Kota the Friend- Long Beach II
Every month I listen to the majority of bands and musicians who are playing in Los Angeles and select some for a monthly playlist. It includes a variety of genres and usually newer work by the artists.
This month includes new music by Black Moth Super Rainbow, dance arts center, Gretchen Klempa, Black Milk, and Kurt Vile.
The song above is from Kota the Friend‘s 2026 album, Just Happy to Be Here!
Below are July’s selections.
Jenny Holzer was born today, July 29th, in 1950. Pictured in this post are some of her famous Truisms, when they were on view at Akron Art Museum.
Her latest exhibition, Wrong Answers, is currently at the Serralves Museum in Portugal, closing November 1st.
Betye Saar, “Takin’ A Chance on Luv”, 1984, pigment on cotton sateen, created in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Los Angeles artist Betye Saar passed away on Sunday, July 26th, at 99 years old, just a few days before her 100th birthday. Saar is best known for her assemblage pieces that confronted racism and sexism, often incorporating spiritual and mystical elements into the work as well.
Takin’ A Chance on Luv, pictured above, was part of the group exhibition Some American Dreams at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, which closed in June.
The short documentary below, created by Christine Turner for LACMA‘s Art+Film Initiative, features the artist at 93 discussing her work.
Caproni Brothers, “The Boxer at Rest”, 19th century Painted plaster cast from the original bronze which was produced between the late fourth and second centuries BCE
Lisa Brice “Untitled”, 2025 Pigment and natural water-soluble binders on linen
Jeffrey Gibson, (l to r) “Power, Power, Power”, 2017, “People Like Us”, 2014, and “You Can Feel It All Over”, 2015, Repurposed punching bags, glass beads, artificial sinew
Rashid Johnson, “Self-Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson‘s Grave”, 2006, Durst Lambda print mounted on panel
Approaching the front steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you will find people of all ages and backgrounds taking photos with the statue of Rocky out front, often imitating his famous pose. Through a variety of works from antiquity to the present day, Rising Up looks at the history of this statue, the meanings attached to monuments, and the allure of boxers and boxing culture.
From the museum about the exhibition:
Blending the worlds of art, sports, and popular culture, Rising Up takes on the life of monuments by exploring the meanings and mythologies of the Rocky statue. The exhibition looks to the statue of the most famous Philadelphian who never lived as a way to better understand our complex and vital relationships to our public monuments.
The statue first appeared on-screen in the Oscar-winning Rocky film series. The third installment, Rocky III (1982), featured the dedication of a monument that celebrated the boxer as both an underdog and a hero. The movie-made statue was placed outside the actual museum during filming, a dynamic blurring of art and life that continues to this day. Since that introduction, and through the statue’s departure and prolonged absence from the museum grounds to its prodigal return to the steps, the statue has sparked debate over its aesthetic value and its role in the city. Today, the power of the Rocky statue as a monument stems from its ability to summon public participation.
From antiquity to modernity, Hollywood to contemporary art, Rising Up spotlights both popular narratives and undertold stories surrounding the Rocky statue. Each gallery offers a response to the exhibition’s central question — why do millions of people visit the Rocky statue at the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art each year? — and further explores the relationship between art, boxing, and civic identity. It offers a renewed context to consider the statue through works and artifacts that reflect on the deep legacies of boxing monuments across time.
Rising Up marks the first time that the Rocky statue has been displayed inside the museum, explored alongside Philadelphia’s landmark boxing culture and multigenerational artists’ interpretations of sport and society. At its core, the exhibition looks at how monuments are made — by artists and by us — through the lens of the Rocky statue and the ways people engage, debate, and gather around this site of memory.
This exhibition closes on 8/2/26.
Nation of Language- Inept Apollo
This song is from Brooklyn band Nation of Language’s 2025 album, Dance Called Memory.
They will be opening for Death Cab for Cutie at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, 8/2, and Monday, 8/3/26.
As you approach the Calder Gardens building, you will first notice the gardens and, if you visit in spring, the flowers. Once inside you’ll find a selection of Alexander Calder‘s works, including a few of his paintings. The space is organized in a way that never feels crowded, encouraging visitors to look at the work from different angles or watch how some pieces move with the slightest change in the air around them.
For the month of July, Philadelphia residents can visit Calder Gardens and the Barnes (which is located across the street) for free.
About Calder Gardens from their website:
Calder Gardens is a new art institution dedicated to Alexander Calder (1898–1976), one of the most acclaimed and influential artists of the 20th century. Building on the artist’s enduring legacy, it is conceived as a place where an evolving interplay between art, architecture, nature, and programming encourages contemplation and self-discovery.
Set within a landscape featuring more than 250 varieties of plants in gardens conceived by Piet Oudolf, Calder Gardens’ 18,000-square-foot building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, houses a rotating installation of artworks by Calder. Spanning the artist’s 50-year career and diverse bodies of work, the objects on view respond to architectural moments rather than art historical narratives. This selection of artworks slowly changes over time, echoing the natural rhythms of the seasons. Some will remain for years, while others are only on view for a few months, creating an ever-changing environment that encourages close looking and repeat visits.
In dialogue with Calder’s own experimental practice, programming at Calder Gardens presents performances, sonic experiences, screenings, lectures, and other events that connect the artist’s legacy of innovation to contemporary art. Emphasizing mindfulness and environmental awareness, Calder Gardens is a space that foregrounds the interconnectedness of all elements of life. Straying from fact-based learning, Calder Gardens offers daily walks that encourage personal introspection as visitors move through the building.
Calder Gardens is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the heart of Philadelphia, a city with deep connections to the Calder family across several generations. It extends this lineage to the present day and joins Philadelphia’s rich artistic and cultural communities.
Along several walls at the Barnes, Native American (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) artist Sky Hopinka‘s installation, Red Metal Dust, layers photographs and transparencies of a variety of landscapes with cut copper shapes to form dreamlike vistas.
About the work from the museum (in the artist’s words):
Red Metal Dust is a body of work that considers landscape as a place shaped as much by what remains as by what has been removed. Each panel layers photographic prints with transparencies of concurrent landscapes, allowing images to pass through and across one another rather than resolve into a single view.
Geometric silhouettes, cut into polished copper and placed over the image, follow the contours of the transparencies beneath them. These copper forms both interrupt and clarify the landscape, using the logic of the silhouette to define presence through reduction. The copper reflects light and the viewer’s image, bringing the body and present moment into the work.
The title draws from the Ho-Chunk way of describing copper, naming the material not as monument but as remainder-something carried, scattered, and endured. Here, copper becomes less a surface than a witness, resilient and reflective, shaped through contact rather than display. Across these works, landscape is approached as a layered field of return, where images accumulate, echo, and settle into one another over time.
For more information on the work, this interview with Hopinka from ARTNews is also worth checking out.
Below is another section located on a different wall.
Red Metal Dust is on view until January of 2027. The Barnes is also free for Philadelphia residents for the month of July.
American artist Edward Hopper was born today, July 22nd, in 1882. He created numerous portraits of people in New York City, including the one pictured above, Summertime, painted in 1943. It is currently on view at the Delaware Art Museum.
Surfbort- Lucky
This song is from Surfbort’s 2026 album, Reality Star.
They are currently on tour and playing at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles on Wednesday, 7/22, and in Long Beach at Alex’s Bar on Friday, 7/24/26.
Old televisions and clock radios are given a second life in the interactive sculptures in Emily Francisco‘s exhibition, Alchemical Signal Flow at The Delaware Contemporary. The exhibition also includes videos and documentation of some of Francisco’s other projects, and a few cyanotype prints.
From the museum:
What is a signal? We often think of cell phone reception, or a message sent through a digital app. A signal means many things in this exhibition, it references the transfer of physical data and digital data (ones and zeroes) that happens within technology. A signal can also be social, like how you dress, what brands you buy, or what you throw away. Emily Francisco combines old and new technology to help us rethink how we live with new and changing technology. To many, the mechanics of a harpsichord (a keyboard instrument) and organ are as magical as an MP3 player. Francisco embraces that magic and makes alchemy of blending old and new, low and high tech.
Francisco uses cheap everyday technology and discarded, obsolete (or no longer produced) devices. By doing so, she disrupts signal flows from user to speaker. This action challenges our expectation of call-and-respond and challenges our sense of time. Someone once owed every piece of discarded tech. One could have even been yours. She asks us to think about what these personal objects mean to us at the end of the day. What do they mean to us?
Through her work, she brings together the memory, nostalgia, and aspiration these objects hold, attempting to give them new purpose.
This exhibition closes 8/2/26.