Contemporary Art

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work Drifting Toward Twilight—recently commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds.

 

“Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight” transforms an entire room in the Scott Galleries into what the artist calls a “cocoon-like environment.” The walls are painted in an oceanic blue gradient, featuring a poem by Saar and phases of the moon. Shifting lighting effects in the gallery emulate phases of daylight to twilight, evening to night, and night to dawn. Inside the canoe, Saar positions mysterious “passengers,” including antlers in metal birdcages, children’s chairs, and architectural elements—all drawn from the artist’s ever-evolving collection of found objects. The space beneath the canoe is illuminated by a cool neon glow, highlighting plant material.

 

Betye Saar (b. 1926) is one of the most significant American artists. Over her six-decade career, she has created assemblage works exploring themes of racial oppression, mysticism, the occult, family, memory, and identity. She fashions her assemblage artworks from found objects, antiques, and family heirlooms that she collects. Emerging as an important artistic voice during the feminist and Civil Rights movements, Saar is a pioneer of Black feminist art who connected the personal with the political, taking on such subject matter as the legacies of enslavement and the impacts of racism.

Before the city’s first dedicated contemporary art museum was established, Los Angeles was home to disparate, heterogeneous art scenes with artists forming different nodes and establishing tight networks throughout the city—from Venice to East LA, and from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the north to the Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park. Artists utilized unconventional contexts including the street, the studio, the art school, and other public spaces to show and present their art while embracing performative and ephemeral actions to engage the public in more immediate ways. In doing so, artists were responding to the possibilities of a burgeoning art scene and the urban sprawl and dispersed landscape of LA.

 

Timed reservations required: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.,
Thursdays 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

The Museum of Latin American Art is pleased to present Alexandre Arrechea: Intersected Horizons, the first solo museum show in California that explores the artistic practices of the well-known and multidisciplinary artist Alexandre Arrechea. A contemporary Afro-Cuban artist based between Spain and the USA for more than two decades and the former co-founder of the Los Carpinteros collective,

 

In this exhibit, Arrechea’s method of transgressing the limits of traditional artifacts and materials as a point of examination is redefined as a social and political exploration that melds art, history, and archaeological forms.

 

Adults – $15 Seniors & Students – $10, Members and Children under 12 Free,
Free Admission every Sunday

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.

The Broad is pleased to announce Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), an exhibition drawn entirely from the Broad collection, showcasing works by Los Angeles-based artists. Drawing its title from a John Baldessari work, the exhibition includes reflections on L.A. as a city in flux, and on societal issues that extend far beyond it. The show includes the work of 21 artists across varying generations who were raised in the Los Angeles area, or relocated to the city.

 

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.

Bahia Reverb: Artists and Place presents the work of ten former fellows at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil, all from North America and of African descent, to reflect on how Bahia, an epicenter of the African diaspora, has fueled their work and changed their understanding of themselves.

Artists include Gerald Cyrus, Juan Erman Gonzalez, Mark Steven Greenfield, Karen Hampton, Rik Freeman, Francis Tre Lawrence, Germaine Ingram, Sandra Brewster, Precious Lovell, and Tim Whiten.

Bahia Reverb: Artists and Place is organized by the California African American Museum (CAAM) and Art + Practice (A+P). The exhibition is curated by Bia Gayotto, independent curator, artist, and writer. CAAM at A+P is a five-year collaboration.

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.

Drawn from the collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra, Art for the People explores paintings created in the United States between the 1929 stock market crash and World War II. The exhibition focuses on federal Works Progress Administration artists of the 1930s and early 1940s who were employed by the government to help stimulate the post-Depression economy. More than 10,000 artists participated, creating works that represented the nation and its people and seeking to express fundamental human concerns, basic democratic principles, and the plight of the dispossessed.

 

Sundays, Mondays, & Wednesdays  – Saturdays 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

This landmark exhibition presents a range of works from Charles Bibbs’™ personal art collection as well as the artist’s original paintings and drawings. Through Sacred Spaces, Bibbs seeks to not only share this artistic journey but also send a message about the power of art in everyday life. He believes in a vital connection between the art that people see in public spaces and the lives they live in the spaces they inhabit every day. Sacred Spaces brings together these concepts in the hope that visitors will experience a connection with art that they take back into the sacred spaces of their own homes.