Shana Nys Dambrot

Whether you’ve never heard of RAW or it’s just been a while since you last checked it out, Wednesday’s celebration at the Exchange L.A. nightclub is a good time to drop in. REFLECT will be augmenting the classic, eclectic RAW array of inspired offerings with decade-surveying retrospectives, all-stars and just the smallest bit of well-earned satisfaction in making it all work....

For this edition of our ongoing series introducing you to some of our favorite Los Angeles artists, we meet Peter Wu, a witty conceptualist and a science fiction–obsessed polymath whose video- and sculpture-based installations interrogate the ways in which mythologies about the future are already fully operational in the present....

This Saturday night most of the roughly 10 contemporary art spaces in the historic Bendix Building downtown open with new shows, or maybe stay open late with their ongoing shows, in support of their neighbors....

Los Angeles is blessed with its share of public art, cultural monuments, civic statues and landmark murals, from the abstract to the narrative, interactive, commemorative and cause-based. The popular appeal of the Hollywood Sign, the lore of the Watts Towers, the creativity in appropriating billboards, and the grandeur of the city's many historical murals from Crenshaw to Historic Filipinotown to Olvera Street are all undeniable. But some sculptures and statuary activate space on a more human scale, by simply imagining folks moving through it. So from Chinatown to Staples Center, the Huntington to Hollywood, Venice to Westwood, here are some of our favorite real and symbolic people to encounter in the landscape....

Other Places art fair (OPaf) participants construct site-specific, boothlike setups across the offbeat location; this year, it will be the Battery Leary-Merriam at Angels Gate in San Pedro. Once an army installation, big-gun encampment, missile launch site and other military-industrial functions, it’s also been a film location, public park and studio art center. Not only this richly weird history but the entire grounds are available to the artists, to interact and intervene as they see fit with trees, tunnels, concrete pads, green space, views and architecture....

Described as a “learning event for artists, designers and creatives,” this one-day gathering gives structure and an all-star lineup of special guests from across the city’s intersecting arts economies — from murals to movies, design to production — to offer their views and answer your most urgent questions about how to survive and thrive as an independent artist in these interesting times....

Our ongoing series of Q&As with some of the city’s most intriguing artists. This week, we meet James Peter Henry, a prolific and passionate painter whose canvases and murals combine narrative and stylistic influences from European art historical movements like cubism and surrealism with the talismanic power of elements from the aboriginal arts he grew up surrounded by in his native Australia. The results are kaleidoscopic tableaux rich with dense, sexy pattern and detail, striking lines, exuberant color and timeless yet modern imagery....

From intimate and undocumented performance art to more public engagements, through an education in the conceptual underpinnings of image-making, an early and long-standing gig as a young Michael Jackson’s official photographer, and an ongoing interest in travel study, especially in continental Africa, Todd Gray has acquired a large and utterly unique archive of parts with which to sum....

Curated by Yael Lipschutz and on view through March 13 by appointment at painter Henry Taylor’s former studio in Chinatown, “Lucid Within the Dream, Touch Yourself You Are Breathing” offers a keen selection of examples of Derrick Maddox doing his best to, as he says, “take ugly, dirty and discarded things, and make them into something beautiful.”...

Perhaps, as the illustrator of The New York Times “Modern Love” column, it’s unsurprising that Brian Rea's personal visual art would tend toward a word-based drawing technique. And it’s even more appropriate that Rea has, in addition to a show of his paintings this weekend, just published an original book of his own....