Expanding small universes: Made in L.A. 2023 at the Hammer Museum

The lack of curatorial edits in Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living creates a lush soundscape of voices; each artist is given an embarrassment of riches in wall and floor space that potentially steals from an overall design. A friend likened it to a BFA show where as much work as possible is huddled into one room. However, each artist begs for more room, as if the Hammer Museum weren’t big enough, as if the world is too noisy to hear clearly each perspective.

The overflow of talent points to a deeper issue — representation and space for BIPOC voices is still lacking in Los Angeles, a city that has all but outpriced many of its own artists in the last five years. Acts of Living offers an uncommonly deep view into underrepresented artists, but there’s still endless work to be done. Surviving in LA, or any major city, is a job all its own.

As the saying goes, Los Angeles plays itself — in that it routinely erases its own history in favor of big money developments and vanity projects for rich celebs. Preservation is always a battle and much of our city’s history goes unwritten while the city itself, its buildings, crowds, and vista points remain immortalized on screen as anonymous features. How we remember a place is more important and Acts of Living makes for a textured field — an intense visual archive of life in Los Angeles. 

There’s a lot of physical Los Angeles in this year’s Made in L.A., from freeways and homesteads to historic basins and battlefields, anthropological pop cultural references to sports teams to coyotes, to the Coachella Valley Cemetery, and the Wanna Mo Betta Butt? advertisement on every bus bench across the region. In Acts of Living, public space becomes personal and even mythical, with bits recognizable to Angelenos — specific references and intricate landscapes become an exercise in memory and detail geared towards deep looking but rendered by overwhelming curatorial design.

Acts of Living is dense with paintings that are dense with subjects, from Jessie Homer French’s animal characters delicately painted onto smaller canvases to Kyle Kilty’s sagas on massive painting planes, easily filling the walls. The result is hectic and cacophonous, a spectacle sure, but each work is a world unto itself — if only the viewer can spare the focus.

One of the few artists born before the 1980s, Joey Terrill and his Richard Nagel-esque paintings feature in graphic novel style a Los Angeles that barely exists. Made in an era when erasure was a life or death situation, many of Terrill’s works include portraits of friends and places during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

A portrait of a friend, Chris Miller on Melrose Ave. (1984), depicts a man with messy blonde highlighted hair cut in an 80s-era mullet wearing a black vest in the foreground with Melrose Avenue behind him. The asphalt features an enormous crack (has it been fixed since?) with the saturated colors of the red curb, the painted pink column, and turquoise E of the l.a. Eyeworks storefront sign, which frames the profile of his handsome face with a 5 o’clock shadow. Like a time lapse of sorts, the l.a. Eyeworks sign hasn’t changed much in forty years, painted turquoise in Terrill’s rendering, now bright red today. 

Infrastructure and human life coalesce in Terrill’s scenes, exemplified by Isamu Noguchi’s “California Scenario” (1992–1993), a grid of nine smaller paintings with recognizable excerpts from LA’s postmodern built environment featuring the public sculptures of Isamu Noguchi, still installed in a business park in Costa Mesa. The dark hair and outfit of Terrill’s subject, a friend I think, makes a flat silhouette among landscaped gravel and leafy plants. A mirrored-glass pyramid business complex angles sunlight against the grainy stolid stone of Noguchi’s sculpture. The gridded composition makes for a weird, very Californian collapse of the natural world decorating the built environment, which is designed in the likeness of the former. Like LA Eyeworks, the Noguchi is still there in front of the mirrored glass business complex in Costa Mesa. The slippage between time and place is activated by the figures of Terrill’s friends; the places may look the same, but it’s unknown whether the friends still live to walk among them.  

Like many more pictorial paintings in the show, Michael Alvarez’s primary medium is memory. His compositions read like family photos layered with images pulled from site visits and photo albums, made thick with oil and spray paint, pencil, and pastel. As Christina Catherine Martinez put it in her catalog essay, “Alvarez builds his paintings the way we often build a memory,” with bits of local detritus like bottle caps or sand that appoint his canvases with the viscera of his hometown, Los Angeles. For Markie and Ro Ro (2023) a three-generation family poses for a photograph in front of a garage, whose door is split down the center with two symbols — the blue and white Dodgers LA insignia and a purple cross on a yellow background, the sacred colors of the LA Lakers. Painted alongside each local symbol is the visage of a grandfather or uncle in memorandum, in respective sports gear — a Dodgers and Lakers bomber jacket for them both. At the center, a family with dogs and cats scattered along the driveway pavement, pets of present and past, indicated by opacity of paint. My favorite was a ghostly bulldog, grinning defiantly in the foreground despite being barely there, his ethereal presence accentuated by a much more evident boxer standing proudly behind him in full color.

When narratives are controlled — whether that’s through the dominant media or long held cultural beliefs — retelling them in one’s own voice becomes a radical act. Paige Jiyung Moon’s biographical paintings use details to convey narrative with the scale of landscape paintings. Intimate, interior space, in delicate and precise brushstrokes show spaces in transition — and the intimacy of shared moments of time through scale. In Carlos and Mia at 7:45 A.M. (2021), a finely painted and detailed bedroom scene imagined as a landscape, alive with items strewn about from clothes, slippers, cellphones — a sky of clutter. At the center and lower foreground, two figures sleep: a father in bed, and a baby in a nearby crib, all in a room of pine wood floors and house plants. In the window: a view of a mission style terracotta roof and cypress trees. I became quiet looking at every detail in Moon’s compositions. 

Another painting, Joshua Tree and Us (2022), centers a formation of giant sandy boulders from Jumbo Rock in Joshua Tree, a popular camping spot for Angelenos, with carefully painted diminutive tents and sleeping bags at the base. The figures are small and the earth is big; the scale evokes geologic time, which brings me comfort in days of brutality when my eyes are tired from witnessing death. The interruption of time and daily routine from the recent pandemic is still a fog I’m emerging from. Paintings like Moon’s are meditations, affirmation of a shared humanity. 

Dopamine Dream (2023) by Melissa Cody is a Diné woven rug with prismatic chevrons that frame the long edges like sandstone buttes. Layers of rhizomatic patterns in complementary colors hover and buzz. Cody imagines and weaves her father’s vivid dreams, caused by a medication for Parkinson’s Disease, that he later recounts to her. Working on a vertical Diné loom and propelled by her ancestry in weaving, Cody preserves Indigenous knowledge and her father’s memories through vibrating pieces of art, using traditional weaving techniques and motifs, particularly those associated with the Diné people. Art in some ways, is proof of life. 

Every person is a world; every artist is a universe. Acts of Living elaborates on that proof however small or seemingly insignificant. From side streets to major highways, from landmarks to personal memories, the message of each artist is found by whoever is looking long or hard enough, but it takes significant focus that this era lacks.

In Acts of Living, it’s too generous to assume the average museum goer will have the capacity, confidence, or willingness to engage on the level necessary for unlocking deepest messages. Not everyone can stomach a feast. What does it mean, then, for an exhibition to provide too much art? The museum and curators probably hope that people will absorb as much as they can — will be inspired by the few works that really speak to them — and accept the fact that everything else may be lost in the noise. With long-rostered, blockbusting group shows back in vogue — at least in LA — the rigor of curating is losing its meaning; a precise edit is all that’s needed to amplify the messages worth listening to in this year’s Made in L.A..

---

Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
October 1 to December 31