Hola, Los Angeles!

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and, as a distraction from all the politics, I’ve been marinating in KCRW’s Lost Notes: Groupies podcast, which tells the story of some of rock history’s most famous groupies. 

These women — with fabulous names like Lori Lightning and Miss Pamela — are treated as footnotes in the heavy tomes written about major (male) rock bands. So it’s great to hear the women speak for themselves. I was also intrigued by how they would create their own fashions and turn their presence on the Sunset Strip into a form of improvised performance.

In addition to that series, I’ve also been marinating in some fantastic exhibitions around town. Here’s what’s on my checklist:

• Three must-see gallery shows that channel everything from spiritual rite to labor history
• Pages from a medieval manuscript reunited
• Plus, catch me at CAP UCLA!

Keep scrolling... 

The featured image at the top of this week's newsletter is the painting "Ritual," 2025, by Hugo Crosthwaite, courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Three's Company

It seemed like every LA gallery opened a new show during the art fairs late last month — and I’m just catching up. This week I saw three exhibitions that wowed, delighted, and perplexed me.

In no particular order, here’s what’s on my must-list:
 

TAU LEWIS at DAVID ZWIRNER (East Hollywood)

A partial view of Tau Lewis's "Spirit Level." (Elon Schoenholz / David Zwirner)

Step into Zwirner’s space and you’ll find less of a gallery exhibition than a full-blown spiritual rite. Five larger-than-life figures (around 12 feet tall) are imaginatively crafted out of found bits of fabric and trim and stand over a circular quilt — presented on the floor — that invokes a portal to another world. 

Artist Tau Lewis was born in Canada, to an Irish French mother and a Jamaican father, and is now based in New York. Her work has long invoked Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions. And, for years, I’ve been running into her elaborate pieces in exhibitions. At Prospect.5 in New Orleans, her powerful wall quilts bore patterns that formed elements of the human body: a spine here, an eye there. In LA, her work has materialized at Night Gallery downtown, and in the group show No Humans Involved, held at the Hammer Museum in 2022.

The show at Zwirner is a restaging of Lewis’ solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston last year. And it captures her ability to make out of found materials something much greater than the sum of their parts.

Want to make the experience more immersive? The show comes with a Spotify playlist.

Tau Lewis, Spirit Level, is on view through March 29th at David Zwirner; davidzwirner.com. 

🎨🎨🎨

HUGO CROSTHWAITE at LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES (DTLA)

Hugo Crosthwaite, "La Línea (The Line)," 2024. (Hugo Crosthwaite / Luis De Jesus Los Angeles)

In some ways, the art of Tijuana-born painter Hugo Crosthwaite couldn’t be more germane to the realities of his border city. In his canvases, buildings rise improvisationally on sloping hillsides, and a street vendor chats on her cell phone next to her food stall. But in Crosthwaite’s hands, the mundane is always accompanied by the fantastic. 

In his large-scale painting “La Línea (The Line),” from 2024 — a phrase used to describe the queue to cross the border, as well as the border itself — you’ll find a row of people standing in line. Except one figure bears a mask-like jaguar head and a puppet’s body. Another has a hand that is aflame as she carries a Catholic icon known as the anima sola or anima bendita, which shows a chained figure engulfed by fire. Also present: Coatlicue, the Aztec deity of life and death, whose face is composed of two snakes. She couldn’t be a better symbol for the US-Mexico border region: a single body formed out of two beings.

Crosthwaite’s show takes inspiration from ex votos, religious paintings that give thanks for a miracle. But the artist offers a contemporary take on the form, incorporating Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and knife-wielding spirits. The show also marks an important artistic transition. For years, Crosthwaite has presented his work in black and white; in this series, however, he goes full bore color — and the effect is captivating.

Hugo Crosthwaite, Ex-voto is on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles through April 5th; luisdejesus.com.

🎨🎨🎨

SULA BERMUDEZ-SILVERMAN at HANNAH HOFFMAN (Westlake/MacArthur Park)

A detail of Sula Bermudez-Silverman's "blister iii," 2025. (Hannah Hoffman)

When I entered Sula Bermudez-Silverman’s solo show at Hannah Hoffman, I was a bit perplexed. Instead of a press release, I was presented with a small booklet in which the LA artist detailed her research process. It contained photographs of old industrial molds used to make toy horses, tidy notes about mules, as well as the nature of camouflage (biological and military), not to mention a fascinating section devoted to the ways in which the pineapple, which is native to the Americas, became a status symbol during the colonial era. 

The book connects loosely with what’s on display in the gallery, where Bermudez-Silverman has recreated a metal mold used to manufacture a toy barn — except she’s reimagined it out of painted fiberboard at a supersized scale of 10 feet. Elsewhere, she presents cast glass recreations of industrial molds (like the ones used to produce those toy horses), displaying them on pillow-topped plinths or embedded within bits of industrial equipment.

But truly mind-blowing are the hand-blown glass pieces that hang from the walls, which feature constrained orbs of pink or red glass nestled within farming equipment, like an iron donkey bridle or a pair of sheep shears. In many of these, the glass has been blown in a way that makes it appear as if it is being squeezed, and that, at any moment, it might shatter. 

The pieces can be confounding, but they are enthralling. In them, I found absorbing material and theoretical meditations on the nature of creation, as well as the role of labor within the agricultural empires that sustain us still.

Sula Bermudez-Silverman, mole, mold, molt, is on view at Hannah Hoffman through March 29th; hannahhoffman.la.

🎨🎨🎨

Around the Internet

Ryan Preciado's "Atentamente," 2024, is on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum. (Karma Gallery)

• For Hyperallergic, I wrote about an obscure Nicaguran carpenter who worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and is now the subject of a show by LA artist Ryan Preciado in Palm Springs.
• Ricardo Scofidio, whose firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Broad museum, among other cultural institutions, is dead at 89.
• Lin-Manuel Miranda has cancelled a production of Hamilton at the Kennedy Center following Trump’s takeover of the institution.
• Related: Trump has appointed right-wing anchors Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center board.
• A group of arts organizations is suing the National Endowment for the Arts following Trump’s executive orders on gender.
• Sandra Jackson-Dumont is stepping down from her role as CEO at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and George Lucas himself will handle “content direction.” This does not bode well.
• Convicted LA art dealer Doug Chrismas was supposed to go to prison last month but was instead seen at Frieze after his surrender was pushed back.
• The LA Phil has released the hotly anticipated schedule for Gustavo Dudamel’s last season.
• The Getty has reunited two halves of a medieval illumination.
• Critic Charles McNulty has a good tribute to anti-apartheid playwright Athol Fugard, who died last week. 
• Plus, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross had a terrific interview with Fugard in 1986, when South Africa was still governed by the apartheid system.
• Essayist Raquel Gutierrez has invited me to be part of a talk and performance at the Nimoy in Westwood on March 13th. There will be us — as well as dance, politics, and music! 
• Signing off with “If You Hadn’t Been There,” Dolly Parton’s tribute to her late husband Carl Dean, who died last week.

Thank you for reading! And see you next week!

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