Frogtown: A Creative Hub Blossoms Along the L.A. River
Turn onto the wrong street from Riverside Drive and you might never find it. You’ll hit the 2 or the 5 freeway, or maybe wind up at a side entrance to Home Depot. But once you do enter this neighborhood of single-family homes and low industrial buildings, nestled along the curving, soft-bottom section of the... More
Desert Storm: Art in Joshua Tree and the Coachella Valley
The drive from Palm Springs to Rancho Mirage isn’t what you’d describe as scenic: The landscape shifts from explosively verdant flora and palm tree colonnades to tan stucco boxes, asphalt, and scrub. But Neville Wakefield, the artistic director of the Desert X biennial, opening February 25 and on view through April, wasn’t necessarily looking for... More
Exploring The Wild Unknown With Kim Krans
As Kim Krans sees it, the “deep psyche” is always trying to tell us things, and tarot is just one way to tune in and listen. A Portland, Oregon-based artist, Krans is best known as the creator of the Wild Unknown tarot deck, which began as a self-published project for herself and her community and... More
Planet Queen: Lita Albuquerque On Art and The Cosmos
Throughout a four-plus decade career, the Malibu-based artist Lita Albuquerque has engaged in an ongoing, epic dialogue between earth and sky—from early desert installations like Spine of the Earth (1980), a “terrestrial painting” invoking the four directions on a dry lakebed in the Mojave; to Sol Star (1996), which mapped the constellations over the Pyramids... More
Eve Babitz’s Classic Hollywood Memoir is Finally Reissued
Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ L.A.-based press agent and a man about the Sunset Strip, introduced Eve Babitz to the Fab Four as “the best girl in America.” Indeed, for a hot minute that spanned the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the Hollywood native was a bright star in the galaxy of art and glamour that was... More
On a Dark Desert Highway: The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project
Driving on the freeway, usually wanting to be someplace far from wherever we are at any given moment, we fixate on the speedometer, the exit signs, the lines in the road: proof that we are moving. In this liminal state, billboards become a sort of visual white noise or worse, a perceived assault that we... More
The Distinct Californication of Paris Photo Los Angeles
With nearly 200 art fairs on the international cultural calendar, it’s no surprise that art-world denizens have a case of fair fatigue. Paris Photo L.A., however, seems to have the cure for what ails them. Expecting 20,000 people for its third year at Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood this weekend, it is an art fair... More
The Colorful History of California Graphic Design
Louise Sandhaus’s new book, “Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design 1936-1986” ($55, Metropolis Books), is a collection of visual artifacts as eclectic as California itself. The volume begins in the year that the L.A. transplant Merle Armitage designed the nontraditionally laid-out book “Igor Stravinsky” and ends with April Greiman’s “Does it Make Sense,”... More
Gary Baseman Collaborates with Coach for Spring 2015
During Coach’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, the C might as well have stood for “classic” or “collegiate.” But Stuart Vevers, Coach’s new creative director, has a decidedly different agenda for the brand: “Making the normal fantastically normal” is how he describes it. For spring, C stands for “cartoonish,” or “cultish.” Putting together his... More
Cameron, Witch of the Art World
Pale and slender, she is wrapped in a black and white shawl that once belonged to Rudolph Valentino, a Spanish comb fanning out from her fiery red hair. Slowly, she lifts the long, fringed lashes framing her blue eyes and fixes her liquid gaze on the camera. She extends her hand and opens her palm... More
Videre Licet: Furniture Glam Enough for Hollywood
President Obama sits behind a custom walnut desk of their design in his private study, and François-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayek’s Paris apartment is illuminated by their light boxes, but until now, the design partnership of Daniele Albright and Stefan Lawrence fell under the auspices of Twentieth, Lawrence’s contemporary furniture showroom in Los Angeles. Now,... More
“Veils” Celebrates the Art of the Obscured
As its name suggests, “Veils” — a 40-artist group exhibition opening Saturday in the West Adams neighborhood of L.A. — offers interpretations of the physical act of concealment. But the show’s curators, Jhordan Dahl and Ariana Papademetropoulos, also made a point to stretch the concept, exploring ideas about public personas and the occult. The works... More