13ThingsLA: May 8

Poetry, Public Art & Painting for your art calendar

Shana Nys Dambrot

and

HIJINX ARTS | 13 THINGS LA

May 07, 2024

Senon Williams

The Getty Center’s Poetry in the Garden series continues on Wednesday, May 8 at 2pm with Senon Williams. Musician, painter, poet, and sometimes parade leader Senon Wiliams spent several weekends last year heading up the Sunset Hiking Club—a walking art exhibition that began at Lauren Powell Projects and summited in Griffith Park. Williams recently published the large-format limited edition book Rituals—part chronicle of these walks and the community they created, part catalog of his new and recent paintings merging fantastical landscape with the gestural burnished embers of chromatic abstraction, and part compendium of his original short-form concrete poetry. And now, he’s about to climb another hill—this time, at the Getty Center, where Williams reads from the book as part of the free Poetry in the Garden series. Continues with a new author every Wednesday at 2pm through May 29. getty.edu. —SND

Full Calendar:

Marilyn Nance at Roberts Projects

Marilyn Nance: The Woman of FESTAC ‘77 closes May 9 at Roberts Projects. FESTAC ’77 (the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) was a landmark convention in Lagos, Nigeria, which brought together more than 17,000 artists, musicians, dancers, actors, filmmakers, writers, and scholars from around the world—plus thousands more audience members, international journalists, curators, producers, and spiritual and civic leaders from across the region. One of those journalists was the photographer Marilyn Nance, the official photographer of the U.S. delegation—selections from whose extensive archives are on view at Roberts Projects now. In a marvelous synchronicity, Betye Saar was among the participating artists in the presentation, and a selection of her archives and process materials is on view alongside Nance’s impressive documentation—intentionally curated to highlight the impactful presence of women in the U.S. program and throughout this history-making gathering. On view through Thursday, May 9 in Miracle Mile; robertsprojectsla.com. —SND

View of Sankofa Park with Kehinde Wiley's Remors of War sculpture. Courtesy of Destination Crenshaw.

Zócalo Public Square hosts a conversation on the importance of public art to Destination Crenshaw, Thursday, May 9, at 6pm. Architect Gabrielle Bullock, LA City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and Destination Crenshaw’s senior art advisor V. Joy Simmons host a conversation and reception celebrating and unpacking the vital role that public art plays in the engaged design, community heart, political soul, economic impact, and historical mindfulness that inspire and animate DC’s work. From intentional, narrative elements of landscape architecture, to the process of selecting and commissioning artwork across a range of international and hyper-local voices, and the generational storytelling that underpins it all—hear from the people making this special and important project happen. At Crenshaw High School; free; zocalopublicsquare.org. —SND

Karla Diaz: Carousel II, 2023 from the El Corrido series, Watercolor and ink on paper, 40 x 60 in (Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles)

LACE presents Artist Unresidencies at Heavy Manners Library, Friday-Sunday, May 9-12. The “Unresidencies” comprise a series of commissioned, research-based zines and the public programs to launch them. This year’s participants are artists Jaklin Romine, Artemisia Clark, and Karla Diaz (whose exceptional exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is on view through June 8), each of whom will offer activations and engagements surrounding their projects, centering ideas of memory and family history. Romine (May 9, 7pm) created and will read from a mixed media meditation on her relationship with her grandmother and echoes between their life experiences. Clark (May 11, 2pm) offers a moving performance and exegesis of an archive of personal letters between her grandparents surrounding a long-buried family secret. Diaz (May 12, 2pm) conceived and illustrated a limited edition deck of fortune-telling cards, invoking both her doomed childhood obsession with TV psychic Walter Mercado, and the legacy of expectation and heartbreak that came with it. Heavy Manners Library on N. Alvarado; free; welcometolace.org. —SND

Mina Alikhani: Crimes Against God

Mina Alikhani: Crimes Against God opens Friday, May 10, 6-10pm at Rebecca Molayem Studio Gallery. Painter and sculptor Mina Alikhani appears to be completely fearless. Her striking images combine figures rendered in stylized surrealism and architectural and patterned motifs that give way to symbol-rich narratives subversive of oppression. Both austere and animated, her works often portray specific acts and political or cultural perspectives (dancing, drinking, divorcing, protesting, being queer) that are considered forbidden under strict Sharia Law enforced by Iran’s Islamic Republic. But there is one thing she might be afraid of, and that’s failing to act in gratitude for the freedoms she enjoys and the furtherance of those freedoms for women around the world who cannot speak for themselves. On view in Miracle Mile through May 16; free; instagram.com/mina.alikhani. —SND

Lucy Bull , 14:01, 2024, oil on linen, 54 x 45 in (Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery)

Lucy Bull: Ash Tree opens Saturday, May 11, 6-8pm at David Kordansky Gallery. Lucy Bull’s paintings defy certain conventions of space, visual plane, color theory, gesture, surface, and scale—but they resolutely remain as landscapes. Her wild, energetic, Fauvism-inflected compositions are documents of their maker’s process—luxuriating in a kaleidoscopic array of marks made, flicks and scars, pressing and topographies, flourishes feathered, prisms shattered, atmospherics layered, optical effects played upon, all dancing across an unexpectedly solid ground, but ultimately, satisfyingly, obeying the laws of gravity. Already working boldly and urgently at a large scale, for this new series Bull pushes into monumental new territory, engaging the gallery architecture and pushing past her own and the viewer’s corporeal space in a way that speaks to engulfment in the world. Bull also curates a 24-hour marathon film screening in conjunction with the exhibition at Lumiere Cinema, from 11am on June 1 - 11am on June 2. On view in Mid-Wilshire through June 15; free; davidkordanskygallery.com. —SND

Vivien Ebright Chung, Flowers For Countess Olenska (or Martin Scorsese), 2024, Oil on canvas, 24×25 in (Trophy Room LA)

The springtime group show May Flowers opens Saturday, May 11, 5-9pm at Trophy Room LA. Nine artists (Sarah Bedford, Sara Bonache, Vivien Ebright Chung, John Flores, Tom Neely. Patrick Pipkin-Arnold, Satoko Okuno, Nick Vaaler, Andrew West, Jesse Zuo) take on the ages-old but enduring art historical trope of floral still life painting. For centuries, painters have turned to the simple idea of a vase of flowers as an infinitely expandable armature on which to hang an array of agendas and experiments as vast as the history of art itself—honing techniques and emblems of verisimilitude, abstraction, encoded narration, memory, fertility, death, wealth, religiosity, romance, naturalism, reverence, expressionism, portraiture and biomorphism, surrealism, technology, primitivism, ritual, and more. Now it’s a new generation’s turn to frolic in these fields and arrange their botanical bounty. On view through June 15 on Verdugo Rd.; free; thetrophyroomla.com. —SND

Lanise Howard

Mashonda Tifrere presents I Never Really Knew You from Saturday, May 11 at Praz-Delavallade. A group exhibition featuring artists Tonia Calderon, Swoon, Dionne Simpson, Malik Roberts, Amani Lewis with photographer Mazi Smazi, and Calvin Clausell Jr. takes stock of the fraught borderland between our inner and outer lives. Seen through the lens of artists in pursuit of self-knowledge as a way of existing in the world, this moving exhibition surrounds and contextualizes a solo exhibition of new work by LA-based painter Lanise Howard. In M.U.S.E. Miss. Understood. Sensuality. Economized. Howard weaves together timelines and tropes from generations of film, music, urban art to more fulsomely express the glorious rise to power and cultural currency of self-actualized Black women. Open May 11-June 1 in Miracle Mile; free; eventbrite.com. —SND

Suzan Woodruff, Over Under, 2024, acrylic on panel, 40x30 in. (Courtesy of Billis Williams)

Suzan Woodruff: Back from the Edge opens Saturday, May 11, 4-7pm at Billis Williams Gallery. As a painter Suzan Woodruff has always been attracted to the edges—of things, of knowledge, of poetry and spirit, of darkness and light, in places where the earth and sea and sky meet, and places where fire and ice touch, geologically and metaphorically. Her painstakingly engineered yet foundationally intuitive abstract compositions echo and express a state of perpetual, universal liminality, enacting in pigment and motion the phenomenological cavortings of her terrestrial and celestial muses. But in the past few years, the edges she has explored have come to include silence and battle, faith and despair, and even, quite literally life and death. Like many cosmonauts of the soul before her, and also like many painters who have pushed and tested the limits of what their materials (and bodies) can endure, she’s back from the edge with intensely energetic, richly surfaced captures of the barely controlled, impossibly beautiful chaos that’s unfurling out there at this very moment. On view in Culver City through June 8; free; billiswilliams.com. —SND

Brandon Ballengée, RIP Great Auk/ After John James Audubon, 1858/2023. Artist cut and burnt Bien edition chromolithograph, ashes, and etched funerary urn 35 x 47.5 in (Courtesy of the artist & VSF)

Review: Brandon Ballengée: Call of the Void is open through June 15 at Various Small Fires. When I was in NYC last December, I had the pleasure of visiting the Jennifer Baahng Gallery to view an exhibition by the artist and environmental scientist Brandon Ballengée. I was so moved that I ended up reviewing the show for The Village Voice, which you can read in full here. Among the pieces that made the most profound impression on me were the haunting subtractive papercuts in his ongoing Frameworks of Absence series—a huge selection of which, I am delighted to report, are currently on view in Los Angeles at VSF. Here’s some of what I wrote before, “Each one begins with a vintage illustration of an animal species, the kind you find in rare-book shops and natural history museums, from which a now extinct species of beast, fish, or bird has been painstakingly cut out, its title annotated with ‘RIP.’ At first look, these images are so familiar as to be unremarkable, especially the ubiquitous works of the best-known artists and animals—and then you notice.” The experience further deepens in proximity to a pair of operatic sculptural installations. On view in Hollywood through June 15; free; vsf.la. —SND

Maurice Sendak

The Art of Maurice Sendak is open at the Skirball through September 1. “Celebrating the work of Jewish American artist Maurice Sendak, creator of acclaimed children’s books like the iconic Where the Wild Things Are (1963), this groundbreaking exhibition adds new depth to audiences’ understanding of Sendak’s life—as a child of immigrants, a lover of music, someone with close personal relationships—and how it dovetailed with his creative work, which drew inspiration from writers ranging from William Shakespeare to Herman Melville. With more than 150 sketches, storyboards, and paintings, plus portraits he made of loved ones, archival photographs of family members, and toys he designed as a young adult, the exhibition brings Sendak and his work to life in three dimensions.” General admission $18; skirball.org. —SND

Lee Quiñones (Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery)

Lee Quiñones: Quinquagenary is on view at Charlie James Gallery through May 25. A celebration of the 50th anniversary of the legendary career of New York artist Lee Quiñones, which began in his teens with bold, whole-car subway pieces and handball court murals bearing his trademark “LEE.” As part of the Fabulous 5 crew, Quiñones pioneered a particular East Coast style that found its zenith on the moving metal canvases of the MTA. The artist continues to innovate in paintings and drawings that employ the aesthetic vocabulary of graffiti in works that are tightly controlled, compositionally complex, and socially engaged. These works straddle the line between gallery and street, pairing tags and graffiti writing with bold, expressionist painting. Quiñones honors the tools of the artform, using spray paint and paint markers to create layered abstract compositions. Free; cjamesgallery.com. —SND

The 13th Thing:

Yaeun Stevie Choi Kite designs, El Segundo blue butterfly & the La Tuna Puma (via Clockshop)

Clockshop’s Community & Unity People’s Kite Festival is Saturday, May 11 2-6pm, in LA State Historic Park, Chinatown. Clockshop is known for its unique, innovative engagements with public lands and grassroots communities. And one of its most popular annual events is also a proper herald of summer on the horizon. An afternoon of free arts workshops and live music centers around an all-are-welcome kite-flying minifestival. As part of their annual kite art commission program, artist Yaeun Stevie Choi has created three unique Korean motifs based on animal species native to Los Angeles whose existence is threatened by urban and industrial development. For the first time, a kite competition will take place this year, with attendees competing for the award for best handmade kite. Free; clockshop.org. —SND