051 ☼ Highlights from art week LA

On Tongva land

Feb 24, 2025

Proud to work with The Art Newspaper all week and they gave me the front page story which I reported with a migraine lol! Proud of myself!

I still love art—I hem and haw on the “art world” whatever that means, the mealy pit at the center of a rotted fruit long fallen from its tree with all its corruption, soured taste, and bad actors—I still love and enjoy art. After graduating during Covid lockdown in 2020, I spent the next few years sleeping off the art world. Thoroughly burned out and feeling abandoned, I found myself adrift but drawn to pretty paintings. The trends in sales followed suit: landscape paintings made for the most secure sales at the Dallas Art Fair last year (as I reported here and here), and listen, I get it. In an insecure financial market, asset-snatchers (i.e. art collectors) are going to gravitate to what appreciates best: and that’s beauty and a strong narrative—traditional or otherwise.

This week Frieze and its attendant satellite fairs descended upon Los Angeles. Now in it’s seventh year, Frieze is bigger than ever with events sprawling across town. It’s overwhelming and maybe not the best way to see art, as all manners of work is huddled together in an airplane hangar in Santa Monica like show room of culture and private equity. Since the wildfires were so recently, there was a debate as to whether or not LA should host their fairs—because of the environmental impact, and because so many folks are without homes. I needed the work, artists needed the funds, and galleries of all sizes needed the support. So the fairs forged ahead and as far as I heard, it was a good decision.

I was at the uncool art fair all week (Frieze)—while gathering sales data for my day job, I collected a few images of work I absolutely loved. I had ambitious plans to visit Felix, the Other Art Fair, and Post-Fair but each night after hitting deadline on-site, I went to bed and did not wake up until 11 hours later, two nights in a row. Here’s a sampling from what I did get to. Thank you for gazing and please subscribe! I can’t write without you.

From Frieze:

Zheng Zhilin

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr

Leiko Ikemura

Daniel Correa Mejia

Ariana Papademetroupoulos

Katherine Bradford

Noah Purifoy!!! This was thrilling. These works have been in a collection for decades and have rarely been seein in public. Most of Purifoy’s work is at his Outdoor Desert Museum in Yucca Valley/Joshua Tree and the rest hides out at his Foundation. Seeing this vibrant works was so exciting. I wrote about his connection to fellow junk artist Louise Nevelson for New York Review of Architecture last year and yes, I gushed all that I had learned about them to the gallery guy manning the booth who low key seemed just as excited as me, lol!