Holly Myers

Dennis Oppenheim

No Strings Attached: Puppetry at SMMOA; Kori Newkirk at PMCA

Holly Myers
The puppetry bug, when it hits, cuts deep. Recently, a friend, in a move that few who knew her would ever have expected, auditioned to participate in the opening festivities for the Noah’s Ark installation at the Skirball last year. She made it, played an ostrich, and has been fantasizing......

Obscure Objects of Desire

Holly Myers
After all the drama of BCAM — the hurried construction, the opening spectacle, the glistening parade of ridiculously expensive objects, the fevered debate over what should and shouldn’t have been done and all the rhapsodic talk of L.A.’s preeminence as a capital of contemporary art — an afternoon spent with......

Obscure Objects of Desire

Holly Myers
After all the drama of BCAM — the hurried construction, the opening spectacle, the glistening parade of ridiculously expensive objects, the fevered debate over what should and shouldn’t have been done and all the rhapsodic talk of L.A.’s preeminence as a capital of contemporary art — an afternoon spent with......
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Lauri Firstenberg

Holly Myers
Lauri Firstenberg was born and raised in Los Angeles but like many bright, young, Southern California minds went east to make her mark. She earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, worked with curators Thelma Goldin at the Whitney and Okwui Enwezor on Documenta 11, and ran the curatorial program at the......
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Piero Golia

Holly Myers
It’s not easy to get a straight answer out of Piero Golia. A spry, wiry Neapolitan with a full brown beard and eyes that rarely stop laughing, he is a consummate talker, given to rambling, heavily accented anecdotes that tend to bypass a question altogether, only to swing round and......
Untitled (2008)

The Paradoxes of Sandeep Mukherjee

Holly Myers
The paintings of Sandeep Mukherjee rarely involve more than a handful of individual elements, flawlessly executed and held in a state of exquisite tension. Early work, made shortly after he completed his MFA at UCLA in 1999, revolved primarily around his own figure floating through space, sometimes among flurries of......
Kara Walker

Kara Walker in Black and White

Holly Myers
Kara Walker has been a potent, if controversial, presence in the art world since she premiered her first large-scale cut-paper piece, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, at the Drawing Center in New York......
Brian Bress

Getty Curator Glenn Phillips on the "California Video" Show

Holly Myers
The first video piece that Getty Research Institute curator Glenn Phillips remembers encountering was Paul McCarthy’s Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York in the mid-1990s. Phillips was an undergraduate at Yale at the time, pursuing an independent study course in contemporary art, and so green......
Credit: David Wild

Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

Holly Myers
Like most exhilarating works of copious bloodshed, Toby Barlow's debut novel, Sharp Teeth, begins on a quiet note: with a solitary, mild-mannered figure named Anthony Silvo, flipping through want ads at his East L.A. breakfast table. After several fruitless phone calls, he happens upon a position with the city's animal-control......
Marnie Weber

Art Utopia

Holly Myers
In a city known for its dreams, West Cypress is a street where people actually make things. There’s a tile showroom on the corner, at San Fernando, across from a discretely demarcated contract manufacturer of beauty supplies and cleaning products. The one-block stretch between San Fernando and the riverbed of......