Women Around Town, September 2024

Keep your eyes out for all of the exhibitions associated with Getty-led initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide which will open this September. For example, Plugged In: Art and Electric Light at the Norton Simon Museum.

September 20, 2024 thru February 17, 2025.

IN THE GALLERIES

David Zwirner gallery is featuring At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World curated by Hilton Als. This exhibit highlights the artist’s career-long commitment to depicting the human condition and her practice of painting people from many walks of life. This presentation focuses on her paintings of individuals from queer communities and those who were a part of their circle. The works on view will include paintings of politicians, philanthropists, writers, performers, and artists, as well as friends and neighbors—together forming a collective portrait that both embodies and complicates an understanding of the queer world of Neel’s moment and the artist’s place within it. (DZ) September 7 thru November 4, 2024.

Craft in America is a wonderful gallery, and I see that Lorraine Bubar is having an exhibit there opening later this month, Lorraine Bubar: Papercut Perspectives. She uses her talents to finely cut papers to depict the beauty of the natural world. “Bubar’s papercuts reveal the hierarchy of nature and the intricate layers within it. The symmetry and lacey patterns she incorporates allude to the complex fractals to be found in nature itself. The scale and extent to which the artist pushes the medium, emphasize both the strength and fragility that humble paper possesses.” (CIA) September 14, 2024 thru January 4, 2025.

Here is what will be happening at the Institute of Contemporary Art  (ICA) which sounds so compelling.  “In conjunction with the forthcoming United States presidential election, Los Angeles-based artist Kathryn Andrews will premiere a site-specific outdoor project on ICA LA’s 7th Street facade. With a conceptual practice grounded in gender theory, Andrews creates work that engages the aesthetics and technologies of Hollywood cinema, political propaganda, and art history to unearth the complex relationships between people, culture, and power that structure the violent fictions of our everyday lives. Titled Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway […] (2020-Ongoing), Andrews’ work at ICA LA addresses gender disparity in the presidential electoral process. “Featured within the work are the names of women who have run for U.S. president such as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress; Patsy Mink, the author of the nation’s Title IX civil rights law; and Gloria La Riva, the first Latinx woman to run for President in 1992. “… Chronicling the nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat—beginning with Victoria Woodhull in 1872 before women had the right to vote—Kathryn Andrews’s work serves as an active record of the persistent and systemic sexism in American politics and a call for the urgent need for change. The project began in 2020 and reoccurs every four years with updated names and faces, displayed publicly until a woman is elected President. With the recent endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, such a reality feels that much closer.” (ICA) September 7 thru November 17, 2024.

September 11: 6- 8:30 p.m. Let’s Talk About It!: Women and the Presidency

Anet Egbi Gallery presents Brittney Leeanne Williams: The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses continues Williams’s interest in the notion of theophany—the visible manifestation of deities. Many compositions take inspiration from the artist’s research and references of biblical genre paintings, that depict angelic apparitions wrestling, conversing, or engaging human beings. In these narratives angels are archetypal forms—guards, messengers, and bearers of symbols.  Williams also draws on ideas of angels as dialogic or instructional partners embodied in texts such as Talking With Angels by Gitta Mallasz (published 1979), from which the show’s title is drawn. For Williams, angelic visitation becomes a metaphor for intense feelings of disconnection from revelation or creative power—also known as artist’s block. The paintings explore exalted emotions, attainment of wisdom, and the struggle to comprehend the world beyond what is in front of our eyes. Thru October 5, 2024.

Concrete is Fluid is a solo exhibition at Honor Fraser gallery featuring the artwork of eco-hacktivist Lauren Bon and the artist’s interdisciplinary platform, Metabolic Studio. Concrete never dries which gives the materiality flexibility during fluctuations in temperature. The motility of concrete is applied as a metaphor for the change that is needed for us to support the web of life. The exhibition examines the transmutability of Bon’s concrete warehouse, which is located next to the concrete channel known as the LA River. Once a symbol of inflexibility and industrial order, the reclaimed warehouse is taken up as both a political site and a malleable material—pierced and transformed into a permeable membrane through which light, soil, and water can interact and flow uninhibited…. During the exhibition, Honor Fraser will act as a conduit between Bon’s warehouse—a space teeming with potential and metamorphosis—and the creative estuaries in and around Los Angeles. The gallery is temporarily transformed into a sounding board for Bon’s ecological compositions, as well as a satellite site to decipher the exuviated relics of subterranean Los Angeles. (HF) September 14 thru December 14, 2024.

The Box presents Through the Vanishing Point, the work of Eugenia P. Butler (1947-2008) whose career lasted over forty years and played a formative, but often overlooked, role at the border between conceptual art, community art practice and experimentations with drawing. Through a constant deconstruction of patriarchal logics, her works explore the material, emotional, artistic and psychic labor necessary to meditate on her recondite experiences and traumas: in her own words, she is interested in the “unknown, the psyche, the world of dreams and the unconscious”. For PST ART 2024, The Box presents a selection of Butler’s production dedicated to her fascination for transitional states: a collection of abstract drawings that represent mysterious landscapes of physics phenomena of transformation. At the center of this body of work spirals, holes, spheres and ovals emanate rays of energy, eruptions, overlaps and vortices, producing intensified movements between energy and matter. The viewer is invited to observe these phenomena and to engage with the uncontrollable and the unexplainable of vision and perception. Opens September 14, 2024.

Vielmetter Projects presents works by Andrea Bowers.  Bowers is a local artist known for decades-long artist practice that is driven by activism and advocacy. Her work was recently the focus of a retrospective exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum, so it will be interesting to see what this gallery offers by this important artist. September 14 thru October 26, 2024.

 

 

Jenna Gribbon, Like Looking in a Mirror is the upcoming exhibit at David Kordansky Gallery. Here a selection of presents new paintings by Gribbon will be on view. She is an artist known for her portraiture in which she incorporates props, and the careful positioning and gaze of her subjects, she alters the viewer’s experience of looking. In this body of work, she uses reflective surfaces and mirrors to aid in the act of seeing. September 13 thru October 19, 2024.

 

 

 

IN THE MUSEUMS

Look for Nancy Baker Cahill’s monumental Corpus on the Hammer Museum’s sculpture terrace. WARNING:  This is a “virtual sculpture” and requires your mobile phone to view (Fee Wi-Fi is accessible on the “Nancy Baker Cahill” network) that imagines a future of blended, embodied entanglement between human, machine, flora, and microbiome. The towering Augmented Reality (AR) figure is a glowing, dynamic body that blurs the boundaries between the digital and physical world. September 7, 2024 thru March 2, 2025. Also at the Hammer is an interesting group exhibition titled Breath (e) Toward Climate and Social Justice and is part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide. The exhibit features over 20 artists and was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic and America’s racial reckoning in 2020.  The exhibition strives to challenge and deconstruct polarized political attitudes surrounding climate justice in America and offers new perspectives around land and indigenous rights of nature. Among the artists with work in this show are: Tiffany Chung, Sarah Rosalena, Clarissa Tossin and many others including Yoshitomo Nara. September 15, 2024 thru January 5, 2025. `

For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability is the long-awaited exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. This is the first major exhibition to survey themes of illness and impairment in American art from the 1960s up to the COVID-19 era. The exhibit narrates the history of recent art through the lens of disability—a term used inclusively—recognizing the vulnerable body to be a crucial throughline for art in the United States amid the upheavals and transformations of past decades. The artists whose work is in the exhibit includes many familiar names: Laura Aguilar, Carlos Almarez, Ida Applebroog, Ron Athey, Rina Banerjee, Nayland Blake, Barbara Bloom, Gregg Bordowitz, John Boskovich, Morris Broderson, Beverly Buchanan, Lisa Bufano, Jerome Caja, Patty Chang, King Cobra, Tee Corinne, Moyra Davey, Zeinabu irene Davis, Jay DeFeo, Emory Douglas, Angela Ellsworth and TT Takemoto, Simone Fattal, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Pippa Garner, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Milford Graves, Joseph Grigely, Anna Halprin, Barbara Hammer, Ester Hernandez, David Hockney, Camille Holvoet, Tishan Hsu, Kim Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Stephen Lapthisophon, Liz Larner, Carolyn Lazard, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Riva Lehrer, Simone Leigh, Zoe Leonard, Fred Lonidier, James Luna, Guadalupe Maravilla, Park McArthur, Juanita McNeely, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Mundo Meza, Frank Moore, Frank C. Moore, Ray Navarro, Senga Nengudi, Alison O’Daniel, Pauline Oliveros, Carmen Papalia, Howardena Pindell, Pope.L, Yvonne Rainer, Niki de Saint Phalle, Judith Scott, Kathryn Sherwood, Hollis Sigler, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kiki Smith, P. Staff, Liza Sylvestre, Sunaura Taylor, Joey Terrill, Rigoberto Torres, Mary Ann Unger, Kaari Upson, Catherine Wagner, Charles White, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Richard Yarde, Sandie (Chun-Shan) Yi, Liz Young, and Constantine Zavitsanos. Note: This exhibit is part of the Getty-led initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide. September 19, 2024 thru February 2, 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTINUING MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Broad Museum featuring over 80 works that include not only mixed-media painting, but also installations, collage, and photographs. Thru September 29,  2004.

A comprehensive survey of the work of Simone Leigh at LACMA. Note that Leigh’s survey is concurrently featured at the California African American Museum thru January 20, 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lumen: Helen Pashgian 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.” Thru January 26, 2025.