May
1
to Jun 30
Dec
18
to Feb 28
IN COLOR
Mae Engron Joe Davidson
Iva Gueorguieva David Lloyd
Manuel Lopez Rosalyn Myles
In the time of covid, Quotidian and Klowden Mann present IN COLOR, an exhibition that invites viewers to embrace the art of slow looking through an immersive experience in color rich paintings, collage and sculptures.
Always in the act of weaving together community through expressive and necessary visual language, IN COLOR offers a deeply satisfying moment connecting us to Joe Davidson, Mae Engron, Iva Gueorguieva, David Lloyd and Manuel Lopez and Rosalyn Myles. These artists who we have shown and continue to work with have diverse approaches to making, yet each arrives in a generous place of texture, form, and most importantly for the dialog between works, intense color palettes.
Mae Engron (1942-2007) inspired this gathering of some of our favorite artists. Her work lives at 410 S Spring Street since Quotidian began working with her estate in 2016. Engron's paintings suggest tapestries, African American quilting traditions and the unburdening of emotion through color and gesture. Francine Kelly, Quotidian founder and early supporter of Engron recalled that color was the most important aspect of her work. With a desire to engage her "love language" in a moment when it seems we need it most, we tapped into artists' works that investigate, employ and ultimately embrace color.
David Lloyd sees color as a challenge and a gift, both provided by his native Los Angeles. We love Lloyd's work because he adamantly calls himself a painter supported by a never ending curiosity for materials that support that practice. These carved wood painting are rich color fields made more provocative by their form.
Form, structures and systems are at the heart of Rosalyn Myles' latest works. Literally cut from the headlines, these masterful collages are equal parts rage and art work, saturated in the hues of the moment. Myles is a prolific maker and storyteller, and with these texts pinned to the wall, she reveals her origins in textile, connecting her in multiple ways to back to our muse.
Joe Davidson pushes the boundaries of how seductively color influences form in his latest body of plaster works. These self-referential sculptures are moniz's favorite articulation of Davidson's practice. Their minimalism invites interpretation, fantasy and some wonder. While he doesn't see himself as a narrative artist, these abstract sculptures seem infused with emotion - the intangible result of chemistry and feeling that drives our passion to become literate in its language(s).
For Manuel Lopez, visual language is at its most powerful and clear when it is reflecting the vitality of space and place. Lopez's detailed renderings of his East LA neighborhood are well known, as we are so happy to include his intimate watercolor and oil paintings in IN COLOR. He deftly immerses the landscape in meaning, perspective and the intersections of hue and form that become the doorway to indigenous and canonical histories of the pictorial.
Finally, we are proud to exhibit the work of Iva Gueorguieva, an artist we both admire, but have never had the opportunity to show until now. Her work represents the convergence of our galleries' missions, specifically our dedication to talking with and encouraging local artists. Gueorguieva's abstractions are pregnant with color and emotion, and through the complexity of her layered palette speak with urgency to the dislocation of our collective good. While she unpacks this dystopian moment, she offers - like all IN COLOR artists - something of herself as explanation and balm. For us, and we hope for you, to be awash in these works provides the necessary visual nourishment we need to persist.
Mae Engron, Untitled, no date. Oil on Canvas, 53.75 x 57.5 in
Mae Engron, no date, no title (quit). Oil on canvas, 56.5 x 60.5 in
Iva Gueorguieva, First Light, 2020. Acrylic and collage on muslin (janus), 120 x 124 in
Iva Gueorguieva, Sparrow, 2019. Acrylic and collage on muslin, 127 x 79 in
Iva Gueorguieva, Swerve, 2019. Acrylic and collage on muslin, 120 x 81 in
Iva Gueorguieva, Dona in the Garden, 2019. Acrylic and collage on muslin, 127 x 80 in
Manuel Lopez, White Cross Pink Wall, 2018. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 48 x 48 in
Manuel Lopez, Monstera, 2020. Mixed media on paper. 18 x 14 in
Manuel Lopez, El Sereno View, 2019. Etching on rag paper, 7 x 5 in. Ed 1-3/50
Joe Davidson, Blue, 2019. Cast tinted hydrocal, 13 X 13 x 10 in (on 16 inch base)
Joe Davidson, Asking for the Sun, 2020. Cast tinted hydrocal, 34 x 9 x 6 in
Joe Davidson, A Skinny Lucian. 2020. Cast tinted hydrocal, 35 x 9 x 8 in
Joe Davidson, Untitled (Balloon Stack), 2020. Cast tinted hydrocal, 25 x 10 x 8 in
Rosalyn Myles, Performative, 2020. 3 inch tall collaged letters and fabric pins, Dims vary
Rosalyn Myles Of Course We’re Angry, 2020. 3 inch tall collaged letters and fabric pins, Dims vary
Rosalyn Myles, Colonizer, 2020. 3 inch tall collaged letters and fabric pins, Dims vary
David Lloyd, untitled, 2017. Acrylic and encaustic on wood. 48 x 36 in
David Lloyd, untitled, 2017. Acrylic and encaustic on wood, 48 x 36 in
David Lloyd, untitled, 2017. Acrylic and encaustic on wood, 48 x 24 in
David Lloyd, untitled, 2017. Acrylic and encaustic on wood, 69 x 79.5 in
David Lloyd, untitled, 2019. Acrylic on wood. 24 x 17 in
Sep
21
to Oct 25
Miguel Osuna: Lineage
Quotidian presents Miguel Osuna: Lineage highlighting artist Miguel Osuna’s investigation of the line.
Miguel Osuna has worked closely with the gallery for several years on solo and group exhibitions. Quotidian is showcasing these works in our inventory to highlight his ongoing relationship with the gallery’s principal. And we are using Lineage as a metaphor that describes their trajectories as ceaseless artifacts that are visible from certain perspectives and loci.
In Lineage, Miguel Osuna uses the line to explore the concepts of physicality and perception, challenging the viewer to understand that the line exists and extends beyond the canvas. For him, the line is a referential code – a visual emotional language and context framed by unseen and sometimes unknown and unknowable forces that act on it.
Some works in Lineage stretch perception by elongating dimensional contours and emphasizing movement. In the embroidered piece August Bloom Osuna has fragmented the line, yet in reality, the elements in the front and the back of the canvas are one continuous gesture that articulates how we see and how we feel and engage with the physical world. These fragments and horizons are singularly and cumulatively essential in articulating the language of experience – we move through, effect and are impacted by the spaces around us.
Osuna’s work focuses on movement and he shares with the viewer the kinetics necessary to make the piece. Following the gestures becomes the gateway to exploring ideas about material, surface, color and positionality. These codes are seen and felt as the bonds and boundaries between us and the canvas.
Table Manners, 2015
Permission to Sing Freely, 2017
Legal Tender, 2018
Not Even Light, 2016
Rule of Thumb, 2016
August Bloom, 2020
Jacaranda 2, 2020
Maroma Aqua, 2020
Fulfillment Center, 2017
Aug
25
to Oct 9
Mojo Rising at Ronald Silverman Gallery, CalState LA
Betye Saar is one of the most important artists of our time. Her transformative oeuvre memorializes Black life and women’s work, as well as challenges canonical categories and the white gaze. Her prescient language of assemblage deconstructs and reimagines ideas and objects, making space for and giving permission to three generations of Los Angeles artists to embrace the convergences of aesthetics with racial identity, mysticism, gender and culturally relevant themes.
My friendship with Betye Saar began after a public conversation we had the California African American Museum in 2006. Since then, we have collaborated, traveled, hunted and gathered, and discovered our shared interests in family, history, gardening and encouraging artists to create work that builds powerful visual literacy for their communities.
Mojo Rising celebrates her near 50 year relationship with CalState LA, that mounted her first survey exhibition in 1973. It demonstrates the extent of Saar’s influence and the roots she has cultivated for her daughters, grandchildren, students and every artist who encounters her work. The artists included here represent a small selection of those who benefit from her wisdom, creativity, generosity and the experience of living Betye Saar’s hometown.
This exhibition showcases Betye’s work and the visual dialogue other artists have with her. The confluences are evident in intention, in recycling found objects, imbuing common materials with mystic meaning, using sacred geometry, and honoring the ancestors (recent and long past) with work that speak to both aesthetics and narratives that must be told and shared.
A walk through video of the exhibition can be found at https://vimeo.com/452372061
Jan
25
to Mar 28
This PLACE
Fran Siegel Clouds Past Never, 2019 Detail
This PLACE
Dale Davis, June Edmonds, Srijon Chowdhury, Dwora Fried, Umar Rashid, Fran Siegel, and Carla Viparelli
This PLACE focuses on artists who articulate, correct and/or challenge historical narratives about geographical and cultural perceptions of place. Grounded by never exhibited 1960s ceramic works by Dale Davis — multimedia artist and Brockman Gallery co-founder who made space for the black arts west movement, This PLACE highlights how artists know, remember and reimagine environments that are relevant to their identities, aesthetic concerns and histories that define public visual awareness.
Quotidian’s mission is to highlight artists who use the creativity energy of Los Angeles to inform their practices. This PLACE’s artists rely on the diversity of the city — topographies, cultures and art media — to make space for their investigations of here and elsewhere. From life as an USC art student in the tumultuous 60s to post World War II Austria, the contemporary migrant crises in the Mediterranean, to a questioning nostalgia of a Bangladeshi past, the radically black and beautiful survival stories from Jim Crow and Afrofuturist offerings, to the convergence of the material history of making, LA makes possible the unification of these disparate narratives and mediums.
This PLACE January 25 – March 28, 2020
Nov
10
to Jan 11
Youngbloods
Opening Reception: November 10, 2-5p
November 10, 2019 through January 11, 2020
Quotidian’s curatorial project is an exploration of the ways that Los Angeles informs and makes space for diverse visual and cultural languages. Youngbloods focuses on artists who are extending the aesthetics of freedom and identity, making artwork that speaks to and about communities. These artists are unapologetic about the confluence of their language, media and identities as they push the boundaries on materiality and on meaning.
Youngbloods speaks across media – photography, painting and sculpture– to showcase the breadth of innovation and authenticity among LA’s emerging artists. This new generation of makers is in the unique position of having a robust local, national and international audience for their visual narratives. Quotidian celebrates their aesthetic contributions to the dynamic creative energy that is made in LA. Youngbloods will feature work(s) from Alex Anderson, Texas Isaiah, Cole James, Francesca Lalanne, Manuel Lopez, Star Montana, Daniel Gerwin and Alexis Slickelman.
Sep
10
to Feb 16
LA Blacksmith
September 10, 2019 - February 16, 2020
Opening Reception: October 2nd, 2019 | Can’t stop, Won’t stop
CAAM | California African American Museum
600 State Dr
Los Angeles, CA 90037
For decades black artists in Los Angeles have worked with metal for its historic and symbolic significance, as well as for other sociocultural, political, and practical considerations. LA Blacksmith highlights this tradition, from historic Los Angeles metal sculpture that signifies the durability of West African metalsmithing aesthetics to contemporary explorations of iron and steel alloys, bronze, copper, tin, aluminum, and gold. Beginning with Beulah Woodard's homages to African mask making, LA Blacksmith examines how the Watts Rebellion and other political and aesthetic ideas shaped midcentury metalwork. Contemporary artists explore metal as appropriation, power, and play in twenty-first century Los Angeles. For these artists, metalwork layers the tension between tradition and resistance, preciousness and posture, as well as the sacred and the profane.
LA Blacksmith is guest curated by independent curator jill moniz.
Complete list of artists:
Joseph Beckles, Kendell Carter, Adrienne DeVine, Charles Dickson, Melvin Edwards, Charla Elizabeth, Maren Hassinger, Artis Lane, Ed Love, Kori Newkirk, Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, Duane Paul, John Riddle, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Gerard Basil Stripling, Kehinde Wiley, Glen Wilson, Beulah Woodard, and Suné Woods
Sep
8
to Oct 27
Antigone
Opening Reception: September 8th | 2-5pm
Antigone highlights the idea of choice in choicelessness, focusing on how the decisions artists make, inform and effect the choices and aesthetic conventions that follow. Antigone also reveals the visible and invisible interconnectedness of people, places and things.
Marthe Aponte, Lorraine Bubar, Barbara Kolo, Lilah Lutes, Victoria May, Blue McRight, Lena Moross and Joan Wulf work with diverse materials: paper, paint, tape, textiles, wood and fire, that represents the aesthetic dynamism of Los Angeles: Their narratives describe landscape as well as internal, emotional environments such as love and longing. People experience these phenomena in multiple ways, and the works in Antigone reverberate with the correlations that bind the artists as women and storytellers with agency to the manifold ways their choices stimulate responses.
In the Greek plays about her, Antigone exercises her divine rights that ultimately forsake her. However, she takes control of her destiny, realizing that there still may be choice as a means when choicelessness is the only end. In the exhibition Antigone, narratives speak of the environment and conservation, the tenacity and tenuousness of human relationships, and the labor of women’s work. The artists invoke their responsibility as makers to animate these subjects with outcomes over which they may have little control. These trajectories do not stop them from the practices that they believe in and that are necessary to the artistic vibrancy in all its forms of LA.
Jul
26
to Sep 29
LA #UNSHUTTERED One from Many
LA #Unshuttered showcases the photography of young artists advocating for social justice. Located in the Museum Entrance Hall, Plaza Level, the projections in this installation provide a unique gallery experience. Featured are works by ten Los Angeles-based, high-school students who have been learning about, engaging in, and working for causes greater than themselves. They collaborated with nonprofit organizations and community establishments to explore topics such as mental health, African American hair and identity, immigration experiences, stereotypes about aging and beauty, religious tolerance, and LGBTQ+ pride.
This installation reflects the photographs of those who participated in the program at the Getty. Thousands more have contributed online. To learn more or to join our Unshuttered community, visit www.unshuttered.org or download the Getty Unshuttered app.
Getty Unshuttered is inspired by Genesis Motor America.
The Getty
1200 Getty Center Dr
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Jul
4
6:30 PM18:30
What to the slave is the 4th of July: The evolution of The Black Aesthetic Under Fascism
5239 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Jun
23
to Aug 23
Telling, Making, Doing: women's work
Telling, Making, Doing: women's work: June 23rd - August 24th
Opening reception: June 23, 2-5 pm
Artist Talk: August 15th, 12-2 pm
All over the world, women do the work of creating, sustaining and retaining cultural knowledge and communities. Telling, Making, Doing: Women’s Work highlights Los Angeles-based artists Susan Feldman, Karen Hampton, Veronica De Jesus, Raksha Parekh, Monica Nouwens, Charla Elizabeth, Diane Silver, and Carla Weber who use aesthetic compositions in two and three dimensions to tell stories.
Stories are pieces of memories, language and feeling stitched together. The artists in Telling, Making, Doing use stories as a framework for the material investigations and vice versa, creating a closed, but not hermetic paradigm for their practices. These artists are doing women’s work of remembering, codifying and reinterpreting the telling of identity, of materiality and of aesthetics.
Quotidian has a mission to honor LA as incubator of robust visual language. The city makes space for innovative practices, including material explorations of narratives signified through dimensional forms. LA is also burgeoning with historic truths about women’s work, the acts of making and doing as women, mothers, sisters, wives, partners and artists that create root structures of cultural identity and meaning. Telling, Making, Doing merges ideational and visual topographies of moments, feelings and gestures into transformative expressions that resonate with viewer experience before, during and after exposure to the work.
Telling, Making, Doing is an exhibition about the ways we remember described in a language that is hard to forget. Feldman, Hampton, De Jesus, Parekh, Nouwens, Elizabeth, Silver and Weber are Angelenos by birth and by design who use the space the city provides to honor their history, their narratives and their artistry and in turn engage us in a profound exploration into women’s work.
For further information about Quotidian, the exhibit: Telling, Making, Doing: women's work and available artworks, please contact the gallery.
Apr
20
to Jun 8
COLLAPse
COLLAPse
April 20 – June 8
Opening reception April 20, 6-9 pm
Quotidian presents COLLAPse, featuring Rodney McMillian, Rosalyn Myles, Miguel Osuna, Jenny Hager, Charles Dickson, April Banks, Joe Davidson, Ana Rodriguez and Roy Thurston. Continuing Quotidian’s mission to highlight uniquely California visual literacy, Collapse looks at the ways artists articulate moments of impact, absorption and consolidation of materials, stories and aesthetics.
Collapse is the investigation of materiality, challenging tradition with innovative approaches to composition – extending the language of landscape, reimagining the canvas, or the value of paint, and dissolving pigment into surfaces to sublimate artifice with dimensionality. These works coax the sublime out of the ordinary, collapsing our ideas of the hierarchy of media, objects and meaning.
The exhibition also highlights artists who fold time and space in their narrative practices to make new work that merges the past and present, as well as explore Afro-futurism. These makers fuse ritual materials and significance into contemporary concepts, extending the allegorical nature of certain narratives into certain other material and aesthetic concerns. Collapse removes the liminal place between identity and creativity, and between the hard edge line and intimate and often feminine geometry that informs it.
McMillian, Myles, Osuna, Hager, Dickson, Banks, Davidson, Rodriguez and Thurston are Los Angeles makers who through their art explore the elasticity of ideas, techniques and materials to make rich, new visual language. They construct bridges of awareness, understanding and appreciation that help us navigate the ongoing disassembling of systems to necessitate a more exact, yet broader understanding of collapse.
curated by jill moniz
Mar
27
7:00 PM19:00
Quotidian Talks: Narratives in art, literature, music and masculinity
Guest author Ed Pavlić reads from his latest novel "Another Kind of Madness" and talks with Serpentine Fire artists Umar Rashid and Duane Paul about art, music, border crossings and Chicago.
Reception and music following the conversation
About the participants:
Ed Pavlić’s has written ten other books, most recently: "Another Kind of Madness" and "Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener" (2016), "Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno" (2015) and "Visiting Hours at the Color Line" (2013). His next book, poems, "Let It Be Broke" will appear in 2020. In 2018 his essays appeared in Boston Review, the New York Times, and Brick, A Literary Journal as well as at The Poetry Foundation. He is Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
In 2003, after relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles, Umar Rashid began to write and illustrate the history of the Frenglish Empire 1648- 1880 (a portmanteau of France and England) based on the supposition that the historically antagonistic empires of France and England made a tenuous peace and unified into a single, gargantuan, colonial empire. The main focus of Rashid’s work is the stories and reinvented histories of people of color who are oftentimes marginalized and omitted from the historical record, and the intricacies of race, gender, class, and overall power in the colonial world. In the process of writing and illustrating this history, he creates alternative narratives that reference history and focus on the cosmologies of the empires, paying particular attention to religion and spirituality. The common thread throughout the work employs iconography as a place marker between past, present, and future. This element is realized in the oeuvre in the “Imperial Tattoo System” (a classifying mechanism Rashid uses to define and differentiate the characters in the story) and within the maps, and cosmological diagrams. The narrative is also heavily informed by the hip hop culture of his youth (golden age), various (modern and ancient) pop culture references, gang and prison culture, and revolutionary movements throughout time.
Duane Paul is an Afro-Caribbean artist, trained at Parsons who has participated in DCA’s Public Art program with installations at LAX and in Pasadena and many exhibitions in and beyond LA. Paul's layered, multi-hued, organic, sculptures are subtle, invoking memories and experiences, and focus on "the impermanent". Paul’s practice celebrates the past, but allows the new and now to reveal itself in a "sense of stoic stillness, serving as venerated communicative emblems of my experience with people, family, lovers, linage, and my chosen kinships."
Serpentine Fire is an immersive moment of aesthetic innovation and black masculine joy. Based on the song of the same name by Earth, Wind & Fire, Serpentine Fire captures a group of artists who have radical art practices, much like the band’s early music. Mel Edwards, Henry Taylor, Ed Love, Todd Gray, Kori Newkirk, Umar Rashid, Lyndon Barrois, Glen Wilson and Duane Paul use divergent media to create visually rich language born from life in LA.
Mar
2
to May 5
Breadth: Curated by jill moniz @ Good Luck Gallery
Breadth is curator jill moniz’s response to the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, in which she insists on a fresh look at the language and aesthetics to break down categories and controlling narratives. Breadth examines what it means to be a maker with intention and emotion, where making is the expressive conduit of creative energy without consideration of the canon or the exclusionary institutional gaze.
Sean Dougall and Andrew Paulson, Yrneh Gabon, Gronk, Debbie Han, Ed Love (1936 -1999), Dominique Moody, Marisela Norte, and Ann Weber, actively resist labels, expanding the idea that art is both an impulse and a sustaining practice. Each artist has been influenced by the multiple border crossings and intersections that constitute and give breadth to Los Angeles artists communities.
The work in Breadth defies boundaries. These artists are not interested in polite, distant viewing; instead they see their work as catalysts for a necessary visual literacy, creating art that lives.
The Good Luck Gallery presents Breadth, a glimpse into the possibility of art without labels.
The Good Luck Gallery
945 Chung King Road (Chinatown)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Jan
19
to Mar 30
Serpentine Fire
Quotidian presents Serpentine Fire featuring LA’s standard bearers in iconoclasm who push boundaries, developing new techniques, modalities and aesthetics. This community of makers feeds artistic and cultural curiosity, realizes visions and sustains itself through their work. Serpentine Fire, based on the song of the same name by Earth, Wind & Fire, captures a group of artists who have radical art practices, much like the band’s early music. Mel Edwards, Henry Taylor, Todd Gray, Ed Love, Kori Newkirk, Umar Rashid, Lyndon Barrois, Glen Wilson and Duane Paul use divergent media to create visually rich language born from life in LA.