International Artist-in-Residence Exhibition
Sweet by Henry Taylor
Last year, the Los Angeles art scene enthusiastically welcomed The Mistake Room — a cultural institution devoted to facilitating “an international program of art and ideas” while empowering “the lives of practitioners of the imagination.” Those familiar with the mission of Artpace — a “laboratory of dreams” founded by the late artist and philanthropist Linda Pace — will likely see TMR director/chief curator Cesar Martinez as a natural fit for the SA institution’s revered International Artist-in-Residence program. As guest curator for the first IAIR exhibition of 2015, Martinez tapped London-based Colombian art star Oscar Murillo, theatrical Houstonite Autumn Knight and LA-based painter Henry Taylor. Dubbed by fans as a “21st-century Basquiat,” Murillo has been known to paint with a broomstick and scrawl words like “burrito” on his canvases, which have skyrocketed into six-figure territory in the recent past. An expected pick for Martinez, Murillo helped inaugurate TMR with a solo show that nodded to the site’s past life as a manufacturing facility. A trained drama therapist, Knight combines elements of performance, video and sculpture in multimedia projects that encourage discourse about emotional, racial and geographic boundaries. Honored in 2012 with a mid-career retrospective at MoMA PS1, Taylor has depicted prostitutes and drug dealers in his figurative yet folky paintings, but does not identify as an “outsider artist.” Free, 6-9pm (artists’ dialogue at 7pm) Thu, Artpace, 212-4900, artpace.org. — BR
