Early in 2024, graffiti artists broke into the half-finished Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper development in downtown Los Angeles, scaled dozens of flights of stairs and, over a few days, covered much of the towers’ exterior with spray paint. Colorful tags — “Sorak,” “Libre” or “Suave,” more than six feet tall — were emblazoned on mirrored glass windows of nearly every floor.
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“I don’t consider myself a creative person at all,” Greta Waller tells me, in the kitchen of her south Los Angeles bungalow, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
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On a dance mat in a cavernous rehearsal space in downtown Los Angeles, the actor Abbott Alexander put on a battered green bowler hat, last worn onstage 33 years ago. Nearby, two drummers perched behind their kits and, to the side, two dancers stretched against the wall.
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The high terrain of the Walking Cane Ranch in north-central Arizona, between the Painted Desert and the Little Colorado River and the San Francisco Peaks, is astoundingly beautiful. Flaxen grasses dust black and red volcanic gravel, which rises in huge, soft mounds — extinct volcanoes, the newest of which last erupted in 1066.
James Turrell, 81, the owner of this ranch and one of America’s most beloved artists, calls it “a land between”.
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Before Marlon Mullen begins a painting, he likes to tidy his work space. He’ll pre-mix his paints — Golden acrylics in recycled pots — and lay out his brushes and canvas on his table. Often, he’ll empty the studio’s trash cans. Sometimes he’ll even sweep the yard outside, or rearrange objects on the studio shelves according to their relation to colors he plans to use in his painting. As I learned when I visited him in Richmond, Calif., one recent rainy morning, this ritual process can take days.
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Tourists and surfers strolling down the Santa Monica pier in 1979 would have passed a mysterious awning advertising “The Natural Museum of Modern Art”. A nearby explanatory panel did little to clarify: “The Natural Museum of Modern Art project is part of an ongoing interest by the John Doe Co in natural objects and phenomena.”
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On a sunny autumn morning, in Jessie Homer French’s garage-studio, up several miles of mountain switchbacks from Palm Desert, Calif., a dozen canvases are propped on shelves in various stages of completion. Most are landscapes. Three depict cemeteries, a recurrent subject for the 83-year-old self-taught artist. Standing out among the browns and the greens, however, are two pictures of wildfires, in furious tones of orange, yellow and black.
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To mark the occasion of his double-bill exhibition at both the Bury Street and Helmet Row galleries of Modern Art in London, Ron Nagle had his nails done. Specifically, just his thumbnails: black on his right, pale pink on his left.
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In 2018, the artist Richard Mosse was understandably weary. He had spent most of the last decade in places torn by conflict and civil unrest.
In the early 2010s, the Irish-born New York-based artist had worked for five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, photographing and filming the humanitarian disaster that has claimed millions of lives and displaced millions more. That project led to another video and photographic series focusing on the European refugee crisis unfolding around the Mediterranean. Before that, he had embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq.
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The painter Richard Mayhew, who recently celebrated his 99th birthday, has lived through as broad a swath of this nation’s history as anyone you might hope to meet.
Sitting at a patio table outside his cedar-shingled suburban home in Soquel, near Santa Cruz, Mayhew leaned back in his chair and reflected on his long life.
“I drove across the United States six times,” he said. “Three over, and three back, from New York to San Francisco. I was always looking.”
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Jonathan Griffin 