Art and Politics

Nikki Maloof working in a larger scale in Caught and Free at Jack Hanley Gallery. Gallery Link

In the back room, beautiful watercolor studies for the paintings.

Also pencil drawings showing clear and consistent vision based in value and patterning.

At Lyles & King a gorgeous survey of Mira Schor's California paintings, when she attended Cal Arts and participated in the epic Feminist Art Program. Gallery Link

These works on paper have never been shown, but Schor visited painter and at -the-time instructor Tom Knechtel's art history course at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1983 or 4, when I was a student there, and she showed this painting. I never forgot those palm fronds.

The power of landscape to alter vision is inescapable, and I love that about this show.

A more recent painting, emblematic of the work Schor makes now, which derives from her cultural history, current politics, and sketchbooks.

A work from the Wet period (Wet is a seminal compilation of essays written by Schor in the 1990s, which I and many others refer to, to this day). This show just opened. Don't miss it!

Heading north on Chrystie to Frosch & Portmann is Elise Ensler's Diary of a Radio Junkie, 1237 days' recording of the news in small watercolor mono-and multi-chromes and pencil drawings. Gallery Link 

When Ensler left the project for a brief vacation, she invited colleagues to substitute! Here, Leslie Kerby.

Judith Simonian, top left.

This is just the smallest detail of the 1237 drawings (Engler just posted she is adding more!)

Judith Page.

The biggest surprise of the show is memory: how quickly we forget text, how image resurrects events, and how much has happened.