13ThingsLA: May 22

Paintings, Playgrounds & Playlists for your art calendar

Featured:

Kenny Scharf at Branded Arts Mural Festival 2024

Branded Arts Mural Festival Public Reception at César E. Chávez Learning Academies, Friday, May 24, 4-8pm. I don’t know about you, but the art we had at my primary schools was never this good. All week, artists Carlo Valentino, Christian Garcia Perez, DesiBoo Creations, Erica Friend aka Insomniart, Jesica Burlaza, Josh Everhorn, JP Murals, Kenny Scharf, Kristy Sandoval, Levi Ponce, MURO, Ozzie Juarez, Rah Azul, Shantell Martin, and Sofia Enriquez will have been transforming the school campus into a monumental outdoor gallery. And on Friday afternoon, all are invited to celebrate. Across its years-long partnership with LAUSD, Branded Arts has encouraged, curated, and facilitated scores of projects like this—bringing art to public schools in a way that inspires, involves and reflects the student body in the creative process, honors neighborhood history, and demonstrates aspects of what an art career can be. 1001 Arroyo Ave, San Fernando; free w/ rsvp; brandedarts.com. —SND

Levi Ponce at Branded Arts Mural Festival 2024

Full Calendar:

Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Up and Down), 2024; Diana Thater: Natural History One Redux, 2024. Installation view at David Zwirner Gallery Los Angeles (Photo by Shana Nys Dambrot)

Review: David Zwirner: 30 Years opens Thursday, May 23, 5-8pm. “Work by all of the gallery’s artists,” reads the press release—and they weren’t kidding. Since that list numbers about 80 at the moment (including lifers, newcomers, and estates) they needed all 15,000 of the square feet in their brand new and entirely gorgeous, light-filled, museological yet somehow understated three-story flagship, plus both the adjacent spaces they’ve already been using, to install it all. Many of the impressive, emblematic paintings, sculptures, and installations were made or conceived specifically for this landmark anniversary show, sensitively installed in dialogue with key historic works. Everyone will have their favorites, whether it’s large-scale and rather operatic new work from Marcel Dzama or gnarled garden glory from Joan Mitchell, a painting-sculpture pair from Neo Rauch or breathe-easy minimalism from Blinky Palermo, Donald Judd, and Robert Ryman in a top floor lightbox, a regal blood-red quilted symphony by Anni Albers, a particularly cheeky Alice Neel, or Barbara Kruger paired with Diana Thater for the best possible use of a dramatic architectural stairwell. 606, 612 & 616 N. Western Ave., Melrose Hill; davidzwirner.com. —SND

Darius Airo, "when you are a child you get behind the wheel of time hot and a little dizzy. you go for the brakes and hit the accelerator WHOOSH", 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. (Courtesy of Abigail Ogilvy & Whitebox.LA)

Darius Airo: Mickey’s Mirror opens Saturday, May 25, 6-8pm, at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. Oil paintings by Darious Airo are sharp-toothed, prismatically colorful, raw energy fields that push their imagery as far into the realm of abstraction as they can without dropping their tethers to the figure. Memory-shrouded cartoon characters shred and fold into expressionist portraits, fields of solid and gradient pigment keep something like pictorial space together, shape and color wrestle for the spotlight, and the shrapnel of these battles falls into place in tectonic, quixotic compositions. Curated by Joshua White of Whitebox.LA. On view through July 6 in downtown; abigailogilvy.com. —SND

Keith Haring, 1989 (Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation)

Keith Haring: Radiant Vision, opens Saturday, May 25, 7-10pm at Long Beach Museum of Art. If you think you’ve already seen and heard everything Haring had to say, think again. For one thing, the LBMA’s installation of the traveling exhibition Radiant Vision will be the first time a show on this scale has been staged in Long Beach. This is an appropriately special milestone since broader access to art and ideas was a pillar of Haring’s worldview—and doubly so since the curation centers on his specific commitment to social justice, equality and activism as fundamental to his work. The collection showcases sketches, drawings, posters, and documentation relating to many such projects from his career of advocating for change. LBMA opening night party tickets, $20; On view through August 25 in Long Beach; regular admission $12; lbma.org. —SND

Eric Nash at KP Projects

Eric Nash: Lost in Desire opens Saturday, May 25, 6-9pm at KP Projects Gallery. Charcoal drawings and oil paintings by high desert artist Eric Nash combine an impossibly rich and velvety dimension of black and blacker than black with an equally impossibly precise hand and an occasional cameo by a poignant pop of color—rendering evocative vintage-style signage, architecture, and telling objects in images with the breathless fullness of old-timey film stills and other, more personal memories. Nighttime service stations speak of remote loneliness, eerie beacons along shadowy routes; hotels and highway signs beckon the weary forward and bounce our minds back to some half-remembered past. Nash's technical perfection astounds and amplifies the appeal of his prismatic apparitions. On view through June 22 in Hollywood; kpprojectsgallery.net. —SND

Ron Jude, House at Sunset, 2014, from the series Lago (Courtesy of Gallery Luisotti)

Shelters & Shacks opens Saturday, May 25 at Gallery Luisotti. Fans of Gallery Luisotti’s program form a sort of appreciation society for classic, canonical photography and the endlessly fascinating and stubbornly relevant ways in which lensfolk sought to move the discourse on the still-suspect medium forward in its early iterations. Questioning not only the claims to dispassion of documenting what the photographer sees, but also the reliability of the camera’s so-called neutrality when it comes to narrating elements of perception, this exhibition brings together seven artists from the program in a group show centered on the motifs, mechanics, misunderstandings, and meanings of construction, romanticism, and ruin. On view through July 6 in downtown; galleryluisotti.com. —SND

Kyungmi Shin, Three Magi, 2022, Acrylic on archival pigment print, UV laminate, 44 5/8 x 49 3/8 in. (Courtesy of Kim Allen-Niesen)

New exhibitions open Saturday, May 25, 6-9pm at Craft Contemporary—Kyungmi Shin: Origin Stories, 3B Collective: Highway Hypnosis, and We Carry the Land. Kyungmi Shin: Origin Stories was organized by jill moniz to more deeply explore the artist’s exegesis of her multiple legacies as a Korean American, both inside and in resistance to Western-style modernity. Shin’s palimpsestic, ever-revelatory identity is expressed in the physical layers and accumulations of many mediums and visual traditions. 3B Collective: Highway Hypnosis explores the diverse and multidisciplinary group and its historically-minded, creative cross-border exchange as a way of upending the commercial hierarchy of craft and labor. We Carry the Land is a courtyard installation designed by six emerging Native architectural and graphic designers, as part of the museum’s ongoing collaboration with Materials & Applications—an organization dedicated to the furtherance of truly progressive design and narrative, eco-conscious materiality. Opening night party, $12; Exhibitions on view in Miracle Mile through September 8; regular admission $9; craftcontemporary.org. —SND

Gioj De Marco, Apogee (Courtesy of the artist and Winslow Garage)

Gioj De Marco: Apogee opens Sunday, May 26, 3-6pm at Winslow Garage. You may recognize existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit as the source for the iconic quote “Hell is other people,” which was also the premise of The Good Place, which was perfect television—but I digress. It also has the line, “When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist,” which is closer to the energy of De Marco’s durational, percussive, mesmerizing, confounding performance-based video installation. The entire 90-minute play is run by four actors, each inhabiting their own screen, facing each other in a square; but all the dialog is replaced with Morse code sound waves, insistent as a drunken telegraph, revealing the barriers inherent in language when it comes to truly hearing and being heard. On view through June 29 in Silver Lake; winslowgarage.com. —SND

Winter Landscape with Figures, about 1723, Jan Berents (Dutch, about 1679–after 1733). Opaque watercolor, with decorative border in gold on vellum, laid down on panel (Courtesy of the Getty Museum)

On Thin Ice: Dutch Depictions of Extreme Weather opens Tuesday, May 28 at the Getty Center. The Little Dutch Ice Age sounds so cute when you say it like that. But considering how thorny it can be to navigate climate chaos even with all our advanced creature comforts, protective infrastructures, and predictive technology, one can assume that a sudden 17th-century onslaught of cold summers and deep-freeze winters wreaked a bit of havoc. Featuring works by Hendrick Avercamp and other Dutch artists of the era, the timing/premise/context of the exhibition is readily apparent—what might be more surprising is not how much has changed in terms of the seriousness of society’s understanding and response to meteorological upheavals, but rather, how little. Still, no soup, please. On view in Brentwood through September 1; admission is free, but parking is $25 (consider carpools, or better yet, public transpo); getty.edu. —SND

Angel Otero, Neverland, 2024. Oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 95 5/8 x 95 5/8 x 1 1/2 in. (Photo by Thomas Barratt; Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth)

Angel Otero: That First Rain in May opens Wednesday, May 29, 6-8pm at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood. With a beguiling mix of sentimentality and opaque surrealism, dream logic and complexified material process, Angel Otero transforms emblems of his Puerto Rico childhood through perspectives of oneiric juxtaposition, color story, pattern recognition, intuitive balance, and the context of his contemporary life, in which these symbols are summoned from where they have been stored in the subconscious. In advance of the opening reception, Otero will be in conversation with Julie Rodrigues Widholm, executive director of BAMPFA, on Wednesday, May 29 from 5-6pm. On view in West Hollywood through August 24; hauserwirth.com. —SND

Farah Al Qasimi, Desert Dreamscape (Hyundai Artlab Digital Commission)

Review: Farah Al Qasimi: Desert Dreamscape is now online at Hyundai ArtLab. Artist Farah Al Qasimi makes photographs, films, and music—and for this new digital commission, she draws on all three to create a gently endless video vignette in which exaggerated femininity, luxury, nostalgia, sandswept aridity, and an oddly soothing ASMR-like soundtrack combine to surreal and meditative effect. Awash in the comfort of pink chiffon and sleeping puppies, surrounded by inscrutable and seemingly random souvenirs and casual altars, one wall open to a soft blizzard of breeze-born white sand, a mellow raga drifting by above the sound of wind and ruffled curtains—this isolated place is as comforting and discomfiting as any fairytale would be if you couldn’t quite be sure of what was real. Online now at artlab.hyundai.com. —SND

Harminder Judge, Untitled (waist and back and front embrace), 2023. Plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim and oil, 90 9/16 x 78 3/4 x 1 9/16 in. (© Harminder Judge; Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles)

Review: It Never Entered My Mind is now open at Sean Kelly Gallery. Film producer and prolific art collector Michael Sherman curates a lively exhibition of 15 artists working in painting and sculpture, hailing from Los Angeles and beyond. Ostensibly organized as a snapshot rather than a thematic program, the exhibition includes several standouts whose work nevertheless feels in direct dialogue with art history in a way informed by an assertion of identity—from Harmonia Rosales masterfully decolonizing the Renaissance, to Hammzat Tahabsim pulling the rug out from under Paul Gauguin, Mario Moore bringing a touch of Artemesia Gentileschi, Taj Poscé’s visceral and dark-edged post-Pop, SANGREE’s cheeky re-incarnations of ceremonial vessels, Harminder Judge channeling somehow both William Blake and Jay DeFeo, and many more such compelling frameworks. As the exhibition’s title is a Miles Davis reference, it’s only fitting that the show also lives on Spotify in the form of an accompanying playlist organized by musician and producer MeLo-X, curated after speaking with the artists about their favorite music to create by. On view in Hollywood through July 27, skny.com. —SND

The 13th Thing:

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk residency at LA Phil, May 21-30. Personally, I’m not really in the cult of Kraftwerk, but it’s obvious their string of appearances at Disney Hall is a BFD. The German electronic music legends—whose practice has long been informed by a sophisticated, futuristic visual sensibility enacted in groundbreaking multimedia situations—celebrate the 50th anniversary of their album Autobahn, which apparently changed the course of human history. A series presenting eight albums in chronological order begins with Autobahn (1974), and proceeds with Radio-Activity (1975), Trans Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003). Each night will feature one complete album plus bonus material, and the finale will span their entire discography. The series puts even the Ring Cycle to shame, unfolding across more than a week—except on Monday the 27th, because even European art house icons love a good Memorial Day picnic. Disney Hall, downtown; $94-$139; packages available; laphil.com. —SND