painting

NEW YORK — Scientists have identified the origins of the blue color in one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings with a little help from chemistry, confirming for the first time that the Abstract Expressionist used a vibrant, synthetic pigment known as manganese blue.

“Number 1A, 1948,” showcases Pollock’s classic style: paint has been dripped and splattered across the canvas, creating a vivid, multicolored work. Pollock even gave the piece a personal touch, adding his handprints near the top.

The painting, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is almost 9 feet wide. Scientists had previously characterized the reds and yellows splattered across the canvas, but the source of the rich turquoise blue proved elusive.

In a new study, researchers took scrapings of the blue paint and used lasers to scatter light and measure how the paint’s molecules vibrated. That gave them a unique chemical fingerprint for the color, which they pinpointed as manganese blue.

The analysis, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first confirmed evidence of Pollock using this specific blue.

“It’s really interesting to understand where some striking color comes from on a molecular level,” said study co-author Edward Solomon with Stanford University.

The pigment manganese blue was once used by artists, as well as to color the cement for swimming pools. It was phased out by the 1990s because of environmental concerns.

Previous research had suggested that the turquoise from the painting could indeed be this color, but the new study confirms it using samples from the canvas, said Rutgers University’s Gene Hall, who has studied Pollock’s paintings and was not involved with the discovery.

“I’m pretty convinced that it could be manganese blue,” Hall said.

The researchers also went one step further, inspecting the pigment’s chemical structure to understand how it produces such a vibrant shade.

Scientists study the chemical makeup of art supplies to conserve old paintings and catch counterfeits. They can take more specific samples from Pollock’s paintings since he often poured directly onto the canvas instead of mixing paints on a palette beforehand.

To solve this artistic mystery, researchers explored the paint using various scientific tools — similarly to how Pollock would alternate his own methods, dripping paint using a stick or straight from the can.

While the artist’s work may seem chaotic, Pollock rejected that interpretation. He saw his work as methodical, said study co-author Abed Haddad, an assistant conservation scientist at the Museum of Modern Art.

“I actually see a lot of similarities between the way that we worked and the way that Jackson Pollock worked on the painting,” Haddad said.

Ramakrishnan writes for the Associated Press.

Authorities in Argentina have opened a criminal investigation into the daughter of a former Nazi official and her spouse after an 18th-century painting stolen from a late Jewish art dealer was recovered from one of their properties.

Prosecutors announced the probe on Thursday, which will focus on Juan Carlos Cortegoso and his wife Patricia Kadgien, whose father was the fugitive Nazi officer Friedrich Kadgien.

The elder Kadgien died in the late 1970s. He spent the final decades of his life in Argentina, having fled Germany at the end of World War II.

He is believed to have brought with him priceless artworks looted from the collections of Jewish families and businesses, including that of the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

Goudstikker had amassed a collection of nearly 1,400 pieces, according to the meticulous records he kept.

But that made his collection a target for Nazi officials like Hermann Goring, who sought to seize the artwork for himself. The elder Kadgien was Goring’s financial adviser.

It is unclear how Kadgien came to own Portrait of a Lady by Giuseppe Ghislandi, an Italian portraitist prolific during the Baroque and Rococo periods.

The painting, a large portrait of the Contessa Colleoni holding gloves and a book, had not been seen in decades. As far as researchers knew, only black-and-white photographs of the artwork survived.

Goudstikker had been forced to sell many of his artworks to Nazi officials as the Holocaust unfolded in Europe.

In May 1940, the art dealer would ultimately die from a fall on board the SS Bodegraven, as he fled a genocide that would claim at least six million Jewish lives, as well as millions of prisoners-of-war, dissidents, LGBTQ people and those with disabilities.

Goudstikker’s heirs have been seeking to recover his collection ever since.

Thought lost, Portrait of a Lady reappeared suddenly last month, as the result of internet sleuthing.

Dutch journalists with the publication Algemeen Dagblad had been investigating the late Kadgien’s dealings with the Nazis, and they stumbled across a real estate listing from February for a house belonging to his daughter, Patricia Kadgien.

A picture in the listing showed Portrait of a Lady hanging above a green velvet couch.

The journalists published their findings on August 25, and soon after, police in Argentina raided the residence, which was located in the coastal city of Mar del Plata.

But the painting was nowhere to be found. Instead, authorities reported they had recovered other paintings, this time from the 19th century, that they suspected may also be Nazi-looted artwork.

A tapestry was found hanging where Portrait of a Lady was once photographed. The real estate listing, meanwhile, appeared to have been removed.

Police have since raided several properties belonging to Patricia Kadgien and her sister. On Wednesday, it was announced that the painting had finally been recovered.

But in Thursday’s hearing, federal authorities revealed they were charging Kadgien, 59, and her husband, Cortegoso, 62, with attempting a cover-up.

Prosecutor Carlos Martinez accused the couple of hiding the painting, despite being “aware that the artwork was being sought by the criminal justice system and international authorities”. That, he said, amounted to obstruction of justice and concealment.

“It was only after several police raids that they turned it in,” Martinez explained.

Patricia Kadgien and Cortegoso were briefly put under house arrest on Monday, though that was lifted in favour of a 180-day travel ban and a requirement that they seek court approval before leaving the house.

A lawyer for the couple reportedly asked a civil court this week to allow them to sell the painting, but that request was denied.

Martinez, meanwhile, told journalists on Thursday that Marei von Saher, one of Goudstikker’s heirs, had already reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States to ensure the painting’s restitution.

He explained that prosecutors had requested Portrait of a Lady be held at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum for now.

Aug. 27 (UPI) — A painting looted by Nazis from a Jewish Art dealer 80 years ago has been seen on the website of an estate agent selling a house in Argentina.

The painting Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi was seen in a photo hanging above a sofa in the living room of a house in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.

The Dutch newspaper AD reported that the painting is featured in a database of lost art.

“There is no reason to think this could be a copy,” said Annelies Kool and Perry Schrier of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, who reviewed the images for AD.

The artwork is among hundreds looted from an art dealer who helped Jews escape during the war, Jacques Goudstiker.

More than 1,100 paintings were brought up in a sale by senior Nazis after he died after falling in the hold of the vessel and breaking his neck.

After World War II, some works had been recovered in Germany, but Portrait of a Lady was not among those.

AD’s investigation found wartime documents suggesting the painting was in possession of Friedrich Kaidgen, an SS officer and senior financial aide to Goring.

Kadieng died in 1979, and as a U.S. file seen by AD said he “Appears to possess substantial assets, could still be of value to us”.

The paper noted it made efforts to speak to his two daughters about the missing artworks. A reporter was dispatched to knock on doors where they believed someone was home, but no one opened the door.

“There was certainly someone at home; we saw a shadow moving in the corridor, but no one opened,” the journalist, Peter Schouten, reported.

AD said all attempts to speak to the sisters since finding the photo had failed, with one reportedly telling the paper: “I don’t know what information you want from me, and I don’t know what painting you are talking about.”

Some SoCal residents spent their summer at the beach, or at their local rooftop pool; others spent it indoors, hiding from ICE agents.

It’s why Riverside artist Perry Picasshoe spent his summer documenting the melting of 36 ice blocks on sidewalks across the Inland Empire.

He traveled to nine locations, a mix of parks, storefronts and gas stations, where immigration enforcement raids have taken place in the past few weeks. In each spot, he placed four 25-pound ice blocks on the ground and took photos of them as they melted. He would periodically check on the progress, he explained, and found that some were smashed into pieces or completely disappeared.

“I took it as a metaphor of what’s happening,” Picasshoe said, referencing the recent ICE raids taking place across Southern California. “I was also thinking a lot about having these blocks of ice as almost a stand-in for people.”

This latest art piece is just one of the many other Chicano-focused projects that Picasshoe has created in his hometown in the past three years. His goal, among all of the artworks, is to push its residents to reflect on the complexity of the Inland Empire’s Latino identity.

Perry Picasshoe and his father place an ice block near the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk in downtown Riverside on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Juan Carlos Hernandez Marquez is an emerging Mexican American multidisciplinary artist from Riverside who goes by the stage name Perry Picasshoe. The moniker, which he created as a teenager, is a play on Pablo Picasso’s name mixed with an early 2010s social media term “art hoe.” Under this pseudonym, Picasshoe first gained recognition for creating art that explored the complexities of his dueling identities of being an LGBTQ+ artist while surrounded by traditional Latino ideals.

While studying visual arts at UCLA, he reimagined Sandro Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus” with LGBTQ+ imagery, created a 9-foot-tall Christmas cactus in honor of the time he spent with his father during the holidays and hosted a solo exhibition called “Mystic Garden,” which showcased pieces inspired by flowers given to him by an ex-partner. It’s also where he developed his signature red-dominant style in both his fashion and art.

“Red is my comfort color,” Picasshoe said.

He suffered from occasional panic attacks while studying at UCLA, he explained, which discouraged him from going to school. It continued for months — until he found himself wearing a bright red outfit, which brought him a sense of peace.

“It just kind of grew from there,” he added. “It just followed me everywhere that I went.”

Picasshoe also posted videos showcasing his pieces on social media. Like his artwork, his posts were intricately filmed and edited with bright red accents. They were also accompanied by narration detailing the work’s inspiration, creation process and meaning. His efforts amassed him almost 200,000 followers between TikTok and Instagram.

This rapid growth, both on social media and within his network, brought new opportunities to grow professionally in Los Angeles. Yet after graduating in 2022, he decided to continue his career in his hometown instead.

“It was just a different pace that I was not ready for,” he said. “The art scene out here is much more [based in] community, as opposed to [money] or clout. It’s more of making work that people here will get to enjoy.”

It’s a decision that’s worked in his favor.

This year, he’s been honored by the city at the Mayor’s Ball for the Arts with the Emerging Artist award and recognized as one of UCLA’s top 100 alumni entrepreneurs for 2025. Picasshoe’s decision to be a professional artist within the Inland Empire also came at a time when opportunities for Latino artists in the region have grown in recent years.

Cosme Cordova, long-time Riverside Chicano artist and Division 9 Gallery founder, explained that for decades, Latino artists considered Riverside a “boot camp” instead of a city where they could make a living. They would earn some money in their hometown, then travel to other prominent locations, like Los Angeles or Palm Springs, where artists felt their work was more respected. As the years went on, he said, the local community began to understand the value in supporting its artists.

“Then when the Cheech came, it’s got international attention, so it’s just gotten even better,” Cordova said. “I’m starting to see a lot of artists now more genuinely focused on just trying to showcase their work here in Riverside.”

The most prominent addition within the region has been the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture — known colloquially as “the Cheech.” The museum is widely considered the only space in the country that exclusively showcases Latino-made exhibitions, including some of Picasshoe’s work.

Since returning to the Inland Empire, Picasshoe’s artistic vision caught the attention of both community leaders and larger institutions. While hosting one of his first solo exhibitions, called “Red Thoughts,” at the Eastside Arthouse in Riverside, the directors of the Cheech took notice of his unique style.

“They approach their work with abandon, with any medium,” said María Esther Fernández, the center’s artistic director. “They had an installation and it was very interactive and immersive. I think pushing the boundaries of that is really fun and innovative.”

It would lead Picasshoe to work on a wide range of projects in collaboration with the Chicano art center for the next three years.

Perry Picasshoe stands in front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, Calif., on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Last year, Picasshoe teamed up with Inland Empire-based artist Emmanuel Camacho Larios to curate an exhibition for the Cheech’s community gallery called “Desde los Cielos.”

“It was a group show that explored what the term ‘alien’ meant in the context of Chicanxs, and alien in the political, the social and the queerness of it all,” Picasshoe said. “I also made a huge painting for that one, the largest that I’ve ever done so far.”

The seven-foot-tall painting, called “Simulacra of Guillermo Hernandez, Beethoven, y los Guachimontones,” depicts his late grandfather sitting on the bed of a pickup truck alongside a small chihuahua. In the background, looming over his abuelo, is a giant circular pyramid built by the Teuchitlán people. A golden pyramid, made from Abuelita Mexican Chocolate bricks, was placed in front of the painting; the bricks were free for the taking during the exhibition’s debut.

After the time for his co-curated exhibition ended, another installation named “Queer Wishes” was featured in the Cheech for an exhibition co-curated by the Eastside Arthouse’s founder and resident artist.

The piece is a three-dimensional black box with a white dress made from bath towels and bedazzled gems displayed on a dress form mannequin inside. Next to the mannequin is a small black vanity desk and mirror with makeup and porcelain wishbones filling the table’s surface.

“The first time I was really able to express myself was when I would get out of the bathroom, put my bath towel on and pretend it was a dress,” Picasshoe said. “I know I’m not the only one with that experience of being in the bathroom and having that be the only time you have to yourself.”

Since debuting the installation at the Cheech, Picasshoe had hoped to take a step back from creating larger community-focused pieces and spend time finalizing some personal projects. However, as immigration enforcement raids ramped up in Southern California, Picasshoe felt the need to create artwork to express his frustration.

Picasshoe and his father drove the family truck to Fontana on July 3 to pick up three translucent ice slabs, each about 40 inches tall and weighing around 300 pounds, and brought them back to downtown Riverside.

They arrived 45 minutes before the start of the city’s monthly arts walk, an event where dozens of local vendors set up booths to sell their artwork to hundreds of residents.

Picasshoe and his father slowly unloaded the slabs from the truck’s bed onto a dolly and wheeled the installations out into the three chosen locations: the front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk event and the front of the Riverside County Superior Court.

A wooden platform was placed under each slab, with the words “life,” “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” written upside down and divided between the three art pieces, along with a QR code explaining its meaning.

He chose this day, he said, because of its high foot traffic. It was the best opportunity to help some passersby feel represented while confronting others with a hard truth.

“Art should be lived in,” Picasshoe said. “It’s prevalent in a lot of my work, and especially this one, since it’s meant to be commenting on something regarding the public.”

Shaun Ilten had a problem. The senior director of turf and grounds for the Galaxy and Dignity Health Sports Park had 26 full-size practice fields, two game fields and a warm-up pitch to line ahead of last winter’s Coachella Valley soccer tournament. And he had less than five days to do it.

Since it takes three people nearly two hours to lay out and paint boundary lines on just one field, the math said Ilten wasn’t going to make it.

“It’s just not possible to do it all by hand,” he said.

So he decided to skip the hand part and give the task to a couple of robots, who were able to square out and paint each field in about a quarter the time human hands would have needed. Without the robots, the largest preseason professional soccer event in the U.S. would have necessarily been a lot smaller.

“There would just be no way that it would be humanly possible,” Ilten said.

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What made it possible was Turf Tank, a GPS-linked machine about the size of large beach cooler that can paint athletic fields of any size for any sport. It was the brainchild of Jason Aldridge, an Atlanta-based entrepreneur with a long history of using technology to innovate workplaces, from restaurants and telecommunications to shipping and sports.

The idea of using technology and robotics to relieve groundskeepers of the drudgery of striping athletic fields came to Aldridge about nine years ago, while he was watching business-reality TV show “Shark Tank” with his son. It was, he said, an ancient ritual that needed a modern solution.

“Even back to the Olympics in ancient Greece, they used to line the lanes to run the sprints,” he said.

A look at the Turf Tank robot for painting field lines.

(Courtesy of Turf Tank)

Months later he partnered with Denmark developers, who four years earlier had designed a prototype robot based on a similar concept, and in 2017, he said, he sold his first two Turf Tanks to the Sozo Sports Complex in Yakima, Wash., and the Commonwealth Soccer Club in Lexington, Ky.

Since then Turf Tank has grown into a company with more than 200 employees, tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and 5,000 clients, among them San Diego FC, the Galaxy, LAFC, Angel City, eight NFL teams and hundreds of colleges, including Pepperdine, California, UC Santa Barbara and Loyola Marymount. Turf Tank also drew the stylized on-field logo for last month’s MLB All-Star Game in Atlanta.

Two other Danish companies — Traqnology and TinyMobileRobots, whose robots have marked more than 2 million fields worldwide, the company says — offer similar services, as does the Swiss company Swozi and Singapore’s FJDynamics. But Turf Tank claims to be the dominant force in the U.S. market.

The Turf Tank robots, which weight up to 132 pounds and can hold 5.3 gallons of paint, are controlled by a computer tablet and guided by GPS technology linked to a portable base station, which acts as a reference point. All a user has to do is enter the dimensions of the field — the length of the sidelines, the width of the field — into a tablet and the robot does the rest in as little as 24 minutes.

Still the concept of autonomous robots was a tough sell for people who are used to doing things by hand and not on a keyboard. Although it sounded like a good idea, most groundskeepers had to be convinced of the accuracy and reliability of the robots.

Aldridge tried to sell the University of Alabama on the technology for Bryant-Denny Stadium on a scorching July day. The Turf Tank drew the horizontal and vertical lines without issue but the grounds crew director was certain it couldn’t match the precision and accuracy needed to paint hash marks down the center of the football field. So Aldridge took him to lunch and when they returned there was 160 perfect hash marks, each four inches wide, two feet long and 60 feet from the sidelines.

The University of Alabama, Aldridge said, now has three robots, two for athletics and one for intramural fields.

Ilten also had more doubt than conviction at first.

“I was skeptical when they first reached out to me, just because of how it works. It’s all GPS. If something gets in its way, is it going to go rogue?” he said. “But they brought it out, did a demo and I measured the lines after it was done and they were within a centimeter.”

That was 2019 and Ilten now has three robots at Dignity Health Sports Park which he uses to line the main stadium field for football, rugby and lacrosse and the surrounding practice fields for soccer. (For Galaxy games he prefers to mark the pitch the old-fashioned way, with a wheel-to-wheeler roller, which allows him to use a thicker and brighter paint.)

“It just makes everything a little bit more efficient,” said Ilten, who manages a staff of 20. “Instead of having two or three guys take an hour and half to line a field, I can send one guy out and it takes 35-40 minutes.”

But the bulk of Turf Tank’s customers don’t come from pro or major college teams. The time-saving the robots bring can be life-changing for high school groundskeepers and local park directors, who often must line multiple fields in a day.

“It was a pain point,” said Aldridge, 48. “They go to school to learn how to grow grass. Painting a field has kind of been that part of the job that wasn’t what they really wanted to do, but it was a huge necessity.

“It’s like the icing on the cake, right? Building a beautiful field, that’s kind of where our robots come in.”

⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.

Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security’s social media team has published a stream of content worthy of a meme-slinging basement dweller on 4chan.

Grainy, distorted mug shots of immigrants. Links to butt-kissing Fox News stories about MAGA anything. Whiny slams against politicians who call out la migra for treating the Constitution like a pee pad. Paeans to “heritage” and “homeland” worthy of Goebbels. A Thomas Kinkade painting of 1950s-era white picket fence suburbia straight out of “Leave It to Beaver,” with the caption “Protect the Homeland.”

All of this is gag-inducing, but it has a purpose — it’s revealing the racist id of this administration in real time, in case anyone was still doubtful.

In June, DHS shared a poster, originally created by the white-power scene, of a grim-faced Uncle Sam urging Americans to “report all foreign invaders” by calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On July 14, the DHS X account featured a painting of a young white couple cradling a baby in a covered wagon on the Great Plains with the caption, “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”

When my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts asked about the pioneer painting and the Trump administration’s trollish social media strategy, a White House spokesperson asked her to “explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist,” adding that haters should “stay mad.”

Now, behold the latest DHS salvo: a July 23 X post of a 19th century painting by John Gast titled “American Progress.”

A blond white woman robed in — yep — white, with a gold star just above her forehead, floats in the center. She holds a book in her right hand and a loop of telegraph wire that her left hand trails across poles. Below her on the right side are miners, hunters, farmers, loggers, a stagecoach and trains. They rush westward, illuminated by puffy clouds and the soft glow of dawn.

The angelic woman is Columbia, the historic female personification of the United States. She seems to be guiding everyone forward, toward Native Americans — bare breasted women, headdress-bedecked warriors — who are fleeing in terror along with a herd of bison and a bear with its mouth agape. It’s too late, though: Covered wagon trains and a teamster wielding a whip have already encroached on their land.

The white settlers are literally in the light-bathed side of the painting, while the Native Americans are shrouded in the dusky, murky side.

It ain’t subtle, folks!

“A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,” DHS wrote as a caption for “American Progress” — a mantra you may soon find printed on the $20 bill, the way this administration is going.

Gast finished his painting in 1872, when the U.S. was in the last stages of conquest. The Civil War was done. White Americans were moving into the Southwest in large numbers, dispossessing the Mexican Americans who had been there for generations through the courts, squatting or outright murder. The Army was ramping up to defeat Native Americans once and for all. In the eyes of politicians, a new menace was emerging from the Pacific: mass Asian migration, especially Chinese.

Scholars have long interpreted Gast’s infamous work as an allegory about Manifest Destiny — that the U.S. had a God-given right to seize as much of the American continent as it could. John L. O’Sullivan, the newspaperman who coined the term in 1845, openly tied this country’s expansion to white supremacy, expressing the hope that pushing Black people into Latin America, a region “already of mixed and confused blood,” would lead to “the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders.”

O’Sullivan also salivated at the idea of California leaving “imbecile and distracted” Mexico and joining the U.S., adding, “The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.”

This is the heritage the Trump administration thinks is worth promoting.

Vice President JD Vance, center, speaks next to officials including, from left to right, HUD Regional Administrator William Spencer, U.S. Atty. for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, FBI Los Angeles Asst. Director Akil Davis, U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino and ICE Field Office Director Ernie Santacruz at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles in June.

(Jae C. Hong / AP)

Administration officials act shocked and offended when critics accuse them of racism, but the Trump base knows exactly what’s going on.

“This is our country, and we can’t let the radical left make us ashamed of our heritage,” one X user commented on the “American Progress” post. “Manifest Destiny was an amazing thing!”

“It’s time to re-conquer the land,” another wrote.

DHS seems to be vibing with the Heritage American movement, now bleeding into the conservative mainstream from its far-right beginnings. Its adherents maintain that Americans whose ancestors have been here for generations are more deserving of this nation’s riches than those whose families came over within living memory. Our values, proponents say, shouldn’t be based on antiquated concepts like liberty and equality but rather, the customs and traditions established by Anglo Protestants before mass immigration forever changed this country’s demographics.

In other words, if you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown or anything else, you’re probably not down.

Our own vice president, JD Vance, is espousing this pendejada. In a speech to the Claremont Institute earlier this month, Vance outlined his vision of what an American is.

“America is not just an idea,” Vance told the crowd. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

Weird — I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want.

“If you stop importing millions of foreigners,” the vice president continued, “you allow social cohesion to form naturally.”

All those Southern and Eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the 20th century seem to have assimilated just fine, even as Appalachia’s Scots-Irish — Vance’s claimed ethnic affiliation — are, by his own admission, still a tribe apart after centuries of living here.

Trump, Vance added, is “ensur[ing] that the people we serve have a better life in the country their grandparents built.” I guess that excludes me, since my Mexican grandparents settled here in the autumn of their lives.

The irony of elevating so-called Heritage Americans is that many in Trumpworld would seem to be excluded.

First Lady Melania Trump was born in what’s now Slovenia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants. Vance’s wife’s parents came here from India. The Jewish immigrant ancestor of Trump’s deportation mastermind, Stephen Miller, wouldn’t be allowed in these days, after arriving at Ellis Island from czarist Russia with $8 to his name. Even Gast and O’Sullivan wouldn’t count as Heritage Americans by the strictest definition, since the former was Prussian and the latter was the son of Irish and English immigrants.

But that’s the evil genius of MAGA. Trump has proclaimed that he welcomes anyone, regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation (except for trans people), into his movement, as long as they’re committed to owning the libs.

Americans are so myopic about their own history, if not downright ignorant, that some minorities think they’re being welcomed into the Heritage Americans fold by Vance and his ilk. No wonder a record number of voters of color, especially Latinos, jumped on the Trump train in 2024.

“American Progress” might as well replace red hats as the ultimate MAGA symbol. To them, it’s not a shameful artifact; it’s a road map for Americans hell-bent on turning back the clock to the era of eradication.

Like I said, not a subtle message at all — if your eyes aren’t shut.

A man who paid a fraction of that could make a life-changing amount if the picture of Clemintine Churchill is proved to have been painted by the revered wartime Prime Minister

An amateur art collector who claims he has found a lost painting by Sir Winston Churchill is told it could be worth more than £600,000.

Barry James appears on the BBC1 show Fake Or Fortune tonight (MON) with his intriguing picture. He tells presenter Fiona Bruce and international art dealer Phil Mould that he picked it up for just £140 in an antiques market in Ardingly near Gatwick, three years ago because he liked ‘the colours and composition’.

But it was only later when it took it out of the frame that he found a mysterious inscription on the back which read: “This painting of Mrs Winston Churchill on wall of sunken garden at Hurstmonceux (CORR) Castle, Sussex, by The Right Hon. Winston S Churchill. June 1916.”

READ MORE: Rob Brydon wants to channel Claudia Winkleman on huge new BBC1 adventure show

It shows what is thought to be Sir Winston’s wife Clementine perched on a wall reading a book in the pink flowered gardens of the castle. Barry, from West Sussex, hopes the BBC series, returning for its 13th run, can validate it.

In the BBC show, shocked Barry is told that paintings by Churchill – who was British PM from 1940-45 and 1951-55 – can fetch millions of pounds. In 2021 Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie sold one – The Tower Of The Koutoubia Mosque, painted in Marrakesh during WWII – for a record £7million.

And Barry is informed that if his picture is found to be an original then at auction it could make more than £600,000. The TV duo embark on a search to find out if the artist really was war leader Churchill. Records show how he took up painting in 1915 – in water colours to begin with and later in oils – after he had completed his military service during WW1 and narrowly escaped death.

He looked on his new hobby as something that took him away from the stress of his high powered life and it became a source of relaxation. Fiona, 61, delves into a book written by his friend Violet Bonham Carter called Winston Churchill As I Knew Him, in which she mentions that the politician stayed at the castle with his paints and brushes.

The author even writes that he was there as a guest in 1916 – but she mentions August rather than June. Undeterred, Fiona visits the castle to locate the exact spot where Clementine would have sat on the wall in the garden to be painted.

Meanwhile art dealer Phil does some digging to check that it is not stolen – and gets the all clear. A further mystery is uncovered when the artwork is x-rayed and another painting is discovered underneath. Experts believe it looks like a painting of a castle – possibly the very one where Winston and his wife stayed.

This news is not unwelcome as the statesman was well-known for re-using canvases. But some doubt is thrown into the mix when it is discovered that the handwriting on the back is not Churchill’s but that of Conservative politician Colonel Claude Lowther, who bought Herstmonceux and restored it – and invited his friend to stay there in 1916.

Barry, who is married and is a carer with a disabled son, admits: “If the painting is real, I’d probably end up reluctantly selling it, obviously for the family. We have always wanted to go to Niagara Falls. Our son is disabled and I think he’d enjoy something like that.” Viewers can find out if the painting is real on the new series of Fake Or Fortune, tonight at 9pm.

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APPRENTICE star and West Ham United vice-chair Karren Brady answers your careers questions.

Here, Karren gives her expert career advice to a reader who wants to sell their artwork.

1

Q) At the age of 53, I’ve taken up painting, and I think I’m pretty good.

I mainly paint landscapes, and would like to see if I could make some money out of selling art.

My dream would be to retire early and live off the proceeds of my paintings before drawing my pension, though I don’t know how doable that is.

My biggest problem is that I don’t know where to start with selling paintings.

I use a computer for my office job, but I’m not very technically minded and I realise I need to create a website if I want to get my artwork seen.

But what else do I need to think about?

Pamela, via email

A) It’s fantastic that you’ve discovered a real passion for painting, and even better that you’re dreaming big and thinking about turning it into something profitable.

Don’t worry about jumping into building a website just yet – there are easier, more approachable ways to get your art seen.

Start small – take some good photos of your work (make sure you use natural light) and open an Instagram account.

The platform is free, simple to use and a great way to test the waters and see what reaction your paintings get.

I’d also suggest joining local art groups on Facebook, as I’ve seen so many people connect, sell their work and get advice that way.

Platforms like Artfinder and Etsy are also worth looking into, plus don’t underestimate the value of a local craft market to get face-to-face feedback and build your confidence.

Most importantly, make sure you sign your work and keep a log of each piece.

Finally, try to speak to other artists whenever and wherever you can – people are often more helpful than you might expect.

The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32.

The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis’ accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show’s three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.

That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” which hangs alone in the show’s entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.’s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell.

In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting’s otherwise neutral palette. It’s easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich.

Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas

(Anna Arca)

The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn’t last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn’s back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he’s going to ride it forward.

Perhaps the canvas’ most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace.

Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis’ lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London’s Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis’ unusual exploratory strategies.

Titled “Nobody,” a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915.

Noah Davis, “Nobody,” 2008, house paint on linen

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles)

The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich’s art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.

“Nobody” weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It’s one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.

Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis’ choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker’s often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg’s hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis’ torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip.

That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. (“Nobody” almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — “somebody” — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind “Mary Jane,” a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet’s “The Railway,” is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms.

Noah Davis, “Mary Jane,” 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas

(Kerry McFate)

So is the forest of “The Missing Link 6,” where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis’ intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise.

Art history is threaded throughout Davis’ work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran’s celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout “1975 (8),” where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool.

The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, “The Missing Link 4,” has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise.

For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In “1975 (8),” the title’s date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court’s appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled.

Noah Davis, “The Missing Link 4,” 2013, oil on canvas

(Robert Wedemeyer)

The 2013 painting’s composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis’ mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in.

Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist’s metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we’re left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna’s Italian Renaissance painting of a “Dead Christ” or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha.

The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, “Imitation of Life.” The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s.

Not all of Davis’ paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of “Maury” with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art’s messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving.

Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist’s reputation. At any rate it’s just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis’ abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show’s reality is better.

Noah Davis, “Imitation of Jeff Koons,” 2013, mixed media

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

I wasn’t expecting a painting of a naked clown to greet me when I FaceTimed Demetri Martin on a Monday afternoon in May. After the longest two seconds of my life, the comedian appeared in front of the camera with an unassuming smile.

For the past few months, Martin has been toiling away in the studio shed designed by his wife, interior designer Rachael Beame Martin, in the backyard of their Beverly Glen home. Lush greenery peeks through the windows above a lattice he constructed to mount canvases of various sizes. His first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings is just days away and he has some finishing touches to make.

Visual art is not new to Martin, a wiz at one-liners who incorporates drawings in his stand-up.

“The cool thing about a drawing is I can share something personal and I can use a graphic to illustrate it more specifically,” he says in “Demetri Deconstructed,” his 2024 Netflix special. In one graph from the special, he plots the inverse relationship between the amount of “past” and “future” time across an individual’s lifespan. The point where “past” and “future” meet is the mid-life existential crisis.

There is a synergy between Martin’s jokes and his sketches, which are more akin to doodles than drawings. Their humor lies in their pared-down specificity. They “make you ponder something on the absurdity-of-life level, which I guess is comedy,” says Martin’s close friend and musician Jack Johnson.

“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Demetri Martin. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

With his love of joke crafting, Martin says he represents the comedy old guard as stand-up has become heavily autobiographical in today’s internet age.

“Specifically, it’s jokes that have always attracted me when we’re talking about the comedy world,” Martin says of his aversion to storytelling. “Can you do a joke in 12 words? Can you get an idea across? How much can you take away and it still lands with people?”

“Acute Angles,” Martin’s solo exhibition running Sunday to May 31, takes his obsession with constraint a step further. The experiment: Can you communicate jokes visually without any words?

“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Martin, who worked on paintings for two-plus years before he figured he had enough material to fill a gallery. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”

“Acute Angles” — he says the title references the shape of his nose — features large-scale paintings with a unifying color palette of bright red, sky blue and medium gray, in addition to 30 smaller drawings. The paintings depict implausible scenarios: What if the grim reaper slipped on a banana on his way to kill you? What if Superman ripped his underpants on his quest to save you?

The show is a collaboration with his wife, whom he adoringly describes as the muscles of the operation. The two secured a month-long lease of an abandoned yoga studio tucked behind a California Pizza Kitchen in Brentwood. Using her design skills — they met in New York City when she was attending Parsons School of Design and he was pursing comedy — Beame Martin led a rebuild of the studio-turned-gallery.

When Martin’s publicist called to ask if the gallery had a name, the couple turned to Google. They eventually came up with “Laconic Gallery,” for Laconia, Greece, where Martin traces his roots, and because the word laconic perfectly describes Martin’s ethos: marked by the use of few words.

Demetri Martin describes his wife, Rachael Beame Martin, as the muscles of the operation.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

On the day of our interview, Martin is completing the last of 12 paintings for the show and is puzzled why the paint appears differently on the canvas than in the can. He’s trying hard to ensure the color of the naked clown’s pubic hair matches his hair.

The relationship between the viewer and the art is both exciting and scary to Martin. When taking a comedy show on the road, you more or less know your jokes will land, he says. With an art show, there’s more of a vacuum between him and the audience, yet the conceit remains: the show is meant to be funny.

But whether viewers laugh while visiting the art exhibition almost doesn’t matter. For Martin, the reward has been the process of creation — the meditative zone he sinks into, indie rock oozing from his CD player, as he envisions and re-envisions the work. (Many of the paintings in the show are derived from old sketches.)

The show also represents Martin’s re-emergence from his own mid-life existential crisis. At 51, he is older than his dad was when he died and about the same age as his late mom, when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. “So now, is this like bonus time for me?” he started to ask himself in his late 40s.

In some ways, Martin has always been a tortured artist. After graduating from Yale, he attended NYU Law only to drop out after the second year. But New York City is also where he found himself, spending late nights at the Comedy Cellar and the Boston Comedy Club. His days were spent visiting the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daydreaming his way through the galleries, jotting jokes in his notepad, is when he first gained an appreciation for the arts.

“He’s not without cynicism once you know him, but where comics so often lead with cynicism, he has this wide-eyed openness, and I think that’s a thread that pulls through all of his work,” says comedian and fellow Comedy Central alum Sarah Silverman.

Demetri Martin’s first solo art exhibition is a collaboration with his wife, Rachael Beame Martin.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Now, Martin is a father to an 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son — the same age he was when manning his Greek family’s shish kebab stand on the Jersey Shore. His self-described anger at seeing the world his kids are growing up in, namely their peers’ obsessions with cell phones, seeps into his paintings and drawings. But ultimately, being a father has irrevocably improved Martin’s perspective on life.

“I think sometimes resignation is also acceptance,” he says, on his new appreciation of midlife. “You’re still motivated, but maybe not in the same way. … You still want to make things, but maybe it doesn’t matter as much, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. So that’s where I feel like I’m at, where I’m saying, ‘You know what, I’m grateful.’ I understand how lucky I’ve been now.”

He’s not quite done with touring but “Acute Angles” represents a potential escape. If his comedy can travel without him, if he can make money while foregoing lonely nights on the road, he can prioritize more important moments, like playing catch with his son after school. After all, his kids aren’t at the age yet where they hate him — a joke his kids don’t like.

Still, Martin’s art-making mirrors his joke-writing. It’s a numbers game, meticulously filling notebooks in handwriting Silverman describes as “tiny letters all perfectly the same size,” then revisiting and sharpening material until the joke emerges, like a vision.

“It’s really a privilege to have the kind of career where I can try something like this,” Martin says. “I don’t take that for granted anymore.”

L.A. has long been a beacon for the arts. So it’s only fitting that “Forever,” the Netflix series that showrunner Mara Brock Akil envisioned as “a love story within a love letter to Los Angeles,” celebrates local artists.

The Midcentury Modern home of Justin Edwards, one half of the couple whose love story informs the show — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel — is flooded with work from Black Angelenos.

“Local Los Angeles artists were important for me to put into the sets, and the Edwards family home, specifically, being collectors of Los Angeles art,” Akil, an L.A. native, told The Times.

Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev and set decorator Ron Franco are also Angelenos, which they said contributed to the cultural competency of their work on “Forever.” Although the writers’ strike made elements of their jobs difficult, both agreed that their experience on “Forever” was uniquely positive, in large part because of their curation of the art in the Edwards’ home.

“Sometimes art can really make a space and it makes a statement and it tells you who the character is,” said Ingerslev. “In this case, you really knew who the Edwards were — they curated art and they cared about where they live — and I thought that really made a big difference through the art and through the furnishings as well.”

Franco agreed, saying he had fun sourcing artwork from Black artists that matched Ingerslev’s color palette and also contained themes pertinent to the show.

“A lot of times the shows that you see now are just headshots and everything that we put up becomes a background piece that’s kind of blurred,” he said. “We are very lucky in that this camera really opened up, and you follow everybody through both of the [permanent] sets and you really feel a lot.”

Audiences noticed their effort, said Ingerslev, who’s been bombarded with questions about the artworks in “Forever,” which was just renewed for a second season.

Here are five local Black artists whose work are featured in the show.

Noah Humes, 31

Humes cites a book about artist and writer Romare Bearden that he received from Akil when he was 6 years old as the foundation for his worldview as an artist. (Humes’ mother was a casting director on “Girlfriends,” the 2000s TV series created by Akil, whom Humes calls “Auntie Mara.”)

“I look back [and] that’s what helped form and shape my energy with how I approach the canvas, wanting to tell the story of my community and different things that I see — social moments, political moments, historical remnants,” said the figurative painter.

Humes is drawn to bright colors that capture the vibrancy of his hometown of L.A. “Her” and “Mid City,” which feature prominently in the Edwards family’s media room in “Forever,” depict solitary figures against yellow backgrounds. The foliage in “Her” grows in Humes’ mother’s frontyard. “Mid City,” the neighborhood where Humes was raised, features the red-crowned parrots that wake him up every morning.

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1. “Her” (Noah Humes) 2. “Mid City” (Noah Humes)

“I felt inclined to represent and show a certain subtlety of ‘We’re here, we’re centered, we’re always a focal point of unfortunate times, but also we can overcome things and become stronger than we have been,’” Humes said of the twin paintings, which he completed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the national racial reckoning that followed.

Humes also credits his neighbors in L.A., a “system of Black excellence,” for positively influencing his artistry. Animator Lyndon Barrois (“Happy Feet,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks”) is his mentor, and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, including siblings Syd and Travis “Taco” Bennett, as well as Thebe Kgositsile — who uses the stage name Earl Sweatshirt — are his childhood friends.

Francis ‘Tommy’ Mitchell, 41

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

Mitchell has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but it was a high school classmate pointing out the permanent nature of a ballpoint pen that led to his aha moment.

“You can erase graphite, you can paint over acrylic and oil,” said the Baltimore- and L.A.-based artist. “Ink is one of those things that I just think of, no pun intended here, it’s forever.”

Mitchell’s portraits feature individuals shaded with ink set against monochromatic acyrlic background. Because it is extremely time-consuming, most artists working in ink compose smaller, more intimate images, said Mitchell. In contrast, his portraits are huge. If the work were hung on the walls of a museum, the viewer may never notice the figure’s skin was drawn in ink and not paint.

“Going to museums or galleries as a kid, I would see these amazing European paintings, and I’m like, ‘Wow, these are amazing,’ but there’s no one that looks like me,” he said, of his desire to focus on portraiture.

“Francis R. of City College”

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

The subject of “Francis R. of City College,” Mitchell’s painting featured in the Edwards’ dining room in “Forever,” is modeled after his father. For Mitchell, the work represents a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Making the painting in his Baltimore studio less than a mile away from City College, where his father attended high school, felt like a full-circle moment.

Seeing the work on television only adds to the significance.

“One of my goals is to always promote those who work in ink because it’s not a traditional medium,” he said, pointing to tattoo artists Jun Cha and Mister Cartoon as inspirations. “So for it to be seen on television, it lends credence to, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special as well.’”

Edwin Marcelin, 50

Marcelin’s first job as a teenager was at Stüssy, a Laguna Beach streetwear brand founded in the early 1980s. Minimalist graphic design, a trademark of Stüssy as well as brands Supreme and Undefeated, has always informed his art.

“Everything usually is about engagement, confrontation or affection,” said Marcelin. “Those are things that I tend to generate towards by using very minimal strokes.”

During his time at the California College of the Arts — then called the California College of Arts and Crafts — Marcelin was drawn to Bauhaus, a German school of art that melds functionality and design. Marcelin applies those abstract Bauhaus fundamentals and adds the element of movement.

“If it ain’t moving, it ain’t me,” said the L.A.-born-and-raised artist.

Marcelin said his emphasis on motion lends itself well to the screen — his piece “Clarity,” a dynamic painting of Michael Jordan taking flight, hangs in basketball-loving Justin’s bedroom in “Forever.”

“I think Black folks in Los Angeles are dynamic, so I try to keep dynamic images, people doing things, not standing there, and I think that translates to film very well,” said Marcelin.

“Clarity” is part of a 23-painting series titled “Black Jesus.” Each image in the series, which took Marcelin about five months to complete in its entirety, references Jordan, who Marcelin said is disappearing visually from pop culture. Case in point: He said his 19- and 16-year-old sons may recognize the Jumpman logo, but they wouldn’t instantly recognize an image of Jordan himself.

“There’ll be more basketball players, but I wanted to do something that was completely abstract representing him because he has so many moments that are fantastically beautiful,” said Marcelin.

Corey Pemberton, 34

With a background in collage, glassblowing and painting, Pemberton’s large mixed-media works — of a man singing into his toothbrush in the bathroom, a naked woman smoking marijuana in bed, a man devouring a plate of his mother’s food — are both intimate and mundane.

“At a certain point, I turned an interest to those who had been marginalized by society in some way, whether it was because of the color of their skin or their gender expression or their socioeconomic status, and developed an interest in depicting those people in a way that both celebrated them but also gave them some space to just exist,” he said.

Such themes of ownership and viewership are etched into Pemberton’s work. For example, he depicts the space and objects around his figures in vivid detail. Objects are important, he said, because they carry memories of “the people who created them or gave them to us or lived with them before us.”

Similarly, his painting “The Collector” celebrates “a young black person who’s making a concerted effort to own and conserve our culture, which is so often falling into the hands of people who don’t care about us on a deeper level.” And in many of Pemberton’s pieces, miniature renderings of his previous works can be found on the walls of his subjects’ homes.

“I think when you see a work presented that way, it sort of brings a heightened level of importance,” said Pemberton.

“I Used to Cook More”

(Corey Pemberton)

So it’s doubly significant that Pemberton’s work is on display in the wealthy Edwards’ home in “Forever.” The art in question, “I Used to Cook More,” can be found in the family’s kitchen and depicts Pemberton’s friend and fellow collector Jared Culp eating out of a white takeout container.

“We were talking about all of the takeout that we now consume as busy young Black creatives in L.A. trying to claw our way to the top of something,” said Pemberton.

But success in the art world has been easier to come by in L.A., where he relocated to after six years in rural North Carolina, said Pemberton.

“When I moved to Los Angeles, not only was I selling work but I was selling work to people with shared experience,” he said. “I was getting feedback that not only were these works that people wanted to live with, but they were works that people saw themselves reflected in, and that I was doing something important or meaningful to more people than just myself.”

Charles A. Bibbs, 77

Bibbs worked in corporate America for 25 years before becoming an artist full time. For Bibbs, art — in a crosshatching style, in his case — is all about communicating universal ideas.

“I mix that crosshatching with different colors and paint, and it’s just one layer on top of another until you get your desired effect,” Bibbs said of his “spontaneous” way of creating that’s “almost like magic sometimes.”

Like many Black artists, Bibbs chose his subject matter out of necessity. As a young man, he encountered few Black artists, yet innately understood the power of positive images of the Black experience, especially in the home.

“It’s a very honorable occupation because you’re giving people a part of you that is changing their lives in an aesthetic way,” he said. “All of those things play into people proud to be who they are.”

“Daddy’s Love”

(Charles A. Bibbs)

In “Forever,” viewers may catch a glimpse of “Daddy’s Love,” a drawing of Bibbs’ father and Bibbs and his sister as children, on the wall outside Justin’s bedroom. But this isn’t the first time his work has made it to the screen. Bibbs is credited with the Black Madonna artwork on the honey jar central to the plot of the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” He said the experience underscored the importance of art, which he said touches the “subconscious mind.”

“[My work] was part of the presentation of the movie and in some way or another may have helped them understand what that movie was really all about.”