Women Around Town, June 2024

Women Around Town, June 2024

My husband and I just returned from one week in Montreal and Quebec City.  The highlights included visits to their  2 main art museums. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts featured the “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore” exhibit which I had already seen in San Diego. It was still fantastic and what great art history at work in the comparisons of these legends who were both exquisitely inspired by nature. I was also delighted with their permanent collection, in particular works by Nevelson, Picasso, John Currin, Kehinde Wiley,  et al. ……

O’Keeffe and Moore

Then in Quebec City, we visited their Musee des Beaux-Arts du Quebec, the architecture of this museum is world-class. It is located in the National Battlefields Park known as the Plains of Abraham. We were fortunate to view an extraordinary exhibit of Rembrandt etchings, so beautifully installed. Works by other artists from whom Rembrandt drew inspiration along with those by his students and collaborators were also included. Several works by Québec artists from the museum’s collections rounded out the varied body of Dutch work.  I particularly enjoyed the works by Canadian contemporary artists who were invited to create works in response to the etchings.

Rembrandt Etching

Also of note at the museum was an amazing work by Jean Paul Riopelle, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. Riopelle began work on this immense composition in his studio on Île-aux-Oies in November 1992, after having learned of the death in Paris of his former companion, the American painter Joan Mitchell (1926-1992). This narrative sequence of thirty paintings forms a triptych more than 100’ long. Certainly worth a look.

Jean Paul Riopelle

NOTE: These exhibits can be viewed online, but there is nothing like a direct experience.

If the stars align, I will be heading to Paris in June and of course there will be lots of art experiences to share after that venture.

IN THE GALLERIES

L.A. Louver Gallery presents Rebecca Campbell: Young Americans. “Young  Americans all, flowing from inside to out, real to super real, subreal to too real. And robots are driving the cars, but the kids are still playing music and catching sun. These pictures of the space between us and collapsing, the space between us collapsing, the space between all things collapsing.” (Rebecca Campbell) Well-known for her portraits, here the subject of this collection is her children and their friends, the representatives of our future in closely observed vignettes, navigating adolescence in a world of extraordinary uncertainties. Already changed from the time of these portraits, these young Americans each encapsulate the nostalgia, inspiration, unfolding and anticipation of this body of work. Campbell accomplishes a transcendent task in these paintings, demonstrating not only masterful technical prowess but also the ability to convey universal ideas through individual experience. (LA) Thru July 20, 2024.

Rebecca Campbell

Brand 52: Annual Exhibition of Works on Paper opens June 15. This year’s annual exhibit at the Brand Library was juried by Shana Nys  Dambrot. Don’t miss it!!! Thru August 9, 2024.

Artful Alchemy: Exploring the Alchemical Fusion of Art and Design is the current exhibit at Mash Gallery. This is a group show features an eclectic mix of paintings, sculptures, installations, and multidisciplinary artistic expressions that merge with core interior design elements. From abstract and figurative tours de force to dynamic, immersive installations, each piece has been curated for its ability to inspire viewers and enhance spaces with class, beauty, and emotional resonance. Among the artists  featured here as Amanza Smith, Cabell Molina, Lisa Schulte, Lola Okunola, and many more. Thru  June 15, 2024.

Cabella Molina

Opening June 1 at Veilmetter Los Angeles is Medrie MacPhee-Qualia: I Feel You. Here is the gallery’s description of her work and I am intrigued: “In her newest work, MacPhee creates potently physical paintings composed of ordinary garments, deconstructed, then pulled flat and collaged into a distinct matrix of overlapping organic and rectangular shapes. After decades as a painter of architecturally-inspired Surrealistic landscape paintings, MacPhee shifted her focus to works that play with color and texture in a synthesis of formal improvisation and industrial design. She cuts up found and cast-off garments, then affixes them to large panels, carefully aligning seams, zippers, buttons, or belt-loops to create a new scaffolding. Over this puzzle-like infrastructure, MacPhee reorients the outlines of the garments by painting the entire canvas white. She then paints a new, overlapping—related, but not quite aligned—chromatic grid, often outlining new shapes or existing garments with slim strands of tinted piping. The implied presence of the body—through elements that articulate legs, necks, arms—creates a simultaneously humorous and poignant humanistic pull that echoes tangibly in our subconscious.”  Thru July 6, 2024.

Medrie MacPhee Qualia

IN THE MUSEUMS

The Broad has a special exhibition this summer, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. The exhibit  features over 80 works including  photographs, installations, mixed-media painting, and collage. “The exhibition shares its title and several of its themes with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks, in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation.”  (Broad) The themes of the exhibition will extend into a full slate of associated programming developed in collaboration with the artist, including a summer concert series and in-gallery programs centering women and Black and queer communities. Additional details will be announced in the coming months.  Thru September, 29,  2004.

Mickalene Thomas

Craft Contemporary presents Kyungmi Shin: Origin Stories organized by jill moniz explores Shin’s visual storytelling as a Korean American woman who engages indigeneity as a site of knowledges and creativity. 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. Thru September 8.

Kyungmi Shin

The exhibit of works by acclaimed French sculptor, Camille Claudel (1864-1943) continues 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.

Camille Claudel

Also continuing is Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival.  The exhibit at The Cheech at the Riverside 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.

Judithe Hernández