Subscribe now

Founded in 1989, the Metro Arts program began commissioning work for the system in the 90s and today almost every station has art either permanently installed or as part of changing exhibitions. Each of the new works were included in the construction of the stations and commissioned up to ten years before installation. The Artists were each chosen in a competitive process following the recommendations of Los Angeles art professionals (like the heads of major galleries and museums). Looking at one piece from each of the new stations in depth one can easily see the diverse ways they embody the story of LA and create a deep sense of place and history for the travelers who pass them each day.

Located at the first of the new stops, Wilshire/La Brea, Infinite Landscapes: Los Angeles Para Siempre or Infinite Landscapes: Los Angeles Forever is built into the entrance and first level of the station with beautiful glass tiles. The work of Arizona-born artist Eamon Ore-Giron, it forms part of a larger series for the artist entitled The Infinite Regress. The piece celebrates LA’s architectural past and imagines its rapidly changing future through the vibrant abstract patterns, bands of gold, and perspective/sightlines that compose the work. Meant to be read top to bottom or from the entrance down to the first level, the patterns in the work are meant to evoke a back and forth movement and draw major inspiration from The Deco Building nearby, The artist was inspired by the Art Deco aesthetic of the area and how that style was meant to be readable from a moving car, symbol of the 20th Century, and would now be adapted for the next evolution of transportation in LA in the 21st Century. The street level lines are meant to evoke the horizon and elude to Los Angeles as an endless landscape, rather than a city. The title remembers the Spanish roots of the region and its Latino heritage today. Ore-Giron was also drawn to Art Deco as a style that sought to be international and modern by drawing on pre-colombian patterns, an inspiration that has also driven his Infinite Regress series. The diagonal lines all meet at a zero point pulling the viewer into the future and creating a forced perspective effect that was emblematic of Art Deco.

Moving to the next station at Wilshire and Fairfax we come to the verbosely titled Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects by Ken Gonzales-Day. Filing the concourse level, the piece is composed of circles of composited photographs of different sculptures from around the world. Each circle groups art from the same region and gets progressively lighter in color from the dark bronze of the Greek figures to the clay and gray stone figures of Buddhas from East Asia. They each float in a white to black hombre void and are made of rectangular glass tiles. Gonzales-Day is known as a photographer and works part time as a professor of Art History, in creating the piece he worked with LACMA, the museum across from the station, going through their archive of thousands of objects and choosing those that represented the many ethnic enclaves of the city.

For the piece as a whole he thought of the station as an excavation site (in fact, many fossils were found during construction), with the tar pits just up the road he thought of the concrete walls of the station as a capsule in the ground holding back the tar, a time capsule (his words). He asked himself “What if the museum sank into the tar pits and is now being excavated?” He imagined the Greek sculptures darkened by time as having just come from the tar, with each group then further along in the cleaning process, highlighting the cultures often overlooked by western art history with brighter color. Many of the sculptures were greatly enlarged in the composite in the hope that attention might then be brought back to the real object across the road and help the city discover and rediscover some of their richest assets. He wanted to journey through time and continents like the museum does, moving body and mind through the concourse and including the ethnic groups of Los Angeles as a reminder that the museum and art history are for everyone.

Located in the last of the three new stations, Wilshire/La Cienega, the monumental Mining the Archive: S. Charles Lee, Architect covers the exterior, entrance, and first hall of the station. Created by Todd Gray the work continues the artists practice of pulling from the vast architectural archive he has built up over the last fifty years, layering and manipulating the images, then compositing them together to create the final work. In this piece he uses the architectural sketches, plans, detail designs, and interior photographs of the Saban Theatre that sits next to the station. Interlaced with these images are traditional patterns from the fabrics of the different immigrant communities that now live in the neighborhood, honoring the areas past and present. At the entrance to the station he inverted the exterior plans of the theatre, making the background blue and the lines white, giving them an energy and draw on the viewer immediately upon seeing the station. He was amazed at the contrast between the detailed and ornate Art Deco theatre and the plain, boxy buildings around it built since the 1960s. It drew him to the notion of architecture as anchor and keeper of the history of a place, the theatre remembering the expensive shopping street it was built for long after the area became offices and then apartments. He wanted the often overlooked immigrant history of the area to be equal to the glamour of the theatre and thus wove the fabric designs into the work. Day hopes the piece will draw your attention back to the original building, and the rich cultural and architectural history of the area.

These three works are just the start of the artistic programs in each of their respective stations and the larger collection held throughout the system. They speak deeply to the history, architecture, and institutions of the areas they are placed in and ground the traveler in that culture as they move through it. They ask the viewer to stop for a moment and dig deeper into where they are and how it came to be. Each piece deals directly with the layering of histories and the way neighborhoods have changed and adapted over time. Acknowledging all eras and their valuable contribution to the city. Next year the final three stations will open on the D line, leading all the way to Westwood and bringing even more site specific works to the public and deepening our understanding and love of our city.

Subscribe now

Ironside is one of Miami’s first repurposed warehouse developments; it’s a creative hub with gardens, a pizzeria, a café, modeling agencies, ceramics studios, a daycare, an art gallery, and more. It’s a small oasis along the train tracks with a sort of urban tropical-brutalist feel to it. It is a testament to the possibilities of transformation — developing within the abandoned warehouses rather than building everything from scratch.

At the entrance to Ironside, in view of the café, is one of Miami’s quieter works of public art: four double-sided segments of the original Berlin Wall, repainted by Thierry Noir. They stand outdoors, not behind glass, not labeled like a museum object you have to seek out. You simply arrive, and they are there.

Noir, a French mural artist born in Lyon in 1958 and based in Berlin since January 1982, is often regarded as the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. Along with Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet, Noir ended up painting nearly one kilometer of the Wall’s surface, covering the landmark with brightly colored abstract faces, iconic to the artist’s practice to this day.

Thierry’s intervention on the Wall was controversial. For some, the graffiti was seen as taboo, with some Berliners even calling it the Wall of Shame. For others it seemed to legitimize a structure that represented sadness, division, and conflict. Thierry added color and brightness to something that had been the cause of so much pain and even death for those trying to cross the wall. Yet, for the artist, it was not about beauty; instead it was about overcoming the power of the Wall as a force of oppression. Thierry called the works a “palimpsest of protest,” that mede him feel even more powerful than the wall itself, subverting its political power in the name of humanity and human connection. While painting the wall, Thierry even became friends with figures like Keith Haring who also added their own artistic stamp to the structure.

After the Wall was designated a historical monument, Thierry re-intervened and re-painted many sections that were home to his original work. The work on view at Ironside was repainted during the 2013 Miami Art Week.

For the Ironside development, the piece of the wall represents the core values of the community Ironside seeks to build in their small bubble of Miami’s urban sprawl: “Freedom, unity, and strength,” as designated on their website. Yet it also stands as an example of how art and history are inextricably linked, and how a small piece of history can end up as a symbol of strength and freedom even when displaced from its original context. In a city whose artistic identity has often been linked to muralism, graffiti culture, and street art, these sections of the Berlin Wall also stand as a reminder of the history of that practice.

I first discovered Hollywood Forever when I was 15 after seeing it was not only a concert venue for indie bands like Beach House, but also a movie screening site in the summer. I packed my picnic blanket, a bottle of wine (don’t ask how I acquired it), and my best friend to see a sold-out screening of Twilight. To my surprise, guests were ushered to sit on a sprawling grass lawn (not on tombstones) in front of a massive projector that illuminated the back wall of the mausoleum. Celebrities and die-hard Twilight fans scoured the cemetery under a pink August sunset. From that night on, Hollywood Forever Cemetery became one of my favorite places in LA. I had expected a somber evening, only to find hundreds of people laughing, drinking, watching a movie, and spending time together among the dead.

Subscribe now

Opened in 1899, the cemetery became a resting place for celebrities and people of various faiths and cultures alike. Previously an underdeveloped lot attached to the cemetery, Paramount Studios opened in 1926 directly behind Hollywood Forever, and still functions today. Hollywood Forever remains the sole cemetery located in Hollywood. Stars including Chris Cornell and Judy Garland rest here alongside iconic Angelenos such as the original publishers of the Los Angeles Times. The cemetery’s proximity to Paramount feels particularly fitting: Hollywood Forever is a place where the mythology of Hollywood continues even after death, preserving the people who helped create the city’s cultural history while remaining embedded within the industry that continues to shape it.

Beyond the concerts, movies, occasional art show, and one of the largest Día de los Muertos celebrations outside of Mexico, Hollywood Forever boasts eclectic and iconic architecture. The cemetery includes Egyptian-style architecture, such as the large pyramid structure that towers over visitors, alongside elaborate mausoleums, classical monuments, sculptures, and ornate graves. These structures make the cemetery feel less like a single, unified architectural space and more like a collection of different fantasies about death. Some monuments are grand and theatrical, others intimate and weathered, but together they transform the cemetery into something resembling an open-air museum of mourning. Even the architecture refuses to let death become invisible.

Unlike a traditional art gallery or museum, however, Hollywood Forever does not ask its visitors to stand at a distance. In museums, we are trained not to touch the walls, sculptures, or objects; we move quietly through carefully controlled spaces, looking but rarely physically engaging with what is around us. Even the most immersive exhibitions can feel static, their objects frozen behind glass or cordoned off by velvet ropes. Hollywood Forever offers something entirely different. Here, there is no glass separating you from the artwork, no guard telling you to step back, and no clear distinction between the object and its environment. You can touch the weathered stone of a tomb, smell the flowers blooming beside a grave, feel the grass beneath your feet, and watch swans walk directly over the resting places of the dead. The peacocks wander freely between monuments, trees grow around mausoleums, and the elements slowly alter the architecture themselves. The cemetery is constantly changing, decaying, blooming, and being lived in. In this sense, Hollywood Forever feels less like looking at art and more like inhabiting it. Its sculptures and architecture are not static objects to be observed from a distance, but part of a living landscape that engages all of the senses.

I recently visited Hollywood Forever to pay my respects to David Lynch, yet each time I visit, I find another intricate statue I didn’t notice before. To me, Hollywood Forever is a sacred site of community, lively engagement, and the arts. While the setup may seem bizarre to some, I think it sets an example of how a cemetery can simultaneously function as a gathering point that illuminates the joys of living while also paying respect to the dead. In this sense, Hollywood Forever challenges the idea that cemeteries should be spaces removed from everyday life. Instead, it makes death visible and, perhaps paradoxically, makes life feel more vivid because of it.

As of January 2025, Hollywood Forever Cemetery opened the Gower Court Mausoleum. This skyscraper-esque mausoleum boasts views of the Hollywood sign and is an intersection of concrete and blooming greenery. Despite this modern addition, you can find me in the original cemetery, surrounded by historic palm trees and the company of Hollywood stars not forgotten. Hollywood Forever may be a cemetery, but it is also a place to watch movies, listen to music, celebrate cultural traditions, encounter art, picnic with friends, and remember those who came before us. Perhaps that is what makes it so sacred: it does not ask us to choose between remembering the dead and enjoying the living. At Hollywood Forever, the two exist together.

Subscribe now

Halsey, born and raised in South Central LA, has been conceptualizing an artwork both for and of her community for almost 17 years. Her latest work, sister dreamer: lauren halsey’s architectural ode to the surge and splurge of south central los angeles, brings her dream to life and puts both her social practice and her highly regarded fine art sculptural practice on impactful display.

The entrance on Western greets visitors with eight 22-foot-tall architectural pillars topped with carvings of local heroes. At the base of each pillar sits a sphinx, reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian monument guarding a pyramid’s entrance. Halsey carves these sphinxes with contemporary faces too, in the likeness of her family, teachers, and neighborhood role models. Walking along these large sculptures, the references to ancient Egypt, the American civil rights movement, and daily life in South LA all sit presently in the space.

A security guard and a docent, who staff the garden throughout its open hours, sunrise to sunset, greeted me. The docent pointed out some treasures amongst the architectural structure, which carries iconography of LA, the South Side, Black histories, the civil rights movement, and members of the community and Halsey’s life. Portraits of the victims of 1980s South LA’s serial killer, The Grim Sleeper, line the entryway into the space, alongside a portrait of Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders founder Margaret Prescod. Halsey took the opportunity to represent these individuals with respect and memoriam in ways the press did not for Black women from South Central at the time of the murders. The carvings pay homage to the community while the space functions as a site for celebration and education.

The sculpture garden opened in March 2026 and will close in September 2027. Throughout its year and a half in the community, the artist’s non-profit, Summaeverything, has filled the calendar with programming ranging from yoga and run clubs sponsored by Nike to film screenings and community city planning design workshops. The New York Times quoted the artist saying, “I’m deeply in context for the first time in my career, I couldn’t be more happy. I didn’t even know art could do this.”

Fragrant native sages and multiple fountains populate the garden, producing a calming soundscape that expands the visual oasis into a sensorial one. As I walked to the back of the garden to take note of the vegetables growing there (the docent told me a harvest feast might be forthcoming), the bright blue, cloudless sky struck me, interrupted by palm trees and the angular white architecture that reminded me of the Getty, another LA icon.

Halsey’s heavy use of reference speaks to her sensibility as an artist, one who draws on the referential material of daily life as much as the imagery we think of with Ancient Egypt and the civil rights movement. The gesture of carving these images into the architectural facade democratizes them, literally carving space for the artist’s community into history.

As I left, one issue plagued me: this artwork will eventually leave the neighborhood. Because of its dominating presence and welcoming open gates, offering respite and memorial along the busy streets of South LA, it seems so wrong that it is temporary. Halsey has given thoughtful consideration to every aspect of the project, from the native plants that encourage local ecology to the free community programming that activates the space, and all of it feels invaluable to the community. The project raises questions about social practice as an ever-increasing contemporary art form, and its impact. How much social change can we expect from an artwork?

Halsey maintains an authentic commitment to making art objects, monuments, and paintings that speak directly to a larger need within her practice to, as she put it, “be in context.”

If you are in Los Angeles or visiting, I would highly recommend making your way over to sister dreamer: lauren halsey’s architectural ode to the surge and splurge of south central los angeles for an inspired sensorial experience.

Subscribe now

It was during this oppressive heatwave, on July 22, 1934, that the notorious gangster John Dillinger—known as “Public Enemy No. 1”—sought refuge inside the air conditioned Biograph Theatre, a historic landmark that still stands today. As he exited the picture show, Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents in the adjacent alley at 2423 N. Lincoln Avenue. He was accompanied that night by Anna Sage (born Ana Cumpănaș), a Romanian brothel madam famously dubbed the “Lady in Red,” who had traded Dillinger’s location to the FBI to avoid deportation.

Decades later, public art would connect this dark history to modern struggles. I recently took a Chicago gangster bus tour to delve into these notorious exploits, which is where I learned the granular details of Dillinger’s death and saw the striking piece for the first time. This encounter directly inspired this write-up.

On July 22, 2020—exactly 86 years after the assassination—local street artist Gabriel Moskolis painted a mural depicting Dillinger’s mugshot portrait near the theatre. The piece serves to educate both locals and tourists on Chicago’s gritty historical roots. Dillinger’s legacy represents the desperate times of the Great Depression, while Sage’s fate reminds us of the ongoing struggles faced by immigrants; despite her cooperation, she was ultimately deported, and the FBI agent who led the operation later tragically died by suicide. In a modern climate of economic uncertainty and ongoing anxieties surrounding immigration enforcement, this public artwork forces us to reflect on the historical cycles our nation continues to endure.

The Great Depression also birthed an era of monumental civic art, heavily influenced by the Mexican Muralism movement. Chicago local Edward Millman mastered the fresco technique while studying under the legendary Diego Rivera. Rivera’s focus on social justice and the working class heavily influenced Millman’s artistic voice. In 1936, while serving as the state director of mural projects for the Federal Art Project (FAP), Millman was commissioned to transform a blank 400-square-foot wall in the City Hall offices of the Bureau of Water.

Completed in 1937, his massive 10-by-27-foot fresco, The Blessings of Water, is divided into two contrasting narratives. The right side directly depicts the human suffering caused by the environmental collapse, capturing the bleak misery of the Dust Bowl conditions on the Great Plains. Conversely, the left side celebrates the abundance and life produced by sufficient water. Today, this striking piece can still be viewed on the first floor of City Hall’s service center at 121 N. LaSalle Street.

That same year, American printmaker and educator Harry Sternberg painted another iconic, WPA-funded Depression-era mural: Chicago: Epoch of a Great City. While Sternberg did not study directly under Diego Rivera, a 1934 meeting with Rivera and

Frida Kahlo deeply inspired his commitment to union and social causes. By 1935, Sternberg was appointed as a technical advisor to the FAP’s Graphic Art Division. After completing his first post office mural in Pennsylvania under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, Sternberg traveled to Chicago to immerse himself in the city’s history, architecture, and industrial labor.

The resulting masterpiece was installed in the Lakeview Post Office (now the Steve Goodman Post Office at 1343 W. Irving Park Road). The mural spans Chicago’s history, from the early settlement of Fort Dearborn and the tragedy of the Great Chicago Fire to the brutal realities of the local stockyards and steel mills. Sternberg sought to visually capture the working-class struggles famously detailed in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle. To preserve this vital piece of history, the non-profit group Friends of the Lakeview Post Office was founded in 2001, culminating in a meticulous restoration by Parma Conservation in 2003. Sternberg later reflected that his time with the WPA made him feel like a vital part of one of the most important cultural movements in American history.

Chicago is rich with history, resilience, and art—much of it quietly tucked away into the corners of our daily commutes. As time moves rapidly around us, these public masterpieces remain timeless reminders of where we have been and who we are.

The title of the Hammer exhibition, “Several Eternities in a Day,” is taken from Nicanor Parra’s poem “Chronos.” The phrase suggests a non-chronological sense of time. Visitors experience the exhibition through an open, non-linear frame, with connections unfolding across time and space. Upon entering the exhibition, sound creates an atmosphere of primal forces rumbling within the walls of the first gallery. This sound seems to emerge from Edgar Calel’s installation of a mountainous environment, referencing his Guatemalan homeland as well as Southern California.

The sound pieces by Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon are field recordings. Here the sound work is composed of recordings of ambient sound from microphones placed deep in the earth. Throughout the galleries, Chacon’s sound works communicate with adjacent artworks, enlivening them and evoking a sense of ritual and dream.

Objects and installations by a diverse group of Brown and Indigenous artists include works by eighteen living artists and four historic artists. Artworks by Ana Mendieta, Carlos Mérida, Mary Sully, and Francisco Toledo establish a lineage of material experimentation in art made across the Americas. Binding these artists—historic and contemporary—is an understanding of nature as an animate collaborator. Their practices are rooted in the spirit, memory, and knowledge of Brown and Indigenous worlds.

Divided into three “acts”—I. Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form; II. Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form; and III. Clay and Manifestations of Form—the exhibition invites viewers to imagine natural materials as living entities imbued with vital forces.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a visual artist, choreographer, and healer based in New York. At age eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s.

The fragile, bone-like sculptures in his installation are composed of objects Maravilla collected as he retraced his original migration path—steel, wood, cotton, and loofah. While the diagram on the brown wall was created by Maravilla at the exhibition opening. Based on a childhood game he played during his migration journey, Tripa Chuca, the drawing serves as both a form of storytelling and a memory map of his journey. Maravilla’s work affirms the dispersal of cultural knowledge through migration.

The final gallery is devoted to ceramic works. A monumental sculpture by Raven Halfmoon, E-a’-ti-ti (Sisters), stands sentinel in the center of the gallery. Rose B. Simpson’s delicate clay figures are assembled at one end of the gallery as if on an altar.

Simpson brings ancestral knowledge into dialogue with contemporary experience. Born in Santa Clara Pueblo, where Simpson continues to live and work, her clay sculptures are made with the same material her ancestors used. The figures are carefully hand-built from small tile-like pieces of clay and adorned with assorted materials from the Southwest. Her touch and imprint are visible on the face and bodies of the clay figurines. The altar-like installation of Simpson’s anthropomorphic figures is a commanding presence: a community of beings silently stand witness to past and present.

As visitors encounter the ceramic sculptures, Raven Chacon’s final sound work introduces the ocarina, a small clay wind instrument that dates to the ancient Maya people. The piercing sound of ocarinas is made through the force of wind rather than human breath.

A visit to the Hammer Museum is always free!

Subscribe now

While the museum has a number of stunning exhibitions on view, one in particular stands out for its exceptional curation, gorgeous works, and historical importance: Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited, curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta and Cristina Figueroa Vives. At its core, the show rethinks and revisits the Museum of Modern Art’s 1944 exhibition Modern Cuban Painters. That exhibition, assembled by MoMA’s founding director Alfred Barr, marked the initial boom of modern Cuban art in New York. Today, Goizueta and Figueroa fill three rooms with the greats of Cuban painting: Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, Mariano Rodriguez, Carlos Enriquez, and more.

The exhibition finds an ideal balance between the New York and Havana art scenes; in many ways the curators remain faithful to Barr’s vision, but with their own additions that further complement any lacunae from 80 years ago.

The first room of the exhibition, for example, creates a stunning dialogue between Fidelio Ponce de Leon and Wifredo Lam, two painters that remained somewhat apart from the others during their careers. On one hand, Ponce spent his life in Cuba, and remained largely separate from the influence of European modernism, Cubism, and other budding movements popping up on the other side of the Atlantic. On the other hand, Lam — perhaps Cuba’s best known painter internationally — was deeply tied to these European movements; he lived in Paris for many years and was a friend of Picasso, one of his greatest inspirations. While Ponce did participate in Barr’s exhibition, Lam did not, but the curators’ decision to put him in dialogue with the other artists was a crucial decision that acknowledges a broader vision of the Cuban artistic scene.

In the same vein, it is worth noting the inclusion of Antonio Gattorno in the exhibition’s second room. Gattorno was a Cuban surrealist painter who was an established member of the New York City arts scene at the time. Nevertheless he was excluded from the 1944 exhibition because he did not represent the art coming out of the island. Yet here, the curators include his work on an impressive salon-style wall of the Cuban masters who did participate back then. Lining the walls are so many of the great artists that enthusiasts of Cuban art know and love— the defining voices of the Cuban vanguardia: Mariano Rodríguez, Carlos Enriquez, Cundo Bermúdez, Victor Manuel, and more.

One of the most exciting aspects of the exhibition is the third and final room, dedicated primarily to Amelia Peláez, the only woman painter of the group, but often seen as one of the intellectual and artistic leaders of the time. This room shows both the breadth and depth of Peláez’s work and her balance between the Cubist trends of her European counterparts and her Cuban aesthetic.

Overall, Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited is a treat, whether you know a lot or nothing about Cuban art. The galleries are filled with archival materials and information that contextualize the works and their histories, and the works themselves are some of the most important examples of modern Cuban painting we have available in the United States. It is a show that unfolds before your eyes and is worth visiting again and again.

This is High Prismatic by Pearl C. Hsiung and it is just a single part of the vast collection of art and installations to be found throughout the Los Angeles Metro system. Founded in 1989 the Metro Arts program began commissioning works for their stations in the early 1990s, and today almost every station has some art either permanently installed or part of a constantly changing exhibition. The program includes digital shorts that appear on large screens at stations, the Lightbox Exhibition program which features photo based artwork on illuminated displays, and the Metro Art Buses where portraits of actual riders are added as wraps on the sides of the vehicles. Beyond the changing shows, permanent works are included in the construction of new stations with artists chosen in an open competition process following recommendations by Los Angeles based art professionals (including the heads of major galleries and museums). Some work gets commissioned up to ten years before its installation and the opening of the station and the wide variety on view show the diversity and dexterity of the program and the many ways to represent an ever-changing city.

Subscribe now

The heart of the Metro system is at Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles — often called the last of the great rail stations — which opened in 1939, built in a mixed Moderne/Art Deco/Mission Revival style. It is currently the busiest station in the Western US and also serves as an Amtrak, Metrolink, and Greyhound hub serving 110,000 passengers a day. The Metro Art program began commissioning work for the new expansion of the terminal in 1993, the most impressive of which is the massive City of Dreams/River of History by May Sun and Richard Wyatt.

Installed in 1995 the piece seeks to depict the history of the site and the city, a history long covered over by modern development. Union station sits at the former crossing place of several native trails, a bend in the Los Angeles river, and the original Chinatown. All of this went into the overlaying of natural and cultural histories that created the piece. The work is made up of an eighty foot mural by Wyatt which includes depictions of Native Americans, later settlers, and contemporary Los Angelenos. On the floor below the mural two hundred paving stones reference native plants, animals, and a wagon wheel. Behind that a curving bench and sculpture are made from stones taken from the LA river, with water trickling down the sculpture and historical artifacts embedded in it found during the digging of the B line. Finally the back of the room has a 7,500 gallon fish tank filled with native coastal fish and historical figures etched in its glass. Created in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake and the LA riots, this complex work wanted to create a place at the city’s core that displayed the past, embraced the good of the present, and dreamed of the city’s future. To show a path for coming together as a city in the place where all walks of life naturally converge and where the city began. The piece reminds us that we cannot disconnect ourselves from the land that we live on and the history it holds, but we must use it as a foundation for a better tomorrow. These themes and hopes may elude the average commuter, but the artists feel that seeing them everyday plants a seed for the future.

As the system continued to expand the Metro Arts program sought to maintain the deep connection to place seen in the Union Station commissions, with each station’s work seeking to be an expression or an embodiment of its neighborhood. The most emblematic example of this was the installation of Hooray for Hollywood by Gilbert ‘Magu” Lujan at the Hollywood & Vine Station in 1999. For this commission the artist worked closely with the architects to create an immersive experience akin to walking into a film or entering one of the great movie palaces, like those located just outside. Lujan wanted to evoke the glamour of the golden age of Hollywood and the movie palaces which he sees as Hollywood’s satellites around the world. The space has ceramic pillars like stylized Art Deco/Egyptian palm trees with low vaulted ceilings like the foyer of a theatre. The walls have 240 tiles hand-painted by the artist showing images and icons of the silver screen. From the next level down the ceiling is covered in old film reels painted blue like the sky, recalling the illusionary ceilings of the movie palaces. On the level above the platform are two film projectors from the 1930’s, donated by Paramount Pictures, and the notes on the handrail play Hooray for Hollywood. The artist wanted to show Hollywood as the dream factory for world culture and said the ingredients for it and the station’s design were light, power, fantasy, enchantment, glitz, and glitter. The work perfectly encapsulates its moment in art and culture with its postmodern architecture, since of whimsy, and love of celebrity. It embraces the viewer in a complete environment and creates an atmosphere of fun with slight menace that is perfect for Hollywood. The sketchy hand painted quality of the tiles evokes the graphic design seen on MTV in this era, and the overall sense of 90’s kitsch is palpable. A red metal curtain rises over a blank silver screen as you enter the platform and your movie or journey begins.

Standing as the centerpiece to the Arts Grand Ave/Bunker Hill Station, High Prismatic by Pearl C. Hsiung was installed in 2021 and depicts the tumultuous history of its site in stunning mosaic. Built as part of the construction of The Broad Museum, the station sits on the former site of Bunker Hill, the wealthy enclave of Los Angeles from the 1870’s until the 1920’s. Once a picturesque Victorian neighborhood, the hill became less fashionable over time and the houses were divided into apartments for low income workers by the 1960’s. The city would see the area as blighted and began a massive renewal project that leveled every building on the hill. The hill was then transformed into the financial and arts center for the city, with a new skyscraper going up every year into the early 1990s. Starting in the early 2000s the city began the Grand Ave project to revitalize the hill again, this included the construction of the Broad and the addition of the Arts Grand Ave/Bunker Hill station as part of the Regional Connector expansion of the Metro. All of this history was central in the mind of Hsiung as she created her mosaic; she wanted to blend it with the geological and anthropological histories of the region into one expression of the city’s power and energy. The mosaic depicts a colorful eruption rising out of an infinitely rolling landscape toward a celestial expanse, alluding both to the oil boom that helped jump start the region and the creative energy that sustained it. The piece seeks to visualize the human and physical forces that created Bunker Hill; with its composition and color alluding to the buried, exposed, and still forming identities of art spaces like M.O.C.A. and The Broad that are pushing it into the future. It is a celebration of the cosmos of images and cultures that make up Los Angeles, ever changing and ever present, driving the future. It’s a message of hope, rooted in the past, and dreaming of tomorrow that is central to the art commissioned for the Los Angeles Metro system.

This is only a glimpse of the vast collection of art to be found on the LA Metro, each piece deeply connected to its location and representing the best of the city’s culture and history. LA Metro’s website has an excellent database of all the work on view as well as changing exhibitions throughout the system. Recently three new stops have opened on the D line, connecting downtown to LACMA by subway for the first time, and adding huge new works in their stations. This alongside last year’s opening of the Metro Transit Center at LAX and its massive installation, The Distance of the Sun, show the growing ambition of the Metro Arts program and the sophistication of Los Angeles’s metro lines and its public art. With the Super Bowl and the Olympics on the horizon I look forward to the work that we will be getting in the coming years and the ways it will further connect and express Los Angeles.

Subscribe now

Born in Paris and now based in Miami, Billet’s practice is informed by her background in architecture. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Pratt Institute and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University, Billet transitioned from architecture to a full-time artistic practice. Nevertheless, her training continues to inform her understanding of space, materiality, and design.

Billet often uses plywood and digital fabrication techniques to create highly textured forms that combine textures from the natural world and technological processes. Central to Billet’s work is this interest in the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology, frequently transforming industrial materials into works that reflect erosion and environmental changes. According to Billet, her work seeks to foster conversations about how humans can coexist with nature while also embracing technological advancements.

This approach is especially evident in Forces of Nature, Billet’s ongoing public art commission developed in partnership with Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places program and Casa Familia, a Miami non-profit dedicated to creating safe and affordable housing throughout the county. The project consists of sculptural canopies, benches, reflective surfaces, and integrated plants designed as an immersive ecosystem rather than presenting a single monumental object. Inspired by abstract painting, the canopies serve as functional spatial markers that invite visitors to move beneath and through them. The benches provide seating while also serving as sculptural forms etched with tactile details. Mirrored fragments incorporated throughout the installation encourage visitors to see themselves reflected within the surrounding landscape.

What distinguishes Billet’s contribution to Miami’s public art ecosystem is her emphasis on participation. Many public artworks remain essentially for the purpose of observation. Billet’s installations instead become places to gather, rest, and interact. The viewer is not positioned outside the artwork but becomes part of it, prioritizing community engagement rather than mere visual impact or even social media capital in our current “instagrammable” era.

Her recent projects in the Miami Design District further demonstrate this philosophy. Works such as Woven and her sculptural benches integrate living orchids and plant material into fabricated structures, creating installations that lend themselves to evolve over time. By incorporating living elements, Billet challenges the notion of sculpture as a fixed or stagnant object and instead presents it as an ongoing dialogue between the built and natural environments. These projects blur distinctions between landscape architecture, public design, and fine art while encouraging the connection with free access to art.

As Miami continues to invest in site-specific public art, artists like Joyce Billet demonstrate how these commissions can move beyond decoration and become meaningful civic spaces. Her installations do not simply occupy public environments; her work suggests a future for public art that is less about observation and more about connection.

Billet’s work will next be featured in a solo exhibition at Mindy Solomon Gallery, curated by Sophia Ballesteros and opening on July 26. The exhibition offers another opportunity to encounter the artist’s evolving practice beyond the public sphere.

“When Henri Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I’m not crazy about his roosters and asses and flying violinists, and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last things he’s done in Venice convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”

Picasso famously proclaimed this in 1964 about Chagall, who in return responded, “What a genius, that Picasso. It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.”

Historically and to this day, the art world is filled with stories of great rivalries and mutual influences. Even though we will never truly know the intimate details of the Picasso-Chagall relationship, Chicagoans have the unique honor of hosting a piece of their shared history. Long after both men have gone, their art still lives on in our city.

In 1963, when Picasso was commissioned to create the 50-foot sculpture at Daley Plaza—then called the Civic Center at 50 W. Washington, across the street from City Hall—he refused to accept the $100,000 payment, insisting on gifting the piece to the city instead. While charitable foundations funded the construction of the monument, the artist himself wryly noted, “You know I never accept commissions to do any sort of work, but in this case I am involved in projects for the two great gangster cities” (the other being Marseille, France). Initially, the sculpture sparked intense controversy. People were unsure what the abstract design meant, but it undeniably got them talking.

It still does. I will never forget visiting downtown as a child, and later working as a paralegal. Visiting the courthouse, I frequently saw both locals and tourists questioning what the monument was meant to be. Over the years, I have watched teens ride their skateboards along its base, protesters gather, and festivals unfold—all backdropped by the same Picasso monument that has anchored these urban stories since 1967. Picasso later indicated that the sculpture was meant to represent an Afghan Hound, an aristocratic and loyal companion. Perhaps that loyal sentiment is exactly what he wanted to leave with the city.

To preserve the history of this monumental gift, the Art Institute of Chicago houses both a miniature model, Maquette for Richard J. Daley Center Sculpture, and a simple white chalk sketch on wood titled Richard J. Daley Center Sculpture, 1967.

Just a short walk away in Gallery 144, visitors can view Chagall’s famous 1977 stained-glass masterpiece, America Windows. This, too, was a gift to the city from the artist, the City of Chicago, and the Auxiliary Board of the Art Institute, commemorating the American Bicentennial in memory of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The brilliant blue panes beautifully incorporate local iconography, including the Chicago skyline.

Prior to creating America Windows, Chagall completed another massive public piece in 1974: The Four Seasons, located at Chase Tower Plaza. Chase Tower first opened in 1969 as First National Plaza, serving as the headquarters of the First Chicago Corporation; at its completion, it was among the tallest reinforced concrete buildings in the world. Chagall’s 14-foot-tall mosaic wraps around four sides of a central plaza structure. Its creation is documented in the film The Gift: Four Seasons Mosaic of Marc Chagall, directed by Chuck Olin, where Chagall notes that the work is meant to “represent human life, both physical and spiritual, at its different stages.” He expressed hope that the people of Chicago “will feel the same emotion that I felt when doing this work.”

Understanding this history transforms the viewing experience, connecting the viewer directly to the artistic process that bridged the South of France to the Midwest. Chagall and Picasso may have inspired each other, or they may have simply been rivals—we will never truly know. What we do know for certain is that their work continues to spark conversations and evoke a deep appreciation for the immense labor behind public art. While a monument relies on an artist’s vision and a village of donors to fund and install it, the final product always belongs to the public.

Chicano muralism in Los Angeles took over at the beginning of the 1970s as a result of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. For many, the murals were a way to take back the false narratives about Mexican-Americans cultivating a new Chicano identity. These murals often showcase pre-Colombian figures and motifs blended with Catholic imagery, as well as Revolutionary figures and portraits of Mexican leaders. Another aspect of these colorful murals dotting East Los Angeles and beyond is the concept of community and Do-It-Yourself undertaking. While some later murals were commissioned by the city, many came about through fundraising and volunteer efforts.

The East Los Streetscapers, originally Los Dos Streetscapers, began with artists David Botello and Wayne Healy who worked on their first artistic collaboration in third grade while attending elementary school together. Their name changed when other artists joined them like George Yepes who assisted on The Education Suite, as well as David’s younger brother Paul. While Botello’s early career was focused on commercial art, Healy worked for the Hughes Aircraft Company after having studied mathematics and engineering.

Located in the Helen Miller Bailey Library on East Los Angeles Colleges’ campus, the mural covers three walls. While there is no separation in the painting, each wall has a distinct focus. The first wall represents Arte with depictions of Luis Valdez, Edward James Olmos, Picasso, and references the cave paintings in Lascaux, France and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. This first wall establishes iconic Mexican-American figures like Valdez and Olmos as deserving of the same recognition given to European artwork and artists. By referencing the cave paintings and hieroglyphs, the Streetscapers situate their own mural making practice back to centuries old practice of self-authored history through symbolism and wall painting.

The next wall represents Ciencia which depicts a magical realism dream of the past, present, and future. In the center is an underwater city with explorers utilizing futuristic technology, below them are a depiction of Aztec pyramids and a lush corn field.

The inclusion of the corn in this section may allude to the early domestication of the teosinte which was an essential grain of early agriculture. In the upper right, Jane Goodall is seen interacting with a chimp, the pair is positioned in a way that makes them look like they are shooting out of the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

The last wall which takes you up to the second floor of the library represents Filosofia. In this section there are depictions of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. Similarly there is a representation of an Indigenous elder reflecting Indigenous philosophies and practices. This wall diffuses religious and spiritual hierarchies by presenting various philosophies and ways of thinking on the same plane creating an equality amongst them. There also appears to be a nod to Hell with some flames at the bottom center of the composition and a goblin looking figure peeking through. Additionally Martin Luther King Jr. and Pancho Villa are depicted in discussion. Finally the entirety of the mural is wrapped up by a student sitting on the edge taking it all in next to a depiction of the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll’ s Alice in Wonderland. Much like in Carroll’s story, the rabbit in this mural helps to reveal a new world, illustrated by pulling back the curtain to ELACs campus.

Despite the forty-five years since The Education Suite was painted, discussions about restorative revisions of history still persist. This past April saw the closing of Judith F. Baca: Great Wall of Los Angeles: The 1970s- A Decade of Defiance and Dreams (February 21–April 4, 2026) at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Baca’s collaborative mural and public art project are not just appreciated for their aesthetic beauty but for the intentional retelling of history through the perspectives of marginalized voices.

Public artworks are made better through thoughtful reflection and consideration, without which they would dissolve into the landscape. By engaging with public artworks one engages with a community and its values. Murals in particular have a narrative quality that has a message for its viewers.While murals may represent a specific place and time, they may also evolve to better represent their communities through restoration and conservation efforts. When murals are understood as in conversation with the community and landscape in which they are painted, viewers are prompted to make connections between the mural and the neighborhood, people, and businesses that surround it. History is anything but stagnant and change is necessary for any growth to happen. When communities take ownership of their stories and provide space for broader interpretations or revisions they ensure their own future and the future of those to come.

For further reading:

Khan, David. “Chicano Street Murals: People’s Art in the East Los Angeles Barrio” Aztlan, Vol. 6, no. 1, 1975, pp. 117-118. Chicano Street Murals- Aztlan journal article

Barnett-Sanchez, Holly and Drescher, Tim. “Give Me Life: Iconography and Identity in East La Murals” University of New Mexico Press, ABQ. 2016

In 1899, Louis Sullivan was commissioned by the retail firm Schlesinger and Mayer to design a building in downtown Chicago. Sullivan’s famous saying “form follows function” now posits an ironic conjunction with the Target store occupying the building today. What was once a groundbreaking department store designed to celebrate modern retail architecture now houses a contemporary corporate chain, producing a tension between architectural idealism and mass-market consumption. Sullivan believed that architecture should express its purpose. Standing in front of the ornately decorated building now, the question becomes what that purpose has evolved into. The once celebrated structure reads less like a typical Target store and more like a monument to the endurance of consumer culture.

Despite the favored nickname “Goth Target,” the building is not Gothic. The ornate exterior instead pays homage to native Midwestern prairie plants, a hallmark of Sullivan’s decorative philosophy and an early gesture toward what would later become the Prairie School. Stylized organic forms wrap the façade in intricate terra-cotta ornamentation celebrating the surrounding landscape. These details were meant to elevate everyday urban experience, transforming a commercial building into something approaching civic art. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago’s retail architecture aimed for something ambitious, it was not simply about selling goods but generating curiosity.

Today the building reads somewhat differently. Though designed for retail in a busy commercial district, it now feels like a capitalist beacon of Chicago architecture that encourages perpetual consumption. The red Target logo glowing inside the historic structure feels almost theatrical. The effect is oddly cathedral-like: the building draws people inward with the promise of spectacle, yet the ritual inside is the circulation of commodities rather than spiritual contemplation.

Subscribe now

The nickname “Goth Target” unintentionally reveals how the building is experienced today. Gothic cathedrals historically functioned as civic anchors and spaces of collective awe, organizing urban life around beauty, ritual, and belief. The Target occupying Sullivan’s building gathers people in a similar physical way but toward a different goal. Bodies move through aisles of affordable goods rather than through chapels and transepts. It is difficult not to think of the building as a contemporary temple of consumption.

In the art world, we are of course not strangers to temples of consumption. Art fair booths or even some galleries resemble temporary storefronts, and artworks are presented like products in carefully staged display windows. The visual language can be compelling, but viewers never forget that everything has a price attached to it. Art becomes not only something to admire but something to acquire.

Something like Frieze LA or Art Basel, for me, echoes the experience of standing in front of the Sullivan building in Chicago. In both cases, beauty operates as an invitation that leads toward consumption. The aesthetic experience is genuine, but it exists within an economic system that quietly structures how we move through the space.

Nevertheless, architecture remains one of the few art forms that still belongs to the public. Unlike painting or sculpture, it cannot be hidden behind the walls of a private collection. It exists in the open city, where anyone can experience it without paying admission. A building can still provoke curiosity, admiration, and reflection simply by occupying space, just like Sullivan’s building does for Chicagoans and tourists alike.

At the same time, architecture is not immune to capitalism. With corporations like Target embedded within historic Chicago buildings, the boundary between artistic experience and commercial activity becomes blurred. The Sullivan building embodies this paradox perfectly. Its façade remains an extraordinary example of early modernist architectural ornamentation, while the interior embodies the contemporary economy of mass retail.

The building stands as a reminder that even remarkable artistic achievements can be absorbed into systems of consumption. What was once a radical statement about the future of architecture now serves as a backdrop for fluorescent aisles and discount merchandise. And yet the building remains strangely captivating. The terra-cotta ornamentation still catches the light in ways that reward slow looking. Pedestrians still pause to admire the curling details across the façade. The architecture continues to provoke the sense of wonder Sullivan intended, even if the context surrounding it has changed.

Maybe this is why the so-called Goth Target feels so symbolic. It exposes the uneasy coexistence of art and commerce without attempting to hide the contradiction. The building stages a quiet confrontation between architectural beauty and corporate branding.

Perhaps the so-called Goth Target is more honest than we would like to admit. It reveals that art and consumption have never been entirely separate, exposing with unusual clarity the moment when the architecture of beauty becomes indistinguishable from the architecture of buying.

With the onset of the Covid pandemic, Art Muse President Clare Kunny wanted to find a new way to engage with art in outdoor public spaces. She noticed that in West Los Angeles, there were so many clusters of public art that were just waiting to be seen and explored. The result: a new set of public art access guides that brought in interns to write about sculptures at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA, in Beverly Hills, and in Century City.

Over the years, Art Muse Academy (or AMA, among friends) solidified its internship program, offering university students and recent graduates an opportunity to network with experts and create something that highlights the public art of their surroundings. The mission of AMA thus became: Art Muse Academy provides hands-on training and career foundations that equip the next generation of art historians, educators, and cultural guides to make art accessible to all.

Now, six years later, the paid internship program and public art guides span not only Los Angeles, but also Miami. We have new guides in Downtown LA’s Bunker Hill as well as Miami’s Underline public park initiative in the Brickell neighborhood. Our interns have gone on to receive jobs with major museums, galleries, and institutions across Southern California and South Florida.

Additionally, we are proud to have formed a new partnership with East Los Angeles College’s Museum Studies Certificate program. The College has provided two interns this year, Izzy and Alex, who are currently wrapping up their incredible work over the last ten weeks. They’ve had one-on-one meetings with curators, educators, artists, and philanthropists all in an effort to network and learn from industry experts, all while creating the foundation for our next guide featuring murals of East LA.

Art Muse Academy has become a gem of an opportunity for rising stars in the art world, fostering professional development and hands-on experience for those looking for opportunities in museums, galleries, and art foundations. We’re still growing and always looking for the support of our followers and friends. So, please look at our upcoming programs and inquire about how to support a project that we’re so proud of.

To support, please email info@artmusela.com

However, Getty Center’s exhibition, Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages, asks viewers to question and explore this very subject matter a little further. The show’s curators Beth Morrison and Larisa Grollemond ingeniously curated artworks from two belief systems. They are: 1) illuminated manuscripts (handmade books from the Middle Ages—from AD 476 to about the 1500’s) presenting Christian-based stories; and 2) American Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales’s paintings, inspired by Christianity and the Yoruba religion originating from African countries.

Walk into Gallery N105 and the first illumination that will take your breath away is The Creation of the World from the Stamheim Missal.

The Stamheim Missal is a 12th-century German illuminated manuscript. The term illuminated stems from the Latin word illuminare, meaning to illuminate or light up, due to intense colors and gold leaf. This liturgical book contains prayers, chants and instructions for a priest to celebrate the Roman Catholic mass throughout the year. At left, the creation story is inspired by the Judeo-Christian bible - Book of Genesis, Chapters 1 and 2. It states that God created the world. We see the cosmic order in roundels, placed inside a large circle, outlined in red. At top, God is flanked by angels, holding the universe in his hands.

The six roundels show God created the universe in six days. Beginning at left with the half-brown roundel we see that on the first day, God created light and separated it from darkness. At the sixth roundel, creation ends with animals and humans.

The first man and woman, Adam and Eve, are at center page, depicted as white humans by the medieval Christian artist. This was a visual tool used for the illiterate white European masses to visually identify with Adam and Eve. They live in the Garden of Eden which contains a vegan buffet. God tells them to help themselves and, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Then an evil snake suggests to Eve that if she eats the fruit from the forbidden tree, she’ll obtain knowledge and be like God. Eve eats the fruit and shares it with Adam. After disobeying God, Adam and Eve are ousted from the garden by an angel holding a sword (at bottom left page).

In Harmonia Rosales’s Portrait of Eve, the spotlight is on the woman.

The golden roundels bring to mind illuminated manuscripts and paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance eras when artworks showcased deities in golden halos. Rosales’s oeuvre is inspired by these art styles and by her Afro-Cuban ancestors’ beliefs and traditions.

At Getty Center’s March 1, 2026 event, Creator/Creation: Conversation with Harmonia Rosales, the artist stated that her version of Eve is an antidote to the medieval Eve. In the roundel above Eve’s head, we see Eve as the matriarch of the African Diaspora. Harmonia states, “the haloes are a map of your destined path….the snake symbolizes knowledge and the tree represents control.” She refers to the transatlantic trade of enslaved people from Africa that were sent by Europeans to Brazil and the Caribbean between the 1500’s and 1800’s. One roundel contains the strangler fig tree which grows by taking hold of a host tree, thereby “strangling” it. Per Harmonia, “the strangler fig symbolizes manipulation and control of any society.” Next, we see ships with slaves that will be sold for money. Then, inevitable pain and death will occur. Harmonia says, “In my work, I want to offer healing. Eve breaks the cycle of pain. She holds space for the next generation – greatness.” The biblical Eve can be seen as the first woman and ancestor of all people, while this Eve embodies Harmonia’s ancestors.

Our next object is an Armenian bible with its left page showcasing the creation in roundels at its inner margin. The right page in this illumination is ornate because it introduces the sacred text. This is a hallmark of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, replete with refined calligraphy, decorated margins and zoomorphic creatures forming large letters of opening sentences. It looks as though light emanates from within the pages. This is an intentional artistic effect, as light resonates with the words of God at creation, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” (Genesis: 1:3).

Regarding light, Harmonia Rosales’s Creation mesmerizes us with celestial radiation.

The artist’s subject matter is inspired by her Afro-Cuban ancestry’s Yoruba religion. Originating in southwestern Nigeria and other areas of Africa this belief system traveled to the Americas, influencing the religions of Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in Cuba.

In this heavenly sphere, we see the Yoruba creation story, beginning with the merging of female (Odua) and male (Olodumare) energies. Per Rosales’s book, Chronicles of Ori:

“Olodumare, the reincarnation of the primordial being, was a divine force

in constant motion…. [D]rifting from one galaxy to another, he collected

the minerals and microbial remnants of long-deceased planets. Within the

belly of his ethereal form, Olodumare bore the seeds of life, each a thing

of pure possibility poised to be nurtured and reborn….”

Olodumare goes deep into the Universe and collides with Odua:

“She was the light, composed of pure hydrogen. She was the womb from

which all things emerge.”

Olodumare is now in Odua’s power and then bursts. At this moment, his seeds of life are taken by Odua and scatter into the dark void, giving origin to the life force! Sounds like The Big Bang theory to me!

Odua and Olodumare now transform. At top, we see Odua - a personification of light. Rosales states that Odua is akin to the Holy Ghost in Christianity. At bottom, Olodumare becomes the moon and fragments into the orishas, known as the emanations of Olodumare’s powers. They become the landscape, rivers, lagoons and the seas.

At center, a golden snake symbolizes transformation. “We need transformation to create movement. The snake is a never ending cycle,” says Rosales, who has listened to these stories since her childhood. Inside this serpentine circle, we see Earth, personified as Mama Onile or Mother Nature. She represents the Earth – the ground, fertility and death. At left, we see a zorse in fertile land! At right, the arid landscape and a skull signal death.

Heading back to Eden, we’re reacquainted with Adam and Eve in two artworks with overlapping contexts.

Above, we see a lavish book called The Arenberg Hours. It contains prayers meant to be recited at different hours of the day. The stiff figural style and bright colors are attributed to 15^th-century Belgian artist Willem Vrelant. At the time, the city of Bruges was at the height of manuscript production. This book contains 80 illuminations. On this page, the marginalia’s floral details are astounding. Imagine how long it might take an artist to paint one page made of parchment or vellum (animal skins) with organic pigments and gold leaf.

Adam and Eve stand on each side of a tree, shaped like a cross. This foreshadows the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ who is seen at the top. The snake’s head is a personification of a woman. This element suggests that women were seen as temptresses, dating back to Eve, their progenitrix.

Beneath the Arenberg Hours, Harmonia Rosales’s Stranger Fig: Adam/Strangler Fig: Eve paintings fuse the creation stories of West Africa and Judeo-Christian imagery. This oeuvre and Vrelant’s Adam and Eve Eating the Forbidden Fruit are next to each other – one hangs on the wall, while the other is displayed in a case.

In-gallery, you’ll notice that both Stranger Fig paintings are united by a tree which is flanked by a black Adam and a black Eve. While the snake in Vrelant’s artwork is the evil temptation, Rosales’s snake symbolizes knowledge – all good. The biblical version states that when Eve ate the fruit from the forbidden tree, she sinned because she wanted knowledge. In Strangler Fig: Eve, the fruit in this progenitrix’s hand represents survival for the people in the African Diaspora. The tree’s roots that wrap around Adam and Eve’s feet mimick the movements of the snake above. Just as the snake and tree roots are manipulative, so was the economic slavery trade. The gold background has a mesh like pattern. Rosales states, “Adam and Eve stand in a gilded cage”, referring to the forced Christian conversion of enslaved, displaced African people.

Rosales states that she does not attack Christianity but clearly feels that, “Medieval traditional work was created to teach theology to illiterate people. They defined the figure, it was white washed. These are tools that indoctrinated society, that shaped cosmic beliefs. I’m using those tools and redirecting them.”

Harmonia Rosale’s vibrant paintings invite us to reinterpret Medieval works. The exhibition Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages is on view at The Getty Center until April 19, 2026. The artist’s book, The Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic is available online and at the museum’s bookstore.

In discussing their work, the artists point to European gothic horror as a reference point, particularly the way nature is mobilized as a site of dread. In classical Western gothic imagery, castles are often used to embody a physical site of temporality. Castles and ruins are sites of violent pasts that converge with a looming present and uncertain future for the protagonist. In South America, where gothic architecture of this kind is largely absent, this logic shifts from building to land. The gothic is no longer housed within walls but embedded in territory itself.

Marcelo’s The Feast of Fire presents a grandiose daytime landscape charged with ritual anticipation, a territory marked by its violence. The composition balances a vast natural landscape that appears receptive yet indifferent to its chaos. Humans populate the terrain framed in violent vignettes of labor, enslavement, and sacrifice against a much larger, uncontrollable geological power; the volcano.

On the canvas’s reverse, night reveals the same landscape after the eruption and after human presence has vanished. Nature persists seemingly unchanged, quietly reclaiming the site as embers fade. This absence reinforces Canevari’s meditation on sacrifice and futility, inspired by the 1973 film, The Wicker Man. The Feast of Fire explores extremely pertinent themes within the canon of South America, natural terrain bears the weight of historical violence that is not imagined but lived; these events occurred, and their traces remain embedded in the land. The environment becomes haunted not by fantasy but by history, carrying the ghosts of territorial conflict and collective trauma familiar to South America.

Marcelo introduces a white canvas into the foreground of his paintings for X Marks the Spot. The blank canvas is used as a double narrative within his charged environments. On a personal level, it stands as an homage to his father, also an artist and illustrator, and the formation that shaped Canevari’s early career. Both father and son collaborated finishing each other’s paintings, the blank canvas acknowledges his father’s absence leaving a part of each work incomplete. A quiet acknowledgment of origin rather than an explanation. On an artistic level, the canvas operates as a self-reflexive gesture: an attempt by painting to enter its own mystery. Its blank surface functions as a fantastical intrusion, a consciousness trying to understand its own confusion and contradictions.

Ornella Pocetti draws from both literary and historical devices throughout the exhibition. In An Old Friend, she references Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, a short story centered on a teenage girl confronted by an older man whose charm conceals an imminent threat. The narrative unfolds through suggestion rather than explicit violence, sustaining a sense of psychological unease that never fully resolves.

Pocetti depicts a moment drawn from this atmosphere of suspended danger, depicting both vulnerability and desire through the exposed figure of a young woman whose isolation is underscored by an unseen male presence, suggested only by a pair of dress shoes. A white pigeon functions as a fragile emblem of innocence under threat, held in a moment just before harm is realized. Pocetti’s uncanny staging translates the story’s tension between seductive appearance and underlying menace into a quiet conflict, aligning with the exhibition’s broader exploration of desire, violence, and dread as forces that linger rather than erupt.

Ornella’s If I cannot persuade the gods of heaven, I will move those of hell (2026), presents a self-portrait encased in black and red. The portrait incorporates objects that recur in Pocetti’s visual language such as the black glove, the ruby red heels, and a forgotten beer glass in which a fly had drowned. The central femme fatale figure, with one hand rendered in red and the other in black, uses colors that, as the artist notes, invoke blood and ash, inspired by Selk’nam ritual body paint associated with states of transformation. The woman presents herself as both armored and exposed, set against a wilderness that resembles a theatrical backdrop.

Across the exhibition, references to history, literature and film persist, with Pocetti’s nod to Oates echoed by Canevari’s work and his evocation of folk-horror cinema, recalling The Wicker Man in its staging of ritual, sacrifice, and communal belief. On view from January 17 through February 28, 2026, the X quietly marks a hidden treasure where Mindy Solomon Gallery stands.

X Marks the Spot: Ornella Pocetti y Marcelo Canevari (Español)

X Marks the Spot une a los artistas Ornella Pocetti y Marcelo Canevari en un paisaje gótico donde el deseo y la violencia permanecen en suspenso más que en resolverse. Al explorar temas vinculados al folk horror argentino y al surrealismo, cada artista construye escenas que se sienten teatrales, pero ancladas en la memoria literaria y en una historia mórbida. El título de la exposición, un modismo en inglés, se resiste a una traducción directa al español, preservando la letra X como un marcador ambiguo: signo de tesoro oculto, de lo erótico y lo X-rated, y de una aventura esquiva que promete descubrimiento mientras niega ofrecer alguna claridad. Al mismo tiempo, la X funciona como una señal de intersección, un punto donde convergen dos prácticas artísticas como pareja y colaboradores. Pocetti y Canevari conciben la exposición como un territorio compartido, modelado por cruces narrativos y señales temáticos.

Al hablar de sus obras, los artistas se inspiran en el horror gótico europeo como un punto de referencia, en particular la manera en que la naturaleza se activa como un espacio de pavor. En la metáfora gótica clásica occidental, los castillos suelen funcionar como lugares que manifiestan un sitio físico de la temporalidad. Castillos y ruinas son espacios donde pasados violentos convergen con un presente ominoso y un futuro incierto para el protagonista. En Sudamérica, donde este tipo de arquitectura gótica es en gran medida inexistente, esta lógica se desplaza del edificio al territorio. Lo gótico deja de habitar los muros y pasa a inscribirse en la tierra misma.

The Feast of Fire de Marcelo presenta un paisaje diurno cargado de una anticipación ritual, un territorio marcado por la violencia. La composición equilibra un vasto entorno natural que parece receptivo, aunque indiferente a su propio caos. Figuras humanas habitan el paisaje, encuadradas en viñetas violentas de trabajo, esclavitud y sacrificio, frente a una fuerza geológica mucho mayor e incontrolable: el volcán.

El reverso del lienzo revela el mismo paisaje pero nocturno, después de la erupción y tras la desaparición de toda presencia humana. La naturaleza persiste aparentemente intacta, reclamando en silencio el lugar mientras las brasas se extinguen. Esta ausencia refuerza la meditación de Canevari, sobre el sacrificio y la futilidad, inspirada en la película The Wicker Man. The Feast of Fire explora temas profundamente pertinentes dentro del canon sudamericano: el terreno natural carga con el peso de una violencia histórica que no es imaginada, sino vivida. Estos hechos ocurrieron y sus huellas permanecen incrustadas en la tierra. El entorno se vuelve espectral no por la fantasía, sino por la historia, portando los fantasmas del conflicto territorial y del trauma colectivo que resultan familiares en América del Sur.

Marcelo introduce un lienzo en blanco en el primer plano de sus pinturas para X Marks the Spot. Este lienzo vacío opera como una doble narrativa dentro de sus entornos cargados. A nivel personal, nos remite al padre de Canevari, también artista e ilustrador, y al formador que marcó su trayectoria inicial. Padre e hijo colaboraban terminando la obra que el otro había empezado, el lienzo en blanco reconoce la ausencia de su padre, dejando cada obra deliberadamente incompleta. Un reconocimiento silencioso de su origen más no una explicación directa. Por otro lado, el lienzo funciona como un gesto autorreflexivo: un intento de la pintura por adentrarse en su propio misterio. Situada dentro de la escena, la superficie en blanco actúa como una irrupción fantástica, una conciencia que intenta comprender su propia confusión y contradicciones.

Ornella Pocetti recurre a dispositivos tanto literarios como históricos a lo largo de la exposición. En An Old Friend, toma como referencia el relato de Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, centrado en una adolescente confrontada por un hombre mayor cuyo encanto oculta una amenaza inminente. La narración se desarrolla a través de innuendos más que de violencia explícita, sosteniendo una sensación de inquietud psicológica que nunca llega a resolverse por completo.

Pocetti representa un momento extraído de esta atmósfera de peligro suspendido, articulando vulnerabilidad y deseo a través de la figura expuesta de una joven cuya soledad se ve acentuada por una presencia masculina invisible, sugerida únicamente por un par de zapatos de vestir. Una paloma blanca, emblemática de la frágil inocencia amenazada, detenida justo un instante antes de que el daño se concrete. La escena inquietante de Pocetti traduce la tensión del relato entre la apariencia seductora y la amenaza de un conflicto silencioso, explorando más ampliamente la temática sobre el deseo, la violencia y el horror como fuerzas latentes que aún no estallan.

If I cannot persuade the gods of heaven, I will move those of hell (2026) presenta un autorretrato de Ornella encapsulado en negro y rojo. La obra incorpora objetos recurrentes en el lenguaje visual de Pocetti, como el guante negro, los tacones carmesí y un vaso de cerveza olvidado en el que una mosca se ha ahogado. La figura central de femme fatale, con una mano representada en rojo y la otra en negro, emplea colores que, como señala la artista, evocan la sangre y la ceniza. Estos colores están inspirados en la pintura ritual de los aborígenes selk’nam y asociados a estados de transformación. La mujer se presenta a la vez blindada y expuesta, situada frente a un paisaje agreste que remite a un telón teatral.

A lo largo de la exposición, ambos artistas recurren a referencias históricas, literarias y cinematográficas: con el guiño de Pocetti a la autora Americana Oates y también la evocación de Canevari del cine de folk horror, que recuerda a The Wicker Man en sus escena del ritual y sacrificio. En exhibición del 17 de enero al 28 de febrero de 2026, la X marca silenciosamente un tesoro guardado en el lugar que ocupa la galería Mindy Solomon.

I first visited Vienna in 1966, at only 17, as part of a summer course I took in Salzburg to advance my study of German. But it was a year spent in Vienna, courtesy of my college’s Junior Year Abroad program, that changed my life and revealed to this suburban California girl a new, much more sophisticated, world. Vienna has been for fifty years the city I know best and love the most. In that college year, our art history professor was Anna von Spitzmüller, or “Spitzi”, as everyone called her. She was Austria’s first female curator, who when at the Albertina in the 1930s and 1940s had secured a large collection of Egon Schiele’s graphic art for the Museum. Her apartment, where she had lived since 1913, was filled with artworks by those fin-de-siecle artists that we were just learning about. She knew everyone who was important in the Viennese art world and introduced us to several of the dealers who represented the artists of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. This was in 1969-70, the time of one of the first “discoveries” by the rest of the world of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It was the period when Klimt’s painting The Kiss (1909) became a poster sold at supermarkets, to hang in every college girl’s dorm room. I could have bought a Klimt drawing then for $200—if I had had that kind of money! Because of Spitzi and her enthusiasm for the art of her beloved city, I determined to become an art historian focusing on German and Austrian art. (I have written Spitzi’s story in my book, Three German Women: Personal Histories from the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).

A decade later, I was in the doctoral program in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. I was writing my dissertation on the Viennese artist Anton Romako (1832-1889), a so-called “proto-Expressionist” who influenced later Expressionist artists. Romako was unknown in the U.S., while Klimt and Schiele were just beginning to experience overwhelming popularity here, a circumstance for which Otto Kallir (1894-1978), with his New York gallery Galerie St. Etienne, was chiefly responsible. In the 1920s Kallir had opened the Neue Galerie in Vienna devoted to Austrian and German art. (The Neue Galerie in present-day New York City takes its name from Kallir’s Viennese space.) In 1938, as a Jew, he was forced to flee, first to Switzerland, then France where he opened his first Galerie St. Etienne, and eventually to New York. Luckily, he was able to bring his inventory with him, which included artists such as Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt and Kallir’s discovery, Richard Gerstl, who were then virtually unknown in America. Kallir mounted a Schiele exhibition in New York in 1941, which received little attention. He offered a Schiele painting to MoMA’s Alfred Barr; the director turned it down. As the writer of Kallir’s Wikipedia entry recounts, “At Egon Schiele’s first American exhibition, drawings were priced at $20, watercolors at $60; none sold.” American art collectors—the very few that there were in the 1940s—were only interested in French art, and Nazism and World War II further tainted anything Germanic.

Finding these works impossible to sell, Kallir set out to find American artists to represent. This search led to the “discovery” of the American folk artist Grandma Moses. Kallir promoted her art and remained her dealer throughout Moses’ years of tremendous popularity in the 1950s. After the war, interest in his European holdings grew, stimulated by Kallir’s donations to several museums and by his scholarly work, producing, for example, the first English-language catalogue raisonné of Egon Schiele. Soon after his arrival in America, Kallir hired as his secretary the very young Hildegard Bachert (1921-2019), a German who had also fled Hitler; she became his dedicated associate at Galerie St. Etienne. When he died in 1978, Bachert remained at the gallery as co-director along with Kallir’s granddaughter Jane Kallir. Together these two extraordinary women produced numerous exhibitions and catalogs, promoting not only Austrian and German artists, but continuing to represent Grandma Moses’ work and other folk artists, as well as taking on contemporary American artists such as Sue Coe. As an art journal wrote in 2021, when Galerie St. Etienne closed for business after more than 80 years, the records of this institution “represent an older way of doing business in the art world.” As Bachert said, “The gallery isn’t about buying and selling art like a commodity. We don’t show art that we don’t believe in. We want to be as knowledgeable as possible about what we do.”

This is the point at which I come back into the picture. Before finishing my research in Vienna on “my” artist Romako, I came to Galerie St. Etienne to find out what materials Otto Kallir might have hidden away about this relatively obscure figure from the art world of nineteenth-century Vienna. I still remember going into the eighth-floor gallery in an office building on New York’s 57^th Street, one of the first times I had ventured into a prominent gallery space. Jane Kallir and Hildegard Bachert greeted me and were especially delighted to learn that someone was interested in this field in general and this artist in particular. While the gallery by that time had little to offer on Romako in the way of archival material, we established a correspondence that endured throughout my travels in Vienna and Germany; they continued to send me their little brochure-like catalogs for several years. When many years later I was working at the Rifkind Center, I had several opportunities to contact their gallery again. Hildegard remembered me fondly and inquired about my Viennese research! She remained at the heart of the gallery’s operations for some 80 years, until her death at the age of 98.

In 2020, Jane Kallir decided to close the commercial part of Galerie St. Etienne, transferring its archives to a nonprofit organization, The Kallir Research Institute. At the same time, she began to consider where the family’s remaining collections—much of which was part of Otto Kallir’s original inventory when he arrived in America—should be distributed. Given that LACMA is the home of The Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, which has had a long-standing relationship with Kallir’s gallery, as well as the fact that the Museum has long sought more works by Viennese artists, Jane Kallir happily chose Los Angeles as the recipient of this generous gift. The current exhibition at the Museum will highlight 24 works from this gift; additional pieces will arrive incrementally, and further exhibitions will occur, along with a planned show featuring the entire Kallir collection in 2030. For now, the pieces on display amply reveal the richness of this addition to the Museum’s collections. Paintings and drawings by Klimt and Schiele that have had little public display before now are part of this small exhibition, but for me, the inclusion of a drawing by the short-lived Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) is an unprecedented opportunity to learn about this artist, whose artworks and recognition were saved from obliteration by Kallir himself in the 1930s. Waiting to see what other treasures appear in the years to come is an exciting and pleasurable anticipation, and reason to follow the Museum’s exhibition schedule for the next few years.

With the 35 contributing artists, I will spotlight the contributions of Jackie Amezquita, Lisa Reihana, and Clarissa Tossin’s, looking deeply into their respective works El Suelo que nos alimenta ( The Soil that Feeds Us), In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] , and Future Fossil. Though we may think of ourselves as self-made individuals we all grow from deep roots of place, family, and culture; and though this is often forgotten in contemporary society, it is centered in Grounded.

Taking up almost an entire wall of the exhibition, the monumental El Suelo que nos alimenta (The Soil that Feeds Us) speaks to the many streams of people that flowed together to make Los Angeles and how a new home for millions was built from foundations of Latino and Indigenous culture. It asks us who gets to call this place home and who really makes it work. The work is composed of one hundred and forty-four 12 by 12 inch square tiles, each representing one of the one hundred and forty four neighborhoods that make up Los Angeles. The tiles themselves are made of soil and materials from the neighborhood represented — salt, rain, limestone, copper, and masa (a corn dough used to make tamales). Engraved on each tile is a scene of daily life in that part of the city; people grilling food, buying tacos, attending church, and riding the train. The artist calls these “rituals of survival” and “gestures of survival” speaking to the invisible actions of undocumented people that pass unnoticed but are essential to the community of Los Angeles. Amezquita herself came to this country at 17 and lived undocumented for over a decade, but is now a permanent resident. In talking about the piece she said she wanted viewers to consider the “metamorphic dimension” of soil as a source of life and an imprint of history. She included the masa in memory of making tamales and tortillas with her grandmother as a child, a common memory for Angelenos, as LA was once part of both Mexico and Spain and contains millions of immigrants from Central America and Mexico. The mix of food and earth make up the body of the people and connect them to other places and times, the work makes all that history present and shows how it informs each part of the city individually and uniquely. The piece is like a great quilt, the patchwork of Los Angeles, made up of all the pieces that come here, mounted on the soil of tradition and history kept alive by Latino/indigenous heritage.

Filling the final room of the exhibition and acting as its grand finale, In Pursuit of Venus [Infected], is an hour and four minute long film/moving tapestry that reimagines the history of contact between Pacific Islanders and Europeans. Based on a highly racist and exoticized wallpaper from the 19th century — as well as the folio by Captain Cook of his travels in the Pacific in the 18th — it recasts the initial moments contact as the “epic original infection’ of a culture from the Polynesian perspective. The film is made up of 70 scenes including historically accurate ancient rituals, scenes of trade (where goods are exchanged for sex or violence due to cultural misunderstanding), and even the death of Captain Cook. Scenes of indigenous life are all linguistically and historically accurate to each tribe, and the artist worked with collaborators from across the Pacific to accomplish this goal.

The film runs in a continuous loop evoking Ta-Va, a Pacific concept of cyclical time that allowed the artist to tell a more layered cultural narrative. Inspired by seeing Les Savages de la Mer Pacifique wallpaper in an Australian museum the artists wanted the work to ask us “Who tells the story and how do images, past and present, shape our understanding of history?” The European public was fascinated by Cook’s romanticized vision of the Pacific Islands as a garden of Eden with abundant resources and primitive people, which helped make the case for colonization and empire. This work stands as a corrector of history and a call for truth from a people whose culture and home were ransacked, refuting Cook’s image of exotic far off lands and riches made civilized by Europeans. It gives the people dignity, culture, and history rather than casting them as simple children or easy sexual conquests. The project took 10 years to complete and has now been acquired as part of LACMA’s permanent collection.

Located on a plinth in the middle of the first room of the exhibition, Future Fossil looks like it could be fallen modernist totem pole or a psychedelic tree heart, with its layers of rainbow and marbled plastics rolled up, smashed, and placed on top of one another in the hollowed out center of a log. Representing what the artists calls “a core sample of the future” the piece takes the show’s theme to a cosmic level, thinking of the earth as all of humanity’s native soil and what would happen if alien explorers arrived. Part of a larger installation based around Octavia E. Butler’s sci-fi trilogy Xenogenesis, the work imagines an earth of the far future and what our civilization will leave behind after everything else is gone. The artist used DIY materials and Amazonian folding techniques to make each layer in a nod to her practices focus on climate change and capitalism and the trilogy’s setting in the Amazon. It pushes the viewer to consider indigenous knowledge in relationship to the environment and the contemporary footprint that will be left in the geological sediment for eons to come. Having books that inspire the piece reminds one of the belonging to be found in the shared love of a work of fiction, the home it creates across space and time. Its tale of future liberation of a marginalized people, who are still trapped by the echoes of colonialism and capitalism, speak to the wounds our own history have left on us and the wounds we will leave on the future. Finally it foretells of climate change as the imminent destroyer of all homes; all forms of belonging to place, a dire warning for a likely future.

In our society’s rush toward tomorrow and what’s new, we often ignore the importance of belonging and place, yet without these concepts we lose our depth and any understanding of where we came from. We are the products of history, the products of place, and Grounded digs into the meaning of this belonging and the way it shapes our lives and histories. It reverses the narrative of Western expansion and centers the perspective of those whose homes of millennia were pushed into and taken. It asks us to take a truer accounting of history, to reconnect with the roots we may have lost and to create from that place of rootedness and truth. In our modern day when there is so much fighting over who can and can’t call this land home I think that is a message that we all need to hear.

All of the fairs this year were a treat. In an art market that generally leaned on the safe side this year, I think there really was some great work and great presentations. Some of it was fun and playful, others were smart, fresh, and made me learn something new.

The Fun Stuff:

I found there to be two standouts on the fun and interactive side of the fairs. First is Lucy Sparrow’s installation, “Sugar Rush” at Art Miami. In what’s generally considered a more commercial fair, “Sugar Rush” was commercial capitalism to the max. A bright candy store where plush felt candies and snacks were all for sale. Did I buy some? Yes! Is it high art? No, but that’s okay, it was something people were talking about and having fun with.

Over at Art Basel, Beeple’s pooping robot dogs gained a lot of attention, but it was Jack Butcher’s “Self Checkout” installation that was a standout for me. The pay-as-you-wish checkout station allowed you to literally pay back Butcher’s booth fees, production costs, flights, and hotels, and in return you received a receipt that certified your participation in the artwork (and made the ticker go from -$74,211 into the positives). On the receipt is a seed phrase to a crypto wallet that also holds a digital NFT of your receipt, so even if you lose the paper, you still have your records. Part performance, part tech, part audience participation, and the only downside was that the system was down both times I tried to use it.

Finally, Perrotin Gallery showed an awesome sculpture by conceptual collaborative MSCHF that counted every time someone touched it, defying the expectation that you can’t touch the art

!

The Smart Stuff:

Hidden and tucked away behind the flashy Basquiats, Harings, and Warhols were some gems that truly captivated me.

Mia Middleton at LA gallery Roberts Projects was a surprise for me. As a fan of moody realism, the Sydney-based painter’s compositions completely captured my attention. In the series of work she showed, she painted simple two-part still lifes, where two objects formed an unusually unsettling tension, washed in deep tones and shadows. My favorite? A stick of butter with a horsefly on it. Sounds silly, but I am still thinking about it.

As a specialist in Brazilian art, I always pay careful attention to the Brazilian galleries which are always plentiful at Art Basel. São Paulo and Salvador-based gallery Galatea had a number of works by Dani Cavalier, a young artist producing nylon weavings that are incredible. While I personally don’t always gravitate toward fiber and textiles, Cavalier’s story — using weaving as a means of using extra fabric from bikinis on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro — offered a unique backdrop to her intricate designs and textures.

Dominican painter Hulda Guzmán at Stephen Friedman Gallery was also totally engrossing. Her painting, Makosuki, measuring over 15 feet, was a surreal, colorful adventure. I absolutely loved it.

The Bad and the Ugly:

There’s very little I walked away from with disgust or disappointment, and my critiques are minimal, and mainly just personal. Beeple’s robotic dogs, for example, were fun and photo-worthy, but I found that the concept was lost on people who were mostly there to take pictures.

On an intellectual level, it was also interesting to see how outsiders came to Miami with a new twist on an inflated Latin American market. Cuban painter Wifredo Lam’s exhibition at MoMA, for example, has injected new life into his market among collectors, so much so that one gallery even had a Kabinett (spotlight) exhibition of his work, seemingly ignoring that Lam has an incredibly strong collector base in Miami (aka North Cuba) and an active secondary market in a number of established Miami galleries. But, maybe that’s me just being picky.

As for the “ugly” — let’s just say that Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão’s “meat” ceramic tile walls are totally off-putting, no matter how much I love Gomide & Co., the gallery that showed it.

Until next year!

The thirty-three artworks, reproduced in the exhibition’s stylishly produced and bilingual catalog, are divided into two sections: “16 Mexican Artists in the Republic of Mexico,” and “17 Mexican, Mexican American, and ChicanX Artists in the United States.” (All of the prints were produced in 2022.) Each artist’s work is accompanied by an artist’s statement and biographical note in the catalog. The topics range from the folkloric (Gabriela Morac, Regreso a La Matria [Return to the Matriarchy]) to the nostalgic (Lacey B. Mills, Regalos de Mi Abuela [Gifts from My Grandmother]) to the powerfully feminist (Jainite Silvestre, Madre Americana [American Mother]).

My favorite pieces are those that are slyly political, using popular Mexican symbols to comment on current oppression and resistance. Miguel Aragón’s Marciano Indocumentado (Undocumented Alien) depicts a colorful alebrije--the mythical creature that often figures in Mexican folk art—standing on a row of blue stars up against a red line that represents The Border. Aragón writes: “These fantastical figures are sometimes referred to as marcianos in Mexico, a word commonly used to refer to extraterrestrial beings or aliens; creating a connection to wording used by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.” Marco Sanchez, in his poignant piece Calazada de las Herencias (Roads of Inheritance), surrounds his portrait of a young boy playing an accordion with well-known Mexican motifs that remind him of his own past in his native country. The printing methods used range from linocut and etching to aquatint and woodcut.

In the informative and entertaining talk that Sanchez gave on campus in early October, he recounted the difficulties and ultimate rewards of corralling 30+ different artists, both in Mexico and in Texas and other parts of the U.S., to create prints with the overarching theme of cultural heritage and Hispanic roots. The pieces were created to fit together into one box. For me, the most poignant and dismaying part of his talk were the comments he made in response to an audience member’s question about the current situation for Mexican-Americans in his community. As someone born in Juarez, Mexico, but raised in El Paso, Sanchez has experienced how life along that arbitrary line has changed over the years; anyone who has visited this part of the country knows how closely entwined are these two communities. He said that he became an American citizen as soon as Trump was elected in 2016. Now he always carries papers identifying himself as a citizen, he is careful of what he says in his classes so as not to provoke any controversy, and the trip across the border to Juarez that used to be quite fluid for citizens on both sides can now take up to three hours to cross.

In the 1970s, I lived in San Antonio, Texas. There I got to know several young Chicano artists; I participated in their frequent parties and attended their exhibitions. As the first in their families to get a college education, they felt the world was theirs to create, and while obstacles to their advancement in the American art world still existed, they easily and enthusiastically embraced both cultures, often traveling without problems to Mexico and back. (Several of that San Antonio group are now well-respected and internationally known artists.) That Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are now, fifty years later, the object of such intense governmental scrutiny makes the aims of this small exhibition even more necessary and welcome. As we used to say in Texas: ¡Viva la Raza!

Nexo Entre Raices/Nexus Between Roots is on view until December 13, 2025, at the Janet Turner Print Museum, California State University Chico, 400 W 1st St, Chico, CA 95929. Hours: M-Sat., 12-4 p.m., Thursdays 12-8 p.m. Entrance is free.

And this takes us to the first decapitation artwork I viewed - Summary Execution Under The Moorish Kings of Granada, by Henri Regnault. This painting was discussed in one of my college courses. It alludes to a specific site – the Alhambra, a palace and fortress in Granada, Spain. As I observed this post-execution scene bathed in the warm glow of sunrise or sunset, I was immediately drawn to the executioner – a Moor. This is a person belonging to the Muslim population of the Maghreb or North African countries. In fact, Regnault created this painting in Tangiers, Morrocco.

Subscribe now

Although the steps invite us to enter the picture, the executioner’s stance and sword immediately halt us. At this point, one can’t help noticing the muscular pectorals and arms of the executioner – he’s so buff! As our eyes move toward the foreground, we see the severed head. Our first assumption is that the blow of the sword caused the head to tumble down one step. In reality, due to the force and velocity of the execution, the head would have rolled down a few more steps. From my perspective, the head and bloodbath evoke a feeling of terror. Summary Execution is categorized as an Orientalist painting. Orientalism was a nineteenth-century art and literary movement wherein countries in the East (particularly the Middle East) were depicted in works by Western artists and writers. Henri Regnault was fascinated by bizarre oddities.

Regnault’s Summary Execution Under the Moorish Kings of Granada was inspired by the bronze sculpture, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, made in the sixteenth century by Benvenuto Cellini.

Cellini’s oeuvre relates to the ancient Greek myth of Perseus, a demi-god, beheading the snaked-haired gorgon, Medusa. He did this with the help of the gods. Any man who looked into Medusa’s eyes (whether she was dead or alive) would be instantly turned into stone. This masterpiece exhibits a nude and triumphant Perseus standing on Medusa’s body while he presents her head to us. Cellini’s Perseus was placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi among marble sculptures of men. This was an awesome move! Do you see the blood that pours out of Medusa’s head? The artist’s choice of bronze for the sculpture is closely linked to that blood. Just as the blood of Medusa flows from her neck, so does the pouring of molten metal into the mold to create the statue. Hence, bronze is the blood of the artwork and, in my opinion, Perseus with the Head of Medusa steals the show at the loggia.

Returning to the myth, Perseus was ordered by the goddess Athena to bring her the head of Medusa (Athena previously transformed Medusa, a beautiful maiden, into a gorgon). After Perseus completed the beheading, his preferred choice of travel was via Pegasus, the winged horse. Flying over the Sahara desert, Perseus held Medusa’s head in hand. Drops of blood fell onto the desert floor and each drop developed into an insect or reptile. The ancient Greeks created this myth of origin to understand how different species of insects and reptiles came to be.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ seventeenth-century painting, Medusa, how many types of insects and/or reptilian creatures can you point out? Rubens was an influential painter in Flanders (present-day Belgium) and was renown for the Baroque style which emphasized color, drama and movement. Rubens’ works frequently depict the sensuous forms of nude, robust women. In Flanders and other northern European countries, artists specialized in certain elements of painting. E.g., one could be an expert in figurative paintings, landscapes, still-lifes or animals. In Head of Medusa, it is believed that Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657), a specialist in animalia. Snyders painted the venous snakes and insects borne of the blood and head of Medusa. Apropos, this dead Medusa is more repulsive than Cellini’s bronze version.

However, this frightening look is not exclusively reserved for gorgons. Italian artist Caravaggio (aka Michelangelo Merisi) employs a similar look of terror on Holofernes, a character from a biblical story The name of this painting is Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Per the deuterocanonical book of Judith (a “second canon” of books and passages of the Old Testament by the Catholic and Protestant Churches), the text states that an Assyrian army led by general Holofernes wished to destroy the city of Bethulia. Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow, decided to save her city. She marched into Holofernes’ army camp, seduced him and gave him some strong brew. When Holofernes was drunk, he passed out. Judith then killed Holofernes by decapitation and returned to Bethulia with his head. This painting is an exemplar of Caravaggio’s Italian Baroque style wherein highly-dramatic scenes sparked a flurry of emotions in its viewers. Do you notice the realism of the elderly maidservant’s face? Caravaggio employed realism and tenebrism or the use of a “spotlight” effect in painting the illuminated figures as though they are performing onstage. If we visually conspire with our heroine, Judith, perhaps we feel free from persecution by the Assyrians. On the other hand, if we stare at Holofernes’ gaping mouth long enough, can we feel his agony as he chokes on his last breath?

Speaking of breath, one glance at this purple-clad pope draws our eye directly to that cavernous mouth. I wonder what he’s feeling. Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Francis Bacon is considered a masterpiece by art historians. When Bacon created this and 49 more versions, he was inspired by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. A figurative painter who incorporated raw imagery, Bacon never painted from life (he never saw the Velázquez portrait in person). Instead, he relied on different source materials such as photographs and medical journals. He produced portraits of close friends, popes and also made self-portraits. As in Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon’s figures are encaged or isolated in geometrical, metal frames with added drapery and gloom. Predictably, if you were seated in a chair surrounded by this paraphernalia, you’d would freak out, too, right?

Subscribe now

This screaming pope, dark purple hues and the nocturnal background create a feeling of doom. When asked if his pope paintings symbolize atheism or the killing of a father figure, Bacon responded that he sought to “cool” Velázquez. The term “cooling” in painting refers to changing the color palette by incorporating darker tones.

Personally, I prefer the warm red hues of The Scream, by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Although I don’t feel so terrified or isolated, the figure in Munch’s composition is pretty freaked out.

Per Munch’s account, his inspiration for multiple versions of The Scream (paintings, pastels and prints) are stated in his January 1892 diary:

“One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.”

Regarding the Norwegian skies turning ‘blood red”, some theorists state that Munch had a lingering memory of the 1883 volcanic eruption on the island of Krakatau (Indonesia), which caused this effect. Other critics state that the red skies were caused by polar stratospheric clouds, aka nacreous clouds. Formed in polar winters, the clouds are illuminated between dusk and dawn by the sun from below. They look like streaks of bright orange and red hues in the sky. Some critics/art historians believe that this phenomenon, coupled with Munch’s Proto-Expressionist style, created The Scream. In art, expressionists create certain moods by portraying the world in a radical, emotional manner, based on their perspective.

In this painting, I see the figure’s mood or state of mind. The shape of the head has an otherworldly appearance, like a ghost. Ears are covered with both hands. A third motivating factor for this piece could be that there was an insane asylum nearby. Munch stated that he “sensed” hearing a scream as he walked. If these ghastly sounds came from an insane asylum, then this figure is a self-portrait of Munch who feels the screaming horror of the asylum – as expressed in this head!

Since Halloween is right around the corner, what’s your inspiration for choosing, creating or wearing a head of horror?

My inspiration is Vincenzo Gemito’s Medusa sculpture. Just pronounced by the goddess Athena, the curse is not yet complete. As the snakes creep into her golden hair, Medusa is still beautiful. The transformative horror of this head is just beginning….