Photography (Photography)

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California. Taken outside Palmdale, Littlerock, Pearlblossom, Victorville, and Barstow, towns where the population does not exceed 20,000, Ruppersberg’s trip follows the outskirts of Los Angeles. As with many of his other photographic series, the artist here inserted into each view a constant element that disturbs the otherwise quiet scenes: a hand holding an open magazine.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles. By 1968, the year she began creating Domes , the twenty-nine-year-old artist had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA, and was part of a generation of artists whose work was characterized by of the masculine overtones of Southern California’s flourishing car culture. Inspired by new technologies in the auto manufacturing, these “Finish Fetish” artists appropriated industrial materials such as car paint or lacquer to create artwork with pristine finishes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Photography (Photography)

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers.

Painting (Painting)

5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica) is a series of paintings that artist Eddie Arroyo created over an extended period of time, depicting the same site as it appeared from 2016 to 2018. Like the series shown at the Whitney, their focus is a building complex that until recently housed a Voodoo Botanica and Variety Shop, another iconic set of businesses on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti that housed practitioners of voodoo proffering candles, potions, and incense. It was one of many businesses in the area bearing paintings by Serge Toussaint, a local artist and professional sign painter known for his portrayals of Little Haiti.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Bassoonist

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Violinist

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Battle of Karbala was a military engagement that took place on 10 Muharram, 61 AH (October 10 th , 680) in Karbala, situated in present day Iraq, when Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, was killed. This battle is central to Shia Muslim belief in which Hussein’s martyrdom is commemorated each year, in a celebration called Ashura which symbolises the birth of Muslim division still at issue today between the Shia and Sunni. During Ashura , the artist worked in close collaboration with the people of Zeynebiye (referring to Hussein’s courageous sister, Zeyneb), documenting their preparations for the ceremonies, which involve a mass theatre performance and the isolated, weeping ritual at the end of the Ashura day.

Installation (Installation)

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach.

Photography (Photography)

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Horseback is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Horseback is a black and white photograph that depicts the arched shoulders of a horse, its slick mane splayed across its neck.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gated Commune , a video by Camel Collective, is a critique of the complex, and often obtuse, language used to describe sustainable development projects. To construct a future scenario in the imagination of the viewers, a voiceover narrates two perspectives of futuristic practices in architecture and social behaviors: neo-primitives on one hand, who value organic materials and design based on geometric forms, and futurists on the other hand, who value organic forms and computer design. In this constructed universe, both perspectives lead to societal structures that malfunction due to issues with their design, which are not in line with their users’ needs.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years. It was a playground for the rich in the 19th century and where Old New York had its summer homes and diversions. The center image is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother when she was 16 in 1949.

Painting (Painting)

The Shedding by Anju Dodiya is part of a series of mattress paintings the artist creates using fabric stretched on padded and shaped boards. The imagery relates to other paintings in this body work that expresses the visceral and vulnerable side of creativity. The posture of the protagonist—a part-human, part-carapaced animal—is opening herself outwardly.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle.

Photography (Photography)

Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.

Photography (Photography)

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works. Here, McCarthy squirts liquid out of a bottle held near his crotch onto a stuffed animal in the shape of a lion. The costuming, materials, and simulated bodily functions frequently appear in McCarthy’s work, which often disturbingly juxtaposes visceral and startling manipulation of the body with the cheerful artifacts of popular consumer culture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Something Other Than What You Are by Camel Collective is formed by two works: a multi-channel video installation with controlled lighting, and a single-channel version with stereo sound. In both works, the 36 minute video depicts a narrative taking place outside of a live theater performance in the form of monologues that moves between the production and technical crew. There is a set of three different characters—a lighting technician, a lighting designer, and a professor all played by the same actress who share in their personal experiences and attitudes the precariousness of their work, the problems and myths of collaboration, and the obsolescence of theatrical technology.

Installation (Installation)

Dave is part of Mohamed Bourouissa’s project Horse Day , which stemmed from a residency the artist conducted in Philadelphia in 2014. There, he discovered the activities of the Fletcher Street Riding Club, a historical stable and training program built by and aimed at young African Americans. Weaving together two predominant symbols of American lifestyle and culture—the cowboy and the car—Bourouissa collaborated with local riders and artists to organize a contest celebrating the best adorned horse, in the manner of car tuning competitions.