Contemporary Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

The work of New York-based artist Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles) inaugurates the museum’s outdoor sculpture pedestal at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue. Anchoring this corner is Oracle (2021), a cast bronze figure weighing 7.64 US tons (15,280 pounds) and standing at 25 feet tall. This monumental commission from Biggers continues his “Chimera” series that hybridizes the canonical figures and gestures of Greco-Roman sculpture with an assortment of iconic African objects from the 14th–20th centuries.

Sanford Biggers: Oracle is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant.

This moving, seminal, visual arts project was conceptualized and developed by the Arts Center Director, Rosie Lee Hooks who commissioned 13 artists from the community to use shovels as a canvas to honor the legacy of our ancestors. Each of the world-renowned, master artists who accepted the challenge have a history of building arts institutions in Watts and the greater Los Angeles community.  

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.