Past Stories
Mixing it up
As interim curator for the dA Center for the Arts in downtown Pomona, Rolo Castillo’s focus this year has been to bring credibility to the dA as a gallery space. A perception exists of the dA as everyone’s gallery, ...
Capitalism Strikes Again!
There seem to be two modes of thinking when it comes to creating our American culture—quest for commerce and quest for artistic expression, and they often butt heads. Some people, for example, see an antiquated building a...
Silence is Golden
Most folks who aren’t into abstract art say things like, “my kid could have done that—and better!” Or maybe, “this one looks like dog vomit.” At the very least, they might utter the words I o...
The Faculty to Communicate
Faculty shows often are a mixed bag, yet Uncommon Practice at Pitzer College presents a widely divergent experience. A problematic feature of faculty shows in general is that, by definition, they limit curatorial voice. Contrib...
Roadwork Ahead
The Inland Empire 66ers are not exactly road warriors this year (2-11), even if destinations like Lake Elsinore and Rancho Cucamonga are technically home games for a geographical blanket like that. And if you’ve been keep...
Alley-Poop
With the NBA’s playoff schedule stretching for eons between games, an award-winning weekly publication such as this can jump in with our analysis and still come off as timely (if not prescient). Right, well, Pau Gasol doe...
The Starry Nights
So far, wherever the skatepuck is played in this series, the home fans ain’t happy. The Ducks laid colossal eggs (the first one a goose variety) to open their Stanley Cup title defense with the Dallas Stars before anyone ...
A Day in the Life
Jason Maloney walks out of his bedroom with his bundles of joy wrapped tightly in his arms, proudly displaying the fruits of his labor. “I bought them on eBay,” he says gushing. The Newport Beach-based artist known ...
The Art of Curatorial Authorship
Pitzer College needs Ciara Ennis. In her first year at the helm of the college’s art galleries, where Ennis acts as the director and curator, the Pitzer art program feels born again. In the trends-as-fleeting-as-fashion a...
Final Approach to Fatal Femmes Fighting
“I don’t feel bad at all,” says MMA fighter Sophie Bagherdai when the subject of guilt is brought up for sending Stephanie Palmer to the hospital after their fight. “If they’re cool we’ll fig...
Connecting the Dots
Aristotle’s principle, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” is a widely debated mathematical position. But while the idea might not compute in the finite world, in theory, and especially in art, it m...
Luminosity and a Sense of Jazz
The new work from Sandeep Mukherjee in Spell at Pitzer College’s Nichols Gallery has the feel of jazz. Subtle visual undulations of acrylic ink intoned in a pulsing rhythm of quantized marks invoke flights of improvisatio...
Evan Holloway
At the Pomona College Museum’s Project Series 35, Evan Holloway casts himself as provocateur. The space, which is fairly small, approximately 20×25 feet, is papered with a pattern of small black dots on a white groun...
Don’t Cover Your Eyes!
Depicting the nude in artwork means walking a tightrope—and there’s no catch-net below, only crowds of people. People who are still burdened by censorship-minded Puritanical roots, people who are uber-liberals and f...
Historical Hodgepodge
Comics, politics, and pop culture all figure in the paintings of the late Cuban artist, Pedro Álvarez, whose work is currently at the UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery. The Signs Pile Up addresses the legacy of this artis...
Culture Clashing
The sprawling landscape of the Inland Empire is home to a hybrid of little battles—metropolitan refurbishments vs. historical architecture, mass-produced subdivisions vs. untamable nature, and people—aboriginals and...
Meet the Devil at the DA
Chris Rock once said if he met the devil at the crossroads, he would be damned sure to get more than a few guitar lessons. Rolo Castillo, who might just have a little of the devil in him, kicks off…
The Western Brink
In the print edition of New American Paintings 2007, Pacific Coast Edition, from which the current show at dba 256 was culled, MOCA curator Alma Ruiz remarks, “ . . . a place to think and be productive, at a…
Stronger Art, Lower Brows
“Nothing at last is sacred,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once penned, “but the integrity of your own mind.” There was certainly no concrete evidence of anything sacred in the burgeoning downtown LA art scene in ...
Art as Evidence
For thousands of Mexicans, November 25, 2006 will forever be fixed in memory as the day a teacher’s demonstration in Oaxaca’s capital city, held annually for the past 25 years, took a bloody turn when government tro...
Ethereal Abstractions and Primordial Soup
Rapidly asserting itself as the force to be reckoned with, Pomona Arts Colony’s dba256 Gallery has erected another monument to innovative California artists. In her second exhibit, Liquid Light, dba director Andi Campogno...
Embrace Your Sexy Menstrual Cycle!
At first glance, the Girly Show flyer, which promotes Chaffey College’s new exhibit on “Pin-ups, Zines & the So-Called Third Wave,” looks like a page torn from a rockabilly calendar hung in a 1950’s ...
Grave Beauty
Photographer Dick George has an eye for the strange, the illusory, the easily overlooked. Traveling in the rural southwest five years ago, the Arizona-based artist found himself drawn to an unusual subject matter. In dust...
Like Drowning in Asphalt
The first impression one has when standing in the midst of the Wignall Museum’s new Invisible Trajectories: Passing through the Inland Empire exhibit can be summed up in three letters: T.M.I.
That’s not to say...
New Kids on the ARTsBlock
Due North: 13 UC Grads Are Taking Contemporary Art in the Right
Direction
As a local critic endlessly on the lookout for good art in
the Inland Empire, all I can say is—thank God for Sweeney. The most
reliable venu...
Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me
If you ever have the chance to sit down with Gallery Director and co-owner of dba256 Andi Campognone as I did, be prepared to walk away with one hell of an arts education–perhaps even indoctrination into artistic and capi...
Art Meritocracy
On Saturday, August 18th, Soul Expressions Tattoo Studio once again reinvented itself into an art gallery, hosting the Give Me 5 on the Down Low art show. Featuring pieces from contributors as local as the resident tattoo artis...
Out of This World
The notion that the world outside has become so distasteful that people are now, en masse, turning inward for solace is probably too obvious to restate. But I did it anyway. And while art often serves to take us to…
