Exhibition

Fostering Photovoice: a photo exhibition about the foster youth experience, features photographs that depict identity, family, and the foster care system by six LA based foster youth artists. Join us for our Closing Reception on March 8, 2025. Stay tuned for upcoming details.

Fostering Photovoice is a group photography exhibition that reflects the lives and experiences of youth impacted by foster care. The project was conceived by a photovoice research collective that included six artists—all former foster youths between the ages of 18 and 25 who reside in Los Angeles County. Several UCLA undergraduate and graduate students were involved, among them, participants who have had lived experience in foster care, or had expertise in using the arts-based empowerment method called photovoice for research and social policy.

The collective came together over 7 weeks during the summer of 2023. The exhibition is organized by prompts and considers the differences in the views of each artist. It includes reflections on who the youth are, how they think about family, and how they would have liked the system to respond to and support their needs.

The series invites the viewer to beliefs about foster youth and the foster care system, including any biases they may have. It is also an opportunity to reflect on how to best support foster youth who enter state care through no fault of their own—both as children and as they transition to adulthood.

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. The exhibition explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. See website for ticket prices and registration.

Prior to the colonization of Southern California in the 18th century, Native communities throughout the region deployed controlled fire regimes to ensure the well-being of their local ecosystems. Fire Kinship counters attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, arguing for a return to Native practices in which fire is regarded as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community well-being, and tribal sovereignty. Wednesdays 12:00 noon – 8:00 p.m., Thursdays – Sundays 12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m.

Commissioned on the occasion of Hollyhock House’s centennial, Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy presents twenty-one photographs by the artist that introduce new perspectives on Los Angeles’ only World Heritage site. Ireland’s photographs privilege the quiet, subtle details of Hollyhock House and make visible the care and conservation that sustain the site over time.

The title of the exhibition comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, in which he describes the process of realizing Hollyhock House. For Ireland, Wright’s phrase “even by proxy” points to the fraught relationship between client and architect in building the house as well as the ongoing project of preservation.

Even by Proxy is presented in partnership with Project Restore and the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University.

Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family and domestic life, the built environment, and interactions between humans and the natural world.

Her 2024 mid-career survey, Janna Ireland: True Story Index, was jointly hosted by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. The resulting solo exhibition traveled from the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno to the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas and the AIA Center for Architecture in New York.

Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Janna Ireland is the 2024 recipient of the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award, which is presented to a photographer who honors Shulman’s legacy by challenging the way we look at physical space. She is the recipient of the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Program (COLA-IMAP) grant, and is a 2024 runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.

Advance reservations recommended. To book a self-guided tour ticket, CLICK HERE.

We’re thrilled to announce the opening of the PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition, Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics on Saturday, September 7, 2024, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions LACE at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, this exhibition revisits the collaborative artistic practice of the late Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012) as an investigation into technoscientific experimentation, politics, activism, and art-making, contextualized for our contemporary moment. Curated by LACE’s former Chief Curator/Director of Programs Daniela Lieja Quintanar with Ana Briz, the project weaves together an exhibition, public programming, performances, educational workshops, and study groups as an evocation of da Costa’s approach to the intersections of ancient and non-academic forms of knowledge. This exhibition is complemented by a publication surveying da Costa’s entire artistic career with curatorial essays, reflections from previous collaborators including Donna Harraway and Robert F. Nideffer, and more. The catalog is the most extensive analysis of da Costa’s practice to date, and is distributed by MIT Press. Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024, presenting more than 70 exhibitions from organizations across the region exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.

Since 2007, JANM has partnered with Eric Nakamura, founder of Giant Robot, to produce the Giant Robot Biennale, a recurring art exhibition that highlights diverse creative works celebrating the ethos of Giant Robot—a staple of Asian American alternative pop culture and an influential brand encompassing pop art, skateboard, comic book, graphic arts, and vinyl toy culture.

Giant Robot Biennale 5 will feature artists Sean Chao, Felicia Chiao, Luke Chueh, Giorgiko, James Jean, Taylor Lee, Mike Shinoda, Rain Szeto, and Yoskay Yamamoto.

Giant Robot Biennale 5 is presented by JANM and Eric Nakamura, founder of Giant Robot.

Top: Felicia Chiao, Imagination (detail), 2023, Copic marker and ink on brown toned paper. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2019, Lawson answered more than 1,000 questions in his Story File so that future generations can continue conversing with him to learn about his legacy. What would you like to ask Lawson?

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.,
Thursday, 12:00 noon – 8:00 p.m.
Adults – $16, Seniors and Youth – $9, Members and Children under 5 – Free