Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Sabrina Gschwandtner: Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice
Shoshanna Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
November 1, 2025–January 10th, 2026
Gschwandtner treats old film strips like long pieces of fabric, carefully sewing along the perforated edges to create large quilts from vintage celluloid. She mounts these pieces to light boxes, which allow people to study the narrative that plays out in long, diagonal strides. She also enhances her compositions by hand-painting additional color onto the film, cementing her into the history of women’s labor. In the early 20th century, one of the few roles women could have in the film industry was that of a colorist. They would painstakingly add tints and dyes to tiny, 35 mm film strips to create special effects.
In this newest body of work, Gschwandtner pays special attention to two early films directed by women, a rarity for the era. Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 film “Madame’s Cravings” follows a pregnant woman fighting her unhealthy cravings for tobacco, alcohol, and sugary foods. Mary Breckinridge’s documentary, “The Forgotten Frontier” (1931), follows midwives and nurses working in her Frontier Nursing Service, who reached the corners of Appalachia by horseback to provide healthcare to rural women. These film quilts are Gschwandtner’s way of grappling with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reckoning with what it means for reproductive health to take a step backward.
Reflection: What do you consider “women’s work”?
MONUMENTS
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, Los Angeles, CA
October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026
This fall, MONUMENTS will be the most talked about show in Los Angeles and will likely be cemented into art school syllabi for years to come. When Confederate statues began coming down across the country—first in 2015, after the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, and then steadily over the next decade following events like the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march in 2017 and George Floyd’s murder in 2020—I expected these pieces to go into municipal storage, be donated to history museums, or find their way into white supremacists’s personal art collections via the black market. It did not occur to me that a statue of Stonewall Jackson would be given to artist Kara Walker, hacked to pieces, and rearranged into an ugly chimera that more accurately depicts his vile spirit.
While Walker got to have her way with a monument at The Brick, the nine others are placed throughout the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, juxtaposed next to new commissions and borrowed pieces from primarily Black artists. In one room, Andres Serrano’s seemingly sympathetic portraits of Ku Klux Klan members are mounted just a few feet away from a toppled statue of Jefferson Davis, which is ablaze in fluorescent pink paint. Together, it’s giving “you reap what you sow.”
Reflection: How would you get revenge?