Happy New Year, LA!

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda in your 2026 inbox with a dispatch about a couple of intriguing projects that explore sex and desire in the days before the internet.

But first I want to tip you off to a gorgeous show at Lisson Gallery in Hollywood that is now in its final days. If, like me, you are feeling assaulted by the news since the start of the year (that small matter of a Venezuelan invasion), the presentation of fiber artist Olga de Amaral’s work at Lisson offers wondrous escape — an elegant meditation on form, material, and diaphanous color.

Now 93 years of age, the Colombian-born artist has long pushed the boundaries of weaving — employing unorthodox materials like Japanese paper, which she presents in unusual ways, often suspended from the ceiling-like sculpture. The show at Lisson — de Amaral's first solo in LA in almost a decade — brings together a small clutch of works from various eras dating back to the ‘70s. In these, you’ll find images of timeless mountainscapes and elements of the cosmic — forces that transcend our politically toxic present. Don’t miss the details; part of the magic is seeing how these remarkable pieces are quite literally woven together.

Olga de Amaral is on view at Lisson Gallery through January 17th; lissongallery.com. 

Need more? Critic Silvia Benedetti had a good review of de Amaral’s recent retrospective, which originated at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2024.

Now, on to the main event, with detours into…

• The hijinks at the Kennedy Center
• The storied career of Carmen de Lavallade
• Beast Jesus
  

At top is Olga de Amaral's Lienzo Ceremonial III, 1987, on view in the artist's solo show at Lisson Gallery. (Olga de Amaral / Lisson Gallery

HOT STUFF

Jean Lowe, Newsstand (Cracker Barrel), 2025, in SeXObjects at Craig Krull. (Shaun McCracken)

When I was a nerdy tweener in the early ‘80s, a pal used to invite me to her house when her older brother was out so that we could play video games on his PC. When we grew bored of gaming, we would turn our attention to the contents of his desk, which always contained an impressive stack of girlie magazines featuring nude women in gynecological poses. These, we would scrutinize with the intensity of medieval scholars, trying to understand what might be expected of us once we came of age. Whatever it was, I was sure it would involve body glitter and the flexibility of a contortionist.

Two artistic projects — a witty group show at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica and a stunning new book by the LA photographer Reynaldo Rivera — take us back to a time in which questions about sexuality couldn’t be quietly searched on the internet. Instead, answers were pieced together through loose copies of Penthouse and furtive encounters in backseats. It was messy and awkward; it could also be thrilling and wild. 

SeXObjects, a group show curated by Hannah Sloan at Craig Krull (one of three worthwhile exhibitions currently on view at the gallery), offers a view of sex through the lens of Gen X, the generation that came into adulthood before the internet began to mediate all the ways people encountered each other. The show is a small one — featuring only six artists — but it’s cleverly presented.  The gallery’s walls have been painted pink and a beaded curtain installed at the entrance, an aesthetic throwback to the video and magazine shops of old, where you would find the naughty goods in a discreetly curtained room in the back.

Alia Malley, Laid, 2025. (Carolina A. Miranda)

Slip through the beads and you’ll be greeted by a large installation created by SoCal sculptor Jean Lowe, whose papier-mâché works often examine the more banal aspects of consumerism. (In a solo exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum in 2022, she transformed the museum’s basement into a basement bargain store.) In SeXObjects, she presents a magazine rack bearing hand-painted papier-mâché replicas of adult magazines like Playboy, Hustler, and Derriere. Her bright colors and impressionistic brushtrokes make the magazines feel especially lurid. The collected images (inspired by actual covers) also reveal the frequent use of the U.S. flag as a motif in porn. God bless America, indeed.

In another wall piece, Costa Rican artist Valiente Pastel playfully reimagines erotic playing cards by painting over the figures in abject, cartoonish ways — exaggerating the already exaggerated poses. Nearby, a small shelf presents a scent titled Laid, created by New Mexico-based multimedia artist Alia Malley. This singular perfume is presented in an old CK One bottle and, according to the artist, features notes of “boozy dive bars / Wonderbras beneath baby tees / second-hand leather jackets / cigarettes after sex and mornings of regret / videotape / the ozonic state of charged air at the threshold of the digital.” Viewers are invited to take a scent strip and dip it in the bottle. (Heads up — it’s strong.) Several days out, I’d say that it smells like a chemical reaction between drug store body spray and backseat pleather in an old muscle car.

SeXobjects might seem like a nostalgic lark. But the show gets at the ways in which technology has remade how humans approach sex. Shifting attitudes towards homosexuality, rising rents, and hook-up apps have taken a bite out of the queer nightlife scene. The advent of video and the internet has essentially wiped out porn theaters. Earlier this year, The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote about the “sex recession” among Gen Z, and how younger people are having less sex even though the internet has made it easier to find than ever. “Presented with a Vegas buffet of carnality,” she writes, “young people are losing their appetite.” 

Reynaldo Rivera's Propiedad Privada will hit bookstores in February. (Semiotext(e))) 

The internet provides access, but what has it taken in the process? To get a sense of that, it’s instructive to pick up Reynaldo Rivera’s stunning new monograph, Propiedad Privada, which will be released by Semiotext(e) early next month. The photographer's work has previously appeared in the Hammer Museum’s 2020 biennial, and last year, he was the subject of a solo show at MoMA PS1 in New York. For decades, Rivera has chronicled Latino Los Angeles — from its old drag bars to underground happenings. Propiedad Privada records more intimate territory.

A range of photographs, from the 1980s to the present, captures the artist’s friends and lovers striking erotic poses and looking flush from lovemaking. It is a paean to desire, principally queer desire, and the improvised communities that can arise from its pursuit. In a pair of grainy photos from the 1990s, Rivera and a presumed lover in Guanajuato appear to look wistfully across a bed at each other. You can practically feel the ache. 

Giving the images context are contributions by writers like Chris Kraus, Colm Tóibín, Raquel Gutiérriez, and Brontez Purnell, all dwelling on the vagaries of longing. Included is a text by the photographer himself. “Hope is the drug,” writes Rivera. “Love is the high.”

The book is ultimately a poignant reminder that while the internet might be handy at delivering products, it is only in other people that we find human connection.

AROUND THE INTERNET 

• Carmen de Lavallade, the groundbreaking LA dancer and choreographer, has died at 94.
• Cecilia Giménez, the amateur Spanish artist who remade a church painting into the viral sensation known as Beast Jesus, is also dead at 94.
• Venezuelan artists react to the U.S. attack.
• A statue of a Confederate general at the U.S. Capitol has been replaced by a monument to a Black teenager who led a walkout at her segregated high school in 1951.
• A writer for South Park bought the Trump Kennedy Center domain names and made a satirical website.
• Speaking of the Kennedy Center, there have been more performer cancellations.
• President Trump auctioned off a $2.75 million painting of Jesus during his New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago.
• The Department of Homeland Security used a painting by Japanese artist Hiroshi Nagai (without permission) to promote deportations.
• Nancy Buchanan’s terrific recent show at the Brick is one of those I regret not writing about. Thankfully Catherine Wagley took up the task in CARLA! 
• A short film about the teeny, tiny micro galleries of Long Beach.
• Signing off with this instructional video on how to make Roman concrete, in the event you have to build an aqueduct.

Thank you for reading! 🤓🙏🏽

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