HIGHLIghts
Three Downtown Lost Angeles exhibitions use data, disaster, and a shared history to explore community connections. They tap into the past, present, and imagined future to speak about class, labor, and inequity through the use of storage systems, pride of place, and what happens when things fall apart. At Gallery Luisotti’s El Cuerpo: The (Performing) Body and the Photographic Stage Chicano/a artists use themselves as subject to connect through a shared history, at the Los Angeles Central Library Nancy Baker Cahill: Substrate Part #1: Universum uses civic institutions, cultural resources, and data storage systems to forge a connection of community driven by data and at The Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA Grand exhibition Josh Kline: Climate Change community members connect to survive the aftermath of the climate crisis.
El Cuerpo: The (Performing) Body and the Photographic Stage, a group exhibition at Gallery Luisotti, @galleryluisotti, 818 South Broadway Suite #1001, Los Angeles, CA.
On view through: September 14, 2024
Curated by: Christina Fernandez @cmfrndz
Featuring: William Camargo @billythecamera, James Francisco Garcia @jamesfgarcia, Arlene Mejorado @ari.mejorado, Star Montana @starmontana, Aydinaneth Ortiz @aydinanethortiz, Juan Manuel Valenzuela @juanmanuelvalenzuela1, and Christopher Anthony Velasco @caver83
Gallery Luisotti’s El Cuerpo: The (Performing) Body and the Photographic Stage is a gem of a photography exhibition featuring Chicano/a artists using themselves in a performative way to train their camera on personal histories with a focus on social demographics and urban topographies. These artists generously share insight into their community with each other and the world.
Curator Christina Fernandez, a professor at East LA’s Cerrito College, uses her connection with the community to guide a show about pride in a shared cultural, ethnic, and community identity. Grounded in Latino cultural theory, the work is rooted deeply in how colonization has overwhelmed this culture. In Juan Manuel Valenzuela’s #2 from the series Marrano Beach Club, the artist speaks about a time when many Chicanos were not allowed access to swimming pools. They found alternative spaces; in this case, it was a little river that families would go to affectionally called Marrano Beach Club. Valenzuela captures that history unphotoshopped; the chair and umbrella are from Target, and unbelievably, that horse happened during the shoot. The work in this show is individually strong and only made stronger by their proximity to each other in this exhibition.
Nancy Baker Cahill: Substrate Part #1: Universum, A Substrate Project by Shereen Moustafa, Mark Sosa, Casper Torres, Miguel Zavala, Los Angeles Public Library, @lapubliclibrary, 630 W 5th St, Los Angeles, CA.
On view through: December 2024
Curated by: LBCC Art Gallery’s Karla Aguiñiga @cyanyellowmagenta,
Let’s consider for a moment the complex approach needed to capture and grow a complicated system working with what is arguably one of the most disparate and, at the same time, intertwined systems in the country. All these systems form a map of who Los Angeles is in a reflection through data compiled and configured by the artists learning and living in the community.
New Media artist Nancy Baker Cahill @nancybakercahill, with the Universum artists Shereen Moustafa @shereenmoustafastudio, Mark Sosa, Casper Torres, and Miguel Zavala-Lopez, launched part one of Cahill’s LACMA Art + Technology Grant at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Video Wall, a 28-foot video screen located in the library’s Tom Bradley Wing. Artist Nancy Baker Cahill’s overarching project, Substrate, is a testament to collaboration. It connects institutions, cultural resources, and data storage systems to create a framework for interconnected civic hubs across the city. This initiative sees the Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Long Beach City College joining forces to explore innovative approaches for breaking down access barriers, managing permissions, and generating and sharing knowledge.
These student artists have carefully studied the cultural artifacts from LACMA’s collection that resonate with them, intending to share, preserve, honor, and showcase them in a significant digital and zine exhibition at L.A.’s Central Public Library—a crucial community hub. Leveraging Filecoin and IPFS, the largest decentralized storage network, Substrate symbolically connects these public resources as “Mother Trees,” with the potential to support communities through distributed, multi-stakeholder cultural initiatives. It will be interesting to see how Cahill’s work grows from here.
Josh Kline: Climate Change, an exhibition and a total work of art by Josh Kline at The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Grand Avenue, @moca, 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA.
On view through: January 5, 2025
Organized by: Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant
In his first West Coast museum exhibition, Josh Kline’s @joshklinejoshkline Climate Change at The Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Grand Avenue, focuses on when things fall apart. Here, MOCA does something special; they bring together Kline’s major works, which consider climate change, for the first time, and new work commissioned by MOCA. This exhibition is an immersive collection of sci-fi installations envisioning a future shaped by devastating climate change and the everyday people fated to live in it. New connections and communities are set and reconfigured. It is reinventing normalcy in the aftermath of disaster.
The multi-media immersive installation Personal Responsibility, shown last year at the Whitney, transforms the space it fills into a refugee camp. It is reconfigured here (see above image) under the same red glow and flickering videos featuring interviews with essential workers. In other spaces, doors lead you in and out of rooms with work that encourages dialogue about environmental issues. As you move through the exhibition, you never feel alone. You feel as if there is someone, or more importantly a group of someones, who are working towards a solution, albeit after the fact. It brings the what-ifs to the forefront of the conversation and inspires a connection to community-driven solutions.
About the writer: Michele Jaslow is a pioneer shaping the current visual arts landscape as a NYC-based independent curator and writer. @radarcurator.