Carla issue 40 by contemporaryartreview.la

Letter from the Editor

This issue, Carla’s 40th, is a biggie: It marks our ten-year anniversary. It represents a significant milestone for the publication, and also a personal one for me, Carla’s founder and editor-in-chief all these years; during the span of this issue’s circulation, I too will turn 40—an auspicious coincidence.

Carla has evolved beyond what I ever could have imagined when I founded the publication in 2015, working out of a shared live-work space in DTLA while scraping various art jobs together—art handling here, gallery assisting there. The organization has grown since those early days of cold-calling galleries to introduce the magazine in hopes of an ad sale. In the beginning, as an unpaid staff of one, I used to stuff my Honda Civic to the brim with still-off-gassing magazines, driving them around to art spaces across the city. We’ve since grown, covered thousands of artists, worked with hundreds of writers and art spaces, gained nonprofit status, and fostered a lively membership community.

And yet, much about the original vision for Carla—its scope, tone, and mission (our north star, as it were)—has remained unchanged. I wrote in my very first letter from the editor about my desire to pair rigor with community: “Community and criticality should exist in tandem, balancing and challenging each other.”

Ten straight years of quarterly publishing signals that Carla has the active support of that community, too. By reading, becoming a member,

hosting a launch party, or publishing your words with us, you are insisting on the importance of accessible yet rigorous writing about our region’s art and artists. I offer my profoundly sincere thanks to everyone who has been a part of our work over these years.

To the writers whose ideas fill our pages, who have engaged in our intimate editing process. To the unsung grammar heroes who examine every comma. To the designers and color correctors who diligently visualize Carla to communicate our ethos. To our dedicated board members who offer advice, feedback, and time to build sustainability for Carla’s future.

To the advertisers who have worked with us for years. To our membership community, who support us with essential participation. To our small but very mighty staff that keeps Carla on track and operating smoothly. And, to the dedicated readers who have collected every single issue of the magazine, discussing its contents over dinner with friends.

In celebration of a decade of community-minded impact, Carla is hosting an anniversary soirée and art auction on June 14, 2025. The auction will feature accessibly-priced works by an impressive roster of (drumroll!)

101 L.A.-based artists. The event will be a night of community, celebration, and art, and we look forward to seeing you there (see p. 6–7 for the artist list and more details about the event).

I signed off that first editor’s letter, hopefully, “cheers to many more,” not knowing how many more were really in store. Looking back on the last decade of Carla—and the community we’ve been a part of—I can’t wait to see what the next ten will bring.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Cheers to many more,

Lindsay Preston Zappas Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Executive Director

Investing in Black Art

Evan Nicole Brown

On Scientist Ed Wortz’s Relationship with Artists

Catherine G. Wagley

Four Artists on Octavia E. Butler

Jessica Simmons-Reid

Rebuilding Art Practices in the Wake of Wildfires

Featuring: Beatriz Cortez, Kari Reardon, Margaret Griffith, and Jamison Carter

Photos: Monica Orozco

Kati Kirsch at Cheremoya —Zoey Greenwald

Kenneth Webb at Huma Gallery —Steven Vargas jinseok choi at Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery —Hande Sever

Sasha Fishman at Murmurs

—Qingyuan Deng

Charlie Engelman at Château Shatto —Ashlyn Ashbaugh

Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio Arabesque (detail), 2014 ©

The Estate of Noah Davis,

Courtesy

The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

Carla Ten Year Soirée & Art Auction

June 14, 2025, 7-10pm

Preview: 5-7pm

The Pit

3015 Dolores St.

About the event

Founded in 2015 by artist and writer Lindsay Preston Zappas, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla) is an essential voice made in and for Los Angeles.

Carla remains committed to building entry-points into the arts for the greater L.A. community, and in celebration of ten years of being an impactful presence in the landscape, we are hosting an anniversary soirée and art auction. The soirée will coincide with the release of the milestone 40th issue of our quarterly print magazine. The event will also feature our first-ever art auction of accessibly-priced works on paper by an impressive roster of L.A.-based artists, many of whom have been featured in our pages over the last decade —the artists included will mirror Carla’s dynamic and inclusive coverage.

Join us for a lively evening of art, music, and drinks, plus a special performance (to be announced). Come soirée with us and help keep art and cultural production in L.A. thriving.

Host Committee

Alex K. Scull

Analia Saban

Dominique Clayton Echelon

Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory

Jenn Pablo & Paco De Leon

Jennifer Ferro

Jobert Poblete

Nazarian / Curcio

Neil and Anjelica Sarkar

Solid Art Services

Tim Disney

West of West Architecture + Design

Participating Artists

Elliott Hundley

Erik Frydenborg

Francesca Gabbiani & Eddie Ruscha

Georgianna Chiang

Heather Rasmussen

Henrik Munk Soerensen

iris yirei hu

Isabel Yellin

Jemima Wyman

Jonathan Casella

Jules Garder

Julia Haft-Candell

Justin Olerud

Karl Haendel

Kayla Tange

Kour Pour

Kyungmi Shin

Lani Trock

Lindsay Preston Zappas

Liv Aanrud

Liz Walsh

Luka Fisher

Maria Maea

Marty Schnapf

Max Maslansky

Meghan DeRoma

Michael Rey

Michelle Jane Lee

Mike Swaney

Mikki Yamashiro

Molly Haynes

Molly Larkey

Mungo Thomson

Drink Sponsors

Naotaka Hiro

Nasim Hantehzadeh

Nick Aguayo

Nick McPhail

Patrick Jackson

Pau S. Pescador

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Penny Slinger

Public Sculpture Archive

rafa esparza

Rakeem Cunningham

Rema Ghuloum

Rodrigo Valenzuela

Roksana Pirouzmand

Rosha Yaghmai

Ross Callahan

Sarah Ippolito

Sarah Miska

Sarah Rosalena

Seffa Klein

Senon Williams

SHAGHA

Sharif Farrag

Sophie Roessler

Steven Wolkoff

Sylvie Lake

Tanya Brodsky

Todd Gray

Trulee Hall

Vincent Pocsik

Wayne Atkins

Widline Cadet

Zane Zappas

Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles is an essential voice made in and for Los Angeles. Founded in 2015 by artist and writer Lindsay Preston Zappas, Carla is a nonprofit organization and publishing platform that is dedicated to providing critical, thoughtful, and inclusive perspectives on contemporary art. Our quarterly print magazine is an active source of dialogue on Los Angeles’ art community and is available for free in over 160 galleries and art spaces in L.A. and beyond.

Editor-in-Chief & Executive Director

Lindsay Preston Zappas

Managing Editor

Evan Nicole Brown

Contributing Editor Allison Noelle Conner

Graphic Designer Satoru Nihei

Copy Editor Rachel Paprocki

Administrative Assistant Aaron Boehmer

Color Separations

Echelon, Los Angeles

Printer Solisco Printed in Canada

Submissions

For submission guidelines, please visit contemporaryartreview.la/submissions, and direct all submissions to submit@contemporaryartreview.la.

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Cover Image

Widline Cadet, Seremoni Disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis] Appearance #1) (2019). Image courtesy of the artist, LACMA, and Nazarian / Curcio Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: © Widline Cadet, digital image © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Contributors

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder of Carla. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Her writing has appeared in Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, KCRW, Carla, ArtReview, Flash Art, SFAQ, Artsy, LACanvas, and Art21 Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), OCHI (Los Angeles), and City Limits (Oakland).

Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor, and journalist who covers the arts and culture. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, ARTnews, CULTURED, Dwell, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, T Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the founder and host of Group Chat, a conversation series in L.A.

Allison Noelle Conner is an arts and culture writer based in Los Angeles.

Satoru Nihei is a graphic designer.

Rachel Paprocki is an editor and librarian who lives and bikes in Los Angeles.

Aaron Boehmer is a writer and photographer from Texas. He is interested in writing and research related to the intersection between politics and art and has written for publications such as The Nation, The Drift, and Texas Monthly

Board of Directors

Lindsay Preston Zappas, Executive Director Melissa Lo, Board Chair MJ Brown Trulee Hall

Membership

Carla is a free, grassroots, and artist-led publication. Club Carla members help us keep it that way. Become a member to support our work and gain access to special events and programming across Los Angeles.

Carla is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; all donations are tax-deductible. To learn more, visit join.contemporaryartreview.la.

Thank you to all of our Club Carla members for supporting our work. A special thank you to our La Brea and Western members:

Anjelica Triola, Anthony Cran, Chad Karty, Charles James, Heather Mingst, Ian Stanton, Jennifer Michaela Byrne, Jobert Poblete, Laurie & Rick Raskin, Michael Zappas, Michal Hall Bravo Ramirez, Melissa Lo, Philippe Browning, Raskin Foundation, Sarah Ippolito, Solid Art Services, Tim Disney, Tiffiny Lendrum, and West of West Architecture + Design.

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Libraries/Collections

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Scan to access a map of Carla’s L.A. distribution locations.

Sanford Biggers, Psyche (detail) (2009–11).

Lithograph with hand sewn thread, 43.5 × 25.5 inches.

Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Against Symbolic Inclusion

Investing in Black Art

When the late Dr. Samella Lewis, an award-winning artist, author, and art historian, joined the staff at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1968 as education coordinator, the spirit of the institution was in a different place than it is today.1 Frustrated by the exclusion of Black artists from the museum’s exhibitions and the absence of adequate Black art representation in the permanent collection, the arts educator (who would later establish L.A.’s Museum of African American Art and the scholarly International Review of African American Art in 1976) resigned the following year, saying, “We were not included in the art museum here.”2

Dr. Lewis’ statement was supported —emboldened, even—by months of ensuing protests agitating for LACMA to expand its worldview by deepening the institution’s awareness of Black artists and outreach to Black audiences.3

The museum course-corrected shortly thereafter with a string of subsequent exhibitions that brought Black artists into the fold, such as Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington (1971); Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists (1972); and the museum’s first comprehensive survey of AfricanAmerican art, Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976).4 The last show retroactively acknowledged the contributions of Black artists between 1750 and 1950 and featured more than 63 artists and 200 works across painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic design, craft, and decorative arts. The Black

Arts Council (BAC), founded in 1968 by LACMA art preparators Claude Booker and Cecil Ferguson, was the organizing force behind collective public pressure calling for the development of African-American programming at the museum, which would eventually lead to these three seminal exhibitions in the institution’s history.5 BAC was comprised of both museum employees and, beyond LACMA’s white walls, members of L.A.’s art community. The organization proposed events for the public (including a three-part lecture series and the one-time, day-long Black Culture Festival), planned field trips for students, and staged small protests to call attention to the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists.

In the decades since this era of pivotal advocacy and organizing on behalf of Black artists, their work, and its essential place in the art historical canon, LACMA—as with many institutions, in the art world and beyond—has evolved to a place of greater and more consistent inclusion, though the work of making up for centuries of exclusion (and worse, erasure) is long. Generally, there are trends toward museum exhibitions and collections expanding to prioritize a more nuanced view of the robust work coming directly from, or aesthetically inspired by, the continent. In an effort to guard against these efforts as merely symbolic gestures (performed for a “woke” and watching public that is rightly critical of the integrity behind institutional promotions of “diversity” and “inclusion”), some art spaces are taking predictable virtue signaling a step further by considering what tangible, meaningful investment in these narratives looks like in practice. But the reality of underrepresentation in museum holdings is still damning: A 2022 Burns-Halperin Report found that only 2.2 percent of acquisitions and 6.3 percent of exhibitions at 31 U.S. art museums between 2008 and 2020 were of work by Black American artists; unsurprisingly, the biggest spike (by approximately 200 percent)

Evan Nicole Brown

in acquisitions took place following the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.6 And though statistics regarding international interest in acquiring contemporary African art—via auctions, art fairs, and gallery sales into private collections— demonstrate solid financial investment, they are still on the decline. In 2022, the global total sales value of art by African-born artists at auction peaked at $197 million, and by 2024 these sales dipped to $77.2 million.7

LACMA’s current Pan-African exhibition of contemporary art, Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, helps redefine what it means to invest not only in showcasing Black art from an ethical standpoint, but also in supporting Black artists from an economic one (over half of the works in the show were acquired by LACMA). The exhibition, on view through August 3, translates the intangible power of the universal albeit varied Black experience into an aesthetic exploration of time, place, and approaches to record-keeping. The root of this show, which gathers different explorations of remembering (and how we preserve those cultural memories through artmaking as storytelling), reflected in the institutional choice to invest in collecting many of these works for preservation in the larger archive, rather than to temporarily borrow the bulk of the offering from private collectors or other art institutions. Curated by Dhyandra Lawson, the Andy Song Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, the show brings together 60 contemporary artists working across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Of the 70 works spanning the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and time-based media, 42 are new acquisitions into LACMA’s permanent collection, exemplifying how institutions can expand their Pan-African holdings in a way that also sustains the livelihoods and creative practices of Black artists.

“This was an intentional strategy in terms of my curatorial methodology from the get-go,” Lawson told me.

“I was considering the history of LACMA and the history of how contemporary Black art from outside the U.S. has been exhibited in California and on the West Coast. LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum in the western United States and we have done great work growing our collections of Black American art, [but] it seemed to me that we had a lot more work to do in looking at Black art internationally.” This decision to invest in art that reflects the creative multiplicity of the global Black diaspora for the museum’s permanent collection highlights an effort to address the gaps and erasures within most public collections. And by prioritizing the acquisition of the majority of the show’s works (as not only a symbolic effort toward greater representation but also a form of meaningful curatorial ethics), Lawson offers a progressive view of what it means to support Black artists across the diaspora. She is interested in exploring diaspora not only as an aesthetic concept, but also as a way to think about how broadly and dynamically curators and collectors should be seeking out and investing in contemporary Black art—across generations, locations, styles, and experiences. Lawson’s efforts also emphasize public collections as living monuments to record-keeping, a cultural responsibility that preserves history and also establishes the sanctity of its contents for audiences and scholars to come.

Walking through Imagining Black Diasporas is a practice in presence; the show, organized into conceptual categories that each highlight an aspect of the Black experience—speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination, and representation— requests an embodied, reflective approach to witnessing the myriad artworks, which are as varied and beautiful as the African diaspora itself. Los Angeles native Sanford Biggers’ silhouetted images of afro-crowned Black Power figures stretch high up

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st -Century Art and Poetics (installation views) (2024–25). Images courtesy of the artists and LACMA.

Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

on a white gallery wall, towering over the intricate, small-scale work of Senegalese artist Abdoulaye Ndoye: a book of invented script drawn on henna-washed pages that he describes as poesie graphique, 8 or visual poetry. Chelsea Odufu’s eight-channel video installation Moved by Spirit (2021), which was previously exhibited at the Dakar Biennale as part of the U.S. Embassy’s programming in 2024,9 is a faith-based investigation of water as a material for cleansing and its movement, a vessel for migration. The film explores the syncretic roots of Senegalese Sufism and includes footage of spiritual rituals and worship, vignettes of figures in Afrofuturist costumes engaging in traditional dance sequences, and pictures “the Door of No Return,” a passage in the stone wall of Elmina Castle on Ghana’s coast, which was a prominent hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Elsewhere, Ibrahim Mahama’s repurposed jute coal sack, a mixed-media assemblage dyed and adorned with cloth embellishments, puts a spotlight on the troubled, interconnected legacies of labor, colonialism, and capitalism in his native Ghana. Mahama refers to his practice as a form of “time travel”10—a nod to the material journey his objects take from manufacture, utilitarian use, and eventual acquisition and reimagination by himself, the artist.

There are several prominent American museums focused specifically on the preservation and pedestalling of Black art and material culture as an act of memory-keeping and selfdetermination (L.A.’s California African American Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., among others). But the impact of an investment in more diverse holdings has different implications when carried out by a general-focus institution like LACMA. Instead of this gesture being at the center of the institution’s purpose and therefore part of a long history of collecting and archiving the work of Black artists (as is the case with the aforementioned museums), this

move by LACMA shows a fairly new commitment to supporting and preserving contemporary Black art in ways that go beyond the superficial: It signals a reconsideration of the museum’s own collection practices writ large.

In essence, Imagining Black Diasporas is a show that is not solely concerned with the present context of diasporic works being mounted for audiences to view for a fixed amount of time, it is also simultaneously focused on correcting a long history of underinvestment in Black art. By acquiring more pieces for the permanent collection from a diasporic group of Black artists, the museum is actively making steps toward manifesting a future where generations of audiences may have access to works like these as a default rather than as an anomaly. And while this curatorial approach does model a new path toward more consistently diverse collecting practices, LACMA (whose encyclopedic collection boasts more than 150,000 objects) still has broad improvements to make; a 2019 study showed that at the time, almost none of the museum’s collection was dedicated to Black artists.11 Part of Lawson’s motivation for prioritizing permanent investments came when reflecting on the curatorial strategies behind many Pan-African exhibitions throughout time, which “tend to compile loans,” she says. “I think the impulse has been to show as many works as possible and to gather a large grouping of works, but here it felt really important to think through what it would mean to actually make investments in artists by making purchases, and receiving gift offers from generous donors.”

While the show includes generational American greats like Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and others, it is also a celebration of emerging and mid-career artists working outside of the United States, representing both the Pacific Rim and the Black Atlantic. This offers an expanded, contemporary understanding of Pan-African art—a movement that encompasses various artistic expressions that reflect Africa’s rich cultural

history and diverse creativity while promoting a unified sense of shared identity. This is a crucial reframing of “diaspora” as more than just a shorthand for shared ancestral homeland, as it is most commonly deployed—an application that oversimplifies the myriad shades and sensibilities of Blackness globally into a universal origin story that belies the abundance of languages, customs, and aesthetic choices that exist within it.

Awash in hues of blue and lavender so delicate they’re almost surreal, Widline Cadet’s photograph, Seremoni Disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis] Appearance #1) (2019), is at once a very personal self-portrait and also a broader reflection on memory-keeping and migration—particularly for immigrants like the Los Angeles-based Haitian artist herself, whose proximity to home has shifted at various points throughout her life. In the image, Cadet stands in the water, looking on at a collection of smaller images showing the artist during her childhood in Haiti superimposed on a larger print of palm trees, hanging on a backdrop stand in the ocean before her. Sheets of corrugated metal attached with spring clamps to the stand almost wink with iridescence, under a quality of natural light that looks like it belongs to the morning. The backdrop stand is more practical than beautiful—a contrast to the femininity of her sea-soaked silhouette—but sturdy enough to ensure that her memories won’t be washed away.

The photograph, Cadet told me, is her way of “imaging that absence, that lack of access” to her home island, and is additionally an exploration of her relationship to photography as a medium. “I barely had any exposure to [it].… My first interaction with photography was getting my passport [photo] taken as a kid.” The image is, in some ways, a fantasy of the artist’s subconscious: a dream-like photomontage where time and space are collapsed and she is at once both girl and woman, home and away. The resonant impact of Cadet’s work entering into LACMA’s permanent holdings

is not lost on her: “The way I see my work functioning in the world is as an archive, so I really enjoy the prospect of it becoming a part of a public collection at LACMA.… The idea that my work will exist in its collection for years and years to come and be accessible to people in the future means a lot, and I think it adds another layer to my work,” Cadet said.

Over the course of curating the show, Lawson told me she was thinking through the ethics (and historically problematic nature) of collecting African art—particularly Indigenous objects—in museums. By focusing on contemporary artists and their work, she was able to facilitate transactions that prioritized the curator-artist relationship and the transparent communication that blooms as a result. “We are having open and frank conversations about how much things cost and it is super important that we can do that now,” she said. “It is a way to acknowledge the looting that has happened historically and to, in a contemporary moment, choose a different path.”

Imagining Black Diasporas —the exhibition itself and the curatorial and collecting practices surrounding it—reminds us that honoring the diversity of diaspora involves an active process of remembering and recordkeeping, and that to advocate for a nuanced collecting practice is also to advocate for the necessity of permanent collections that reflect the breadth of contemporary Black art. Museum holdings act as living archives, with a responsibility to accurately represent the reality of art that exists but also has existed. And if there’s a gulf in that presence historically, it is important to seek out opportunities to close the gap. “We can bring this diasporic memory into our holdings for the first time with this show,” Lawson mused. “Once an artwork is in a collection, it is [available] for a lifetime of new interpretations.”

1. Marcos Ribero, “Dr. Samella Lewis,” Samella Lewis, February 5, 2024, https://samellalewis.com/bio/.

2. Samella Lewis, interview by Richard Cándida Smith, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities (J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999), https://archive.org/ details/imagebeliefsamel00lewi/mode/2up%20/%20 https://www.thepomonan.com/exhibitionsopenings/2022/6/1/celebrating-the-life-andachievements-of-dr-samella-lewis.

3. “In Memoriam: Samella Lewis (1923–2022),” June 9, 2022, Unframed, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, https://unframed.lacma.org/2022/06/08/memoriamsamella-lewis-1923%E2%80%932022.

4. LACMA, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” January 13, 2022, https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/ two-centuries-black-american-art.

5. LACMA, “Two Centuries of Black American Art at LACMA: Who’s Who,” January 13, 2022, https://www. lacma.org/two-centuries-black-american-art-lacmawhos-who.

6. Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns, “Exactly How Underrepresented Are Women and Black American Artists in the Art World? Read the Full Data Rundown Here,” December 13, 2022, ArtNet, https://news.artnet. com/art-world/full-data-rundown-burns-halperinreport-2227460.

7. Margaret Carrigan, “ Temperature Check: Is Africa’s Art Market Cooling?” February 15, 2025, ArtNet, https://news. artnet.com/market/temperature-check-is-africas-artmarket-cooling-2609191#:~:text=Global%20total%20 sales%20value%20of,decline%20year%2Don%2Dyear.

8. Christa Clarke, “Abdoulaye Ndoye, Ahmed Baba,” Smarthistory, April 10, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/ abdoulaye- ndoye-ahmed-baba/.

9. Nicolò Lucarelli, “Dakar Biennale 2024: A Mirror of Lights and Shadows of Contemporary Africa,” Contemporary Lynx, December 9, 2024, https:// contemporarylynx.co.uk/dakar-biennale-2024-amirror-of-lights-and-shadows-of-contemporary-africa.

10. “Ibrahim Mahama,” White Cube, April 8, 2025. https:// www.whitecube.com/artists/ibrahim-mahama.

11. Hakim Bishara, “Artists in 18 Major US Museums Are 85% White and 87% Male, Study Says,” Hyperallergic, August 15, 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/501999/ artists-in-18-major-us-museums-are-85-white-and-87male-study-says/.

Ibrahim Mahama, No. 20 (2014). Coal sacks with cloth, 83 × 80 inches.

Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

Photo: © Ibrahim Mahama and © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Love at First Sight

On Scientist Ed Wortz’s Relationship with Artists

In the summer of 1969, the scientist Edward Wortz began organizing the first National Symposium on Habitability, at NASA’s bequest. The goal was to determine how to make foreign environments habitable enough to allow long term space missions. He likely would have taken a different approach before he met the artist Robert Irwin.

But Wortz, a physiological psychologist researching space travel, had spent the last few months collaborating with Irwin and James Turrell as part of LACMA’s Art & Technology project. He had been annoyed when his employers at the Garrett Corporation let him know that two artists were on their way to his laboratory. Then he met them. “It was like love at first sight,” Wortz recalled in 1977.1 He had already been pushing the boundaries of “acceptable procedures and acceptable perception”2 within his own field, and here were two people who were also doing that, if from a different vantage. They worked together for two years, using an anechoic chamber at UCLA to explore the effects of sensory deprivation on perception, using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to try to measure the consciousness reached when in a meditative state, and developing a number of exercises in meditation. The three of them never produced an actual artwork. As Wortz put it, making any finished product “got more and more irrelevant.”3

The inaugural National Symposium on Habitability was held in Robert Irwin’s Los Angeles studio in

May 1970. The scientists, city planners, physicians, engineers, and other experts in attendance stayed at the International Hotel by the airport and took a bus to the Venice Beach studio. The schedule, made up of lectures and panels, resembled a typical conference. But the environment did not. Irwin had knocked a hole into a brick wall in his space, which participants had to step through before emerging into a pristine room lit ambiently by colored skylights, with pillows on the floor. The red canvas chairs for panelists were set up to face each other, so that the experts would speak directly to one another. During the first day of the symposium, a line of white cardboard columns covered a far wall. The next day, the columns were gone, exposing a window covered in multi-colored translucent film. The third day, the window itself was gone. Irwin’s interventions into the space made participants uncomfortable at first, but so did the diversity of the people in the room—many of the scientists and scholars in attendance weren’t used to thinking alongside people from dramatically different fields. “The first day of the symposium was a very intense situation,” Wortz recalled.4 There was no second National Symposium on Habitability,5 and Wortz soon left aerospace altogether. “My exploration led me to change my career as well as changing my colleagues, my lifestyle, my family, everything,” Wortz said in a 1986 interview.6

I first learned about Wortz in the early 2010s, when I started researching the Art & Technology program, which paired artists with technological corporations to give artists unprecedented resources for artmaking. Within these pairings, conflicts abounded as artists’ sensibilities and politics clashed with corporate culture. Few corporate figures engaged as fully with the artists as Wortz did. I continued to see his name pop up as I did research for my forthcoming book about women-run art galleries in Los Angeles. In his oral history, the artist Tom Wudl mentions the time Wortz handed him a translated copy of the Avatamsaka Sutra, a

Catherine G. Wagley

Artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell inside the anechoic chamber at UCLA in 1969, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (detail) (1967–71). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

Top: Artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell meeting with Dr. Ed Wortz of The Garrett Corporation in 1969, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71).

Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

Bottom: LACMA staff Maurice Tuchman and Gail Scott with artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell at The Garrett Corporation, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

canonical Buddhist text. When Wudl started reading, he thought, “This is it. This is what I've been looking for all my life.”7 The book helped him stop comparing his career to others, and he started making ornate, methodical drawings based on lotus flowers.

The collaboration with Irwin and Turrell, two of the most famous artists to emerge from Los Angeles’s 1960s ferment, was sensational, but Wortz’s quieter, constant presence in the local art scene—which began in the 1970s and continued until his death in 2004—compelled me more. His persistent presence in the lives of artists underscored for me the way that art, in its most beautiful and inspiring forms, requires experimental approaches to thinking and living. These approaches are difficult to sustain. Because of this, there is inevitably a tapestry-like support network surrounding artists, and Wortz’s own interests and affections led to his unique role in this network. While the Turrell and Irwin collaboration has been cited in multiple art histories, little in the canonical written history of art in Los Angeles traces Wortz’s role after that. But when stories like Wortz’s fall by the wayside, their absence impoverishes the story of art, reducing it to a myth that props up cults of the individual and glorifies art objects over the energies and possibilities that allowed them to exist.

Wortz was born in 1930 and grew up near San Antonio, Texas. He spent three years serving on the USS Rochester in Korea before finishing his PhD research at the University of Texas, Austin in 1957. Since he had begun working in aerospace in graduate school, he continued. He took contract work for NASA and eventually landed at the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles, where he lived with his wife Sue Nelson and his twin daughters. By the time he met Irwin and Turrell, Wortz was the director of the Life Sciences Department at Garrett. He met the critic and art historian Melinda

Wortz (née Farris) through Turrell and Irwin, artists associated with the L.A. Light and Space movement about which Melinda wrote avidly. She and Wortz married in the early 1970s, after both of their first marriages ended (Melinda had three daughters with her first husband, former Pasadena Museum of Art director Thomas Terbell). Wortz’s encounter with art coincided with other shifts: Before he left the Garrett Corporation, he began working with the Buddhist monk Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An, who would eventually ordain Wortz. Together, they founded the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Koreatown, an exceptionally interdisciplinary and interfaith center. It opened in 1970, shortly before Wortz enrolled at the newly-founded Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles. He enrolled hoping to become a better scientist. In his research, he had been using EEG biofeedback, a technique meant to increase mind-body awareness by connecting electric pads to a person’s body. The pads read brain waves and emit a sound to indicate increased anxiety or increased heart rate. This way, someone can learn to better regulate their own energy, a skill essential for astronauts in alien environments. “The people I was working with…were having profound experiences and having some difficulty integrating those experiences into their lives,” he explained in 1986.8 He felt a responsibility to help his subjects navigate the effects of his research. He didn’t intend to become a therapist, but by 1973 he was licensed and practicing the process-based Gestalt method, which privileges presence and awareness in the moment over mining the past.

This was an unusual trajectory for a scientist, but for Wortz, it all felt connected. He had already been looking at the relationship among physiology, emotions, and intellect, and he had used meditation techniques to help train astronauts to cope with the environment of space shuttles; therapy involved using the same strategies, but with different applications. He left

the corporate world gradually, staying on at Garrett until 1976, dropping his workload to four days a week, then three, and then one.

In Melinda and Ed’s Pasadena home, the boundaries between art, spirituality, and exploration were fluid. While Ed practiced Buddhism, Melinda was on the vestry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. The artist Barbara T. Smith, who attended weekly group Gestalt therapy meetings at the Wortzes’ home, used to babysit their daughters. Smith had met Wortz through Irwin and she would visit him to talk about her ideas and he “would walk me right over to a laboratory where the people working would listen and begin to fantasize a solution.”9 She felt validated by the access Wortz gave her as a scientist, and then as a therapist—he embraced as serious ideas that others in the art world treated as outlandish. When she was unhappy, separated from her children following her divorce, Wortz asked her, “Barbara, why don’t you do just one thing to make yourself happier?”10 So, she took a lover. For his therapy sessions, Wortz practiced out of a home office. He had a “greeter cat,” as the artist Scott Grieger recalled, who would walk clients back to meet him. His approach to therapy was practical, problem-oriented. “He was interested in your sad story,” Grieger said, “but his take on things was ‘let’s not dwell on it.’”11 Or as Wortz himself put it in the Buddhist publication he edited, Dharma Family Journal, “I like to train my clients to construct and deconstruct the experiences that are causing them difficulty.”12 Many of his clients were artists, writers, or filmmakers. At one point, he was seeing so many Los Angeles artists that it was a running joke. “Why haven’t you come to see me yet?” Wortz shouted across the yard to the artist and critic Peter Plagens, at a party.13 Sometimes Wortz accepted art in lieu of payment, though he referred to his own visual sensibility as “clumsy”: “I usually appreciate [the artists] far more than I do the things that they make,” he said.14 Visual acuity did not matter much to him—it mattered more that

he understood and shared the impulse to push the limits of perception and to experiment with materials and ideas. “It’s really exciting to have one foot on a banana peel and the other hanging over an abyss,” Wortz said in 1977, when asked about Robert Irwin’s penchant for repeatedly reinventing his approach to art making.15 As a therapist attuned to the peculiarities of artists, and also deeply embedded in the city’s nascent, evolving art scene, he offered something unique—emotional and psychological support—to a class of people whose work required emotional intelligence. “I think he helped a lot of people keep going with their art,” Karen ComegysWortz, who was married to Wortz when he passed in 2004, told me of her late husband’s influence on artists.

As Wortz made his transition from scientist to therapist, the L.A. art scene was itself changing. A robust feminist art movement was emerging alongside a surge in experimental, conceptual, and performance art practices. Wortz’s interdisciplinary, exploratory approach to his own life and work felt right on time. Perhaps he knew this when, in 1973, right as he was becoming a therapist, he made his second attempt at a convening around habitability, but this time without the concerns of the space race hanging over them. One of his takeaways from the NASA-sponsored symposium had been that “largely people weren’t aware of how environments affected their behavior.”16 Once again, he pulled in artists alongside city planners, policymakers and aerospace engineers for a conference held in Monterey and sponsored by the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville— the artist and designer who helped found the Woman’s Building, which opened in 1973 in downtown Los Angeles—gave a talk at the symposium. She argued that before they could address strategies for improving “life quality” or executing “good design,” those very terms required interrogation. Whose quality of life? Good for whom? For de Bretteville, generalized

Ed Wortz applying electrodes to seated woman (1969). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute.

Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

assumptions about “good” design and its effects on people became a form of control, one which “inevitably operates through oversimplification, enforcing a single reading or use.”17 This was exactly what Wortz invited by bringing a designer like de Bretteville into this conversation: to push the boundaries of how he and others understood the “habitability” of our world, still an urgent question best answered by the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that remains elusive today.

In the years that followed, as Wortz’s involvement in the arts also continued through his friendships and his therapy practice, he also intermittently collaborated with artists. In 1976, he helped plan a public sculpture project along the Northern Waterfront area of San Francisco. In 1991, he co-curated an exhibition called and about Addictions at the

Barbara Museum of

with

Gabrielson explained in the catalogue for the show that he wanted the benefit of Wortz’s wide-ranging expertise as someone who understood Buddhism, artists, substance abuse, and biofeedback.

When he became ill with prostate cancer in the early 2000s, Wortz had already spent over a decade caring for Melinda, who had received an Alzheimer's diagnosis right before she turned 50 and passed in 2002. He stayed in constant conversation with his friends and his doctors about his experience with his illness. Irwin believed Wortz kept cancer at bay through his curiosity. “He researched it and got into the whole process,” Irwin told the writer Lawrence Weschler. “The doctors…loved him because he was the best feedback candidate they ever could have had.”18 Wortz would

Santa

Art,

the artist Walter Gabrielson.

get tired in the afternoons and have to lie down. Sometimes, during visits, Irwin would lay beside him. “We’d actually hold hands,” Irwin recalled, “and he would talk about this whole process of dying.”19

Irwin said that Wortz had given him a lesson in how to die. But they had both already been teaching each other how to live for decades. Wortz had developed, through the time he spent with artists, an inclusive theory of art’s value that pivoted away from capital: “The profession of art provides the individual with a lot of options. It’s a very wealthy profession,” he said, acknowledging that this “wealth” was not typically monetary. “The options have to do with behavior, lifestyles, dress, environment, and all sorts of things society lets the artist get away with. This makes the artist very rich.”20 Others have recognized this potential richness, but Wortz found a way to keep helping the people around him access the possibilities that living experimentally and open-mindedly invited. I stumbled recently upon an exuberant 1980 painting by the L.A. artist Caron Colvin, a portrait of Ed and Melinda Wortz. They both smile warmly. Ed holds a plant in his right hand and a finger growing out of his head reaches out to touch a plant growing out of Melinda’s head. Red block letters next to him read, “being as existence manifests only through relationship,” a precept Ed likely articulated, and the painting itself —with the plants, the words, the kind eyes of both subjects, Colvin’s gestural vivacity—makes this statement resonate.

Catherine G. Wagley is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her book She Wanted Adventure, about supporting each other while living through and around art, is forthcoming from FSG.

1. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz, 1977, “Robert Irwin Project Interviews,” UCLA Center for Oral History Research.

2. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz.

3. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz.

4. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz.

5. Not officially, nor with NASA’s involvement. The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota did host an experimental online habitability symposium in 2020.

6. Ed Wortz, interview by Saibra Vickland, March 22, 1986.

7. Oral history interview with Tom Wudl, July 17, 2020, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

8. Wortz, interview by Vickland.

9. Barbara T. Smith, The Way to Be: A Memoir (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2023), 39.

10. Smith, The Way to Be, 140.

11. Scott Grieger, interview with the author, March 17, 2025.

12. Ed Wortz, “Relationships, Dependency and Dukkha,” Dharma Family Journal 1 (no. 2), March 2000.

13. Peter Plagens, interview with the author, March 14, 2025.

14. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz.

15. Oral history interview of Ed Wortz.

16. Oral history interview with Ed Wortz.

17. Sheila de Bretteville, “Habitability from a Feminist Point of View,” in Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the CCAIA: Habitability (Monterey, CA: California Conference of American Institute of Architects/ CCAIA, 1973). This is quoted in James Merle Thomas’s 2014 Stanford University dissertation, “The Aesthetics of Habitability: Edward C. Wortz, NASA, and the Art of Light and Space, 1966–1973,” a rare in-depth consideration of Wortz’s contributions to art.

18. Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

19. Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting, 289–90.

20. Wortz, interview by Vickland.

Artmaking and Apocalypse

Four Artists on Octavia E. Butler

Last year, I spent some time rereading several novels by Octavia E. Butler. Perhaps subconsciously, I started with Parable of the Sower, which begins in July 2024 on the outskirts of a ruined and lawless Los Angeles, the city an “oozing sore.”1 Distressed by the carnage of our own world, the primal terrors of Butler’s post-apocalyptic world offered a bleak yet welcome distraction. I’m not the only one to think so: Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, debuted on The New York Times bestseller list in 2020 at the height of the pandemic (and 14 years after Butler’s death), attesting to its relevance as a narrative of calamity and survival. In the years since, Butler, a foremother of Afrofuturism and a 1995 MacArthur Fellow, has continued to exert posthumous cultural influence, with numerous publications issuing renewed considerations of her novels and with multiple film and TV adaptations currently in the works.2 Additionally, numerous artists—including Firelei Báez, Connie Samaras, Alicia Piller, and American Artist3—have made work inspired by her words. The discourse around her writing reached a crescendo in January in the aftermath of the firestorms that ravaged the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, where Butler once lived and is now buried, with many noting that Parable of the Sower envisions a similar catastrophe (in the novel, recurring fires create an “orgy of burning”).4

While her fiction may seem to eerily prophesize our current moment, Butler’s science fiction stories (mostly written in the 1980s and ’90s) grew from her acute observation of the very

real crises brewing around her (racism, inequity, climate change), allowing her to anticipate how our unchecked societal malignancies could metastasize over time. Butler poured these observations into fantastical realms inhabited by non-heteronormative beings, creatures she wielded to subversively challenge the hierarchical norms endemic to our own world. As a dystopian tale marked by the threat of fascism and the extreme ramifications of climate change—scarcity, destitution, fanaticism, slavery, tyranny, violence— Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), offer some of Butler’s keenest insights into the perils of life in the contemporary United States. Their relevance persists because, out of all of her imagined realities, the Parable novels’ fractious future is the one that most incisively incriminates our present, and not only because the novels’ fictional timeline now coincides with our current moment. Butler ultimately viewed both novels as warnings, yet the crises she forewarned are already here: To quote her protagonist, “things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.”5 Eventually, disintegration yields to collapse.

The two novels, often referred to as the Earthseed series, span the years 2024–2027 and 2032–2035, respectively, conjuring a speculative future marred by environmental and societal collapse. Protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina, the teenage Black daughter of a preacher, lives with her family behind the fortified walls of a close-knit, working-class community. Due to an unspecified apocalypse, the world beyond the walls is dangerously brutal, with violence and savagery running amok. The structures of government and society have remained intact just enough to allow for a villainous fascist to reign, one who ominously talks of “making America great again.”6 In response to the tumult around her, Lauren develops a personal religious philosophy called Earthseed, which posits that there is no God in the traditional monotheistic sense—God is simply the force of change. She approaches her belief system as a kind

Jessica Simmons-Reid

Firelei Báez, On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us) (detail) (2020). Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 inches.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Photo: Argenis Apolinario Photography.

Top: Connie Samaras, Huntington Chinese Garden; OEB 3245 Commonplace Book 1990, fragment on climate change and changing the ways humans inhabit Earth (2016). Archival pigment print from film. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

Bottom: Connie Samaras, Huntington Desert Garden, Agave; OEB 1723, Novel Fragment, Parable of the Sower, 1989 (2016). Archival pigment print from film. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

of found object: not a thing that she concocts from the depths of her imagination, but rather a fundamental truth that she observes in the world around her. She eventually codifies this theology into a network of cooperative Earthseed communities that collectively espouse environmental stewardship and mutual care—radical prospects for a world splintered by brutality and deceit. Parable’s most frequently cited quotation, etched on Butler’s tombstone, posits this notion of change as a type of personal and collective reciprocity: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”7

In one of the novel’s more imaginative elements, Lauren secretly suffers from a sensory disorder called Hyperempathy that causes her to palpably experience any bodily wound she witnesses as if it were inflicted upon her own flesh. This pernicious condition ultimately offers the potential for radical social transformation: “if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain…who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?”8 The subtext is that change can be simultaneously somatic and systemic, and that gestures of reciprocal care can stanch the bleed of collective suffering.

Many of the artists inspired by Butler’s work have seized upon this tenet of transformation, examining how our bodies, environments, and societal milieus can alternatively wound or nurture one another, highlighting their intrinsic entanglements. Firelei Báez’s large-scale painting, On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us) (2020), which was part of New York’s Public Art Fund Art on the Grid installation project in 2020 and on view at the Bronx Museum in 2021, allegorizes this sentiment.9 Melding abstract, figurative, and surrealist sensibilities, the work depicts a tightly cropped Black female figure at rest in a field of grass, her face nearly obscured by lush blooms that disperse into thick, shiny coils of rich brown hair. A single eye, almost cloaked, meets the viewer’s gaze. The subject,

bedecked in a diaphanous dress beautifully rendered by Báez’s gleaming brushstrokes, has a copy of Parable of the Sower laying open in her lap. This idyllic vision of a Black woman symbiotically communing with an abundant green earth—eschewing the toils of capitalism in favor of leisure and literature—represents a moment of pleasure, agency, and bodily sovereignty that nonetheless eulogizes the toils of the past (and present), as the title suggests. It also establishes a dialectical tension with the unseen viewer, who hovers from a voyeuristic vantage point of power. The figure’s lack of vigilance subverts this hierarchical dynamic, supposing instead a reciprocal exchange of vulnerability and trust. By framing Butler so prominently, the painting ultimately positions Parable of the Sower as both an emblem and an omen: This Edenic tableau, like the novel’s hellish dystopia, functions as a speculative social reality that is contingent on our collective behavior toward one another.

Connie Samaras’ conceptual photographs based on Parable of the Sower similarly employ the book as a symbolic object within a verdant composition. Her images depict vignettes of cacti and other flora from the Huntington Desert Garden in Pasadena, which she photographed through enlarged transparencies made from Butler’s handwritten notes about the book (Butler’s archives are currently housed at the Huntington Library). In Huntington Desert Garden (agave) and OEB 1723, novel fragment from Parable of the Sower, 1989 (2016), the sinuous limbs of a large, variegated agave occupy the entire image frame in a tangled and semi-abstract composition. Superimposed over the plant are snippets of Butler’s handwriting; her notational marks disappear and re-materialize like guarded murmurs. Though it’s nearly illegible, the word “changing” functions as one of the image’s most visually prominent elements. This reference to Earthseed’s central belief system simultaneously implicates our ongoing detrimental

alteration of the environment and identifies perpetual metamorphosis as the natural world’s native state, in which survival necessitates interspecies symbiosis. Samaras’ title for this series, The Past is Another Planet, positions the work as a botanical study of an existentially threatened ecosystem—an eventual vestige of Earth’s fertile past.

Together, both Báez and Samaras offer intimate, microcosmic glances at hyper-specific moments or environments, one ecological and one interpersonal, suggesting that sustained care for a single being bolsters the integrity of the entire living system. In both Parable novels, Samaras’ notion of the past as another planet emerges quite literally. Butler details how climate change has obliterated Earth’s fragile ecology—a brittle Southern California wilts without rainfall for years—making edible plants, fruits, and seeds precious and laborintensive commodities. While Lauren’s Earthseed community nurtures the land as if it were a living body, tending to it so that it may sustain its inhabitants in return, the movement’s ultimate (and somewhat contradictory) goal lies in abandoning this synergistic relationship altogether and eloping to other planetary worlds: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”10 Humans, Lauren asserts, can function as seeds for propagating life beyond the bounds of this planet, just as a windborne plant embryo takes root in the soil of a distant island. Alicia Piller’s immersive sculpture, Mission Control. Earthseed (2024), included in The Brick’s PST exhibition, Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism, specifically interprets this element of the narrative. Like Samaras, Piller culled from Butler’s archives at the Huntington, embedding images of the author’s handwritten notes within the work. The sculpture recalls the crew module of a spaceship, represented as a pliable, tent-like structure that stretches down from the ceiling and encompasses three large chairs, which seem to have the potential to grasp

onto a body (viewers are encouraged to sit). Composed of pliant, salvaged materials including vinyl, paper, and fabric, the sculpture has the supple elasticity of skin, perhaps a nod to the living, womb-like spaceship central to Butler’s Dawn (the first novel in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy). Emerald green with trailing, snake-like limbs, the back of each chair exhibits ornate patterning reminiscent of the reproductive organs of a flower or a human vulva: elliptical orifices, looping folds, embedded seed pods, tiny hairs. With the inclusion of these symbolic fruiting bodies, this futuristic craft seems poised to sow its organic cargo, perhaps with the aim of attracting unknown pollinators as it traverses extrasolar worlds. Piller employs Butler’s narrative as a fulcrum for a speculative sculptural abstraction, creating a hybrid automotive being that conceptually intertwines the processes of change and creation. Whereas Piller contextualizes Butler’s work in an abstract visual lexicon, American Artist hones in on its wider philosophical and cosmological implications. Their years-long, multi-venue exhibition project, Shaper of God, connects the novels’ science fiction themes to the real-world development of rocket technology, the history of which has deeply shaped Southern California’s social, economic, and natural landscapes. (Like Butler, American Artist hails from Altadena). The Monophobic Response (2024), exhibited at LACMA in 2024 and recently on view at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, takes its title from Butler’s eponymous 1995 essay that explores the human instincts of fear and longing. In a video performance, the artist deploys a fully functional rocket engine in the Mojave Desert, a reenactment of a 1936 launch test. The video imagines a multiracial cohort of Earthseed adherents gathering in barren terrain to ignite their engine prototype, proposing an alternative reality wherein cooperative communities, rather than neocolonial oligarchs, revolutionize space exploration for the existential

Alicia Piller, Mission Control. Earthseed (installation view) (2024). Mixed media.

Image courtesy of the artist and Track 16, commissioned by The Brick.

Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Top: American Artist, The Monophobic Response (film still) (detail) (2024).

Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

Bottom: American Artist, The Monophobic Response (sculpture) (2024). Steel, methanol, oxygen, tanks, sandbags, hoses, paper, and pencil, 150 × 72 × 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

and spiritual betterment of all humans. Together, these artworks merge the premises of Butler’s literature with the predicaments of our own imperiled reality, using the theses of her fiction—change, attentiveness, care, reciprocity—as relational propositions for shaping the contours of our own future, however speculative. Artists, with their unique attunement to material fallibility, share a kinship with Butler’s protagonist, whose condition of hyperempathy is a metaphor for the role of the artist at the end of the world: to absorb the pains and pleasures of their environs and translate them into something new. Harnessing this ethos, the artists discussed here propose dictums of change through tenets of care that mitigate collective pain and trauma: How do we relate to vulnerable bodies and ecosystems, now and in the future? This question dissects power’s inevitable abuse: Who gets to dictate the terms of our mutual survival? Báez’s incandescent painting, Samaras’ enigmatic photograph, Piller’s anthropomorphic spaceship, and American Artist’s Afrofuturistic vision will not, on their own, obliterate fascism or stall our extinction; collectively, however, they underscore the notion—crystalized by Butler herself— that kernels of radical thought and subtle shifts in perspective can, over time, ripple outward to elicit seismic sociocultural changes. Perhaps, then, we can one day implement the antidote to our own self-induced apocalypse. In the meantime, as large catastrophes overwhelm, small poetic gestures sustain. If we lose those, what remains?

Jessica Simmons-Reid is an artist, writer, and critic based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Carla, frieze, Momus, and The New York Times. She is a 2024 recipient of AICA’s Young Critic Prize.

1. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York City: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), 109.

2. The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and The Paris Review, among others, have published commentary. Ava DuVernay is developing Dawn (1987), the first novel in Butler’s Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood series, for television; Amazon Studios is developing a drama series based on the Patternist series; and Garrett Bradley is directing a feature film based on Parable of the Sower.

3. Kara Walker’s new commission at SFMOMA, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) (2024), counts Parable of the Sower as one of its many references. Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s opera based on the novel opened at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2023.

4. Butler, Sower, 144.

5. Butler, Sower, 123.

6. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York City: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 21.

7. Butler, Sower, 3.

8. Butler, Sower, 115.

9. Underscoring the social commentary of this painting, Báez has written that "this work is in reference to the 70,000 black women and girls in the United States currently missing,” and that the figure in the piece is modeled on a circa-1961 photograph of sleeping Freedom Riders. Firelei Báez for the Public Art Fund: Art on the Grid, James Cohan, accessed April 9, 2025, https://www.jamescohan.com/public-exhibitions/ firelei-baez-for-the-public-art-fund?view=slider.

10. Butler, Sower, 84.

As Carla celebrates our 10-year anniversary, we wanted to look back over each year of the magazine, tracing our growth along with the major exhibitions and events that have shaped the L.A. art community and world at large. Museums and galleries have opened and closed, unions have rallied, and striking shows have animated the city. We asked a group of 10 writers, staff, and board members to reflect on Carla’s archive, prompting each contributor to reflect on one Carla article from each of our 10 years. Alongside this, the writers highlight notable cultural moments that have impacted both L.A.’s art scene and their own personal engagement with the city.

Carla, a Timeline in 10 Years

Photo: Esteban Schimpf

Aaron Horst

Carla, issue 2

Layers of Leimert Park

—Catherine G. Wagley

Catherine G. Wagley captures a nuanced, complex, contextual, and above all local picture of a neighborhood in Los Angeles with both rich historical weight and an unclear future. Wagley deftly unspools the intertwining realities of power, history, real estate, and the public good that the contemporary art world has a hand in shaping, for better or for worse.

L.A. exhibition

Vengeance, film noir tics, Cronenberg-ian assemblages, and flashing lights comprised John Bock’s installation Three Sisters. The 40-minute film centerpiece both chews and is chewed by the film’s scenery, which filled up Regen Projects’ main room as if flung out by the film’s intensity. Drama of my favorite sort.

2016

Catherine G. Wagley

Carla, issue 8

Interview with Penny Slinger

—Eliza Swann

Eliza Swann, whose own work as an artist and teacher I deeply admire, spoke to artist Penny Slinger at the Goddess Temple where Slinger then lived, a home in the redwoods specifically built to honor the divine feminine. She spoke to Swann about the difficulty of doing sincerely spiritual, sexual work in the contemporary art world.

Art world news

Protests against galleries in Boyle Heights began in earnest in September 2016, as certain mid-size galleries that had opened during L.A.’s gallery boom from 2013–15 were already losing their spaces thanks to greedy landlords who had only rented to them while waiting for Soho House or Google to arrive in the neighborhood.

The Art + Practice campus from Leimert Boulevard in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. June 16, 2015. Photo: Natalie Hon.

Penny Slinger, The First Slice (1973). Photo collage in card vignette. Image courtesy of the artist.

2017 Matt Stromberg 2018 Lindsay

Carla, issue 10

She Wanted Adventure: Dwan, Butler, Mizuno, Copley

—Catherine G. Wagley

Drawing on archival sources and interviews, Wagley documents the historical importance and innovative practices of four female gallerists, positing that their absence from the official story may have been in part a result of their subversive strategies that were at odds with both their male counterparts and conventional efforts of historicization.

Standout artist

I first encountered Lauren Halsey’s work in black is a color, a summer 2017 group show curated by Essence Harden at Charlie James Gallery. Into a grid of whiteon-white carved gypsum panels she monumentalized images of Black identity: from jazz musicians and the P-Funk mothership, to Afrofuturist pyramids, and phrases like “Black owned beauty supply”and “here nobody surrenders.”

Preston Zappas

Carla, issue 12

Interior States of the Art —Travis Diehl

“An artwork may or may not be what it says it is,” Diehl writes in an article that examines artworks that exist in the ether—their materials, only discernible to the viewer via wall didactics. These works are a profound trust exercise in which a viewer must believe an artist at their word.

L.A. exhibition

Nina Chanel Abney’s colorful, dense, graphic compositions in her dual shows at CAAM and ICA LA exploded with an array of references, some political, others pop-cultural, others merely playful. Not wanting to be boxed into any one discourse, Abney has fervently pursued a painterly language that fuses synchronal subject matter, stacked and tangled.

Virginia Dwan at the exhibition Language III, Dwan Gallery, New York (1969). Image courtesy of Dwan Gallery Archive. Photo: Roger Prigent.

Ivana Bašić, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #1 (2017). Wax, glass, breath, weight, pressure, stainless steel, oil, 126 × 128 × 14 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Contemporary.

2019 Jessica Simmons-Reid 2020 Trulee Hall

Carla, issue 18

Putting Aesthetics to Hope

—Catherine G. Wagley

Wagley’s examination of work by Carmen Winant in relation to the womyn’s land movements of the 1970s and ’80s coalesced around questions crucial to both photography and feminism —invoking gaze, authorship, intimacy, and agency—while also suggesting the limitations of a feminism that isn’t wholly intersectional.

Art world news

Local art world events —the successful unionization of MOCA employees and the attempted unionization of Marciano Foundation employees (which spurred the Marcianos to abruptly shutter the museum)— reflected larger national debates, highlighting deepening divisions over workers’ rights as well as echoing growing calls for institutional transparency and accountability.

Honey Lee Cottrell. Image courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

Carla, issue 22

The Glitch Strikes Back: Legacy Russell’s Feminist Manifesto

—Allison Noelle Conner

Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, dissected by Conner, reclaims tech glitches as feminist rebellion, shattering gender and race binaries. Glitches disrupt norms, empowering “messy,” non-binary identities online. It’s a bold lens on how cyberspace can liberate when it breaks, urging marginalized voices to hack oppressive systems.

World event

The world was collectively traumatized as the pandemic locked most of us at home to exist primarily in digital realms. Work, education, social life, and yes—the art world too—all went virtual. Black Lives Matter protests shined a spotlight on widespread racial injustice, and U.S. political divisions were amplified.

Juliana Huxtable, Ari 1 (2019). Inkjet mounted on Dibond, 45 × 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

2021 MJ Brown 2022 Allison Noelle Conner

Carla Podcast, episode 29

Interview with Patrick Martinez

My brother and I used to play this game when I visited L.A.: You abruptly shout out the large text you pass while driving across the city— storefront signage, banners, billboards. Patrick Martinez spoke about his penchant for these surfaces: “not the anti-advertising, but the flip side of a community advertising or aesthetic.” His work translates the experience of landscape rather than representing landscape.

World event

Former U.S. President Joe Biden’s words, “America is back,” linger in my memory of 2021—they remain fractured, untrue, and nostalgic for an imaginary America that acted in accordance with the values it espoused. I leaned heavily on Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights that year as these realities and non-realities surrounded us.

Carla, issue 29

From Both Sides of the Lens: Ulysses Jenkins’ Self Reflexive Video Practice —Neyat Yohannes

One of the joys of Yohannes’ feature lies in her ability to sketch out a loose image of the Black art scenes in the 1970s and ’80s. She deftly explores Jenkins’ prescience in turning the camera into a self-reflexive tool, where the artist played dual roles as “both witness and subject.”

Art world news

Organized as an extension of Simone Leigh’s exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, the Loophole of Retreat at the 59th Venice Biennale was a three-day conference at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini that gathered scholars, artists, and activists. Through performances, film screenings, and dialogues, the symposium celebrated the breadth and rigor of Black women’s theory and imagination, outlining the many expressions of sovereignty and liberation.

Patrick Martinez, Color Allowed (2020). Neon on plexiglass, 32 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery.

Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation (rehearsal documentation) (detail) (1984). Color print, 3.5 × 5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

2023 Evan Nicole Brown 2024 Aaron Boehmer

Carla, issue 34

Tuning In and Dropping Out: Spiritual Frontiers in Recent Art and Curation

—Isabella Miller

Miller's piece explores the American West as a spiritual frontier, and the shared “distrust of modernity [and] interest in the occult” that guided the work of a community of artists. She examines the tenuous yet fertile relationship between mysticism and the art market.

L.A. exhibition

Some of my most powerful and cherished childhood memories revolve around Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach, the book (1991) and the story quilt (1988). Her survey at Jeffrey Deitch reminded me of the whimsical magic her artworks hold, which inspired me to dream as a young girl. Now, just one year after Ringgold’s death, I am struck by how profoundly alive her vivid narratives have always been.

Emil Bisttram, Oversoul (c. 1941). Oil on masonite, 35.5 × 26.5 inches. Private collection. Image courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

Carla, issue 37

The Connective Role of Art in UCLA’s Pro-Palestine Encampment

—Aidann Gruwell, Alex Bushnell, Alex Yang, Katherin Sanchez, and Ricky Shi

Last spring, students and community members established Gaza Solidarity Encampments on campuses across the country, demanding their universities divest from companies profiting from and facilitating the genocide in—and occupation of—Palestine. The authors wrote as participants in the UCLA encampment, where students used visual art as a tool “to agitate, to criticize, and to unify.”

Standout artist

Ironically, I first heard of Evan Apodaca after his art was censored by the San Diego International Airport in 2023 for being too critical of the city’s hyper-militarism. The following year, he plastered rocks with cyanotype reprints to confront eviction and displacement brought on by L.A.’s Dodger Stadium.

UCLA encampment occupying Royce Quad shortly before law enforcement began forcibly removing the demonstration and arresting more than 200 protesters, May 1, 2024. Photo: Keegan Holden.

Interview with Erin Christovale

and her answers unfolded into a love letter to the L.A. region. Our conversation opened up into a larger continuum of histories: collectively understood, spoken, carried—and intimately interconnected.

CJ Salapare: How did your personal relationship with L.A. come to be?

I first met curator Erin Christovale in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was a Getty Marrow intern at the Hammer Museum working with Erin on her 2022 exhibition Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation. In the months that followed, the power and prescience of Jenkins’ work was undeniable amid Zoom calls and Black Lives Matter protests. I admired his radical sensibility homegrown in Los Angeles, and I soon realized that Erin also embodied this very spirit.

The ensuing years that I’ve known Erin have only confirmed this belief. Los Angeles, with all of its enigmas and edges (including Long Beach, where we were both raised), is inextricable from her ways of working and being. Her curatorial work—from the 2018 edition of Made in L.A., to Jenkins’ longoverdue survey, to the 2022 Sylvia Wynter-inspired exhibition No Humans Involved—is grounded in the intergenerational practices of Black radical imagination, archival preservation, and local experimentalism.

Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal (February 9–May 4, 2025), which Erin recently curated at the Hammer with Nyah Ginwright, is her latest imagining brought to fruition. The multimedia exhibition brings together the visionary musician and spiritual guru’s music and archives alongside works by 19 multi-generational artists. What emerges is a dual portrait of a dynamic life and legacy.

For this interview (which took place on Valentine’s Day), I asked Erin to reflect on her sense of place,

Erin Christovale: I've lived in L.A. County for practically my entire life. I grew up in Long Beach and the city has always been a cornerstone to my existence, to the way that I think, the way that I move, the way that I navigate spaces. […] I always think of L.A. as, like, this sort of B [or] C-list actress who had that one breakout role and her career didn’t really take off after that. She’s a glamour girl, but she's also very raw and gritty and seedy. [L.A. is] ruled by the entertainment industry. […] It's also a city that has very deep political and racial underpinnings. I think about the LAPD being one of the most militarized police departments in the country. I think about a history of uprisings from Watts to South Central. I think about a city that’s always sunny…. To say that imbues some positivity or beauty, but actually what it means is the city [rarely] gets rain. What does it mean if the city is never sort of replenished in that way? There’s so many layers to this incredible city. I love just being in the thick of all of that… and also incorporating that into what I do as a curator.

CJS: Can you expand on this dissonance between the region’s associations with Hollywood’s glitz and glamour and these more visceral layers of meaning that inform your curatorial work?

EC: I’ve always been interested in the study of film. […] I remember so clearly one of the classes at USC that really had an impact on me was a class taught by Professor Kara Keeling on the history of African-American cinema, and one of the first films that she showed was The Birth of a Nation.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Adam Davis. Interview

I’m thinking, what does this film have to do with African-American cinema? But you come to understand that [this 1915] film—by D.W. Griffith, who's actually one of the founders of Hollywood—was in part made to convince people, and mainly new immigrants to the country, that Black people were savage, bad, and not to be messed with or engaged with. […] So I’ve always been fascinated by the way that moving image has been deeply instrumentalized to sway the opinions and ideas of the collective.

CJS: I’m curious about what or who gets brought along from your approach to the moving image, specifically in terms of the archival and social impulses central to your practice, in shows like Ulysses Jenkins or Alice Coltrane.

EC: I formed this project Black Radical Imagination [with filmmaker Amir George] and the title of that project ties directly back to…Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination [2002] by Robin D.G. Kelley. He does this brilliant job of outlining all of these Black liberation movements over the years and [is] always coming back to the simple idea that if someone wasn’t courageous enough to radically imagine another way of existing, a new future, that none of these movements would have been in place. Amir and I applied that philosophy to the moving image space, particularly experimental video.

My curatorial practice is deeply tied to this notion of Black radical imagination and if you look at any of my projects [or] exhibitions, there’s always a nod or [a] direct tie back to a Black cultural figure, back to Black scholarship, back to an essay or a person. And what I find important about [this] excavating is my intention to…offer up an extension of those thoughts or ideas…through the art space, but also point at the fact that these thoughts are universal and Black radical thought is actually global and is a cornerstone for many liberation movements.

CJS: The exchange that an exhibition can make possible, that transmission of knowledge, also feels fundamental to the way that you think. If we framed the exhibition space as a matrix—art, artists, and audiences as the trifecta— is there anything specific or singular about these three coalescing in L.A.?

EC: I think that’s a really beautiful question… Just the way that L.A. artists have come together, regardless of the institution, regardless of the validation of the larger art world, regardless of the market, has always been deeply inspirational to me and a reminder that art happens and exists beyond the framework of the art world. Art happens every day in the smallest of moments and in the strangest of places.

I’ve been so proud and have loved the fact that the L.A. art scene has these historical roots. It's not about the gallery or the fair or the institution. […] I think L.A. has always been a city of artists for artists. The L.A. art scene has always been doing its thing regardless of these other powers that be, and there's something very punk and rebellious and almost anarchist about that, [which] I love. […] Historically, the artist in L.A. has always needed the collective, as opposed to other art centers.

CJS: I wonder how the collective manifests through [trailblazing] spaces in LA, like Self-Help Graphics & Art and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, or the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

EC: Those spaces raised me. I could not exist as the person that I am now, in the institution that I’m very consciously aware of that I exist in now, without those spaces. I think those spaces are actually the most important spaces within [this] ecosystem because those are where deep experimentation and innovation are still alive and well and accessible… I often feel they don’t get the credit that they deserve, or the deep labor that goes into making those spaces possible is never really praised.

Top: Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum.

Photo: Joshua White.

Bottom: No Humans Involved (installation view) (2021–22). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum.

Photo: Joshua White.

Human Resources has always been an incredibly important space for me and for young curators who have the opportunity to put on shows. LACE [Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions] has always been an incredible space that has a very rich history and was started by artists and I think still has that sort of flair. The Echo Park Film Center [Collective] is another space [where] I could screen films or friends of mine learned how to shoot on film for the first time.

CJS: You mentioned that you carry L.A. around with you wherever you go. How do you feel that your community in L.A. informs this belief?

EC: So many of the artists that I have worked with are my peers, and we’ve grown up together, and I’ve been in and out of their studios over years. […] These spaces are the genesis of the work that I bring to the Hammer now and the group of artists that I’m constantly in conversation with.

CJS: In creating a sense or form of the collective, there needs to be a kind of magnetism, or this ability to connect with others that you undeniably possess.

EC: Thank you for seeing that in me… This is something I can’t overthink. I just do, it’s just intuitive. […] I’ve always understood that to be a human is to be in constant connection, refraction, reflection, projection, a collective of others that are all working through this notion of the human condition.

I think also that space always reminds me that we are all still learning… and when you enter other people’s spaces [you] come in those spaces with an open mind, come in those spaces knowing that these people are the authority, the legacy keepers of what those spaces mean to them, and what your contribution is from there.

CJS: Can you elaborate on being in this learning mindset? Especially in terms of the curator historically being a bastion of expertise, or a gatekeeper.

EC: I think being a curator now in this contemporary world is so vast and it has truly broken from those early constructs. I consider myself to be a part of a larger group of specifically Black contemporary curators who for the first time en masse have come into these institutional spaces. What that has meant for me and so many of my colleagues is these spaces don’t always know what we need [and] how to treat us.

I’ve had to be deeply creative and I’ve had to take care of myself in these spaces in order to survive. I think with that labor in mind, I have to be open, I have to be receptive, I have to learn from others because I too am sort of learning on the spot as I go about what I need, what I want, how to advocate for myself. Shout out to our elders and our mentors who [didn’t have] the network that we have now.

I think being a good curator in this contemporary world calls you to be…a person of the world. You’re constantly in the flux and flow of society and culture, and you’re moving between so many different spaces and classes and types of people. I think in order to do that well, you kind of have to be fluid, you have to have an open mind, you have to be willing to learn, or else you miss the point of what this incredible job and position can be.

CJS: I think what you’re describing so profoundly is the reality that the curator isn’t solely in the business of aesthetics anymore. I want to focus on the ethics that come with such a position of responsibility.

EC: This…notion of care has to extend beyond the object. At least that’s how I feel. The Latin word for curator [cūrātor] stems from this idea of caring… if you don’t care about or for the objects and the people and the audience that you are hoping to manifest in these spaces, then what are you actually gaining from this experience? This is the rhetorical question that I always toy with.

I remember one of the most brilliant things that the artist Martine Syms said. She was like, “I make shows for my mom.” It’s so simple, but so profound. Because what she is getting at is if grandma doesn’t feel it, if my little niece is not engaged, if my mother is not interested, who am I doing this for? I acknowledge not everyone thinks like this or has this set of priorities or even ethics, but the community of art people and workers that I keep close to me are those that feel similarly and do similarly.

I also just want to shout out certain art workers and curators in the city who have laid the groundwork for me to exist in this space, like Alma Ruiz who was at MOCA, or Rita Gonzalez who is at LACMA now, or Essence Harden, who’s curating the next Made in L.A. biennial. So many of these people who are often women of color have been the foundation of these institutions in this city, and I think that just needs to be reiterated over and over again.

CJS: Naming these people and spaces, calling to mind these different sensibilities and ideas—these are ways of keeping memories and archives alive, of making sure that they don’t fade away.

EC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is part of the work. That’s…why oral history too is so deeply important. Saying those names, getting those names in print, circulating those names in digital spaces. [...] These are the blueprints. These are the thought partners. These are the people who have made the L.A. art world what it is and what it will be. That is incredibly important to me.

CJ Salapare is a Filipino-American arts worker and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He currently works in the Modern and Contemporary department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Erin Christovale is a Los Angeles-based film programmer and curator at the Hammer Museum. She is the cofounder of the international experimental film program Black Radical Imagination (2016), which has screened in spaces such as MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco, Guadalajara, Mexico. During her time at the Hammer, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed Made in L.A. with Anne Ellegood; No Humans Involved, the retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation with Meg Onli; and Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal. She was awarded the New Leadership Award by ArtTable in 2020, completed the Curatorial Center for Leadership/Studio Museum in Harlem's Forum from 2021–2023, and is an advisor of the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute.

Bottom: Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (installation view) (2022).

Image courtesy of the artist and Hammer Museum.

Photo: Jeff McLane.

Top: belonging (installation view) (2019). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Through the Lens of Loss

Rebuilding Art Practices in the Wake of Wildfires

Photos by Monica Orozco

As the Eaton Fire raged through the foothills of Altadena beginning on January 7, the flames consumed more than just homes and studios—they devoured histories, lifetimes of creation reduced to embers. Photographer Monica Orozco, a Los Angeles native, stood helpless in the early hours of devastation as her beloved city burned, the air thick with loss and the acrid scent of charred dreams. Among the displaced were close friends—artists who lost not only their creative sanctuaries but the tangible expressions of their artistic practices and life’s work.

This photo essay is both an elegy and a testament to creation as a form of resilience. It captures the raw emotions of grief, the indelible spirit of artistic creation, and the intimate process of mourning and rebuilding. Even in destruction’s wake, the impulse to make something new never fades. Art itself becomes a bridge toward healing. Through Orozco’s lens, we see the fragility of artistic practice in the face of catastrophe and, ultimately, the quiet but persistent ways in which art endures.

Beatriz Cortez

“It was like losing both homes at once and again. But this time I was surrounded by a community that cares. I am so fortunate [that] Los Angeles is my home. My studio is not in Altadena and it is safe, and for a few hours each day I don’t think about anything else but creating sculptures.”

“The first time I had to leave my home in a rush was in 1989 during the war in El Salvador. I still dream of the house and all its memories. When the Eaton Fire burned my apartment in Altadena, I lost most of the things I was able to save from my first home.”

“Time

and control, or lack of it, has been a concept within my work for a long time. I find myself stuck on these concepts again in new ways, trying to find reason within all of this.”

Kari Reardon

“Driving around what was my neighborhood, I was struck by how beautiful the melted car parts were. These aluminum drips and flows spilling out and down driveways, like molten metal tears. I asked permission from my neighbors and friends if I could collect their melted car parts; I don’t [know] what form this will take, but I do know that I’d like to make it into a public art piece for Altadena. I went back to dig where I knew I had some specific cast artworks. It was exciting when I found something recognizable—a treasure hunt of sorts. The best moment was when I found my favorite tool. It was for wax sculpting, it was thinner and bent but still there.”

Margaret Griffith and Jamison Carter

“My studio and home were both lost in the Eaton Canyon fires on January 8. I was set to install a public artwork on [January 22]. [The piece reflects] upon my interest in impermanence... It is titled Kaleidoscope, because it has a series of circular openings that are constantly changing as you move around the piece. There is newfound urgency and immediacy in making art. All notions of perfection are out the window. I can obsess over small details in my work, but after so much loss, I am currently finding the imperfections [to be] positives and not negatives.” —Margaret Griffith

“I finished [this] piece a couple of days before the fires. I decided to name it using the conventions of NASA and ESA naming comets and other celestial bodies. It’s titled JC73-20J, after my birthdate. I didn’t know at the time that this piece would be the source of a rebirth of sorts, since nearly every other piece I made was destroyed in the fire.

I’ve made a few pieces since the fire, with fire affected things. I have always used my current moment to fuel my practice, but there is definitely a shift in the urgency [and] consideration of things I’m making.” —Jamison Carter

“I find myself returning to Sister Corita Kent’s first rule: Find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while. We certainly trusted what we had, and for a variety of reasons, that trust has been broken.” —Carter

Kati Kirsch, Paper Goods (installation view) (detail) (2024–25). Image courtesy of the artist and Cheremoya. Photo: Evan Bedford.

Kati Kirsch at Cheremoya

Decmeber 14, 2024–February 8, 2025

The goods in Kati Kirsch’s Paper Goods are, first of all, ceramics: milky, candycolored objects, tiny and spread like gnome or fairy talismans throughout Cheremoya’s gallery. A single miniature laced-up brown boot sits coquettishly by the window. Books the size of thimbles hang from relatively oversized white ribbons. These ceramics, imperfect with their crinkled edges and thin, colorful glazes, join Kirsch’s oil paintings. At once serious and playful in their dreamy depictions of doll-like figures and objects, Kirsch’s paintings work just as hard as the ceramics to destabilize our ideas of the dainty or cute. Wishing wells and prize-ribbons don’t hide their childhood and fairytale associations—but they’d be hard to dismiss as simply twee. Every tiny object and painted scene in Paper Goods whispers an eerie nostalgia and is filled with enormous, ungraspable spirit. Through nail-polished embellishments and gauzy ribbons, Kirsch troubles the trinket with a distinctly feminine spirit, opening up a wondrous dream-space. Her glassy oil menageries and intricate, delicate sculptures blend elements of the mundane and the uncanny to redefine decoration as an investigation into the vitality of objects. Works like July 2023 Calendar (all works 2024), Days of the Week, and Pencil Pouch employ found objects

to recall and disrupt their utility. Days of the Week is a framed piece composed of small paintings inspired by found flashcards, here arranged to represent a weeklong calendar. In bright watercolors, the signifiers of each day are replaced by irreverent images that seem to share in the secret language—a feminine language, a childhood language, a fantasy language—which animates all of the objects in Paper Goods: Thursday is for garden; Friday is for zipper. In the image for Wednesday, a contented, bow-tied magician skillfully juggles bright blue dots.

Recalling the Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement of the 1970s and ’80s, Paper Goods seeks to display formal interests traditionally attributed to women and children. The movement centered crafts like weaving and ornamentation that were previously relegated to the domestic sphere—what P&D artists Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro described as the work of “female culture.”1 By displaying and documenting historically female art, P&D artists challenged cultural delineations between art and craft as well as between the public and the domestic. Kirsch’s work takes this move one step further—doubling down on the power of the decorative to disrupt, to reach places that other work can’t. July 2023 Calendar is a dazzle of fuschia and violet contained in round calendar boxes which, instead of merely telling the time, recall plush mattresses. On top of this, we see a bed lofted high, recalling perhaps The Princess and the Pea. We see a quilt

slipping off of an anonymous sleeping figure like a lazy, melting grid—much like time itself. Here, the utility of the object is not only emphasized by being taken out of its context; it’s blurred into a fantasy dreamscape. Importantly, the majority of Kirsch’s figures appear with eyes closed. They do not have a gaze, they do not view. Perhaps they have sleepily taken to dreaming—they are dreamers—but they are not unaware. Their compositions trouble the “cute” by rejecting mere docility— figures sometimes navigate heavy oil on a densely patterned found fabric, and other times are underpainted with the presence of industrial materials or utility objects. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has written of the “cute” as an aesthetic category which necessarily calls up the process of “objectification,” of being made object. But she also notes that the cute is an entry into a complex emotional plane; while it is “an aestheticization of powerlessness,” it is also incredibly affecting.2 Kirsh plays in this exact paradox—behind the plane upon which her figures are pliant and objectified, plush and childlike, there is a plane where their dreaming, like tendrils, moves freely—where dreaming displays, as only dreaming can, an unpatterned and at times uncanny syntax.

In Paper Goods, the craft is not only elevated to fine art (in a radical display of female culture)—the craft also speaks. A collage of assorted found fabric, buttons, nail polish and loose threads, Pencil Pouch bears a recycled scrap of fabric with an image of

Zoey Greenwald

a bulldozer. This is the craft speaking for itself, speaking the secret language of objects which we are, for a brief moment, allowed to read. In bold, all-caps text, it says: I WORK EVERYDAY.

The feminine and childlike spirit of the work is never unintelligible but always ineffable, representing female culture beyond its cliches and moving rather into mystical or even violent spaces. Kirsch’s work is never merely decorated—it is active.

Large oil paintings are underpainted with collage-like planes and objects; her underpaintings bury strange machines beneath familiar or even nostalgic scenes.

In Melon, orange, lemon, almond., a small gearoperated metal tool is represented slicing through a scene which otherwise houses a bow and a top-hat; in Bridge Tally Card, the body of a violin and a large jingle bell are hidden underneath a translucent, ornate bridge score card; in School zone Company Alphabet flash cards - the letter q, a cherry-red dress form and a snakelike length of red corrugated industrial tubing haunt the multicolored quilt of a sleeping figure. Here, the quaint is shocked alive with the literal and nonliteral mechanics of girlhood, its literal ephemera tied inextricably to its complex spirit. Though the machinery is industrial and cold, the quilt is warm, and heavy.

1. Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled–FEMMAGE,” Heresies #4: Women’s Traditional Arts – The Politics of Aesthetics, 1, no. 4 (1978), 68.

2. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 53–110.

Kenneth Webb at Huma Gallery

January 25–March 8, 2025

Abolition interrogates the systems currently in place. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney conjure “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”1 Prisons in the United States are a byproduct of values instilled by a government built upon slavery, greed, exploitation, and policing. But abolitionism asserts that our punitive system is just a forced narrative. Abolition requires more than eliminating physical spaces; it introduces community, mutual aid, and acceptance. Recreating society first requires confronting old habits and ways of thinking. In multidisciplinary artist Kenneth Webb’s Hymns From the Cave, recently on view at Huma Gallery, the L.A. native documented the internal and external journey of escaping one’s habitual shadows.

Previously serving a prison sentence of 50 years-to-life, Webb expedited his case by maneuvering through complex semantics of the legal system that had worked against him.2 During his incarceration, he co-organized a dance class at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) that challenged participants

to embody their emotions with vulnerable choreography. When he wasn’t in dance classes, he painted. In Hymns From the Cave, the two genres of his artistic practice collided. Throughout the exhibition, Webb’s work insists that the show (and prison industrial complex) is not just about him; it involves all of us.

In the center of the gallery, the installation Sketchbooks on Granny’s Couch (2025) included a floral couch and large stack of papers atop a rug and a side table with its door ajar. The work welcomed viewers into a safe and cozy home. However, a closer look revealed the stack of papers to be Webb’s court documents stacked up high. Soil seeped out of the side table. Portions of the couch were covered in painted phrases that gave viewers insights into Webb’s process. One phrase on the back left corner of the couch was notable: “I daydream a lot. I pluck my images from this ‘dreamland’ a place of fiction and I visit this place often. However, when my art is extracted from that place and crafted into the physical realm, is it still considered fictional? NO! It’s post-fiction.” After the opening, Webb told me that he describes fiction as the lie we all agree to. “Postfiction” is the practice of agency over one’s own narrative. This is what drives Webb’s practice.

In addition to the installation, 13 paintings lined the walls of the gallery, about half of which were created in a California state prison. Webb’s approach to storytelling through these works is aesthetically diverse—realism,

Steven Vargas

Kenneth Webb, Blood in the Soil (detail) (2023). Oil on canvas, 35.5 × 39.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Huma Gallery. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

cartoon, color field. Blood in the Soil (2023) addresses the killing of innocent Black men with realism. The painting depicts a Black man lying in a cotton field with an arrow shot through his hand. The man’s right hand lays at a 90-degree angle to his side with his left over his heart. The stance is particularly reminiscent of the one we hold when reciting the pledge of allegiance or being sworn into court. It tells the story of a man who has followed the rules and pledged to the U.S., only for its history and government to then cause him perilous harm. By pairing imagery of cotton with a weapon shot through the body, Webb fights a discriminatory fiction. Webb’s post-fiction theme surfaces by exposing the truth behind this normative system.

The abstract I Painted a Mirror Black (2020) differs stylistically from the surrounding works, a color field meditatively filled with shades of black. Created following George Floyd’s murder, the piece suggests a direct confrontation with Blackness and its meaning for the viewer. Is it a community? Is it worth attacking? Is it simply a color?

On the back wall hung a single vibrant painting called Finally Free / Heavy is the Head (2024). It depicts a mountainous landscape viewed through a broken fence. On the other side of the fence, a small naked man stands atop a rock with his hands out wide. In the foreground, CDCR attire is tossed on the ground, suggesting the figure stripped the prisoner uniform from his body before running to take this victorious stance. Finally Free / Heavy

is the Head marks Webb’s destination: post-fiction. He has stripped the narratives that have dictated his worth. He is naked. He is free.

At the exhibition’s opening, Webb’s performance began with a reading from his journal: “I feel like I’ve died multiple times.” Webb sat on the floral couch alongside his mother and auntie. As his mother sang hymns from his childhood in the Baptist church, Webb gravitated to the stack of his court proceedings. He slammed his hand on it and the audience cheered, Finally Free / Heavy is the Head visible over his shoulder. Webb grabbed a few pages from the stack, approached a shredder hanging from the ceiling like a light fixture, and fed it pages. As the shreds rained to the ground, more people cheered. Webb concluded the performance by inviting audience members to shred pages themselves. Family, friends, strangers, elders and children all partook. It was a party. This was the freedom Webb imagined in the final painting of the exhibition.

The prison industrial complex is as inconspicuous as our furniture or the way we experience a color. Webb challenges our complicity in its fiction—by grappling with the truth in his paintings and channeling joy in his movement.

1. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text, no. 79 (Summer 2004), 114.

jinseok choi at Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery

September 11, 2024–February 15, 2025

jinseok choi’s exhibition Before the Last Spike at Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery interrogated the histories of labor, immigration, and visibility, bringing forgotten narratives into focus through sculptural and multimedia works. The exhibition derived its name from one of the most iconic yet incomplete photographs in U.S. history —the 1869 “Champagne Photo” commemorating the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.1 While the image captures a jubilant moment of industrial triumph as engineers and workmen from the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad share a handshake and cups of champagne, it deliberately omits the thousands of Chinese laborers whose grueling work made the railroad possible. With a keen sensitivity to materiality and historical resonance, choi reactivates these erased histories, centering his work on the politics of invisible labor. His dramatization of absence seems to offer an alternative mode of remembrance: a reimagining of labor as something shaped by its own erasure—by the traces, omissions, and exclusions that structure our understanding of work. In doing so, he exposes the unseen forces that sustain economies and challenges dominant narratives in the United States

2. Brian Seibert, “Can a Dance Class Free Men’s Bodies in a Place Meant to Contain Them?” New York Times, June 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes. com/2023/06/07/arts/dance/ dance-class-california-prisons.html. Hande Sever

that celebrate industrial progress while concealing the racialized labor that made it possible.

Through a practice rooted in reclamation, choi transforms salvaged materials—antique railroad spikes, discarded fabric from garment factories across Los Angeles, and remnants from his own labor as an arts fabricator—into sculptural assemblages that speak to labor’s imprint on memory, time, and space. The exhibition’s central series of work, which was displayed in the main gallery and is similarly titled Before the Last Spike (2023–2024), stitches together scrap fabrics imprinted with the oxidized marks of antique railway spikes into messy patchworks united by the layer of rust that covers them. Two of the four textile-based sculptural assemblages in the show were controlled by an Arduino (an open source software for creating simple electronic systems) system of moving metal armatures that causes the fabric to shake and flow in randomized sequences. In the gallery, this motion captured the viewer’s attention without immediately revealing the source of the movement, as if an imperceptible wind was lending the textile works life. With their subtle, almost melancholic motions marked by the impressions of the spikes, these textile works— halfway between flags and sails—seem to serve as silent witnesses to the histories they invoke, linking the history of the railroad with that of garment manufacturing, another industry invisibly upheld by immigrant labor. By evoking these industries through traces of labor made

invisible, choi resists the nationalist mythologies that have long erased the role of immigrant labor in shaping infrastructure and production in the U.S.

Another series featured in the exhibition, We Return (2022–24), consists of wooden masks crafted from scraps left over from choi’s work as a professional woodworker and arts fabricator. Inspired by traditional Korean Talchum masks used in folk dancedramas, these sculptures recall historical trickster figures who, through satirical public performances, critiqued social hierarchies, offering a subversive commentary on class, labor, and erasure. Traditionally animated through dance and storytelling, the masks here were mounted on the wall, stripped of their performative function, and instead held a ghostly presence. Some of the masks incorporate as decoration incense made from sawdust collected in choi’s studio. The incense awaits ignition, symbolically mirroring the catharsis that masked performances once provided to their audiences. Two masks in the series, Saja (June) (2024) and Bibi (April) (2024), reference South Korea’s long history of protest movements, pointing to the April Revolution of 1960 and the June Uprising of 1987 through their titles. Unlike the others, these masks feature large, irregular holes across their faces, alluding to the bodily harm inflicted by police forces during these uprisings. Together, the works in Before the Last Spike weave a network of entangled narratives, embodying both the resilience and disposability of the laboring body within

a capitalized world. We Return was installed adjacent to Town Square (2021), which extended choi’s exploration of material agency and labor histories. For this sculptural work, choi assembled small wooden fragments from his carpentry work into a composition that reclaimed the value of these discarded materials. Rather than treating these offcuts as mere waste, choi allows them to dictate the structure of the piece upon each installation, emphasizing the inherent agency of the objects through their shapes, textures, and histories. The result was a free-form assemblage that wove through the space, its formal logic dictated by the materials themselves. Integral to Town Square are incense elements crafted from hazardous sawdust, inviting an olfactory engagement with the work, the pungent woody smell lending a sense of gravity to the otherwise playful tone of the sculpture. This material choice compels viewers to consider the overlooked risks embedded in everyday labor. Sawdust, produced through sanding, cutting, and other woodworking processes, poses serious health hazards when inhaled over time, yet its dangers often remain unacknowledged. By transforming this hazardous byproduct into incense —a material traditionally associated with ritual, reflection, and purification— choi subverts its usual connotations, urging viewers to confront the bodily costs of physical labor and the broader structures that render such risks invisible. By transforming industrial debris and discarded materials into objects of resistance, choi

jinseok choi, Before the Last Spike 2 (2023). Fabric scraps rust-dyed with railway spikes, 87 × 128 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery.

Photo: jinseok choi.

not only restores the visibility of forgotten histories but also prompts reconsideration of the ethics of labor, material consumption, and historical amnesia. Through its material and conceptual inquiries, Before the Last Spike operates as an act of remembering, an insistence on visibility, exposing how U.S. identity is constructed through cycles of extraction and erasure. The work ultimately urges a reckoning with the histories that underpin U.S. industry and expansion at the expense of marginalized labor.

1. Andrew J. Russell, East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail, May 10, 1869, collodion glass negative, 10 × 13 in., Oakland Museum of California, http:// purl.stanford.edu/hx407zx8552.

Sasha Fishman at Murmurs

November 22, 2024–February 23, 2025

The abject can be slippery. Theorist Julia Kristeva writes about how it threatens the unity and coherency of identity and systems of social order by disrupting boundaries.1 Throughout the history of visual culture, artists have turned to the abject to investigate the mechanism of desire, an evasive psychical force that delights and unsettles. Sasha Fishman’s practice belongs to this genealogy. Fishman is a New York-based sculptor and researcher whose practice is informed by an interest in bioplastics and other alternative and natural materials. For Resurrectura, her recent solo show at Murmurs (and her first solo show in L.A.), Fishman focused this sense of abject desire on salmon fish,

taking her viewers to the limits of identification with (and violence towards) the non-human other. Made in collaboration with bioscience labs and fisheries, the exhibition confronted how the intimate integration of salmon into modern consumers’ lives is built upon sympathetic exploitation. Fishman’s confrontation with salmon feels, in turn, sensual, violent, clinical, and caring, as we watch her wade into the sticky, wet, and muddy zone of forming an interspecies relationship with the abject other.

I want to be wet (2024) is a monumental and sprawling installation about Fishman’s multivalent desire for and identification with salmon in a classic case of the abject, as the artist finds herself both fascinated and repulsed by salmon farming. The body of the installation is a spindly Douglas fir sculpture that alternately resembles a fish ladder, a crown, or a throne. The structure is sticky and shiny from a surface treatment of shellac, collagen, beer, glycerin, egg yolk, and marshmallow. Preserved salmon skin fragments in the shape of shells have been inserted in the fir sculpture, retaining verisimilitude, as if newly cut from freshly-skinned fish.

Seven video monitors are attached to the sculpture, playing four-channel videos of footage collected from a range of sources: the Salmon River Fish Hatchery in Altmar, NY, which works to conserve the salmon population and stock local rivers, and a trip the artist took to Sarasota, Florida. There are images of maritime tourism from a cruise ship in Alaska where the artist

saw preserved salmon skin for the first time, scientific laboratory research, salmon processing, and the artist sensuously dressing herself in salmon skin on the beach. The camera zooms in and out, far and near, suggesting a diaristic intimacy and casualness. Yet the editing is mechanical and efficient, the color correction clinical. The narrative—part nighttime surveillance tape, part instructional video, part documentary, and part gory snuff—has an emotional intensity that revels in the dynamics of consumption and dependence. In one scene, the artist, halfnaked and covered in salmon skin, goes into the water to swim, her gestures obscured by the darkness and made all the more erotic by the lingering camera. This cuts to a bloody scene depicting the dissection of salmon fish for a clearing and staining process to make the fish transparent. Another shot matter-of-factly documents a dead fish being doused in a chemical perseverant. In the end, viewers find themselves seduced by the confusion of boundaries between self and other, desire and repulsion, intimacy and violence, as Fishman offers an intimate view into the moral ambiguity of interacting with our animal others.

A few wall-based works served as appendix to the artist’s fascination with the abject. Water cap (2024), an inkjet print mounted in a sculptural copper frame, presents an image Fishman took in her studio of a salmon skin lying flat on a tabletop, presumably raw material to be processed later for an envisioned work. Preserved

Qingyuan Deng

Bottom: Sasha Fishman, Resurrectura (installation view) (2024-25).

Image courtesy of the artist and Murmurs.

Photo: Joshua Schaedel.

Top: Sasha Fishman, I’m hypersensitive to blue and New tits (installation view) (both 2023).

Image courtesy of the artist and Murmurs.

Photo: Joshua Schaedel.

salmon eggs are scattered across the surface of the framed print, playing with dimensionality and materiality. Another inkjet print, My seams (2024), is an extreme close-up image of wet salmon skin sensualized by the addition of real salmon skin and sticky fish glue that has been poured into a viscous mess on the sides of the photographic print. These pieces both seduce and obfuscate, reminding us that we can anxiously find the subjugated desirous. Elsewhere in the gallery sat If you trap me in resin will I ever dry out (2023), a ceramic chamber that looks like a dilapidated well on the exterior and an intestinal tract on the interior. A resin-covered, chemically preserved salmon rests on the inside, inviting touch, while salmon eggs sit next to it, suggesting impossible signs of life. Through seductive works that showcase both harm and repair alongside a sensual blending of materialities and ecologies, Fishman guides her viewers into the maze of desire that is her multispecies fantasy. Yet, our attempts to fully identify with Fishman’s sculptures often short-circuit into confusion: As we are reminded of the violence it takes to sustain our consumption of salmon, our feeling of sensual desire becomes distant. These powerful, raw emotions sharing space in Fishman’s work elicits shame and guilt, which only reify the visceral intensity of the abject desires she explores.

Charlie Engelman at Château Shatto

February 18–

March 29

Salvaged old-growth redwood and high-density polyurethane foam might seem an odd pairing anywhere but here in California, where redwoods grow centuries old and foam serves, variously and ubiquitously, as the stuff of film props, furniture, surfboards, and fuselage. Together, the two materials bring to mind the often fraught interplay between California’s natural and built environment—that is, between the landscape that hosts the culture and the culture that is in turn imposed on the landscape.

In Pith, which closed at Château Shatto in March, the artist Charlie Engelman shaped beguiling, bemusing forms out of both materials, stretching their associative and physical implications to draw out not only their California-centric associations, but also their broader expressive and tactile possibilities. By using polymer to abstract familiar motifs into alluring yet uncanny forms while shaping redwood into playful tributes to modernist sculptural tradition, Engelman crafts a sculptural vernacular that ultimately speak to timeless questions of how a sculpture’s regional context, material, process, form, and influence mutually shape each other.

Engelman’s foam sculptures made up the bulk of Pith, and the sculptor’s explorations of the infinitely versatile material cohered

into a vocabulary of round edges, pastel surfaces, and alluring yet uncanny forms that flirt, by turns, with familiar visual motifs from across California’s landscape. Capsule and Remainder (all works 2025) recall blushcolored manzanita buds, and their half-revealed interiors, ridged and furrowed as a canyon’s walls or a human esophagus, contrast with their rubber-smooth exteriors. Elsewhere, the gentle curves of Caregivers, Marquee, and Bijou Backrest, each hewn from polymer and painted white, pink, and forest green, respectively, resemble justbarely abstracted elements of Art Deco architectural ornamentation. They might have been lopped off a building facade in downtown L.A., were it not for the almost-eerie gloss of their surfaces. In Caregivers, two curvy shapes, mirror images of each other, sit together on a plinth, their poreless surfaces painted with creamcolored acrylic, their sides touching to make a unified whole—the forms here too wink at an Art Deco cornice but remain ultimately unplaceable.

The other polymer forms in Pith proved even more slippery, their possible referents warped and stretched into a distinct formal lexicon. In Traveler (dusk), a blue frame contains a Millennial-pink undulate tendril, a layer of flocking velveting its surface, its form falling somewhere between a human tongue, a vibrator, and a succulent plant leaf. Heart talk is similarly confounding; tied together with a dangling black neoprene cord, a bundle of pale, round-edged urethane

Ashlyn Ashbaugh

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Charlie Engelman, Drip trip (2025). High-density urethane foam, acrylic paint, pine dowels, epoxy, stainless steel hardware, neoprene cord of variable length, 20.5 × 31.75 × 4.5 inches.

Image courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto.

Photo: Ed Mumford.

foam tubes rest on a bloodcolored, cylindrical plinth. Coated with acrylic paints in Googie pastels, the smooth, seductive surfaces of these works reminded me of the 1960s California Light and Space artists—who, like Engelman, shaped industrial materials into minimalist forms with hyper-sleek, polished finishes. But while many of the sculptures the Light and Space movement produced functioned as (sometimes literal) prisms through which the viewer’s perceptions were dispersed and refracted, Engelman’s dense foam and flocking conjures the enticing haptics of retail displays. Instead of melting into their environment, these objects call out for attention, even touch. The endless plasticity of foam makes these glancing, associative links possible, as each of Engelman’s forms seems to absorb myriad possible references, then scramble and remix them. While Pith’s polymer works seem to sublimate their own references, both eliciting and subverting Californian architectures, industries, landscapes, and art histories, Engelman’s redwood sculptures employ the specific qualities of his material to address traditions of modernist sculpture more broadly. What can a Californian redwood articulate about the perpetual interchange between sculpture as material, object, and process? Pith heart sap (for Auguste Rodin) and Sap heart pith (for John Lee) are, at first glance, the show’s most straightforwardly representational pieces. In each, a gleaming, solid lump of redwood sits atop a redwood

remaking of a nineteenthcentury sculpture stand like those Auguste Rodin used as he shaped lumps of clay. Yet here, the stand is part of the sculpture, not apart from it, both carved from the same material: the sculptural object merges with its own process of being made.

Veined and ringed with centuries of accumulated growth, the carved redwood evokes, as the sculpture does, the physical unfolding of itself. As redwoods index passing time in outgrowing layered rings, Engelman’s sculpture grows out and envelops its own art historical references. Here, the iconic California material prompts a consideration of what the artist William Tucker in his seminal book The Language of Sculpture calls the art form’s “concreteness both as object and as process.”1 In fact, looking at Pith heart sap, I thought of that book’s epigraph, from the poet Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is the subject of the poem, /From this the poem issues and/To this returns.”2

Substitute “sculpture” for “poetry” and “poem,” and the lines would resonate throughout Pith, where Engelman’s forms both acknowledge and subsume their own materials and art historical influences, reshaping them into a distinct and distinctly Californian idiom of forms. If every sculptor reckons with the possibilities and limits of their materials, techniques, and influences, then Pith is at its core a show about the discipline of sculpture as a medium itself, wherein one artist’s practice becomes a means of transforming

a Californian artistic inheritance, absorbing and remixing existing motifs into a reimagined vernacular of redwood and foam.

1. William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 10. 2. Ibid.

Photo Essay Contributor and Featured Artists

Monica Orozco is an L.A.-based fine art photographer who thrives on capturing the beautifully messy, raw, and brilliant sides of artists. Through portrait, documentary, and self-portrait work, she explores the complexity of human experience. Her work has traveled the world, graced many pages, adorned gallery walls, and ignited conversations about identity, creativity, and the artistic journey. www.demonicaphoto.com

Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar born in El Salvador and based in Los Angeles and Davis, CA. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including the 60th Venice Biennale and the 14th Shanghai Biennial. Her work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Getty Research Institute; Michigan State University Broad Art Museum; El Paso Museum of Art; and Ford Foundation, among others. She teaches sculpture and critical theory at UC Davis.

Kari Reardon is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed her MFA in 2012 at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Since 2016 she has been an active member of the artist-run exhibition space Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Kari, also an educator, teaches a wide range of sculpture courses at California State University, Northridge. A recipient of numerous grants, residencies, and fellowships, she has shown her works throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Margaret Griffith (b. 1972, Winston-Salem, NC) is a visual artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Sculpture and her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art in Painting. Griffith has shown at several institutions and galleries, nationally and internationally. She is the 2023–24 recipient of the Los Angeles DCA Trailblazer Award and the 2017 recipient of the Davyd Whaley Mid-Artist Career Grant. Griffith is currently represented by CMAY Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and BCMT Art Gallery, Kingston, NY.

Jamison Carter (b. 1973, Winston-Salem, NC) received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Carter’s work has been exhibited in art fairs and solo, and group exhibitions at galleries and public institutions across California and internationally. His work was featured in the exhibition We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles with Bardo LA as a collateral exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. He currently teaches sculpture and 3D design at Los Angeles Valley College.

Review Contributors

Zoey Greenwald is a writer and editor based between Los Angeles and New York. She is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts and the nightlife editor of On the Rag

Steven Vargas is a multimedia journalist, dancer, and actor based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on the intersections of media, social justice, and performance. He’s a former arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times and has also written for publications like Alta Journal, E! News, USA Today, TheWrap, Dance Magazine, and ARTnews

Hande Sever is a Los Angeles–based artist and writer from Istanbul. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Getty Research Journal, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, frieze, MARCH: A Journal of Art and Strategy, Public Art Dialogue, Stedelijk Studies, X-TRA, and in Perspectives on In/stability (Art Institute of Chicago, 2022). Sever is a recipient of the 2024 Art Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Qingyuan Deng is a writer, curator, and translator based between New York and Shanghai.

Ashlyn Ashbaugh (she/her) is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Jeffrey Gibson, Treat Me Right, 2024. Glass beads, nylon fringe, tin jingles, vintage pinback buttons, metal bells, plastic bone pipe beads, cold-rolled mild steel, nylon thread, acrylic felt, steel plate, marble base.

Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, NY. Photo by Jeffrey Schenck Exhibition title: ©Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017), courtesy of Graywolf Press

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Image: Assemblage with Front Line of Freedom San Francisco: Queer as a Three Dollar Bill, ca. 1981, Ken Wood; Self-Portrait, ca.1900s–1910s, Elisar von Kupﬀer, “Elisarion”; and Pur·suit (detail), 2019, Naima Green, © Naima Green. Collection objects from Getty Research Institute. Text, design, and photo: © 2025

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