For those who can’t make it to the “City of Brotherly Love,” Laurel Garber, the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, has assembled an online collection of Gág’s drawings on sandpaper—a gritty and sparkling medium that suits her objects.  These were inspired by a move from New York City to rural New Jersey where she purchased her beloved farmhouse, Tumble Timbers.  It is the exterior of this home that first assails the viewer’s eye. 

Johnston’s songs have been covered by several hundred artists, including David Bowie and Tom Waits. The late Kurt Cobain mused that Daniel Johnston is the best songwriter in America. In 2006, his life was documented in the award-winning film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and his painted illustrations were exhibited in the Whitney biennial. Johnston had a lifetime battle with mental illness, and medication prescribed for this condition damaged his liver requiring multiple hospitalizations. He died from a heart attack in his sleep before the morning of September 11, 2019.

In an era when vast accretions of consumer detritus and the vapid anecdotalism of digital media seem poised to overtake human creativity, authentic storytelling and the tangible materials of human existence take on elemental value as a means of connection, survival, and reinvention. In different media, but with the same rigorous and clear-sighted approach, artists Maximo González and Ato Ribeiro are innovating the philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities that will carry future generations forward into new modes of existence.

Topp uses mixed media with screen printing in overlapping layers on paper and board. Images are hand-pulled with mixed-media application in each print, with predetermined sizes and ink selections for different bodies of work.  In the last few years, Topp’s tattooed Disney Princesses and Sesame Street characters have gone viral to the point that his pieces have been pinned over a million times on Pinterest.

Downtown Los Angeles’s Corey Helford Gallery is currently presenting its annual Art Collector Starter Kit group show, featuring new 12” x 12” works from artists spanning across the globe, displayed throughout the Main Gallery. Featuring smaller, more affordable new works by well-known, popular artists was the idea behind CHG’s annual show when it launched in 2013. The show is back for its seventh installment, ACSK VII,  featuring top artists in the New Contemporary art scene.

Jackson Fine Art is currently featuring an exhibition of new works by Erik Madigan Heck from his new series and accompanying monograph, The Garden. This is the gallery’s second solo exhibition of Heck’s painterly large-scale photographs, following 2018’s Old Future. For The Garden, Heck’s focus turns inward, photographing his family and studies of the idyllic landscape surrounding their home.

The recently published book American / True Colors (GTF Publishing) is an exploration—from coast to coast—of who we are as Americans. Photographer Stephen Marc captures American identity and sense of place -- from the perspective of a baby-boomer African-American documentary/ street photographer. Marc shows the rich gestures of a new American culture that are performed, displayed, and exchanged every day, representing hot issues such as immigration, gender identity, civil and women’s rights, cultural diversity, patriotism, community and police violence, sports and play, and popular culture.

 A laser-sharp political awareness doesn’t flourish in a vacuum and studying at the Workshop for People’s Art had exposed Sue Coe to the poster art and library sources that fueled her imagination.  If the likes of Rembrandt, Goya, and Kathe Kollwitz filled her nascent eyes, expressionist Otto Dix and social muralist Jose Clemente Orozco heightened it further.  She visited prisons, AIDS wards, even slaughterhouses to peel the layers of her vision clean.