The Pit has become a very serious operation, opening a second space in Palm Springs and now representing 25 artists, whom they’ve placed in some of the top collections in Los Angeles and abroad.
Now the couple is leveling up again, leaving Glendale for a 12,500-square-foot space in Atwater Village with three galleries and a shop purveying books and editions. It opens Feb. 24 with a two-person drawing show from longtime collaborators Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman and a massive group show, Halfway to Sanity, featuring 50 artists who’ve shown at The Pit over the years. “A big part of this expansion is to be able to work with more historical and institutional artists on more substantial projects,” says Miller. “We want to show the emerging and mid-career artists with the artists who inspired them.” 3015 Dolores St., Atwater Village
After his opening of Shattered Glass — the landmark 2021 group show in Hollywood of emerging BIPOC artists curated by Melahn Frierson and AJ Girard — Jeffrey Deitch made a number of visits to a group of Southern California-based Mexican-American artists featured in the show (like ceramic sculptor Diana Yesenia Alvarado, painter Mario Ayala, and the multimedia and performance artist Rafa Esparza).
“I’ve always looked for communities of artists rather than individual talents,” says Deitch, who just staged a Wild Style show celebrating the 40th anniversary of the film that captured the downtown New York street scene surrounding Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. While that show was important, his next, At the Edge of the Sun — featuring landmark works (including a replicated truck stop) from this group of 12 artist friends who’ve bonded over neighborhood pride, graffiti and lowrider culture, and a nightlife scene they are leading — will be “the most important show I’ll put on in L.A. since Shattered Glass,” says Deitch. “For me, this group is the most exciting thing going on in contemporary art in America right now.” The show runs Feb. 24 to May 4. 925 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood
Depending upon your point of reference, most people know Terry Allen as the west Texas musician behind the conceptual outlaw country albums Juarez and Lubbock, or as the polymath multimedia artist who attended the Chouinard Art Institute and palled around with the Cool School. “I don’t really separate the two, never have,” says Allen, who will don both hats during L.A. Art Week. The Santa Fe-based artist will have a solo booth Frieze Los Angeles with LA Louver featuring six decades worth of works on paper, sculpture, mixed media work, and a compilation of videos (including his theatrical piece “The Embrace”).
The two nights before Frieze — Feb. 28 and 29 — Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band will give a special performance of music relating to the works in the exhibitions (and some iconic albums) at the Masonic Lodge of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. “It’s the first time we’ve played a cemetery gig so we’re calling it Music Beyond the Grave!” says Allen, who just released a songbook from Juarez lyrics with etchings made to relate to the songs. “I’m looking forward to it. We’ll play some songs about Houdini and the afterlife. Why not?”
When the Austrian performance artist Waltraud Hollinger introduced herself in the late sixties to the Vienna Actionists as Valie Export, she quickly gained notoriety for the feminist performances Tap and Touch Cinema, for which she invited strangers in the shopping district of Vienna to touch her breasts through a cardboard cinema stage, and ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic. For the latter she walked into an art house cinema in Munich wearing a biker jacket and crotchless chaps, her hair teased out like Mötley Crüe. To memorialize her new persona she made a series of wheatpaste posters in her Action Pants ensemble, exposing herself in an alley while brandishing a machine gun. She followed these radical feminist gestures with a series of Body Configurations photos of herself insinuating her sometimes clothed body over public spaces.
Those seminal photos and two videos — Adjunct Dislocations (1973) and Syntagma (1984) — exploring the expanded cinema through body movement and the doppelgänger will open at the MAK Center during L.A. Art Week (running Feb. 28 through April 7). As the artist once said, “You have to go against some of the rules of the state that suppresses people’s liberties.” In a post-Roe world, Export’s actions are perhaps more relevant than ever. 835 Kings Rd., West Hollywood
As part of its new Room Project Space, the Hollywood gallery Make Room Los Angeles will open a speakeasy/coffee shop with the now L.A.-based multimedia provocateur Terence Koh, who has done everything from gold leaf his own shit to operate and harvest a “bee chapel” within the confines of art spaces over the past two decades.
At Make Room, Koh will give two performances — on Tuesday, Feb. 27th and Saturday, March 2nd — where the artist will invite visitors to drink homemade coffee with him and engage with a cave-like structure that will have its own soil floor.
“Terence is very interested in ritual and community,” says Make Room owner Emilia Yin. “So turning our gallery into a coffee shop is a perfect venue for that. And during a certain hour of the day there will be a really special light coming into the exhibition that he wants people to encounter.” 6361 Waring Ave., Hollywood
A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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