Featured Artist

The “Featured Artist” page archives the artworks that grace the homepage of the LARB website every week. Each gallery compiles four images of works, followed by a short text. This section reflects LARB’s longstanding commitment to honor not only verbal but also visual culture, and to increase the reach of artists not only from the United States but from all across the world. The art on the homepage and the gallery archive is an ongoing nonverbal contribution to the larger conversation between here and there, between the past, present, and future, that LARB seeks to foster.

  • Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography

    Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography

    Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Annie Ernaux with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers selected by writer and curator Lou Stoppard. The book is the product of an exhibition following Stoppard’s residency on using the photography from the MEP collection for new research.


    The book includes texts from Ernaux’s book Exteriors (Journal du dehors), 1993: a record of moments in trains, shops and streets around Cergy-Pontoise between 1985 and 1992. The photography in the book features work from the second half of the 20th century throughout the globe.


    More from Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography

  • Candace Hill-Montgomery

    Candace Hill-Montgomery

    “Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar,” is Candace Hill-Montgomery’s first show in the five boroughs of New York City since the 1980s. The exhibition is organized by Lawrence Kumpf and Tyler Maxin and is currently showing at Blank Forms in NY.


    Over the last ten years, Hill-Montgomery (b. 1945) has largely worked with weavings made on homemade looms, cunningly fusing an assemblage of techniques and materials including sheep’s wool, mohair, linen, paper yarn, and other fabrics, often augmented by found objects. The exhibition includes a spread of weaves produced between 2016 and 2023.


    Raised in suburban east Queens, she grew up with the pre-fame Ronettes and babysat Count Basie’s daughter. From her late teens to early twenties, she did runway and print modeling for designers such as Jacques Tiffeau, Bill Blass, and Oscar de la Renta, before enrolling in the studio art program at Fordham University. In 1979, she was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and presented an artwork inter-rogating public space, dually installed at Artists Space and a tenement on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. She soon intermingled with the bustling downtown arts scene of the ’80s, presenting a work responding to the FBI raid against Fred Hampton at Colab’s “The Times Square Show,” staging a performance at Franklin Furnace, exhibiting at the New Museum in a 1982 solo show, producing a number of artists’ books, and collaborating closely with figures such as Ntozake Shange, providing sets (“built-poems”) for theatrical performances, and Lucy R. Lippard, with whom she co-curated the 1983 exhibition “Working Women/Working Artists/Working Together,” at Gallery 1199, operated by a local of the Service Employees International Union representing hospital workers. For roughly three decades, Hill-Montgomery worked as a high school art and journalism educator. Since her retirement in 2011, she has lived full-time in Long Island.


    Hill-Montgomery continues to produce artwork and poetry prolifically; her latest publications include the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, in 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins.


    More from Candace Hill-Montgomery

  • Ouattara Watts

    Ouattara Watts

    Abidjan-born, New York–based artist Ouattara Watts’s new paintings are currently exhibiting at Karma in Los Angeles. The presentation marks the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. Characteristic of Watt’s practice, the large-scale works place cosmograms, numerals, cloth, and other symbols and relics from around the world in relation with one other. Alongside acrylic and gouache, the artist uses various materials such as papier-mâché, fallen leaves, textiles gleaned from flea markets, and photographic reproductions. Watts alternates between working on the wall and the floor. Since the late 1990s, he has utilized drop cloths stained with acrylic as substrates for new paintings.


    The exhibition runs until March 16.


    More from Ouattara Watts

  • Winogrand Color

    Winogrand Color

    Winogrand Color is the first monograph of renowned American photographer Garry Winogrand’s early work exclusively in color. Born and raised in the Bronx, Garry Winogrand (1928-84) was a highly influential American photographer who came into prominence for his trailblazing contributions to street photography. The book includes 150 photographs selected from the archives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.


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  • Hanna Hur

    Hanna Hur

    Hanna Hur’s solo exhibition Two Angels was recently shown at Kristina Kite Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition marks the gallery’s last exhibition at its Washington Boulevard location. 


    Hanna Hur (b. 1985, Toronto) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include: Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper, Aspen Art Museum; Drawing Down the Moon, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Inconstant World, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021). Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Grunwald Center Collection at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.


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  • Tender

    Tender

    Tender is the first monograph by artist Carla Williams published by TBW Books. Made in private between 1984 and 1999 and kept mostly to herself for more than thirty years, the images in Tender comprise a complete, personal self-portrait of a young, queer, Black woman intimately exploring the realm of her own possibility. When Williams was eighteen and studying photography at Princeton, she began making the black and white and color portraits in Tender to create pictures in her own image. Made with instant Polaroid 35mm and 4×5 type 55 film formats, Williams profited from the near instant result to continuously play with her own expression and form. The book includes essays by the artist and scholar Dr. Mireille Miller-Young.


    More from Tender

  • Noon Has No Shadows

    Noon Has No Shadows

    Noon Has No Shadows is a multi-site exhibition of Rosemary Mayer’s work presented for the first time in Los Angeles.


    A more traditional focused presentation is presented at Marc Selwyn, where two related bodies of Mayer’s work from the late 1970s and early 1980s will be displayed side by side, and an expansive, non-linear presentation at Hannah Hoffman that contains work crafted as early as 1971 through 1993, and including a new work created by the Estate of Rosemary Mayer.


    The presentation at Marc Selwyn focuses on a series of unrealized proposals for elaborate tents on the roofs of city buildings and sculptures based on classical Greek vessels. The combination suggests ideas of containment and safety alongside a yearning for celebration. Mayer’s drawings and watercolors at both sites are in dialogue with her three-dimensional configurations but exist as compelling works in their own right. A set of drawings from 1971 depict “impossible” fabric constructions, fantasies of sculpture unfettered by space, size, material, or money. They exude an unrealized melancholy, embracing the nuance that undergirds the traditionally beautiful. Many of the works on paper also employ text, which pervades much of her work. The title of the show, “Noon Has No Shadows,” comes from a series that pairs evocative phrases with images of beautiful flowers.


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  • Samia Halaby

    Samia Halaby

    Samia Halaby (b.1936, Jerusalem) is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Halaby is recognised as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world.


     


    Halaby began her career in the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from Indiana University with a MFA in Painting. During her studies of geometric abstractions in Islamic architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, Halaby launched a series of experiments. These experiments would initiate a career-long investigation of the materialist principles of abstraction: how reality can be represented through form.


     


    Also influenced by the abstract movements of the Russian avant-garde, Halaby works with the conviction that new approaches to painting can redirect ways of seeing and thinking not only within the realm of aesthetics but also as contributions to technological and social advancement. This underlying notion has led to additional experiments in drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art, and free-from-the- stretcher painting. From the 1960s until the late 1980s, Halaby taught at universities throughout the United States. She was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art


     


    Halaby has been collected by international institutions since the 1970s, including the Solomon  R.  Guggenheim  Museum  of  Art  (New  York  and  Abu  Dhabi);  Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and the British Museum. Selected solo shows for the artist include Ayyam Gallery (2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015); Birzeit University Museum, Ramallah (2017); Beirut Exhibition Center, Lebanon (2015).


     


    She has participated in recent group shows at Grey Art Gallery, New York City, USA (2020); Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Palestine (2019); Ayyam Gallery (2017, 2018); Katzen  Art  Center,  American  University  Museum,  Washington,  USA  (2017); Palestine Museum, Birzeit, Palestine (2017); Galerie Tanit, Munich, Germany (2017); The School of Visual Arts, New York, USA (2017);  Zürcher  Gallery,  New  York,  USA  (2016);  3rd  Qalandiya  International Biennial (2016); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2015); the National Academy of Arts, New York (2015); The Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi (2014); Broadway 1602, New York (2014); and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2009).


    More from Samia Halaby

  • Rosalind Nashashibi

    Rosalind Nashashibi

    Rosalind Nashashibi’s Electrical Gaza includes  footage of Gaza the artist shot with her film crew, drivers, and translator, along with animated scenes. Gaza is shown in the quiet moments before the Israeli bombardment in the summer of 2014.


    Nashashibi’s mediation eschews images of extreme violence and suffering global audiences have come to associate with Gaza, as well as sentimentalized imagery. Instead, the artist films daily life. Scenes of boys and horses cooling down in the Mediterranean, of vibrant streets filmed from the back of a moving car, and of a young man spreading falafel over bread are interspersed with animations of the alleys, the border crossing, and the coast. The film indicates both the richness of Gazan life and its hostile enclosure.


    In her reflections on the history and the making of the film, Nashashibi compares the state of existence in Gaza to enchantment, as in, “under a spell; because it exists, it existed, isolated by the world and on a different plane of reality to everything that surrounded it.” Enchantment, as the film suggests, accounts for the particular marking of time, experience, and memory in Gaza. These cultivations also emerge as the enchanted object of settler-colonial violence. The film, however, does not end with the image of an animated and ever-expanding black hole, but cuts to an image of children swimming in the sea. The abrupt shift upsets the death-driven narrative of erasure so many viewers will have come to expect. Throughout the viewing experience, we struggle as we confront those deep-seated narratives and reconsider our roles as watchers and witnesses. You can view the film here (password: 31£C74!CV16V%V-40$1£).


    Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973 in Croydon, UK) received her BA in Painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK) in 1995, after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK) where she received her MFA in 2000. As part of her Master’s degree, Nashashibi participated in a three-month exchange program in Valencia, California (US) at CalArts in 2000. Nashashibi became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in London (UK), after the program was re-established in 2020. She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017, and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her work has been included in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah 10. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. 


    Nashashibi has had solo exhibitions at venues including, Nottingham Contemporary (UK); Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes (FR); Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilnius (LT); S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE); The High Line, New York, NY (US); Tate Britain, London (UK); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (UK); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (US); Imperial War Museum, London (UK); and ICA, London (UK). Nashashibi has participated in group exhibitions at, Centre Georges Pompidou and Forum des Images, Paris (FR); Tate, London (UK); Sculpture Center, New York, NY (US); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (MX); Whitechapel, London (UK); Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (DE); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (US), among others. 


    More from Rosalind Nashashibi

  • RaMell Ross

    RaMell Ross

    The first book by artist, filmmaker, and writer RaMell Ross, Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (published by MACK) brings together Ross’s large-format photographs, sculptures, conceptual works, and selected films. The book presents a historical and imaginative narrative of the American South and includes texts by RaMell Ross, Tracy K. Smith, Richard McCabe, and Scott Matthews.


    RaMell Ross (b. 1982) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. His work has appeared in places like Aperture, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, MoMA, Georgia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Walker Art Center. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. RaMell holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University and is an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department.


    More from RaMell Ross

  • Francesc Tosquelles

    Francesc Tosquelles

    Francesc Tosquelles (Reus, 1912 – Granges-sur-Lot, 1994) is known as one of the major founders of the practice of institutional psychotherapy. His practice was deeply contextualized with the humanitarian emergency during the Spanish Civil War and World War II


    Disciple of Emili Mira and attentive to the theories of Hermann Simon, Strauss and Jacques Lacan, Tosquelles articulated psychoanalysis and Marxism to establish the foundations of institutional psychotherapy. This was most realized during his work at the hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole between 1940 and 1962, after staying at the internment camp of Septfonds. Images from the Tosquelles family archive of daily life at Saint Alban and other archival ephemera are featured in the art portfolio of the “Air” issue of the Quarterly Journal with an introduction by scholar Joana Masó.


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  • Yalda Afsah

    Yalda Afsah

    Berlin-based artist Yalda Afsah’s new and recent work is currently showing at JOAN. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles presents two films from an ongoing series documenting different ritualized encounters between humans and animals. 


    Curro (2023), Afsah’s most recent film, documents a centuries-old Galician tradition known as Rapas das Bestas, in which wild horses are corralled into an arena to be tamed. The second film, SSRC (2022) focuses on the Los Angeles-based Secret Society Roller Club, a group of amateur roller pigeon enthusiasts, as they gather to watch the aerial choreography of the birds they have trained and cared for, sometimes for generations.


    German Iranian artist and filmmaker, Yalda Afsah (b. 1983, Berlin, lives in Berlin) has had recent solo exhibitions at Between Bridges Foundation, Berlin, Kunstverein München, and HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, and has presented her work at numerous other exhibitions and festivals including Manifesta 13; Locarno Film Festival; New York Film Festival; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; Institute of Contemporary Arts London; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. She attended CalArts in 2011/2012 for an exchange as part of the MFA Film/Video program. In 2018, she received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff scholarship and from 2019–2021 she was a fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts’ Graduate School. She is currently a mentor for the Berlin program for artists (BPA).


    This project is organized by Hannah Spears, Associate Curator.


    More from Yalda Afsah

  • Mind’s Eye

    Mind’s Eye

    Mind’s Eye is an exhibition of new work by Deana Lawson on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.


    In a collection of artist notes on select works in the exhibition, the artist writes of knowledge production, chance occurrences, dreams, and the cosmic and otherworldly. From memories impressed upon landscapes and immediate environments to polished obsidian as the earliest mirrors, Lawson writes of materiality and the metaphysical, perception and bearing witness both in photography qua experience and experience grounded beyond Western epistemologies.


    In 2022, Deana Lawson was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and she is the first artist working in photography to be awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2020); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2019); The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2018); and more. Lawson lives and works in Los Angeles.


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  • Rose Wylie

    Rose Wylie

    CLOSE, not too close is an exhibition of new work by British artist Rose Wylie at David Zwirner in Los Angeles. Marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the show features a group of large-scale paintings as well as related drawings, the presentation includes works that variously feature Wylie’s home and garden, media she’s consumed, and other elements drawn from her daily life and surroundings.


    Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. The artist has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than—and along with—traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation. Working in both single- and multi-panel formats, she regularly juxtaposes apparently disparate imagery, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into a unified composition.


    Rose Wylie (b. 1934) studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Kent, England, and the Royal College of Art, London, from which she graduated in 1981. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place in 1985 at the Trinity Arts Centre, in Kent. In recent years, she has had solo presentations at venues including the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2012); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, England (2012); Tate Britain, London (2013); Haugar kunstmuseum, Tønsberg, Norway (2013); Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany (2014); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015); Space K, Seoul (2016); Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales (2016); Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2016); Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017); Plymouth Arts Centre and The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, England (an exhibition that traveled to Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Cornwall, England); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2018); and The Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida (2020).


    More from Rose Wylie

  • Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar

    Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar

    Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar presents the work of Spanish mid-20th-century artist, filmmaker, and inventor José Val del Omar (1904–1982) at the Museum of Moving Image in New York. The show is the first major U.S. exhibition devoted to the artist’s multisensory work and runs until October 1, 2023.


    Disrupting the conventional relationship between the viewer and the screen, the works in this exhibition foreground historical and contemporary experimental technologies, creating aesthetically rich environments that engage the body and mind. Cinema of Sensations is organized by guest curator Almudena Escobar López with curatorial advisor and Director of the Val del Omar Archive Piluca Baquero, and Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, President of the Val del Omar Archive as consultant.


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  • Noguchi Subscapes

    Noguchi Subscapes

    Noguchi Subscapes is a survey of Isamu Noguchi’s particular interest in the unseen and hidden: invisible forces, subterranean structures and their makers, spatial metaphors for the unknown, and the inner recesses of the self. This series of installations of around forty sculptures and designs, mostly drawn from the Museum’s collection and incorporating photographs from the artist’s archive, occupies nearly the entire second floor.




    One section of the exhibition is dedicated to archival images and objects from Noguchi’s set design for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky’s Orpheus. The set design, like the exhibition, offers Noguchi’s exploration of unseen surfaces, but more focused on life and death and the artists’ conceptualization of the Greek hero Orpheus’s artistic vision as a form of blindness. In his notes on Orpheus, Noguchi writes of a silk curtain presenting a passage of life whereas death is seen when the artist’s mask (of blindness) is taken off.


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