Contemporary Art

Port Traits pays tribute to the work of late AGCC Studio Artists Scott Brown and Slobodan Dimitrov. The exhibition features a selection of paintings by Brown and his alias, Butcher John Henry (a collaboration with artist Logan Fox), in addition to black and white film photographs by Dimitrov. With over 25 years of history at the Center, Scott Brown and Slobodan Dimitrov will be remembered for their impact on the San Pedro community.

Scott Brown was a painter, photographer, and storyteller who grew up in Southern California. Scott was an active member of the South Bay arts community, participating regularly in the First Thursday art walk in Downtown San Pedro and other events around San Pedro and Palos Verdes. Brown’s colorful and uniquely stylized paintings captured the people and places in his life around San Pedro and beyond. Paintings by Scott Brown and his collaborative alias, Butcher John Henry, will be on view in Port Traits.

Slobodan Dimitrov was the unofficial photographer of the labor movement in the LA area for the past thirty years, a crucial period in its history. He was born in former Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia) and spent several years in France as a child before emigrating to Los Angeles. He became an AGCC Studio Artist in 1984, and he has spent much of his career documenting the labor movement in addition to San Pedro’s history and local artists. Port Traits will feature several bodies work by Dimitrov from his black and white film photography practice.

Port Traits will be on view in the AGCC galleries March 9th – April 6th, 2024, with open gallery hours Thursdays – Saturdays from 10am to 4pm. The exhibition will open with a free public reception on Saturday, March 9th from 3-5pm.

Support for the AGCC exhibitions program is provided by City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, The Ahmanson Foundation, Norris Foundation, the Perenchio Foundation, and the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

About Angels Gate Cultural Center

Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) emerged from a group of San Pedro artists in the 1970s that created art studios and exhibition space within the WWII era army barracks of Angels Gate Park near the Port of Los Angeles. Today, AGCC hosts over 50 artist studios in addition to a variety of programs to engage the diverse communities of the Los Angeles Harbor region, including arts education in local schools, community classes, cultural events, and exhibitions of contemporary art. More information about AGCC is available at angelsgateart.org

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.

Can a Football Stadium Be a Black History Museum?

Moderated by Khalil Kinsey, Curator, Kinsey African American Art & History Collection

In February 2022, SoFi Stadium marked two milestones. The first was hosting the Los Angeles Rams’ home-field victory in Super Bowl LVI. The second was opening an exhibition of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection. En route to the bathroom or on a beer run, visitors to the stadium’s second level may find themselves taken off guard by letters from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, photographs of L.A.’s early-20th-century Black firefighters, formal portraits of 19th-century Black men and women, and works by major Black artists.

What does it mean to juxtapose this experience with watching professional football players—over 50% of whom are Black—go to battle on the turf below? What have the Kinseys chosen to display, and why at SoFi? And how are other people and organizations, in fields from fine art to poetry, using Black narratives to inform and enrich our understanding of history and contemporary life in unexpected ways?

A panel of artists and athletes visit Zócalo and Kinsey Collection at SoFi Stadium to discuss what one of the world’s largest private collections of Black art and historical objects is doing at one of the world’s grandest football stadiums, why it matters, and where similar efforts are scoring big.

6 PM: In-person audience members are invited for a last, best chance to join a guided tour of the Kinsey exhibition, which leaves SoFi at the end of March

7 PM: Conversation, in-person and online

8 PM: In-person audience members are invited to join us for a reception with a DJ and complimentary food and beverages

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.