RUDIMENTARY FIGURES

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Jan Tumlir, Eli Bonerz, and Ross Simonini

Saturday, January 24, 2026, from 4-6 PM

PHASE Gallery

1718 Albion Street, Los Angeles, CA 90031

Please join us for a discussion between Jan Tumlir, Eli Bonerz, and Ross Simonini this coming Saturday, January 24, from 4-6 pm.

Tumlir is the organizer of our current exhibition Rudimentary Figures. Bonerz and Simonini are the authors/editors of a forthcoming volume on the work of Rhoda Kellogg, who furnished this show with its theoretical and practical cardinal points. 

Rhoda Kellogg (b. 1898, Bruce, WI, d. 1987, San Francisco, CA) was an Early Childhood scholar, educator, theorist, author, and activist. She amassed an extensive and wide-ranging collection of child art through her travels around the world and through her work with children in numerous preschool programs, including Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool, which she designed and built. Over the course of six decades, Kellogg earned an international reputation for her pioneering research in early graphic expression through teaching, lecturing, and publishing, notably in her books What Children Scribble and Why (1955), The Psychology of Children’s Art (1967), Analyzing Children’s Art (1969), and Children’s Drawings, Children’s Minds (1979). In these works, she explains and documents her theories that children in all cultures follow the same graphic evolution in their drawing, from scribbles through certain basic forms, and that children’s art can be a key to understanding the mental growth and educational needs of children.

Bonerz and Simonini were drawn to the work of Kellogg as parents of young children and committed champions of art in all its forms. Especially compelling to both is Kellog’s injunction, voiced throughout her writings, to treat children’s art aesthetically above all. Although Kellogg is often affiliated with the field of child psychology, she consistently refrains from psychologizing children’s art as indicative of “exceptional,” “normative” or “aberrant” tendencies. Within her practice, discriminating measures of good or bad performance gain meagre traction. Rather, we are advised to look for commonalities: the “twelve basic scribbles” from which their forms emerge and to which they always return. Kellogg has defined these as the building blocks of not only children’s art but art more generally, which always proceeds both forward and backward through time. “The artist must live all the primitive experiments over again,” declares the art historian Henri Focillon. 

Our discussion will focus on Kellogg’s analytical methods. We will explore their relation to the twentieth century avant-garde movements that she attended no less assiduously than the art produced in her preschool classrooms. Finally, we will consider the continuing relevance of Kellogg’s teachings for art history as well as the contemporary field of art production.

Biographies

Jan Tumlir is an author based in Los Angeles. He is a founding editor of the local art journal X-TRA and a long-time regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. More recently, he has joined the editorial team at Effects, a London-based journal devoted to “aesthetics in the shadows of the contemporary." Tumlir has written extensively on such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg and James Welling. His books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles co-written with Chris Kraus and Jane McFadden (Black Dog Press, 2005); Hyenas Are…, a monograph on the work of Matthew Brannon (Mousse, 2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records(Onomatopee, 2015); and Conversations, produced in discussion with Jorge Pardo (Inventory Press, 2021). A book-length study of the role of gesture in painting is forthcoming. Tumlir has served as a faculty member of the Fine Art and Humanities and Sciences departments at Art Center College of Design since 1999. In 2022, he joined the faculty of SCI-Arc as resident art historian.

Eli Bonerz has worked in professional design—architecture, graphic design, and fashion—for some three decades. In 1991, he co-founded one of the original streetwear brands, XLARGE, where he served as the principal designer and art director until 2008.  He has designed album art for Beastie Boys and The Crystal Method, among others. He co-founded Georges, a short-lived gallery in Hollywood that gave Henry Taylor, Yoshitomo Nara, and Takashi Murakami their first gallery exposure in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book of drawings and sketches by the architect Richard Neutra for Inventory Press. He is also collaborating with Ross Simonini and others on a publication featuring the writings and children's art collection of Rhoda Kellogg.

Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician.  He has held solo presentations of his painting at the Sharjah Biennial (UAE), Francois Ghebaly (NYC), Human Resources (LA) and elsewhere. His published his debut novel, The Book of Formation with Melville House and his next album, Themes Vol. 1 & 2, will be released this May on Ulyssa records. His writing appears in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, and many monographs. He has taught at Columbia University, CCA, and UCLA. He is currently at work on a monograph about the work of Rhoda Kellogg and children’s art. One of his paintings is currently hanging at the Watermill center for an exhibition of Kellogg’s collection and contemporary artist inspired by children’s art. He lives in Los Angeles.