Artist Ishi Glisnky’s sculpture Inertia-Warn the Animals (2023) is part of the “Made in LA” exhibition. Ashley Kruythoff/Hammer Museum
Guatemalan artist Jackie Amézquita made a map of the city where she arrived at the age of 17 for the exhibition “Made in LA”; acts of life. It’s not a piece of paper. There are no avenues or streets in it. Instead, he chose to depict the gigantic city in 144 slabs of corn dough, limestone and earth. Each represents one of the neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The pieces contain drawings of urban scenes. Emblematic buildings, barbecues in public parks or images of omnipresent traffic. “The Soil That Feeds Us” (2023) forms a huge grid that has been on display for several days at the Hammer Museum Biennale, dedicated to artists who live and work here.
The exhibition’s curators, Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, together visited nearly 200 studios to compile the selection of 39 artists. The first list contained 51 names, but available space forced a new review. The result is one of the most anticipated fall shows in the country. The set reflects the creative explosion that is experiencing Los Angeles, a city that has always been a creative hub in the country but is now experiencing a renewed boom. Proof of this is that in recent years international galleries have landed here, eager to witness the boiling moment that some compare to New York in the 1970s.
“Non-Western art is on the rise,” says 40-year-old Pablo José Ramírez. The curator of Guatemalan origin was responsible for contemporary indigenous art at Tate Modern. He crossed the Atlantic to join Hammer and prepare this exhibition with Nawi, an art historian who has lived in Los Angeles for several years. The result of their work, on display at the museum until December 31, is a face of the forces that coexist in a city that refuses a unified version and is made up of 80 small towns. “80% are non-white artists. There are more indigenous and Latin American artists, not because we suggested it, but because these people are doing the most interesting things,” the curator adds.
Some of the 144 plates in “The Land That Feeds Us” by Guatemalan artist Jackie Améxquita.
The work of 35-year-old María Maea illustrates the curator’s words well. The Long Beach-born artist with Mexican and Samoan roots uses the palm tree, an endemic plant with a long migration history, for her ephemeral works. In one of her recent exhibitions, Maea met once a week to weave the dried plant, giving an ethereal body to a mask made of a family member’s face. In “The Jade” (2021), a cyclist appears who appears to be riding a long-handled lowrider bicycle made from onion plant waste, orange branches and sunflowers. In another piece, Untitled (Sobrino, 2020), Maea creates a figure from garden waste such as jasmine plants, proteas and milkweed plants, commenting on family and community.
The works are divided into five different thematic groups. The city offers a common space for common concerns such as climate change, transnational identity, violence on the streets, freedom of the body or the family. These works offer fresh insights into Los Angeles classics, such as the colorful sunsets over the Pacific, the influence of Hollywood popular culture, and some interpretations of urban art such as graffiti and store signs.
There are in space some of the dialogues that American society is having today. Page Person has transformed his experience into a work of great magnitude. After coming out as transgender in 2017, the artist claims she was marginalized in art spaces. So this year he began performing in drag shows, where his goal was to convey a simple message: “I AM A PERSON.” The Hammer features the clothes Person wore in these shows and some of the oil paintings , where he started 2020, full of color and glitter.
Christopher Suarez, originally from South Los Angeles, has designed his neighborhood with ceramics. He transformed stores, churches, homes and even Chittick Field, an athletics field in Long Beach, the community where he grew up, into miniatures. Use the same material to form the trucks and cars that drive through the streets. His work pays homage to the real-life businesses that Mexican immigrants founded in the region, especially like his father and maternal grandfather, to put down roots in their new country.
“A large majority work with materials that are not neutral, but have a specific cultural history,” says Ramírez. “And many work with materials, sensibilities and stories from the diaspora. There is a recognition that, unlike some modernist variants, art does not emerge from nothing. It has a history, a family, a community and a context, a set of relationships,” explains the curator.
Iranian artist Roksana Pirouzmand performs her work Between Two Windows.Ashley Kruythoff/Hammer Museum
These relationships become clear to the viewer in works such as “Inertia – Warn the Animals” (2023). Ishi Glinsky’s monumental sculpture is, on the one hand, a nod to popular culture and, on the other hand, an acknowledgment of indigenous peoples. The same mask that Wes Craven popularized with the modern slasher-horror classic Scream is touched upon with contributions from eleven local artists, each from a different native tribe. The work consists, among other things, of goatskin, wool, clay, willow remnants, threads, shells and bear grass.
But it is perhaps one of the simplest works that evokes the most emotions. Two window frames connecting two galleries are enough to nostalgically support the weight of the diaspora in a city open to immigration. The Iranian Roksana Pirouzmand shows the conflict between body and memory with her installations. For the performance of Between Two Windows (2023), the artist enters the narrow space, shaken by a powerful current of air. In a small space, visible to all visitors, Pirouzmand tries to capture family photos and letters. The small, claustrophobic window captures the themes of many of the 39 exhibiting artists.
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