When I found out that the 15th Annual Los Angeles Art Show is taking place at the LA Convention Center this year, I immediately flashed back to the last time I was there, about 5 years ago, getting sworn in as an American citizen. Instead of being surrounded by fellow foreigners awkwardly waving our tiny American flags as a video George Bush, wheat fields, and smiling children played on a large screen, this time I was surrounded by rich old people, hipsters, and hungry reporters.

“Who’s here? What celebrities? Who’s checked in so far?”
“Tatyana … hm… something,” the publicist was a bit taken aback by his ferocity. “Let me look it up, I’m not good with celebrity names.”
“Honey, if you can’t remember the last name, they’re not important.” BURN.

All I was hungry for was pasta and possibly champagne. Journalism is usually an individual sport, lonely, cold and demanding, like curling, so when fellow reporter Tommy Tung, a freelancer for Juxtapoz, suggested we wander the art show together, I was excited to have a partner in crime. Especially when it came to snagging a drink and food at the same time – teamwork was of the essence.

The LA Art Show is vast in size and scope. Kim Martindale, the Director/Executive Director of the show, had a very clear vision for utilizing the space to its maximum advantage, including giant live painting installation Vox Humana, the Downtown Gallery Association, and the Sister City Los Angeles International Art Exhibition. “The great thing about the convention center versus any other facility in Los Angeles, is that you have the potential to do these things. When we moved the show here we were at 70,000 square feet, this is 150,000 square feet.”

The size of the space is important, since Kim’s view of the LA Art Show is encyclopedic, “We have [everything from] very historic work to really cutting edge. This show is about showing all the different types of art.” That may account for some overheard grumblings at the show about Holly Hobby art, or declarations that the LA Art Show is no Art Basel. But for every complaint, there is a gallery or an artist that has a chance to show its work to an outside audience. Be it the art of Uruguay, the debut country for the brand-new Guest Country Program, or the graffiti of Retna and El Mac, this convention center is a site where many unlikely matches of artist and art lover will occur.

Tommy and I were most excited for the Vox Humana Art Performance, which is curated by Bryson Strauss of LA ART MACHINE. There are two separate 12’x12’ murals for Mear One and Kofie, and a joint mural that’s a collaboration between Retna and El Mac. It is a black and white photorealist portrait of a woman, a universal mother figure with pained eyes and a wrinkled face – El Mac’s contribution. Her face touches something primal inside, a nostalgic guilt that is so familiar to every kid who’s ever upset his mother. Starting from the top left corner, Retna has begun to cover the background in his signature calligraphy, beautiful in its fluidity and grace. By the end of the show, he will complete the Spanish quote, which so far reads “I am your mother, who gave you the earth that bore you, now my tears…” I can’t wait to see the finished product.

A featured spot at the LA Art Show brings a certain legitimacy to an art form that is illegal in its natural environment; a fact that’s easy to forget with artists like Shepard Fairey and Banksy having become pop culture staples. Kim Martindale is proud to aid this shift in perception with Vox Humana, marking the first time a prominent art fair has featured street art: “Graffitti art is part of that latest movement that has gone through transitions, where people pushed it aside, saying it’s an evil thing for our society, and in the last 5 years you start hearing a lot more about those artists, and they really are artists.”

Just as the live graffiti art installation is a first of its kind for any art fair, not just the LA Art Show, it is a first event of its kind for the artists as well. Retna tells me he’s excited to paint here, “It’s nice to be able to be in an environment like this and be able to produce the pieces that we would normally do on the street.” For El Mac, the ability to paint on a 12’x24’ canvas is another bonus – he says his work has a lot more impact large, in addition to minimizing a perfectionist streak that can run wild when he is working on a small scale.
Retna and El Mac are glad to expose a different kind of audience to their work, seeing the difference between this gig and what they usually do as merely a difference between the private and public sector. “We kinda do it for everyone, it’s a universal thing, there’s stuff we give away to the people and there’s stuff we give away for a commercial purpose, but the meaning is the same,” says Retna.
For El Mac, creating the giant murals under the watchful eyes of an ever-changing crowd goes hand in hand with the exhibitionist nature of being a graffiti artist, “The more the better. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Wanting people to see the work, whoever they are, whether they are little old ladies, or rich Italian people. Whoever might like it, whoever it might do something for.” Both artists hope that the exposure will lead to new opportunities and new investors.

After taking some video of Mear and Kofie working their magic with aerosol cans, acrylic paint, and rulers, I head over to the giant Hershey kiss that has been beckoning to me throughout the evening; even more than the pomegranate martinis.

The 20’x12’ kiss is one of several delightful offerings of CA mosaicist Jean Wells, presented by Timothy Yarger Fine Art. Its Oldenberg-like oversized playfulness draws people from all around the show like a shiny silver beacon, and its little paper flag flies a promise of something fun, silly, and sweet. It does not disappoint – inside there is a little bench, where videos of silent movie kisses play on a loop. It is an escape pod from reality, a giant piece of brain candy.

Elizabeth Yochim, the Director of International Exhibitions for the gallery, shared what she thought made Wells’ work so popular internationally in the last couple of years, and so attractive to serious collectors: “It seems very simple, but it is very highly crafted mosaic works, each piece is hand-cut glass. [And] they find her work refreshing, whimsical, funny, nostalgic – which can be a trite word, but it truly does remind you of a innocent happy time, and also [attracts] people who are just drawn to objects of pop vernacular.” Ah yes, Jeff Koons fever.

Other pieces include a ritzy gold teddy bear in a hilarious brightly patterned vest – it has the expensive look of the Damien Hirst diamond-encrusted skull but it comes with a sense of humor. As I let a giggle escape, I catch an older man frowning at me and the bear, which reminds me that a lot of people do not consider this art. Elizabeth is used to hearing that. “Whether or not the art world accepts it as art, or fine art, it touches people. Everybody who looks at that teddy bear smiles,” says Elizabeth. “Is that art? Is it an expression of the human condition? Of course.” As I watch people interact with the bear and the kiss, I see their emotional response, and the whole argument becomes moot.

On our walk back to the parking lot, I overhear a formidable-looking gentleman with neck tattoos tell his friend with a shiver, “That painting sucked the life right out of me.” I want to recommend that he check out the Hershey’s kiss, where his vigor would be surely restored, but he heads straight for the bar. That works too.

I leave the LA Art Show feeling excited and inspired by what people are trying to create here, the city that Kim Martindale believes is the new epicenter of the art world. He tells me that there is a far greater purpose to the obvious desire for the commercial success of the show: “You are trying to develop an interest in art, in the community. It’s about uniting all those non-profit, for-profit, institutions large and small so that more people talk about art, and create an excitement about art, because without that, my soul is lost.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Listen to the Interview

For his first homework assignment at the prestigious Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, Alexey Steele brought in a seven-foot by seven-foot canvas. His fellow students laughed and declared him an incurable ‘gigantomaniac,’ thereby sealing his fate as a man with big ideas.

Fast forward several decades to a Monday night in Los Angeles at Alexey’s (you guessed it) large warehouse in Carson, where his biggest idea to date, Classical Underground (CU), is about to begin. Over two hundred people swirl around in eddies, checking out Alexey’s paintings as they wait for L.A.’s most unique classical music concert to begin. In addition to the snatches of Russian I expect to hear, there is French, Romanian, and Spanish. In the room nearest the entrance, there are long tables laden with all kinds of food and drink—it’s BYO everything. Myriad cultures represented gastronomically, as well as linguistically, in the form of fruit pies, pickled herring, hummus, dolma, donuts, gyoza, vodka, beer, and sake. The atmosphere is that of a Thanksgiving dinner with a family you actually like.

Amidst the teeming masses I make my way to Alexey, who is easy to spot due to the white Panama hat perennially perched atop his mountainous pile of dark curly hair, and underscored by a roguish black mustache. He is simultaneously kissing a grandmother, shaking hands with a pale disheveled young man and his paler girlfriend, and rubbing the head of a round, bald man in a Hawaiian shirt. The people don’t seem to know each other, but once all are squeezed into Alexey’s bearish embrace, they make introductions. Although I can’t hear what he’s saying, his donkey’s bray of a laugh cuts through all crowd noise like a hot knife through butter.

Before Classical Underground became L.A.’s most talked-about venue for classical music with hundreds of fans willing to drive to Carson on a Monday night, it was simply an impromptu gathering of Alexey’s friends, many of whom are classical musicians. Although Alexey cannot play a note, he finds inspiration for his painting in chamber music.

“I moved into this place, heard the acoustics in here, and said, ‘My God, we must have people play!’ My great friend Sergei” —with Alexey, everyone is a “great friend” and you believe it— “I wanted to hear him play, so I invited a couple of people over, he played, it was great. Then our other friends played, then it grew and grew until… Uh-oh! Suddenly I have a problem with people coming over!” He laughs his donkey laugh until I’m cracking up myself, then continues gesticulating wildly, “So I said if we do this, let’s REALLY do this! LET’S INVITE SOME PEOPLE!” His laugh runs away from him again, and I gladly follow.

For the September CU, Alexey and Maxim Velichkin (CU musical director and a phenomenally talented cellist to boot) decided for the first time to use an RSVP system. The email went out at 9 A. M., and by noon the 250 slots were full, but over 800 people tried to sign up anyway. Steinway Piano Gallery of Hollywood even donated a piano worth thousands of dollars to the cause. “And they told me classical music was dead?!” Alexey thunders, shaking his fists at the sheer audacity.

Following the puzzlingly successful Christie’s New York sale of postwar and contemporary art on November 13th, where Rothko’s “Untitled: Red, Blue, Orange” fetched a hefty $34.2 million alone, I was trying to reconcile the strained economic climate of the local art community in Los Angeles with the heavy hitters in New York. Although the last several years have been an economic nightmare for most Americans, at what point does the idea of a recession become bigger than the recession itself? What effect is the economic downturn having on the L.A. art scene, and is the success of the Christie’s auction a sign of recovery, or more of the same price inflation of modern art that we were seeing before the recession? I also thought about the old adage that creativity and poverty go together like peanut butter and jelly—well, maybe not in those exact words. To put it bluntly, is the recession good for art?

To my relief, Yossi has been holding up well through the recession, thanks to a comissioned sculpture of Donald Douglas at the Santa Monica Airport, along with the sale of several other works. Yossi frequently works in bronze, and has found collectors eager to invest in the material as its value appreciates in relation to ailing securities and real estate markets.

Despite his own good fortunes, Yossi can count many colleagues who are not nearly so lucky: “[Of] American artists, 5% actually make a living from their work, so 95% depend on a 2nd or 3rd job to survive.” Rampant lay offs have eliminated countless such day jobs. Without supplemental incomes, Yossi explains, many artists are “really in a bind; they can’t think with a clear mind to make art.” And just in case anyone harbored a romantic vision of the struggling artist, Yossi quickly dispels it, “A good artist wouldn’t care about how much they make or not, but a starving artist cannot make art. It’s not true that starving artists make good art, staving artists starve.”

While he remains optimistic about the resiliency of artists, and the work they are creating during this turbulent time, he thinks we as a society lack “a system that can catch [unemployed artists] so they are not hurt, so you can put them back in the system [where they can] produce work and flourish.” In his view, the art scene in Mexico is thriving despite the crisis because of a public initiative to help artists find work and keep them afloat, and he wishes the government here could offer artists comparable stability.

As a studio director, Yossi’s own fortunes are largely dependent upon the finances of over 30 other artists. On paper, the recession has meant a significant drop in revenue from last year’s total sales of over $40,000 between all the studio artists. “Pretty much everything went on hold,” and in an attempt to attract buyers in the sluggish market, Yossi has seen artists try and use “prettier shapes and colors,” as well as work smaller: “With galleries, all of a sudden now, things that are 10 inch by 10 inch…have more buyers interested than the bigger pieces.”

Despite the economic squeeze, Yossi believes true artists will remain steadfast, continuing to work whatever the hurdles. “They will spend their last $5 dollars on materials before breakfast.” Suzanne Erickson (see her work in this Issue of FORTH), an artist working just a couple of doors down from Yossi, feels lucky she has other skills to fall back on while waiting for business to pick up. “My residual checks from commercials have really come in handy,” she laughs. While only the true believers may splurge on Suzanne’s more stunning but outré work, adjusting scale or color to sweeten the pill is not an option she’ll consider. Indeed, she sees the recession as an opportunity for emerging artists like herself, “You’re in a good place if you are under $10,000, because I’ve met a few collectors who are still buying that, but they are not buying the $50-100,000 range.” Suzanne takes to heart the advice of her old professor, who told her: “Just do whatever you need to do to keep it going. Take another job for a while, just produce work, make work, store it, keep it, don’t say the art world sucks.”

For Suzanne, this has meant commercials for pharmaceuticals, which she somehow always books—I tell her it must be because she looks equal parts healthy and trustworthy—and a new business she started painting people’s walls. “To me, it was like a degrading thing, to paint a nursery, but I felt like, OK, I’m going to make it an installation, this baby is going to sleep great! And I charged well for it, and it is a beautiful space. I’m quite proud of it. And as long as I’m doing my art, this is fine.” Suzanne feels lucky to have found a commercial niche because of how avant-garde her work is, “For my clients, you know celebrity-type people, to buy a sculpture seems a little crazy, but to pay for a mural seems practical.”

Suzanne Erickson interview

Suzanne Erickson is constantly surprised to find that she is just like her parents. “I used to get really freaked out when my dad would dig for junk. I’m exactly like my dad now,” she laughs. “I drive through the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for someone else’s garbage.” Suzanne and I are sharing a couch in her studio that might have been garbage itself, were it not for her magnificent reappropriation, inscribing the upholstery with a florid patchwork of paint and needlepoint. She tells me this sort of transformative creativity is inherited from her mother—a woman who would disassemble a bed and convert it into a wet bar in the scant free hours between ferrying Suzanne to and from day school.

Suzanne’s own crafty manipulation of found objects has resulted in ununexpected and inspired creations. Recently, rather than dispose of her old mattress, she felt the deeply personal connections literally imprinted on its surface should be decorated and put on display. The result is captivating: an intricately embroidered Eastern goddess figure surrounded by a fiery array of pinks, fuchsias, burgundies, and crimsons; its vagina blooming from the center of the giant fabric canvas like a peacock’s plumage.
“[It] looks sexual, because it is a woman with her feet above her head and the whole vagina exposed”— maybe Suzanne is not her mother after all—“but it’s really not about that.” For Suzanne, the power of womanhood is simultaneously sexual and maternal. “To be whore and the mother, that’s the goal, isn’t it?” Suzanne laughs. The magenta inscription forms a semicircle arch around the mattress, and it reads, “We all enter the world through a woman’s womb and we leave through the gateway of death. Praise the woman!”

Suzanne works in diverse media, but she stole my heart with the Fragile Series, a collection of figurative sculptures. The piece that drew me in is a seated female in scarlet red, mournfully yet purposefully staring down, her figure tense but beautiful, coated head-to-toe in the slick glossy red of Garbo lips. No wonder—she is actually made of lipstick, 150 sticks to be precise, pressed over a cement-and-hemp armature. Suzanne originally planned the sculpture to sit atop a mirror, gazing down like Narcissus. Instead, she sits on a wooden crate marked “Fragile,” lending that theme of vanity and self-obsession a brittle tenderness.
The Fragile Series is Suzanne’s exploration of isolation and loneliness. She is candid, if a tad self-conscious, about the personal nature of this work. “I don’t want you to paint me as this fragile little [thing] but I am! I realize that’s who I am. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

It would be a stretch to describe Suzanne as a fragile person; any sign of her fragility is eclipsed by a fierce sense of individualism and purpose. Take “Fuck the Flock,” another sculpture from the same series of a female figure with no arms and a black crow’s head. The idea for the piece came to Suzanne when she noticed flocks of crows in the parking lot of her studio, and marveled at how they always managed to stick together.

“I can’t be part of the flock. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to be a part of society, or I’m rebellious, but you gotta be so strong, you gotta be yourself. Whatever that is.” This stubborn strength is manifest in her crow-woman, knees and feet stained with dirt (she has scraped and clawed to get here), but her back straight and her gaze calm. The contrast between the raw pink fleshiness of the figure’s human body and the helmeted security of its crow’s head is a visual essay on Suzanne’s own push and pull between vulnerability and independence.

It is easy to take Suzanne’s work too seriously—heady themes, confrontational forms—but titles like “Fuck the Flock” and pieces like “Chair” and “Finally” show her playful side. She describes “Finally” as a work of “complete frustration.” After building layer upon layer of this female figure, through seven incarnations, Suzanne still found herself grappling for the perfect form to illustrate her thought. “I finally ended up cutting her off, and just showing her crotch and ass,” she guffaws. What remained was a sawed-off mid-section exposing her process layer by painstaking layer, like the rings of a tree revealing its age, like a birthday cake. So, Suzanne slapped on a layer of white resin ‘frosting.’

Read A Spotlight on the Cautionary Tales-Feral Structures Exhibit, by Sofiya Goldshteyn