Putting Aesthetics to Hope:Tracking Photography’s Role in Feminist Communities

Catherine Wagley, October 2019

In 2016, a group of women sent scouts down to the border between Venezuela and Guyana to seek out land for their feminist utopia. At first, they called their planned community Herland, after the female separatist novel set vaguely in South America by feminist yet xenophobic writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They opened their community to trans individuals, and vigorously planned on Facebook and Tumblr pages that remained active until soon after the 2016 election—Trump’s ascent making escape all the more attractive. On a Facebook page with over 5,000 members, potential participants discussed capitalism, money, menstruation, and other logistics. Kate White, one of the founders, gave interviews. “We are putting feminism into actual practice,” she told Vice.

Learning as Supporting: Alternatives for Futures in Art Education

Catherine G. Wagley, September 3, 2019

Artist Eliza Swann moved to Los Angeles in 2013, after the spirit of a raven told her, head west. Swann had been in the Colorado mountains, when she began jotting down notes, trying to remember everything the bird’s spirit said. It also told her to found what would become The Golden Dome School, a non-hierarchical institute for studying the relationship between metaphysics, art, and ecology. This did not come as a complete surprise: during graduate school, she had been told again and again that her intuition and spirituality did not fit into a serious art practice, and she had been looking for a space to bring art and spirituality together. Within a few months, she was assembling a faculty, mostly out of friends and acquaintances who thought widely about the issues she wanted to explore – art-making as psychic living, the spiritual dimensions of natural sciences, and, relatedly, humankind’s responsibility to the earth. “I think it was tongue-in-cheek at the beginning,” Swann told me, of the title “school.” She certainly appropriated trappings of the educational model as a way, in her words, to begin “tackling the exclusion and hierarchy” embedded in higher education and in the way that institutions selectively distribute specialized knowledge. But the school was never meant to have any kind of accreditation, or to replace formal institutions.

Generous Collectors:How the Grinsteins Supported Artists

Catherine Wagley, October 1, 2019

“Before he died, Picasso designed a KFC in Koreatown.” This was tweeted in reference to the po-mo Kentucky Fried Chicken on Western Avenue and Oakwood, just blocks from my home. Elyse Grinstein and her architecture partner Jeffrey Daniels envisioned the building in the late 1980s, when a franshisee wanted to take a risk. Curbed L.A. later nominated the “funked out bendytower shaped building” (a description by a Yelp reviewer) for its Ugly Building Contest in 2007, citing its “strange clown” qualities. The KFC features a bucket-shaped exterior (though one journalist compared its shape to an abstracted chicken), and a dumbwaiter that brings food from the bottom floor up to the top, where most patrons sit. Perhaps it has been so misunderstood because it was designed by someone whose tastes had graduated well beyond Picasso, and whose cultural proclivities had never been conventional.

Why the Layoff of a Curator at a Little-Known Art Space Was the ‘Last Straw’ for San Francisco’s Frustrated Art Community

500 Capp Street has been a beloved part of San Francisco's art scene since 2016. But its audience feels betrayed by its new direction.

Catherine Wagley, July 17, 2019

Liz Magor, a Canadian artist known for her uncanny casts of banal objects, moved the late artist David Ireland’s furniture and possessions into piles for her show at 500 Capp Street, the foundation in his longtime home in San Francisco’s Mission District. In 500 Capp’s garage, artist Nina Canell installed two sculptures made from mastic gum sourced from pistachio trees, which were already melting by the time both shows closed on July 7.

This California Museum Had Big Ambitions—and Then Shuttered. Here’s What It Teaches Us About the Perils of Private Museums

The Main was founded by a local developer to serve as a beacon of creativity in downtown Los Angeles.

Catherine Wagley, June 5, 2019

What causes a museum—especially one that had hired high-profile staff, commissioned a $53 million redesign, and espoused a forward-thinking mission—to implode?

This is the question behind the rise and fall of the Main Museum, a non-collecting, nonprofit contemporary space that opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2016. Last month, the stately Beaux-Arts building that formerly housed the institution reopened as ArtCenterDTLA under new leadership. The developer Tom Gilmore, who founded the museum and owns multiple surrounding properties, has agreed to lease the building to the Art Center College of Design for $1 per year, walking away from his former vision for a cutting-edge contemporary art museum. 

Trulee Hall’s Untamed Magic

Catherine Wagley, May 21, 2019

A lumpy pink ceramic jar of Hannah’s Pickled Eggs sat on a lumpy dark pedestal, behind which you could see a woman’s smooth bare rear on a nearby screen. The woman leaned over in front of a white lattice. In the opposite direction, across an expanse of warm green artificial turf, a multipane window punctuated a textured pink wall, on which a mostly pink painting hung: in it, a chicken laid an egg on a pillow, surrounded by lacy things, beads, a trellis, and another (painted this time) jar of Hannah’s Pickled Eggs. Trulee Hall’s The Other and Otherwise, the exhibition at Maccarone that closed in March, understood its own logic. It existed as a precisely-planned, well-realized but also instinctively attuned ecosystem, one that encouraged close looking, but also rewarded a quick turn of the head (see a corn husk in a video, another husk identically positioned in the adjacent painting, and another comically phallic mechanized, sculpted husk moving back and forth through a hole in the wall, all in a matter of seconds). Good exhibitions sear into you, you internalize them, and then—in a month or two—they disappear.

LACMA Sold LA on Its Shrunken Zumthor Building by Promising to Add Satellites Around the City. Now That May Create Even More Problems

LACMA's building plan has become a lighting rod for the debate over what a 21st-century museum should be.

Catherine Wagley, April 25, 2019

When the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted unanimously two weeks ago to approve funding for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new building—initially an ambitious black floating flower by Swiss starchitect Peter Zumthor that now resembles, after years of tweaks, a tasteful beige space station—it almost seemed like they were approving something else entirely.

The museum’s plans for satellite locations, spread across the city, came up frequently. Board chair Janice Hahn said she wanted to “encourage us as we move forward to invest in satellites of the art museum everywhere.” Sculptor Thomas Houseago praised LACMA director Michael Govan: “His idea of satellites is so radical and brilliant.” Artist Ian White, son of the artist Charles White, called the satellite plans the kind of “out-of-the-box thinking that an institution as vital as LACMA needs.” 

The Architecture of Exclusion: Storytelling Hannah Hoffman’s New Home Through Paul Williams and Tony Cokes

Catherine G. Wagley, March 15, 2019

Architect Paul Williams used to sketch out plans, virtuosically, upside down. He became famous for this skill – most writing about him mentions it. He’d position himself across the table from white clients who wanted to hire him but found his skin color discomfiting. He’d then brilliantly cater to their desires without requiring a physical nearness. In his 1937 essay “I Am a Negro,” Williams termed this talent a “sleight of hand.” Stories about this and other tricks and burdens of his trade appear in Tony Cokes’s new video work The Will & the Way…Fragment I (2019). Cokes’s piece, accompanied by a Radiohead-remix soundtrack, currently loops on a screen in the living room of the one house Williams designed for himself. Hannah Hoffman acquired the house last year, and Cokes’s exhibition, titled Della’s House, is the first show there (any plans for future show are yet to be determined). It always matters where a gallery is – the Boyle Heights protests drove that home – but the context of this one announces itself, immediately and dramatically, from the moment you turn into Lafayette Square, a planned community with one way out and one way in, with iron gates marking its boundaries. These houses, until recently, rarely went on the market and hardly anyone drives into the square without reason. A neighbor, sitting in his bay window across the street, watched me closely as I parked, and then again as I drove away.

Laughing in Private: Vanessa Place’s Rape Jokes

Catherine Wagley, March 5, 2019

“I laughed in private,” said psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, after Vanessa Place performed her Rape Jokes on stage in Brooklyn in 2015.1 I read, Place’s book version of the performance, out this past November and called You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes, cover to cover, while still in bed, then went back to sleep, not entirely because of its weight or crude violence (for instance: “My wife was raped by a mime. He performed unspeakable acts”). It was more the effectiveness of the book’s structure, which made it digestible, so that its readability contradicted its offensiveness (my own impulse to consume pitted, exhaustingly, against any impulse to condemn). The cover is yellow-tan, the serif font inside bigger than usual, a white page placed between each page of text—a needed break that makes continuing easier. No images, special punctuation, or line breaks—except occasional indentations—interrupt the jokes.