Car Culture: Then, Now and Future
Opening in 2021, Jonathan Michael Castillo: Car Culture, is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work and features his arresting, candid photographs that capture Los Angeles’s driving culture.
Exhibitions
Jonathan Michael Castillo: Car Culture
Opening in 2021, Jonathan Michael Castillo: Car Culture, is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work and features his arresting, candid photographs that capture Los Angeles’s driving culture.
Life Interrupted
Life Interrupted is the result of an art competition initiated by the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks (CMATO) to capture the perspective of Generation Z artists. Generation Z is defined by people born after 1997, and who will turn ages 8 to 23 in 2020.
Empathy: Beneath the Surface
October 18, 2019 to March 29, 2020
Empathy: Beneath the Surface presents a multi-disciplinary perspective on the idea of empathy and personal agency, with works that explore the universal themes that confront, and ultimately bind, us.
Through six distinct gallery spaces covering 5,000 sq feet, visitors will view paintings, sculpture, virtual reality, mix-media installation, photography and tapestries all bound together by the idea of empathy and personal agency.
Featuring: Hung Liu, John Nava, Simphiwe Ndzube, Ami Vitale, Marisa Caichiolo, Marjorie Salvaterra and Tom Everhart.
RISK
May 9, 2019 to September 4, 2019
Writing under the pseudonym RISK, Graval rose to prominence as the originator of a bright, colorful, west coast graffiti style. Graval’s mixed-media work follows in the rich tradition of Pop Art. Iconography from Buddhism, rock and roll, advertising, and cartoons figure prominently in his work. Working in neon translates his bright palette into light while painting on metal calls back to the many nights spent in the rail yards of Los Angeles County. Graval’s work plays with visual and material juxtapositions to both draw in and push back on the viewer. Metal, lights, paint, grit, and shine are the materials of Graval’s practice and the materials of the city that raised him.
Sign of the Times
Over his 30-plus year career, Graval has moved from the impulse to make himself known to an artistic practice that seeks to make American culture known to itself. In one of my first meetings with him, he recounted a story from his childhood wherein his uncle climbed a railroad bridge that yawned over the main road into town and painted the town’s name on the side in big block letters. A forgotten fishing village in the bayous near New Orleans, this act of place-making served to unite an impoverished community even if the act was illicit. It made an impression on Graval.
Graffiti Glossary: The More You Know
hit: To tag or bomb a surface
bomb:To apply graffiti intensively to a location. Bombers often choose to paint throw-ups or tags instead of complex pieces, as they can be executed more quickly.
Subway Art: a collaborative book by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, which documents the early history of New York City’s graffiti movement. Originally published in 1984, it is known by many as ‘the bible’ of graffiti. Subway Art quickly acquired the dubious accolade of becoming one of the most stolen books in the United Kingdom.
Style Wars: an American 1983 documentary film on hip hop culture and its American roots, directed by Tony Silver and produced in collaboration with Henry Chalfant. The film has an emphasis on graffiti, although bboying and rapping are covered to a lesser extent.
To Bomb and Beautify: How RISK Got Up
Beautifully Destroyed, the name given by Kelly “RISK” Graval to his color field painting series, is an apt way to describe the paradoxical relationship between graffiti and walls. The element of destruction is embedded in the vocabulary—to hit, to bomb—as well as the ethos of graffiti, which stands in contrast to the undeniable beauty of the results—brilliant, saturated colors adorning previously blank walls with the soft diffusion and sharp lines of spray paint.
No Moonrise: The Birth Date of Moonrise
The lore of the great Himself, Ansel Adams, is often at the heart of many fond, usually exaggerated, personal recollections of the jolly old elf. One of the great kafuffles spins around the precise “birthday” of Ansel Adam’s seminal work, “Moonrise, Hernandez”, arguably the one of the most significant photographs in photographic history.
The Lay of the Land
The subject of Ansel Adams’ best known photography is, of course, the drama of America’s western landscape. Yet in his old age, Adams himself became an even bigger subject. He turned into a mythic figure whose fame almost eclipsed the work on which it was based.
