Women Around Town, November 2024

I am so thankful for so many things, and especially to all my readers out there.

IN THE GALLERIES

Days of Reverie opens this weekend at the Descanso Gardens’ Sturt Haaga Gallery. showcasing new bodies of work by four Los Angeles-based visual artists: Catherine Ruane, Debbie Korbel, Jason Jenn, and Jill Sykes. This project was initiated and curated by Vojislav Radovanović, who envisioned each artist creating entirely new works inspired directly by the beautiful environment of Descanso Gardens. Thru January 26, 2025.

Debbie Korbel

The Glendale Community College Art Gallery is now exhibiting a compelling body of work by Kim Abeles. Kim Abeles: Body, Machine and Industry is curated by Dana Marterella includes three connected sections: Smog Collectors, On Photography (inspired by Susan Sontag), and The Retina Journal. In Abeles’ own words, she provided descriptions of these bodies of work. “The Smog Collectors materialize the reality of the air we breathe. I place stenciled images on transparent or opaque plates or fabric, then leave these on rooftops and let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. After a period, from four days to a month typically, the stencil is removed and the image is revealed in smog. To quote a stranger who saw my first experiments, they are “footprints of the sky”.
“Susan Sontag’s On Photography influenced my first series of self-portraits,  I made these photographs using different implements to strike the camera shutter button. The self-
“portraits that followed through the years were photographed using the 10-second timer on my camera and retain the subject-object-viewer interchange.” Finally, about The Retina Journal, “Over a two-day period in September 2023, the vision of my left eye transformed, first with the appearance of being half-submerged in murky water, and then, to total blindness. The retina had dropped like a curtain. For the year that followed I created numerous artworks based on peculiarities of what I was seeing, new distortions following surgeries, and what I could not see. The world continued to rotate while this interior reality became a framework for my perceptions; I became my own lab rat. The body is a gadget for observation. We devise contraptions and take photographs to confirm our observations. We assume we all see the same things, make qualitative judgments, and find comfort in collective wisdoms. Truth is sought, lost, and sought again. Is it a table or a chair?” Thru November 22, 2024. NOTE: There will be an artist talk, November 6th @ 7p.m.

Kim Abeles

A site-specific outdoor project on ICA LA’s 7th Street façade by Kathryn Andrews is titled Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway […]. Andrews, whose work is grounded in gender theory addresses gender disparity in the presidential electoral process. This work chronicles the nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat—beginning with Victoria Woodhull in 1872 before women had the right to vote. 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. Thru November 17, 2024.

Kathryn Andrews

Anat Ebgi (Fountain Ave.) presents Anna Freeman Bentley: Complete Reality. The show includes ten new oil paintings that explore the uncanny within architectural spaces and interiors, The meta-fictional scenes of these paintings are the culmination of the past few years of work inspired by the artist’s visit to a film set, shot on location in an historic house museum in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. These staged environments are peppered with clues such as video cameras, lighting equipment or an incongruous, plastic bottle of water, visible traces of crew and production that allude to our behind-the-scenes viewing perspective. Thru January 11, 2025.

Anna Freeman Bentley

Between Earth and Sky, textile paintings by Debbie McAfee is the current exhibit at Craig Krull Gallery. McAfee offers intimate windows into the contemplative quiet of desert dawns and dusks. A longtime resident of the high desert in Southern California, McAfee has driven and walked the land around Joshua Tree for years, observing and recording the terrain and conditions around her. In the summer, the nighttime provides respite from the hot, dry days; in the winter, night is brisk and challenging. She offers intimate windows into the contemplative quiet of desert dawns and dusks. Thru November 30, 2024.

Debbie McAfee

Luis de Jesus gallery presents Lia Halloran: Night Watch, a new series of oil paintings capturing the passage of time across multiple scales—whether through the movement of star trails, the changing of seasons, or the Earth’s steady orbit around the sun. The paintings create a visual dialogue between the mechanical and the natural, from the cyclical nature of the seasons and, the gradual transformation of landscapes, using colors and textures to evoke the season’s changes. The exhibition runs from November 9–December 21, 2024, with an opening reception, on Saturday, November 9, from 4–7 PM; and an Artist Talk, on Saturday, December 14, 2024, from 2–3 PM.

Lia Halloran

In conjunction with Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, a monumental altar assemblage titled Mojotech, by the renowned artist Betye Saar, continues being exhibited at Roberts Projects.  Thru February 28, 2025.
Panel Discussion: Gender, Art and Technology, Saturday, November 9, 2024, 1pm.

IN THE MUSEUMS

A fascinating exhibit is now on view at the Orange County Museum of Art.
Deux Femmes brings together a collection of work by artist Leonor Fini (b. 1907, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 1996, Paris, France) and Leonora Carrington (b. 1917, Clayton Green, England; d. 2011, Mexico City, Mexico), each of whom emphasize metamorphosis and transformation as a source of power. Both artists lived in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, engaging with ideas inherent in SurrealismDeux Femmes celebrates the enduring legacy of Fini and Carrington, emphasizing how both artists used self-representation in an imaginative and defiant way, embracing duality and multiplicity of identities. Thru February 23, 2025.

Liz Larner

Leonora Carrington

Also at the Orange County Museum of Art is Transformative Currents, Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, an exhibition of work by Liz Larner. Larner’s works are part of the multi-venue exhibition Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, a group exhibition organized by the Oceanside Museum of Art, with additional presentations at OCMA and Crystal Cove Conservancy, which is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, 2024. Her recent sculptures, Meerschaum Drifts (2020–21) and Asteroids (2020–22), are two interconnected bodies of work. Made from plastic waste accumulated over three years, Meerschaum Drifts references the form of sea foam as a response to plastic pollution in the ocean. It also alludes to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean, drawing attention to plastic’s devastating environmental toll and its ominous future presence in marine environments as pervasive as seaweed or algae. Asteroids—ceramic pieces named after existing and imagined asteroids and inspired by the near miss of the “2019 OK” asteroid—symbolizes uncontrollable, potentially destructive natural forces. The ceramic works are presented in contrast to the human-generated crisis of plastic waste, hinting at the potential convergence of environmental disasters, cosmic movements, and earthly catastrophe. By juxtaposing her Meerschaum Drifts and Asteroids, Larner blurs the lines between celestial and oceanic spaces, urging contemplation on the state of the natural world. (OC) Thru January 5, 2025.

 The Santa Paula Museum of Art will be having a comprehensive exhibit of Joanne Julian’s ouevre, titled Nature’s Spirits. “Julian draws on her long career in painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture to create realistic images of natural forms that merge and dance with spontaneous brushwork in the Japanese Zen “splashed-ink” style.” Premiere Party, November 9, 4-6 p.m.
November 9 thru March 9, 2025.

CONTINUING MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
One of current ongoing exhibitions features the work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard continues at LACMA , it features ceramics, paintings, and drawings, including an important selection of works made collaboratively with her husband, Michael Frimkess, spanning over a 50-year period.  Thru January 5, 2025.

I highly recommend Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective continuing at the Hammer Museum. Ramberg is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. In her work, she develops a visual vocabulary of fetish objects from hands, torsos, shoes, and locks of hair. Over time these images become increasingly abstract, eventually reduced to a set of simple geometries. The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Ramberg in almost 30 years, the exhibition presents approximately 100 works including paintings, quilts, and archival ephemera. Thru January 5, 2025.

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion continues at the Skirball.  The remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of Diane von Furstenberg’s iconic wrap dress (I did own on these long ago). Organized in four thematic sections, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion includes a selection of over sixty pieces drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. The Skirball’s presentation of this exhibition will also include new images and audio that shed light on von Furstenberg’s personal biography as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work. Thru August 31, 2025.

Paper and Light at the Getty Center is exhibition of drawings that charts some of the innovative ways in which the two media were creatively used together. Works include the Museum’s extraordinary 12-foot-long transparency by Carmontelle—essentially an 18th-century motion picture—which will be shown lit from behind as originally intended.  Drawings by more contemporary artists including Vija Celmins will join sheets by Tiepolo, Delacroix, Seurat, and Manet to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light. Thru January 19, 2025.