Although it is important to recognize the personal context of her work, the repeated emphasis on Becker’s psychiatric health denies a much more expansive reading of her practice, which presented us with a mode of producing space for the self that not only emerged from internal struggle, but from the specific conditions of living in Los Angeles in the 1990s and beyond. It reveals a precarious way of being, born from a city which was—and still is—unwelcoming to the survival of artists.

By the time they were graduating from CalArts in 1999, Robby Herbst and his classmates were speculating about what would come after postmodernism... was it post-postmodernism? The idea that postmodernism was just a temporary stage to new modernisms felt exciting because it meant the past never really subsides, despite being constantly historicized. So, for his thesis show that May, he carved a large foam sculpture in which the years 1968 and 1999 were '69ing. Herbst, co-founder of the Journal and Aesthetics and Protest and initiator of the Llano Del Rio Collective, looks back at the collective approach to art and publishing that developed among him and his peers in the late '90s and '00s.

Since the 1990s Amy Adler has used film stills and photographs (her own as well as found) as the basis for her work, methodically drawing the existing images, most often in pastel. In the careful construction of her compositions, she stages scenes that buzz with a dynamic charge, even when depicting only a single figure. Jordan Karney Chaim examines Adler’s career, and its evolving relationship with images over decades.