And Lily Kwong plants a living installation at Night Gallery
Words by CATHERINE BIGELOW, DAVID NASH, and ELIZABETH VARNELL
Natural Selection
Melding botany and art, LILY KWONG’s Subterrestrial (through Aug. 2025) — a new living installation taking root in Night Gallery North’s courtyard, seeded with a variety of native trees, grasses, and flowers — marks her first environmental intervention in L.A. in seven years. Accompanying the show is a second exhibition of lumen prints using expired photography paper and a mix of salt, gold, and alchemizing elements to create the images of California plants from Kwong’s garden and the Santa Monica mountains comprising Solis (through Dec. 2024) in the gallery’s Chapel viewing room. In both shows, Kwong, who has had installed works at the New York Botanical Garden, the High Line in New York City, and Salone del Mobile in Milan, navigates between aesthetic control and elemental chance brought on by sun and rain. A vernal equinox gathering on March 20, 2025, will celebrate the self-irrigating garden bed (hügel) at full bloom. 2050 Imperial St., L.A., 323-589-1135; nightgallery.ca. E.V.
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Portrait of an Artist
At 87 years old, British artist David Hockney is still as relevant to pop art and culture as he was at the beginning of his career in the early 1960s. If you’re not convinced of his star status, just look at prices for his pieces at auction ($90.3 million for his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) at Christie’s in 2018) and the number of world-class museums and institutions that count his works among their permanent collections — or ask ARTnews Top 200 Collector Jordan Schnitzer, who has been hoarding Hockneys since 1980.
Better yet, visit the PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM’s exhibition David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation to see more than 240 works. As the largest survey of Hockney’s prints, the show includes works from 1954 to 2022 and presents the artist’s oeuvre from early printmaking to his tech-forward iPad drawings. “I’m addicted to David Hockney,” says Schnitzer, who also counts a work from Hockney’s Blue Guitar series as one of the first prints he bought. “He’s a master colorist, the foremost portrait artist of our time, and a naturalist.”
Originally conceived as a show of 160 works, it has increased by nearly 40 percent to include many of Hockney’s earlier prints, in which he explored his sexuality, that were not shown in a recent exhibition of Schnitzer’s collection at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The exhibition is part of the museum’s Q+ Art initiative, which focuses on the work of LGBTQ+ artists and includes public programs, collection building, and awards geared toward solidifying their voices in the arts.
Says Adam Lerner, the museum’s executive director, “Hockney’s work challenges viewers to see the world through his unique lens, embracing both artistic and personal freedom.” Nov. 23–March 31. 101 N. Museum Dr., Palm Springs, 760-322-4800; psmuseum.org. D.N.
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Face Time
Michelle Obama’s official portrait is returning to San Francisco alongside a rendering of Breonna Taylor and nearly 50 other works, including a new triptych, as SFMOMA debuts its much-anticipated midcareer survey of portraitist Amy Sherald. The exhibition, Amy Sherald: American Sublime, showcases her depictions of Black women, men, and children at ease. Sherald’s use of gray shades for the skin of her subjects, a technique dating to the Renaissance, shines a light on race as a construct. Her works, organized into six thematic galleries, redefine what it means to be seen as an American. Known for her particular process, she invites people she meets to be photographed, selects garments, and creates paintings that subtly reference canonic visuals. The museum’s recent acquisition, For Love, and for Country, evokes Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a sailor kissing a woman. In Sherald’s version, there are two men. Nov. 16–March 6. 151 Third St., S.F., 415-357-4000; sfmoma.org. E.V.
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Changemaker
The roots of environmental justice are deepening in Los Angeles with an exhibition of Joseph Beuys’ social sculptures and a host of works from the German artist’s practice on view at THE BROAD’s Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature (Nov. 16–Apr. 6). Performance art and early involvement in Fluxus led Beuys to seek open public debates. His desire to communicate with a wide audience sparked his “multiples,” or small editions of sculptures made to give away or sell. Bottles of Rhine Water Polluted (1981) speak volumes. In addition to the show, an off-site reforestation initiative, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, directly addresses climate change, planting 100 native oaks in Elysian Park’s Chavez Ridge. 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A., 213-232-6200; thebroad.org. E.V.
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A Photography Show to Dye for From a Master Lensman
The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney in New York, along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles, include William Eggleston images in their permanent collections. His exhibitions roster is lengthy and his auction results are enviable, but the 85-year-old photographer’s dye-transfer printing process for photography that defined much of his career’s work is coming to an end. Thankfully, DAVID ZWIRNER’s exhibition, William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, offers an opportunity to see and acquire the final prints created using the analog process. As one of the last major groups of the artist’s photographs to be produced using this method, the show is a rare opportunity to experience images in the format he initially presented them in the 1970s. Works on view include pieces from his Outlands and Chromes series, along with several images first shown at his 1976 MoMA exhibition in New York. Developed by Kodak in the 1940s, the dye-transfer process, materials, and film were phased out in the early 1990s. Since then, Eggleston and specialists in the field Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli — who have printed the artist’s work for 25 years — have been acquiring these all-too-rare materials, using much of it to print these final images. Nov. 16, 2024–Feb. 1, 2025. 606 N. Western Ave., L.A.; 310-777-1993; davidzwirner.com. D.N.
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Pixel Play
The tools of the digital trade, including image-editing software, have sparked ongoing debates about altered text and visuals, but they’ve also launched a wave of ongoing creative experiments. LACMA’s Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film mines the matrix to explore the role of such innovations — from the 1980s onward — in photography, graphics, and visuals. The exhibition, assembled just as AI image generators emerge, includes 150 photographs, posters, videos, moving image files, and interactive software created by nearly 200 artists and designers. With the computer graphics of films or the distorted reality of photographs by Loretta Lux, the blurry lines between fact and fiction are established and explored. 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 323-857-6000; lacma.org. E.V.
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Deco Darling
The bold, vibrant, dramatic works by portraitist Tamara de Lempicka, the grande dame of art deco, have returned in a striking exhibition at the DE YOUNG MUSEUM 83 years after her first San Francisco gallery show. This sweeping survey, featuring more than 120 paintings and drawings as well as related fashion and decorative arts, is Lempicka’s first major U.S. retrospective. “One of Tamara’s lasting legacies is that she was truly a self-made woman, a self-made artist,” says the artist’s great-granddaughter, Marisa de Lempicka. “She was a true original.” famsf.org. C.B.
Feature image: Hockney’s five-sheet print titled 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed) is one of more than 240 works on display. PHOTO: David Hockney assisted by Jonathan Wilkinson.
Portions of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of C Magazine.
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