Some of the collaged-together paintings in Devon Troy Strother's show "Look at all my shit," on view at Richard Heller Gallery, have mouthfuls for titles. One of the longest belongs to the painting in which pitch-black figures with afros ride tangerine-colored cheetahs among multiple layers of... More >>

Susan Silas' found birds series involves, as the title suggests, finding birds on sidewalks, alleys or lots. They've already died by the time Silas takes them home to photograph over a period of time. Often she treats them like sacred specimens, placing them against a white backdrop and... More >>

From the late 1950s through the '70s, John Mason made monuments that sometimes riffed on the prehistoric, like his 1957 ceramic Vertical Spear form. Or sometimes he made pop products seem prehistoric, like the 1959 ceramic Blue Wall, which looks like petrified blue jeans spread across a wall.... More >>

Ghebaly Gallery, the space run by François Ghebaly, started out in Chinatown, moved into a muffler shop in Culver City in 2009 and now has an impressively big space by the Dames and Games nightclub downtown, adjacent to the space the young-and-growing Night Gallery opened in January.... More >>

Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded the first missions in California and famously compelled Native Americans to convert through fervent chest-beating, has been exhumed multiple times since his 1784 death. Once in 1882, a friar distributed threads from Serra's dug-up burial stole.... More >>

When designer Halston partnered with JC Penney early in the 1980s, it was something of a first: a couture name making clothes for the masses. The ads for the match all said, "You're Looking Smarter Than Ever." One showed a lady in bold pink pantyhose, a matching pink dress and white hat... More >>

Just when you thought you'd figured out what art really is, Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer is where modern art and the Protestant work ethic weirdly intersect, which is to say that a 340-ton granite megalith painstakingly transported over two weeks from Riverside sits in a 456-foot-long slot,... More >>

The word "power" often connotes bigness -- the tallest buildings, the strongest weapons, the deepest bank accounts. So the smallness of the emblems in "Shaping Power," the debut exhibition in LACMA's newly opened African Art galleries, is striking. The show consists largely of exquisitely... More >>

From 1900 through the 1960s, Edward Steichen photographed gowns, buildings, artists, actresses and aircraft characters. Usually the images had an air of seriousness, even if they were melodramatic, like the one of sculptor Auguste Rodin staring at (and posed like) his iconic sculpture The... More >>

Late in the 1950s, when David Rockefeller decided Chase Manhattan Bank should have an art program, Sam Francis was one of the first painters the bank enlisted. The abstract expressionist, who had just started to establish himself, painted in primary colors. The shapes he rendered look like... More >>

Ivan Morley's A True Tale paintings were painted onto cracked glass, then peeled off and affixed to aluminum, but it might not matter much whether you know this or not. You'll still get that sense of a shattered surface when you looked at them, and the twisty shapes and colors that vaguely... More >>

John Knuth's mural, part of the Sixth Street Mural at the Standard program, shows red-orange smoke billowing out against a black background. It's the photograph of an emergency flare against a night sky, and, seen shooting up out of the desert, or on the side of a road, it probably would have... More >>

"Ragpicker," artist Steve Roden's new show at Susanne Vielmetter Projects, includes a fantastic suite of smallish drawings. They're in the second gallery, on the westernmost wall. Some are long, some square; they're all surreal and precious-feeling despite the fact that their shapes are... More >>