Made in L.A. 2020: a version
Off-site Projects by Larry Johnson and Kahlil Joseph Accessible Now
Artist Project Updates at the Hammer and The Huntington
(Los Angeles, CA)—While the Hammer Museum and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens await state and county public health approvals to safely reopen their galleries for Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Angelenos can get a preview of the biennial via two artist projects located around the city. The exhibition catalog, which showcases newly commissioned interventions made by artists specifically for the page and functions as another “version” of the exhibition, is also available.
Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the fifth iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout greater Los Angeles, is cocurated by Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi as assistant curator of performance. All 30 artists included in Made in L.A. 2020: a version will be represented at both the Hammer and The Huntington—in two versions that make up the whole—with select off-site and online interventions in between.
The exhibition’s opening date is dependent on Los Angeles County guidance allowing museums to reopen to the public, in keeping with the State of California’s “Blueprint for a Safer Economy.” Updates about exhibition dates will be shared via the Hammer website and The Huntington website.
Two off-site projects are accessible now, installed throughout the city. The first episode of an artist-created podcast series conceived as part of the exhibition will be available soon. Larry Johnson’s new site-specific works are now on view on five commercial billboards in the MacArthur Park neighborhood throughout the run of the exhibition. Their content features site-specific texts and visuals. Poetic and humorous interventions into space and local geography, the billboards quote their cultural and quotidian environment. Two of the billboards are located near the intersection of South Alvarado Street and Eighth Street, two near the intersection of South Rampart Boulevard and Seventh Street, and a fifth nearby at Seventh Street and Hoover Street. The presentation is coproduced by The Billboard Creative.
Kahlil Joseph’s ambitious installation of BLKNWS®, a conceptual news program that blurs the lines between art, reporting, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique, is installed in satellite sites around the city. Coproduced by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), the two-channel video presentations of BLKNWS® are being hosted predominantly in Black-owned businesses such as barbershops and cafés and in other sites of community gathering, as well as commercial hubs and healthcare facilities.
Six sites can be viewed without reservation, with social distancing practices in place: Patria Coffee Roasters (108 Alameda St.), Sole Folks (4317 Degnan Blvd.), Natraliart Jamaican Restaurant (3426 W. Washington Blvd.), Bloom & Plume Coffee (1638 W. Temple St.), Hank’s Mini Market (3301 W. Florence Ave.), and Go Get ‘Em Tiger (5916 N. Figueroa St.).
BLKNWS® will also be on view at the Hammer Museum and the Underground Museum, pending approval from LA County for museums to open to the public. More BLKNWS® sites will be confirmed and updated throughout the run of the exhibition. A full list and a map showing each location are available on the websites of the Hammer, The Huntington, and LAND. Major support is provided by Aubrey Drake Graham.
SON., a platform founded in 2016 by Justen LeRoy, has created a new podcast to be released in conjunction with Made in L.A. 2020: a version The first episode will be available soon, and nine more episodes will be released at two-week intervals during the run of the exhibition. The podcast will be available on such platforms as Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. Recorded in SON.’s headquarters at the South Central barbershop Touched By An Angel, the episodes feature conversations, cultural commentary, newly commissioned music, and special guests. In the first episode, LeRoy talks to author and activist Darnell Moore (No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America) and filmmaker and entrepreneur Curtis Taylor Jr. (The Greens Co.) with soundscape by producer Slauson Malone. Podcast updates will be shared via the Hammer website and The Huntington website. Looking toward the opening of Made in L.A. 2020: a version in the Hammer and Huntington galleries, some artist projects have been adjusted and reimagined in light of COVID-19 safety considerations, particularly performance-based works and installations. Three previously announced performance weekends will no longer take place in person. Instead, most performances will be transferred to an online stage and presented digitally. Artist and writer Aria Dean will build an ambitious sculptural installation of two-way mirrors in the Hammer Museum’s galleries as a set for a play, which will unfurl in three episodes. In lieu of live performances, each episode will be recorded within the installation and then broadcast on screens that are part of the sculpture. The three episodes of the play will also be presented online, in turn, like a teleplay.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork will construct an open-air, two-room structure containing loudspeakers and a performer outdoors on the Annenberg Family Terrace at the Hammer. She will present a performance four times per week for the length of the exhibition. In concert with one another, the loudspeakers and the performer will create an evolving assemblage of sound that reconsiders public speech and its content, delivery, and reception. The creation of this work is made possible by a generous contribution from VIA Art Fund.
Artist, archivist, filmmaker, and dancer Harmony Holiday will write, direct, and record a one-person play, God’s Suicide, about the five rarely acknowledged suicide attempts by writer James Baldwin. No longer a live performance, the recorded play will be a film premiering online at a date to be announced, and an excerpt will be presented in the galleries.
Artist Nicola L.’s installation La Chambre en fourrure (The Fur Room), which is being recreated with the artist’s estate for presentation in the Hammer galleries, will no longer be interactive. Instead, video documentation will demonstrate the activation of the room with people stepping into the “penetrable” body shapes within the installation.
Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis will present her work deader than dead in a video translation of the original performance piece. Initially developed as a choreography for 10 dancers that would “out-die” each other in corners and other “dead spaces” within the galleries to consider the notion of deadpan and “corpsing” in theater, Lewis has reduced the performance to three people and redesigned the piece as a full-fledged theatrical work to be performed in the galleries at a later date.
Sonya Sombreuil COME TEES created a venue within the exhibition at the Hammer that will host a series of activations that will feature artists, filmmakers, musicians, and others from her community. The artists on view include Dee Alvarado, Jan Gatewood, Narumi Nekpenekpen, and Yoma Ru. Among the monthly interventions planned for the duration of the exhibition are films by Alima Lee, Maia Ruth Lee, and Fox Maxy; live music by Eartheater, Esra Padgett as Chicklette, Jasmine Nyende (of Fuck U Pay Us), and Davia Spain; and a fashion show by NO SESSO. Instead of in-person experiences, documentation videos of the interventions will be shared online. The creation of this work is made possible by a generous contribution from UGG. Writer and curator Sabrina Tarasoff—whose recent research project has been focused on the work of the 1980s “poetry-gang” that gathered at Beyond Baroque literary center for Dennis Cooper and Amy Gertsler’s Wednesday night poetry series—will revitalize this living archive through a haunted house installation at The Huntington, which will have a limited capacity of one visitor at a time. A complementary programming series will be presented at the Hammer, rallying the poets and artists who have been the subjects of her research. These programs include a restaging of Tea with Tosh, the late 1980s cable-access show hosted by the writer Tosh Berman, in which he interviewed various figures from the literary scene; a screening of Fear of Poetry (1983), a documentary about Beyond Baroque’s young poets in the 1980s, directed by Gail Kaszynski; and a panel discussion of haunted houses with the writer Dennis Cooper. Made in L.A. 2020 Artists Mario Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA)Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA)Hedi El Kholti (b. 1967, Rabat, Morocco)Buck Ellison (b. 1987, San Francisco, CA)Niloufar EmamifarChristina Forrer (b. 1978, Zürich, Switzerland)Harmony Holiday (b. 1982)Patrick Jackson (b. 1978, Los Angeles, CA)Larry Johnson (b. 1959, Lakewood, CA)Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle, WA)Ann Greene Kelly (b. 1988, New York, NY)Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, CA)Nicola L. (b. 1937, Mazagan, Morocco; d. 2018, Los Angeles, CA)Brandon D. Landers (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA)SON. (Justen LeRoy) (founded 2016)Ligia Lewis (b. 1983, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)Monica Majoli (b. 1963, Los Angeles, CA)Jill Mulleady (b. 1980, Montevideo, Uruguay)Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, Carson, CA)Alexandra Noel (b. 1989, Columbus, OH)Mathias Poledna (b. 1965, Vienna, Austria)Umar Rashid (b. 1976, Chicago, IL)Reynaldo Rivera (b. 1963, Mexicali, Mexico)Katja Seib (b. 1989, Dusseldorf, Germany)Ser Serpas (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA)Sonya Sombreuil / COME TEES (b. 1986, Santa Cruz, CA)Jeffrey Stuker (b. 1979, Fort Collins, CO)Beyond Baroque by Sabrina Tarasoff (b. 1991, Jyväskylä, Finland)Fulton Leroy Washington (aka MR. WASH) (b. 1954, Compton, CA)Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, MD)
CATALOG AND COMPANION PUBLICATION
The exhibition catalog, now available at the Hammer store online and the Huntington Store online, draws inspiration from historical artist magazines and serves as a third “version” of the show, showcasing newly commissioned interventions made by artists specifically for the page. There also will be a companion publication published after Made in L.A. 2020: a version to include programs, conversations, and other records of the work comprising the biennial. Both publications are designed by Studio Ella and distributed worldwide by DelMonico Books•Prestel.
MOHN AWARDS
Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, The Mohn Award ($100,000) and the Career Achievement Award ($25,000) will be selected by a professional jury, and the Public Recognition Award ($25,000) will be determined through a public vote at both locations. All the artists in the exhibition are eligible to receive the awards.
In 2018 Lauren Halsey received the Mohn Award for the community-oriented installation The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture); Daniel Joseph Martinez received the Career Achievement Award; and EJ Hill received the Public Recognition Award. Other past Mohn Award recipients include Adam Linder (2016), Alice Könitz (2014), and Meleko Mokgosi (2012).
RELATED PROGRAMS
There will be a full slate of related public programs presented online throughout the run of the exhibition, including film screenings with Hedi El Kholti, a series of panels by Kandis Williams, Beyond Baroque-related programs organized by Sabrina Tarasoff, short curator-led talks about individual artists in the exhibition, and more. Please check the Hammer website and The Huntington website for further details.
ABOUT MADE IN L.A.
The Hammer’s biennial exhibition series Made in L.A. focuses exclusively on artists from the Los Angeles region with an emphasis on emerging and under-recognized artists. The biennial debuts new installations, videos, films, sculptures, performances, and paintings commissioned specifically for the exhibition and offers a snapshot of the current trends and practices coming out of Los Angeles, one of the most active and energetic art communities in the world. Made in L.A. began in 2012 with subsequent iterations in 2014, 2016, and 2018, and followed the tradition of the Hammer Invitational exhibitions, which occurred every two years and included Snapshot (2001), International Paper (2003), Thing (2005), Eden’s Edge (2007), Nine Lives (2009), and All of this and nothing (2011). Made in L.A. 2012 was organized by a team of curators from the Hammer Museum and LAXART: Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood, Hammer curator Ali Subotnick, LAXART director and chief curator Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART associate director and senior curator Cesar Garcia, and LAXART curator-at-large Malik Gaines. Made in L.A. 2014 was organized by Hammer chief curator Connie Butler and Los Angeles–based independent curator Michael Ned Holte. Made in L.A. 2016 was organized by Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi and LAXART director Hamza Walker. Made in L.A. 2018 was organized by Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood and associate curator Erin Christovale, with curatorial associate MacKenzie Stevens.
CREDIT
Made in L.A. 2020: a version is organized by the Hammer Museum in partnership with The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
The exhibition is organized by independent curators Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, assistant curator of performance.
Made in L.A. 2020 is presented by
The exhibition is made possible in part by the Mohn Family Foundation and members of the Hammer Circle. Major support is provided by Apple Music, Bill Hair, Mark Sandelson and Nirvana Bravo, Darren Star, The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, UGG, and VIA Art Fund. Additional funding is provided by Emily and Teddy Greenspan, Michael Silver, Forest Hill Entertainment, and the Pasadena Art Alliance.
This exhibition is part of The Huntington’s Centennial Celebration, which is made possible by the generous support of Avery and Andrew Barth, Terri and Jerry Kohl, and Lisa and Tim Sloan. This exhibition’s presentation at The Huntington is also supported by The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Maribeth and Hal Borthwick, and The Ahmanson Foundation Exhibition and Education Endowment.
Made in L.A.: a version is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
