13ThingsLA: October 15
Walking Shoes for your art calendar
With total awareness and support for those whose art-viewing will mostly consist of clever and impactful protest signs on Saturday, this week’s Los Angeles art calendar proposes further events that require comfortable walking shoes. There’s a lot of buzz around Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Philip Guston show at the Skirball, and it’s easy to see why. After that, pop in on Wonzimer Gallery, Automata, Face Guts, Wende Museum, Vincent Price Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Culver City Art Walk & Roll Festival, Beverly Hills Art Show, LAND at Arlington Garden, The Huntington, Getty Center, and Outside In Theatre. Protest in the afternoon, art in the evening? Also, keep an eye on those plans, because last time Angelenos asserted their constitutional right to peacefully protest, a lot of folks ended up postponing planned events. No Kings!
Bonus: Catch me, Shana, on PBS Sunday, October 17, as a lovely new documentary on last year’s PST: Art initiative features me in two small, but I hope helpful, clips.
FEATURE
Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston opens Thursday, October 16, noon-5pm & 7:30-9:30pm at the Skirball. In this tightly argued, viscerally painted dialogue, Trenton Doyle Hancock stages a reckoning with one of his most formative influences, Philip Guston. Guston’s recurring Klansmen figure—those bulbous, blunt-edged characters rendered in chalky pinks and icy greys—were themselves a kind of grotesque self-portraiture, weaponizing cartoonishness as both confession and critique. That paradox—how the ridiculous can often expose evil more sharply than the solemn—has long been central to Hancock’s own mythmaking. His collaged, cacophonous canvases push Guston’s dark absurdity into new registers of resistance, where plastic bottle caps, fluorescent hues, and his superhero proxies like Torpedoboy turn mockery into power. Across the galleries, Guston’s hooded specters shuffle through murky rooms of complicity while Hancock’s characters burst outward, reclaiming narrative through mythic exaggeration. Both artists wield the language of comics and satire to probe moral anxiety, but Hancock transforms Guston’s private battles into public discourse in an art-historical call and response that proves the grotesque still has teeth, and that laughter can be a weapon against darkness. Opening day timed tickets are free; Regular museum admission is $18/Free on Thursdays; On view in Brentwood through March 1; skirball.org. —SND
