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.
For All the Ghosts: Kristofferson San Pablo
UCR Arts, Riverside, CA
November 23, 2025–April 12, 2026
Art museums often draw a line between high culture and pop culture, and curators tend to avoid showcasing the latter unless there’s a critique that undermines its commercial value. That’s why it’s surprising and exciting to see the Culver Center for the Arts give Kristofferson San Pablo a solo exhibition that earnestly celebrates real and fictional icons like Danny DeVito, Tony Soprano, and Hank Hill.
The artist, who shines in colored pencil, graphite, oil, and acrylic, obsessively recreates his favorite moments from television, sports, and tabloid news. He keeps the scenes fresh with short, quick lines that emphasize texture, which also resuscitates emotion behind the gazes of dead-eyed celebrities. You can tell that San Pablo is driven by the romance of nostalgia, and that his references to The Simpsons or Home Alone are also a way to depict a typical childhood in the Inland Empire. In the suburbs, when your only mode of transport is a skateboard, the high life of Los Angeles—so close, yet so out of reach!—must be consumed through fuzzy broadcasts reigned in by the TV antennae. San Pablo draws like he’s taming that static reception.
Though there’s no shortage of references from the 90s and early aughts, San Pablo is also quick to capture fleeting memes and news. He was able to produce a drawing of the Astronomer CEO’s Coldplay cheating moment before the couple could spill their defense to People. Don’t be surprised if San Pablo sneaks in some new, timely drawings of 2025’s most cringeworthy moments into the exhibition.
Reflection: What makes you feel nostalgic?
Images: Tanya Brodsky
Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles, CA
November 22, 2025–January 3, 2026
Brodsky is fascinated with the mechanics of everyday infrastructure. Through sculpture and installation, she has dissected steel girding, grates, and support brackets. A recent fixation on keychains has rabbit-holed into another obsession: door handles.
Brodsky dusts off her drawing skills to understand these devices’ interlocking machinations, reverse-engineering their structure through depictions of their ornate hardware store displays. While Brodsky hasn’t yet fallen into the realm of technical drawing, she seems to be inching closer to the discipline with a piece that reproduces notes on computation paper. Her drawing of a drawing depicts clusters of “X”s marching across a grid, plotting the rhythm of a kinetic sculpture placed just a few feet away, directly atop the gallery floor.
The nearby sculpture animates a doorknob display stand. With keys inserted, the knobs slowly turn on their own, unlocking and locking into nowhere. Brodsky refers to the piece as an animatronic rather than a machine, implying that the hardware is an animal instead of an object. What would it mean if all our infrastructure were alive, if the tubes and guts that make up the mechanism were actual vital organs?
Reflection: What charms do you have on your keyring?
—Renée Reizman