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title: Monica Majoli's show of drawings is hidden inside an archive
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 Monica Majoli’s drawings are on view at the Mazer Lesbian Archives. Plus, the Cultural Olympiad and ghosts!  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| Not rendering correctly? View this email as a web page here. Hey, LA: I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I’m ruminating on Pablo Larraín’s Mis muertos tristes (My Sad Dead) on Netflix, a four-part series inspired by a tale by Mariana Enríquez. It’s an unconventional ghost story that serves as a reminder that perhaps it's the living we should fear most. Fresh Air’s John Powers has a terrific review. This week, contributor Catherine Wagley pays a visit to a show that is not only inspired by an archive, it’s tucked inside of it. But, first, four upcoming happenings: The Eternal Quality of Aesthetic Joy, at Craft in America. Laura Andreson founded the ceramics program at UCLA and went on to influence generations of students. Now an exhibition brings together more than 50 of her pivotal pieces. Through January 9th; craftinamerica.org. Public Spirits. A free, day-long performance art festival organized by the Performance Art Museum will take place in four sites around Chinatown. October 23rd, 9:20 AM to 10 PM, pamuseum.org. Christina Catherine Martinez, MODERN TIMES, at 2220 Arts + Archives. Martinez is a critic and a comedian, and her witty act marries high-minded philosophy with discoveries made at Ross Dress for Less. October 23rd, admission $20, 8 PM; 2220arts.org, get tickets on dice.fm. Grand Ave Arts: All Access. A day of free workshops, tours, and performances at cultural institutions on Grand Avenue. October 24th, 11 AM to 4 PM; grandavearts.org. Now, onto the main event… At top: Pedestal Vase (1979), by Laura Andreson, from the artist's exhibition at the Craft in America Center. (M. Lee Fatherree / Collection of Forrest L. Merrill) SISTERS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES By Catherine Wagley An Ovulars contact sheet from the Tee Corrine archive at the University of Oregon, as photographed by Monica Majoli. The first thing you see when you climb the stairs to Monica Majoli’s Countervision, an intimate exhibition at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, is a floor-to-ceiling wall vinyl of the Ovulars, workshops that met each summer to explore what a truly feminist, non-objectifying photography looked like (for instance, if the subjects were nude, so was the photographer). This particular image, from 1980, shows 20 women posing on the wooden deck of a shack on the rural Oregon land trust where they gathered. They squint, smiling, into the sun, and nearly half of them have cameras in their hands or around their necks. Inside the two rooms that comprise the Mazer archives, more photographs, pamphlets, and publications coexist with the lush, vulnerable drawings Majoli made for the show, each based on a tender, spirited Ovulars photoshoot. Five of them hang on the ends of the archive’s gray, industrial metal shelving, so sensual colored pencil renderings of nude bodies hugging, huddling, or sliding into and over each other interrupt the lines of storage containers. The rest of Majoli’s drawings are in a five-drawer flat file, and visitors can pull them out and look at them like they would any other materials housed in the archives. It’s an unusually hands-on way to experience an exhibition, and yet it feels intuitively right — all the more so because this show, inspired by communal workshops, not only takes place in the grassroots archive; it also pays homage to the bookstore where Majoli first paged through the publications that introduced her to the Ovulars. A group portrait of the Ovulars greets visitors to the installation. (Evan Bedford / LAND) Majoli grew up in LA and still works here. (Her first exhibition was at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 1990.) As a teenager, she would sometimes stay at Sisterhood Bookstore in Westwood all day, reading and watching the other customers, as she explains, “searching for my tribe.” So when she began talking with Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) about an exhibition informed by her research into the Ovulars, she and Christopher Mangum-James, the show’s curator and LAND’s deputy director, both thought the bookstore’s former location might make an ideal site. Sisterhood was founded by sisters-in-law Simone Wallace and Adele Wallace with Gahan Kelley in 1972. Second-wave feminism had just hit, though early press sanitized the shop’s politics: “All three Ms’s…are also Mrs,” not of the “man-hating breed,” declared the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; it has “no formal ties to the women’s movement,” explained the LA Times. But, as Kelley wrote in a 1972 letter that appears in Majoli’s exhibition, “We are three movement women.” Now Sisterhood’s home is a boxing store called Fight 2 Finish, and when Majoli and Mangum-James approached its management about holding an exhibition there, they were met with confusion. It was Mangum-James who learned that Sisterhood’s records were held at the Mazer archives at the Werle Building in West Hollywood. The archives, originally known as the West Coast Lesbian Collections, were started in Oakland in 1981 by two activists. They moved to Altadena in 1985, when film editor Nancy “Bunny” MacCulloch and her partner, therapist and activist June L. Mazer agreed to store the material in their home. Mazer died of cancer in 1987, and the archives were renamed and eventually rehomed at the Werle. When Mangum-James and Majoli approached them, they happened to have an online exhibition about Sisterhood in the works. Majoli's drawings are displayed in a flat file at the archive (Evan Bedford / LAND) In a vitrine, Majoli laid out selections from Sisterhood’s papers, including black-and-white headshots of visiting authors: Gloria Steinem, Judy Grahn, Ntozake Shange. There’s also an invitation to a “Dump Reagan” book sale, and a police report from July 1984, when the store received a bomb threat from someone claiming to belong to the right-wing John Birch Society. A monitor on the wall plays footage from Sisterhood’s 25th anniversary fundraiser in 1997, where Steinem described the shop as a post-patriarchal space for trying out “different values.” Two years later, it closed. Loss is a theme in Majoli’s work. Recently, she made a series of watercolor woodcuts based on 1970s and early 1980s centerfolds from the gay men’s magazine Blueboy — made right before the AIDS crisis took hold. Though she did preparatory drawings for that and all her series, she rarely exhibits drawings on their own. But Countervision is all drawings, none of them framed. The hair of four women depicted kneeling, huddled together looked so soft I wanted to touch it, and, though I refrained, nothing physically prevented me from doing so. There’s something hopeful about showing unprotected work in a space like the Mazer, allowing visitors to treat the art like the periodicals, letters and fliers, objects there to be handled with care, so that the past remains tangibly present. 🗄️🗄️🗄️ Monica Majoli: Countervision is on view at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives by appointment through November 21st, 2026; nomadicdivision.org. MORE LIKE THIS… Across town at USC, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the artist Regina Truax is exhibiting a series of strange sandpaper rubbings, part of a project about the visceral and bodily dimensions of archival material. They’ll also perform for 46 hours straight, channeling and responding to the work of artists held at ONE (Laura Aguilar, Annie Sprinkle), starting at 1 PM on October 23rd and ending with brunch on October 25th. Catherine G. Wagley is an art writer based in LA. Her work has appeared in Momus, CARLA, and The New York Times. Sponsor Alexander Apóstol, Regime: Dramatis Personae at MOCA Grand Avenue Regime: Dramatis Personae (2017) by Alexander Apóstol is a series of large black-and-white portraits depicting archetypal figures appearing on the stage of both populist and authoritarian governments. The portraits are not representations of specific individuals, but rather of the roles produced and performed under autocratic regimes. On view at MOCA Grand Avenue through January 3, 2027. Learn More AROUND THE INTERNET With less than two years remaining for the 2028 Olympics in LA, the Cultural Olympiad remains a question mark. Alissa Walker at Torched gets into the nitty-gritty of what is happening culturally around the Olympics. Lita Albuquerque, whose art engages the cosmic, is profiled by the LA Times on the occasion of her two new SoCal exhibitions. Ben Davis has an insightful review of Arthur Jafa’s retrospective at New York’s New Museum. The Huntington has announced five recent acquisitions, including a remarkable still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder. LA Metro has recently refurbished Thomas Eatherton’s underground light piece, Unity. Rainey Knudson on Ed Ruscha’s depictions of the Hollywood sign. In San Francisco, a show by Dread Scott includes a US flag protected by armed guard. Megan O’Grady reviews a new biography of critic John Berger. Christopher Hawthorne has an overview of the Eames Institute’s (not to be confused with the Eames Foundation) connection to a right-wing donor trafficking in conspiracy theories in one and two parts. Signing off with the types of films that play in art museums. See you next week! Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe to Art Insider for more design, art, and culture from Carolina Miranda. SUBSCRIBE KCRW 1900 Pico Blvd.  Santa Monica, CA 90405  You received this email because you are subscribed to Art Insider from KCRW. Update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive. Unsubscribe from all future emails. |
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