Publications
Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond
by Laura Whitcomb
Contributions by Peter Frank, Jim Newman, Antoine Thirion, Gene Youngblood,
Jay Sanders, Robby Herbst, Steve Seid and Steina and Woody Vasulka.
The publication Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond (2021) is the result of 8 years of research by Label Curatorial's director Laura Whitcomb and the research director Narin Dickerson. It is particularly anticipated after the Dilexi's well reviewed retrospective in 2019 which saw six galleries across California participate. The Dilexi Multivenue Retrospective included Parrasch Heijnen, Parker Gallery, The Landing, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles and Crown Point Press and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco. The exhibition received very positive reviews in the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and was featured twice on KCRW as well as in articles by art critic Jonathan Griffin in two publications. Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond now stands at 420 pages and is a vital piece of scholarship that corrects the multitude of errata associated with the gallery and its artists while enriching this period of history in an in-depth manner.
Alan Lynch
Château Shatto
Summer 2025
Los Angeles, California
Alan Lynch’s art practice was defined by wide philosophical and reverential systems. These took root in the artist through his early study of judo, then expanded into a sustained practice of Sōtō Zen Buddhism––with Lynch eventually being ordained a monk––and a transcendental understanding of the material world that characterized his relations to it. Château Shatto discovered the work of Lynch through Laura’s Dilexi publication and now represents the estate. Laura collaborated on the project and contributed an essay: Alan Lynch: A Brush Stroking the Void.
Salvador Dalí:
The Paradox of Fashion
Forthcoming
Los Angeles, California
The artist Salvador Dalí sought to deliver Surrealism to its final frontier to "transform reality" by weaving through the fabric of mass culture his complex ideas parlaying the consciousness of exclusionary worlds into popular culture. Dalí enacted this transformation through the culprit of the most familiar components of modern life, one of which would be the uniform made in fashion. Along with the Surrealists, Dalí saw fashion's archetypal power merging exalted states of beauty, primal desire and metamorphosis as a central source of its visual semiotic vocabulary. The artist was the most vigorous in bringing Surrealism to the forefront of the archetypal role fashion could play in culture. He worked with some of the most renown fashion designers, directors, actors choreographers and dancers of the 20th Century while revolutionizing particularly the world of fashion. Recalling how costume signifies the potentialities of a shaman in a magical ritual, Dali, who viewed himself as a modern day alchemist saw costume as a means to initiate both a transmutation of the self and the world at large.
Bay Area Artist- and Poet-Run Galleries 1949-1965
by Laura Whitcomb
Forthcoming 2026
Los Angeles, California
This book is the first comprehensive summary of the most critical artist and poet run galleries and alternative spaces in the Bay Area. The publication chronicles how each offered a dynamic role to the gestation of the new modalities of Californian and American contemporary art. This book expands the interest of alternatives art spaces and the cross pollinating genres of the arts that became a signature dynamic of the Bay Area. These alternative art spaces showcased the new strains of Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Figurative, Funk and what became known as Beat era art. These were the first venues to show Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, and many other key American artists that hailed from the Bay Area.