Journalism
Pushing the Boundaries of Gender Performance
From Aperture, October 19, 2016: Spanning over eighty years of photographs, an exhibition explores the gender non-conforming potential of the word “they.” The singular gender-neutral pronoun “they” was named word of the year in 2016. Judging from the social and...
Sam Richardson from ‘VEEP’ on TV’s Hottest Political Sitcom
From Maxim, May 9, 2016: The hit HBO series regular talks Julia Louis-Dreyfus and his upcoming Comedy Central show. It’s hard to hate a do-gooder who is charmingly oblivious. Take Richard Splett, played by Sam Richardson plays on HBO's hit political cringe comedy...
Actor and Comedian John Early is Taking Over All Your Screens
From Maxim, May 21, 2016: Look for him in Seth Rogen's new 'Neighbors 2.' John Early is literally on fire — there are more flames coming off of him than a young Divine in Pink Flamingos. The young actor-comedian is everywhere—from scoring a Netflix Special titled The...
Skewering clichés in Ellen von Unwerth’s erotic Bavarian wonderland
From CNN, March 3, 2017: Milk the cows. Churn the butter. Chop the wood. These farmland chores sound boring as all hell until they're re-envisioned as a campy Bavarian fantasy in "Heimat," a series by German photographer Ellen von Unwerth. The photos have been...
Bug Out
From The New Inquiry, August 30, 2016: What’s crawling underneath the fantasy of an insect-free home? WE who live in homes still strive for them to be bug-free, or at least occupied by as few bugs as possible. The proliferation of exterminators and other “pest...
Joe Cool
From The New Inquiry, March 2, 2016: Why isn’t the popular grocery store Trader Joe’s on social media? TODAY’S consumerism is riddled with elaborate and often meaningless choices: Which brand of pasta should you buy? Would that be best with Ragu, Amy’s Organic, or...
The Women Behind Netflix’s Girlboss Share How You Can Start Being the Boss of Your Own Life / GLAMOUR
When Charlize Theron read Sophia Amoruso’s memoir, #Girlboss, about the eBay entrepreneur’s unconventional approach to starting the Nasty Gal empire, it wasn’t the author’s history of dumpster diving or her rebellious attitude that drew Theron in. No, “every page was...
The Queer Art that Helped Define Post-Blackness – Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — “Post-black” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, though its meaning is not totally fixed. In Derek Conrad Murray’s book Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights, he argues that the intersectionality of...
Show Me the Money! Collective Fundraises for Pyramid to House 14,000 ‘Jerry Maguire’ Tapes / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — In an alt-facts world that gets more bizarre with every passing day of this new administration, absurdist art that plays on America’s obsession with entertainment provides temporary comic relief. “The Jerry Maguire Video Store” at iam8bit gallery was one...
An Online Project Shames Selfie-Takers at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial / Hyperallergic
World War II ended more than 70 years ago, but the horrors of the Holocaust (or Shoah, in Hebrew) have not receded from historical memory. Yet for some reason, there’s a disconnect when it comes to social media culture. Many people casually visit Holocaust memorial...
A Leimert Park Performance Artist Weaves Together Social Media and South L.A. History / LA Weekly
Jasmine Nyende was 12 years old when she started fiddling with her family's video camera. These early experiments inadvertently chronicle her childhood in Leimert Park, a neighborhood that's seen a lot of change in the past decade or so. Now 23, the performance artist...
LA Artists Raised $100K for the ACLU — Now What? / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — “Amplify Compassion” may be the best name for an art sale to benefit the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during a time when the President himself utterly lacks compassion, managing only occasionally to shout “Sad!” at the end of random tweets. Over...
An Artist Reinvents Herself to Mine the Fictions of America / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — In the lead-up to a Trump presidency, the worst possible outcome for an America that has come so far in the past 100 years in terms of social progress and civil rights, it’s not insane to think that conservatives could take us back to a pre–Roe v. Wade...
The Year That Was and Wasn’t 2016 / The Morning News
Me and many other fantastic writers were invited to contribute my thoughts on the most important and least important events of 2016 for The Morning News. Check out what I said below, and read thoughts from other wonderful writers on this post:...
An L.A. Art Show Was the Backdrop for a Major Discussion About the Future of Standing Rock / LA Weekly
“April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain,” T.S. Eliot writes in his epic poem, "The Wasteland." This poem couldn’t have predicted the start of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests...
Artists’ Fascination with the Soft, Tingling Sensations of ASMR / Hyperallergic
Sometimes we all just want someone’s gentle, soothing voice whispering in our ear that it’s all going to be okay, or we long to hear some meditative, relaxing sounds that induce calming sensations.ASMR, or “autonomous sensory meridian response,” offers these types of...
Pushing the Boundaries of Gender Performance / APERTURE
Spanning over eighty years of photographs, an exhibition explores the gender non-conforming potential of the word “they.” The singular gender-neutral pronoun “they” was named word of the year in 2016. Judging from the social and historical depth of photography and...
How Akbar Has Managed to Stay Open — and Relevant — for 20 Years in a Gentrifying Neighborhood / LA Weekly
Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, long before it was a hipster haven replete with cheese stores and upscale coffee shops, Silver Lake was a center for L.A.’s gay leather community. That all began changing in the ‘90s, and the chipping away at that subculture has continued...
‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette’ Could Break Down Ideas About Monogamy / MEL Magazine
Could reality TV open up a real conversation about relationships? During the last season of The Bachelorette, 25-year-old bachelorette JoJo Fletcher was overwhelmed. The physical intimacy she experienced in the Fantasy Suite — the only private moment offered to...
Nikita Gale: Place is the Space is the Place / Art21 Magazine
Born in Alaska, Nikita Gale spent her formative years in Atlanta before attending Yale University, where she studied anthropology and archaeology. But she always had a sense that she’d end up making art. A turning point occurred during her last undergraduate semester,...
‘Feminist Fairytales’ hilariously reawakens your childhood inner rage / Daily Dot
Deeply hidden away in every American is a memory of some fairytale they first heard as a child—and those standards of Eurocentric beauty are haunting. Actor/comedian Sarah Ann Masse is the American half of British-American sketch comedy duo, We Are Thomasse. Her...
Bug Out / The New Inquiry
What’s crawling underneath the fantasy of an insect-free home? WE who live in homes still strive for them to be bug-free, or at least occupied by as few bugs as possible. The proliferation of exterminators and other “pest control” companies like Orkin position bugs as...
Issa Rae’s long road from YouTube to HBO / Daily Dot
Issa Rae is in post-production for her forthcoming HBO show Insecure, set to bereleased on Oct. 9. But the breakthrough star is also working on a million other projects. A girl’s gotta stay busy. She is best known for her popular webseriesAwkward Black Girl, which...
‘The Book of Ye’ podcast explores all-things Kanye / DailyDot Upstream
To many, Kanye West is a mystery. To others, he’s a genius. Is his infamous Twitter presence performance art, or nonsense more in line with his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” line? You're along for a bumpy ride either way. West and his wife Kim Kardashian West are...
The New Inquiry Vol. 54: Bugs
AS we write this, an ant is crawling on our forearm. More than any other non-human lifeform, bugs of any size — the term can refer to a virus, bacterium, or arthropod — challenge the serenity of life under human command, which in the anthropocene means nearly all...
Funny Feelings / Real Life Magazine
“The stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed.” — Erving Goffman,The Performance of Self in Everyday Life In putting us behind screens, social media can seem as though they put us in...
New webseries ‘Swapped’ messes with Hollywood gender dynamics / DailyDot Entertainment
Women comprise only 7 percent of directors in the 250 top-grossing films of all time, according to a Variety study. While Hollywood catches up, artists with a clear vision of the future are taking it upon themselves to do what they do best: Make a lean, mean, parody...
6 Male Artists Making Inspiring Feminist Work / Hyperallergic
We all know about the terrible gender disparity in the art world. As ladies, we live with systemic sexism on a daily basis. We are reminded of the art world’s sexism by investigations like Micol Hebron’s findings that women (here we speak only of gender not even...
A Miniature Version of the Broad Museum Parodies the Art World / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — Scott Marvel Cassidy’s art makes viewers do a double take. Stylistically, his paintings are located somewhere between realism and magical realism, and this sense is only heightened when his work takes on three dimensions. In his new project “Levitate the...
You can now officially transform into Tinder meat / DailyDot IRL
If you’ve ever had the thought, “Ugh, I feel like a piece of meat!” while swiping on Tinder, rest assured that you are not alone in this meatspace. Others feel your pain—though, chances are, they’d like to feel your flesh, too. To cope with this dichotomy, there’s...