Hayley Barker’s paintings depict landscapes of gardens and homes she visits and inhabits, works which render the texture and movement of the natural world as something that is not only seen, but lived in. Influenced by tarot and earth-based spirituality, her early practice as a performance artist, and feminist artists such as Ana Mendieta, Hayley's work offers a fresh perspective in contemporary landscape painting. Sóla Saar Agustsson recently spoke with Hayley about the evolution of her artistic and spiritual practice, and "Laguna Castle," her solo exhibition at Night Gallery in February 2023.

Maurice Tuchman, LACMA’s first curator (1964–1993) of 20th century art, remains an outsized figure in the history of art in Los Angeles. Known for a legacy both controversial and groundbreaking, his most well known exhibitions—Art and Technology (1971), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (1986), and Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992)—continue to resonate today. The following conversation looks more deeply into Tuchman’s motivations for staging the Spiritual in Art exhibition, his struggles to realize it, its reception, and the continued influence and controversy of “the spiritual in art” today.

I tried to write an essay about David Hockney and Rodney King once, before King passed away. While doing research, I became obsessed by a particular painting that Hockney had created of a Beverly Hills housewife. Painted one year after the 1966 Watts riots, Hockney's housewife gazes idly outside the range of the portrait. She is miles away from the action, likely captured at a different time of year, but I want badly to imagine that she can hear the sound of sirens. I wish that she could at least smell the smoke.

Graffiti sprayed across the entrance of Nicodim Gallery in Boyle Heights, 2016, photo: Liz O. Baylen, Los Angeles Times Perhaps we ought to think of painting as a ghetto waiting to be gentrified. —Walead Beshty, “The Whiteness of the Whale”1 High on the…