Shana Nys Dambrot

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....

In our ongoing series of Q&As with contemporary Los Angeles–based artists, this week we interview Jennifer Moon, an interdisciplinary artist whose practice involves an expanded field that encompasses object-making but transcends the studio to include every aspect of lifestyle, character, community and patriarchy-smashing social systems....

Adding to the still-expanding lineup of new, warehouse-scale contemporary art galleries opening in downtown’s Arts District, this weekend’s inauguration for Brannan Mason Gallery promises a fresh take on the premise. All of its exhibitions will focus on social, political and environmental issues, with causes and organizations chosen by the artists to receive donations from each sale....

New from Writ Large Press (the Los Angeles wing of the Accomplices literary collective), comes poet and professor Mike Sonksen’s long-awaited follow-up to his landmark instant-classic song of the city, I Am Alive in Los Angeles! — Letters to My City....

Worlds collide for the Lethal Amounts family, at the NSFW intersection of fashion, spectacle, body modification, sexual liberation, club culture and photography in their current exhibition, “Community Guidelines.”...

An ongoing series of Q&As with contemporary Los Angeles-based artists. This week we interview Mikael B., a native of Denmark whose love for Wild Style graffiti and the energetic flow of cosmic cubist abstraction combines not only on his murals and canvases but in a pursuit of the American Dream that prompted his move to Los Angeles several years ago. His next show is in New York but you can catch him now on L.A. walls from West Hollywood to DTLA, and in the pages of his gorgeous new monograph, Never Tomorrow....

Italian multimedia artist and avant-garde design aficionado Mattia Biagi, inspired by the international interest in Los Angeles during Frieze Week, has produced a environmental installation of his own original art shown alongside curated selections of furniture, lighting and design pieces culled from 1stdibs, in an immersive experience of images, objects, smoke, light and sound....