One of the many art works in East Jesus, an art museum near the Salton Sea in California. This sculpture by Flip Cassidy is made entirely from found and collected TV sets and computer monitors, with more added as time goes on. The version pictured is from 2018.
Happy Birthday to Betye Saar who turned 94 today! This work Still Ticking, (2005), was part of LACMA’s exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response which opened at the museum in September of 2019.
From the wall description of the work-
Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, the assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to various important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers both to the timepieces in the sculpture- which, of course, are not ticking; indeed they are either frozen in time or missing their hands- and to the artist herself, who is alive and well, still ticking, now at age ninety-three.
Absconded From the Household of the President of the United States, 2016
Billy Lee: Portrait in Tar, 2016
Twisted Tropes, 2016
Monumental Inversions: George Washington, 2016
The above images are from Titus Kaphar’s exhibition Shifting Skies at Jack Shainman Gallery in 2017. Kaphar recently created the cover of the June 15th issue of Time Magazine covering the George Floyd protests.
Nina Chanel Abney’s In the Land Without Feelings (2017) from her 2017 exhibition Safe House at Mary Boone Gallery in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery.
From the press release-
Safe House is so termed for being a place of refuge. It is also a phrase used more colloquially as a space where one escapes the dangers affiliated with the law. With these eight single-panel paintings, Abney invites us into a place of reprieve, showing us people partaking in everyday activities. Abney’s scenarios offer sincere portrayals that counter how black life is represented in the mainstream media. The decision intentionally explores black joy as a means of resistance.
A deeply accomplished artist associated with innovating history painting, Abney took a multipart strategy to reclaim a space for creativity for this exhibition. To begin, she sourced graphics from posters dating from the 1960s that addressed aspects of safety for occupation, home, and leisure, abstracted these, and made them grounds for large-scale compositions. Then, against this backdrop Abney painted figures, objects, and letters to articulate the complex dynamics of contemporary urban life. She unequivocally is in pursuit of a depiction of commonplace activities and things. With each intuitively developed composition, each element such as the figures is often obfuscated by another element such as text, which in turn is challenged by a direction, such as an arrow. The imagery is reminiscent of sign painting, and each move made by Abney necessitates another. This chain of forms turns each element over to a type of writing, which opens a narrative and its reception to many readings. The abstracted source material (safety posters), combined with the abounding narratives from the detailed scenes, returns us to the title of the exhibition. The phrase prompts us to ask directly or obliquely: What caution and care are these narratives invoking and advocating? What danger might not be readily apparent to the viewer here?
Ryan Brown’s Praia do Sancho (2015), from the 2015 group exhibition Extraction at Steve Turner in Los Angeles. For this work he used the structural components of stretched canvas to create this large work that resembles a beach chair.
A section of Yayoi Kusama’s installation at the now permanently closed Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles.
Two works from Museum of Latin American Art’s outdoor sculpture garden, just one of the great things about this Long Beach museum.
Currently they are showing Arte, Mujer, y Memoria: Arpilleras from Chile; Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective; En Vision: Picturing the Self -selected pieces from MOLAA’s Permanent Collection in conversation with self-portraits by students of Las Fotos Project, a community-based nonprofit organization that inspires teenage girls through photography, mentorship and self-expression; and the work of Afro Cuban artists José Bedia and Belkis Ayón; in addition to work from the museum’s permanent collection, as part of their Museum en Casa online programming.
Jamie Isenstein’s Onions (Mario to Clown Mouse), 2015, from her exhibition Para Drama at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in 2015.
From the press release–
… And on the wall are a series of photographs of masks wearing masks. By putting on masks the support masks become anthropomorphized into faces so that these inanimate objects come alive. At the same time, the layering of these masks emphasizes their emptiness. Behind the illusions there is nothing. Absurdly, the more masks the masks wear, the deeper the layering of nothingness becomes. Onions, 2015, is a sculpture of many masks layered over the hollow head of a mascot costume. The title of the work refers to a monologue in the Henrik Ibsen play Peer Gynt in which Peer peels away the layers of an onion as he examines the various roles he has played in his life. Eventually he comes to realize there is nothing substantial at the core.
One of artist Sean Duffy’s Road Signs, part of a group exhibition in 2013 at Vielmetter Los Angeles.
For Doug Wheeler’s fourth solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s NYC location, he created the immersive light installation 49 Nord 6 Est 68 Ven 12 FL (2011–2012), shown above.
This exhibition opened on 1/24/20 but was closed due to the Coronavirus (COVID 19) pandemic.