Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Tag: Patrick Jackson

October 6, 2026

Patrick Jackson

François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

View of “Patrick Jackson: All Signs Fail,” 2026. From left: Memorial, 2026; Untitled (Mother and Child), 2026. Photo: Paul Salveson

Patrick Jackson did not make the cobwebs that, on my visit to his show, tangled around the scaffolding supporting his billboard sculpture Memorial, 2026, but he didn’t brush them away, either. Visitors who venture behind the giant forty-four-foot-wide printed image that splits the gallery diagonally encounter a “behind-the-scenes” area of dusty and cramped corridors that establishes a complicated set of relations between frontality and interiority, contrivance and authenticity, desire and disappointment. The exhibition’s title directs us to the artist’s position: “All Signs Fail.”

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April 22, 2021

Made in L.A.

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Huntington Museum, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino

Fulton Leroy Washington (aka MR. WASH), Mr. Rene # MAN POWER, 2011, oil on stretched canvas, 61 × 50.8 cm.
Courtesy: the artist, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Before entering the long-delayed (and now revised) ‘Made in L.A. 2020: a version’, I pitied its poor curators, whose exhibition has been kyboshed by a succession of lockdowns. Originally scheduled to open in June, the biennial – split this year between the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino – has lain partly dormant, partly unfinished. With (almost) all works installed, museum leaders allowed in a few members of the press, who, they hoped, might grant ‘Made in L.A. 2020’ a little exposure to daylight. (The biennial is currently expected to open to the public next year.)1

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