Women Around Town, May 2024

Spring has sprung!

IN THE GALLERIES

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park  presents its annual  COLA exhibition. Artist Jane Brucker is one of five recipients of the City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project (COLA IMAP) grants in design and visual arts. Brucker’s new work for the COLA exhibition prompts us to pause and reflect on the ambiguities of health, safety and viewpoint that complicate the act of rest. In each of her works, Brucker uses materials that she has made or gathered including objects inherited from her own family to reflect on the vulnerability of our minds and bodies.

May 18 through July 20, 2024; Opening Reception: Saturday, May 18 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm

Gallery Hours – 11 am to 4 pm, Thursday – Saturday

Vielmetter Gallery in downtown presents April Bey: I Know All About What you want to Know all About. The exhibition centers on the library and librarians of “Atlantica”, the artist’s imagined alternate universe where glitter is the currency and where visitors travel via portals of flora and fauna. Bey’s work is deeply rooted in her rigorous reading practice, her love of books and her obsession with Sci-Fi. She incorporates colorful faux fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles such as brocade and velvet–materials rich in queerness–to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community. Her work, which spans across multiple media such as printed textiles, synthography, weaving and elaborate stitching, reflects her background in printmaking and design and results in richly layered works rooted in the intersections of post-colonialism, Speculative Futurism, internet culture, and feminism. (VG) Thru May 18, 2024.

The Perversion of the Visual, current work by Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) a contemporary of the Pictures Generation is the current exhibition at Spreuth Magers. Bender is known for her commentary  on the age of television, her work continues its relevancy in today’s privatized and multi-screened cultural landscape. The show will feature the first of her two immersive and career-defining “electronic theater” works, Dumping Core (1984), shown for the first time on the West Coast since Bender performed it in 1986. Alongside the installation will be newly printed photo- collages that address the horrors of war and the fear of a collective numbness to its reality. (SM)
May 24–August 10, 2024; Public Reception: May 23, 6–8pm.

 

April Bey, “The Divine Venus of Eleuthera: Teal, Camel, and Speculative Futurism Among the Growers,” 2024 Canvas, resin, glitter (currency), crushed velour, cotton, metallic thread, yarn on panel

 

 

 

Anat Egbi’s Wilshire Blvd. location is featuring Gloria Klein (1936-2021): Unbinding Unwinding. With a legacy that is often overlooked, Klein is considered a founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement.  Her paintings and drawings from the 1970s can be read as Minimalist, Conceptual, and systems-based, but they are also indebted to the burgeoning support for ‘women work’ and the Pattern & Decoration movement.

Also on view at the gallery is work by British artist, Charlotte Edey. Edey’s work is primarily concerned with contemporary issues of selfhood. The language of drawing is translated through her textile practice. Mark-making and gesture are explored through extensive hand-embroidery and beading on tapestry, forging direct relationships between line and thread. She employs found objects and artist frames as narrative devices to blur the boundary between the real and the represented, forming portals to bodily otherworlds that               reflect the interior. (AE) Thru June 15, 2024.

At Jeffrey Deitch you will find Ella Kruglyanskaya: See Saw.  Paintings of vibrant and commanding female subjects are a combination of paint and drawing. These are large diptychs of scaled-up notebook pages on which pairs of women are drawn riding a see saw. These works capitalize on the tension of the characters’ cinematic pose but also of the blatant allusion to their swinging emotional state. In this series, she presents three themes: “See-Saw” paintings, “Street Corner” paintings, and “Skeleton in Closet paintings”. Thru June 8, 2024.

Luis de Jesus presents Karla Diaz, Mujer Valiente y Los Diablitos (The Brave Woman and the Little Devils). Diaz is known for her storytelling kaleidoscopic paintings, which she began making to chart memories, dreams, and whims during her recovery from a stroke. Her healing journey has resulted in a prolific series of works that have evolved into a playful yet formidable anthology of Latinx and Mexican-American experiences in Southern California. Diaz’s surreal paintings chronicle a collective unconscious of cultural iconography, pop references, current events, and familial dynamics and traditions that shape the worldview of the artist and her communities. In Diaz’s latest series, she expands her visual storytelling to encompass music and performance through the Northern Mexican genre of narrative ballads, the corrido. (LDJ) Thru June 8, 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE MUSEUMS

Don’t miss “Clay LA” at Craft Contemporary, Saturday, May 4; 12-5 p.m. and Sunday, May 5; 11-5 p.m. “iconic annual ceramic marketplace and fundraiser that brings together dozens of emerging and established ceramic makers from the greater Los Angeles area. Meet and shop from some of LA’s most dynamic and vibrant artists, celebrated for their diverse and unique approaches to art and design.

Later this month, visit their next exhibition, Kyungmi Shin: Origin Stories. Shin, a Korean-American woman has her own brand of visual storytelling. She uses personal archives and figures from Korean shamanism to question the navigational forces that chinoiserie and “the Orient” play in empire, colonization, religion, gender and importantly love. Shin layers photography, painterly traditions, ethno-mythological symbolism and porcelain to engender a generous, new imaginary that centers rather than elides and holds space for diverse journeys across space and time. The exhibit is organized by jill moniz. May 26 thru September 8, 2024.

Nearly 60 works by acclaimed French sculptor, Camille Claudel (1864-1943) , and a few by Rodin, make up the current exhibition at The Getty Center. This important exhibition  is a successful effort to reevaluate her life’s work and secure her legacy. She may stand out more due to her tumultuous relationship with Auguste Rodin and her internment in a psychiatric institution of the last 30 years of her life, but here we are reminded of her great skill, intuition and perseverance. A must see! Thru July 21, 2024.

By the way don’t miss the amazing giant abalone shells hanging the rotunda of the museum. These are by local artist, Mercedes Dorame, and were commissioned by the Getty. The title is Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back). Dorame was drawn to the view from the Getty Center across Pacific Ocean to Pimugna, or Pimu (Catalina Island), long inhabited by the Tongva people. “To conjure a return gaze from Pimugna, her  installation includes painted  views of the coastline and suspended sculptures of abalone-an endangered mollusk and important cultural resource for coastal California Native peoples” Thru July 28, 2024.

Continuing at the Orange County Museum of Art is the exhibition of the work of Joan Brown(1938-1990). The exhibit features over forty vibrant paintings and sculptures. Thru June 2, 2024.

Also continuing is Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival. The exhibit at The Cheech at the Riversise Art Museum documents her nearly fifty-year 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. Thru August 4, 2024.