select publications 

on carol rama
for momus
The artist attends to the woman’s nude body as she might her own, indexing the hair growing from her areolae like the attenuated petals of a dandelion, the heavy-charcoal shadow enlarging her eyes and the rosy, unfurled lips of her vulva. The image recalls the artist’s description of erotics as “the rejection of any prudery” and an embrace of a detail-oriented sensuality: “the body being scrutinized and dissected in its anatomical parts, in all its bits and functions...continue reading.

in conversation with derek fordjour
for ocula
It may take time, but if you stay in the darkness, your eyes will eventually adjust. Differences in depth and tone emerge, allowing for meaning and recognition. Persevere, and what initially seems like a single shade of night will give way to what writer Toni Morrison might describe as a rainbow. Derek Fordjour’s densely layered, technicolour paintings reward a similarly sustained engagement; their chimerical surfaces shift and shimmer before your eyes. Like the night, they comprise multitudes: ecstasy...continue reading.

in conversation with sally mann
for interview Her new memoir, Art Work, is similarly intimate and irreverent, not unlike talking to a friend—albeit one capable of moving from parasitic pinworm removal to Robert Frost’s “Immortal Wound” in a single breath—over, you guessed it, martinis. Across 12 chapters, the self-proclaimed “19th-century Flaubertian recluse” offers instructions for how to “get shit done” both in art and life. Unbelievable anecdotes and endearing Mann-erisms interrupt...continue reading.

on reza aramesh
for artforum  “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.” Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila wrote these words on a whiteboard in a Gaza hospital one month before he was killed in an Israeli air strike. Reza Aramesh, a London-based Iranian artist, memorializes images of suffering and subjugation, not unlike those that continue to flood our news and social media feeds from Gaza, so the victims of violence might not be forgotten, their bodies not allowed to...continue reading.

on contemporary woodworking
for artsy For millennia, humans have reimagined the possibilities of wood. Used to produce heat, provide shelter, transcribe language, cultivate food, and visualize the divine, wood has played a vital role in human history. To this day, it still accompanies each person from cradle to grave. This lasting connection led the architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright to describe wood as the “most humanly intimate of all materials...continue reading.

in conversation with takako yamaguchi
for ocula There is a story attributed to the late art critic John Berger that goes as follows: ‘A man walks along a stony beach. As he goes, he turns a single stone upright. He leaves it, standing there, on its end.’ Another story might go something like this: a 73-year-old artist, Takako Yamaguchi, walks through the hallowed halls of art history...continue reading.

on aya takano
for artsy AYA TAKANO has visions: colorful, crystal-clear images that appear suddenly before her eyes. They began in high school, when the captivating but distracting scenes posed a challenge to her schoolwork and social life. Now, at 48, she still sees them, but much less frequently. “I really have to concentrate, and I have to sketch it...continue reading.

on isca greenfield-sanders 
for flaunt I need a new word. The problem with using words like “collage” or “painting” or “mixed-media” to describe Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s works is that they don’t convey, not really, what she’s doing with oil paint, archival photography, watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil. Their straightforward presentation and familiar subject matter belie the complexity of production and wealth of art historical and literary references....continue reading.

on the new meaning of surrealism 
for ocula today ‘surreal’ seems to be applied to anything that presents familiar objects and images in unconventional ways, even when the artist doesn’t necessarily draw their means of estrangement from the tenets of the 20th-century movement. Rather than focusing primarily on psychoanalysis or spiritualism, their references are syncretic, spanning a range of disciplines, including biology, computer programming...continue reading.

on emerging artists at art basel in basel 
for art basel The human body looms large in presentations by emerging artists at this year’s Art Basel: Is the body primarily a physical organism or a repository for personal and historical memory? Can a body be a site of oppression and resistance? What does it mean to be embodied in an increasingly digitized world...continue reading.

on jackie castillo 
for the los angeles times Four groups of five steel reinforcing bars either ascend from the concrete floor or descend from the ceiling of ICA’s first-floor gallery. On each bar, five reclaimed terracotta tiles are arranged at various levels and angles, recreating the twists and turns from the film stills. To stand in the middle and view them in the round is to see how ruin and repair, falling and rising, are inexorably bound....continue reading.

on kelly akashi 
for arforum  If the context lent urgency to the show, it was the artist’s mastery of her materials that precipitated the feeling of irrevocability. Just outside the gallery, visitors were confronted by an astonishing true-to-size relief of Akashi’s nude body emerging from a travertine pillar. The innumerable pockmarks constellating the surface of the stone can be interpreted as hollows yet to be filled—suggesting that the figure is still in the process of forming—or as early signs of its inevitable deterioration...continue reading.

in conversation with maría magdalena campos-pons 
for bomb To speak with María Magdalena Campos-Pons is to have your conception of the possible indelibly expanded. In the grace and gravitas of her insights and explications, to say nothing of her undeniable art practice that spans photography, painting, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, there is a perceptible “shadow of magnitude,” to borrow from fellow diviner John Keats...continue reading.

in conversation with mariam rahmani  
for bomb Given her effervescent, incisive prose and the plot’s playful yet profound twist on the romantic comedy genre, it’s easy to understand why. Rahmani and I caught up between her book launch in Brooklyn and the reading in Los Angeles to discuss everything from the marriage plot and vintage shopping to global constructions of whiteness and art’s potential to...continue reading.

on artists depicting climate disasters    
for artsy Many are increasingly foregrounding humans’ responsibility for the climate crisis and visualizing the consequences of the resulting catastrophes. By depicting houses, roads, and other manmade structures affected by fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, they make the incomprehensible scale of climate change immediate and personal. As poet and writer Guy Davenport wrote in 1982, “Art is always the replacing of indifference by attention.”...continue reading.

on ana mendieta, derek jarman, and p. staff  
for hyperallergic Audre Lorde once referenced planarians, the small, self-generating animal species that sends out an electrical charge in the shape of their severed or damaged limbs, as part of her summons to envision the future we wish to inhabit. The artists in Earthshaker, too, draw our attention to the negative space...continue reading.

on ruth asawa 
for artsy The experience afforded the young artist an anti-hierarchical approach to materials that she maintained throughout her career. Asawa believed her lines could “go anywhere.” They led her from finely limned sketches, calligraphic ink paintings, and patterned, geometric abstractions, to her signature tied- and looped-wire hanging sculptures. While she is best known for her voluminous, cascading lobed forms, Asawa never stopped drawing—the medium she described as both “the greatest pleasure...continue reading.

on craft contemporary 
for alta The building itself was an anomaly: a three-story neo-Georgian townhouse along bustling Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. On its front door, an enormous egg with a single pale blue eye was poised atop a mahogany stand. During the latter half of the 1960s, if you ventured through that enigmatic entrance, you’d find yourself in a warmly lit room, surrounded by amorphous chairs sculpted from cypress and ash, towers of woven baskets from Guatemala, Inuit figures carved from soapstone on pristine pedestals, myriad hand-built...continue reading.

on asher bingham 
for dwell Though she wasn’t extensively experienced at drawing homes, Bingham’s whimsical line-drawn style and her keen eye for expressive, eclectic details naturally lent themselves to architecture. Rather than schematically accurate designs, Bingham’s renderings are full of the personality and character she’s used to capturing in portraiture. Considering their charm...continue reading.

on la art week  
for artsy “Emotion is energy in motion,” explained De Othello. “It is felt rather than seen, almost like wave lengths or sound reverberations.” His hope for the surreal ceramic vessels scattered about the yellow-light-flooded gallery was that they might encourage us to fine-tune our sensitivity to the unseen, namely the emotions of other human beings. Considering the outpouring of support and compassion in the city over the past two months, these sculptures and Art Week, more broadly, offered a glimpse into precisely what the people of L.A. have done and continue to do: turning up the dial on their capacity for empathy, reminding all of us that together is the only way through...continue reading.

on frieze la 2025
for ocula Even before the fifth edition of Frieze Los Angeles opened its doors last Thursday, the city that only a few weeks prior had endured the most devastating fires in its history was palpably buoyant. Opening night celebrations for highly anticipated exhibitions were packed and a bevy of after-parties had to turn back crowds of invited guests. And yet, artists, gallerists, and collectors alike held their breath until they saw the serpentine line unfurling from wHY Architecture's custom-designed white tents at Santa Monica airport on the morning of the...continue reading.

on jackie amézquita
for flaunt “The temple, inspired by Templo del Gran Jaguar in Tikal, represents the center of a compass,” Amézquita says, conveying a ziggurat-shaped structure modeled in brown Lego bricks. “All four points of the earth come together, and no matter where you or your family or ancestors migrated from, they’re all connected here.” Depending on your cardinal orientation to Amézquita’s studio, her workspace can resemble a kitchen, a laboratory, or a masonry. To one side, a row of ovens and an industrial freezer; to the other, glass bubblers...continue reading.

on indigenous artists at frieze la 
for frieze ‘She’s one of the great figures of American history and she is still marginalized,’ Morrison says. ‘It’s critical that her voice, and those coming up around her, are brought to the fore and formally integrated into the broader narrative of contemporary art.’ For the past 60 years, WalkingStick has composed paint­ings and sculptures that confront both her own fractured identity and that of her country, reinscribing Indigenous presence onto a history...continue reading.

on mina loy
for los angeles review of books Loy adopted complexity as a liberatory practice, refusing to conform to social expectations or strip down her expansive notion of the self. She fought against what she perceived as a compulsive tendency to “re-simplify” in an attempt to “forget what a complicated affair life has been mistaken for.” Perhaps there is value in following her lead and making a more concerted effort to resist the reduction of our lives to easy categorization and quick consumption...continue reading.

on art basel hong kong
for art basel  Introducing contemporary audiences to forgotten avant-garde artists from the 1970s is the project of P420 co-founders Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani. Since establishing their Bologna gallery in 2010, they have revitalized the legacies of artists such as Irma Blank – whose text-based abstractions sought to draw language without words, transcending the limits of syntax and diction – and the vanguard photographer Franco Vaccari...continue reading.

in conversation with ruby neri 

for interview 

Spend just five minutes with the Los Angeles-based artist Ruby Neri, and you’ll be absolutely charmed. “I can’t really sit still,” she says before jumping up to grab a Topo Chico. Then, a bottle opener. Then, a paper towel. Neri radiates the kind of kinetic energy that animates everything around her, including the statuary strewn about her spacious studio. What people mourn when they mourn the end of childhood is the loss of such unabashed vitality. As she bounds between the various vividly painted female figures, her dog Lucy trailing close behind, you’d swear the ceramics were moving, too...continue reading.

on joseph beuys 

for artnews

“If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size...continue reading.

on wendi norris

for art basel 

For San Francisco gallerist Wendi Norris, words matter. More so than ‘surrealist’ – the characteristic most often attributed to her program – ‘textual’, ‘poetic’, and ‘narrative-driven’, best describe her artistic project and curatorial vision. Of the artists she represents, which include María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Enrique Martínez Celaya, and the estates of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, Norris says: ‘Whether they’re using text as a visual material, referencing a work of literature, incorporating their own writing practice, or...continue reading. 

on magdalena suarez frimkess

for art papers

Whereas many ceramicists, including her husband, take great pains to rid their work of evidence of their physicality, eradicating touch, pressure, emotion, and kinetic energy, Magdalena’s sculptures quiver with her presence. Fingerprints, pinch marks, patchwork, the spontaneity and surety of her brushstrokes altogether engender a perceptible alive-ness. As the show’s title, The Finest Disregard, suggests, her feelings about convention and perfection are not on account of amateurism or ineptitude but in obedience to a higher designation, a rarefied vision...continue reading.

in conversation with wendy red star 

for artillery 

Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience. In her series Thunder Up Above, included in Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, at the Autry Museum, Red Star reimagines traditional powwow regalia for a future in outer space. Red Star and I met to discuss Indigenous Futurism, sewing, Crow Fair, and the moment she realized she could paint...continue reading.

on divya mehra 
for frieze 

In the 1984 cult classic Ghostbusters, when the god Gozer asks the protagonists what form they’d like the destroyer of the world to take, one of the team envisages Stay Puft Marshmallow Man – the seemingly harmless mascot of an ultra-processed snack food – who wreaks havoc on New York before finally being restrained. At more than nine metres tall and six metres wide, multidisciplinary artist Divya Mehra’s inflatable replica, We’re Ready to Believe in You (2024), almost entirely fills the second room of her solo show...continue reading.

in conversation with joanna novak

for bomb

I first read JoAnna Novak in 2018 after a friend gifted me her book-length poem Noirmania. I immediately fell in love with her melliferous diction, brimming with words like rosarium, cortège, and efflorescence. Two books of poems, one short story collection, and a memoir later, Novak’s delight in words’ sounds, shapes, and aesthetics continues to beguile. In her latest collection, Domestirexia (Soft Skull, 2024), Novak contends with the ethics and efficacy of desire during pandemic lockdown...continue reading. 

on carl cheng

for flaunt 

Aerospace-grade aluminum, avocado seeds, surfeit cerulean plexiglass, chemistry pipettes, stumps from abandoned Christmas trees, defunct miniature TVs, Wonder Bread, and organic specimens scavenged from shores around the world: these are just a few of the things that 82-year-old artist Carl Cheng has turned into art. Known for his genre-defying objects and innovatory public installations, Cheng has an alchemist’s talent for wresting something from nothing...continue reading.

on kyungmi shin

for artillery 

Vintage family photographs, archival images, art-historical motifs and acrylic paint coalesce in portraits striving to convey the complexity of identity and the discordant narratives that form and deform history. Shin locates the point where the personal and the universal meet: where the urgency of the present intersects with the languid grandeur of the past...continue reading.

on helen pashgian 

for artnews

Before I can tell you how it was, I have to tell you how it wasn’t. It wasn’t futuristic, overtly technological, or like a sequence of special effects. It was less ominous and less speculative than my research had led me to expect. It was astonishing, remedial, and—as dubious as this sounds—transformative. When I left Pashgian’s studio some hours later, I was not the same person I was before...continue reading. 

in conversation with anna marie tendler

for w magazine

Men Have Called Her Crazy offers an original portrait of a woman who’s reached the apex of her rage against the patriarchy, a field guide to contemporary mental health practices, and a moving testament to the possibility of growth and healing. Below, Tendler opens up about her writing process, her current favorite recipe, and the album she can’t stop listening to on repeat...continue reading.

on kate pincus-whitney 

for artsy

For Ernest Hemingway, a “moveable feast” referred to a formative experience of a place—in his case, Paris—that stayed with you long after you’ve left. For self-described artist-anthropologist Kate Pincus-Whitney, the enduring experiences that inform her paintings are literal feasts, too, centered around shared meals in her hometown of Los Angeles. Stuffed celery from Musso & Frank Grill, Nancy Silverton’s Caesar salad...continue reading.

on mickalene thomas 

for w magazine 

The art critic Jerry Saltz recently described Mickalene Thomas’s work as “a brick thrown through the window of art history.” Perhaps this was in reference to the way her nude portraits subvert the traditional male gaze or how her portrayal of Black queer female bodies challenges ingrained hierarchies. Or maybe it’s because of her unconventional use of craft supplies like rhinestones, felt, and glitter or because her mixed media paintings refuse formal categorization...continue reading.

how betye saar’s radical assemblages have inspired a new generation of black women artists

for artsy

Betye Saar has made art for over six decades, yet in many ways, her work feels more relevant and urgent than ever. Her intricate and inventive collages, assemblages, and installations, dating back to the 1960s, merge the political with the mystical, imbuing historical narrative with personal, ancestral memory...continue reading.

on sculptor camille claudel 

for artnews

Though the figure lacks a head, arms, and left knee, she is stolidly centered. The burnished bronze figure writhes, pulling the skin and tendons taut across the delicate bones of her back. The attenuated surface, animated by the innumerable minuscule movements required to maintain the figure’s equilibrium, trembles with life. The absence of the left knee, lower thigh, and upper shin exposes the figure’s breasts and abdomen; her bottom rests on the back of a sudden ankle...continue reading.

on basel abbas and ruanne abou-fahme  

for artillery

In the 18th century, when the Iranian elite heard rumors of the grand mirrored halls of Europe, they sent merchants to procure as many sheets of brilliant reflective glass as their boats could carry. Still, the mirrors cracked in their elaborate frames somewhere between Venice and Tehran. Rather than attempt to reassemble the shattered glass, artisans inlaid the thousands of pieces in sweeping geometrical patterns along walls and across ceilings. The mesmerizing designs...continue reading.

on otis houston jr. 
for autre 

More striking than his overalls and melon-cap was the expression of absolute calm and contentment on his face as if he were standing beside not a heaving highway but a mountain lake. What I remember is straining in my seat to look back, transfixed by the grace and gravitas of the man painting over the exhaust, the sirens, the crush of cars, with a smile on his face...continue reading. 

how contemporary women artists are reimagining cubism—and the body

for artsy

“Nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen,” wrote Gertrude Stein in Picasso, her 1938 portrait of the Cubist pioneer. In the early 20th century, artists around the world set out to process and represent the effects of accelerated urban, industrial, and technological progress on visual perception. Early Cubists, concerned with the spatial relationship between a form and its parts, dissected familiar objects...continue reading. 

on jessie homer french
for artsy
Coming from someone else, the sentiment might register as untrue or intentionally contentious, but looking at Homer French’s intricate painting of jimsonweed blooming between scorched pinyon trees, or another of a pearlescent plane soaring over a field of turbines, the viewer understands her sincerity. You see what she sees: a world alternately ravaged and renewed by man’s capacity for devastation and rebirth....continue reading. 

on anna libby and anne rosen 

for artillery

communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from...continue reading.

on hugh hayden 
for autre 

where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me...continue reading.

on teresa baker
for autre 

if art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye...continue reading.

on duke riley

for artillery 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” remarked the poet who gave us The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot. The observation supports the standard explanation for the failings of our species to adequately address the climate crisis, the scope and scale of which are too abstract and elusive for people to fathom...continue reading.




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