Women Around Town, August 2024

Women Around Town, August 2024

IN THE GALLERIES

Anat Egbi gallery presents Kate Pincus-Whitney, To Live and Dine in LA/You Taste Like Home. Pincus-Whitney synthesizes mythology and contemporary life in her paintings.  Her vibrant and maximalist paintings are filled with platters of food from iconic Los Angeles restaurants and eateries, glittering glassware, menus, local flora, sentimental objects, and so many books.  In her work, she maps culture, place, and self through the foods and objects we consume. Thru 8/17/24.

Kate Pincus-Whitney

Armory Center for the Arts is a participant in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time:  Art and Science Collide which returns in September. Here, the exhibit, From the Ground Up, features 16 contemporary artists and art teams who explore diverse technologies, histories of contested spaces, and traditional understandings of  nature as they “imagine alternative, sustainable futures”. This exhibit will be of special interest to those who are enthralled with the intersection of art and the environment as well as sustainability. Participating artists include Charmaine Bee, Beatriz Cortez,  Mercedes Dorame, Hillary Mushkin, Sarah Rosalena, and many others.

Melissa Meier

Melissa Meier: Nature’s Masquerade is the current exhibition at Lois Lambert Gallery.  The artist confronts social and spiritual issues in her work as she incorporates mixed media sculpture into narrative assemblage. Her first series in this exhibit, Skins consists of wearable sculptures made from organic materials including grains of rice, dried pasta, pistachio nut shells, flowers, and porcupine quills, among others. “My artwork is an exploration of both the natural world and the self. The organic constructions are just another form of expression and revelation that needs to be peeled away, as are the masks. They look like different themes, but to me, they are telling the same story.” (MM) Thru August 31, 2024.

BLUM is pleased to present Quiet Inside, paintings by March Avery. With a selection of still lifes from the 1960s-2010s, this exhibition offers a glimpse into the artist’s mastery of color, hue, and spatial relationships. In these oil paintings variously portraying flowers and plants in vases, placed on tabletops, alongside animals, or growing from the earth, the New York-based artist celebrates the pleasures of domesticity, nature, and the everyday.

March Avery

Also at Blum is Maureen Dougherty. “Dougherty plays with the push and pull between innocence and maturity—deliberately blurring the two in renderings that serve as commentary on the state of media and contemporary culture. The painter draws imagery from platforms like Instagram or OnlyFans—known for its proliferation of social media archetypes and amateur pornography—and reflects these commonplace representations back upon themselves with eloquent mimesis rendered with sensual brush strokes that selectively reveal the artist’s hand. Hyperbolizing the peculiarities of her chosen scenes, Dougherty isolates her figures in monochromatic backgrounds with compositions that reference the work of more recent artists such as Alex Katz or Pablo Picasso as well as classical artists of the High Renaissance such as Raphael.” (Blum) Thru August 30, 2024.

Maureen Dougherty

IN THE MUSEUMS

Don’t miss the current exhibit at the Broad, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love before it closes in September. Featuring over 80 works that include not only mixed-media painting, but also installations, collage, and photographs. Thru September 29, 2004.

Mickalene Thomas

Craft Contemporary has a wonderful exhibit of Kyungmi Shin’s work organized by jill moniz. Shin’s visual storytelling reveals her identity as a Korean American woman. 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.“Kyungmi Shin’s unique engagement with the complexities of history, Asian identity and temporality create a portal for the viewer. Her work transports us to the past and back to examine shamanism, religion, chinoiserie, ‘the Orient’ as well as the migrational and navigational forces that shape empire, colonization, religion, gender, refusal, and importantly love,” (moniz)

Thru September 8, 2024.

Kyungmi Shin

A comprehensive survey of the richly layered work by Simon Leigh is currently on view at LACMA. The exhibit features approximately 20 years of Leigh’s production in ceramic, bronze, video, and installation, as well as works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. Over the past two decades, Leigh has created works exploring questions of Black femme subjectivity and knowledge production. Addressing a wide swath of historical periods, geographies, and traditions, her art references vernacular and hand-made processes from across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and architecture. Note that Leigh’s survey is concurrently featured at the California African American Museum thru January 20, 2025.

Simone Leigh

Lumen: Helen Pashgian opens soon at the Getty Center. Her installation made of cast urethane is part of the exhibition: Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. Here is their description: “Pashgian’s Untitled (Lens) challenges human perception. The feelings evoked by this meditative sculpture and light installation could be likened to those inspired by medieval sacred spaces that, like Pashgian’s work, use light to take the viewer utterly beyond the outside world, energizing and focusing the mind, and creating transformative experiences.” August 6, 2024–January 26, 2025