Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Mariah Green, Vanessa Perez Winder, Jas Keimig, and Sam Wrigglesworth pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast. This week, VW editors Amelia and Ella are popping in with a couple picks too.
Mariah Green’s pick
Fernanda Durazo featured in The Space Zine’s Land Issue
In the past 100 years, San Bernardino, Redlands, Riverside, and Bloomington (all within the Inland Empire in Southern California) have transformed under the influence of warehouse developments occupying through Black and brown neighborhoods and communities. Areas that were once home to schools, local businesses, and strong support systems are now claimed by warehouses with few original buildings remaining.
Local documentary artist Fernanda “Bloomington Girl” Durazo captures her rapidly changing hometown and the cultural and health implications of gentrification. Beyond displacement, the diminishing air quality, constant traffic, smog, and headaches are now everpresent in her community. Amazon’s footprint is apparent in her images — capturing the in-between stages of expansions against symbols of the past.
WE DESERVE BETTER AIR QUALITY IN THE INLAND EMPIRE. WE DESERVE TO LOOK TO THE MOUNTAINS WITHOUT FIRST SEEING A WAREHOUSE
Reflection:
How have warehouses affected you?
Do you want a warehouse in your backyard? Next to your school?
How can we imagine past the smog?
Amelia’s pick:
Xican–a.o.x. Body
The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, Riverside CA
June 17, 2023 to January 7, 2024
There are a lot of terrible examples of celebrities getting involved in the art world. Hunter Biden comes to mind. Kim Gordon. Sylvester Stallone. But one silver screen hero transformed his love of art and culture into something that has become profoundly generative and — this is the rare part — actually has meaningful programming. That person is Cheech Marin.
The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum has fascinated me since I first found out about it a few months ago (I’m late to the game, it launched in June 2022). Marin has been a huge supporter and collector of Chicano art and culture for years, and that love is now realized in a physical addition to the Riverside Art Museum. “The Cheech” occupies a renovated mid-century building that originally opened as the City of Riverside’s public library in 1964.
One of the shows on view is Xican–a.o.x. Body, which claims to add complexity to understandings of Chicanx art and culture by exploring the visual practices that foreground the body as the site in which imagination and political enunciation are articulated.
I’ve been thinking a lot about being in a brown body and what it means to be “brown enough,” and I desperately wish I could see this show to experience how the artists are reconciling the embodiment of Mexican, Mexican American, and Xicanx life. For me, being mixed means never feeling enough of anything but also feeling like too many things. Artists are particularly good at finding ways to articulate these sticky psychological states.
Reflection: How do you untangle your identity?
Ella’s pick:
Annie Pendergrast: Burning Peduncles and Potato Chip Portals
Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles CA
January 14 to March 11, 2024
Opening reception: January 14, 4 – 8 PM
My dad recently gifted me his original copy of Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. I know some people think this album is a stinker and far too weird for an educational documentary about the life cycles of seeds and fungi, but I’m a firm believer that vegetation art should be freaky — embodying the mystical and complex qualities of plants and our planet.
Annie Pendergrast’s exhibition Burning Peduncles and Potato Chip Portals at Shoot the Lobster Los Angeles presents a series of gouache paintings that depict the artist’s post apocalyptic approach to rendering the “otherworldly sentience” of Earth.
While some pieces lean further into abstraction — tending to the interaction of radioactive lime green semi-circles against a ground of fluorescent orange stripes — Pendergrast’s flowers present an unavoidable truth about the future of our planet. Bursting through cracked ground like coiled LED tubing against gradient skies that recall Ellsworth Kelly’s hard edge paintings, there’s something both alluring and ominous about these images.
The natural world is straining against capitalism-fueled climate change, morphing before our eyes and Pendergrast envisions a world where the flora outlives us all.
Reflection: What is your relationship to nature? How has it changed over the years and how do you think it will change in the future?