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
FULL CALENDAR (July 2-8)
We the People opens Thursday, July 2 at LADC Studios. The most famous three words in American lore get a necessary upgrade, as Dominique Clayton curates an examination of the principle which asks whether—no, states the fact that—this “we” is an idea badly in need of expansion. As the nation barrels toward its semi-quincentennial (and the government daily acts to shrink the “we” instead), organizers Community Coalition and Sankofa gather the creative power of dozens of BIPOC artists to augment the republic’s ongoing chronicle, as its authors. Clayton structures this intervention without nostalgic safety nets or comfort zones, balancing conceptual critique with exceptional skill and vision; artists such as John Simmons connect artistry and photojournalism; mixed media works of bold, magic-infused, unconventional materiality from Patrick Martinez, Patrisse Cullors, and Genevieve Gaignard challenge the true cost of belonging; and striking figurative painting by Glenn Hardy Jr. and Jonah Elijah adamantly preserve spaces of neighborhood joy, survival, and domestic sanctuary. On view through July 19 (closed Saturday, July 4) in South LA; wethepeoplesouthla.com. —SND
And After opens Friday, July 3, 6-8pm at Good Mother Gallery. The wreckage of contemporary narrative undergoes a forensic sorting in a sprawling assembly that rejects easy aesthetic hits to linger amid the fallout in an apocalyptically saturated media terrain. Curator Nathan Bennett evokes the transgressive, 19th-century dark romanticism of Isidore Ducasse, as the presentation tracks dominant cultural myths exhausting themselves. The dialogue moves through the raw, ink-scrawled disillusionment of Raymond Pettibon and the stark subcultural nihilism of Banks Violette, avoiding nostalgic trapdoors to locate a shared, generational skepticism. Nate Lowman’s fragmented pop ironies and Aaron Young’s residual marks of high-octane spectacle sit alongside Gardar Eide Einarsson’s severe signs of political control, charting a collective exhaustion with institutional authority. Paired with a cohort of painters tracking narrative disjunction, the collective energy of this #BigSummerGroupShow refuses to either apologize for its jagged boundaries or for withholding comforting answers. On view in West Adams through August 22; goodmothergallery.com. —SND
Nancy Baker Cahill: FREE opens July 4 at Alcatraz Island (4th Wall App). Cahill’s site-specific augmented reality project FREE, presented by Bay Area creative tech org Gray Area, subverts the carceral silhouette of Alcatraz Island—just as the country flags (flogs?) its increasingly precarious ideals of liberty. The participatory, geolocated public artwork transforms the San Francisco waterfront and global app-space into an arena for collectivity and awareness-raising action, as viewers worldwide crowd-source the digital sky via the app, dispatching messages of solidarity to those held in U.S. detention centers—individual blessings, poems, and testimonies that materialize as a soaring digital murmuration over the Bay. Building on the activist spatial disruptions of her earlier East Coast project Liberty Bell, Cahill leverages technological connectivity to contest carceral erasure, asking who actually has the right to life and liberty. Live through November 4th; free; 4thwallapp.org. —SND
Not Real Art & CODAworx present 250: A Celebration of Public Art in the U.S., opening online July 4. The traditional American monument—stiff bronze figures stranded on stone pedestals—is so out. Launching via independent culture platform NOT REAL ART in partnership with CODAworx and arts nonprofit Arterial, 250: A Celebration of Public Art in the U.S. bypasses gallery walls and stately inaccessibility to instead map a digital cartography of more interesting activations of our republic’s shared spaces. Curated by Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis, the survey highlights a single work of public art from each of the 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The cross-country dialogue ranges from Blessing Hancock’s neon-drenched word-canopy in Nashville to Bart Walter’s bucking bronze stallion framed against the Wyoming horizon, balancing playful anomalies like Matthew Mazzotta’s rain-catching Cloud House in Missouri against sharper urban reclamations like Walter Hood’s Three Trees in Chicago. Shane Albritton, Norman Lee, and Quenton Baker’s light-etched pavilion in Maryland stands as a permanent testament to the uncredited contributions of enslaved peoples, anchoring a celebration of civic imagination and gentle reckoning that forms a true monument to the best of the USA. Free; prnewswire.com. —SND
LA County Arts & Culture Conservation Open House, Saturday, July 4, 10am-1pm at Whittier Narrows Recreation Area in South El Monte. A whimsical pocket of local public art heritage gets a meticulous makeover just in time for the holiday weekend. Following an intensive eight-month restoration by the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Benjamin Dominguez’s beloved, fantastical sculptures are ready to step back into the civic spotlight. The morning’s conservation open house invites the community to revisit or discover these restored neighborhood landmarks, starting the narrative journey at the back of the Mother Dragon to mold clay, craft custom kites, and talk preservation tactics with the young apprentices who executed the cleanup. It is a joyful, tactile reminder that public sculpture lives its best life when it’s built for play and togetherness. Free; instagram.com/lacountyarts. —SND
National Museum of the Aftermath screening series, Tuesday, July 7, 6-8pm at Oxy Arts. Cauleen Smith’s National Museum of the Aftermath—curated by Jon Rubin and Harrison Kinnane Smith—transforms the gallery into a rotating sound stage and community incubator confronting the persistent fallout of systemic racism. While the broader summer framework maps historical finales, this double-feature film screening shifts the focus toward a layered, intricate interiority of everyday human gatherings. The evening pairs Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s poetic short Foosball, which isolates the casual, recreational leisure of Black student life at 1970s University of Virginia, with the sharp institutional critique of Andrea Fraser’s This meeting is being recorded. Performing directly to the camera, Fraser embodies all seven white women from an intergenerational psychoanalytic circle attempting to dismantle their own unconscious racism, turning defensive group behaviors into a singular, slightly absurd diagnosis of the ways collective struggles fracture and realign from the inside out. Free; exhibition on view in Eagle Rock through August 8; oxyarts.oxy.edu. —SND
Nathan Mabry: Bird Watchers at Hotel Bel-Air. A sleek, mischievous aviary henge infiltrates the ultra-manicured paradise of the Hotel Bel-Air, scattering a commissioned sculptural trail across its legendary gardens and grounds. Mabry populates the storied site with a series of seven monochromatic steel fabrications that marry formal modernist geometry with the whimsical rhythms of the natural world. Whether discovered through a mimosa-enhanced scavenger hunt or by unknowing guests in chance encounters, these cast metal feathered friends—not to be confused with the iconic and very much alive hotel lake swans—perch atop geometric plinths reminiscent of primary-colored midcentury abstraction as blasts of bird-topped buttercup yellow, cherry red, Mediterranean blue, and fancy fuchsia interrupt the building’s more low-key luxuries with a sharp improvisational wit. Free in Bel Air through October 9; royaleprojects.com. —SND
Vincent Pocsik: A Thousand Years at Nazarian/Curcio. The strict, pious discipline of 19th-century Shaker design settles into a more emotional immediacy, as Pocsik merges traditional hand-carving with digital modeling to fuse wood, cast metals, and stained glass into elongated anthropomorphic forms that hover between the familiar and the surreal. The presentation introduces fantasticality into steadfastly functional objects—rocking chairs carrying subtle bodily proportions and overhead umbrella-form chandeliers emitting light through stained glass panels—to expand the boundaries of domestic utility. Walnut hands clutching bronze tools, fruit, and flora sketch cyclical relationships of labor, craft, and sustenance, directly honoring the historic Shaker philosophy of deep presence in fabrication. Yet as the human figure emerges indirectly through gesture and material tension rather than literal representation, the pieces push traditional American craftsmanship into a highly psychological, even gothic, terrain. On view in Hollywood through July 11; nazariancurcio.com. —SND
Heretic Beauty: Women Artists Shaping the Visual Language at KP Projects. This particular #BigSummerGroupShow goes way more than skin deep, as it makes the case that Pop Surrealism’s long trajectory from subcultural underground to an internationally recognized movement finds its most brilliant dimensions in the hands of women. The expansive group survey offers a matrix of roughly 40 works, positioning a powerhouse roster of artists as the matriarchs of contemporary narrative figuration. Spanning brain-bending drawing, shimmering watercolors, and richly saturated oil paintings, the presentation serves as an open ledger of independent personal mythologies, art historical legacies, and collective cultural memory. Masterful contributions from Laurie Lipton, Lezley Saar, Camille Rose Garcia, Miss Van, and Jennybird Alcantara anchor a wide, cross-generational conversation that includes vital, witty works by Audrey Kawasaki, April Bey, Junko Mizuno, Allison Bamcat, and Julie Beezy. In dream logic, fairy-tale tropes, unconventional materials, and not giving a single fuck, this taxonomy of female autonomy, strength, and vision is also, forgive me, really quite gorgeous. On view in Hollywood through July 18; kpprojectsgallery.net. —SND
Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer at the Norton Simon Museum. The critical role of the German-born art dealer and impresario—and apparently terrifically fun friend—Galka Scheyer in introducing European modernism to California gets the main character treatment in an intimate focus exhibition. Curator Gloria Williams Sander spotlights the personal friendships that sustained Scheyer’s visionary patronage of intellectual and visual iconoclasts like the Blue Four (Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee, and Vassily Kandinsky), as well as more local boundary-testing artistic heroes like Maynard Dixon and Beatrice Wood. With historical correspondence, notes, and archival ephemera alongside portraits given to Scheyer by the artists she supported, the collection maps the lifelong bonds and artistic exchanges that allowed Scheyer to play such an outsize role in cultivating the American taste for the European avant-garde. On view in Pasadena through July 20; Admission: $20; nortonsimon.org. —SND
Josh Cloud: Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone at Megan Mulrooney Gallery. Imagined from the sketchbook outward, Cloud’s process scales wacky improvisational drawings into coil-built sculptures whose hefty ceramic, fiber, and wood bodies take up space and express themselves like beings, like creatures, like cursed or haunted demigods. From a starting point of the eyes, Cloud constructs elaborate, baroque crowns, bowls brimming with ceramic and real rocks, shimmering glazed orbs, and sprouting wood stalks that draw formal and cosmological resonance from Yoruba sculptural traditions—but with the campy energy of costume and crazy eye. Though clearly carrying the residue of ritual, their distinct purpose remains deliberately, poetically obscure; as biomorphs, they are entirely delightful and at the same time, inexplicably melancholy, or maybe… wounded? On view in West Hollywood through August 15; meganmulrooney.com. —SND
THE 13th THING
Jaws annual screening, Saturday, July 4, 7:30pm at the Aero Theater. The 1975 classic screens on the Fourth of July every year, because that’s the weekend it all kicked off at the beach. You’re going to need a bigger boat, and maybe a bucket hat, etc. Admission: $17; americancinematheque.com. —SND