Los Angeles's built environment, as well as its opaque soul, is on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum as it opens the seventh edition of the popular Made in Los Angeles biennial, featuring 28 artists with deep ties to the sprawling metropolis. Exhibition 2023entitled Acts of Life, was loosely based on the pandemic. This year has no title or theme: curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha rely on the work itself to shed light on the amorphous nature of the city.
During a brief tour of the still-in-progress galleries a few days before the exhibition opened last Saturday, Harden and Pobocha discussed the finer points of the exhibition, including how they organized the work, juxtaposing different artists and historical references to highlight the art's connections, rather than dedicating each gallery to a single artist or time frame.
“If there is a Venn diagram, then in that Venn diagram there is a place where each artist’s interests intersect,” Pobocha said. “Much of this work is about Los Angeles. It's kind of looking back, engaging with the city itself and its impact, either on the artist involved in the show personally or on the broader population.”
“Hold the Ice” by Patrick Martinez is on display at the “Made in Los Angeles 2025” exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
There are Pat O'Neill's glossy pop art sculptures, made from steel, fiberglass and parts of old camera equipment and covered in automotive paint; cinder block murals and neon paintings by Patrick Martinez; giant door sculptures representing seasons and memories by Amanda Ross-Ho; Gabriela Ruiz's interactive painting about the ubiquity of surveillance in the city, especially in black and brown communities; analog film and video art by Mike Stoltz; sculptures similar to scientific experiments by Carl Cheng; still lifes on fabric by David Alekhuogie; and a large-scale painting of Ali Eyal, who grew up in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion of Iraq and later moved to Los Angeles.
Eyal's inclusion emphasizes that artists don't have to be from Los Angeles to participate in the Made in Los Angeles program, Harden said.
“Los Angeles is a global place, and the influence of Los Angeles and America is global,” she said. “So the attitude towards this place and who chooses to be here or should be here – in any case – is critical to how the city is shaped.”
“Still Life with Okra, Corn and Tomatoes,” David Alekhuogie, 2022.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
The exhibit's first floor lays the groundwork for everything to come, Harden and Pobocha explained as they stood near a recreation of a mural called “Eyes on '84,” which was done by Alonzo Davis for the 1984 Olympics and originally painted on the concrete wall of the 110 Freeway. Davis died earlier this year at age 82.
“How do you get as many people to see as much art as possible? And in Los Angeles, that means freeways,” Harden said. “But again, freeways are fundamental structures that have divided the city and created all sorts of underclasses that have really affected a lot of people of color and a lot of working class people.”
Davis, however, has flipped that paradigm to use the freeway as a unifying factor, she added.
The show features wall text with a quote from beat poet and writer Jack Kerouac. “Los Angeles is the loneliest and most violent of American cities,” it says, echoing a common criticism of one of the most misunderstood urban areas in the world. Curators say Made in Los Angeles 2025 corrects this misconception.
“If you don’t live in Los Angeles, you might think there’s no community and everything is fragmented,” Pobocha said. “And I think one of the things that you see throughout this entire presentation is that there are actually so many points of convergence, especially in the arts community.”
