Los Angeles is diverse, LA Art Show director Kassandra Voyagis tells Observer. “You have to have multiple different voices, different things, you have to have young galleries, young artists. You have to push the envelope with exhibits of things that haven’t been seen before,” she explains. “The beauty of the LA Art Show is that galleries can take risks; that’s what makes L.A. stand apart.”

Starting today, more than 90 galleries, museums and arts organizations from around the world have converged on L.A.’s Convention Center for the 31st edition of the LA Art Show, which this year has no shortage of diverse voices. Featured exhibitions include “Elegant Freedom: Nature, Tradition, and the Human Spirit,” works by artist Jinny Suh that explore hanji, traditional Korean handmade paper from which the artist conjures chickens, birds and butterflies, symbols that explore themes of freedom and human connection. With “Including You And Me,” artist Moon Min deploys metal, resin and mixed media to reflect on modern humanity in relation to technology. Bright, abstract paintings and vessels by Dr. Esther Mahlangu, cultural ambassador of the Ndebele nation, will be presented by Art of Contemporary Africa. And Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri offers a selection of photorealist portraits of women.

With the fair situated just a stone’s throw from Hollywood, visitors can expect to see celebrity buyers as well as practitioners. “There are a lot of people in the entertainment world who have become artists,” Voyagis says. “It’s an avenue, it’s a creative outlet from acting to painting or drawing, so I get approached by a lot of celebrity artists and their galleries.”

Sylvester Stallone, for instance, has been painting since 1966, back when the future actor was a lad of 20. “The gallery walked me through the history and told me he started painting when he was a kid, before he started acting. And this was an escape for him from his household and where he grew up,” Voyagis says, pointing out a diptych of his signature character, Rocky, entitled Male Pattern Badness, priced at $2 million.

“I started selling these in June, and I’ve sold 27 pieces in the last six months,” Provident Fine Art gallerist Shawn David says of Stallone’s artwork. Another piece, Hercules O’Clock, priced at $1.2 million, references a pivotal moment in the actor’s youth when in viewing a Steve Reeves Hercules film, he discovered a male role model that would influence him for the rest of his life.

“Art collectors in their forties and up, Sly fans and buyers from all over the world,” is how David describes collectors of the actor’s work. “We had somebody purchase a fairly large piece, sight unseen, as most of them have been, from French Polynesia. So, literally from all over the world.”

Not to be outdone, Paul Simonon, former bassist of The Clash, will also be showing at the fair with London-based John Martin Gallery. “The moment I was old enough to ride a motorcycle, I got a Triumph, and a friend of mine, he had a Triumph. And we used to ride around a lot together in London, and this was during the Clash period,” Simonon tells Observer, noting the inspiration behind the five works shown here, featuring leather jackets, gloves, motorcycles, cigarettes and helmets. All are drawn from his 2014 show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, “Wot No Bike.”

“I got to know Lucien Freud quite well,” he recalls while discussing influences. The two met over cocktails in a bar one night and wound up talking about movies centered on artists, including one called Odd Man Out, featuring an artist played by Robert Newton whose father, Algernon Newton, was often called the Canaletto of London. “Newton turns out to be Lucien’s friend. And he took me to his house, and on the table was a Rodin bronze.”

Artist, sculptor, musician, Simonon also happens to be on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling album, an iconic black and white image featuring him smashing his guitar on the stage at New York’s Palladium in 1979.

“I remember it very well.” He smiles, recalling the moment. “To be honest, I just lost my temper. And when I lose my temper, I tend to destroy my own things. I don’t take it out on people. It was a sporadic moment. It was Strummer and Mick Jones who said it’s got to be on the cover.”

DIVERSEartLA, the fair’s noncommercial platform curated by Marisa Caichiolo, returns with “The Biennials, Art Institutions and Museums in the Contemporary Art Ecosystem,” exploring how art evolves through biennials and museums, and how they serve as engines of creative innovation and cultural dialogue. Caichiolo, who will be co-curating Chile’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, also curates the fair’s new Latin American Pavilion, centered on themes of memory, migration and identity.

For the art market, 2025 was a year of uncertainty, though auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips closed out the year with strong results. Sotheby’s finished with a $2.3 billion November week, including the $527.5 million sale of the Lauder Collection, featuring Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which sold for $236.4 million.

“The summer was difficult,” Voyagis laments. “I think the market is still cautious, but it’s much better. The collector base here is under 40, which is really quite young. I think there’s finally that market and excitement around the art world and collecting in L.A. The LA Art Show, this will be our 31st year. I think we survived through all of it because we represent L.A., and I appreciate that the Angelenos come out and support us every year. I want the show to be open to everybody.”

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After Beth Morrison earned her bachelor of music at Boston University and a master’s of music at Arizona State University, she moved to New York City with limelight ambitions. What she encountered were like-minded creatives grousing about the entertainment industry’s indifference, which she set out to remedy by earning an MFA in theater management/producing at Yale School of Drama. Returning to New York in 2005, she set up Beth Morrison Productions and resumed grumbling over industry indifference.

Since then, BMP has become the country’s premier hothouse for new opera, staging more than 50 productions, including Pulitzer Prize winners Angel’s Bone by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek and p r i s m by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins. A Grammy nominee, BMP has four titles nominated for 2026, including Adoration and Trade / Mary Motorhead. Starting tomorrow, the company celebrates its quarter-century anniversary with the 2026 Prototype Festival, which this year will mount six productions at venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “I’ve been working for this change,” Morrison tells Observer. “It’s why I got into what I do in the first place, to create this new kind of opera. And I think we’ve done that. We have 15+ seasons in our history showing that, and we’ve inspired others as well.”

Fans will find inspiration in the BMP: Songbook Concert and Celebration (Jan. 7-8), a performance pulling together their greatest hits, with 14 arias culled from the company’s storied history and sung by the original artists. (If you can’t make the show, pick up the album, a double-disc vinyl set featuring 60 arias. It goes well with the BMP Songbook Anthology, a 500-page coffee table book celebrating the company’s history.)

Precipice takes to the boards Jan. 8-11, the story of a young woman’s struggle set against the epic backdrop of the mountainous West. Leaping from a tall cliff, she awakens mute in the wilderness, where she must fight to recover her voice. Set to Rima Fand’s folk-inspired score, Precipice incorporates sounds from nature, singers, string quintet, piano and mandolin.

Hildegard makes its New York City premiere Jan. 9-11 and 14. This must-see opera by the incomparable composer Sarah Kirkland Snider is named for the 12th-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic, visionary, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner. The world premiere in Los Angeles last November drew superlative reviews on both coasts. “I’m so proud of her,” Morrison said at the time. “It’s been totally a labor of love. She loves Hildegard so much, the historical figure, and she’s written such a beautiful piece.”

If you can’t make it to Brooklyn, try Times Square on Jan. 11 for The All Sing: Hwael-Rād (Whale-Road) and join the choir for this world premiere choral work bridging the gap between humanity and our ocean-dwelling friends. “It’s this goth-industrial music meets classical,” is how Morrison describes the world premiere piece by composer Jens Ibsen. “We’ll have music up on the website, and anyone can download it and learn it and come and sing with us.”

The New York premiere of the comedic post-rock opera What to Wear (Jan. 15-18) by Michael Gordon and the late avant-garde theater icon Richard Foreman draws from the latter’s original staging. A collaboration between BMP, BAM and Bang on a Can, this acerbic commentary on society’s superficiality features a cameo by St. Vincent. “Already we’re selling out and had to add a performance. It’s going to be the hardest ticket to find. It’s a huge lift because it’s raising a lot of money in a short period of time to get it done, and it’s a complicated production,” says Morrison. “It’s crazy and amazing, it reminds me of Einstein on the Beach. It’s a spectacular show, truly one to blow people’s minds.”

On Jan. 16-17, submerge yourself in Art Bath, a cross-disciplinary experience highlighting female voices and genre-bending music and opera, theater, puppetry and visual art. Also not to be missed is Tiergarten on Jan. 16, a Weimar cabaret in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Carroll Street. Directed by Andrew Ousley, it explores historical moments of societal madness, featuring music by Handel, Verdi, Dean Martin, Max Richter, William Byrd, Brecht, Weill and songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the form of opera, classical, jazz, ballet and burlesque.

Over the years, BMP has expanded to a staff of 14 and launched its Next Gen program fostering emerging opera composers. From it, one is offered a commission for an evening-length work as well as a world premiere production. BMP’s partnership with LA Opera has resulted in 17 shows in 10 years. The Prototype Festival has only been in existence for 15 years, relying mainly on the generosity of individual donors, including the Mellon Foundation, a major backer whose agreement with BMP runs out in 2028—something that has sent Morrison scrambling.

“If we don’t replace it, what does that mean? What will the festival look like? That’s our challenge now. I’m someone who’s a very pragmatic dreamer. I’ve got a couple of big ideas that I’m working on right now to bring a lot of partners together to create something larger than ourselves, exploring opportunities,” she says, lamenting, like so many arts institutions, the loss of NEA money after 560 grants totaling over $27 million were cut last May.

“A lot of foundations have left the arts that were really holding it together or have changed their priority in how they fund the arts. And a lot of individual donors who have propped up the non-profit performing arts for decades are aging out. A lot are dying, and there isn’t anybody coming up and taking their place,” she says. “It’s not easy, but it’s never been easy. It’s harder than it’s ever been. We’re announcing thirteen commissions over the next five years. It’s a big campaign for us. We’ve never done a campaign like this before, but it’s exciting. There’s a lot of amazing work being done here that people should feel good about. We’re just trying to create a conversation about what opera can be in the 21st Century.”

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In his lifetime, Joseph Cornell’s studio was a top destination for many in the art world. But not all were invited to the basement of his modest Dutch Colonial home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. The painfully shy recluse extended the offer to very few—mainly women, who might furnish their male counterparts with a book and a seat at the kitchen table to wile away the time. But now, anyone can visit. Not the actual studio, of course, but a painstaking replica titled “The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson,” which is the brainchild of curator Jasper Sharp and the filmmaker and will occupy the storefront windows at Gagosian in Paris through March 14.

“He said let’s recreate the workshop and all of his tools and his table and his furniture,” Sharp recalls Anderson suggesting. “So, that’s what we’ve done. We loved the idea of doing it on street level, a storefront, and creating an exhibition that we never open the door to. It’s entirely consumed on the street.”

A famous hoarder, Cornell spent his days scouring secondhand stores, flea markets and other venues, choosing objects that caught his eye and storing them away for future use. The basement was more like a workshop than your average artist studio, packed to the rafters with items that might look like junk to anyone else, but to Cornell were sweet morsels which, when paired properly in one of his glass-fronted shadowboxes, conjured magic. Much like the artist’s own assemblages, the Gagosian installation paints a portrait of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures.

While recreating the studio might not sound like an overwhelming challenge, the project required arduous research, drawing on accounts from curators, friends, family members, assistants, and collectors. Sharp and his team relied on the few photos that existed, taken by people like Hans Namuth, Duane Michals, and most of all, Harry Roseman, who worked with the artist from 1969 until his death in 1972.

Famous from the photos is a shelving unit containing whitewashed boxes on which Cornell labeled the contents—owls, Caravaggio, watch parts, seashells—each reproduced in the artist’s hand by a pair of sign painters who work on Anderson’s movies. Another of Anderson’s crew, Catherine Little, was called upon to age items and recreate the walls, damp and damaged by the years.

“We have several hundred bits of printed material, a little box of Dutch clay pipes,” says Sharp, noting the inclusion of the artist’s typewriter and 16mm projector used to view titles from his oversized film collection from which he sometimes spliced disparate images and sequences, creating his own movies. “We have the most beautiful things from his studio and from his home, which are original. We’ve collected the records that Cornell had in his record collection. We’ve collected the exact editions of books on the moon, on the stars, that he had. These are not Cornell’s objects, but they’re exact equivalents.”

Original items from the Cornell studio came courtesy of a variety of sources, including the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Four unfinished Cornell works and a small selection of archival material and cutouts are on loan from the museum. Additionally, the installation includes 15 complete shadowboxes, one object and four collages interspersed among hundreds of historical items discovered by Sharp in secondhand shops and flea markets on several continents, as well as eBay, antiquarian booksellers and record dealers.

Also included is Pharmacy, modeled after an antique apothecary cabinet, owned by Teeny and Marcel Duchamp. Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) is from the artist’s celebrated Medici series, framing reproductions of Bernardino Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy behind amber-tinted glass, presented alongside wooden toys and maps of Italian streets. A Dressing Room for Gilles pays homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot, the original of which hangs just a few blocks away at Musée du Louvre. And Blériot II honors Louis Blériot, the first to make an engine-powered flight across the English Channel.

“There’s stuff everywhere, piles of National Geographic, aisles of film, he’s an absolute hoarder,” says Sharp, who mounted the 2015-2016 show, “Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust,” at Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum as well as London’s Royal Academy of Arts. “Everyone who went to the studio described it as beautifully organized chaos. He kept dossiers on dozens of individuals, some of whom he knew, some of whom he was friends with, and some of whom had died three hundred years prior. He kept dossiers on Dürer, he kept a dossier on Lauren Bacall for 30 years. And he was making these exquisitely poetic boxes which were aligning him more with European Surrealists, a label he rejected.”

Perhaps the most eccentric in a milieu full of eccentrics, Cornell lived his whole life in the same house and rarely ventured outside of New York City. One exception was attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. As a graduation gift, he was promised by his father a trip to Paris. But his father died soon thereafter, and Cornell, despite having reached his senior year, never graduated. Instead, he returned home to care for his mother and his younger brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy.

A voracious reader, Cornell was an armchair traveler, once describing specific sights in Paris to his friend Marcel Duchamp, who was surprised to later learn that Cornell had never visited the city. An autodidact, in his late 20s he began making collages and assemblages—boxes with items strategically placed within. Some of the items commented on or rhymed with others, some did not. But they were regarded as treasures by those who collected them, including figures like a young Yayoi Kusama, with whom he shared a platonic relationship. Once, when his mother caught them kissing, she is said to have thrown water on the couple.

In 1931, Cornell visited Julien Levy Gallery while Levy was unpacking new works by Surrealists like Max Ernst. Captivated, Cornell later brought his own collages to show Levy and was invited to join the gallery’s 1932 Surrealist exhibition. In addition to Levy, he later showed with gallerists like Richard Feigen and Leo Castelli.

Those who made the journey to Utopia Parkway include filmmaker and collector Billy Wilder, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of assemblage Cornell found kinship with, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Mark Rothko and Stan Brakhage. His artwork impacted that of people like Dorothea Tanning, Betye Saar, Octavio Paz and Louise Nevelson, among many others.

A transplant from Houston to Paris, Wes Anderson might have visited the house on Utopia Parkway had he not been born a mere three years before Cornell’s passing. Their work overlaps in movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel, the poster of which appears to be a tribute to Cornell’s castles and hotel pieces like Untitled (Pink Palace).

“It goes beyond the aesthetic, the narrative and storytelling, it’s a deeply layered relationship. And Wes, someone who’s grown up in the States and made a decision to live his life in Europe, when you look at his films, there’s certainly a kindred spirit,” notes Sharp, who refrained from referencing “pink palace” in the show, lest it shorthand their artistic kinship.

“He treasured as perhaps the last of his almost Edwardian youth, the right to be quietly eccentric,” wrote art critic Jed Perl, “to take a subtly ironic attitude toward a world that he observed with the friendly caution of a man who was glad to be here but also suspected that he was meant for another time and place.”

A devotee to opera and ballet, Cornell struck up friendships with dancers like Tamara Toumanova, Allegra Kent and Balanchine’s tragic muse, Tanaquil LeClercq, but never married and, by his own admission, died a virgin. His final sentiment, expressed to his sister, was one of a heart-wrenching regret: “I wish I had not been so reserved.”

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Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.

Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”

It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.

Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.

“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”

Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.

“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”

Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.

“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”

Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.

“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”

Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.

The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.

“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”

The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.

“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”

“Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse” is at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 25, 2026.

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Sometimes asthma is a good thing. If artist Robert Therrien didn’t suffer from it as a child, he might not have spent most of his time indoors, drawing and absorbing comic book images, and he might not have spent as much time surrounded by the shapes and objects we normally associate with domesticity, such as skillets, stacked dishes, a dining room table and chairs. These items make up just some of the artworks in the retrospective, “Robert Therrien: This is a Story” at L.A.’s the Broad through April 5.

“He was inside more and kind of a sickly kid,” Dean Anes, co-director of the artist’s estate and former Therrien liaison at Gagosian Beverly Hills, tells Observer. “Back then, in the comic books, there would be ‘Draw Tippy,’ a turtle with a hat, and he would draw those. This gameplay of drawing was also something he did as a child and continued into his work.”

Gathered here are some 120 artworks from the L.A.-based sculptor who passed in 2019. Included are artworks ranging from simple drawings, like those mentioned above, to No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) (2007).

“There’s a great desire to see artists as illustrating their memories. Robert Therrien, for me, did not do that,” says Broad curator Ed Schad. “He took generative moments inside his own biography and used that as an opportunity to go and meet a visitor on terrain that is shared. So, even though the table held specific memories for him, that’s far, far less important than creating an object that held memories for you.”

One item that holds memories for this viewer is the logo of Underwood deviled ham, a red devil silhouette brandishing a pitchfork. It is a recurring motif in the show, found in the silkscreen, ink, bleach and graphite on paper, No title (devil thinking about three feet) from 1993, as well as No title (waving devil) from 1991, also on paper. While the latter is in black, the former is in red, and both are cousins of Therrien’s 1993 No title (devil wall), a silkscreen with an off-white background and five randomly spaced tiny devils. All bear some relationship to his No title (red dots panel), inspired by the dots he saw as a child after using his asthma inhaler.

Motifs are common in Therrien’s work, shapes that rhyme, like an oilcan and a chapel, both of which feature a large base with a long thin feeder or steeple. No title (blue chapel relief) from 1982 changed color a year later and became No title (bent cone relief), and later became No title (red chapel relief) in 1991, and No title (black witch hat) in 2018. Similarly, the snowman shape he created in the late 1970s, a stand-in for the human form, when turned on its side became a cloud in 1981 and, later, smoke signals.

“He spoke about the subjects as the more ties and strings of meaning for him, the more interesting they were for him,” says Paul Cherwick, co-director of the Robert Therrien Estate and the artist’s assistant of 17 years. “He didn’t read them one way or another. He saw them in multitudes.”

It’s one of the reasons he left most of his works untitled. “He was very cloaked about the true meaning behind those things,” says Anes, noting a connection to Marcel Duchamp, who likewise found inspiration in quotidian items. “He never divulged that as part of what you were supposed to understand or take away. You were supposed to figure that out for yourself. He could have been making statements with it, but he preferred to have people come and realize what they’re thinking about it as opposed to his take on it.”

At the age of 21, Therrien attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and opened a studio in Berkeley. He later studied printmaking at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and painting at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. In 1971, he moved to L.A. and pursued a master’s at USC. A year later, he moved into his studio at 5084 West Pico, a storefront with a living space upstairs.

A landmark year came in 1985 when he participated in the Whitney Biennial with No title (iron snowman) and No title (bent cone). That same year, he showed at Gagosian in L.A. and began his relationship with Leo Castelli in New York City.

Five years later, Therrien moved into a custom-built studio near USC on West 37th Place, which he modeled after his former studio. The larger space had a direct impact on his work. Mainly, things got bigger. Within five years, he made Under the Table, which was exhibited at Carnegie International but was preemptively purchased by the Broad Art Foundation.

In 1998, he made No title (black beds), two plastic and enamel beds placed end to end, curling upward in an arch, which appeared in the artist’s 2000 LACMA show highlighting the change in his work since the 1990 move. Its cousin, No title (large telephone cloud), a steel and enamel snarl of telephone and cords, was made the same year. Both inspired No title (large metal squiggle), a steel sculpture of looped wire from 2017.

“It really did open up the scale when he went to 7,000 square feet,” says Anes about the new studio. “We’re talking about the time when the galleries were really sizing up their works. I know there was a push to create larger things for the greater art world and institutions. His answer was to go supersize and create an environment.”

Oversized pieces in the show include No title (stacked plates), a classic from 1992, as well as No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) and No title (disc cart III, grotty), which resembles a drying rack for oversized plates.

“Most of the sculptural tradition is about monuments, putting a person on horseback, up on a pedestal to loom over you from a powerful position,” observes Schad. “It’s profound to think that something of size can be about individual human responses to sizes. That it’s not about the powerful figures, it’s not about history, it’s not about religion, it’s about you inhabiting your life, your body, your memories.”

Among the largest works in the show is an oversized beard made of stainless steel. It sits in a gallery with smaller beards made of synthetic hair or plastic, a motif that emerged around 1999. Inspired by Constantin Brancusi, it’s not the only piece he made that was dedicated to the pioneering modernist. No title (linear bird panel) is an oil on cardboard tribute to Brancusi’s most famous bronze, Bird in Space (1928).

To meet city codes, the studio near USC required space for an indoor dumpster. The wasted space inspired No title (room, pots and pans I), resembling an enormous pantry stuffed with oversized pots and pans, enclosed by a Dutch door, a recurring subject in his practice based on a feature in his grandparents’ home he recalled from childhood. Red Room is a mixed media piece with approximately 888 red objects stuffed into the closet-sized space. No title (room, panic doors) is a related piece but is less like a closet than an institutional space with naked walls and a fluorescent light.

“To the outside world, he was definitely an introvert and not the life of the party. In his studio was the place where he was comfortable. There, you would have long conversations about literature, poetry, music, gossip, all kinds of things,” notes Anes, who along with Cherwick, lost a close friend when Therrien passed in 2019. “He was a very interesting and engaging guy.”

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art

• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

The year of the Guerrilla—that’s what 2025 is. Not the insurgent kind with a gun in her hand, but the artistic kind with a paintbrush. The Guerrilla Girls, the witty and irreverent activist movement battling sexism in the art world, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with shows in D.C., London, Germany and Norway. Their largest retrospective, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” is at L.A.’s Getty Research Institute through April 26, 2026.

“Our exhibition is drawn from the archives, housed here at the GRI. That’s really the cornerstone in addition to more contemporary works that are on loan,” says co-curator Kristin Juarez about the show, which brings together posters, planning documents and ephemera. “It tells the story of how they worked together, how these works came to be, giving a behind-the-scenes look at their collaboration and how they thought through these processes.”

A newly commissioned work for the exhibition explores the Getty’s collection of European painting and sculpture depicting violence against women. It’s introduced with a text that says, “Too much violence in our culture today? Take a look at these old masterpieces.”

Familiar figures are presented in a single composition, each with comic strip-like speech bubbles. Included is Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold (1622), where a nude Danaë, imprisoned by her father, reaches up toward a gold torrent symbolizing Zeus. The captions tell her story, ending with the comment: “The artist showed me naked and willing when in fact I’m a prisoner being raped.” Nearby is Lucretia, painted by Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia. The scene of this Roman noblewoman’s rape is a subject Gentileschi often returned to after her own experience being raped by fellow artist Agostino Tassi, who spent less than a year in prison for his crime.

Also included is an oversized version of the Mona Lisa with a fig leaf covering her mouth, part of their billboard, First They Want to Take Away a Woman’s Right to Choose…Now They’re Censoring Art. The show wouldn’t be complete without a copy of their 1989 billboard, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, which depicts Ingres’ Grande Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask. Included are statistics noting that 5 percent of paintings in the museum’s modern art section are painted by women, while 85 percent of the nudes are women. Included are early designs for the billboard, as well as updated versions from 2005 and 2012.

“What the Guerrilla Girls were doing is collecting the evidence,” says Juarez, noting how data has been essential to their message, exhibited here in archival photographs, annotated charts, research files and handwritten tallies. “So, when they’re developing posters that look at galleries and collections, they can say, ‘No, it hasn’t changed, or maybe it has.’ The methodology is relevant in holding institutions accountable.”

The statistics indicate chronic underrepresentation, the result of ingrained ideas formed through an old-boys-club mentality. Wealthy collectors, many of whom sit on the boards at major cultural institutions, favor works that mirror their own ideas and worldviews. “The system of legitimization within the art world is a problem,” says co-curator Zanna Gilbert. “The Guerrilla Girls are interested in promoting different ideas of what art is and can be: What is genius, and what is art for? It can be for creating community. The values that underpin our art world can also be changed.”

The group leads by example, lowballing their posters, although they could charge more. “They’ve never created a situation where they are making their work inaccessible, limiting circulation to make it more valuable, which is what the art world tends to do,” adds Gilbert.

It began in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when a group of women (future founding members) protested an exhibition that featured only 13 women out of 169 artists. The response was vague curiosity and a collective yawn. In their frustration, they realized that a concerted effort was needed to change attitudes about equal representation in art.

Women artists began holding formal meetings in lofts and studios, eventually creating a poster campaign that would blanket the city, and they held art institutions and galleries accountable. Concerned that their activism might damage their reputations, participants donned gorilla masks and used aliases. Employing eye-catching design and advertising techniques, statistics and humor, they painted the town in wheatpaste posters. “We’ve encouraged our gallery to show more women of color, have you?” queried a letter sent to prominent male artists in the 1980s. Responders signed an agreement, and their names appeared on posters advocating for greater representation.

One of the group’s most famous posters ironically lists the advantages of being a woman artist, items like “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty” and “Having more time to work after your mate dumps you for someone younger” or “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.” Early drafts of the list accompany it, with one including a list of advantages to being a male artist, among them, “Being considered a ‘good investment’.”

“That’s something we show—the process by which a poster would come to be,” Gilbert says. “They had to agree; it was consensus-based. There were a lot of ideas that didn’t make it onto the final poster. But if they agreed on something, then people would come with different ideas, and they would hash it out together, brainstorming and whittling these things down.”

Membership in the group rotated continuously, but members were always anonymous, borrowing monikers from historically underrepresented artists like Frida Kahlo and German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz. Members contributed in any way they could. One founding member had a background in advertising, so she worked on designing posters. Others performed menial tasks, such as going through the mail. Some focused on guerrilla actions at universities or booking TV appearances and getting the word out.

“If we believe in art and the power of art, then we also need to listen to it and help it affect change in our own institutions,” offers Gilbert. “I think there’s a really intransigent part of the art world that we see 40 years after the Guerrilla Girls started. Maybe it hasn’t changed all that much, the most market-driven part of the art world. But certainly institutions have changed and have better representation of women artists and artists of color.”

Over the past year, artists such as Lucy Bull, Firelei Báez, Frida Kahlo and Jadé Fadojutimi have set auction records, perhaps due in part to the efforts of the Guerrilla Girls. Juarez sees changes throughout the art world, although change can be frustratingly slow. “To be relevant,” she says of the establishment. “They need to be engaging with and showing work that represents the communities they’re a part of.”

Sometimes a headache is a good thing, and sometimes a migraine is a message from God. At least that’s what Hildegard of Bingen thought. Often called the Sybil of the Rhine, she was a mystic, visionary, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner. Subject to visions, she was a 12th-century German Renaissance woman before such a thing existed.

“From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time,” she wrote toward the end of her life. “The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it ‘the reflection of the living Light.’ And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.”

Speculation varies on Hildegard’s affliction, some calling it divine manifestation, and the more scientifically inclined calling it epilepsy, autism or as neurologist Oliver Sacks opined in his 1970 book Migraine, “migraine with aura.” It’s what drew composer and fellow migraine sufferer Sarah Kirkland Snider to Hildegard.

“I wanted this to be an opera about what it means to be yourself when being yourself comes into conflict with socially conditioned notions of right and wrong,” Snider tells Observer about her first opera, HILDEGARD, which had its world premiere yesterday as part of LA Opera’s Off Grand series highlighting new works, running through November 9 at The Wallis in Beverly Hills. “I wanted to write an opera that was not only about Hildegard but about female relationships, collaborative, empowering relationships.”

One empowering relationship is that which Snider shares with visionary producer Beth Morrison, who strongly believed in the composer’s first opera effort after falling in love with her Penelope, a 2010 song cycle based on Homer’s Odyssey.

“I’m so proud of her,” Morrison says of Snider. “It’s been totally a labor of love. She loves Hildegard so much, the historical figure, and she’s written such a beautiful piece. And I can’t wait to share it with everybody.”

Snider’s music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Emerson String Quartet and soprano Renée Fleming in venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center and the Sydney Opera House. Much of her work has centered around chamber ensemble compositions, orchestral and, lately, choral and sacred music like her 2020 album Mass for the Endangered. Despite her many accomplishments, opera remained a mountain yet unscaled.

“I’m actually not a big opera fan,” she confesses, which might explain why she’s taken so long to compose one. “It either seems overblown, and kind of blustery and ridiculous, or it seems not immersive or emotional enough. With a lot of modern operas, I have a hard time relating to the characters. So, I wanted to make things immersive and emotional and relatable.”

HILDEGARD director Elkhanah Pulitzer, who regularly collaborates with composer John Adams, recently helmed his Antony and Cleopatra at the Met. Her LA Opera productions include Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 2014. For Hildegard, she envisions a blend of influences inspired by medieval religious paintings and iconography, as well as a minimalist take on Hildegard’s own artwork.

Leading a cast of nine, soprano Nola Richardson makes her LA Opera debut as Hildegard, accompanied by soprano Mikaela Bennett as Richardus. Veteran baritone David Adam Moore, seen earlier this year in Beth Morrison Productions’ Adoration, plays Hildegard’s superior, Abbot Cuno.

In her early fifties, Hildegard met and cared for Sister Richardus, an epileptic who endured the era’s best-known cure for her affliction—severe beatings meant to drive out malignant spirits. In return for Hildegard’s kindness, Richardus transcribed her visions for presentation to the pope. If they were not approved, Hildegard faced excommunication, making the opera’s principal conflict one of the individual versus an entrenched power structure. But there’s more—rape, disinterment, accidental suicide and a faceless angel, to name some.

Morrison introduced Snider to two librettists early in a process that began eight years ago. Librettos are commonly written by poets, who are adroit at saying a lot in a few words. Snider recalls hearing a frequent refrain: “You’ve got a lot of ideas here, you should really write this yourself.”

“I felt so much self-doubt,” she shudders. “But then when I started getting the music involved, that really helped shape the libretto. The challenge I had was only nine instruments to work with. For me, that’s a relatively small ensemble. And for a two-hour opera, I think the challenges were mostly just how to keep interest sustained, how to find peaks and valleys and keep this thing levitating all the way through.”

Morrison had concerns but stood behind Snider in her effort to write her own libretto, bringing in dramaturg Annie Jin Wang and the director Elkhanah Pulitzer to assist. “So, when she kind of settled into herself with it, and found her confidence, then she was able to really write this very, very beautiful narrative and language that is the libretto that we have today,” Morrison recalls.

It wasn’t just the libretto that pushed Snider to her limit. There were multiple workshops and meetings, eviscerating her words and music, a process she found “grueling and decimating.”

“Emotionally, I’m constantly getting torn down and having to build myself back up, my confidence and conviction,” she laments. “Arguing with a group about my ideas, that’s not easy. I’ve developed some battle scars.”

With that in mind, one might assume that HILDEGARD will be Snider’s first and last opera. But no, she says she can’t wait to do another. “Writing a two-and-a-half-hour opera gets you thinking on a bigger canvas, bigger storylines,” she offers. “I’m always trying to make musical connections and have motivic repetition, but it’s not easy to do that over the course of two and a half hours. I want music to tell the story and help orient the listener. For me, it’s a lot of referencing your own materials in ways that keep it fresh and changing, and use new harmonic color to shape the ever-evolving emotion of the characters. It’s something I haven’t done before on that scale.”

HILDEGARD will be presented as part of Beth Morrison Productions’ Prototype Festival in January, and at the Aspen Music Festival Summer 2026. Also coming early next year is Snider’s new orchestral album Forward Into Light, as well as an untitled new work for the New World Symphony and the Miami City Ballet premiering in April. After that, she will introduce Marmoris with the Monterey Symphony in May.

“I’m always trying to push in new directions with my music and try to lean into my fears, cause I feel like interesting things can happen there,” she says. “I have grown so much through this process. We have this idea that as we get older, we get entrenched, we calcify with our ideas and our ways of doing things. With this opera, it’s been the opposite for me. I’ve pulled all the cells out of my body and put in new ones. And I feel younger and more alive, creatively, than I ever have before. That has been really wonderful and really exciting.”

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Some say it began in 2015, when Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine worshippers in cold blood. According to survivors of the massacre, before opening fire, Roof told them, “Y’all are raping our women, and y’all are taking over the country, and you have to go.”

It surprised few that racism was alive and well in the U.S., but many were shocked at the overt racism that characterized Donald Trump’s first term, notably when he referred to white supremacists as “some very fine people” following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one dead. On that night in 2017, white supremacists gathered around a monument of Stonewall Jackson, mounted on his horse. Such tributes to Confederate figures had become targets of groups like Black Lives Matter and others who saw them as symbols of a racist cause defending the Confederacy’s “peculiar institution” of slavery. Since then, roughly 300 monuments have been decommissioned in cities across the U.S., most of them in the South.

Those who take pride in the Confederacy’s Lost Cause argue that decommissioning public monuments amounts to erasure. But the only thing being erased with the show, “Monuments” at MOCA Geffen and The Brick through May 3, 2026, is the myth of valor. “These objects are not history. They have a history. But these objects are about myth,” says The Brick curator Hamza Walker, who teamed with MOCA’s Bennett Simpson on the show. “People talk about recontextualization. So, putting plaques next to them, that’s one thing, more didactic materials.” That’s what W.E.B. Du Bois had in mind when he argued in a 1931 issue of The Crisis: “If Confederate monuments had told the truth, they would have included inscriptions that read: ‘Sacred to the memory of those who fought to perpetuate human slavery.’”

The MOCA Geffen houses 18 decommissioned monuments, including bronze ingots that were once a figure of Robert E. Lee, standing proudly in Charlottesville. Many bear the marks of ignoble demise, like the red paint veiling Beaux-Arts master Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl’s 1903 piece, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Like the rest, its presence is powerfully imposing within the confines of a gallery. Recontextualizing these monuments are commissioned artworks by practitioners such as Bethany Collins, Abigail DeVille, Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Walter Price, Davóne Tines, Julie Dash and Kara Walker. Additional artworks by Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Hugh Mangum, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano and Hank Willis Thomas are on loan from private collectors and art institutions.

Sculptor J. Maxwell Miller’s 1917 monument, Confederate Women of Maryland, stands in conversation with Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit series of photos that pose Black mothers with their fallen sons in Pietà-like compositions that mimic the monument, giving voice to the many who have lost loved ones through violence and institutional racism.

A powerful counterbalance to all of the monuments is Hugh Mangum’s 1910 portrait series of average African American citizens, nameless here but seen in a way that was rare in the Jim Crow South, when most of the monuments were erected. Mangum’s photos stand in stark contrast to Andres Serrano’s color portraits of anonymous Klansmen who, in their shame, hide behind hoods. A rebuke lies in Edward V. Valentine’s pink-splattered likeness of Jefferson Davis from 1907, which used to stand in Richmond, Virginia.

Proponents of the Lost Cause argue that the war had nothing to do with slavery, noting that only 5.67 percent of the white population were enslavers and that the conflict was over states’ rights and safeguarding Southern culture. This insignificant percentage ignores the fact that adjustments accounting for the family unit would put enslavers closer to 30.8 percent, and roughly 50 percent in South Carolina and Mississippi. Without slavery, the Southern economy was unsustainable. Others argue that plantation life was characterized by bucolic peace and harmony. Such nostalgia for a fictional time and place was captured in silhouettes of the era, often depicting children at play and contented workers in the fields. In artist Kara Walker’s hands, such nostalgia is shattered by silhouettes of graphic violence and rape committed against slaves, powerfully belying the myth behind the Lost Cause and confronting viewers with the truth.

It’s what makes Walker the perfect candidate to take on the Stonewall Jackson monument that stood at the heart of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. She and her team disassembled the bronze sculpture, then reassembled it as a grotesque centaur, combining elements of Jackson with those of his gelding, Little Sorrel.

“I wanted to deal with the material in a way that was also about the act of separation—separating man from horse and man from myth,” Walker said in an interview with Hamza about the new piece entitled Unmanned Drone. “The stuff we’re parsing through—the Lost Cause, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, these symbolic assertions of white supremacy—it’s in the bloodstream, in a way. That’s really a horror.”

The Trump administration has appointed only two Black people among the 98 Senate-confirmed nominees for major government departments. It has attacked cultural and educational institutions that support DEI initiatives and has targeted agencies with many minority workers for cuts, disproportionately affecting Black federal employees. This comes at a time when the Supreme Court is believed to be poised to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, effectively nullifying Black votes through redistricting. The current iteration of racial strife might have begun with Dylann Roof, but its roots go back all the way to 1619 and the arrival of the first slaves on U.S. soil.

“Sometimes you’re not even aware of the ebb and flow. And suddenly, to watch the dismantling of things that I thought were sacrosanct, that’s the ebb and flow. This moment connects also to that larger arch,” offers Hamza. “The Lost Cause as an ideology is still here.”

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• ‘Jon Rafman’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Not even historic wildfires and a year of ICE roundups could stop “Made in LA,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial pulse check on the art scene in Los Angeles, on through March 1, 2026. This year, 28 artists were chosen by Art Institute of Chicago and former Hammer curator Paulina Pobocha and independent curator Essence Harden. “We did our studio visits in 2024, and we saw too many people and so many varieties of work that I would say it was very difficult to find a genre or category that seemed to exist or have a larger presence than any other. The distribution of genres and mediums is really broad,” Pobocha tells Observer.

Harden was drawn to the work of Amanda Ross-Ho for her emphasis on object and place. Visits to the studios of sculptor Pat O’Neill and Carl Cheng, with his “nature machines” and pseudo-appliances, left them gobsmacked, as did experimental film Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) by Mike Stoltz, commissioned later for the show. “His work is so engaging, in a multifaceted media-analog way,” says Harden. “Those things surprised me, like a lot of people whom we stumbled upon and then were blown away when we got to the studio.”

Artist Leilah Weinraub’s work The Kids integrates video and performance in her imaginative study of the often ornate building facades of Lower Manhattan. She’s also teamed with theatermakers Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel of Hollywood’s New Theater for their film THEATER, a silent movie shot in 16mm. “Experimental avant-garde theater has a very long history in Germany and Weimar Germany between the wars. A lot of the people who ran those theaters were Jews who emigrated to Los Angeles and started the entertainment industry,” Pobocha says of the Pitegoff and Henkel, who managed several noteworthy bar and theater spaces in Berlin, including TV Bar and Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne. “There’s a generational structure connecting a place like Berlin to L.A. There are actors everywhere, making movies, but there’s not much theater going on. So, what they’re doing is deeply rooted in the history of the city.”

In THEATER, Weinraub stars as an Uber driver in L.A. who gets hit by a city bus and receives a payout from the state. With her newfound fortune, she decides to start a theater and assembles an acting ensemble. She soon runs out of money and starts living in the theater. Hitting rock bottom, she rents it out. Henkel and Pitegoff used rehearsal footage of productions they staged in the theater for the film.

“It definitely pulls from the world around us,” says Henkel. “We are obsessed with the acting classes in the neighborhood. We filmed them painting the building red, and in the film, a character pays to paint the building red. We fill in and shoot this narrative when we can, and then at a certain point, we edit it together. The theater next door that was there when we were working on the film is now closed and gutted. So, it’s a lot of documenting other spaces.”

New Theater Hollywood is named for an establishment they had in Berlin. The L.A. iteration is housed in a historic 49-seat black box theater on the Theater Row section of Santa Monica Boulevard, a dilapidated stretch in Hollywood. “In Germany, theater is the most direct way, as an art form, to speak to the people,” says Henkel. “There, everyone goes to the theater. It’s really set up so that people of all backgrounds go. You can stand up in the middle and say, ‘fuck this,’ and walk out. It is state-funded. It allows for experimentation, artistry on an amazing level.”

Originally from Chicago, artist Amanda Ross-Ho relocated to L.A. 20 years ago to attend grad school at USC and currently teaches at UC Irvine. For her 2008 California Biennial piece Frauds for an Inside Job, she transported the actual walls of her East L.A. studio into the galleries of the Orange County Museum of Art. The nine panels stood 11 feet tall, the same height as the four panels of her “Made in L.A.” installation Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS). “There are relationships with scale that not a lot of people have the capacity to do, and recovering her own personal history, but not in a way that felt obvious in terms of the texture itself,” says Harden. “We invited her because we were interested in her way of thinking through objects and space that I haven’t seen that much of.”

Ross-Ho turned tragedy into triumph when her father, artist Ruyell Ho, was hit by a car in 2020 and injured his head and hip. Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is composed of four scaled-up versions of the door to his room in a medical facility. Each represents a different season through holiday decorations—Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, July 4, and Halloween.

“Decorations mark time for patients with memory issues, dementia,” says Ross-Ho, who worked as a propmaker in Hollywood when she first moved to L.A. “I was interested in creating this thing where you saw the walls as an artifact that was kind of ripped out. Displacement is a factor. This is all prop making. I wanted you to feel like these doors were pulled out and set into the place.”

Like most of “Made in LA,” Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is not overtly political in our current polarized era. But viewers who dig deeper will find elements that comment on the hostility immigrants are facing nationwide. “For me, this isn’t extraordinarily political but is oblique,” she says. “My dad was an immigrant and had this incredible life of overcoming all sorts of things, not just to survive but mostly being free. And in this medical facility are the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, the most without. And this is a Medicare unit. They’re on the chopping block.”

In a time when caring and compassion are somehow considered radical acts, Ross-Ho’s work takes on political undertones. In a time when ethnic subject matter is considered woke, Patrick Martinez’s epic piece, Battle of the City on Fire, depicting Mayan murals as street art, becomes political. And Bruce Yonemoto’s Broken Fences, juxtaposing footage of Japanese American prisoners interned during World War II with Jews in Nazi death camps, is political in any era.

“This thing happening now in the United States is not ahistorical. Even ICE itself is not an invention of Donald Trump,” observes Pobocha. “From ICE raids in L.A. to so many current government policies, these are returning crises not only in the United States but in Los Angeles. I think these artists are students of history.”

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The idea of tourism is a relatively new one. In the medieval period, no one traveled for fun. In fact, most people never ventured further than twenty miles from their hometown. If they did, it was usually for one of five reasons—diplomacy, war, trade, pilgrimage or enslavement. These ventures, captured in illuminated manuscripts, are the subject of the Getty Center’s “Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages,” on view through Nov. 30.

“Eyewitness accounts, hearsay and rumor, these sorts of things get combined with historical fiction. Accounts that are received from antiquity and repeated over and over again, then merge with eyewitness accounts and blend together in a mix of some fact informed by historical fiction, and elaborated for medieval imagination,” Getty’s associate curator of manuscripts, Larisa Grollemond, tells Observer. “If you did take a journey, pilgrimage would be it. Foot travel is by far the most common mode of transportation, foot travel, donkey and cart.”

Capturing this theme are The Translation of the Bodies of Aimo and Vermondo and The People of Milan Praying at the Altar Where Aimo and Vermondo are Buried, two illuminations attributed to Anovelo da Imbonate, circa 1400. Made from elements common to the medium—tempera, gold leaf and ink on parchment—the artwork’s Byzantine handling of perspective is evident in the positioning of the bodies of 7th-century saints, Aimo and Vermondo.

“We’ve been taught this narrative of artistic progress, which culminates in the Renaissance with an increased naturalism, which we think of as better or more sophisticated,” explains Grollemond. “Medieval artists are not often interested in naturalism; that’s not the point. They’re interested in decoration, ornamentation and emotional power of the images, and their ability to convey a particular kind of information. There are some things in the 12th and 13th Centuries that we would not consider naturalist or realist at all, but the technique is beautiful. It’s not doing the things that we expect of art, in some ways, but it is fulfilling a purpose that was very much part of the book culture and visual culture of the Middle Ages that we don’t necessarily share today.”

By the 15th Century, there was greater dialogue between Northern European and Italian artists, and it shows in works like Flemish artist Simon Bening’s 1550 miniature, Villagers on Their Way to Church, from a Book of Hours, a devotional volume for Christians. Jacques de Lalaing Taking His Leave from the Dauphin of France, from 1530, shows celebrity knight Jacques de Lalaing, famous for his prowess and tournament fighting in non-lethal competitions.

A new acquisition is a 13th-century manuscript devoted to Alexander the Great, including Alexander the Great with the Horse Bucephalus, a late 14th-century image of the king wearing aristocratic pointy shoes and holding the reins of the horse, which, according to prophecy, could only be tamed by he who would conquer the world. Alexander Adventuring Underwater depicts the legendary king in a giant jar, surrounded by fantastical animals as he explores the ocean depths.

Illuminated manuscripts are full of such beasts, like the dragons seen roaming the desert in China, from Book of the Marvels of the World. A common reference for the wild kingdom was The Bestiary, a compendium of creatures compiled throughout the Middle Ages. It mixed mythical creatures like the griffin with real-life animals like the lion, albeit a likeness not fully familiar to contemporary readers. Around the time of The Bestiary, Henry III of England received an elephant as a gift from France’s Louis IX, which might explain why it’s rendered more accurately than lions and deep-sea creatures.

“Misinterpretation becomes a baseline for later writers,” explains Grollemond. “People like Marco Polo go to India or China, and they see a rhinoceros and say, ‘I saw this thing with a horn and it has these metal plates, and it’s bumpy and weird-looking. I didn’t know unicorns would look like that.’”

Most manuscripts are bespoke books for the medieval one percent. Early practitioners tended to be monastic illuminators, but by the end of the Middle Ages, there were thriving book markets in many European cities and the emergence of professional scribes and artists—most of whom remained anonymous as it was not common practice to sign a manuscript. Professional binders and guilds dedicated to the manufacture of pigments, ink and other tools of trade were instrumental in expanding the practice.

It’s not easy tracing the legacy of illuminated manuscripts, but Grollemond senses the closest progeny might be art books. “There’s something intimate and seductive about the book as an object. You have a relationship with people through time when you handle books. I think there’s something really nice about that.”

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• Yale Center for British Art Illuminates William Blake’s Imagination in ‘Burning Bright’

• Kim Tschang-yeul’s Water Droplets Flow Through Eternity at MMCA Seoul

• Black Creative Resilience Challenges Historical Erasure in Derek Fordjour’s “Nightsong”

• At Musée Jacquemart-André, Georges de La Tour’s Light Shines Brightly

It’s not the art fair; it’s Los Angeles’s Other Art Fair, which is so named because it often coincides with bigger fairs like Frieze. Earlier this year, the spring edition of the Other Art Fair L.A. was staged at a warehouse in Atwater Village. But this past weekend, in its second West Coast iteration for 2025, it occupied Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. Organizers of the fair are happy to report that it set a new record for the L.A. edition: the second-highest sales in the history of the fair, trailing this year’s spring edition in Chicago. Sales were up 94 percent over September 2024 and up 52 percent over September 2023, and 95 percent of exhibitors made at least one sale. (The top 10 selling artists saw an average profit margin of 88 percent.)

With shows in London, Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas and a number of cities in Australia, the Other Art Fair posts an open call online, with no fee to apply. Artists upload four artworks and background material, which is reviewed by a rotating selection committee comprising artists, dealers and sometimes nonprofit personnel. Of the 150 artists that participated in the most recent edition, about half come from L.A., the other half from around the world. They can rent a booth for as little as $2,250, which affords artists two spotlights, a nameboard, 20 complimentary VIP tickets and discounted tickets to the fair, plus three pre-fair 60-minute workshops covering operations, marketing and curation.

While art markets in general are seeing a slump, the Other Art Fair has implemented a strategy that seeks wider engagement rather than focusing on a few wealthy buyers to boost numbers. “We’ll have someone walk into the fair and drop $20,000, no big deal. We’re seeing fewer of those, but we’re just trying to get in front of more people, not necessarily art lovers, who are already collecting art,” Saatchi director Nicole Garton tells Observer. “Maybe you have a lower budget to spend on art. But we have amazing and incredible work for $5,000. Some people, their budget is under $500, so we have special curated sections to hit people wherever their entry point is. It means no matter where you’re at, we’ve got something for you.”

It’s easy to assume that, happening in such a heated political environment, current events might be reflected in the show. “Art buyers fall into every political spectrum and issue. It’s a delicate line to walk. If there’s a lot of outspokenness in this direction, does it turn off people?” she says, characterizing the show as politically muted. “You might expect it to be more robust, but I think people are feeling defeated. Rather than ‘fired up,’ I think it’s more like care for each other. So, it’s very gentle.”

The fall iteration of the fair had programming full of art-adjacent activities like a chakra tune-up and an immersive sound bath portal. Visitors could stop by The Karmacy 2.0, where a pill bottle with a note inside might make their day. They could also make another’s, leaving a note for a future “patient.” Exhibitor Alycia Shiann was reading animal guide oracles, artist Mad Watson was painting Aura Portraits. Some sipped tea with Priscilla, who’d read the leaves when they were done, or danced to music by Mariachi Tierra Mía, DJ Phatrick and KCRW’s Dan Wilcox.

“The artists come from whatever background—art school, retired teacher picking up their passion again, self-taught, at the start of their career. We get scientists who are approaching from a technological perspective,” says Garton, noting the organization’s loose definition of art and their recognition of craft. “We have, for many years, seen a rise in textile work and embroidery. We have artists who make paintings out of beads. So, if it’s coming from an artistic place, we’re going to embrace it.”

Artist Sam Tilson, an Angeleno who used to work in the film industry, now earns money as an event photographer. “If I sell something, awesome. But it’s not the end of the world if I don’t,” he told Observer, standing in a booth hung with photos of astronauts alongside an erupting volcano in Iceland. “I’ve been an artist my whole life. It’s the first time having it available for purchase in a gallery setting. I’ve been enjoying it because it’s a way better way to meet people instead of doing social media. Last time, I think I got 50 people to sign up for my email list. Getting people to do that on the internet is hard. So, I really appreciate the in-person aspect. Also, the opportunity to meet curators and people who want to buy art.”

Julie Crone, from Newport Beach, was attending for the second time. A full-time artist, she was thrilled to be asked to hang some of her abstracts made from cut canvas, oil, acrylic and cold wax in the lounge, giving her visibility outside her booth. “It’s a great experience,” she said. “I’ve met people here who I met while I was doing it a couple of years back. It’s like a family.”

With the fires earlier in the year, followed by ongoing ICE roundups since spring, mounting another edition of the fair in L.A. might have been less than optimum. But in the end, Garton and fair participants are thrilled by the results. “It’s so much more emotional than what I feel when I’m at other art fairs,” says Garton. “The artist, it’s all on their face, and they’re so excited to talk to everyone.”

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If a classic is defined as “that which achieves a lasting reputation for quality and relevance,” then West Side Story is classic in the best and worst ways. With giants like Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and a young Stephen Sondheim, quality is never in doubt. Sadly, with themes of racism and street crime, neither is its relevance.

“When I was a kid, hearing the Jets hurl all that negativity toward Latinos, I learned a lot of slurs. It had a big impact on me,” soprano Gabriella Reyes tells Observer about seeing the movie for the first time. The daughter of immigrants, she’s singing Maria in LA Opera’s season opener through Oct. 12. “I heard it again in school and amongst people I thought were friends. And also seeing it in the immigrant communities, the fear of being sent back, since I was a kid. It’s amazing to me that it has not gone away. It has escalated.”

Making her LA Opera debut, Reyes is familiar to New York fans from the Met’s 2024-2025 season as Margarita Xirgu in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar. She also sang both Mimì and Musetta in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of La Bohème.

‘Tony’ to her ‘Maria’ is tenor Duke Kim, who brought the house down last season as Romeo in LA Opera’s production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet.

“Pieces like this are very important, ‘cause we show the struggle, the hate but also the love humans can have,” Kim says of West Side Story. “We pose the question—which one can I choose? It’s up to you. And I think it’s even more important nowadays to ask these questions.”

Partnered for the first time, Reyes and Kim are under the direction of the great Francesca Zambello who, by her own count, is directing West Side Story for the 12th time, including productions at the Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance and an outdoor show overlooking the harbor in Sydney, Australia. In the U.S., she helmed productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival, all three of which are co-producers on the show.

“The young people, it’s making them understand the incredibly horrific situation of the story, which gets more horrible every day, the unbelievable treatment of immigrants and undocumented workers,” says Zambello about the roughly 1,900 detained in LA ICE raids since last spring, most of whom have no criminal record. “It’s amazing they wrote this seventy years ago. Everything in it is amplified today. It’s very important to me, everyone who’s a Shark is Latino. Many of the kids in this cast are the children of immigrants, and it’s really interesting, hearing each of their individual stories.”

Conductor James Conlon leads a full orchestra, with Robbins Estate-approved and Emmy Award-winning choreographer Joshua Bergasse handling the dancers. The song order follows the original production and not the classic film version, with Officer Krupke and I Feel Pretty both positioned later in the show. Reyes and Kim are the only two opera singers in the cast, with musical theater performers filling out the rest. The unusual mix prompted Zambello to mike them all.

“It gives us the opportunity to face one another,” says Reyes about being miked, an uncommon practice in the opera world since it surrenders control of the voice to the sound mixer. “From an acting sense, it helps me lock deeper into the character instead of having to cheat out all the time. We’re able to be intimate, and everyone will hear that, which is different in opera.”

For Kim, the problem is sound compression. “Even with the great technology we have today, it can’t really capture all the overtones. Even if you sing louder or softer, there’s a range. So, it doesn’t go beyond the range.”

Bernstein simultaneously composed Candide and West Side Story, with both intended as operas, but quickly settled on musical theater for the latter. Kim finds the tessitura (vocal range) a bit low for a tenor, and Reyes finds Maria’s quite broad, requiring her to strike a balance between emotion and technique. “We think musical theater should be easy. But it’s really not. There are a couple of floated high A-flats. The high C that’s sustained for five bars, I have to work up my stamina to hold that at the end of the quintet.”

Tony’s screaming and crying in the second act puts Kim’s vocal cords to a cruel test. “My throat is a little scratchy,” he notes. “When we’re having back-to-back shows, evening and matinee, I’m wondering how I will feel. I’m learning to deal with that challenge right now, to deliver something real but also have it not hurt my throat.”

Reyes, the first Nicaraguan-American to sing at the Met, believes every Latino singer should perform in Spanish at least once, citing the tradition of storytelling through song and dance common in the culture. It’s partly why she jumped at the chance to sing Rosalba in Lyric Opera’s Florencia en el Amazonas (with Maestra Zambello), as well as the Met’s Ainadamar, set during the Spanish Civil War.

“Stepping into this role, the point of view of an immigrant who has only been in this country about a month, who wants change and falls in love with an unexpected man, society needs to see these stories, that love transcends these walls and boundaries we’ve set for years based off tribalism, based off racism. Love can overcome that,” she says. “In this city, in particular, with how devastating it’s been to the Latin-American community, I hope it’s a lesson and reminder of what love can do if we actually choose it.”

LA Opera’s West Side Story is playing through October 12, 2025. Get tickets here.

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This weekend, darkness falls on David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., but in the best way. It’s where Derek Fordjour is mounting “Nightsong,” through Oct. 11, his immersive odyssey into the origins and byways of Black music, consisting of paintings, sculpture, video and hush harbors.

“I don’t want to say that I’m trying to encapsulate the history of Black music, but I am pulling from the tradition, which of course is a deep, rich and vast well,” Fordjour says about the sprawling exhibit that incorporates spontaneous live music from producer Omar Edwards and composers Jason White and Josiah Bell, as well as a four-hour soundscape culled from over 200 samples collected by the artist. “When you follow the Black voice in America, in particular, you find the history of race, power, agency, ownership, autonomy. All of the things that are germane to my practice reveal themselves when you go back far enough.”

“Far enough” refers to West African roots that materialize first in work songs and gospel, followed by the latter’s secular incarnation, the blues, which coincided with emancipation. Early in the twentieth century, it all came together with jazz. For inspiration, Fordjour visited New Orleans’ Congo Square, a crossroads welcoming Haitians, Mississippi Delta bluesmen and later, ex-military personnel tinkering with the cornet. Added for good measure were the Spanish guitar and a West African instrument made from a gourd that, on the plantation, became the banjo.

“That mix of European instruments, enslaved people and free people, that happened at Congo Square because the French allowed the enslaved people to play music there and be free, one day a week,” explains Fordjour. “It’s credited with the birthplace of jazz music. But it is in that cultural jambalaya that jazz takes place. Cornel West called jazz music the sound of slaves taking up the instruments of the aristocracy to make a new sound.”

The first gallery, draped in black and dimly lit, features eight paintings, all of them 24×30-inch copies of works by past artists whom Fordjour admires, like Romare Bearden’s Thank You For Funking Up My Life, which became the cover of an album by jazzman Donald Byrd.

“The origin of covers comes from the practice of larger White music labels remaking regional Black hits. It’s a form of erasure,” notes Fordjour. “I wanted to show those origins. So, I’m playing on the idea of covering my greatest hits that feature Black musical subjects.”

Moving on from there, viewers encounter what he calls “the artifice of night,” where everything is covered in black. Fordjour worked with architect Kulapat Yantrasast, who designed the gallery’s extension in 2014, to make darkness predominant throughout the space, using only dim light wherever necessary.

Leaving the larger gallery space, viewers land in an area densely packed with trees, a simulated “hush harbor” where slaves would retreat to hatch plans and conduct services. A visualization of work songs and their beginnings includes a painting called Gourd, Drum and String, the origins of the banjo.

The third gallery is centered by a rotating sculpture and another room filled with photos of 125 deceased musicians and images of people the artist has lost in life. In an adjacent area, a four-hour rendering of a visual archive, including some animation of Fordjour’s paintings, unravels, revealing his unusual process.

Starting with an acrylic substrate, he cuts pieces of corrugated cardboard and affixes them to canvas, creating channels to conduct rivulets of paint. He then wraps the piece in newspaper and adheres it with glue in crosshatching patterns, making air pockets that get torn open. After it dries, he applies another coat of paint, then wraps it again and applies another coat. He then tears through the air pockets and wraps it a third time, creating a scaly surface on which he begins his composition.

“As this new show makes clear,” gallerist David Kordansky writes in an email, “Derek offers art as a form of participation, of sharing and collaboration and communion, even as he stays close to the kind of magic that’s only possible when an artist deeply commits himself to the daily life of the studio.”

Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Fordjour received a BA from Morehouse College, an MFA from Hunter College and a Master in Arts Education from Harvard. His work has been exhibited in places like the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA and the Whitney Museum. Public works include Parade, a mural at the 145th Street subway station in New York.

“With each year, he increases the stakes and the reach of his vision,” Kordansky continues, “combining painting, sculpture and performance in ways that allow viewers to fully inhabit worlds in which this creative impulse becomes a life-saving necessity and life-giving pleasure. In so doing, he reveals new and nuanced ways of understanding the achievements of Black communities throughout American history.”

When he first conceived of “Nightsong,” Fordjour had no idea it would arrive at a time of erasure under the government’s anti-DEI measures. “This is something I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” he gasps. “And I will say, naively, I thought certain tenets of social progress were unmovable. They’re the foundation of democracy and our country; they’re hard fought, and I thought they would stand like pillars. And, in fact, with the right sledgehammer, they can all be leveled. To observe it in real time, in my generation, is something I wasn’t prepared for. So, to put forth these ideas in the current political context is a conspicuous choice. One voice comes from one body; a collective voice comes from many. That’s really where the show starts. Once we abandon our voices, then we’re in trouble.”

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After a successful world premiere at Jacob’s Pillow last summer, Camille A. Brown & Dancers brought their latest work, I AM, to L.A.’s Music Center for three nights this past weekend. It’s part of their mini-tour with stops at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey (Sept. 26), followed by dates in Boston (Nov. 14-15) and then Seattle (March 7, 2026).

The new show uses her previous show, ink, as a jumping-off point. “In that one, I was talking about the idea of Black people being superheroes, because we keep rising,” Brown tells Observer. “The idea of perseverance and the celebration of onward movement, regardless of obstacles; I wanted to discuss what it is like to move through the future with joy. I wanted this to be an experience where we’re starting at joy from the top, then where do we go? I have fifty minutes’ worth of where we go. What does it mean to start with joy, and what does that look like with their individual bodies, and as a community, brought together?”

The piece draws its title and inspiration from episode 7 of the HBO series Lovecraft Country, in which the character Hippolyta Freeman (played by Aunjanue Ellis) moves through time and space, visiting different eras and drawing personal insight, joy and strength through her experience.

“I thought that was so powerful and spoke to me, personally, as a Black woman, and what I have to navigate in the world,” says Brown. “I wanted us to feel we have pushed out of these four walls, the black, the space, the universe. The solo, which I created for myself, depicts the story, and my interpretation of Hippolyta’s journey and my journey as an artist. Each section is another form of spirit and joy and love and community. And it’s shown through different ways, through brotherhood, through sisterhood, through funk and R&B, the ballroom, the church, hip-hop, African dance, everywhere we can possibly go.”

Brown, who’s been tapped to choreograph the 2026 Broadway revival of Dream Girls, won’t be dancing the solo in this iteration of the show. That honor falls to Courtney Ross, an independent contractor with the company since 2019. “While the piece is created on her and debuted by her, the story is human enough to be transferred into what I can bring to the table,” says Ross about taking over the role from Brown. “Within the solo, there is a sense of reclamation, which is something Hippolyta is going through in her journey. So, there are moments where I’m reaching for a higher place. It’s leaning more and more into my joy, and there’s the thing that becomes the strength. Camille went to Ailey, where you’re heavily trained in ballet, modern technique and jazz. We have to bring all of those technical elements into the space.”

Originally from Jamaica, Queens, Brown studied at The Ailey School on a scholarship, while also studying at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts. Her early career was spent at Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, and she was a guest artist at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before founding Camille A. Brown & Dancers in 2006.

Her work on playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy led to her first Tony nomination for Best Choreography. Her directorial debut, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, garnered two more, for Best Choreography and Best Direction. Her fourth Tony nomination came for Alicia Keys’ jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen, followed by another last year for Gypsy, starring Audra McDonald. At the Met, she worked on Porgy and Bess as well as Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

“In the shows that I’ve worked with, everyone has to do everything,” says Brown. “If it’s not a dance focus role, maybe they don’t have as much to carry as a trained dancer in the show. In Hell’s Kitchen, the dancers had to be dancers in the space. With Gypsy, dancers had to sing, dance and act. So, it depends on the requirements of the show.”

Ross confirms that working with Brown requires multi-disciplined training. “We are very well rehearsed. Once you get into the choreography, Camille is very detailed. With the solo, I have a bit more freedom because the solo is about freedom. So, I have agency. I love this work, I AM, my family loves the work and the community loves this work. I’m excited to continue sharing and hearing the response.”

In recent months, Black voices have been targeted by government-backed anti-DEI measures in arts and educational institutions. “If I were to isolate and look at the news, it can be a lot,” Ross says. “It’s an intentional choice to be a Black woman from the African diaspora and say, ‘I’m going to step on stage and tell these very loud and proud stories.’”

By continuing to do what she does, Brown is committed to speaking truth to power. “It’s scary; I don’t want to negate the fear aspect of it, at all. Hopefully, it inspires us all to have conviction,” she says of the crisis. “If we start censoring ourselves and start doing these things to get a grant or a performance, then is it really our art that we’re making, or does it turn into something else? In order for me to continue in this world, I need to focus on my work.”

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A little bit of L.A. lands in the heart of Manhattan this fall as sculptor Larry Bell mounts his largest public art project to date in six locations across Madison Square Park. “Improvisations in the Park” includes the longtime Angeleno’s large-scale vibrantly colored glass cubes, Pacific Red II (at the 2017 Whitney Biennial), and Fourth of July in Venice Fog, as well as two new works, Cantaloupe but Honeydew and Red Eye II. Other works include Frankly Purple and Blues from Aspen.

“I used improvisation as needed,” Bell tells Observer about the show, which is on from September 30 through March 15. “Everything is based on right angles. And it is possible to combine different pieces of workable scale together and create new things from existing things. Each piece can be a thousand different pieces. Glass has the potential to absorb, transmit and reflect light. It’s the key to the whole thing.”

At 85 years old, Bell is the youngest member of the “Cool School” of the 1960s, a cadre of L.A.-based artists who exhibited at West Hollywood’s Ferus Gallery. Founded by artist Ed Kienholz and curator Walter Hopps (whose nickname for Bell was Ben Luxe, ‘son of light’), Ferus served as a platform for artists like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and John Altoon.

“I see him now and then when I go to L.A.,” Bell, who now lives in New Mexico, says of his old classmate, Ed Ruscha, one of the few other Cool Schoolers still alive. “The last time I saw him was at a memorial for (artist) Joe Goode (who passed away last March). We all went to Chouinard (Institute, now CalArts), together and stay in touch. There was a time when certain kinds of surveys were done that included our work in shows together, not so much in the last twenty years or so. But I have nothing but fond memories of all those people. In one way or another, they were all my teachers.”

Fresh out of Chouinard in 1959, Bell was making shaped paintings, sometimes featuring a 40-degree ellipse that mirrored the shape of the Andromeda galaxy, a form he believes has supernatural powers. But assessing his own work alongside that of classmates like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, Bell decided painting might not be his thing and turned to sculpture.

Like his mentor, Robert Irwin, Bell is a member of the Light and Space Movement, focused on how the eye interacts with various conditions of light. Among its ranks are people like Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell.

Early in his career, Bell worked at a Burbank framing store where he experimented with glass shards inside a wooden shadow box. His trademark vacuum deposition-treated glass cubes first began to appear around 1963. Acquired from Bronx Christmas ornament manufacturer Ben Koenig, the vacuum chamber layers glass with a film of aluminum, silicon monoxide or whatever it takes to stimulate the interplay between light and space. In 1965, Bell’s sold-out show at New York’s Pace Gallery put him on the art world’s radar at the age of 26. He spent about a year in the city, befriending people like Donald Judd (whose foundation is concurrently running Bell’s “Irresponsible Iridescence” exhibit), and Frank Stella. He even had tea with Marcel Duchamp.

“His wife served us in the parlor,” Bell says of the meeting. “On the walls were Max Ernst, Brancusi and an extraordinary number of artists who were legends. It was a very nice little visit. I remember asking him if he was doing any new work. And he said, ‘I’m working on a new show.’ And I said, ‘What is the show?’ And he said, ‘They’re earlier pieces.’ And I asked him how early, and he said, ‘Oh, when I was six or seven.”

For the “Improvisations in the Park,” the laminated large-scale pieces do not use the vacuum chamber since the size of the glass makes it too cumbersome to handle. But in recent years, he’s used the chamber to treat pieces of mylar paper and laminate film that seem to bend light and color. Some hang from the ceiling in his studio in sculptured forms Bell calls “Light Curls.”

“It’s a lot cheaper than glass, and I could cut it easily to the size I wanted to work with,” he says of his non-cube renderings. “It started a whole new awareness of surface and light. And I became less involved with the kind of magic that happens with glass. There’s another kind of magic that I started to appreciate, and the coater was my introduction.”

As preparations are made for “Improvisations in the Park”, Bell busies himself with a new show, “Improvisations” at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Included is The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat, a large-scale piece of four treated glass panels positioned like a booth, open at the corners, with exterior leaning glass panes propped against them. It dates to the 1980s and draws its title from the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man in which the hero, Griffin, conjures an invisibility potion. He first tries it on his landlady’s cat who seems to vanish entirely, but for its eyes.

“My six-year-old kid ran inside the standing sculpture when it was up in my studio,” Bell recalls, noting that today that kid is 50. “She had very dark eyes, and the light transmitting through the sculpture, all I could really see of her was her dark eyes. And it reminded me of the passage in the Wells story.”

Bell’s collection of Wells’ writing includes numerous first editions and several signed. As large as it is, the library is dwarfed by his collection of 400 guitars, mostly 12-string acoustic. Born partially deaf in one ear, he prefers the 12-string for its stronger vibrations. He plays well enough to clear a room, which is what he did when Lenny Bruce appeared at the Unicorn Club on Sunset Strip in 1963, the night he was arrested on obscenity charges. Bell was working the door when the crowd became unruly. The manager pulled Bruce off the stage and put Bell on with his 12-string. “After the first song, there was no one,” he recalls. “The place was empty.”

His other great achievement in the world of music includes being one of the last five living figures among the fifty-seven pictured on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by British pop artist Peter Blake along with Jann Haworth. The likeness of Bell is a photo taken by actor Dennis Hopper in Ocean Park, in front of a shop called Mike the Tailor. “I didn’t know anything about the Beatles. That wasn’t the kind of music I liked,” says Bell. “I was into folk music and the blues and grungy stuff.”

Bell moved to Taos in the early 1970s, but kept his studio in the Venice section of L.A. up until a few years ago. “Nothing but fond memories. I do miss Venice. I miss being next to the ocean,” he says, looking back. “There’s a different kind of physical mechanism that, when you leave and come back, you can feel it. I’m quite sensitive to those things. A lot of decisions are made by feelings, and it gets at what I think art is all about. It’s all about feeling.”

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Since spring, when ICE descended on L.A., indiscriminately detaining innocent people and igniting mayhem, a significant portion of the city has been living in fear. Public transit has seen a 10-15 percent decline in riders since the beginning of the raids, and predominantly Latino neighborhoods look like ghost towns where immigrants, legal and otherwise, hide from authorities.

“There’s just not enough positivity and love,” Santa Monica gallerist Bruce Lurie told Observer. That’s the impetus behind his show, “Carpe Every Single Diem,” featuring works by street artists Ruben Rojas and WRDSMTH (Phil Brody). “This show means a lot more to me since this is such an emotional time in everybody’s life. I’m excited to do something that people are going to say, ‘Wow, I’m really glad I saw this.’”

The new exhibit features limited-edition prints, immersive installations and some collaborative works and curated pieces by the artists. The title of the show is borrowed from a collaboration by the two, Carpe Every Single Diem, featuring WRDSMTH’s signature manual typewriter stencil with the title set against a backdrop of Rojas’ “love” pattern. The color scheme is monochrome on the right, blue and orange on the left.

The Only Lie, another typewriter by WRDSMTH, reads “The only lie I ever told you is that I liked you when I already knew I loved you.” Rojas’ Pool Party is the word “love” in cursive red against a lapis background.

“We named the show ‘Carpe Every Single Diem’ and it’s just spreading positivity,” says WRDSMTH, who did pieces benefiting the recovery effort after the fires earlier this year. “There’s a lot going on in the world right now. It starts with empathy and then the neighborhood, the city, state, country, world. This show is about: come, walk through the door, we’re going to spread positivity. We’re going to make you smile, we’re going to make you feel good in the moment and live in the moment.”

A native Angeleno, Rojas was a boy when the Rodney King uprising reduced portions of the city to ashes. This year alone, his hometown has witnessed not one but two man-made conflagrations.

“I see L.A. burning, and it’s like, what’s the right way? Lighting cars on fire, lighting the U.S. flag on fire isn’t the answer,” says Rojas, a TED speaker and corporate consultant who has partnered with brands like the NFL, BMW and American Express. “There’s too much fear in the world. You turn on the TV, it’s fear, you read the news, it’s fear. It’s too easy to forget that love is the answer. I’m inviting people to see the world through the lens of love. I hope my work allows people to have more conversations. We’ve lost the art of debate. Maybe we don’t see eye to eye, but we can accept each other and have a beer together.”

Rojas planned on becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but spent the summer before med school working in real estate, where he made a small fortune. By his early twenties, he was working in loans and finance, making more money than he ever imagined. Then came the subprime meltdown of 2008. He turned to retirement financial services and again earned a fortune, but little peace of mind. To clear his head, he did community work, painting murals.

“My first mural said, ‘Who will you be?’ And instead of looking at billboards that told me I wasn’t enough and I needed to buy this and I needed to buy that, I started writing the opposite of fear,” recalls Rojas. “And that’s how the work started.”

WRDSMTH moved to L.A. after quitting an advertising job in Chicago. He wrote screenplays for short movies and features, as well as a novel, The Holden Age of Hollywood, a satiric noir set in Tinseltown. It was around this time that his typewriters with cryptic messages started turning up on walls and overpasses around the city.

“It started with L.A., to say things to people in L.A. that I wish they had said to me when I arrived,” he notes, recalling the origins of a street art career that has taken him around the world. “We come here with big dreams, and my messages were to aspire to inspire, and dream bigger and persevere. I like the idea of being surprised by my pieces, it will change your mood, your day. I know people started taking photos and forwarding them to friends and family and loved ones, and there was a ripple effect. That was calculated in that I wanted to spread positivity.”

When fire struck the Palisades last January, gallerist Lurie was concerned, but not overly. “When they tell you you got to get out, the fire’s coming down the hill, you figure they’ll stop it. It’s the village, it’s not going to go into the town,” he shrugs. “So, you leave everything. I was almost going to leave my dog. I figured I’ll be back in three or four hours.”

He wasn’t. The fire took everything, his entire inventory, including names like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Anna Sims, Mr. Brainwash and Michael Gorman. At the time, he was planning a blue-chip show featuring $1.2 million worth of art: works on paper by David Hockney, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons and Robert Motherwell. Luckily, the truck delivering the artwork got snarled in emergency traffic and had to turn back.

Originally from Brooklyn, Lurie was steeped in Manhattan’s vibrant 1980s art scene. He launched his first gallery in the East Village and later moved to Chelsea in 1987. After 9/11, he relocated to L.A. Since losing his Pacific Palisades gallery in the fire, he opened a new space last March in nearby Santa Monica.

“I feel like I’m doing something positive,” he says about “Carpe Every Single Diem.” “Ruben’s work just says ‘love.’ How much better can you get than that? Brody’s work is always about positivity. What’s better than a message with positive wording? This show will give people hope and compassion.”

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• At Pallant House Gallery, Artists Capture Each Other With Candor, Compassion and Bite

• Summer of Revelation: Artists Revisit Judgment Day

• Suppressed Intergenerational Traumas Surface in Christine Ay Tjoe’s Abstract Canvases

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When the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1982, it was a place of quiet contemplation, exhibiting objects from the venerable institution’s Africa, Ancient Americas and Oceania collections. Made of wood and other natural fibers, they could only withstand about fifty lux of light, so each piece floated in its own private pool of luminescence in the dimly lit gallery.

“That’s been the classic way of lighting Africa and Oceania materials, which are often made of wood and are light-sensitive. It’s such a cliché that they’re always seen as the dark continent. And when you go into these galleries, they look dark, like a Hollywood version of what those cultures are about,” architect Kulapat Yantrasast of L.A.’s WHY Architecture tells Observer. He’s the man responsible for the $70 million redo of the new Met wing, which opened in spring to universal acclaim.

“So, what we tried to do is create a sense of uplifting space. When you walk into the room, it feels uplifting. The ceiling, though it’s lower, feels higher, like a cathedral, because we eliminate the lights and everything else. So, the lighting is a very big part of what we changed.”

That change involved replacing the south-facing glass wall, plagued with condensation and leaks, with a new glass system—a five-layer honeycomb design with UV and energy filters that protect the art while providing more light. “I felt strongly that the park needed to be part of the picture because most of these artworks were made to be in natural light, outdoors,” observes Yantrasast. “So, it makes sense for it to have that connection to the park. Most of the wells in the wing are in a north-south orientation, so it doesn’t block the view.”

A highlight of the renovated gallery is a Ceremonial House Ceiling by Kwoma artists in Papua New Guinea, commissioned for the wing on its opening 43 years ago. Painted sago palm leaf stems form panels illustrating a map of the cosmos, clan histories and mythical knowledge. Traditionally, the Community House is a place where village leaders (always men) gather to discuss issues facing their people. In the past, viewers were unable to stand under the flat roof. But by angling it steeper and placing benches under it, Yantrasast has made it so visitors can lie down and admire the ceiling, or enjoy events and musical gatherings beneath it.

WHY Architecture is celebrating 20 years of mainly designing art spaces: David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., the FriezeLA tent, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures galleries, the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall and Christie’s Beverly Hills showroom. “I never thought I would be doing museums for a living, as a specialty. Most architects would prefer new construction rather than renovation. I think it’s almost the same thing,” he says.

Projects designed from the ground up include the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum and the Studio Art Hall at Pomona College, as well as a house he built for himself in the Venice area of L.A. In limbo is his Tchaikovsky Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre in Perm, Russia, which broke ground several years ago but was put on hold after the invasion of Ukraine. “Because we started construction, hopefully when everything goes back to friendly terms, they can do it without us,” he says. “But I want them to finish it, because I think culture means a lot over there.”

Born in Bangkok, Yantrasast studied at Chulalongkorn University and, later, University of Tokyo. Upon graduation, he went to work as an associate for Pritzker Award-winner Tadao Ando from 1996 to 2003. He founded WHY Architecture in 2003 with former partner Yo-Ichiro Hakomori.

“My grandparents in Thailand were immigrants from China,” he says. “So, I grew up hearing these stories about why they had to leave—war, prejudice, conflicts. You try to make your life in a different place, you do everything you can. It’s not the best, but you make do. And everything can be wiped away with a sense of hatred, which I feel is pretty unfair if you believe in the American Dream.”

When Yantrasast looks at his staff, helpers and friends, he sees fear in their faces. “That is not the right mode for anyone to be in,” he sighs. “It’s like the country has a fur ball and we have to choke it out and be a better cat.”

Next up for him is the Louvre, a former palace and the most hallowed art institution in the world, for which he’s designing a space for the newly created department containing Late Roman, Byzantine and Early Christian artwork adjacent to the Islamic wing. Despite confronting a bureaucracy rife with tradition-bound thinking, he’s happy to find his museum counterparts to be open-minded.

“They want something different,” he notes with optimism in his voice. “What we’re trying to do is create a view from across Late Roman, Byzantine, Islam, Early Christian, so we understand that the world at that time was not as divided as we think it was. When you look at artifacts and motifs, even their belief systems, you realize how close they were. Today, we kill each other over issues of identity. At that time, it was not an issue. So, we’re hoping for art to reflect that sense of similarity as well as difference. It’s heartbreaking to see the world as it is now. With art, we can really transcend the prejudices and clichés, us-and-them situations.”

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The rarest of arena rock bands, they’ve been around for sixty years and can still sell out 60,000-seat venues. The Grateful Dead is one of the last Boomer bands still standing. “If you were to vote in 1968, the band most likely to fail, The Grateful Dead would have won,” cracks photographer Jay Blakesberg, the man behind “An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965-1995,” at L.A.’s David Kordansky Gallery for a few more days, says. “And here we are sixty years later, and they’re the last band standing. What other original bands out there are still doing this? The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead. And they’re playing stadiums.”

The show features twenty-eight large-scale and thirty-two smaller prints, many never seen before, spanning the band’s early days in the mid-sixties through to the death of their irreplaceable frontman, Jerry Garcia, from a heart attack in 1995. At 63, Blakesberg has seen over 250 shows. His daughter, Ricki, is co-curator and heads up Retro Photo Archive, a conglomerate of band photos taken by numerous artists over the years, including Blakesberg, Adrian Boot, Snooky Flowers, Greg Gaar, Andy Leonard, Rosie McGee, Ron Rakow, Jonathan David Sabin, Elizabeth Sunflower and Kirk West.

The exhibit grew out of a 2023 show Blakesberg presented at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco to coincide with Dead & Company’s stop at Oracle Stadium. “David saw the exhibit and we ran into each other on the ballfield,” Blakesberg says about the origins of the Kordansky show. “I didn’t know David, and he said, ‘This is incredible, I want to do a book!’ I was like, ‘Crazy guy.’ People say that to me all the time.”

Months later, during the band’s residency at Sphere in Vegas, a new iteration of the exhibit doubled the show’s size to 160 prints. Roughly 65,000 people saw it, as many as 2,000 on show days—a big leap from the 6,000 total attendees in San Francisco.

Laid out chronologically, each wall of the gallery represents a different period. It starts with photos by Rakow, who managed the band in the 1970s through albums like Wake of the Flood, From the Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah.

“Ron Rakow mentioned, ‘By the way, when I managed the Dead, I had a Nikon camera with me,’” Blakesberg recalls. “We scanned 1,000 photos, 800 color, about 200 black and white. It was all in great condition, color slides, well kept.”

The earliest shots are of the band before anyone knew who they were. These are the beardless Jerry days when they called themselves The Warlocks, house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, LSD-fueled events hosted by the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Rakow is so good at capturing in-between moments, cause he was with them so much,” notes Ricki. “This is just them having fun. They’re so young and vibrant, they’re not so serious yet.”

His opus is an Ektachrome shot of Garcia hanging by his fingers from the Pacific Stock Exchange Building. “The chromatic sensibility and the color in this picture, it’s so formal, so amazing, this body bisecting the composition,” says Kordansky, noting the color saturation and film grain.

In the spring of 1967, the band went to New York City for the first time, playing a half dozen shows at Café Au Go-Go in Greenwich Village and a show at the bandshell in Central Park. As the era rolls forward, the crowds grow, but the intimate communal vibe maintains. Fans are within a few feet of the band, some with their arms sprawled on the stage—no chainlink fences or security guards anywhere. Where other bands required a press credential for photography, the Dead allowed anyone to take pictures. “That’s why this band is so well documented,” observes Blakesberg. “They’d let people tape their shows!”

Bootleg tapes are legion among the faithful, with hundreds of concerts recorded and traded. Deadheads follow the band from venue to venue, sometimes living on the road for years at a time. Setting up shop in the parking lot before showtime, some sell drugs and handcrafted items—t-shirts, jewelry, artwork—to earn enough to scalp a ticket and a cheap meal. From this melange sprung a universe of Dead merch—bumper stickers, shirts, hats—that continues to grow over time.

Beth Sunflower’s images of rhythm guitarist Bob Weir in jail is proof of an October 2, 1967, drug bust at 710 Ashbury, where the band was living. It’s an event that only existed through word of mouth over the years. In the shot, Weir, long straight hair, head bowed, is seen behind bars, hands cuffed behind his back, a cop lurking.

“Prior to the discovery of these images, this was all mythology,” notes Kordansky. “The arrest was just a thing we all talked about. And then to find these images, never been seen, to actually know that it happened and it was documented, it’s surreal, in a way.”

A subsequent shot in the accompanying catalog, also titled “An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965-1995,” shows the band’s keyboardist Pigpen (Ron McKernan), seated behind bars. Of the volume’s 275 images, 150 have never been seen before. British photographer Adrian Boot’s black and white shots of the 1978 Great Pyramids concert in Giza are included, notably Garcia posed like a superhero, a step pyramid looming behind him.

Blakesberg was beginning to find steady work as a rock photographer when, in 1987, he heard a rumor that the band would be shooting a music video, Throwing Stones, at an abandoned high school in the Oakland area. He happened to live across the street from an abandoned high school in Oakland.

“I literally put my cameras around my neck, loaded up my pockets with film and just walked on set and stayed for ten hours,” laughs Blakesberg. “About six hours in, Mickey Hart walks up and says, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Jay Blakesberg, Relix Magazine.’ He goes, ‘Okay.’ And that’s it. Can you imagine if you walked on the set of a Red Hot Chili Peppers video? You’d be arrested.”

The final gallery emphasizes the fans, most of them dancing, including “spinners,” hippies twirling like dervishes. For Blakesberg, these were often the hardest shots to capture because most took him for a narc. “They ran away from me,” he laughs. “So, I took pictures of my friends, cause they knew me and trusted me. But there were a lot of people doing a lot of sketchy things.”

In the 1990s, Blakesberg stepped out of the photo scrum to work with band members one on one, shooting Weir’s portrait for a children’s book he penned and mentoring the guitarist’s daughter in photography. He remained friendly with the late Phil Lesh (bassist), and drummer Mickey Hart, with whom he worked on other projects.

From New Jersey originally, Blakesberg was still in his twenties when he embarked on a career in the 1980s. The Dead were considered old-fashioned, so he photographed bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction and the Flaming Lips for magazines like Guitar Player. His first assignment for Rolling Stone was shooting a free U2 concert in downtown San Francisco in 1987. He went on to shoot over 300 stories for them, including Lollapalooza and Radiohead when they were still a club band. In addition to music magazines, his photos appeared in publications like Time and Vanity Fair.

“In the artworld, it’s Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, and that stuff’s cool,” says Kordansky. “But the Grateful Dead was so formative!” The blue-chip art dealer with galleries in New York and L.A. grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Hartford Art School before matriculating at CalArts. He attended numerous Dead shows between 1992 and 1995 and continues to go to Dead & Company concerts today.

Along with the recent exhibit, “Rearview Mirror” at Gagosian (photos taken by Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ first U.S. tour), the show at Kordansky’s might signal a new trend. “Everything has been brought into the artworld,” says Kordansky. “For R. Crumb to be represented by David Zwirner Gallery, for particular artists to be brought in because they were so visionary and ahead of their time and deserve the context of the artworld—for me, photography is sort of this last documentarian space that hasn’t yet fully been appreciated in the artworld.”

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When Skylar Brandt first got the opportunity to dance Giselle, it came as a shock. The year was 2020 when, in conversations with American Ballet Theatre artistic director Kevin McKenzie, he casually mentioned the 1841 ballet, a role every ballerina aspires to, but offered no commitment. Even so, she spent weeks studying with husband-and-wife team Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko, former ABT principals who had been privately coaching her for four years.

Months later, with a Kennedy Center performance looming, Misty Copeland, the company’s renowned principal, suffered an injury, and Brandt got the call. With time for only one rehearsal with partner Herman Cornejo as Albrecht, the pair took the stage. Brandt danced flawlessly, including the demanding mad scene at the end of act one, and the critics gushed, some calling it “jaw-dropping” and “breathtaking.”

Following its triumphal revival at the Met earlier this month, ABT brings Giselle to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Southern California this week for a four-day run. Brandt and Cornejo are scheduled to dance on Sunday, July 27.

Set in the Middle Ages to a score by French composer Adolphe Adam, Giselle tells the story of a peasant girl with a weak heart who finds love in the arms of Albrecht, a handsome nobleman in disguise, who promises to marry her. When she learns he is betrothed to another, Giselle descends into madness in the famous Act I closer and dies of a broken heart.

“Some people really go full straitjacket, pulling their hair and weeping. But for me, she’s so stunned, it’s like she’s replaying the movie of what happened twenty minutes earlier in the act, when she’s pulling the petals off of the daisies,” Brandt tells Observer, describing how she picks petals from the flower out of rhythm with the orchestra. “There’s a delay that tells the audience something’s not quite right with her. So, it’s the fine line of being in the moment and having the emotion be genuine and come out in real time, but also not losing the quality that makes a ballerina so exquisite. You still have to have exquisite beauty.”

For Cornejo, the scene is made unbearable by Albrecht’s passivity in the face of such raw feelings. “At least the ballerina is moving and channeling all those emotions. I find it very draining emotionally,” he sighs. “In many other ballets, if there’s a mistake—Don Q or Swan Lake—you can fix it and people won’t see it. But because Giselle is so slow and smooth, any tiny moment something goes wrong, people can see it. It’s very demanding; you cannot relax for one second.”

The second act finds her in the afterlife land of the Wilis, spirits of women who died before they could marry. There, she protects Albrecht from other Wilis bent on exacting revenge on double-crossing lovers.

“Adagio is not my favorite thing. I feel like I have fast twitch muscles,” says Brandt about what is for her the more challenging portion of the dance. “It takes an enormous amount of effort to look effortless and look light, like a spirit, like you have air in your bones. A lot of that has to do with training and rehearsing, but it’s also how your partner handles you with care. And in Act II, there’s a lot of partnering, and the strength, coordination and natural ability of the partner can also make or break the qualities Giselle possesses. I look good because Herman makes me look good.”

Originally from Purchase, New York, Brandt trained at the company’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in 2005 and joined ABT in 2011, dancing first in the corps de ballet and then rising to soloist in 2015. Following her Giselle debut, she was elevated to principal dancer. Then came the pandemic.

“It was the first time I was off the hamster wheel since I was eight years old,” recalls Brandt. “I feel like I grew a lot more as a person and as a dancer. I was still at home working on my dance. I expanded my view of myself in that time so that my world opened up even more. Every year, you hope to get a little better.”

Originally from Buenos Aires, Cornejo came to the U.S. in 1998, aged 17, joining the ABT Studio Company as an apprentice. In 2022, he was chosen to receive the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Great Immigrant Award.

“I was honored to receive that award,” he beams. “It put it in perspective that, as an immigrant, sometimes you have to prove more than an American. I’m proud of that. America opened the door for me, and I came and I did my job and showed how I can be part of this nation with pride.”

Early in his career at ABT, he danced the Bronze Idol in La Bayadère and the Jester in Cinderella. At five feet six inches tall, he was deemed too small to dance principal roles. But his talent and stage presence are so strong that he was elevated to soloist in 2000 and became principal in 2003.

“There is a bias against short dancers doing lead roles,” says Cornejo, who made a name for himself back then dancing roles like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I hope that will be over one day. It’s about your character, how you move, the weight of your interpretation.”

While fellow ABT principal Gillian Murphy eyes retirement at the age of 46, Cornejo focuses on choreography, even if it’s just for himself. At 44, he sees the next phase of his career as artistic director.

“A director sees what the audience wants, what the company needs and what dancers you have,” he says about his post-dance future. “You want to do titles that will make your dancers look amazing. So, you select based on which company am I leading and how can I make that company the best company.”

But for the time being, if 62-year-old Alessandra Ferri can dance the principal role in the company’s recent Woolf Works, then Cornejo can dance till he drops.

“I want to celebrate my thirty years with the company in 2029, and I want to keep going. I’ve really enjoyed this journey,” he says, looking back on his career. “Before, it was almost like I had to prove myself every time I went on stage—prove myself to my director. But now I feel like everybody knows me; they know who I am and what I can give. So, I feel like it’s exactly what I want to say.”

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How strange that an artist of the caliber of Luchita Hurtado didn’t get her first solo show until the age of 53. Even stranger is that she should toil in virtual anonymity until 2016, four years before her death. A detour into her linear language series of word paintings, “Yo Soy,” the new show at Hauser & Wirth in downtown L.A., through Oct. 5, features nine canvases, seven of which were in her untitled debut exhibition in 1974 (one of which hasn’t been shown since).

In the early 1970s, Hurtado was finally able to dedicate herself to her artwork, even getting a studio outside her home. Up until then, her time had been spent raising kids, and her art practice was consigned to the kitchen table when the family was asleep or whenever she could carve out time. A recent series of self-portraits entitled I Am, an inventive first-person view looking down at her naked body, prefigured what followed—Yo Soy.

“This particular exhibition takes place in a very different time in Luchita’s life, a time when she was empowered by the feminist movement in L.A.,” Cole Root of the Luchita Hurtado Estate told Observer. “In these works, we see a different scale of art than we see in her work in the past and after. For this exhibition, she made line paintings.”

SEE ALSO: Ali Cherri Honors Life, Loss and Defiance in ‘How I Am Monument’

A corner piece, Couple with Offsprings, is in bold orange and yellow over four panels. The smooth lines were applied using a modified squeeze bottle with a sponge or rag tied around the top so the paint creates a continual line. When viewed sideways, the panels read “child,” “child,” “man” and “woman.”

“I had a good response to the show, but no one saw the letters, the messages. Just the color and energy,” she wrote at the time in a document on display. “It didn’t seem important that they were not fully seen, and I thought it superfluous to explain.”

Living in Santa Monica with her third husband, artist Lee Mullican, Hurtado was an original member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. The year 1971 marked a turning point for her, specifically a meeting of local women artists organized by Joyce Kozloff.

“There were at least fifty women, and we began the meeting by stating our name and occupation,” Hurtado recalled. “When it was my turn, I said, ‘Luchita Mullican, painter.’ Across the room, I hear June Wayne ask in what seemed a very penetrating voice, ‘Luchita what?’ ‘I stand corrected,’ I replied. ‘Luchita Hurtado, painter.’”

A year later, she exhibited one of her I Am self-portraits in Judy Chicago and Dextra Frankel’s group show, “Invisible/Visible,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art. The following year, Chicago and fellow former CalArts faculty members graphic designer Sheila Levant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven established the Feminist Studio Workshop, taking the lease near downtown on what would become the Woman’s Building. They sublet space to performance art groups as well as local chapters of the National Organization for Women, the Women’s Liberation Union, Associated Women’s Press, the Sisterhood Bookstore and three art galleries, one of which exhibited “Yo Soy.”

Face for Arcimboldo references Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made portraits of people out of flowers in one, vegetables in another, fish or birds. Hurtado’s geometric painting in shades of red uses words, each written in place of the item it describes—mouth, jaw, forehead, eye, etc.

Dark blue and purple patchwork hides the title, Earth & Sky Interjected, a canvas cut into strips and sewn back together. A splash of bleach runs pale and white lines over heavy shades of blue in Universal Talisman, which hasn’t been exhibited in over 50 years.

Born in 1920 in Maiquetía, Venezuela, Hurtado moved to New York when she was eight. While studying at Washington Irving High School, she took classes at the Art Students League and later volunteered at La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper, where she met Chilean journalist Daniel de Solar, her first husband. In the early 1940s she worked as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast and as a muralist for Lord & Taylor.

“She was integrated into a community of artists around New York. Her first husband brought home Ailes Gilmore, Noguchi’s sister and a dancer at Martha Graham,” says Root, listing Noguchi and Rufino Tamayo as influences. “She was in Mexico City in the 1940s, and she talks about knowing Diego and Frida, going to parties with Leonora Carrington. Man Ray took her portrait here in L.A.”

After 1974, Hurtado toiled in obscurity and was widowed in 1998 when Mullican passed. Nearly twenty years later, his former studio director, Ryan Good, was cataloguing his estate when he found works signed “LH.” Hurtado, who normally took her husband’s name, explained that those were her initials.

Good showed the paintings to Paul Soto, founder of Park View Gallery, who mounted her second solo show, “Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942-1952.” Several of her I Am portraits and the abstract landscapes that grew out of them were on exhibit in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 “Made in L.A.” And a year later Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, mounted her first international solo show, “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn.”

“I still have a built-in resistance to success in the large arena of the commercial world,” she wrote in the 1970s. “The thought of dealing with more than a few dozen people seems unreasonable to me, but who knows, someday soon I may learn to accept the thorn along with the blossom.”

In 2019, Hurtado appeared on the TIME100 list of most influential people. On the night of August 13, 2020, she died of natural causes at her home in Santa Monica, just a few months short of her 100th birthday.

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