Ben Jackel makes amazing, deceptively simple sculptures that resemble the familiar objects they depict in precise, witty detail, even as they dissemble as to what materials they are made from. He is best known for a technique of sculpting in stoneware and wax, creating a dark surface sheen and... More >>

One of the greatest gifts postmodernism ever gave to perception was the idea that art surrounds you every day and everywhere you go. Surprising that it hasn't been showcased in such a colossal way until now: "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974" is the first large-scale exhibition addressing... More >>

With his writing partner Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller wrote six decades' worth of the most popular and best-loved popular music. "Hound Dog." "Is That All There Is?" "Stand by Me." Most everything the Coasters ever did, including "Charlie Brown" and "Poison Ivy."  Stoller has a... More >>

Who said, "I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain." If you answered "Lily Tomlin," you win a trip to Beverly Hills for the Paley Center retrospective "She's Making Media: Lily Tomlin." When she first gained fame in the late '60s on Laugh-In (look it up,... More >>

Photographer Robert Adams is a moralist and a cynic with a soft spot for sheer beauty. His current LACMA retrospective starts with Adams' iconic photographs of Colorado in the 1960s, probably still his best work. They show tract homes and trailers and ranch-style churches against the stark,... More >>

James Franco asked Paul McCarthy, whose self-effacing, irreverent art has only gotten bolder and grosser over the years, to re-stage what happened in director Nicholas Ray's Chateau Marmont suite, among James Dean, Natalie Wood and other cast members from Rebel Without a Cause -- rumors about... More >>

On North Camden Drive, a block from Rodeo Drive, Garboushian Gallery has installed an exhibition perfect for the neighborhood -- archaic objects are glazed, over-produced and presented as novelties. But Emily Counts' sculptures of fax machines, rotary phones and boxy computers made of wood,... More >>

Jim McAllister paints pictures of pleasant pictures. In Sultriest Surrounds Subsides at Richard Telles gallery, he has painted an image of a flower garden over a smart pattern of purple and pink. If Gleaming Summer Spent is all pink and glowing orange, with a still life of vases stacked on top... More >>

In the trailer for their new exhibition and performance series, Arjun Neuman and Kestrel Burley wear Bavarian costumes and send mini missiles at each other from across a sidewalk. "Breaking and Entering: Studies in War, Sex and Fear" at Human Resources includes three performances that explore... More >>

Rock's most cartoonish, colorful and campiest genre is finally getting the museum treatment, thanks to the Grammy Museum's latest exhibit, "Golden Gods: The History of Heavy Metal" (whose opening night coincided with the Revolver Golden Gods Award Show next door at Club Nokia). While... More >>

In 2003, Regina Jose Galindo walked through Guatemala City wearing a billowing black dress and carrying a basin of blood. She dipped her feet in the basin as she went, to leave a trail of red footprints in protest of violent military ruler Efraín Ríos Montt, then running for... More >>

One of the most exciting aspects of the current climate of interdisciplinary practice in contemporary visual culture is the incursion of architecture and industrial design into the fine-art arena -- and SCI-Arc is a big part of why that’s happening. Technically an architecture-based... More >>

In case the only time you've heard about mah jongg was the line from Annie Hall in which Woody Allen says that his mother, a "high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of mah-jongg tiles," today is your chance to open a vast and copious treasure chest of... More >>

This weekend marks the start of the Hammer Museum's biennial crosstown explosion of boundary-blurring contemporary art, "Made in L.A." Three days in a row of opening receptions start Friday night at the Hammer, culminate Sunday afternoon at Barnsdall and in between head to the biennial's... More >>

Renegade scientist James Carter published a zine in 1970 called Gravity Does Not Exist, and he meant it — Newton had been wrong. Carter has spent the rest of his career developing and promoting a theory to explain the structure of matter. His ideas, which Bill Clinton thanked him for... More >>

MOCA's "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981" was the only exhibit under the Getty's Pacific Standard Time umbrella to even briefly look at L.A. music, namely the all-white face of ye olde punk. The Grammy Museum's new "Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975"... More >>

Three months ago, L.A. artist Dawn Kasper moved her studio to the Whitney Museum to prepare on-site for the 2012 Biennial. When the Biennial opened Feb. 28, VIP guest Martha Stewart hung out with Kasper long enough to tweet a photo of the artist in her haphazard, messy space, which looks like... More >>

The name "Malibu" comes from "Humaliwo," a word the Chumash Native American people used to mean "where the waves crash loudly." Benjamin Lord calls his new portfolio of stereoscopic photographs the Humaliwo Chambers, because they imagine a web of chambers and tunnels in the Malibu hillside. The... More >>

Charles Ray is good at immortalizing vulnerability, like when he sculpted his bespectacled, awkward self staring up at a towering woman or when he hired a Japanese craftsman to carve a life-size replica of a fallen, rotting hinoki tree. In his just-opened show at Matthew Marks, a naked, bearded... More >>

German artist Joseph Beuys used to do "actions," his word for "performances." His most famous was I Like America and America Likes Me in 1974, in which he wrapped himself in felt and spent a few days in an New York gallery with a live coyote. A few years earlier, in 1969 in Frankfurt, Beuys... More >>

It's disgusting. It's creepy. It's haunting, funny and sometimes even beautiful. It's mixed-media sculpture in the broadest sense — made from preserved dead animals. Rogue Taxidermy features two dozen artists who list taxidermy among their skills. Demonstrating a surprising variety within... More >>

In 1969, when Laddie John Dill started working in SoCal, he dug holes in the ground and stuck neon tubes into them to make pods of light. Soon after, he filled his studio with mountains of sand and crisscrossed sticks of neon on top of them. When New York dealers stopped in to visit, he was... More >>

Through the Post-War Looking Glass In the middle of the 20th century, photography was winning the battle to be considered the legitimate and unique fine-art medium it is; and a post-war generation of artists, including Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank, was pressing it into the service of a new... More >>

There is a certain operatic, archetypal quality to the process Mickalene Thomas uses to create her art work. Her inspiration draws on images of African-American women in popular culture, her own childhood memories, and memes from art history — which is a familiar enough way to approach... More >>

The opening of the "Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth From New Guinea and Central Africa" exhibition unveils the barkcloth-making legacy of the people of the Ituri rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and those of the people in eastern mountains of Papua in New Guinea. Barkclothes... More >>