Entertainment
Chicana feminist Judithe Hernández draws complex humanity at the Cheech
In a revealing video interview that accompanies her captivating 50-year survey at the Riverside Art Museum’s Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, artist Judithe Hernández recounts how she became the anomalous fifth member of Los Four, the groundbreaking L.A. art collective. Following the group’s ambitious 1974 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hernández prevailed upon them to admit her into their ranks.
An activist colleague and friend of Los Four’s Frank Romero, Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert “Magú” Luján and, especially, Carlos Almaraz, the painter with whom she had been among just five Chicano students at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art & Design), she pressed an irrefutable point: Being all male, Los Four was inherently compromised in its insistence on full Chicano equality in American life. Hernández provided them with a portfolio of her work, so Los Four could see that it was artistically satisfactory.
“She draws like a man,” Los Four approvingly decided, happily accepting her entreaty to join the group. Hernández, in a deadpan recounting of that rationale in the video, offers up an affectionate and knowing smile.
The wry anecdote underscores two qualities of her work that run throughout “Judithe Hernández: Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival” at the Cheech. First, a feminist framework structures everything. Second, drawing is fundamental. The exhibition demonstrates, as if proof were needed, that social activism and individual artistic freedom are anything but incompatible.
In more than 80 drawings and several sketchbooks, which date from the 1970s to the present, women are almost always pictured. Men turn up in just a tiny handful — a 2010 series on the Christian origin story of Adam and Eve — but only to clarify the structural foundations of routine, often unacknowledged chauvinism.
Adam’s body is a chilly blue in Judithe Hernández’s 2010 series on the Genesis origin story, “Adam and Eve.”
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
She renders Adam as a veritable boy-toy, handsome and naked, like a Madison Avenue model picked to sell cologne. Hernández often employs iconic compositions for her work, with just one or two figures shown frontally or in profile and located in a shallow, often decorative space. In “The Surrender of Adam,” the first man reclines naked in a tangle of deep green vegetation, Eden now a knot of San Pedro cactus.
In “The Birth of Adam,” he lies on a ground strewn with pebbles and lily pads, born of the soil that gave him his name (the Hebrew adamah). His eyes are shut, a flower pressed against his chest. His skin is blue, at once chilly but also the color of divine favor, from Hinduism’s Vishnu to Christianity’s mantle for the Virgin Mary.
“The Beginning of Sin” shows Adam from behind lying stock-still on top of Eve, his arms spread wide across the page and beyond its edges, in what can only be described as a prophecy of crucifixion. With her arms wrapped around him, she wears the mask of a luchador — a theatrical Mexican professional wrestler — crowned with branching horns. It’s like Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait as a wounded deer but without any injurious arrows to be seen. This Eve is robust, not distressed. She’s no martyr.
Lying on her back, she stares straight past Adam’s adjacent head and into the viewer’s eyes, wholly indifferent to the deadly red-and-black striped coral snake slithering nearby. Her lips are as crimson as the demonic serpent. Hernández is a brilliant colorist, the vivid hues sometimes functioning in suggestive symbolic mode while always reveling in pure decorative joy.
The decorative element is as feminist as her subject. For whatever reason, a pejorative implication always shrouded decoration in the modern era — even around such an important artist as Matisse. (It’s one reason Matisse was foolishly regarded for so long as secondary to Picasso.) But not here. Hernández, like other artists as different from her and from one another as Valerie Jaudon and Merion Estes, empowers decoration in the service of empowering women. She remade the Genesis story into a colorful visual narrative of complex humanity, rather than a fall from grace.
Judithe Hernández, “Soy la Desconocida,” 2022, pastel on paper.
(Riverside Art Museum)
Hernández was born in Los Angeles in 1948. At 22, her arrival at Otis coincided with the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, the huge antiwar demonstration in East L.A. that forged a broad-based coalition of Mexican American groups in opposition to the Vietnam conflict. Her mentor at Otis was Charles White, the esteemed Black artist whose 1946 study with David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera at Mexico City’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (the People’s Print Workshop) cemented his commitment to socially and politically conscious graphic art.
The exhibition, organized by the museum’s artistic director, María Esther Fernández, is divided into four loosely thematic sections, rather than unfolding in a strict chronology. “The Evolution of the Female Archetype” is the closest to providing background — unfortunately, publication of a reference catalog is not expected until the fall — with observant if generally uninspiring genre scenes of humdrum daily life.
Next comes “Ni una más: Bearing Witness,” which gets up to speed fast. The section emphasizes work related to the shocking serial murders of women in and around the Mexican border city of Juarez, which has seen bloodshed for more than 30 years. (Appropriately, in September the Hernández survey will travel to the El Paso Museum of Art, just across the border from Juarez.) “Reimagining Eve” then pictures women as something other than subordinates — forget about Adam’s rib — while a final gallery marked by hallucinatory and dreamlike probing looks at the “Surrealist Landscape” as a dominant psychic, sociocultural context for Hernández. The organization works well.
Hers is a world where logic does not reign, independence is essential and the unconscious is a mechanism for self-knowledge. Mysterious outside forces are evoked by a red hand that, in numerous works, intrudes on the scene from the picture’s edge. The fateful hand reaches toward Eve on her final night before expulsion from the garden, for example, and elsewhere wields a knife blade to cut a flower rising from the sea next to a floating body.
One lush drawing shows a woman sleeping on the ground before a formidable wall of prickly pear cactus, an entangled piñata floating above like a tantalizing, delight-filled dream that is just out of reach. In the United States, California has always held promises of self-reinvention, and Hernández brings Chicana feminism into the enterprise.
More than 80 pastel drawings are in the 50-year Judithe Hernández retrospective at the Cheech.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Mexican mysticism, inflected by pre-Columbian and Catholic cultures, informs much of the work. Most notably, the young woman standing before a hot pink wall in the coming-of-age icon “Juarez Quinceanera” sports enormous Aztec spools in her ears. The spools frame her mask-like open mouth, decorating voids in the human skull that signaled the soul’s vivacity in pre-Columbian culture. She’s crowned with an elaborate, off-kilter sculptural headdress reminiscent of the dragon-like feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, the creator deity. A pair of calla lilies grasped in her hands acknowledges fertility.
Yet amid all the elaborate cultural festivity around the girl’s arrival at womanhood, there’s a sobering catch. White is the traditional color for an extravagant quinceanera dress, but hers is a funeral black. Behind her she casts a looming dark shadow against the bright pink wall. The fateful red hand that intrudes into other works here smears blood on that wall, as if left behind by a slumping body. For “Juarez Quinceanera,” life and death collide and intertwine.
What makes this and many other Hernández works especially compelling is their medium. These are drawings. The show surveys pastels, their details sometimes inflected with colored pencil, meticulously drawn on large sheets of paper or canvas. Hernández gives her drawings a scale more commonly encountered in easel paintings, but the form is marked by a visual intimacy different from paint applied with a brush. Drawing is about touch, the hand pressed directly to the sheet. Touch holds your eye, inviting close scrutiny.
Hernández is often referred to as a painter, and she has in fact painted numerous public murals. Yet, like her late mentor Charles White, drawing represents her most powerful gift. The urgency of her subject matter is given voice. Hernández doesn’t draw like a man; she draws like an important artist.
Judithe Hernández, “Santa Desconocida,” 2016, pastel on paper.
(Riverside Art Museum)
‘Judithe Hernández: Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival’
Where: The Cheech Marin Center at the Riverside Art Museum, 3581 Mission Inn Ave., Riverside
When: Through Aug. 4. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. 12 p.m.–5 p.m. Sunday
Info: (951) 684-7111, www.riversideartmuseum.org
Pizza Movie (2026) Director: Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, Star: Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone
Somehow, I got through an hour of this movie. I was seconds away from turning off in the first fifteen minutes because of the juvenile humor. Pizza Movie is too silly, repetitive, and the characters are annoying. Stranger Things Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone star as college friends, Jack and Montgomery. College angles are rarely seen in films right now, and that’s the one saving grace of the film. Similar to high school, people are also trying to fit in. The story and visuals were too corny. You can only watch someone’s head exploding for so long without letting yours.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) Director: Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Stars: Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy
I never saw the first Super Mario Brothers Movie when it was out, but I heard it got positive reviews. My brother always loved playing Super Mario video games as a kid, and I’d watch him. I tagged along with my friends to see Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s a cute and fun film. I like it when movies explore the video game world. The animation creates unique worlds and characters. The characters are split into their own storylines, and for me, I felt like it worked. It adds more action, especially for kids who are seeing the films.
Emily in Paris Season 5 (2025) Creator: Darren Star, Stars: Lily Collins and Ashley Park
After a bright spot in season 4, I thought season 5 of Emily in Paris would continue its growth in the story and its protagonist, but no, it’s all drained out in the usual Emily (Lily Collins) mishaps. Ashley Park (Mindy) has become too good for this show. Emily and Mindy waste several opportunities because of their love lives. The whole relationship angle is ruining it. I don’t understand why Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) is still in the show. I thought writers learned their lesson, but by the last episode, they’re continuing to bring the past into an apparent season 6.
Sarah’s Oil (2025) Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh, Stars: Naya Desir-Johnson and Zachary Levi
There’s always history lurking right beneath our noses. Sarah’s Oil (2025) tells the true story of Sarah Rector, an Oklahoma-born African American girl who became the first black female millionaire in the U.S. Naya Desir-Johnson is fierce and driven as Sarah. Zachary Levi is also along for the ride as Bert, a man who helps Sarah. Kate (Bridget Regan) was another favorite character as an intelligent woman. Cyrus Nowrasteh was drawn to the subject for its story and its themes. Nowrasteh’s direction is compelling as he unearths a hidden story from history. The film is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Jack Goes Boating (2014) Director and Star: Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Ryan
Jack Goes Boating (2014) didn’t quite work for me, largely because of its slow pace and uneven storytelling. The film stars the late Seymour Hoffman as Jack, who also directed the film. This was Hoffman’s first and only time in the directing chair. Amy Ryan also stars in the film, giving a solid performance. This was also based on a play that Hoffman starred in. Jack wants to participate in a swim championship. That’s hardly what the film is about, tracking other characters’ stories. While the film aims for quiet intimacy, it ultimately drags, making it an underwhelming viewing experience.
You Kill Me (2016), Director: John Dahl, Stars: Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson
Meet You Kill Me (2016), yet another film that I found in the museum of underrated gems. The concept revolves around Frank (Ben Kingsley), a hitman, who is sent to an A.A. meeting to get his mind focused again. A different story happens, where Frank falls in love with Laurel (Tea Leoni). Leoni is one of my favorite actresses. It also stars the funny Luke Wilson. I liked the trio’s dynamics. You Kill Me is a mental health movie. It’s okay to make changes if you’re not happy. I recommended that you keep an eye out for this movie.
Entertainment
Review: Trigger warning? ‘For Want of a Horse’ gives new meaning to the term ‘animal lover’
“For Want of a Horse,” a play by Olivia Dufault receiving its world premiere in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre, wants to have a rational conversation about a taboo topic that can provoke instant outrage.
The subject is zoophilia, not to be confused with bestiality, though for many of us it will be a distinction without much of a difference.
Calvin (Joey Stromberg), a good-looking, mild-mannered married accountant, has harbored a secret for much of his life. He has a thing for horses. His erotic interest began at an early age, and all his efforts to lead a normal life have left him depressed and contemplating suicide.
His wife, Bonnie (Jenny Soo), is a permissive kindergarten teacher who’s having difficulty restraining a girl in her class who has discovered the joys of masturbation. Worried about her husband, she discovers through his browsing history that he’s once again visiting strange animal sites.
She suggests he keep a horse, explaining that she doesn’t want to end up a widow or divorcée. Calvin is taken aback by her generosity but has come to recognize that his preference is more than a kink. It’s part of his identity — and maybe the only part that makes his life seem worth living.
Joey Stromberg and Jenny Soo in “For Want of a Horse” at the Echo Theater Company.
(Cooper Bates)
A horse named Q-Tip (Griffin Kelly) enters the couple’s lives. A stable is secured, and the mare, who senses that something strange is going on, is indulged with apples and caresses.
Kelly, a statuesque presence in a dress, harness and boots, brings the horse to life with wild, unpredictable movements. The sheer size of the animal poses a threat to humans. One kick, as Q-Tip herself explains in one of her thought-bubble monologues, is capable of penetrating a steel wall. But controlling an animal’s food supply is an effective way of winning over its trust.
Calvin has found support in the online zoophilia community. PJ (Steven Culp), a man whose current inamorata is a bichon frise, is considering moving to a country where zoophilia isn’t illegal. He’s tired of the shame and the secrecy. He’s proud of his attachment to pooch, even if his thing for dogs has cost him contact with his daughter and ex-wife.
Dufault doesn’t shy away from sexual details. For PJ, intimacy depends on peanut butter. Calvin describes the physical signals that reveal Q-Tip’s erotic satisfaction. The play occasionally descends into sitcom humor. (PJ says he’s considering creating a human-dog dating app called Rin Tin Tinder.) But mostly the subdued tone steers clear of sensationalism.
The production, directed by Elana Luo, is scrupulously well-acted by the four-person cast. Stromberg makes Calvin seem not only reasonable but surprisingly sensitive. Soo’s Bonnie sweetly embodies the excesses of a kind of progressive piety. As PJ, Culp gruffly embraces his role as the play’s polemical fire-starter. And Kelly’s Q-Tip, in the production’s most physically demanding performance, straddles the human-animal divide with theatrical aplomb.
Steven Culp, left, and Joey Stromberg in “For Want of a Horse” at the Echo Theater Company.
(Cooper Bates)
The open-mindedness that Dufault, a trans playwright, brings to the play creates some dramatic slack. Possibly the same fear of making value judgments that has inhibited Bonnie from imposing common-sense discipline in her classroom has robbed “For Want of a Horse” of a propulsive point of view.
The play moves monotonously between Calvin and Bonnie’s bedroom and the stable. Scenic designer Alex Mollo has worked out an efficient way of shifting between these realms by employing the same set of wooden trunks. But the argument of the play doesn’t so much build as elapse.
Time takes its toll, and Calvin eventually has to make a decision. But the character who interested me most was Bonnie, whose reality is only glimpsed. The play tacitly uses her husband’s threat of suicide as a trump card. Zoophilia isn’t merely a fetish for Calvin but a nonnegotiable part of his identity.
This questionable assumption can be psychologically scrutinized not only from Calvin’s point of view but also from his wife’s. The play wants to have an intelligent debate, but it doesn’t want to interrogate certain political positions too skeptically.
At one point, Bonnie objects when Calvin compares his situation to that of homosexuality, but the conversation ends there. The reality is that the right wing has been making a similar claim, arguing that same-sex marriage opens the door to bestiality, polygamy and incest. “For Want of a Horse” inadvertently lends legitimacy to this line of reasoning.
Griffin Kelly in “For Want of a Horse” at the Echo Theater Company.
(Cooper Bates)
Not that extremist positions should be off limits, but they ought to be more rigorously addressed. Similarly, Bonnie’s concern about the issue of consent — how can a horse say yes to intercourse with a human — is introduced only to be dismissed in a shrug of mild-mannered bothsidesism.
While watching “For Want of a Horse,” I recalled a program on PBS called “My Wild Affair” that wasn’t about zoophilia but about the problematic nature of human bonds with untamed animals. Relationships with a seal, an elephant and a rhino, for example — obsessive, protective, loving friendships — all seemed to end if not in outright tragedy, then in shattering heartbreak.
Q-Tip is rightfully given the play’s last word, and Kelly, an actor (HBO’s “The Book of Queer”), writer and comedian, is the production’s driving force. We can never know what’s inside this mare’s mind because Q-Tip’s brain has evolved so differently from our own. Kelly plays the anthropomorphic game while retaining some of the inscrutability of a four-legged creature.
It is through language that we, as humans, traverse the chasm separating us from one another. That’s not possible with animals, even with our closest domestic companions. (Try explaining a necessary medical procedure to a cat.)
“For Want of a Horse” sets out to speak about the unspeakable, but its construction may be too tame for such a wild subject.
‘For Want of a Horse’
Where: Echo Theater Company, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., L.A.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays, Mondays; 4 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 25
Tickets: $15-$42.75
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes (no intermission)
Info: echotheatercompany.com
Desert Warrior, 2026.
Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley, Ghassan Massoud, Sharlto Copley, Sami Bouajila, Lamis Ammar, Géza Röhrig, Numan Acar, Nabil Elouahabi, Hakeem Jomah, Ramsey Faragallah, Saïd Boumazoughe, and Soheil Bostani.
SYNOPSIS:
An honorable and mysterious rogue, known as Hanzala, makes himself an enemy of the Emperor Kisra after he helps a fugitive king and princess in the desert.
With aspirations of being a historical epic harkening back to the sword and sandal blockbusters of yesteryear, Rupert Wyatt’s seventeenth-century Arabia tale is about as generic and epically dull as one would expect from a film plainly titled Desert Warrior. Yes, there appear to be real locations here, and there are some admittedly sweeping shots of various tribes storming into battle on horseback and camels, but it’s all in service of a mess that is both miscast and questionable as the work of a filmmaking team of mostly white creatives.
The story of Emperor Kisraa (Ben Kingsley, a distracting presence even with only one or two scenes) rounding up women from other tribes to be his concubines, which inevitably became the catalyst for a revolution led by Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart), uniting all the divided clans and strategizing battle plans for flanking and poisoning, is undeniably ripe for cinematic treatment. The problem is that what’s here from Rupert Wyatt (and screenwriters Erica Beeney, Gary Ross, and David Self) is less than nothing in the primary creative process; no one seems to have a connection to Arabic heritage or culture, but they have made a flat-out boring film that is often narratively incoherent.
Following the death of her father and escaping the clutches of oppression, the honorable Princess Hind joins forces with a troubled, nameless bandit played by Anthony Mackie (he totally belongs here…), who seems to be here solely to give the movie some star power boost without running the risk of white savior accusations. Whatever the case may be, it’s jarring, but not quite as disorienting as how little screen time he has despite being billed as the lead and how little characterization he has. It is, however, equally disorienting as some of the other names that show up along the way.
As for the other factions, Princess Hind talks to them one by one, giving the film an adventure feel that fails to capitalize on using beautiful scenery in striking or visually poignant ways at almost every turn; the leaders of these tribes also often have no character. There also isn’t much of an understanding of why these tribes are at odds with one another. This movie is filled with dialogue that consistently and shockingly amounts to vague nothingness. Nevertheless, each tribe doesn’t take much convincing to begin with, meaning that not only is the film repetitive, but it’s also lifeless when characters are in conversation.
That Desert Warrior does occasionally spring to life, and a bloated 2+ running time is a small miracle. This is typically accomplished through the occasional fight scene between factions that also serves to demonstrate Princess Hind coming into her own as a warrior. When the tribes are united in a massive-scale battle, and that plan is unfolding step by step, one certainly sees why someone would want to tell this story and pull it off with such spectacle. However, this film is as dry as the desert itself.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist
-
World11 minutes agoTehran vows to ‘resist bullying’ as Trump extends Iran truce, blocks ports
-
News41 minutes agoSouthern Poverty Law Center indicted on federal fraud charges
-
New York2 hours agoN.Y.P.D. Narcotics Unit Under Review After a Beating Is Caught on Tape
-
Detroit, MI3 hours agoMI Healthy Climate Conference in Detroit focuses on green funding and strong future
-
San Francisco, CA3 hours agoCalifornia’s New Hotel Edit: The Best Places to Stay Across the Golden State in 2026
-
Dallas, TX3 hours agoThe Brandon Aubrey Deal | DZTV
-
Miami, FL3 hours agoRanking the Miami Heat’s Top Trade Targets
-
Boston, MA3 hours agoFormer Massachusetts doctor faces 81 new sexual assault charges