In a sluggish art market, overinflated by speculation and the unsustainable growth of the ultracontemporary (i.e., emerging) artist sector, collectors are said to be contributing to a much-discussed “flight to quality,” That usually translates to resilient blue-chip paintings and prints by household names. Coinciding with the Frieze Los Angeles art fair, many prominent galleries are interpreting “flight to quality” as a return trip to whiteness, to maleness and toward artists that are middle-aged, senior or dead.
The Los Angeles gallery landscape, however, is nothing if not diverse. Below are five shows to see this month, in the spirit of Eileen Harris Norton’s collection, that belie the notion that quality is to be found only in the loftiest echelons of the international art market [...]
“The Work Is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings and Paintings by Samella Lewis”
Eileen Harris Norton’s first purchase, a 1976 linocut by Ruth Waddy, was bought from the artist at the Museum of African American Art, an institution founded by Samella Lewis (1923-2022), the artist, scholar and arts advocate. A few years earlier, Waddy and Lewis had collaborated on the groundbreaking book “Black Artists on Art” (1969). This exhibition of Lewis’s artworks ranges from a 1942 charcoal drawing to late paintings, but its core may be the linocuts that Lewis made in the 1960s and ’70s, some depicting migrant laborers and others, such as “Black Sun,” that are strikingly abstract...
This week’s exhibitions look back to move forward—mining memory, history, and personal archives to illuminate where we are now. And they stretch far and wide, from Santa Monica to downtown LA to Riverside [...] Over at Louis Stern Fine Arts, The Work is Never Finished honors Dr. Samella Lewis, whose prints and drawings channeled fury at racial injustice into symbolic visual expression [...]
Dr. Samella Lewis’s artwork, long secondary to her advocacy, is the focus of a new exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts.
A review of the must-see current show at James Fuentes Gallery; new exhibitions opening at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Shatto Gallery, Von Lintel Gallery, Louis Stern Fine Arts, M+B Gallery, and Philip Martin Gallery; and a trove of talks and programs at the Getty Center, Blue Roof Studios, ArtCenter, ICA LA, and Thomas Cooper Studio’s open house with Shana on the mic.