Catherine Wagley

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,......

"It felt like a job," said Carlos El Pájaro when an interpreter and I met with him at the hot dog stand outside the Cypress Home Depot. He was describing the unusual project he took on last May, when he agreed to play out moments of the Guatemalan civil war......

One of L.A. artist Kenneth Tam's most recent videos begins with Tam taping shut a big cardboard box. There's a man inside, we quickly realize, and he has an agenda. "Have you ever wanted to be an exhibitionist?" the man asks calmly from inside the box like a doctor trying......

It's not often you hear "amen" followed by outright laughter at art openings. But hang an army of political cartoons in a gallery and people react as if they're in a tent meeting listening to a preacher dressed in a clown suit. At least, there were plenty of amens and......

Six paintings hanging together upstairs in the Hammer Museum all look brand new: Their bold mineral blue, teal and burnt orange backgrounds exude that seductive, fresh quality unique to painting that has barely been exposed to the outside world and spent little, if any, time in storage. This quality only......

Vikings, oversized bunnies, an itinerant matchmaker, a painting instructor doubling as a life coach and running on a treadmill, an impromptu dinner party, a woman masturbating under the stairs. You could find all this in Chinatown Saturday night during the third annual Perform Chinatown festival, where L.A. artists who work......

It's not helpful to know an artist's work has sold in the secondary market for nearly $300,000 before you've seen it in person. Nor is it helpful to know the same artist had collectors on a list somewhere, waiting for the silver paintings he's become known for in the five......

When Osama bin Laden was killed in May and young people, "the Millennials," gathered at the White House, Lafayette Park and Ground Zero in a surprising burst of euphoria, their optimism was unnerving. Did they really imagine a post-Osama world markedly different from this one? One college student, interviewed on......

The painter Cy Twombly, who died Tuesday at the age of 83, has always, perhaps unfairly, been associated with high culture headiness. Sure, he came of age in New York alongside pop forerunners Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and responded to old school expressionism of N.Y. figureheads Willem de Kooning......

Some artists take risks because they have insatiable confidence. French conceptualist Yves Klein may be the most famous daredevil artist. When he leapt face-forward from his rooftop in 1960, his years of judo training assured him he'd land. But Dutch-born, L.A.-based artist Bas Jan Ader had a different approach to......