Shana Nys Dambrot

Because even bona fide rock stars can be bested by the paintbrush, please enjoy this unscientific roundup of musical icons who pursue robust, very public-facing visual art practices—with tricks, treats, and mixed bags. Each of them has some admirable qualities, and they’re giving it their all and we love that for them—but they might bear in mind that not everything always needs to be seen. Perhaps that’s a challenge for someone stalked by the spotlight. Spoiler alert: every single one of these guys paints exactly how he makes music.

As the holidays approach, our column takes a more homey turn, savoring the ways that a pair of the icons who soundtracked our young lives have also long been busy with brush and canvas. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, our folksy mom and dad and iconic troubadours of the American songbook, are creatives who each

David Schwartz approaches sculpture as a form of listening. His translucent boomboxes operate like temporal, Proustian portals where sound and memory dance in the light. In Minneapolis he was a young musician studying art; but he left school when he ended up in Prince’s world, recording at Paisley Park and performing with him. While professionally

Jewel kinda likes it in her brand new place. Even on the eve of opening her second large-scale art exhibition—this time amid the hubbub of the Venice Biennale—the transition from the acoustic vibration of a guitar string to the data-driven algorithms of a 60,000-LED sculpture might seem like a departure. Yet for Jewel, the expansive scale of Matriclysm: An Archeology of Connections Lost suggests an evolution.

The Gracias Gustavo era at the LA Phil finds a fresh visual partner in artist Alexandra Grant, whose kaleidoscopic translations of text-based narrative into pure, expressive image now adorn a pair of definitive Prokofiev recordings from Deutsche Grammophon. For the digital release of Romeo and Juliet

Across a sweeping multidisciplinary practice, Amadour uses visual art and architectural history as a structural blueprint for an intimate, world-building sound—a transified, technicolor, high desert latter-day Jean Cocteau, whose expansive vision is both born from and continually returning to the specific surrealism of the American West.

Read this exciting story from Los Angeles Times June 07, 2026 issue. THE WORLD’S FIRST AI ART MUSEUM IS SET TO OPEN THIS MONTH IN DOWNTOWN L.A., DESIGNED TO PLACE AN EXPERIENCE OF NATURE SQUARELY IN THE DIGITAL REALM — WITH A LOWER CARBON FOOTPRINT, TOO.

The Skirball’s new exhibition, Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86,

Multidextrous artist Julie Green’s recent exhibition at Keystone Art Space in Los Angeles did something rare—it made the invisible mechanics of sound feel solid. Where the Field Begins to Sing