Sunday, June 14, 2015 at 5:00AM Still tripping out over one of the best exhibitions in the history of art, the Noah Purifoy show at LACMA will change your life.
Thursday, June 11, 2015 at 5:00AM Henry Taylor gaves us some pins that were given to him by David Hammons at the recent Noah Purifoy opening at LACMA. We were instructed to give these away...stop by the gallery to get yours.
Monday, June 8, 2015 at 5:00AM Lex Brown performing American Flag at Redcat
Sunday, June 7, 2015 at 5:00AM I'm in the "The Art of Living" summer issue of CALIFORNIA HOME+DESIGN speaking about an artist to watch...hint, we're already watching him! Read about it HERE
Friday, June 5, 2015 at 5:00AM LA Times gave Andre D. Wagner a favorable review!
By Leah Ollman
Andre D. Wagner is a young photographer with an old soul. He shoots black-and-white film and prints his pictures, by his own hand, on a scale (11 x 14 and 16 x 20 inches) that, these days, is conspicuous in its modesty.
The intimate size matters. It matches the tenderness of his approach toward his subjects, mostly fellow residents of Brooklyn. Wagner practices a quiet, lyrical kind of humanism that comes straight out of the traditions of mid-20th-century street photography and the social documentary photo-essay. "Tell It Like It Is," his show at L.A.'s Papillion, is invigorating.
Photography excels at showing us what we can't see -- motion too fast, views too distant or specimens too small for the eye to perceive -- but it also shows us what we don't see, realities made invisible by familiarity, veiled by bias or strategically suppressed.
Wagner's work comes out of his respect -- awe, even -- for the value of ordinary lives playing out in ordinary ways. His focus on African Americans in his community affirms that value, pithily summed up by the meme Black Lives Matter. Wagner's pictures help correct the record, flesh it out. They serve as counterbalance, antidote to injustices perpetrated in the realm of representation.
He shows us older women out shopping, little girls having a laugh on a stoop and little boys in playful camaraderie, mothers with their kids on the bus, a shoeshine man on a break. Nothing of conventional consequence happens during these interstitial moments, but meaning is vested in them and Wagner's keen eye seizes upon the rich, spontaneous choreography of gestures, shadows and signage perpetually staged on city streets.
He homes in on the exquisite visual dynamism energizing even the quietest of scenes.
Consider his picture of three young boys sharing two seats on the subway. The station is a blur out the window, and fragments of bodies on either side frame these innocent souls in their gleaming white T-shirts, hands folded on their laps. Two succumb to motion-induced slumber and the third sits silently observing. Their heads align like adjacent frames in a stop-motion photograph. Wagner edits out all but the bottom word, "History," in the poster mounted above them, as if to acknowledge the ever-present bearing of the past on their unknown future.
American flags crop up everywhere in these pictures -- on shirts and patches, in the hand of a pensive girl at a meat counter, on the exterior of a subway car whose window frames the sober, level gaze of a black passenger, echoing Robert Frank's powerful photograph of a segregated trolley in the '50s. Along with the lucid beauty and honesty of work by Roy DeCarava, Helen Levitt and Gordon Parks, Frank's "The Americans" is a clear antecedent to Wagner's work.
Wagner hasn't so much "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film," as Jack Kerouac wrote of Frank, but his everyday epic, too, is dense and necessary, an affirmation that everything -- and everyone -- matters.
Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 5:00AM In theaters June 19th! DOPE, is a super fresh film written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 5:00AM The Great Discontent magazine featured Andre D. Wagner in their third issue, The Possibility Issue. Andre Wagner is currently in our solo exhibition, American Survey Part II "Tell It Like It Is." The The Great Discontent quotes Andre, "..Ive dedicated myself to noticing what everybody else is missing. I show people what the world actually looks like. Street photography is so special because it's about capturing everyday moments. It's not produced." You can find out where to buy a copy or order online HERE
Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 5:00AM Kanye West recently spoke at the Golden Tremble Fashion Show at L.A. Trade Technical College
Monday, May 25, 2015 at 5:00AM Very honored to be the cover girl for issue 2 of Correspondence Magazine by Citizens of Culture...a site I have great respect for. You can find out where to buy a copy or order online HERE
Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 5:00AM February James, an artist from Washington D.C. living in New York City was featured in Brazillion publication, AMARELLO. You can find out where to buy a copy or order on line HERE.
"...In a way my work is an ongoing body of self exploration. Painting all the things I'm running away from and all the things I'm hoping to become."
Friday, May 15, 2015 at 2:00AM Kenturah Davis' conversation and photoshoot for the Crenshaw/LAX metro line. She is one of the 14 artists selected to create site-specific, intergrated artworks. Those who reside, work or maintain a significant connection with Inglewood are called to be a part of history as the subjects of the drawings that will develop the Florence/La Brea Station.
Friday, May 8, 2015 at 5:00AM Kenturah has the entire Narratives I-IV series included and on view now in a group exhibition taking place during the Venice Biennale.
We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles
@ la Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2015
Exhibition Dates: May 9 - November 22, 2015
Magazzino del Sale No.3, Dorsoduro 264, Venezia, Italy
Presented in collaboration with Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia
We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles is an exhibition that presents, for the first time on the international stage, a group of exceptional contemporary Los Angeles artists whose work makes Los Angeles one of the most exciting hubs of creativity in the world today.
We Must Risk Delight is inspired by the poem A Brief for the Defense by a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry finalist, Jack Gilbert. In his viscerally visual poem, Gilbert calls on humanity to recognize every moment of delight even in the most ominous of impressions. By slicing through the somber depictions of the world we live in with sharp and vibrant moments of joy, the poet presents an irrefutable case for our happiness as being our most requisite expression of freedom, not in spite of the cruelty that is a part of our world, but because of it.
A work of art represents the artist’s vision of the world and, when embraced, it can be seen as a way of making a world. The artists presented in We Must Risk Delight will give the audiences of the Biennale Arte 2015 an opportunity to discover the city of Los Angeles through the kaleidoscope of its creative community, while also encouraging us all to risk delight and celebrate the act of creating as humanity’s pathway to joy: both within ourselves and in the collective world around us.
We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles is being presented as an official Collateral Event of the 56th manifestation of la Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2015.
Presented Artists:
Brandy Eve Allen Tanya Batura Jamison Carter Carolyn Castaño
Robbie Conal Kenturah Davis Amir H. Fallah Alexandra Grant
Margaret Griffith Sherin Guirguis Ben Jackel Mark Licari
Rebecca Niederlander Stas Orlovski Natasa Prosenc Stearns Tony de los Reyes
Frank Ryan Shizu Saldamando Carole Silverstein Alexis Zoto
Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 5:00AM Samuel Levi Jones and Derek Fordjour both have work on view now in NY at Sotheby's S2 Gallery. I Like It Like This is a collaborative exhibition with musician Drake. Samuel Levi Jones has this piece titled Brutality while Derek Fordjour has a painting titled Concatenation.
"Today, musicians rap about painters and commission artists to design their album covers; in the same vein artists look to music as inspiration for their paintings. Influences flow in both directions to create a fertile creative environment, producing some of the most resonant and profound artistic output in American history.
I Like It Like This, presented by S|2 in collaboration with Drake is a celebration of influential Contemporary black American artists. Grammy winning artist Drake has provided musical curation by selecting songs to accompany highlighted works in the exhibition."
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 5:00AM Intrigued by relationships and mesmerized by storytelling, Wedgeworth’s studio practice is informed by both the personal and the collective memory. By mining these memories, excavating narratives from her own experiences and collecting narratives gathered from gossip, oral history and popular culture, she examines the connections we make, as well as, the internal and external responses or consequences of these connections. It is the intersection where the story-telling and the image-making meet, that she employs painting, sculpture and video to investigate memory and madness.
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth lives and works in Los Angeles.
Friday, May 1, 2015 at 5:00AM This Eastern European genius is headed to the stars....literally in like 10 years!
Thursday, April 30, 2015 at 5:00AM February James
"I’m attracted to the lost people of life. I come to them rather intuitively and they wash past me in much the same way. Each of us feeding one another's need. People collecting people."
