Last year, my curatorial colleague Erin Maynes and I met with Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark to discuss her proposal for the second installment of the series Artist Selects. Launched in 2023 with an installation curated by the late German-born, Los Angeles–based artist Silke Otto Knapp, Artist Selects is a biennial exchange that invites artists to create their own focused installation from the collection of LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. We invited Stark to mine the Rifkind’s holdings—which includes thousands of works on paper by German Expressionist artists—to craft an exhibition in the Rifkind’s gallery within the Modern Art Galleries on BCAM, Level 3, where Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War is now on view.
Since the early 1990s, Frances Stark has created a prolific and diverse body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, video, performance, and writing, that playfully and poetically explores systems of power, communication, and intimacy. We anticipated that her singular ability to weave meaning through visual and textual references—from punk manifestos and Henry Miller to Chatroulette and Chantal Akerman—would offer a compelling, contemporary lens for viewing the Rifkind’s historic collection.
In a series of visits to the Rifkind Center, during which we reviewed hundreds of prints, drawings, and periodicals, Stark mapped out an aesthetically driven narrative, intuitively crafting a carefully composed arc of images that explores the cycle of love, birth, and death in a climate of global warfare. Her installation of 29 works on paper, Periodic Love and Perpetual War, is a poignant visual essay that foregrounds formal rhymes and thematic juxtapositions over chronology, technique, or historical contextualization. She aimed to, as she put it, “activate the intensity of each composition and offer entry points for a wide spectrum of viewers, from novice teens to wise elders.” This methodology stems from her former teaching practice (Stark taught at USC for a decade until resigning in 2014) in which she encouraged students to “let the artwork deliver its goods before trying to unlock an obscured meaning or value” provided by some external authority.
Although Stark’s own works of art do not appear in Periodic Love and Perpetual War, the presentation is deeply informed by her understanding of what it means to make art in the present, and how it mirrors or departs from making art in war-torn Europe during the early 20th century. She brought a quiet intensity to her selections, grounded in close observation but also alert to the moral and existential stakes artists face. In a conversation recorded for her Bloomberg Connects audio tour, Stark reflected:
The artist plays a role in the world that is very complicated and hard to pin down. And one of the true gifts of a collection like this is to be able to encounter firsthand, with zero mediation, an artist's gift to the world. This artist is not here with us. They cannot speak about what they did. They can't contextualize it for your time, for you, but what they left is so key.
She continued:
I don't feel that it is the role of the artist to opine on media reports of human carnage and war, but this is undoubtedly the topic [of the show] and undoubtedly the world that we inhabit, whether we're the ones dropping the bombs or running from them. [These works] are in the spirit of the independent human that is not making grand claims about historical narratives, but rather observing minute detail of the world that we're inhabiting.
Stark’s approach recalls John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing, which theorizes that images come before words in human cognition (the visual precedes the verbal) and “to look is always an act of choice.” Her choices not only demonstrate her way of seeing and thinking, but invite us to look at art differently—to form intuitive associations and access visual art’s unique capacity to communicate with viewers without needing further explanation.
Take, for example, her pairing of Willi Geiger’s untitled depiction of women in mourning and Arthur Segal’s The Plague. Though unrelated by subject or technique, they share formal patterns that captured Stark’s attention: the bell-like enclosure surrounding the grieving women echoes the arched shape of the flame that the creature breathes onto the villagers. Stark’s eye for these visual rhymes draws attention to gesture and affect—the hunched torsos of the mourning women, the lifeless bodies across the village—and suggest that both groups are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.
Meanwhile, depictions of mothers with children in works by Conrad Felixmüller, Stanisław Stückgold, and Franz Reinhardt on view across from Käthe Kollwitz’s powerful The Sacrifice span a range of expression, but together articulate a potent emotional tension: the joy of birth weighed against the horror of bringing a child into a brutal world. For Stark, “when you bring a being into the world, you are sacrificing it to that world.” Positioned alongside works that reflect the aftermath of war, the sentiment is no longer abstract—it becomes visceral. Stark does not offer us resolution; she reveals the somber truth that love and pain coexist.
On Monday, September 29, we’ll be joined by Stark for a conversation exploring some of the artist’s recent projects and provide insight into her studio practice as well as her experience researching and working with the Rifkind collection. Learn more and RSVP to what will undoubtedly be a powerful discussion about art’s potential to communicate across borders and generations. Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War is on view through November 9, 2025.