The 2019 L.A. Art Show - Massive!

One of my favorite parties of the year was held last night at the L.A. Convention Center, where the kickoff party for the L.A. Art Show opening went down. We took the train and got there late, as usual, so we had our work cut out for us if we wanted to see even a fraction of the huge amount of art that is on display this weekend. MASSIVE amounts of art. You belong here.

We've learned our lesson in years past, and skipped the long lines for drinks that gobble up all your art viewing time, and the food is always gone by the time we get there (we always end up getting street dogs after), so this night was all about the art. And the very excellent people watching that always happens during this opening party - SO good. This is L.A. after all, so there are all sorts of creative artist types walking around, and it's as fun to see as all of the art.

The massive hall is kind of split up into more contemporary/cool art on one side, and the more corporate/law office type of art on the other. There was so much art that when I split up from my brother in the interest of dividing and conquering and seeing the most art in our limited time, when we compared notes later we had almost no overlapping. I hadn't even seen several of his favorite works, and vice versa. It's a LOT to take in, and probably warrants a trip back downtown this weekend to see the things I missed.

The highlight for me (and everyone, I think) is always the Littletopia section, curated by my friends at the Red Truck Gallery from New Orleans.

My favorite art of the entire show is pretty much always pieces from Red Truck, and last night was no different. There were china dishes with irreverent messages ...

There was even a diorama of Jumbo's Clown Room!

I always enjoy catching up with Red Truck owner, Noah Antieau, who told me that they've also opened up a Red Truck Bar in the French Quarter, so now there's even more incentive to get back to the Crescent City and see all of their cool art in person at the source, and throw back a few cocktails with this great bunch of art lovers. Awesome.

There are always crowd pleasers at this show, that you can detect from the crowds of people gathering around to take photos. One of the big ones this year was a prism thing that created infinite angles when you looked inside of it, the Portal Icosahedron, by Anthony James. It was trippy and reminded of my brother Paul's paintings.

A lot of art these days is about its attractiveness for selfies, sadly, and I stopped to look at the great work by Adah Glenn, particularly a work that said "Trust The Process". Great message. On another wall of her booth, there was a piece that said, "Black Girl Magic", with a gorgeous, fancily dressed black girl taking her photo in front of it. Glenn was happy that her work is popular for that, but at the same time wondered if her real message gets lost in the quest for likes. Interesting to consider. Hey, trust the process, right?

There was plenty of performance art this year, and another crowd gathered around a purple painted woman rolling around on the floor with laundry, underneath hula-hoops also strewn with laundry. Sarah Trouche's You Should Wear Your Revolution was meant to symbolize women's emancipation in the tradition of the French movement of "Sans Culottes" - basically "without drawers". Word.

There was an interactive rainforest made from paper that involved all the senses, and even featured Smellavision. When you stuck your head in the little holes that featured butterfly vignettes and things, it smelled like Febreeze or something - or what I like to call "Eau de Lyft Ride". The message was to save nature though, and I'm all for that.

Also on that tip was the lovely (and one of my favorites) work by Cha, Yun Sook, her beautiful Homage To Nature. It was stunning, and it was a delight to meet the artist, who also made her matching outfit. Loved it.

Another favorite was The Lady Of Arlington, 2018 by Mike Stilkey. It was a portrait of a woman done completely on used books. Fantastic!

If you know me, you know I LOVED Prince, by Craig Alan. It was a portrait of Prince, made up of a whole bunch of tiny people.

If you zoomed in, you could see that all the tiny people were different ... like one in a wheelchair, one with a dog, etc. All combining to make the iconic face of our beloved Prince. Wow.

Another kind of performance art/art piece was by Kate Groobey, with her Places Unknown, 2017. It had a work of art on the wall, that the artist then brought to life by dressing in a costume like the piece ... pretty cool.

David Hockney was representing L.A. for the art show, and was showing a gorgeous screen in his classic style that we all wanted for our homes ... Caribbean Tea Time, 1987. The color and style are pure Los Angeles, and it was nice to see this more main stream artist there among all the rest of it.

Not remotely in the main stream was the performance piece by Dorian Wood, Nodrissx/Narcissx. This work won hands-down for the most out there situation of the evening. There was a dark room with a big Pan's Labyrinth meets Saw looking character wrapped in gauze with a hole for its nipple, intoning monk-like chants with a man-servant type guy sitting there. My friend said, "Why are there so many wet wipes scattered around?" Well, we soon found out why ...

The sign explaining the piece invited viewers to come forward and kneel to suckle at the breast protruding from the hole, and to "feed on the artist's breast for as long as they choose." What. The. Hell?! I guess the point was to challenge the artist/audience separation, but I was not down. We saw no takers for the suckling, but I heard later that artist Gary Baseman had a suck. No, gracias.

The past several years of the L.A. Art Show have always featured a hyper-realistic head sculpture by Kazuhiro Tsuji, and this year's marvel is Jimi Hendrix! It's too crazy how these things look so real, from every angle. Another highlight in a year full of highlights, too many to even see in one outing.

The loudspeaker guy was chiming in to kick everyone out while we still raced about trying to see more and find more friends before we got the boot. Near the front entrance where we were all meeting back up, there was a great neon sign, giving encouragement to all artists and those who love them ...

Everything you need is inside you (I believe a Burning Man installation, by Olivia Steele). I love that, and once again left the L.A. Art Show opening with a spring of inspiration and happiness in my step. I encourage one and all to get down to the L.A. Convention Center this weekend to take it all in. You will leave feeling better about the whole world, knowing that there is so much creativity and talent still in it. Art Saves, and we need it now more than ever.

L.A. Art Show 
L.A. Convention Center
January 23-27, 2019
11 am - 7 pm

The 2018 L.A. Art Show - Art Galore!

I got back to town just in time for the opening night celebration of the L.A. Art Show, and as usual, it did not disappoint. There is just SO much art that you really almost need to attend every day if you think you might be able to see everything ... and you probably still won't. There is truly something for everyone, and as I heard a dude say to his friend, "Dude, aren't you getting inspired?!" You can't help but be.

Margaret Keane (of Big Eyes fame) was an honored with a lifetime achievement award this year, and it was very cool to see her work up close and personal - especially after watching that film and knowing her back story. Whoa. I loved her Girl From Kaanapali, 1971 the most. It's happier than anything I've ever seen from her.

I'd never seen any of her work with adults in it, and it's really something. Her characters (as in the above Escape, 1962) draw you in with their eyes, and make you want to know more. There are also very recent works, like up to 2015 by the now 90 year old artist. The trip downtown was worth it for this alone, but oh boy, was there ever SO much more.

Littletopia is always my favorite section of the L.A. Art Show, and always the most interesting. Curated by the fine folks at the Red Truck Gallery (from New Orleans), they have the best stuff, in my humble - and honest - opinion. Red Truck is so cool, and I made their Rachael Cronin pose in front of the wonderful Albino Deer piece by Chris Roberts, whose work I simply must own one day. She's incredible - and the mother of gallery owner Noah Antieau. Awesome.

I loved the works by Vance Lorenzini, with an entire booth featuring his work. There were the 12 stations of the cross, with words like "Truth" and "Love" emblazoned across the tops.

There were assemblages with pop culture icons embedded within, like the excellent pieces featuring lyrics by David Bowie (as we pass the two year mark since losing him).

Everywhere you look there is something great to look at, so much so that it almost gets overwhelming, especially when you're running into friends and trying to get something to drink. (*Forget about getting food on opening night unless you're there lined up the second it starts. In all the years I've attended this wonderful event, I've never made it to the food section in time to taste a single thing. Oh well, it's about the art. Eat first.) The good news is that near the food area is the L.A. Arts Online booth, so we got to see and compliment the wonderful Paige Petrone on all of her hard work for this event every year. Venice representing! In this time of strong women (like Paige), there was a piece by Kim Dong Yoo showing off some awesome women.

Art means so many different things to everyone, and there truly is something to appeal to everyone at this massive show, representing artists from all over the world. There was a bike covered with fish from Japan that was probably someone's favorite piece there.

There are always fun installations at the show, and this year was no different (if a bit less dramatic than the live naked lady in fresh flowers from a couple of years ago). The big crowd pleaser this year was Left Or Right - A Healing Project (1998-2018) by Antuan, rows of red punching bags adorned with the most punchable faces in the world. There were particularly long lines to punch Trump, of course, and it was very personally satisfying to me to smack George W. Bush in the kisser, but I was a little disappointed there was no Paul Ryan or Steven Miller there. OOH, are they punchable! Kim Jung Un and Putin were also popular to punch. And rightly so.

Interactive exhibits are always cool, and this time around they had a thing you took off your shoes and walked on and looked at stuff (I didn't have the luxury of time to do so, so might have to go back this weekend) that people seemed to like ...

... as well as Brainstorming: Empathy by Victoria Vesna and Mark Cohen - a thing where you could don alien heads and have your brain waves communicate through color and sound to the other person. Trrrrrippy.

I was happy to see a booth featuring the works of Dan Eldon, the young journalist who was killed in Somalia in 1993, and was the author of The Journey Is The Destination - a personal favorite of my brother's and mine. Eldon's mother and sister have taken on his mission of storytelling to influence hearts and minds.

To that end, this was also an interactive situation, where you could fill out postcards with your personal thoughts and missions to add to a wall to create insight as to how "Connection is the solution." Very cool, and also very, very important to our global village in times like these. Seeing Eldon's personal journals there was also very moving and great.

Right after that I walked by a piece that summed that all up ... Matt Smiley was right. His Lessons In History, 2017 tells us the truism, that the world is just not that simple.

Many works made their statements, as all the best art does. I particularly enjoyed Mass Incarceration by Ryan McCann, showing a weed life in what looked like prison cinder blocks. Good one, as L.A. legalized marijuana as of January 1st, just as the little weasel Jeff Sessions is trying to make it the same as heroin again. Please.

This re-cap is all over the place, as were my meanderings around the massive Convention Center. I'd bump into someone and they'd tell me I just had to see the butterflies made out of international currency, so off I'd go ...

Someone would say to go check out the bedazzled punk rock buddhas, and off I'd race in an entirely different direction.

Inevitably, in my travels back to the other side, I'd pass by some other thing that would stop me in my tracks, like the statue of Rocky punching the side of beef that changed dimension as you circled around it. (I'd often be racing so fast that I didn't catch the name of the artist. Sorry if I did!)

There was a fantasy "Spaceboat" installation that looked like something a Wes Anderson type kid would sail away in, brought to us by Bunnie Reiss at the Superchief Gallery in L.A. Loved it.

Jeff Gillette created a hood out of Hollywood, with a Hollywood sign disintegrating into a shanty town that was pretty heavy.

I loved the needlepoint pieces by Suchitra Mattai, with idyllic scenes featuring people with lasers coming out of their eyes. Why not?

For What It's Worth was a mixed media guitar by Victoria Roberts, inspired by the Buffalo Springfield song that was pretty cool.

This year's crazy realistic head by Kazuhiro Tsuji was the artist Mark Ryden. Not as recognizable as the previous years' Frida Kahlo, Warhol, and Dali, but still as trippily real as ever.

The L.A. Art Show lets you know that art can be a sculpture of a pile of thousands of pennies ...

... an archway made out of wood (that you could probably build yourself for loads cheaper) that I loved and wanted for my own pad one day ...

...random words and shapes (by David Buckingham) ...

... or even a clipboard stating that one will no longer draw flying penises in class.  Again, why not?

All in all, art is awesome. The L.A. Art show itself is awesome, in every sense, including size. Thank goodness that so many people still care so much about art, as it and its creators are needed in the world now more than ever. To shape culture and life, to question it, and, ultimately to celebrate it. And as long as this is, it only scratches the surface, so you really gotta get there yourself if you also love art.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to every artist, every gallery, and everyone who loves ART.

The L.A. Art Show is on now through Sunday, January 14th 2018.

The 2016 L.A. Art Show - So. Much. Art!

The opening of the 2016 L.A. Art Show was last night, and it was truly something to behold. Art just everywhere! So much art it can feel overwhelming to see it all, especially when you're stopping to talk to people you know every few feet. We got there a little late, and I began hyperventilating about how we could possibly see it all ... when person after person said, just cruise, relax, enjoy the pieces you see vs. trying to see everything. Such good advice ... and with that, I was off! (and this is just a random sampling of all that I saw ... someone else might have a whole different trove of photos).

Opening night is so fun to see all the people, but opening night is more about that than even the art. It's hard to see the art, in fact, because so many people are squeezed in around the crowd pleasers that you can't really appreciate them as well as they're meant to be appreciated. But that's why you go back over the weekend. To see things like Melanie Pullen shooting people for her High Fashion Crime Scenes, where there was a huge crowd all night.

A bunch of exhibitors had interaction going on, with performers dressed up to match the art in some instances ...

Or you could BE the scene, if Robert Vargas chooses you to create a mural of in front of you ...

There was a lot of live painting, with giant creations coming to life right before our eyes ...

There was a big showing from Asian artists this year, with a whole Chinese section, and a lot of great stuff from Korean artists as well.

There was a "Fortune" castle, where once inside you were surrounded by mirrors and giant wedding cakes ... but I didn't see any fortunes?

There was an adorable "Bakery" from the Daniel Rolnik Gallery, selling little works of art like (and of) baked goods, complete with a Chef back there. Fun!

A great part of the L.A. Art Show is the fun. Every few feet you run into fun people you know, and with as many Venice folks that make the trip downtown, it calms me down a little bit about artists disappearing in Venice. The Art Scene remains strong!

It's also one of those shows where you realize that absolutely anything can be considered art. A pile of purple sandbags? Art.

A claw holding the Earth while it rotates? Art.

A giant red Sumo wrestler statue? Art.

Taxidermied animals chilling in a dining room setting? Art.

A pile of inflatable animals? Art.

Tires rolled out with fabric across the floor? Art. Just think up an idea that looks cool, and it's Art!

A true highlight every year, and the section I beeline for, is Littletopia. It's where all my favorite stuff is.

My MOST favorite within Littletopia every year is always Red Truck Gallery.

What a delight to walk up and see Noah Antieau and Nick Sin chilling there at the table with friends like they were having a house party in the middle of all this chaos.

Antieau curates his awesome gallery with mostly treasures from New Orleans, where they are located (until they open another one soon in San Francisco - yay!). He represents his Mother, Chris Roberts Antieau, and her simply gorgeous works of folk art and quilts, of which I adore every single one. Like this one, Constellations.

They also feature whimsical automatons like you won't see anywhere else.

Antieau was excited about his new artist that does teeny tiny carvings on the top of pencils out of the lead. Tiny!

I would love to have stayed and hung out with the Red Truck boys, but there was just too much ground to cover. This year's Dali and Warhol heads were replaced by Frida Kahlo, in the always eerily real work of Kazuhiro Tsuji. Trippy.

This year we pretty much skipped the bars altogether because they just take too dang long (although spreading them out this year helped some with that), though you could see a lot of your friends in line if you so chose. I ran into my old pal, Seth Green and his wife, Clare ... and only then was jealous I didn't have a drink to toast him with.

We met a couple who had just returned from Banksy's Dismaland - they reported that it was pretty cool, and they sported a whole lot of merch.

Not to be outdone by Banksy, Mr. Brainwash has a strong showing here, especially with his very cool Jimi Hendriz made out of smashed vinyl records. Loved it.

A nice companion piece with this for me would be the great piece of a guitar wielding butterfly girl that I want by Mark Andrew Allen, who I learned worked out of Venice for years. And also misses Hal's.

Allen's booth also featured a "Selfie Booth" that I did not participate in because I don't do that, but people loved it as much as they to take selfies. A lot.

There were also a lot of butterflies from Damien Hirst, of course, and there was one that almost exactly matched my dress. I had to take a photo - but not a selfie.

Never mind the selfies, most of what people were doing was taking pictures of themselves with all the great art. It can't be helped.

You could see yourself in the cool, steel and studded skateboards hanging on one wall ...

But then, you could see yourself in a lot of the art ... and isn't that what Art is? And why you like it? I mean, I've been a sucker before ...

Some of the art is frustrating because you feel like a monkey could do it. Then there's the art that you have to wonder just how they did it, because it doesn't feel like anyone could do it, so intricate and amazing it is. That's the Art world, though. Just blame Obama.

There was a lot of David Bowie art (that all seemed to be done before his death at least), but this was the best one, kind of 3-D.

A similar looking piece was up the way, of a woman, made entirely from wine corks, lighters, and other ephemera that makes up mixed media. Save those wine corks!

If you needed a little break from art and the bar lines, you could cool out with some friends and play some arty ping pong. Why not?

Someone who could probably really use a break was performance artist, Millie Brown, with her Wilting Point piece. She is lying there almost naked, surrounded by flowers, surviving on only water for the five days of the show. She is "focusing on the beauty of the external decomposition around her, and the evolving changes within." And being photographed an awful lot. It was beautiful, but I bet it gets pretty old for her before the weekend is up.

My friend Big Cookie was showing with his sculpture series, Toy Soldiers, depicting young boys as violent men, but still children, in his biting social commentary work. It's powerful stuff.

I loved this deer with waterfalls eyes.



I also loved this piece made from rice paper rolled up, where it would change color depending on where you stood.

There was a crazy installation of sound waves and stuff that I didn't really get from the Metabolic Studio, but it's always fun to immerse yourself in something.

Which is, of course, the point of art, I think. To immerse yourself in something outside of you, to discover the inside of you. There was a big red wall near the VIP area that quoted Auguste Rodin, saying, "The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live."

That's what Art is all about, what LIFE is all about, and I hope you'll get to enjoy some for yourself this weekend at the wonderful L.A. Art Show. I barely scratched the surface here, so you've got a lot to see!

The L.A. Art Show runs now through Sunday, January 31, at the L.A. Convention Center Downtown.