Women Around Town, December 2023
I am looking forward to this holiday season. I will be celebrating my mother’s 95th birthday, spending time with my grandsons, having my artwork included in the upcoming Beloved Planet exhibit at the Makery gallery and to hopefully seeing the biopic of photographer Lee Miller starring Kate Winslet coming out December 6th. (Not sure if this is in theaters or on Netflix).
Wishing all of my readers a peaceful, healthy and joyful holiday season.
IN THE GALLERIES
Wonzimer Gallery presents Ann Weber: “O What Fools We Mortals Be”. Weber’s enormous, anthropomorphic and sensuous sculptures made from discarded cardboard boxes reference not only her personal life, but also the state of the world we live in. Her technique involves weaving cardboard strips to “provide structural strength as a metaphor for the artist’s lifelong practice of bringing people together.” Thru December 22, 2023.
Ann Weber
Diana Yesenia Alvarado
Diana Yesenia Alvarado: Earth Wish is the current exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Projects. Alvarado is a Los Angeles based artists who has expanded her practice with a residency in Guadalajara, México at Cerámica Suro. Through the alchemy of earthen materials and heat, Alvarado’s artistic expression marshals natural forces and the cultural histories of her roots in Los Angeles. The artist’s clay vessels are not utilitarian objects but culturally encoded with stories, mythologies and archetypes.nature, space, and sculpture. This body of work focuses on the symbiotic relationship between figures and vessels, both serving as carriers of narratives and cultural connections. Thru January 19, 2024.
ICA is exhibiting Barbara T. Smith: Proof featuring many of Smith’s most significant works, presented chronologically beginning in 1965 with early paintings, drawings, and assemblages. While Smith is celebrated for her performance art, she has always been a maker of things and an archivist of her output. She was one of the first artists to use a Xerox machine, which she deployed as a tool to make art about her life, often using her own body as object, subject, concept, and medium. She would continue to employ new technologies to make art throughout her career including fiberglass resin, soundwaves, television, artificial intelligence, video-phone, and digital imaging. Thru January 14, 2024. Enjoy a POV tour with artist and filmmaker, Cheri Gaulke on December 6, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Barbara T. Smith
Allison Katz
Westword Ho!, an exhibition of work by Canadian-born artist Allison Katz continues at Hauser and Wirth, West Hollywood. Katz’s deeply personal work addresses the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb biography, art history, information systems and commodity culture. ‘‘Westward Ho!’ speaks of yearning, of a call – for a response, for a lift… an invitation to ride somewhere, to be held for a moment in a frame gliding along the surface, evidence of life, as above so below…’—Allison Katz. The exhibition features a selection of new paintings Katz completed during her recent residency in Somerset, alongside site-specific responses to the gallery’s 1930’s Spanish Colonial Revival building. Thru January 5, 2024.
IN THE MUSEUMS
Do travel to the Huntington Gardens and Library (as I did earlier this week) to view an installation by renowned artist, Betye Saar. Titled Drifting Toward Twilight, Saar fills up canoe with antlers and metal bird cages, children’s chairs and other found objects. The canoe rests on a bed of branches and tree bark culled from the grounds at the Huntington. The room is painted a deep shade of blue with phases of the moon on one wall. It is a space designed for contemplation and Saar cleverly suggests many narratives in this work. This installation will be on view until November 30, 2025. Enjoy a short film about Saar and this work on YouTube.
Betye Saar
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction continues at LACMA. This is a very comprehensive exhibition that displays works from the early twentieth century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists such as Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks and Rosemarie Trockel, and many others whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. A wonderfully researched catalog accompanies the exhibition. Thru January 21, 2024.
Woven Histories Exhibition
Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation continues at the USC Fisher Museum. This exhibition offers a broad overview of Walker’s career through more than 80 works featuring prints, paintings, film, sculpture, and cut-paper silhouettes from almost every stage of the artist’s thirty-year career. Thru December 9, 2023.
Kara Walker
Sheila Metzner
Sheila Metzner: From Life is the current photography exhibit at the Getty Center. Metzner known mostly for her late 20th c. images of fashion and still-life. ” Metzner’s unique style blends aspects of Pictorialism and Modernism to forge an aesthetic that not only stands out in the history of photography, but became closely associated with the best of 1980s fashion, beauty, and decorative arts trends.” (Getty) Thru February 18, 2024.
