She Was Paying Attention: Remembering Alexis Smith
Satisfaction (2000) by the artist Alexis Smith is a collage that features a shabby reproduction of Hokusai’s The Great Wave placed within a glitzy…
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All Positions Possible: Simone Forti Across Time, Through Community
An eight-foot wooden ramp was propped up at a forty-five-degree angle in one corner. Knotted ropes hung from six holes drilled near the ramp’s…
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Proving the Rule: The “Exceptionalism” Problem with Art-World Labor
It’s a rainy winter day in New York amid the ongoing apocalypse and I am struggling to think about museums. I do not, any…
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Bad Faith in MOCA Toronto’s Inaugural Show, “Believe”
I’ve spent the better part of five months trying to write a review of a show that’s now closed: MOCA Toronto’s inaugural exhibition, Believe….
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What to Do About Klaus: How Arts Communities Assert Their Agency
As first impressions go, it wasn’t ideal. On the week he was announced as MOCA Los Angeles’s new director, Klaus Biesenbach managed to alienate…
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Grieving in L.A.
My first trip to Los Angeles started ten days after an election that diminished our assurance in something like a common good. I booked…
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Friends Among Us: Reflections on the Value and Risk of Nepotism in Art
Corazon del Sol had just arrived in Lisbon, to an apartment she left in the early 2010s, not long after losing someone close. She…
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Helen Molesworth Upends the Permanent Hang at MOCA LA
Ruth Asawa spent the summer of 1948 making buttermilk for her teachers, Josef and Anni Albers, in Asheville, North Carolina. She was enrolled at…
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Seeing Red: Understanding Kazuo Shiraga’s Sudden Fame
In recent years, the reputation of postwar abstract painter Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008) – known for turbulent, crimson paintings made with his feet – has…
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