There is no better way to get inspired in your own art practice or to indulge your senses than going to a gallery or museum exhibition. Enjoy these few suggestions…
(Artwork: A Lovely Day by Karen Schifman)
IN THE GALLERIES
Do not miss the current exhibition of paintings by Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner Gallery. Yuskavage is known for her paintings of brazen, doll-like women who shift freely between playful sexuality and sullen contemplation. She renders her subjects in confrontational and pinup poses, situating them in fantastical landscapes or beneath dramatic skies. Here is a description of the artist from her website: “For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage’s (b. 1962) highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, these characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning. While the artist’s painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance. Yet her oeuvre compellingly resists categorization, insisting instead on its own kind of emotional formalism in which characters and pictorial inventions assume equal importance.” A wonderful artist indeed! Thru April 12, 2025.
Lisa Yuskavage
Luis de Jesus gallery presents Derriann Pharr: I Am a Bloodstone. Pharr is a mixed media artist who uses her own visual language and poetic expression in her depictions of the human figure. She draws from her own experiences as a Black biracial woman grappling with self-esteem while facing societal expectations as she liberates her figures from our fixed expectations. “Pharr’s commitment to liberating her figures stands as a response to her observation of a lack of intrinsic and physical consideration of marginalized bodies in the American South.” Pharr envisions landscapes untainted by the injustices of our imperfect humanity. These vibrant scenes emerge as a response to the prevailing sociopolitical environment, serving as a call to embrace personal authenticity as a form of resistance. (Luis de Jesus). March 1 thru April 5, 2025.
Derriann Pharr
L.A. Louver is celebrating their 50th anniversary with an exhibition surveying the gallery’s history, from its formation in 1975 to now. “The gallery was founded with a singular mission: to contextualize Los Angeles and global artists in a distinguished exhibition program.” Comprised of work by over 50 artists, the exhibition includes those from the early days of the gallery, international figures , those living and working in Los Angeles today. Including the following female artists: Deborah Butterfield, Rebecca Campbell, Heather Gwyn Martin, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Alison Saar, Kate Steinitz, and many more.
IN THE MUSEUMS
Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds brings together over 80 artworks from MOCA’s renowned collection, demonstrating how artists create their own worlds through their art–building networks, circles, and mythologies. Embracing the boundaries between the personal and the social, public and private lives, as well as emotional and psychological states, works in the show privilege sites of creativity and the place of the imagination to conjure new worlds and possibilities. Friendship, love, and intimacy become important starting points for artistic expression. The exhibition features work in all media across different geographies, cultures, and periods, by artists including Belkis Ayón, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mona Hatoum, Candice Lin, Annette Messeger, Wangechi Mutu, Lucas Samaras, Mohammed Sami, Tunga, and Haegue Yang, as well as a gallery dedicated to Nan Goldin. March 9, 2025 – January 4, 2026.
Belkis Ayón
Currently at the Getty Center is an exhibition of work by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. The exhibition titled Behold is a survey of 35 years of artmaking and activism by this dynamic Cuban-born artist. Her works reflect global histories of labor as they affected her family through enslavement, indenture, and motherhood, emphasizing resilience and respect for her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors in photographs, watercolors, installations and performances. Thru May 4, 2025. Here is a link to her powerful performance, A Mother’s River of Tears.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Finally, I want to recommend Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe at the California African American Museum. I am an enthusiastic fan of her work, here I share with you what the museum says about the exhibition:“During the last fifteen years of her life, artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings. This is the first major exhibition of Rowe’s work in more than twenty years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. One of the first self-taught Black women to be celebrated for her art, Rowe created her earliest works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. The exhibition, drawn from the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, offers an unprecedented view of how she cultivated her drawing practice late in life, starting with colorful and, at times, simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most acclaimed, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and an excerpt from an experimental documentary on her life, the exhibition is also the first to put her drawings in direct conversation with images of her art environment.” (CAAM). Thru August 17, 2025.
Nellie Mae Rowe
