13ThingsLA: July 1
Yet Wave for your art calendar
It’s #FourthofJuly so yeah let’s get into it because… America, you’re in danger, girl. This week we have some clear-eyed looks at the situation with art exhibitions and online/hybrid projects that go straight there, and some that take a more scenic route through the issues but still get there—and a few that have other challenges on their minds at the moment—from CoCo South LA, Good Mother Gallery, CODA x Not Real Art, 4th Wall App, Oxy Arts, Nazarian/Curcio, KP Projects, the Norton Simon Museum, Megan Mulrooney Gallery, the Skirball, Hotel Bel-Air, American Cinematheque, and LA County Arts.
PS: not sure if you caught this in the LA Times yet, but here is Shana’s story for their USA at 250 package: 9 works of art that consider what it means to be an American, all on view at LA area institutions this summer.
FEATURE
Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution at the Skirball Cultural Center. The foundational vocabulary of 20th-century America’s sense of itself was a codex inked on cheap paper pulp by immigrants and outsiders. Spanning over 250 original drawings and rare artifacts, this wide-ranging historical exhibition is full of surprises as it maps how titans—Superman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther—formed and evolved across decades of geopolitical shifts. As a secular mythology of exceptionalism tracked the nascent superpower’s own troubled origin story, in many ways, it was the explosion of comic books into the American imagination that fueled the discourse. From the Great Depression to the ribald ‘90s, as primary-colored, star-spangled wartime patriotism we associate with DC or the MCU descended into postwar paranoia, the rise of underground, art-inflected, cultish titles and caustic satirical voices like MAD changed the game further—not to mention the powerhouse animated and live action film and television franchises we grew up obsessing over. Wildly engaging the eyes and the memory, the show’s superpower is illuminating how the structural vitality of the industry rose from the margins of the last century’s society—women, Holocaust survivors, veterans, African Americans, LGBTQ folks—establishing a line of defiance connecting the historical record right through to the present. Happy Birthday, Captain America. On view in Brentwood through February 28, 2027; Admission: $20, Free Thursdays; skirball.org. —SND
