Anti-Gentrification Activists crashed the Laura Owens' Opening at the Whitney Museum

For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, as well as the relationships among avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology.

Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene during the mid-nineties, at a time when many in the critical establishment viewed painting with suspicion. Her early canvases upended the traditions of painterly abstraction by incorporating goofy personal allusions, doodling, and common craft materials.

During the VIP opening of the midcareer survey of Laura Owens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on Wednesday, November 8, protesters gathered outside the institution and in its galleries, Benjamin Sutton of Hyperallergic reports.