There is a certain type of person who will only clear their calendar for an art exhibition if there are dogs involved. If that is you, this one was made to order. In August 2023, Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles opened For the Love of Dog, a group show billed as a celebration of the lifelong bond between people and their dogs, and it ran through September 9.
What set the show apart from a standard gallery night was its partner. Hashimoto mounted the exhibition alongside Wags and Walks, the LA-based rescue nonprofit, so the art was never the whole point. The opening reception doubled as an adoption event, meaning visitors could take in more than 30 artists’ work and meet actual adoptable dogs in the same room. Buy a painting of a dog, or bring one home. Ideally both.
What was on the walls
The lineup leaned into range rather than a single style, which is exactly what a subject as universal as dogs deserves. The arts and culture magazine Juxtapoz, covering the show, singled out several standouts: Erin Armstrong’s poised, elegant pups that seemed to borrow their owners’ composure; Joey Wolf’s wrinkly gray bulldog sprawled belly-up on a pink couch, mid-lick; Thomas Martinez tucking ceramic chicken bones under a tufted tree to keep a dog away from them; and Laura Noguera’s image of a woman weeping a literal puddle for her dog to drink, tending to the animal even in grief.
Most works kept a dog somewhere in frame, whether the entire animal or just a stray ear, nose, or paw, rendered across oil, acrylic, and ceramic. Each artist arrived at their own angle on what it actually feels like to love a dog.
The ceramicist with a disco ball of her dog’s head
Among the featured artists was ceramicist Katie Kimmel, whose practice spans sculpture, furniture, graphic apparel, and home goods, all of it steeped in her own menagerie: two Chihuahuas named Pony and Muffin, a Saint Bernard named Boss, and a tortoise named Joey. Kimmel also makes custom pieces of other people’s pets, and three of those ceramic vases went on view in the Hashimoto show.
Her approach is equal parts craft and affection. She has described the custom commissions as the “job” side of her process, while the sculptures of her own dogs are pure joy, made for galleries and for herself. Her wedding, by her account, became one big excuse to make art about her dogs. At one point she found herself in possession of a disco ball shaped like the head of her dog Pony, unsure what to do with it but delighted to have made it. That is roughly the energy the entire exhibition ran on: serious artists being completely, unapologetically sincere about their pets.
The show also featured work from artist Lorien Stern, and its Instagram rollout included pieces shared by painter Nicholas Bono Kennedy. For a few weeks in late summer, a Los Angeles gallery turned itself over entirely to the animals we build our lives around, and sent a few of them home with new families in the process. Hard to argue with that.
