Hello there, Art Insiders:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda, with a dispatch on Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. 

But, before I get to that, I wanted to direct your attention to Ira Sachs’ new movie, Peter Hujar’s Day. This short, sweet film recreates a 1974 interview that the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (recently the subject of a T Magazine profile) conducted with Peter Hujar, known for his portraits of NYC’s cultural demimonde. The purpose of the conversation was for Hujar to recount a day in his life — something that may sound tedious, but which the filmmaker makes absorbing.

The meandering convo is a striking core sample of what made Hujar tick as a person and as an artist. (He is clearly captivated by the technical aspects of dark room work.) It also captures the milieu in which he circulated: photographing a recalcitrant Allen Ginsberg, chatting on the phone with Susan Sontag, and trying to avoid a phone call with the artist Ed Baynard. “He is totally insane,” Hujar declares.

In between, Rosenkrantz shows him friendly affection — concerned about his continuous smoking and lousy diet. To watch actor Ben Whishaw conjuring Hujar as he ruminates on the vagaries of his life feels profound. Hujar died at the age of 53, one of the many artistic lives claimed by the AIDS pandemic. He is gone, but his legacy lives on in this film.

Peter Hujar’s Day is on view at Laemmle theaters — in Santa Monica through November 20th and Glendale starting on November 14th. 

Now, onto Vásquez de la Horra, and the many things I am currently eyeballing, like:

• The drama around the U.S. pavilion for the Venice Biennale
• The underground music scene in Pinochet’s Chile
• And the intersection of romance and bad art 

Keep that cursor moving….

At top, Ben Whishaw as Peter Hujar in a scene from Peter Hujar's Day, directed by Ira Sachs. (Janus Films)

MOTHER EARTH

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Yemanjá, 2025. (Jeff McLane /I CA LA)

One of my favorite paintings on the entire American continent is a strange canvas that resides at the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia. It’s a religious scene from the early 18th century titled La Virgen del Cerro that shows various figures from Catholic iconography surrounding a mountain that bears the head and hands of the Virgin Mary. It’s the ultimate syncretic piece, bringing together Catholic lore with Andean Indigenous traditions of venerating mountains — a Catholicized depiction of la Pachamama, the deity known in English as Mother Earth. 

Pachamama’s power is pervasive in an engaging exhibition by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra now on view at the ICA LA in downtown. In meticulous drawings that range in scale from postcard-sized pieces to larger-than-life works, bodies merge with and emerge from landscapes. Women become mountains and bear circulatory systems made of delicate vines. It feels magical — more so because Vásquez de la Horra fully harnesses the power of drawing. The materials are simple — paper, graphite, and perhaps a little bit of paint. But the stories she conveys are rich and complex. I found myself returning more than once to her accordion-folded drawings of reclining women, which resemble the jagged profile of the Andes mountains. Think of them as a Virgen del Cerro for our age.

The Awake Volcanoes, as the exhibition is titled, was organized by curator Raphael Fonseca of the Denver Art Museum (where it originated last year) — marking Vásquez de la Horra’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Born in Chile in 1967 and based in Berlin since 1995, Vásquez de la Horra began to draw broader international attention in 2022, when she was included in the 59th Venice Biennale. There, she displayed a series of her drawings in a chapel-like structure — an installation, writes Fonseca in the catalog for The Awake Volcanoes, that “created a moment of stillness in the middle of the agitated Arsenale.”

El despertar de un volcán (The Awakening of a Volcano), 2019. (Jeff McLane /I CA LA)

The show at the ICA LA gathers dozens of drawings, prints, and paintings produced by the artist over four decades. This includes small, loose paintings of Chilean landscapes created in the early 1990s, along with works that followed in the latter part of the decade — like a series of surreal anatomical studies that seem to conflate and merge body and plant parts. A small, salon-style hang of these drawings at the ICA includes strange organic forms full of pistils, buds, and seeds. From some, emerge silhouettes of what appear to be human heads. In her world, humans are a part of nature, not apart from it.

Later drawings expand on these and other themes, adding words and phrases, including odd expressions and old sayings. Vásquez de la Horra grew up in Chile during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. In the world of literature, the novels and stories produced by authors who were children during the dictatorship are known as “la literatura de los hijos” — the literature of the children — works that express what a previous generation could not out of a fear of persecution. You could say that Vásquez de la Horra is working in the artistic equivalent of this tradition.

Another larger salon-style hang features dozens of drawings that riff on death and violence and the ways in which bodies (human and otherwise) are suppressed, but also find a way of resisting. Next to a cartoonish drawing of Pinochet, a man holds a flag next to the activist slogan, “El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido” — the people united, will never be defeated. In another, a woman lies next to a skeleton representing death. “Siempre acompañada” reads the adjacent text — always accompanied.

 
A salon-style hang of Vásquez de la Horra's drawings wrestle with violence and the body, among other topics. (Jeff McLane /I CA LA)

This is a quiet show — even when the scale of the artist’s works reaches larger-than-life proportions. But it sticks with you. I found myself chewing over some of its images for days afterwards. In these beguiling drawings, Vásquez de la Horra finds ways to link human bodies, ecological bodies, and the body politic in thoughtful and elegant ways. 

AROUND THE INTERNET 

• Since we’re on the subject of Chile: I write about how artist Iván Navarro is resuscitating the sound of underground bands that made music during the Pinochet era.
• I also recently wrote about Lauren Halsey for Family Style — and the sculpture park she is creating for South LA.
• Artist Robert Lazzarini was supposed to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, but the deal fell apart due to bureaucratic wrangling.
• Artnews and other art media are reporting that it might be sculptor Alma Allen who will represent the U.S. instead.
• Frances Anderton and Christopher Hawthorne dig into the architect designing Trump’s ballroom.
• San Francisco will tear down its ugly-lovable Vaillancourt Fountain.
• An LA art project asks “Am I Next?” amid immigration raids.
• LACMA has declined to voluntarily recognize its new labor union.
• In the ‘90s, LA artist Stephen Prina taught a class about Keanu Reeves. He recently went to see the actor perform Waiting for Godot on Broadway.
• Adam Shatz on the music of Alice Coltrane.
• Signing off with a song about what it means to hook up with a terrible artist.

Thank you as always for reading! 🤓🙏

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