Daytime

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.  

This groundbreaking twist on The Wizard of Oz changed the face of Broadway—from its iconic score packed with soul, gospel, rock, and finger-snapping 70s funk to its stirring tale of Dorothy’s journey to find her place in a contemporary world.  Audiences get to enjoy the epic grooves of such beloved, timeless hits as “Ease on Down the Road,” which became the show’s break-out single, and the bona fide classic “Home” in this spectacular revival.

Tuesdays – Saturdays – 8:00 p.m.

Saturdays – 2:00 p.m.

Sundays – 1:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m.

Listen to iconic music from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and be inspired to create an original piece of art.  

For ADA accommodations, call (213) 228-7430 at least 72 hours prior to the event.

This exhibition showcases more than 150 photographs that reveal the vital work undertaken by a broad coalition of young organizers and everyday people who fashioned a movement that changed America. The exhibition highlights the work of nine photographers primarily affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.

 

 Unlike photojournalists who only reported on breaking news events from an outsider’s perspective, these nine photographers—of different ethnic, racial, religious, and geographic backgrounds—lived within the Movement and documented its activities by focusing on local people and socially engaged students to portray community life as well as protest.   

 

Tuesdays – Fridays, 12:00–5:00 p.m., Saturdays & Sundays, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Surveying twenty-five years of the multi-disciplinary practice of artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom will celebrate a pioneering artist known for his incisive work that interrogates ideas of spectacle, belonging and identity. Inspired by televised sporting events and popular entertainment, Pfeiffer’s work deconstructs our fascination and obsession with celebrity culture, unpacking how collective consciousness is shaped and manipulated through his masterful editing of found footage. In tracing the global trajectory of image circulation, Pfeiffer demonstrates how desire, heroism, and worship operate as part of the mechanisms of art, religion, politics, and nationhood. Bringing together more than thirty works and debuting a new commission, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is the first retrospective of the artist’s multi-disciplinary practice.

 

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and 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.