Santa Monica

All bleeding-heart liberals will respond to paintings, lithos and a few black-and-white photos by New Yorker Jerry Kearns. His bold Lichtenstein-like representation is based on ‘50s comic strips and photojournalism from daily tabloids. Kearns exhumes all of Pop’s parlor tricks--the flat shiny look of magazine ads, huge fuzzy dots that look like newspaper photos writ large, bright colors heavily shaded in black--but his posture isn’t cool observation, it’s a call to arms. He rails every embarrassing folly from Love Canal (a comic-strip couple embrace on a monster-faced gondola) to Oliver North to so-called bedroom politics (Bogart-and-Garbo types nestle in the sheets canopied by a spectral image of the Capital dome). In the powerful “Amandla” (an obvious reference/tribute to the imprisoned black South African leader), a cynical Kearns says, “Do more than talk,” as a black Batman comic hero zooms toward us, all pomp and glitz, while an army of anguished black faces fade into the background like newsprint forgotten in the sun. (Meyers-Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to June 25.)