http://www.laweekly.com/news/features/state-of-the-art-05/175/
L.A. Weekly, October 28-November 3, 2005
State of the Art ‘05
Special Arts Issue
Tyler Stallings
Tyler Stallings is a thinking man’s curator with an inquisitive eye for popular
culture. His shows are intelligent without being academic; ambitious without
being haughty; and playful,
when appropriate, without being flippant. In his tenure as chief curator (and
formerly director of programs) at the Laguna Art Museum, he’s helped to elevate
what might have happily remained a pleasant, provincial, small-town institution
into one of the most valuable — and refreshing — arts centers in
Southern California.
The artists he’s showcased solo — Deborah Aschheim, Sandow Birk, Simon Leung,
Rubén Ortiz Torres, Kara Walker and Robert Williams, among others — are
expansive thinkers, often politically minded and adept at the manipulation of
boundaries. Group shows like “Whiteness: A Wayward Construction” (2003) and
“Cyborg Manifesto, or the Joy of Artifice” (2001) reflect similar concerns on an
ambitious, if occasionally unwieldy, scale. The boundary play, in particular,
comes to the fore in his accessible but still rigorous surveys of popular
culture: “Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing” (2002), “Margaret Keane and
Keanabilia” (2000) and “Grind: The Culture and Graphics f Skateboarding” (1995).
In addition to curating and writing, Stallings is also an artist — his
eloquently unsettling paintings showed at Newspace last year — and he brings an
artist’s sensitivity to all of his many endeavors, making him a salient presence
on the Southern California scene. (HM)
