Harry Gould Harvey IV, “Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” (2025) at Put up-Truthful (all pictures Sigourney Schultz/Hyperallergic)
LOS ANGELES — Yesterday, I bypassed Frieze’s VIP opening and headed to 2 of the town’s various artwork festivals as an alternative: the Put up-Truthful and the Different Artwork Truthful. As the previous’s identify suggests, the brand new child on the truthful block addresses the exclusivity and privatization of typical artwork festivals by providing low-cost entry whereas internet hosting its 29 galleries and venture areas in Santa Monica’s repurposed Artwork Deco-style publish workplace. Later within the day, the Different Artwork Truthful opened for its thirteenth version in Los Angeles, presenting work by 140 unbiased artists who took heart stage and engaged with guests who may buy items instantly. Refreshingly, the one white cubes to be discovered have been floating in craft cocktails.
Sarah M. Rodriguez, “Cup of Everything, Germ of Nothing” (2024), introduced by Babst gallery
At Put up-Truthful, galleries occupied partitions alongside the house’s cavernous wood corridors. On the sales space of PPOW, artist Harry Gould Harvey IV accomplished a hero’s journey with 4 new large-scale works on view. Harvey transforms easy supplies — matte board and located wooden from deserted mansions — into ritual objects meant to translate esoteric religious literature into sources of non-public reflection. I used to be notably drawn to “Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” (2025), which Harvey defined has a direct tie to Los Angeles. On the work’s righthand facet, he included a Xerox switch of late artist Wallace Berman’s “Untitled” (c. 1967), a grid of pictures of a hand holding a transistor radio superimposed with symbolical mass-media photographs. Harvey’s tribute to the pivotal West Coast artist takes the type of a tombstone meant to imbue the work along with his constructive spirit.
Guests circled Dylan Spaysky’s three-dimensional hanging works, introduced by Good Climate gallery.
Guests circled Dylan Spaysky’s three-dimensional hanging works at Good Climate gallery’s presentation, admiring their a number of layers of framed mirrors backlit by night time lights with uncovered extension cords. Spaysky attracts inspiration from cel animation, a method popularized by Walt Disney animators within the Nineteen Thirties and a callback to Los Angeles’s movie historical past. Every mirror is embossed with overlapping characters or units from these early movies, reconsidering their contextual and literal building. Look intently at “1961 mirror” (2025), and also you would possibly spot Pongo and Perdita from the animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians — launched within the paintings’s titular 12 months.
Harlesden Excessive Road’s sales space displaying Angela Anh Nguyen’s gun-tufted textiles (left) and a Joseph Jones cat portray introduced by Ehrlich Steinberg (proper)
In the meantime, hanging from the partitions and adorning the flooring at Harlesden Excessive Road have been Angela Anh Nguyen’s gun-tufted textiles. The LA-based artist makes use of tufting — which she coincidentally realized via YouTube tutorials — to ponder the reflexive nature of American tradition wars exacerbated by on-line media. “I’ve been reading a lot of theory lately” (2023), for one, amusingly depicts a determine having misplaced a battle to a fallen bookcase awash in titles comparable to Das Kapital by Karl Marx, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and A Guide of Widespread Prayer by Joan Didion. As I meandered via the remainder of the displays, the ambiance was cheerful and curious, aided by the lengthy stretches of empty house that allowed for respiratory room between the artwork (and the guests).
Jess Lin (left) and Eden Miller (proper)
After a uncommon traffic-free drive again from Santa Monica, I equipped for the opening night time of the Different Artwork Truthful in Atwater Village. I had pretty conversations with a number of artists on the buzzing truthful, together with Eden Miller, who debuted work of liminal, dreamlike scenes with seraphim taking the form of blue-toned pelicans and winged fish. Down the corridor, I encountered Jess Lin’s works exploring her Taiwanese-American identification as an expat who grew up overseas. Her newer work, amongst them “Marina Martinis” and “Taroko Bao” (each 2024), unexpectedly mix childhood meals with Singaporean and Taiwanese cityscapes to create surreal but scrumptious compositions.
“The Play Pen,” curated by artist STVNDID at The Different Artwork Truthful
Along with the artist cubicles, the entrance room featured a two-person present: Within the Land of Gods and Monsters, curated by Feia Studio’s Thomas Martinez Pilnik and Jake Cavallo, who not too long ago raised cash for artists impacted by the January wildfires. Anna Marie Tendler, writer of Males Have Known as Her Loopy (2024), additionally held pop-up portrait images periods, whereas native artist Judy Baca debuted a mural titled “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” (2025) and artist STVNDID’s “The Play Pen” inspired guests to color in an interactive house.
Each the Different Artwork Truthful and Put up-Truthful are billed as “alternative” reveals — another choice, maybe much less stodgy, exterior of the blue-chip circuit. Nevertheless you select to label them, although, these festivals shared an air of energetic jubilation as neighborhood members got here collectively to assist the true stars of the present: artists.
