13ThingsLA: September 4

Back to School for your art calendar

Oscar Tuazon at Morán Morán

Art Appreciation classes are back in session this week, with eccentric documentary, valedictory style talks, lively neighborhood art walks, and hotly anticipated new exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, UNREPD, Morán Morán, James Fuentes, El Camino College Art Gallery, DTLA ArtNight, Chinatown First Fridays, SPY Projects, Albertz Benda, Gallery SADE, Walter Maciel Gallery, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Arcane Space, Thinkspace/Los Angeles Modern Auctions, USC Roski, and the Academy Museum. Next week Pacific Standard Time gets well and truly underway as well—it’s going to be a lot, but we’re here to help.

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Feature:

Leonard Maiden at UNREPD

Melrose Hill Gallery District hosts multiple opening receptions on Saturday, September 7, 6-8pm. A new art season kicks off with a banger of an unofficial block party, as four of the area’s impressive gallery cohort open their big Fall solo exhibitions. At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World at David Zwirner is a Hilton Als-curated presentation, focusing on Neel’s iconic and exceptional body of startlingly human portrait paintings, examined from the point of view of queer representation. Josephine Halvorson: New Hours at James Fuentes offers paintings and polaroids that capture and celebrate the unexpected warmth and appeal of random objects. Oscar Tuazon: Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) at Morán Morán is a PST: Art+Science Collide exhibition, and with good reason—its multidimensional, interdisciplinary reflection on the artist’s ongoing research, activism, community engagement, and art-making around the discourse on water in terms of public space, architecture, land management, indigeneity, resource allocation, creative inspiration, and geopolitical and hyperlocal history is definitionally both artistic and science-driven. Leonard Maiden: I don’t know what grabbed hold of me at UNREPD is a suite of stylized portraits in the Southern Gothic tradition, portraying characters with a hint of mystery, flashes of cheeky wit, and profound inner lives in a warm, muted palette that encourages presence and contemplation. Think about taking an Uber if you’re going on Saturday night, parking can be rather intense in the area. PS: The other half of the galleries on the block will have openings next Saturday, the 14th. —SND

Alice Neel, Jackie Curtis as a Boy, 1972. © The Estate of Alice Neel (Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery)

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Extra Credit Feature:

Osceola Refetoff, Windblown Corn, Mundelein, IL (2010)

Doodle & Dream opens Thursday, September 5, 6-8:30pm at El Camino College Art Gallery. The marvelous artist and celestial thinker Lauren Kasmer has co-curated, with Michael Miller, a group exhibition exploring the many-splendored ways in which artists (and sometimes writers, like me!) use the narrative content, visual language, and/or altered states of consciousness to access creativity. As the author of the oneiric, dream-journal based novella Zen Psychosis, I along with my partner in all things, the photographer Osceola Refetoff, who contributed dozens of hypnotic, “dreamlike” pinhole exposures to the book, have been invited to participate, and we could not be more thrilled. Besides opening night, there are a series of talks and communal events happening throughout the run of the show, and we would love to see you there! Sweet dreams, everyone! Exhibition on view in Torrance through October 3; free; facebook.com/events. —SND

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