by Matt Stromberg
March 30, 2025

This month, we recommend shows by several artists who provide singular, visionary, and radical ways of viewing the world — and imagining new ones. Madam X’s enigmatic diagrams on view at the Philosophical Research Society draw on myriad spiritual traditions to wrestle with the weight of existence, while Ramekon O’Arwisters’s tangled and knotted constructions reflect the complexities of his lived experience as a queer Black man in America. Carole Caroompas reworks a beloved 19th-century novel as an exuberantly subversive series of paintings. A show of seminal work from Robert Irwin captures the moment he turned away from object-making in favor of the perceptual and experiential. Finally, a Robert Colescott show curated by Umar Rashid sets up a dialogue between the two artists who, in their own ways, reconfigure dense webs of historical and cultural sources in service of alternate versions of reality.

Ramekon O’Arwisters: HOUSE OF
Craft Contemporary, 5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles
Through May 4

Ramekon O’Arwisters, “Bitten #8” (2022), ceramic shards, ber, zip ties, and beads (photo by David Schmitz, courtesy the artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery)
In his knotted and wrapped sculptures, Ramekon O’Arwisters incorporates ceramic shards, zip ties, leather, and clamps, questioning the meanings we project onto specific materials. His practice is grounded in his identity and experience as a Black and queer man, and his artworks reflect a spectrum of intertwined perseverance, resistance, spirituality, and eroticism. House Of encompasses five bodies of work created between 2016 and 2024, each focused on a separate theme from the familial tradition of quilting to the pleasure and pain of BDSM practices, as well as three new, large-scale tapestry-like wall works.