The First Friday art walk in Oakland, California — known as Oakland Art Murmur — is a chance for galleries throughout the city, from uptown to downtown to Jingletown, to throw open their doors for an art-loving public. Current shows of note include Kurt Fishback’s “51 Portraits of Women Artists” through July 18 at Transmission Gallery in West Oakland and Chicago-based painter and textile artist Samantha Bittman’s “Material Data” through July 4 at Johansson Projects. The Friday commute is a...
The 2015 faculty exhibition opened tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery (a chance, perhaps, for students to grade the teachers). Fine artists in the show include Julie Orser, Joe Biel and Joe Forkan. Rebecca Campbell fills an oven with classic paperback literature in Liebe Mütti (courtesy of LA Louver), presumably to be cooked until done at 451° Fahrenheit. Jim Jenkins supplies a kinetic sculpture consisting of school chairs, dunce cap, globe and paper airplane entitled I Ain’t...
Based in the abstraction of the human form, "Figurative Perplexities" at the Q Art Salon in Santa Ana takes a different look at the classic fine art subject, through the lens of six very different artists. Jason Shawn Alexander, Shay Bredimus, Alex Krigbaum, Cecilia Paredes and Orion Fischer join Dan Catalano in the exhibit, tranforming the space of the Q into a kind of cathedral, in worship of the human form. Each room is precisely arranged and glows like smaller altars to the figurative...
Saturday night the Mat Gleason curated exhibition conTEXTual abstraction opens at Peter Blake Gallery. This group show will feature artists that utilize various forms of text in their work and includes Mark Dutcher, Jonmarc Edwards, Gary Lang, Molly Larkey, Adam Mars, William Powhida, Cole Sternberg, and Tim Youd. Gleason, a long time art critic and curator, founded the Coagula Art Journal in 1992 and now runs the dynamic exhibition space Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown. Gleason is also a...
If you happen to be traveling through John Wayne Airport over the next few months please take a look at the show OC Art Blog publisher Chris Hoff curated titled Hidden Treasures: Art from the Permanent Collections of Orange County Colleges and Universities. In this exhibit travelers to and from OC can explore local art from five Orange County colleges and universities in the HIDDEN TREASURES exhibit on display at John Wayne Airport now through August 2015. From the art collections of...
An exhibit of Iberian Peninsula-inspired paintings by Laguna College of Art + Design students and faculty opens this week at the LCAD Space at Forest & Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach. “The Majesty of Spain and Portugal” shows the artistic response of participants in last summer’s LCAD summer abroad tour in Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca, Porto and Lisbon. The artists are Amy Bergener, Aaron Brown, Gabriel Castro, Andrea Clarke, Lani Emanuel (whose oil painting Sorolla’s Steps is shown above),...
Every arts district needs a Bavarian beer hall serving fancy Old World weiners. Downtown Los Angeles has Wurstküche, San Diego's Gaslamp has the sausage fest known as Sausage Fest, and now, on Santa Ana's Fourth Street, with a soft opening through March, comes Wursthaus. Some kinks are still being worked out, but the food is worth engaging. Order at the front counter — try the smoked cheddar bratwurst on a pretzel bun or go exotic with the hickory smoked wild boar — then look for the hidden...
In the sculptural work of Portuguese artist Miguel Palma, a cast concrete block might mark the open page of a favorite book. A half-finished Erector set model of the Eiffel Tower might appear alongside a 19th century photograph of the real Eiffel Tower at a similar stage in its construction. Engineering, architecture, history and even biomechanics all provide stimuli for the artist’s toylike imagination. Currently wrapping up a three month residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica,...
With gas prices down and the stock market reaching all-time highs as we approach the end of 2014, no doubt you’re looking for a place to put your excess cash to work. If so, you might want to consider throwing your weight around in the local art market this holiday season. Here are a few options in and around Orange County: Cal State Long Beach’s 47th Annual Holiday Art Sale runs through this Wednesday, December 10, and features everything from ceramics to printmaking. Something tells...
A celebration was held Saturday in Santa Ana for Newport Beach artist Marilou Hogeboom, who passed away this month at the age of 87. Her work in recent years was seen most regularly at Orange County Fine Art’s co-operative Showcase Gallery, where the memorial was held, but in the early 1950s, as daughter Katy recalls, she exhibited large tapestries at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. Over the years she was recognized with various honors, including as the 2008 artist laureate of the city of...
Chiron Review has long been one of America’s most respected literary journals. After a brief hiatus, they have returned with a new 6 x 9, perfect-bound, softcover format, as well an e-book option supporting kindle, iBooks, Nook and most other readers and devices. In 1989 Gerald Locklin came on as poetry editor and Ray Zepeda as the fiction editor. Since then the magazine has showcased consistently raw, vibrant, often controversial writings from the likes of Charles Bukowski, William Safford,...
The physicist Carlo Rovelli mentioned in an interview recently that religion was a subject of interest to science but only out of respect for the religious as a group and very little scientific study has been dedicated to finding out the wellspring for a belief in “God” specifically. This aversion to exploring the subject of faith in a manner that approaches a possible "source" is not as lacking in fine art but still incredibly rare. Religious dialogue in art tends to be highly...
A to Z Featuring: Craig Antrim Casper Brindle Christopher Georgesco Donald Karwelis Eric Zammitt For galleries, presentation is paramount. The alchemy of impeccable lighting, thoughtful curating and an intimate knowledge of the artist's process combined with behind-the-scenes sweat and elbow grease can transform even the most humble space into a cathedral. For this reason, it is often times the smaller galleries that can be the most inspiring. Tucked away into the end corner of a small row of...
You probably didn't notice unless you rode a bus to the beach this summer, but for a while there was a bit more art in the streets than usual. Sponsored by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and with monetary support from various related advertising companies, the Art Everywhere US project featured reproductions of American art from the collections of LACMA, the Whitney and other participating museums. The outdoor exhibit was nationwide, with billboards and subway posters in some...
Late summer is hardly peak season in the art world: Schools are out of session and gallery owners are on vacation. If art is being seen, it’s most likely at one of the outdoor festivals at the foot of Laguna Canyon Road or in the art competitions at the local county fair. Obviously nobody wants to be indoors when it’s 90 degrees, but there are a few shows ending soon that will make a quick venture indoors a worthwhile endeavor. One example is “Summer Luminaries” at Brett Rubbico Gallery on Old...
In many areas all over the world, the dirtiest, grimiest places are also the places where the creative people are. Whether it be for low rent, more space, the love of the metropolis, or to invigorate communities through gentrification, sometimes the art is just better in the shitty neighborhoods. With low brow art movements originating in grimy areas of cities like NYC, L.A., Paris, Berlin, etc—Orange County is no different. The grimiest of grimy cities is also our beloved art-hub, the...
illustration by Jared Millar (after Alfred Lutjeans) Museums these days are in the content creation space: From MOCAtv to the obligatory museum blog to the iPad apps put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art — for better or worse, it’s about more than just publishing a scholarly catalog with a section of color-printed plates. Lately the Laguna Art Museum has entered the multimedia fray with a series of documentary films by Dale Schierholt entitled “California Masters.” The first of these,...
Last Saturday Peter Blake celebrated his 50th birthday at his namesake gallery in Laguna Beach. Milestone birthdays have a way of causing us to re-evaluate our lives, and the world around us. It is in this vein that the work of Dutch artist Jan Maarten Voskuil was a fitting centerpiece to the event. The archetypal painting gives no acknowledgement to the canvass it’s created on, it serves as background and is meant to be regarded (if it is regarded as all) as a mere substrate to the art work....
I first discovered Tom Backer's work in the early 80's when he was documenting the burgeoning So Cal punk rock scene. Backer's extensive photographic collection of early punk shows, although unheralded, rivaled the work of better known punk rock documentarian's like Edward Colver. I was a fan. However, as the 80's progressed Backer disappeared from my radar and I wasn't sure what happened to this talented photographer. But as fate would have it, I was fortunate enough to run into Backer's wife...
"We Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust" is a participatory sculpture project by Los Angeles-based artist collective Finishing School in collaboration with artists Nadia Afghani and Matt Fisher that utilized the fabrication of a full size replica of a MQ-1B Predator drone aircraft. Over two hundred people helped FS and collaborators at Occidental College hand-finish the drone with an age-old application method using architectural-grade mud to the surface of the cnc'd substrate. In the...
The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.
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British artist Natasha Caruana joins the OC Art Blog to talk about her ongoing exploration of intimacy, secrecy, and the rituals of modern relationships. Known for projects like Married Man and Fairytale for Sale, Caruana’s work blurs the line between truth and...
Join me for a walk through one of the world’s most influential contemporary art fairs, Frieze London 2025. From blue-chip booths to experimental installations, Frieze offers a snapshot of what artists, collectors, and institutions are thinking about right now. If...
In a landmark move for the region’s cultural landscape, UC Irvine has officially completed its acquisition of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), forging a new unified entity under the name UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. UC Irvine News A Fusion of...
Installation view of Obsesiones/Obsessions at Golden West College Art Gallery. Photo by Tyler Stallings By Tyler Stallings Walking into Obsesiones/Obsessions at Golden West College Art Gallery feels both timely and uncanny. Timely, because the exhibition is...
By Tyler Stallings Brennan Roach, Garden of Earthly Absurdities, 2017-2025,paper, pencil, pen, acrylic, oil on triptych wood panel, 55 x 102 inches. Photo by Tyler Stallings.] Brennan Roach’s Visual Morphology, his first solo exhibition in twelve years, is less a...
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