Women Around Town, March 2024

Women Around Town, March 2024

March is Women’s History Month, now march out there and support women artists and (some) candidates!

IN THE GALLERIES

The Box Gallery is currently exhibiting Utility Fatigue, works by Linda Franke. In her sculptures, the artist poses the question “what if objects could be peeled away from their function”? Here she disrupts the narrative of everyday found objects and rearranging their given grammar to invite new forms of language and behavior. “For example, a chair is cast in silicone becoming heavy and tender. With the familiar rendered unfamiliar, the viewer is confronted with the emotional, narratological qualities of the object. Interested in the threshold between chair and chair-ness, Franke simultaneously explores the functionality that it once held—with its meaning embedded into its materiality and shape—and the possibilities that it could hold, with its meaning estranged from its materiality and leftover fragments of its original shape. In doing so she shifts the object´s value from one that is tied to its function to one that is indifferent to those demands.” (The Box) Thru April 27, 2024.

Linda Franke

There are 2 women artists featured in the current exhibitions at Francois Ghebaly Gallery. The first is Trulee Hall with her exhibition, She Shells. In her immersive multimedia installations Hall invites viewers into an overtly artificial world where traditional perceptions of reality are playfully upended. Hall creates gleeful and cutting works that braid together performance, video, and music. Fantastical sets,  costumes, puppetry, claymation, kinetic scenographies, CGI, and original musical compositions have become hallmarks of her practice. In She Shells, Hall takes viewers to the beach in multipart installations that center the ecofeminist potential of water and the creatures that take to it. “Central to the exhibition is the motif of water, depicted in two major installations,  She Shells and Three Flavors.

Trulee Hall

Ann Leda Shapiro

The second exhibition at Francois Ghebaly Gallery is Ann Leda Shapiro: Light Within Darkness. Here, eighteen paintings ranging from 1976 through 2023, track the evolutions and continuities of Shapiro’s work. By taking the body apart and reconstructing it with elements from nature, she reflects the environment through the inner worlds of her figures.  “I want to do intimate paintings, slow art, vulnerable art,” Shapiro has stated. “I want to do the opposite of big and brash.” Light Within Darkness reveals an artist who has committed herself to the vulnerability of the body and the earth and to extending a particular sense of tenderness and care across her decades of painting and healing. This exquisite example of her work is done with watercolor on paper. Both exhibitions are on view thru March 20, 2024.

Luis de Jesus Gallery presents JUNE EDMONDS: Meditations on African Resilience. Edmonds synthesizes abstraction, spirituality, and meditation with her ruminations and contemplations on her African American roots, Black history, and experience in America. Her paintings memorialize historic and contemporary figures and events with narratives that embody Black strength, endurance, joy, harmony, power, and resilience. Her new paintings find inspiration in the emblem of the river leaf (ebe-amẹn) — an ancient and sacred quatrefoil used prominently in the Kingdom of Benin (also known as the Edo Kingdom or the Benin Empire), a pre-colonial kingdom in what is now southwestern Nigeria — to symbolize the power and regality of kings, healers, and deities, and as a spiritual symbol for unity, balance, and protection. Thru April 13, 2024.

June Edmonds

Chrissy Angliker

At Bergamot Station, Craig Krull Gallery is exhibiting the work of Chrissy Angliker, a Brooklyn-based Swiss American artist. The title of this exhibit is See Through, and here she is focused on visually translating how she perceives life itself, as seeking balance between control and chaos. At the center of Chrissy’s practice lies her unique exploration of her ever-evolving partnership with paint, which is explored in her 2016 book, PAINT/ING/S. For every intentional mark, the nature of the medium challenges that intention. The artist is searching for a sense of grace in the oscillation between these two opposing elements. The theme of her work arose from her feeling of life itself being a balance between control and chaos, which has been heightened in these extraordinary times. As people, we have intentions, but must anticipate and welcome the intervention of outside forces beyond our power. (CK) Thru March 24, 2024.

Catherine Goodman

Catherine Goodman: New Works is the current exhibition at Hauser Wirth in the arts district. These are predominantly abstract works, marking a distinct development for the artist, whose signature dynamic surfaces and energetic brushstrokes will occupy some of her largest canvases to date. In a career spanning over four decades, Goodman’s artistic process is rooted in a daily practice of observational drawing sourced from life, film and old master paintings. In these striking new compositions, Goodman continues her longstanding exploration of memory, place and the mystery of the unconscious. Goodman’s intensely expressive painting process uses strongly pigmented oil paint, brushwork, oil sticks, drips and washes to create atmospheric and immersive paintings which explore both figuration and abstraction. Central to Goodman’s artistic process is the act of drawing directly from life, her intimate knowledge of the old master painters and drawing from film, where she immerses in the legends of the modern cinema age. In Goodman’s words, “drawing can bring about a sense of unity and create a portal into other realms of consciousness”. This daily practice roots her mark-making in observation and informs and enriches her paintings. (HW) Thru May 5, 2024.

IN THE MUSEUMS

I am looking forward to seeing the very significant exhibition at The Cheech at The Riverside Art Museum, Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival. This exhibition spans over 50 years of this groundbreaking artist’s career. It is the first major retrospective of her work, which centers the realities and mythologies of Mexican migrant women, exploring the legacies of colonization and the US Mexico border and their impact on women and children. Hernández has invented a visual vocabulary inspired by her cultural background, sexual identity, and concerns. The fifth and only female member of the acclaimed artist collective, Los Four, Judithe Hernández began her artistic career as a muralist working with Carlos Almaraz painting murals for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. She is credited for painting one of the first feminist empowerment murals at the Ramona Gardens Housing Projects in East Los Angeles. This exhibition features over 80 works from her “Adam & Eve;” “Juárez, México;” and “Colonization” series. It also includes a video chronicling the artist’s early career in muralism and her critical conceptual contributions as the first featured cover artist of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Thru August 4, 2024.

Judithe Hernandez

The Orange County Museum of  Art is currently exhibiting the work of Joan Brown (1938-1990). Comprising over forty colorful paintings and sculptures, Deeply embedded in the Bay Area art scene, drew inspiration from many sources to create works that merge autobiography, fantasy, and whimsy, with weightier metaphysical and spiritual themes. This retrospective is the most expansive presentation on the artist’s work in more than twenty years, charting the turns and devotions of a vision that was once dismissed by critics as unserious but was rooted firmly in impassioned curiosity and research and remains uniquely compelling today. Thru June 2, 2024.

Joan Brown Exhibition

Finally, after visiting both the L.A. Art  Show and Frieze L.A. where I found very few works very compelling, I bring your attention to a noteworthy exhibit at the U.C.L.A. Hammer  Museum. Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s is the first North American exhibition to explore the groundbreaking work of a generation of artists who emerged in the decades following the Korean War (1950–53).  Featuring nearly eighty works and archival materials, Only the Young centers a moment of unprecedented creative energy in South  Korea’s art history as the country’s culture experienced a sea change. Note that although the majority of these artists are male, the works represented here are so thought provoking  that I would be remiss not to recommend this exhibit. Thru May 12, 2024.