Exhibition Review #4: Chuck Close

First, a confession: the exhibition about to be chronicled is not in Los Angeles, and therefore technically does not fit within the scope of this blog. However, while at home in San Jose, CA for Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to view “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration,” an exhibition of Chuck Close prints currently showing at the San Jose Museum of Modern Art. Featuring more 125 works by the artist, the exhibition includes not only the finished works but also preliminary proofs, etching plates, and editions at various stages of development> the result is a comprehensive look at the artistic process of one of the most prominent contemporary American artists.

Close’s personal background reveals much about the development of his unique style. As an MFA student at Yale from 1962-1964, Close struggled to find his own style within the dramatically-shifting American art world of the late-1960’s. As he recalls in a recent interview,

“If you think about the late 1960s, painting was dead, sculpture ruled. Painting seemed like a senseless activity. If you were dumb enough to make a painting, it had better be abstract. It was even dumber to make a representational image. Then the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of all possible things you could do was make a portrait. I remember Clement Greenberg said to [Willem] de Kooning that the only thing you can’t do in art anymore is make a portrait.”

Ironically, rather than taking Greenberg’s words as a warning, Close took them as a challenge. Seeking to “mitigate against the standard hierarchy of the portrait,” he turned to “the mug shot as a way around commissioned portraiture.” Thus, his signature photorealist style was born.

Over the last 40 years, Close has continued to produce “mug-shot” portraits, often photorealist in style. That said, it is difficult to label and/or summarize the works featured in “Process and Collaboration.” Close constantly experiments with new artistic styles and mediums; this exhibition alone features collages, aquatints, lithographs, silk-screens, tapestries and wood block prints. One of the exhibitions most striking works is Leslie/Fingerprints (top left), a direct gauvre from 1986. Close created the image by dipping his fingers in ink and pressing them onto a sheet of Mylar, varying the pressure of his touch in order to create a range of gray shades. The end result is extraordinary. Up close, the work appears merely a mass collection of fingerprints; upon stepping back, however, the image suddenly snaps into place.

Close exhibits similar creativity in Self-Portrait/Pulp (2001) [top right]. A large “mug shot” of the artist, it is composed of paper pulp in 11 shades of gray. To create the piece, Close created a plastic mold of his face with an elaborate grid; established a gray scale, giving each tone a number; carefully numbered the grid; and then filled in the grid with paper pulp dyed the appropriate tone. The end result is equal parts photograph, tapestry, and Impressionistic.

My favorite work in the exhibition was Lyle (2002) [bottom left], a silkscreen composed of an astounding 149 colors. The work demonstrates Close’s mastery of the illusions and mechanics of visual perception. Composed of the Kandinsky-esque cocentric circles arranged in a gigantic grid, the work simultaneously abstract and a photorealistic. My eye continued to jump between viewing Lyle as a series of circles and as portrait – this is a silkscreen that messes with your mind (in a good way)!

Beyond the standout pieces featured in “Process and Collaboration,” however, what I find intriguing about Close’s work is how it manages to straddle so many of the artistic debates that polarized the art world during the 1970s and 1980s. One could argue that Close exemplifies “postmodern” art; equal parts painter and photographer, his works draw upon both traditions while adhering to neither. At a time when the art world was up in arms over the future of painting, Close’s work returns to traditional figurative forms but in a whole new way. Moreover, Close in an exemplary postmodernist in that his art clearly consistently engages with the signifier. He does not paint the human face as much as he investigates the principles of perception; as described in the exhibition catalogue, his works strive to make the viewer become aware of the manner in which we see.

Walking out the gallery and back to my car, I happened to pass by “Downtown Doors,” and ongoing project where high-school artists are selected to paint utility doors in downtown San Jose. Stopping to admire the works, I noticed that one painting (see below) was clearly done in the style of Chuck Close. While Greenberg declared portraiture dead, it looks like Close got the last laugh.

Sources:

Siri, Engberg and Madeleine Grynsztejn. "Navigating the Self
Chuck Close discusses portraiture and the topography of the face." Walker Art Center, 2005. http://visualarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2036&title=Articles

Hiroshi Sugimoto: (Post)(Modern) photographer?

Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Theaters" (1978 -)
Pictured: Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993

During our class trip to the "MOCA's First Thirty Years" exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary, I was struck by the three featured works of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. I had first seen Sugimoto's work several years ago at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco and was struck by their beauty and technical perfection. With this knowledge gained through this class, however, the photographs took on a very different meaning this time around.

In class, we've discussed at length the differences between modernist "art photography" (as Solomon-Godeau labels it) and postmodern photography, as exemplified by the "Pictures" generation. What I find so intriguing about Sugimoto's work is how it straddles - or perhaps blurs - the distiction between these two photographic movements. Consider the two works that I have featured in this post, selections from Sugimoto's "Theatres" and "Seascapes" series. At a technical level, these works are brilliant; they remind me of the work of Edward Weston in their rich black and white tones and undeniable visual beauty. Interestingly, Sugimoto - like Weston - uses a traditional 8 x 10 manual camera, despite the availibility of new photographic technologies.

That said, there is a definite postmodern aspect to Sugimoto's work. Postmodern art as a whole priviledges the signifier over the signified, and accordingly, Sugimoto's work is also a reflection on the medium of photography itself. In his own words, Sugimoto describes photography as "the fossilization of time," and his work is centered upon the idea of "capturing" the passage of time. To make his "Theaters" series, Sugimoto sets his exposure to last for the duration of the movie. Similarly, to make his "Seascapes," Sugimoto stations his camera above the sea and then leaves the exposure open for anywhere from several days to two to three weeks. The result, I would argue, is images (the signified) that are both beautiful in a traditional technical and stylistic sense as well highly aware of the processes of signification.

"Seascapes" Series - Sea of Japan, Ruben Island, 1996

While researching Sugimoto, I found this excellent PBS documentary that features several contemporary artists (including Sugimoto). It's interesting to hear the artist reflect on his work, as well as discuss the influence of Duchamp on his photography. Definitely worth checking out.

Exhibition Review #3: "Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory"

Pantea Karimi, "Holy Vanity," 2009

“Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory” – currently showing at the Morono Kiang Gallery in downtown Los Angeles – features the works of four contemporary Iranian-American artists (Pantea Karimi, Hushidar Mortezaie, Amitis Motevalli, and Fereshteh Toosi). An intriguing examination of identity, memory, and hybridity in the contemporary art world., the exhibition was curated Shervin Shahbazi, who himself is Iranian-American. As detailed in the press release for the show, Shahbazi asked the participating artists to “create work based on their personal memories of Iran–or lack thereof—and, in the process, reflect on two different memories: One they would like to save and one they wish to delete even though purposeful forgetting is humanly impossible”. Moreover, in curating the exhibit, Shahbazi sought to expose the viewer to a deeply-personal, often quirky look at Iran, a nation that most Americans know only for its political strife and/or domestic turmoil. “[I] didn’t want to have something cliché and straightforwardly political,” he told the Los Angeles Downtown News. “If you see the exhibit, you will take away something and learn something new.”

The four featured artists utilize radically different tactics – both artistically and theoretically – to explore the questions posed by Shahbazi. Motevalli’s contribution, “Houri,” greets the viewer, as it hangs facing outward in the gallery’s front window. Light streams through the window, casting an eerie glow on the 72 photographic transparencies of the artist’s middle school photo, featuring Motevalli wearing heavy makeup and dressed like an American pop star. As critic Knight note, the work forces the viewer to confront the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural influences, as it “disturbingly melds a publicity-style head shot of a wanna-be pop star with the false Western myth of Middle Eastern martyrs being greeted by virgins in paradise.” Similar dynamics are at play in Mortezaie’s section of the show, a collection of fashion-based works. Most prominent are his plywood figures, dressed in traditional Iranian garb overlaid with Western media images and corporate logos. Recalling paper dolls, the figures are symbolic bodies on which the forces of globalization and cultural imperialism play themselves out.

The exhibition’s two standout artists are Karimi and Toosi. Karimi presents a series of watercolors and serigraphs – exemplified by “Holy Vanity” (2009) – which combine traditional Farsi calligraphy with contemporary western media images. Karimi uses these two mediums to her advantage, creating complex, layered works where image and text bleed into one another. Crucially, Karimi intentionally blur or decontextualize both the images and the calligraphy to the point of illegibility. Thus, “Holy Vanity” functions as a representation of her tangled, “illegible” identity formed from her experiences and memories of living both in and outside Iran.

Toosi’s untitled piece (at right) is the exhibition’s most eye-catching work. Taking up a corner of the gallery, it is a virtual universe of composed of foam spheres covered by knitted Afghan blankets and yarn Ojo de Dios (God’s Eyes). As Toosi points out in her description of the piece, both the Afghan blanket and the God’s Eye are traditional handicrafts that have been divorced from their cultural context and subsumed by middle-class American. The fact that the artist knitted these objects out of traditional Iranian yarn adds yet another level of complexity; in the words of the artist, the installation reflects “the obfuscation of culture,” presenting a universe where Iranian and American cultures are literally woven together into a new, hybrid state.

Beyond simply providing a window into the Iranian-American experience, “Traces of Being” is fascinating in that it grapples with the notion of (cultural) identity. The artists’ works (and their accompanying narratives) do not celebrate multiculturalism; instead, they are defined by a fundamental sense of confusion, of being caught in-between. In his research on hybridity in contemporary art, Nikos Papastergiadis argues that hybridity is used by diasporic and indigenous artists to mark their rejection of being “defined in terms of an exotic alternative or as a belated supplement whose incorporation could serve to both expand and reaffirm the parameters of the mainstream.” Refusing to fit in within any nationalist school or formalist movement, these works challenge the supposed “binary that separate[s] the containment of meaning within an artwork and the establishment of a framework for making meaning within culture."

I see the works in “Traces of Being” as furthering this postmodern, hybrid movement in art. Reflecting the complex identities of the artists themselves, these works revel in their state of perennial “translation,” combining American and Iranian influences only to collapse into an indeterminate, hybrid state of being. Refusing to fit neatly within the artistic traditions of either culture, the works demonstrate the artists’ continual struggle with their own hybrid, Iranian-American identities. In the end, perhaps the title of the show says it all; if the multicultural artwork represents a state of being, then these artworks are traces of being – traces of Iran and traces of America combining to form a complex, multiethnic identity.

Sources:

Knight, Christopher. "Art review: 'Traces of Being: Iran in the Passage of Memories' at Morono Kiang Gallery." The Los Angeles Times. October 2, 2009.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. "Hyrbidity and Ambivalence: Places and Flows in Contemporary Art and Culture." Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 4, 39-64 (2005).

Scott, Anna. "The Iran You Don't Know." Los Angeles Downtown News. September 18, 2009.

Between Koons and Merz lies...?

During our last two classes, we've looked at the often inscrutible work of postmodern German artist Gerhard Merz. Seeking to find out more about him, I googled his name, and discovered James D. Campbell's catalog review of Merz's exhibition in Philadelphia's Lawrence Olivier gallery during the late 1980's.

If Jeff Koons took postmodern art to one extreme - creating works that are (arguably) anti-intellectual and immediately accessible to even the least artistically-savvy viewer - then Merz (and Campbell) take postmodernism to the other. It seems as if the viewer 1) needs an art history degree to understand the meaning(s) inherent in Merz's work, and 2) a PhD to understand Campbell's analysis of the exhibition. For example, consider the first paragraph in Campbell's catalog essay:

There are feelings which tax our powers of expression and seemingly defy explanation. Why should certain things in later Schoenberg-that crescendo of an abstract classicism based on pure form -make me think of Gerhard Merz's Italia MCMLXXXVI? Why should reading certain passages of Sofficci's First Principles of Futurist Aesthetics send my thoughts wandering through the four floors of Merz's staircase installation in Munich's TRV building? What was it in the pellucid blue in Mondo Cane that flashed before my eyes the blue of Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes? Again, and further, why should this artist's Dove Sta Memoria evoke with wonderful clarity the multiple oddities-the rectangular hollows over the tabernacles, the isolated triglyphs - of Michelangelo's anteroom to the Laurentian Library in Florence?

This paragraph is not an exception, but rather representative of the tone of the entire essay. Campbell does not analyze Merz' work as much as he links it - via academic jaron - to increasingly obscure reference points.

Of course, this tension regarding the "accesibility" of art is nothing new. What I find fascinating, however, is just how dichotomized this subject became during the 1980's. The more that artists such as Koons rejected the critical, intellectual legacy of 1970's conceptual art, the more that artists such as Merz felt the need to defend this legacy. They're reacting to the same artistic legacy within the same artistic movement, yet their artwork could not be any more polarized.


In the end, my goal is not to demean the work of either Koons or Merz. Rather, my goal is point out the importance of finding an artistic middle ground. In my opinion, both Koons and Merz belittle their audience: Koons makes work that is purposefully anti-intellectual, while Merz makes work that is purposfully elitist. Surely, it is possible for an artist to challenge his or her audience without alienating them. Difficult, but possible.

Exhibition Review #2: Calligraffiti

Untitled, 2003. "Chaz" Bojorquez, Keo, Mear, Toons, Zender, and Xu Bing.

Calligraffiti: Writing in Contemporary Chinese and Latino Art is an exhibition of contrasts. Currently on display in the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the name “calligraffiti” is a portmanteau combining “calligraphy” and “graffiti.” And combination is definitely the key element here – few other shows can claim to juxtapose contemporary Chinese calligraphic with graffiti-style paintings by Los Angeles graffiti artists. These two art worlds further merge in exhibition’s centerpiece, a series of three murals created for the museum in 2003 by a team of Los Angeles graffiti artists and contemporary Chinese artist/calligrapher Xu Bing.

While calligraphy and graffiti initially seem to make an uneasy combination, the two are actually thematically linked through the notion of “writing” as art. As forms of writing, the exhibition catalogue argues, there are many “correlations between the elevated form, calligraphy, and its historically devalued twin, graffiti”; calligraphy and graffiti, therefore, are not disparate entities rather but two sides of the same coin. Thus, the exhibition seeks to problematize the labels of “high art” and “low art” that typically accompany these artistic mediuma. More alike than different, both calligraphy and graffiti “address issues of power, culture, and universality.”

The exhibition itself can be divided into three sections. The first section focuses on traditional Chinese calligraphy, as exemplified by the works of contemporary Chinese artist Gu Wenda. The second section features contemporary works that question the boundaries of what is considered “calligraphy” or “graffiti.” The paintings of Zheng Chongbin, for example, utilize traditional calligraphic structures but feature ink blots rather than characters; similarly, the two pieces by graffiti artist Gronk more closely resemble a Jackson Pollack painting than a stereotypical graffiti piece. The third and final section – featuring the three 2003 murals – fuses the two mediums. As demonstrated by works such as Untitled (pictured above), Xu’s Chinese characters flow so effortlessly into the graffiti “script” that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two. If graffiti is the “low” form of artistic writing and calligraphy the “high” form, Untitled blends the two into a postmodern milieu that purposely defies categorization.

While Calligraffiti was well-curated and attractively presented, I could not help but reflect on the irony of a major museum doing an exhibit on graffiti. “Tagging” (as graffiti is referred to by its participants) is a complex social practice; for example, MacGillivray and Curwen’s ethnographic study of Los Angeles taggers highlights “tagging’s varying purposes to sustain relationships, carry on dialogue, provide social commentary, and establish and identity by being recognized and known.” Thus, within the tagging community – a community with its own rules, regulations and social norms – tagging serves as the means by which individuals can gain status and establish their identity. As the authors note, “this interpenetration of text and identity captures one of the powers of tagging.”

Thus, while Calligraffiti does serve to validate graffiti as a form of “art,” the very act placing graffiti in an institutional setting strips these works of their social context, and therefore their much of their meaning. The works begin to function simply as images, rather than transgressive attempts to form a social identity. For example, the placard accompanying Two Talk(pictured right), a painting by “Chaz” Bojorquez, began with the following sentence: “Like syncopated notes in jazz, these two calligraphic clusters play off one another.” While Bojorquez is a cross-over artist (he quit tagging in 1986 to focus on his graffiti-style paintings, such as Two Talk), to analyze the work through such academic, formal analysis seems to miss the whole point of graffiti. Similar to how the transgressive video and conceptual art works of the 1970’s were eventually incorporated into the mainstream art world, it was difficult to tell whether Calligraffiti represented a celebration graffiti as an underrepresented art form or the process of co-opting graffiti by aligning it with established art forms (calligraphy) and categorizing its “cannon” through formal analysis.

Perhaps my analysis is too harsh; after all, I would also argue that it is undeniable that graffiti is an art form. One of the concepts that stressed throughout the exhibit is that when people discuss graffiti, they often conflate two separate concepts: art/creation and vandalism. Although it is true that taggers paint on walls that are other people’s property, that doesn’t mean that their work is not “artistic.” This argument is furthered by the juxtaposition of calligraphy and graffiti, which highlights their remarkable similarities. The two mediums each play with the expressive qualities of words, pointing to the ability of words to simultaneously express linguistic and artistic meanings. Moving beyond the low art/high art binary, it becomes apparent that calligraphy and graffiti are both textual mediums, in that they physically incorporate words (text) and that they can be read as a “text” in the post-modern sense.

In the end, it's hard to come to a singular conclusion about Calligraffiti. Regardless of whether you see the exhibit as celebrating or institutionalizing graffiti, however, I believe that all can agree that the exhibition is nothing if not thought-provoking.

Musings on Kitsch

In class this week, we spent a great deal of time discussing the works of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons as exemplars (within their respective mediums) of 1980’s postmodern art. As per other AHVA classes I’ve taken at Oxy, our discussion of Sherman centered on the ways in which her photographs explore and critique of gender roles, female performativity, and the male gaze. Much like the critics of October, we came to a general consensus of Sherman as a “good” postmodernist. In contrast, our discussion of Koons generated more debate. Some viewed his works as commodified, pure kitsch, lacking any critical intervention into the medium of “kitsch”; others viewed placed his work within the celebrated Duchampian “readymade” tradition, arguing that he is unfairly disregarded by critics simply because his work is so unpretentious and readily accessible.

I bring this up not simply to summarize our class discussion, but to demonstrate the frame of reference by which I had come to view the work of Sherman and Koons. That frame of reference was challenged, however, when I discovered the following review online. The article, entitled “Kitsch in Sync,” was published in the New York Times Magazine in May 2005. A review of retrospectives of Koons and Sherman’s work (occurring in separate galleries), the writer links the two artists together due to 1) their prominent position in the art world of the 1980’s, and 2) their focus on kitsch. As writer Mark Stevens notes, “Jeff Koons is a razzle-dazzle impresario of the kitsch object, Cindy Sherman an explorer of clichéd roles and social disguises. They are very different artists, but their approach to the kitschy illustrates the characteristic strengths—and, at times, the principal weakness—of this tradition.”

At first, I was taken back by Steven’s designation of Sherman’s work as “kitsch.” I should note here that I am a sociology major (with a focus on gender studies), a unabashed feminist, and a huge fan of Sherman’s work. To deem Sherman’s work as “kitsch,” it seemed to me, was to make a gross oversimplification. But as I thought more about Stevens’ designation, I began view Cindy Sherman in a different light. It’s commonly argued that Sherman’s work during the 1980’s (such as her famous “film stills”) subtly but powerfully critique gender performativity and the social construction of femininity. But what makes theses works so powerful? This is where I have come to realize that Stevens is actually correct with his “kitsch” designation. Sherman’s photos, I would argue, are so powerful precisely because they draw upon kitsch. Each of her “film stills” draws upon a clichéd, kitschy film scenarios and/or characters (the damsel in distress, the moment before the attack, etc). As kitsch icons, the viewer already has a cultural script of what should be happening in the scene. But Sherman’s characters do not subscribe to these cultural scripts; Instead, they question them. The power of Sherman’s photos come from seeing a familiar, kitsch scene, but realizing that something about it is not quite right.

In conclusion: sorry, Mark Stevens. I judged you much too quickly.

Exhibition Review #1: Hadley Holliday

The Solway Jones gallery is not an impressive space. Tucked away inside a nondescript, run-down office complex in Chinatown, the single-room gallery is small and rather industrial in style: cement floor, exposed wood-frame ceiling, florescent lights. Perhaps this is for the better, however, as the unpretentiousness of the gallery makes it all the easier for the current exhibition – a collection of the paintings of Hadley Holliday – to dominate the space. Eleven works are on display, united by Holliday’s use of stripes, geometric forms and colorful composition. In some paintings, such as Fool's Paradise (pictured), Holliday paints stripes into a elaborate yet elegant, multicolored swirl. In other works, U-shaped stripes stack one upon another, rainbow-like, or form co-centric grids. Many of the paintings are scattered with drips and spots, and as Holly Myers notes in her review of the exhibition, Holliday “generally guides the stripes around them.”

Of particular note is Holliday usage of acrylic paint on unprimed canvasses, a choice of medium that gives her work a unique style. With the pigments free to fully saturate the canvas, her colors are simultaneously vibrant yet gentle. This medium also allows the colors blend into one another, creating a complex, layered visual that is reminiscent of silkscreening.

Moving beyond their formal beauty, however, Holliday’s works raise some intriguing questions on the direction of painting in the twenty-first century. As Myers alludes to in her review, one cannot view Holliday’s work without wondering “Why a return to stripes in 2009?” To answer this question, it is necessary to return to the debate surrounding painting’s return to prominence in the 1980’s, and with it the re-popularization of figurative art.

This dramatic shift in the art world generated both positive and negative reactions, aptly represented by the writings of Barbara Rose and Benjamin Buchloh. Rose was a vocal supporter of these developments. In “American Painting: The Eighties,” she harshly criticizes the conceptual, video, and performance artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, arguing that these artists stunted the art world with “the idea that to be valid or important art must be ‘radical.’” With artists now free from “puritanically precise and literalist styles,” Rose joyfully notes that painters of the 1980’s are “dedicated to the preservation of painting as a transcendental high art, a major art, and an art of universal as opposed to topical significance.” No longer will art be judged on its sociopolitical critique, but rather it’s aura, “emphasizing the involvement of the artist’s hand…[in] creating highly individual visionary images.”

Buchloh, in contrast, argues that “the specter of derivativeness hovers over every contemporary attempt to resurrect figuration, representation, and traditional modes of production.” Curators such as Rose, in his view, are simply refusing to view “developments in the larger context of these historical repetitions, in their nature as response and reaction to particular conditions that exist outside of the confines of aesthetic discourse.” Thus, art of the 1980’s is every bit as reactionary and political as the art of the previous two decades; it is just reacting to new conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher. Buchloh also problematizes Rose’s emphasis on a painting’s aura, arguing that this fetishization serves only to reframe painting as a luxurious, high cultural product.

With this historical context in mind, let us return to Myers’ review of Holliday’s exhibition. Noting that Holliday’s work is “proof that there’s joy to be found yet in what has come to seem a dull and largely reactionary genre,” Myers uses the words “reactionary” and “joy” to describe the paintings. By juxtaposing these two words (and their accordant meanings), Myers is in essence incorporating both Buchloh and Rose’s viewpoints. And this, I would argue, is exactly why Holliday is using stripes in 2009; as a contemporary artist, she must grapple with the conflicted legacy surrounding the return of painting in the 1980’s. Her works are conceptual and reactionary, but they also radiate with joy and exhibit an aura, a masterly touch. In short, her paintings prove that the Rose-Buchloh dichotomy is a false dichotomy.

It is difficult to categorize Holliday’s paintings within any specific art movement. They are too free-flowing and sensuous to fit neatly within the 1950’s abstract expressionist cannon, yet they are too abstract to fit within the “postmodern” cannon of the 1980-1990’s. While they share characteristics the color-field movement of the late 1950’s, Holliday’s press-release denies this affinity. But once again, this is precisely the point. Holliday’s press-release concludes with the following sentence: “Holliday’s works all joyfully nod references to American painting’s history while simultaneously acknowledging closer relationships with fashion and the decorative arts.” Her work, like that of many contemporary artists, acknowledges Rose and Buchloh but pledges allegiance to neither, in order to carve out a personal niche somewhere in between.

Bibliography:

Buchloh, Benjamin. “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting.” October (1981): 39-68.

Myers, Holly. “Artist of a totally different stripe.” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2009, Arts Section, D23.

Rose, Barbara. “American Painting: The Eighties.” Arts Magazine, 1980.