B-SIDE-ART

  What Three Nations Carried to Venice On a flatbed truck rolling into the Giardini in the spring of 2026, a life-sized deer made of poured concrete sat folded into sharp, origami angles, as if someone had tried to wrap a soldier's grief in the shape of a child's paper toy. It had traveled roughly 3,000 kilometers, most of that distance inside a country at war, evacuated from the town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast before Russian forces could reach it. By the time it was lowered onto its plinth at the entrance to Ukraine's pavilion, the sculpture had already outlived at least one version of the peace it was built to commemorate. Ukraine calls the work "Security Guarantees," a title that doubles as a joke and an accusation: it references the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia promised to respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. Artist Zhanna Kadyrova first installed the deer in a ...

  Walk into Roberts Projects on South La Brea Avenue this month and the space feels less like a gallery than a costume shop caught mid-shift. Mannequins wear Renaissance Faire bodices and 1969 stage garments; sketches for a production of "West Side Story" hang beside contact sheets of actors mid-rehearsal. "Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar" opened May 30 as a survey of a part of her career almost nobody had seen, and it closes August 22. In between, on July 26, Saar died in her sleep at her Los Angeles home, four days short of her 100th birthday. Portrait of Betye Saar The premise sounds like a footnote: more than two hundred garments, sketches, and photographs from a fine artist's day job as a costumer. But it reframes two of the most anthologized works in postwar American art. "Black Girl's Window" (1969) and "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972), both built from staged tableaux of found objects, look less like spont...