Catherine Wagley

My agenda includes a couple risks -- eight hours of United Nations-style debating and a visit to a temporary hotel room. Then there are the sure bets -- a lecture by an inimitably clever oddball and a couple great shows on Wilshire......

Anthony Kiedis and Ed Ruscha both like words. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' front man and now-iconic L.A. artist drive around L.A. discussing this shared affinity in a promo video for Pacific Standard Time, the region-wide initiative to celebrate SoCal art's postwar history. In addition to the video, viewable on......

More exhibitions are closing right now than opening, as fall museum headliners have all launched and galleries are installing November shows. The best art to see this week feels transitory -- it's passing through on its way to becoming something else. Here are five art events to see in L.A......

Pacific Standard Time, L.A.'s 60-museum retrospective on L.A. art 1945-1980, is mostly packaged in box sets, each museum or gallery exhibition the visual equivalent of a multi-part, themed concept album. But despite all the carefully cultivated curatorial choices, as you move from show to show, it's the singles that really......

My first official night of Pacific Standard Time started at a reception at Otis Art Institute's main gallery, where intrepid actress Lily Tomlin, the same Lily who filled Altman's Nashville with wry emotion and played opposite Dolly and Jane in Nine to Five, loudly announced "We're all listening now," by......

Heather Cassils built up 23 pounds of muscle in 23 weeks. She changed her diet weekly, ate four raw eggs and three kinds of meat a day, spent $1,000 per month on groceries and, from May 6 to July 27, took a small dose of steroids. At one point she......

Fandom typically involves frivolous pursuits like Dodger dogs or Comic-Con nerdery, but for artists it's practically a necessity. Try to find an artist who wasn't motivated by the work of someone older, who gave them a glimpse into how provocative, eccentric or sincere art could be, and odds are you'll......

Smart people move to L.A. and then just "play tennis and swim" all day, quipped New York art critic Joseph Mashek in 1971. He wasn't entirely wrong. As art began to thrive in L.A. after World War II, artists wholeheartedly embraced California living, clichés and all. Without the following factors,......

You should get up close to the sculptures at newly opened Ambach & Rice gallery. Then take them in from a distance. Grant Barnhart's unfired clay figures could be love children of Spielberg's E.T. and one of those lush, anatomically confusing ladies in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Oct......

Get close to William Daniels' small oil paintings at Marc Foxx Gallery and you'll see how layers of color have been scraped away, leaving buoyant, mishmashed patterns as backdrops for infrastructure that looks like it's built of foil and cellophane. The effect is so engrossing, you don't really notice you're......