Women Around Town by Karen Schifman
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, 1967.
IN THE GALLERIES
Craig Krull Gallery has 2 noteworthy exhibitions of women artists this month. Jean Lowe: Say it with Flowers draws upon the Golden Age of Dutch floral still life paintings and their inherent message that, although vibrant and glorious, life wilts and fades quickly. She crafts juicy papier-mâché sculpture, swashbuckling paintings and elaborate installations in a comically faux Baroque flamboyance. July 11-August 29, 2026. (CK) July 11 – August 29, 2026.
Opening Reception: July 11 4 – 6 PM
Also at Craig Krull is Holly Roberts: Witness. Roberts made a striking appearance in the photography world in the 1970’s with hauntingly painted black and white photos. She found that the slick surface allowed her to more fluidly manipulate the paint, and scratch delineations into the wet surface. The images are layered symbolic ghosts, mostly stick-figure people in the beginning, then adding zoomorphic elements to the dreamlike hybrid forms. Around 2003, her work shifted to a collage approach on painted backgrounds, similar to the evolution of Analytical to Synthetic Cubism. These assembled creatures with cut-outs of Giotto heads, torsos made of nests and legs made of snakes are, as Robert Hirsch describes as a “blending of subjective and objective reality.” “Functioning as a visual psychoanalyst, Roberts creates images that evoke an interior state of consciousness and grapple with a subject beyond its external structure.” Many of her portraits have the odd reconfigured faces reminiscent of a Hannah Höch collage. In recent years, the animal kingdom has played a more dominant role in Roberts’ work. Like Mexican and Indigenous cultures of the American Southwest, animals act as vehicles to convey narrative and mythology. The newer works also address questions about humankind’s effect on the land. She explores the place of animals in our imagination, connecting with the reality that “we are not just interconnected with animals, we are animals.” (CK) July 11-August 29, 2026.
Anat Ebgi presents Phase Shift, an exhibition of new works by Angela Lane. “Lane creates calm pastoral landscapes with depictions of extraordinary meteorological phenomena that seem at once fatal and visionary. Eclipsed suns hover above still lakes, radiating beams descend across valleys and wooded streams, and luminous halos, or mirrored moons emerge within pale skies and mist-cloaked summits. Executed in oil on birch panels, the intimate scale of these works compel viewers to draw physically near in order to fully register Lane’s delicate shifts in hue, softened reflections, and gradual painterly articulations. Despite these diminutive dimensions, the paintings evoke a striking sense of vastness and solitude, balancing grounded naturalistic environments with atmospheric sights that suspend ordinary understandings of perception and scale. She has chosen the title Phase Shift; a technical term in physics that refers to the measurable displacement between repeating waves, oscillations, or signals. Colloquially it can describe being ‘out of sync’ or the subtle realignment that comes from a change of perception—in other words, an awakening. The title points toward a broader interest in how reality is experienced and interpreted. The word phenomenon derives from the Greek phainómena, meaning “things that appear,” which frames reality in terms of appearance to a perceiver, rather than as an objective condition. The paintings are situated within an unstable territory between fixed observation and apparition. As open encounters, they register atmospheric fact, psychological imprint, mirage, and visionary horror and majesty.” Thru July 18, 2026.
Persona Works is a solo exhibition of recent paintings by South Korean artist Moka Lee at David Kordansky Gallery. “Moka Lee makes paintings that simultaneously register the psychological landscapes of her subjects and the digital gloss they live behind. At once pleasurable to look at and unnerving to contemplate, Lee’s portraits and still lifes are masterfully executed responses to the contemporary muddling of person and persona. Her pictures evoke the familiar unease, in our algorithmically determined reality, with which the illusion of virtual connection becomes the lived experience of atomization, vulnerability underlies facades of self-possession, and what is beautiful conceals, on closer inspection, telltale signs of instability.”
July 10 through August 22, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 10 from 6 – 8 PM.
Roberts Projects presents Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, an exhibition exploring the central role of costume design in Saar’s early career and throughout her life as a mother and artist. The archivally-driven exhibition features over 200 objects, including costume designs, photographs, drawings, garments, jewelry, artworks and historic materials from the 1950s–1970s. Anchored by Saar’s costume designs, Let’s Get It On brings together for the first time a collection of newly-discovered photographs documenting early productions at the Inner City Cultural Center (ICCC)—a multicultural performing arts institution founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion—presented alongside the original sketches she created for those very performances. Saar’s work as a fine artist evolved radically throughout the years covered in Let’s Get It On, underlining how some of her most canonical works in assemblage—such as Black Girl’s Window (1969) and The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)—were deeply informed by and indebted to this unique moment in her life. Thru August 22, 2026.
IN THE MUSEUMS
If you have never been to the Bowers Museum, this summer would be a good time to visit. Their current outstanding exhibit, The American Quilt: Cloth and Commerce explores how the materials, dyes, and techniques used in quiltmaking reflect centuries of economic shifts and technological innovation. Featuring over 40 quilts and coverlets from Bowers Museum’s permanent collection, as well as loans from the family of famed quilter Jean Ray Laury and others, this exhibition traces the journey of fibers like cotton, silk, wool, rayon, and polyester through two and a half centuries of American quilting. Thru August 30, 2026.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, continues at The Broad Museum .
Continues thru October Thru 11, 2026. Advance tickets are recommended.
I am looking forward to visit LACMA this month to see their new galleries and a new exhibit, Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity . I just read a brief article about this exhibit in the summer issue of Vogue Magazine. The exhibit traces a century of transformation through more than 70 exquisite ensembles from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and America. It is unique in that displays garments from the last quarter of the 19th century to the mid-1960s, encompassing a period in which imperial rule was replaced by the republic, profoundly changing Chinese culture and women’s role in it.
Vibrant colors, sumptuous silks, and intricate trims showcase the meticulous craftsmanship that is the hallmark of these garments. Displayed on mannequins customized by fashion designer Jason Wu, the works in the exhibition present a seldom-seen story of how Chinese and Chinese American women expressed identity, navigated change, and shaped their lives through dress.
Thru October 12, 2026.
Don’t miss an opportunity to view Laura Aguilar’s groundbreaking photographs at The Huntington Library Laura Aguilar: Body and Landscape features her groundbreaking use of self-portraiture within the natural environments of Southern California and the Southwest, reframing the Western landscape as a site of personal power, resilience, and reclamation. Thru September 7, 2026.
Positive Fragmentation at the Long Beach Museum of Art includes over 180 prints drawn from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, each a work by a contemporary artist who employs fragmentation in different ways. The list of artists is quite impressive: Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Christiane Baumgartner, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Ellen Gallagher, Jenny Holzer , Nicola Lopez, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Morris, Wangechi Mutu, Judy Pfaff, Wendy Red Star, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Swoon, Barbara Takenaga, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker. (Image by Wendy Red Star). Thru September 27, 2026..
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