Daytime

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.

This installation features some of the many forms incarceration has taken in the American West over time, in conversation with a new photo series taken in a California state prison by fine art photographer Pep Williams. Located in the jail cell area of the Autry’s firearms galleries, the installation brings past and present into dialogue.

Adults – $14, Students (with current ID) and Seniors (60+) – $10, Children (3–12) – $6

Tuesdays – Fridays 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Saturdays – Sundays 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers Black image making as a site of protest, contestation, affirmation, and possibility. At CAAM, Fazlalizadeh will present a series of portraits of Black Angelenos wheat-pasted across the atrium’s monumental walls. Based on photographs and conversations that took place this spring while the artist was living in Los Angeles, the portraits ask how safety is inferred, built, and felt for the city’s Black residents.

The Compton Art & History Museum opened to the public this year, just months after its two founders, the husbandand- wife duo Abigail Lopez-Byrd and Marquell Byrd, came together with a vision for the space. “We have archives from Compton from the 1960s and 1970s that the youth can now come and see without having to go to neighboring cities or somewhere deep in LA that don’t represent who they are or where they come from,” says Co-founder Marquell Byrd.

Cuban-born Campos-Pons creates vivid photographs, watercolors, installations, and performances that explore the cultural and personal impacts of migration and memory. Her work reflects the histories of labor affecting her family, emphasizing resilience and honoring her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors. This 35-year survey highlights the interconnectedness between people and their environments, offering a rich, sensory experience.

This public event brings three historians of slavery together—one focused on the importance of slavery to colonial empires, one focused on captive experiences and health in the slave trade, and one focused on the introduction of African maritime culture into the Americas—to wrestle with the question: What actually happened in 1619?

The Intra-American Slave Trade Database is a resource for the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Launched online in 2018, it documents more than 27,000 voyages that trafficked enslaved Africans and African-descended people from one part of the Americas to another from 1550 to 1860. This database strengthens research throughout the University of California system on the history and impact of the slave trade and slavery in the Americas by connecting scholarship on the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds.