Los Angeles-based artist Lauren E. Holland will create the site-specific installation Black Magic Woman for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The artist uses highly allegorical, yet hauntingly beautiful, intriguing and disturbing imagery to explore key themes of creativity and resourcefulness of African-American women, and issues of cultural misconception. For Project Room II, Holland will construct a painting-based work that suggests the structure of a shallow-relief stage set consisting of the backdrop of a large oil on paper mural in front of which there will be numerous smaller freestanding sections. An elegantly presented marriage of opposites, the work is replete with an abundance of seductive and also repulsive images, and possesses the eerie, uncanny quality of nineteenth century gothic ghost stories. With its title inspired by the Santana song of the same name, Black Magic Woman references the formal constructs of the theatre, as well as themes of class, racial stereotyping, consumerism, death, and decay�all of which complement the William Pope.L installation that will be on view concurrently in the Main Gallery. Holland has participated in numerous group exhibitions and her work is in many private collections. A frequent recipient of awards for artistic distinction, she is a recent graduate of the Yale University School of Fine Art. Black Magic Woman is Holland�s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Sep, 2007	Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid
	William Pope.L