Exhibition

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

The exhibition brings together artists Michael Massenburg, Aiseborn, and Mr. B Baby to explore the intersections of family,
culture, and community. Curated by Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, PhD., the works will be on view Wednesday to Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., from April 13 to August 2024, with a reception/artist talk and performance by Nedra Wheeler Trio taking place Sunday, June 9 at 1:00 p.m. Admission is free.

Cover image: Helping Families Grow, by Michael Massenburg, Aiseborn, and Mr. B Baby located at Kaiser Permanente Watts Counseling and Learning Center

Mark Bradford’s 150 Portrait Tone, a mural-size composition that contains elements of both abstraction and realism, is based on an idea for a work that the artist conceived after the fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in July 2016. Castile, a nutrition services supervisor at an elementary school, was shot after being pulled over in his car—an incident that was livestreamed on Facebook by Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to him.

The painting features excerpts of Reynolds’s dialogue from the video. The title, 150 Portrait Tone, refers to the name and color code of the pink acrylic used throughout the painting. Like the now-obsolete “flesh” crayon in the Crayola 64 box (renamed “peach” in 1962), the color “portrait tone” carries inherent assumptions about who, exactly, is being depicted. In the context of Bradford’s painting, the title presents a sobering commentary on power and representation.

Justice in our Barrios, Paz al Mundo: A Moratorium on War and Carrying the Legacy Forward, the inaugural exhibition of the Lincoln Heights Youth Arts Center (LHYAC). The exhibition features the personal archive of Rosalio Muñoz, peace activist, social justice organizer, youth mentor with roots in Lincoln Heights and Highland Park, and a Co-Founder of the Chicano Moratorium. Muñoz life’s work underscores the importance of asking ourselves how we can continue building people power and agency and that, together, we can bring about the changes needed in our world today. The exhibition is the culmination of a nine-week summer youth internship that the Center recognized as the Summer 2024 Youth Leaders.

The opening reception of Justice in our Barrios, Paz al Mundo: A Moratorium on War and Carrying the Legacy Forward takes place on Saturday, September 21, 2024, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. The event will be held at El Pueblo de Lincoln Heights Art Gallery at Lincoln Heights Youth Arts Center, located at 2911 Altura Street, Los Angeles, CA 90031. The opening reception and gallery are free and open for all to attend.

Rosalio Muñoz’s knowledge, lived experience, and personal archive ephemera including photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, campaign materials, artworks, and government documents provide the cornerstone from which this exhibition chronicles the historiography of the growing presence and empowerment of Mexican American people starting in the 1920s. Justice in our Barrios emphasizes the Chicano Moratorium’s multigenerational, intercultural, and national grassroots mobilization efforts whose anti-war 2 mission played a critical role in bringing an end to the Vietnam War. Further, it highlights the Chicano Movement’s priorities and accomplishments that took shape and continued after the post-war era towards creating an improved quality of life for all people, particularly the poor and undocumented in Los Angeles.

In addition to the historical timeline, the exhibition showcases contemporary works of art including painting, drawing, photography, and mixed media, that embody peace, justice, and solidarity. The contemporary collection is of emerging and established artists, from LHYAC visual art students to renowned artivists, exemplifying the vibrant spirit and rich history of Los Angeles’s Chicanx resilience and resistance, and reflect the Chicano Movement’s legacy and relevance to the global conflicts of today. Artworks were selected from an Open Call for Art and carefully chosen by the Youth Leaders themselves.

Featured artists include Rafael Cardenas, Colorsoner, Dare to Struggle, Hailey Deniz, Emma Deniz, Jennaya Dunlap, Paz Fernandez, Mina Ho Ferrante, Yulu Fuentes, Bobby Gordon, Kalli Arte Collective, Lilia “Liliflor” Ramirez, Pola Lopez, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta commissioned by Coyotl + Macehualli, Arturo Meza II, Andrea “Mextica” Ramirez, Josiah O’ Balles, Dara Oum, Sol Itzel Ramirez, Melanny Rivera & Brenda Ceja, Re:sister, Joanna S., and Miki Yokoyama.

The contemporary artworks will be on display until December 14, 2024, and the historical collection will continue through February 2025. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Information on public programming is forthcoming.

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.