and dance appear as metaphorical concepts of femininity, identity, representation, spirituality, and emotions interweave to create a profound sense of belonging to their surroundings and community.” (MOLAA) Thru July 30, 2023.
Yolanda González
Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be is currently at the Getty Center Museum Research Library. This is an autobiographical exhibition’ charts the artist’s practice through interviews and passages from her upcoming memoir. “Since the 1960s, Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931 in Pasadena) has been at the forefront of artistic movements in California. Her work explores concepts that strike at the core of human nature, including sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, and death. This autobiographical exhibition with an accompanying publication explores the artist’s first 50 years, which were marked by dramatic upheavals in her personal life as well as the development of her most pioneering works, including her Xerox art and radical early performances.” (GM) Thru July 16, 2023.
Barbara T. Smith
The UCLA Hammer museum presents Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio. Drawing has remained a crucial part of Riley’s practice for more than six decades. This is the first and most extensive museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist’s drawings in over half a century and the first major exhibition of her work at a West Coast museum. This exhibition presents approximately ninety sheets and covers the full range of Riley’s career, from her student days in the late 1940s, when she dedicated herself exclusively to drawing courses at Goldsmiths College in London, through her groundbreaking black-and-white optical works of the early 1960s, to the innovative color studies she has undertaken from the late 1960s to the present day. Thru May 28, 2023.
Bridget Riley
Alicia Piller
Craft Contemporary is featuring works by Alicia Piller in an exhibition titled Within curated by jill moniz. This exhibit features an installation of multimedia works that investigates the relationship between macro and micro perspectives of knowledges, meaning, and bodily form. Piller uses resin, latex, xeroxed imagery, dried plants, stones, and found objects to create cosmic and biological landscapes that are an invitation for viewers to visually connect abstracted form with the complexities of human experience. The artist pulls apart and reconfigures mundane materials into a rich and deep form of visual storytelling that bridges time and place, reminding us that internally and externally we are part of fantastical worlds shaped by necessity, emotion, and wisdom. Also on view is Strings of Desire. United by themes of human desire and longing, this group of thirteen artists have chosen to work with embroidery either as a singular medium or as a part of a multimedia art practice. The assembled artists have embraced needle and embroidery floss to connect with and integrate their non-Western cultural heritages, their queer identities, and their fantasies. Strings of Desire sets forth artists who have created a hybrid aesthetic that conflates embroidery, painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore personal identities that, like their art forms, are not solitary. Often either self-taught or gained through matrilineal knowledge, embroidery is a practice that is personal at its core, allowing the artists to explore different aspects of themselves in relation to larger aesthetic concepts, such as the hand and technology, childhood memories and adulthood, and lived and projected visions of their hearts’ desires. Among the artists in this exhibition are Jenny Hart, Aubrey Longley-Cook, Carmen Mardónez, Sophia Narrett, and many more. Thru May 7, 2023.
An extensive exhibit of portraits by artist members of Women Painters West is currently at the charming California Heritage Museum in Santa Monica. Portraits delights with its extensive examples of the time honored genre in a variety of media and approaches. Thru May 7, 2023.
Dellis Frank
Portrait of Anne of Austria by Peter Paul Rubens
Finally, an exhibition everyone can visit because it is on the Norton Simon Museum website. Representing Women: Gender and Portraiture in 17th c. Europe. This online exhibit is very much in keeping with my personal interests which extend beyond the work of women artists to the ways in which women have and are depicted in art and mass media. The following digital exhibition explores this question through 10 paintings and prints from the Norton Simon collections that represent women from various social and cultural contexts in 17th-century Europe. These women actively participated in shaping their own images, but their roles are often overlooked in favor of the male artists who depicted them. Portraits were a privilege of wealthy patrons, who commissioned paintings of themselves and of family members in order to display socially desirable qualities. Portrayals of women tended to emphasize beauty, fertility and modesty, rather than the professional, intellectual and financial successes celebrated in representations of men. Nevertheless, elite women exercised control over the process of being depicted, communicating their preferences to artists and rejecting finished portraits that did not suit their desires.
Thank you Karen!
Hi! Thank you for the info. I like the paintings!