Contemporary Art

Tuesdays, Wednesdays & Fridays – 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.,

Thursdays – 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.,
Saturdays & Sundays 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Glenn Kaino: Aki’s Market is inspired by Akira and Sachiye Shiraishi’s small neighborhood market (1957–1970) in East Los Angeles. Created by artist Glenn Akira Kaino (Akira’s grandson and namesake), the exhibition explores the transgenerational trauma from the World War II Japanese American incarceration experience through the stories of Kaino, his family, and the community. It is also an interrogation of the American practice of displacement—collapsing almost 100 years of cultural subjugation into a spiritual, exploratory space from which the building blocks of peace might be discovered.

The exhibition draws from the life of Kaino’s grandfather, Akira Shiraishi, a legendary high school football player who was unable to realize his dreams of attending Occidental College when he was incarcerated at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. Upon returning to East LA after the war, he and Sachiye dedicated their lives to building their market on the corner of Blanchard Street and Geraghty Avenue—a multicultural anchor that served the Japanese and Hispanic communities.

Kaino only knew his grandfather through family stories. To recreate the market, he pulled from his artistic toolkit and used his skill of unlocking past memories through layered conversations (as in his work with historical figures like Olympian, Tommie Smith). He used this methodology to draw out family memories and paint a full picture of the place they called “The Store.”

Through a virtual reality recreation of the store and an installation of related works, Glenn Kaino: Aki’s Market is an exhibition about collective memory where the archival bleeds into the imaginary and where the most advanced technology serves the most personal past.

The exhibition is on view from Saturday, November 18, 2023 through Sunday, April 7, 2024 at the Riverside Art Museum in the Art Alliance Gallery.

An in-depth installation of Jean-Michel Basquiat, features all 13 works by the artist in the Broad collection, including three works on view for the first time at The Broad: Santo 2, Deaf, and Wicker.

Tuesday & Wednesday & Friday – 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Thursday – 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Saturday & Sundays – 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Vamba Bility is a multidisciplinary artist whose work echoes the experience of the African diaspora. Having journeyed from Côte d’Ivoire to Guinea to the United States, Bility perceives this contested way of living as a blur, albeit one that is deeply intimate. In his hands, this blurred sensibility becomes a fluid movement that draws on various material histories. He expresses the reverberating motions of his existence by leaning on and weaving together mediums and materials such as painting, textiles, found objects, and sound. A cracked calabash gets sewn together. A torn canvas gets stitched as a salve. A painting is propped up by a brick or two. All of this is a form of mark-making that structures the landscape of diaspora as a material residue of atmosphere, of feeling, of process. Bility threads this through a shared poiesis—a bringing forth, a revelation—that sketches out an architecture of what it means to be.