13ThingsLA: August 20
Like Home for your art calendar
The new edition of your favorite curated Los Angeles art guide sees a gathering in of exhibitions, performances, films, and conversations around an array of ideas about home—as expressed in architecture, design, painting, sculpture, and spirit. Visit programs at and by Art Bug Gallery, Barnsdall Art Center, LAND, LA Forum, LACE, 839 Gallery, AMPHI Gallery, TAM, Norton Simon Museum, The Armory, NHM, Craft in America Center, and American Cinematheque. And if you feel like you haven’t heard Shana talk enough lately (as if) she’ll be welcoming exhibiting artist Max Presneill in conversation at ArtSpace114 downtown on Thursday evening, August 21. Come through!
Feature
Neo-Chicanonismo in Abstraction, Surrealism, and Latinidad opens August 23, 6-9pm at Art Bug Gallery. Curated by Steve Galindo, Neo-Chicanonismo in Abstraction, Surrealism, and Latinidad brings together Gus Alva, Isaac Pelayo, and Joaquin Stacey in a cross-generational, stylistically divergent conversation about what Chicano and Latinx futurisms can look like in paint. Alva’s layered geometries—like thickets of barbed motifs threading through glowing color fields—read as both architectural and organic, abstract labyrinths haunted by history. Pelayo’s canvases, steeped in hyperrealist finesse and streetwise grit, interlace everyday iconography (hand-painted seafood signage, a lemon wedge arranged like a votive at the center of oyster shells) with graffiti marks, a reminder of how public space acts as both canvas and archive. Stacey leans surreal, dissolving faces and fabrics into liquid fields of saturated color; his portraits hover between figuration and dissolution, as if identity itself is in flux. Together, these works reject tidy categories—abstraction here is lived texture, surrealism is cultural dreamscape, and Latinidad is the throughline binding memory to the present tense. On view downtown through September 13; instagram.com/artbugallery; —SND
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