Tag: Los Angeles
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New Definitions (and Questions) of Power Emerge in a Show Featuring Black Women Artists
For 3 years I have dedicated the month of February to daily posts that celebrate black artists. It was a personal writing challenge as much as it was an artistic one because I wanted to expand my knowledge of black contemporary artists that were underrepresented in traditional arts publications. The artists I featured have greatly influenced the work that…
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Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories
When artists leave us too soon we are reminded of their greatness in the items they left behind. Musicians have libraries of unreleased tracks or compositions, photographers leave behind negatives, contact sheets and undeveloped film, painters have hidden canvases or incomplete work and writers leave behind their words—ideas that weren’t fully developed, concepts that never came to…
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Talking Heads: Jimmie Durham & Wangechi Mutu
I recently encountered two similar works of art, one in L.A. and the other online: the first is by an artist with a 40+ year career who has self selected out of the U.S. art scene for over 2 decades and the second is from a Kenyan born artist with a Brooklyn based practice…
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Artist of the Day Challenge (26): Henry Taylor
Upon graduating from Cal Arts in the mid 90’s, Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor has cultivated a career as a portrait artist who uses his medium to connect with his subjects. That familiarity shows through in his work as most of his portraits come from impromptu encounters with the people who find themselves in his orbit: family, friends andhomeless people in…
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Artist of the Day Challenge (25):Kevin Beasley
I’m currently writing a separate piece on Kevin Beasley’s current installation at the Hammer Museum, but I thought I would highlight him in my artist a day challenge as well. Artists that incorporate sound into their work interest me these days because they activate their environments in an entirely new way. Some of Beasley’s ghost like…
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Artist a Day Challenge (9): Theaster Gates at Regen Projects
Theaster Gates puts viewers to work when they experience his art, and this is precisely what drew me to a particular group of paintings at his current show Regen Projects in L.A. The exhibition titled But to Be a Poor Race is an homage to W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, the seminal series of essays…
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Artist a Day Challenge (7): William Pajaud
William Pajaud was a New Orleans based artist who lived in Los Angeles and specialized in design and watercolor. He was also the first appointed art director for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company. During his tenure as art director and later as a public relations director he amassed a collection of over 200 works…
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Artist a Day Challenge (5) Beulah Ecton Woodard
In Los Angeles in the 1960’s many black artists including Charles White, Ruth Waddy and Samella Lewis fought for representation in local museums including LACMA. Little did I know that at least one artist had been given a solo show there decades prior. Beulah Ecton Woodard was an artist/sculptor born in Ohio in 1895 who grew up in Los Angeles.…
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Artist a Day Challenge (1): Ruth Waddy
In the fall of 1962 a group of black artists gathered in the back of Safety Savings and Loan’s community room. Brought together by a 53-year-old woman with no formal knowledge of art and limited resources, Ruth Waddy’s pitch to the group was a simple one: Her goal was to create a juried art show at a…
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Do I Look Like a Lady? Mickalene Thomas at MOCA
“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile…” ~Paul Lawrence Dunbar There’s something strangely familiar inside the dimly lit living room installation of Mickalene Thomas’s latest exhibition, “Do I Look Like a Lady?”…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 