Los Angeles
January 18, 2023

The Founding Mother of Southern California’s Chicano Drag Scene

A primal, glitter-fueled scream was unleashed with Cyclona, giving birth to generations of queer Chicano performers. | Dakota Noot

REDEFINING MONUMENTS

At the Japanese American National Museum, a Book Becomes a Monument

Internment camp survivors and their descendants are invited to stamp Ireichō, a book that represents the first definitive count of those incarcerated. | Sharon Mizota

The massive book stood open on a plinth and an assistant carefully turned the pages for us, helping us find each name. The sheer heft of the book lent new gravity to the knowledge that this cruel, dehumanizing thing had happened to people we love. Seeing their names in print among so many others and touching them with the stamp suddenly made history very specific and very personal.

CRITIC'S PICKS

Ink, Paper, Stone: Six Women Artists and the Language of Lithography
Oct. 14–Feb. 13, 2023
Norton Simon Museum, 411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena (nortonsimon.org)

The Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in 1960 in Los Angeles by June Wayne, with the goal of reinvigorating the medium of lithography. Countless artists have since produced editions at Tamarind (which relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1970), drawn by the freedom it offers to experiment through printmaking. Ink, Paper, Stone focuses on six women artists who received fellowships to create prints at Tamarind in the 1960s: Ruth Asawa, Gego, Eleanore Mikus, Louise Nevelson, Irene Siegel, and Hedda Sterne.

Sueñx
Nov. 19–Feb. 18, 2023
The Mistake Room, 1811 East 20th Street, Central-Alameda (tmr.la)

Faced with the disruptions of contemporary society — war, disease, economic precarity, environmental collapse — artists are expressing a renewed interest in Surrealism and Magical Realism, just as their predecessors did a century ago when confronted with a world gone mad. Sueñx brings together 26 contemporary Latinx artists who embrace Magical Realism to reflect the contradictions and complications of the present.

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CLOSING SOON

Justen Leroy: Lay Me Down in Praise
September 17–January 21, 2023
Art + Practice, 3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park (artandpractice.org)

Justen LeRoy’s three-channel film installation “Lay Me Down in Praise” links the struggle for Black empowerment with the environmental movement. LeRoy juxtaposes footage of Black performers with scenes of volcanic eruptions and other geological events, drawing a connection between expressive vocal craft with terrestrial tumult.

Joan Didion: What She Means
October 11–January 22
The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood (hammer.ucla.edu)

The writer and essayist Joan Didion was a distinctive voice in American culture, a pioneer of “New Journalism” who captured the turbulence beneath the placid veneer of postwar life. Curated by writer and critic Hilton Als, Joan Didion: What She Means attempts to reflect her vast influence and legacy through the works of 50 or so visual artists. 

UP THE COAST

What to See in San Francisco’s Art Week

Shows not to be missed during the Bay Area’s mid-January flurry of art activity. | Natasha Boas

A city without a biennale, San Francisco celebrates the visual arts mid-January in what is informally referred to by the community at large as “San Francisco Art Week” with significant arts programming throughout the city, anchored by the international FOG Art+Design Art Fair, established in 2014.