Holly Myers

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L.A., Through Raymond Chandler and a Lens Quietly

Holly Myers
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly......
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Cool in the O.C.

Holly Myers
A few days before seeing the Orange County Museum of Art’s “The Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury,” I happened to find myself in a Riverside antique mall, surrounded by claw-foot cabinets, cut crystal punch bowls, floral-print china sets and curling pewter candelabras, remarking with......
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Gordon Matta-Clark’s Urban Cuttings

Holly Myers
Gordon Matta-Clark’s New York was a tougher, grittier, more tumultuous place than the stylish television backdrop it often seems today: The city was virtually bankrupt; crime was rampant; the World Trade Center was going up while tenements stood abandoned; and Soho was cheap enough to attract the artists who would......
The Child Virgin at the Spinning Wheel

Finish Fetish

Holly Myers
A lot changed in the New World between 1492 and 1979. Indeed, it’s hard to think of much that didn’t change, except, perhaps, in gross geological terms — which makes it difficult to grasp the vast historical breadth LACMA’s exhibition calendar encompasses this fall, with “The Arts in Latin America:......
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Margi Scharff: A Life Well Traveled

Holly Myers
Margi Scharff, who died on July 2 from ovarian cancer, was an itinerant artist in an all-but-forgotten tradition: not the sort who jets from fair to fair, commission to commission, chalking up an international network of curators and collectors, but one who actually travels the countryside, surrendering herself to the......
American Feast Pole #1/Corny (2001) (Courtesy L.A. Louver)

Disruptive Influences

Holly Myers
A trim, energetic figure with white hair and startling indigo eyes, Don Suggs has the verbal ease and subtle theatricality of one who’s accustomed to standing in front of a classroom. (He’s been teaching steadily since the early 1970s, at UCLA since 1982.) His spacious Atwater Village studio, though packed......
Ghost Girl

Shooting Low, Aiming High

Holly Myers
Allegory of the Four Elements, 2006 (All images courtesy Mark Ryden and Michael Kohn Gallery)The opening reception for Mark Ryden’s new exhibition, “The Tree Show” at Michael Kohn Gallery, was six hours long. If you glanced at the invitation beforehand, you might have thought this was a misprint. Six hours?......
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Not Starbucks

Holly Myers
In the decade following her emergence from CalArts in 1994, Monique Prieto led what can only be called a charmed career. The summer after graduation, she was one of two students recommended by CalArts for a free ride to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture’s prestigious summer program in......
Andy Warhol at 8 (Phaidon Books)

Big and Bigger

Holly Myers
There were steroids in the water supply at Phaidon and Taschen this year, it seems, judging from the heft of their recent crop of coffee-table books. The heavyweight is the fittingly titled Andy Warhol “Giant” Size (Phaidon, 624 pages, $125), a 15-pound, 442-square-inch visual biography that combines reproductions of artwork......
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After Arbus

Holly Myers
In thinking about Diane Arbus, as one does from time to time, I came to a distressing realization: that I couldn’t name a single photographer subsequent to Arbus (and Frank and Winogrand and Friedlander and Eggleston and the other greats of her generation) who ranked on anywhere near the same......