Writing to artists we can’t stop thinking about
Love Letter to Anthony White
It’s hard not to call Anthony White a painter. He masterfully composes opulent still life paintings of mass-produced objects and icons, evoking sensations of nostalgia and guilt.
Love Letter to La Chica Boom
Don’t be scared. If you have difficulties reading Xandra Ibarra’s work, and subsequently, shy away from engaging with it—it’s okay, she wants to be incoherent.
Love Letter to Etel Adnan
Lebanese artist Etel Adnan details the Mount Tamalpais’ shifting moods and feelings. Adnan’s assorted portraits record a loved one over decades; she bears witness.
Love Letter to Maria Maea
Maria Maea uses palm fronds to create sculptures and installations, weaving them together into something new.
Love Letter to Anida Yoeu Ali
Anida Yoeu Ali brings the strange and wonderful to familiar spaces through performance art.
Love Letter to Kacy Jung
Kacy Jung spins professional nihilism into artistic inspiration. Biomedical Ph.D. student turned full-time artist, Jung proves that you should quit your day job.
Love Letter to Toby Bluth
Before Disney ever introduced family-friendly gay characters, Bluth used the saccharine visual language of his employer to create a queer fantasy world of his own.
Love Letter to Ben Cuevas
Fiber sculptures explore gendered constructs, feminist ideologies, and the restraints of the body.
Love Letter to Julie Green
An Oregon-based educator and artist inspires her students to find beauty in everything.
Love Letter to Kenjiro Nomura
A Seattle-based painter captures 1930s Seattle, Japanese Internment, grief, loss, and recovery—all with his brush.
Love Letter to Essie Somma
A painter challenges the traditional approach to classical painting through vice, intimacy, and the quotidian.
Love Letter to Jeannene Przyblyski
A Bay Area-based educator inspired students to look harder, ask deeper questions, and to take a stand.
Love Letter to Carlson Hatton
A Los Angeles-based painter’s ripples in time on canvas immerse his viewers in another world.
Love Letter to Jessie Homer French
Paintings for the end of the world made in the middle of nowhere.
Love Letter to Lawrence Oliver iii
A Portland-based artist layers personal narratives in whimsical sculptures.
FROM THE ARCHIVES | Love Letter to Patricia Hagen
A Port Townsend-based painter ponders the simultaneity of life and death in her portraits of stumps.
FROM THE ARCHIVES | Love Letter to Pauline Oliveros
Over the next few weeks, the VW team is looking back and highlighting some of our favorite pieces.
Love Letter to Tee Corinne
Through an activist lens, a photographer makes lesbian sexuality visible, allowing others to imagine new futures for themselves.
Love Letter to Yukiyo Kawano
A third-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) explores the DNA of grief, violence, pain, and generational trauma via sculpture.
Love Letter to Patty Gone
An homage to art that shatters academic and “High Art” facades of elitism with the everyday.
Love Letter to Torbjørn Rødland
A Norwegian-born artist casts light onto the strangeness of beauty in the US.
Love Letter to Gillian Theobald
Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, this Seattle-based painter captures the depths and textures of daydreams.
Love Letter to Frank Paletta
A spinal cord injury survivor’s bold, expressive brushstrokes marry the essence art making and living.
Love Letter to Patricia Hagen
A Port Townsend-based painter ponders the simultaneity of life and death in her portraits of stumps.
Love Letter to Suzanne Shifflett
A Long Beach-based painter subverts the fetishization of the female body through bold portraits.
Love Letter to Anna Valdez
An artist’s use of color breathes new life into normal, everyday scenes.
Love Letter to Roberto Benavidez
Explore the inner lives of inanimate sculpture in this Love Letter to an artist, whose work teeters on that delicate line between life and lifelessness.
Love Letter to Kindah Khalidy
A weird, whimsical painter inspires an artist in lockdown to pick up the brush once more.
Love Letter to Nancy Rubins
An L.A.-based sculptor defies gravity, formality, and convention in her monumental practice.
Love Letter to Alicia McCarthy
An painter uses her brush to dig deep into Californian culture and excavate meaning.
Love Letter to Pamela Weir-Quiton
A woodmaker leans into disorientation, offering insight into a moment that feels otherwise aimless.
Love Letter to Joey Veltkamp
Seattle-based textile artist’s “soft paintings” merge subtlety and protest, queering the familiar and undermining the normal.
Love Letter to Huguette Caland
From Lebanon to Los Angeles, this striking artist pushed cultural boundaries to carve out a space for her bold and unique, abstract landscapes.
Love Letter to Beatrice Wood
An Ojai-based potter rejects expectations to bring newly vibrant life to her work.
Love Letter to Juliana Giraffe
L.A.-based artist and musician inspires fearlessness through song, film, and canvas.
Love Letter to Tahnee Lonsdale
As we emerge from isolation, an L.A. painter contemplates the boundaries between the world and the self.
Love Letter to Paige Smith
Crystalline urban sculptures remind us that the earth has something to say.
Love Letter to Alex Schaefer
In an ode to LA, a painter blends his sardonic cityscapes with capitalist critique.
Love Letter to Margaret Kilgallen
A San Francisco street artist teaches men to be better femimists.
Love Letter to Anne Carmack
Santa Monica-based painter cracks open the ordinary, starting a conversation between image and language, seen and unseen.
Love Letter to Rick Bartow
Examining identity, struggle, and trauma through vivid and chaotic abstraction.
Love Letter to Alexa Grambush
An LA-based painter’s evocative, abstract works explore the mysterious nature of being alive.
Love Letter to Rachelle Mendez
An LA-based photographer’s vivid portraits of suburban Southern California.
Love Letter to Nathaniel Dorsky
A San Francisco filmmaker’s intimate vision of the city.
Love Letter to Linda Litteral
Processing trauma through painting and sculpture.
Love Letter to Eel Costello
A time lapse video of portrait in process reveals the painting’s emotional undercurrents.
Love Letter to Andrea Zittel
On finding comfort in simplicity.
Love Letter to Laetitia Sonami
Sparkling aural textures tangle with a narrative of tragedies and triumphs.
Love Letter to Katherine Sherwood
Providing space and care for people with disabilities through references to historical painting.
Love Letter to Bernice Bing
On falling in love with a painter through one photograph.
Love Letter to Mabel McKay
Intricate baskets blur the line between functional objects and artistry.
Love Letter to Norma Cole
Marvelous and strange drawings pose questions about the visual world.
Love Letter to Yoko Kubrick
Abstracting myths and archetypes in evocative marble.
Love Letter to Natalie Krick
A new blue is just one of the reasons to love Krick’s latest series.
Love Letter to Ron Athey
On the radical queer embodiment of Ron Athey’s performances.
Love Letter to Bean Gilsdorf
The stiff gravitas of US politicians made floppy and satirical.
Love Letter to Dr. Qinqin Liu
Painting California’s watersheds as a way to cope with the climate crisis.
Love Letter to Katherine Ace
Exploring fantastical and surreal subjects in masterful portraits.
Love Letter to Laida Lertxundi
The pleasure of finding ways to describe a filmmaker’s roving vision.
Love Letter to Luke Chueh
On feeling guilty enjoying a Luke Chueh painting.
Love Letter to Betye Saar
Betye Saar’s found object assemblages visualize the possibility of liberation.
Love Letter to Jazmin Anita
The power of Black women portraying themselves as diverse and beautiful.
Love Letter to Pauline Oliveros
Listening to music as an act of kinship.
Love Letter to Pace Taylor
Conflicting desires in fields of soft pastel and leaden graphite details
Love Letter to jayy dodd
A glitchy, intimate escape during quarantine questions value systems