13ThingsLA April 23
Save the Date for your art calendar
A review of the Alice Coltrane exhibition/avant-jazz listening library/ashram intake center at the Hammer. New gallery shows opening at Zwirner, Kohn, Honor Fraser, Von Lintel, Philip Martin, Forest Lawn Museum, and SCI-Arc. Adventures with Arts Open San Pedro, a fire relief music festival, tree hugging at the Getty, artists talking ecology at Loft at Liz’s, and chatting around the issues at Oxy Live. Plus this Thursday (April 24, 7pm) catch our editor Shana Nys in DTLA in conversation with legends Laurie Lipton and Susan Feldman at Art/Space114. Oh! And Save the Date of May 8 for a little something special to celebrate the 1st anniversary of our experiment in independent art writing in Los Angeles! I don’t know who needs to hear this…but there’s about to be another great reason to have a paid subscription.
Feature
REVIEW: Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal on view through May 4th at the Hammer. It can be tricky to build an exhibition in a visual art museum around a figure who, transformational as they may be, is not actually a visual artist. The Hammer did something like this with its Hilton Als-curated Joan Didion exhibition—exploring the cultural milieu and intergenerational influence of a writer (or in Alice Coltrane’s case now, a musician and spiritual leader) through primary archives, rare ephemera, documentary film, and photography, augmenting the experience with salient works by contemporaneous and subsequent visual practitioners. Anyway, it’s challenging because if the curation is too on the nose it feels forced, but if too much exposition is required the whole vibe unravels. The good news that the Hammer gets it mostly right—at times, exquisitely so—in channeling the jazz-meets-meditation ambience of ease and energy work that bookends the accomplishments of Alice Coltrane’s miraculous life.
Featured works range from sculpture, painting, and photography to installation and performance, and many were created especially for the exhibition. From the unexpected elegance of Gozie Ojini’s fractal piano deconstructions to the more visceral altarpiece-like sound-studio salvage construction by Rashid Johnson and the poignant object wit of Jamal Cyrus’s anthropomorphic saxophone totem—several of the roughly 20 included artists take the nuts and bolts of rebellious musicianship to heart. GeoVanna Gonzalez built a sculptural stage that feels like a shrine, and indeed it has been regularly activated with salient music and mindfulness programming (including this coming Sunday). Artists like Martine Syms, Cauleen Smith, and Nikita Gale bestow varieties of experimental film, sound, photography, and projection with deliberate embodiment of the music/visual art convergence, and we also learn through a rather divine daybed audio chamber that Steven Ellison of Flying Lotus has family ties to Coltrane. There’s an extensive full discography listening station for anyone who needs a quick primer on Coltrane’s musicianship, and juicy, robust abstract paintings by a Marsalis scion, Jasper, who is also a musician—and thus an embodiment of both the family legacy and creative fusion at the heart of the whole exhibition. Performance artist and therapist Ash Rucker activates the bespoke in-gallery stage on Sunday, April April 27, 5pm. Free; hammer.ucla.edu. —SND
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