Gabriela Martinez puts her life on display

EL CALDO DE PATO by GABRIELA MARTINEZ
On average, Gabriela Martinez’s linocuts each take 30 hours of work, but “The World Never Let Us Down,” her MFA thesis exhibition that incorporates them, was a life in the making.
“I always wrote stories when I was young, in journals,” Martinez says. “I [...]

Gord Peteran redefines what it means to be a chair

GORD PETERAN’S “MUSICAL BOX”
Gord Peteran’s furniture sort of explains a lot of things, possibly even why Wickes just went bankrupt. The 34 creations in “Furniture Meets Its Maker,” now wrapping up a two-year traveling show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, include tables of junk [...]

What’s good at ‘California Visual Artists’? Decide for yourself

PAUL PITSKER’S “SUCKER”
Juried exhibitions are great if they don’t make a big deal about who won—and “California Visual Artists: An Open Exhibition” doesn’t. Comprising an open call for art, there’s something here to offend or appease almost anyone.
It’s an election year, so let’s quickly consider Tamara Carlin’s [...]

Freewheeling with painter Robert Maldonado

ROBERT MALDONADO’S “PUBLIC MASK”
I like artists before they’ve been hit with wealth and taste, before they’re, like Joni Mitchell, used to that clean white linen and fancy French cologne. I like artists when they’re maybe kind of silly, and everything, for them, is the shock of the new. This is especially [...]

‘Shudder’ showcases five nice celebrity photographers

JEREMY AND CLAIRE WEISS, “DAVID LYNCH”
These are not the ones who are killing Britney Spears. These are the ones who come with parabolic reflectors and light meters, and make Britney Spears look beautiful, or at least properly haunted. They do not show her vag stubble or her menses-stained panties, though [...]

‘California Video’ makes history out of art that Long Beach surrendered

“THE ETERNAL FRAME” LBMA, 1975-76
The Getty Center’s new “California Video” exhibition is as much about Long Beach’s art history as it is the state of the state. That’s because nearly half the works in this show were created at, then acquired by, the Long Beach [...]

Matthew Thomas looks within

It smells good at Angels Gate—eons from Long Beach, yet on the same port. It smells New Englandy, somehow, although without the chowder. Maybe it doesn’t smell New Englandy, now that I think on it. Maybe it’s just the rosemary bushes and Pedro’s omnipresent breeze. Maybe the New England sense comes from [...]

Artist Sara Ray’s sinister paintings draw from Long Beach’s underbelly

SARA RAY’S “THE TROUBLE WITH ZOMBIES”
“I’m not sure where the idea for this came from,” artist Sara Ray says as we regard Driven by Demons, one of about 20 of her oil paintings that you’ll see this March in “The Devil Lives in Long Beach,” her [...]

Ron Wilkins documents black villagers in Mexico

PHOTO by RON WILKINS
Some of Ron Wilkins’ photographs in “Journey to Black Mexico” are untitled, and the names of others—Grandma and Me; Village Elder—only hint at their story.
This is an odd problem, particularly if you’re seeing the show as I did, when it first went up and everything was [...]

Finally, an exhibit for your inner meddler

Little could be more innocuous and fun than John Underkoffler’s “Tamper: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design” at the University Art Museum. Wear the special “gesture recognition” (motion-sensing) gloves and pluck images from great old movies—Night of the Hunter, Once Upon a Time in the West—finger-gun them onto a screen, [...]