Contemporary Art

Stockholm-based artist Lap-See Lam presents “Tales of the Altersea” (2023), an immersive video installation inspired by the ruins of a dragon-shaped ship visible from her art school studio. The ship, which sailed from Shanghai to Gothenburg in 1990 intending to serve Chinese cuisine to European patrons, was eventually abandoned. Lam’s work explores themes of loss, memory, and resilience, utilizing the vessel’s history as a narrative foundation.

This exhibition showcases experimental works of modern and contemporary calligraphic art, highlighting innovations in the art form. The exhibition explores the evolution of pictographs, the relationship between content and form, the development of new scripts, and the abstraction of the written word. It is accompanied by a scholarly exhibition catalogue.

Explore the innovative works of artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who utilizes gunpowder and pyrotechnics to create dynamic drawings, paintings, and explosion events. This exhibition delves into the nature and properties of gunpowder, chronicling its use in Cai’s artistic process. Accompanying programs include videos on fireworks creation, interactive displays, and film screenings.

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.

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

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.