Ayin Es (born July 20, 1968) is a self-taught visual artist, writer, musician (drummer), and book artist from Los Angeles, California. They have written articles for Coagula Art Journal [1] and the Huffington Post. [2] As a musician, they played for 20 years as an R&B drummer touring and recording drums with various artists. They played drums on Rickie Lee Jones' Ghostyhead album in 1997.
Their artists' books are featured in the J. Paul Getty Trust Research Institute Library in Los Angeles, [3] National Museum of Women in the Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and also in prominent university collections such as the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University Library, UC Irvine, Otis College of Art & Design, [4] and the UCLA Library Special Collections.
Es' mixed media paintings have exhibited at the Riverside Art Museum, [5] Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum. [6]
Es is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship Award, [7] two Durfee Foundation ARC Grants, and was awarded the 2014 Wynn Newhouse Award. [8]
As a visual artist, Es is known for creating personal narratives. They have used past experience to fuel their subject matter, transforming a broken history into a positive and spiritual resolve. Candid experiences are laid bare and forged directly into their paintings, drawings, soft sculptures, mixed media installations, and handmade books. In 2015, Los Angeles Art Critic Peter Frank wrote: "An autodidact, Es has long embodied [their] interests and [their] struggles - in painted and drawn and even sculpted and sewn imagery - darkly whimsical forms and figures whose deft fluidity have the eye 'going for a walk with a line' (in the words of Paul Klee, who strongly influenced Es) but aggressively trouble the mind." [9]
In 2010, Los Angeles art critic A. Moret wrote: "The viewer activates the past as Es rewrites the story by mending a broken history and constructing a new narrative. ... Es has transformed the past that once plagued [their] existence into [their] raison d' être." [10]
Es' artwork has been reviewed in LA Weekly , [11] Artillery Magazine, [12] Art LTD, [13] ArtScene Magazine, [14] Whitehot Magazine, [15] Jewish Journal, [16] the Huffington Post, [17] ArtNowLA, [18] and in a 2022 VoyageLA interview. [19] They have been represented by Shulamit Gallery in Venice, California, and George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles and are currently represented by Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Ayin published their memoir, Shrapnel in the San Fernando Valley in April 2019 for which they won the Bruce Geller Memorial Prize, [20] and were interviewed in LA Weekly . [21]
In 2021, the artist came out as transqueer/nonbinary and changed their name to Ayin. [22]
Danielle Eubank is an American oil painter and expedition artist with a studio in Los Angeles, known for her paintings of bodies of water, as well as One Artist Five Oceans, in which she sailed and painted all of the world's oceans to raise awareness about climate change. All her artwork is done in an environmentally responsible manner, with high quality environmentally friendly materials. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2014–2015.
Robert Standish is an American artist.
Peter Solomon Frank is an American art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles. Frank is known for curating shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the 1970s and 1980s. He has worked curatorially for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and many other national and international venues.
Noah Becker is an American and Canadian artist, writer, publisher of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, and jazz saxophonist who lives and works in New York City and Vancouver Island. He has written for Art in America Magazine, Canadian Art Magazine, VICE, Interview Magazine, The Guardian UK and the Huffington Post.
Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
RIVERA & RIVERA is a contemporary art gallery in West Hollywood, California, owned by Carlos A. Rivera.
Jennifer Vanderpool is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. In her work "there is a chipper cynicism to the retro character of the figures, buildings, fashions, and patterns, so that there is certainly a sense of tradition, yet there is also a sense of transference and surrealism."
Anthony Ausgang is an artist and writer born in Pointe-à-Pierre, Trinidad and Tobago in 1959 who lives and works in Los Angeles. Ausgang is a principal painter associated with the lowbrow art movement, one of "the first major wave of lowbrow artists" to show in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. The protagonists of his paintings are cats -- "psychedelic, wide eyed, with a kind of evil look in their eyes".
Cole Sternberg is an American visual artist. Sternberg's primary medium is painting. The artist also has works in: photography, sculpture, room installations and film. Cole Sternberg Paintings, a hardcover book released in 2008 features six years of his painting. The 162 page book is listed as the first public release of Sternberg's work. Subsequent work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.
Wendy White is an American artist from Deep River, Connecticut who lives and works in New York City.
Patricia Anne Smith, known professionally as Alexis Smith, was an American visual artist. She worked in collage and installation.
Siri Kaur is an artist/photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles, where she also serves as associate professor at Otis College of Art and Design. She received an MFA in photography from California Institute of the Arts in 2007, an MA in Italian studies in 2001 from Smith College/Universita’ di Firenze, Florence, Italy, and BA in comparative literature from Smith College in 1998. Kaur was the recipient of the Portland Museum of Art Biennial Purchase Prize in 2011. She regularly exhibits and has had solo shows at Blythe Projects and USC's 3001 galleries in Los Angeles, and group shows at the Torrance Museum of Art, California Institute of Technology, and UCLA’s Wight Biennial. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, art ltd., The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post, and is housed in the permanent collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maine.
Travis Collinson is a visual artist whose paintings take elements from photographs and sketches and reinterpret them at larger scale.
Anthony Hernandez is an American photographer who divides his time between Los Angeles, his birthplace, and Idaho. His photography has ranged from street photography to images of the built environment and other remains of civilization, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as evidence of human presence. He has spent most of his career photographing in Los Angeles and environs. "It is L.A.'s combination of beauty and brutality that has always intrigued Hernandez." La Biennale di Venezia said of Hernandez, "For the past three decades a prevalent question has troubled the photographer: how to picture the contemporary ruins of the city and the harsh impact of urban life on its less advantaged citizens?" His wife is the novelist Judith Freeman.
Abel Alejandre is a Mexican-born, United States-based hyperrealist artist, best known for his explorations of masculinity and vulnerability. Working primarily in pencil, Alejandre creates cross-hatched drawings which can sometimes take months to complete. Alejandre's series of twelve panels, "Panoramas," is featured at the Los Angeles Metro Rancho Park/Westwood station.
Sherin Guirguis is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, California. Guirguis has had solo exhibitions of her work at 18th Street Art Center, The Third Line Gallery (Dubai), Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, and LAXART. In 2012, Guirguis received the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and the 2014–15 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship.
Chase Langford is a Los Angeles–based American contemporary painter known for his paintings, inspired by geography and maps.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. For 15 years he was a freelance arts writer and Lead Art Critic for LA Weekly and during his tenure there was considered “one of the most important voices on art in the city” by editor Tom Christie, "an art critic who is read all over the country, is smart, snappy, original, has an independent open eye, a quick wit, is not boring and never academic" by New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz, and "a master of the unexpected chain-reaction of thought" by Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times critic Christopher Knight.
Michael Maloney is a Los Angeles-based art appraiser and art dealer. He owned and operated the Michael Maloney Gallery in Santa Monica, California (1985–90) and Maloney Fine Art in Culver City, California (2006–16), and since 1998 has pursued a career as an art appraiser and private dealer in Los Angeles and New York.
Mat Gleason is an American-born author and curator.