No Artists Are Outsiders at ‘Made in L.A.’ Biennial

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This year's edition of the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. Biennial takes its title from a statement by Los Angeles artist Noah Purifoy: 'One does not have to be a visual artist to utilise creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.'

Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez spoke to the city's communities of support and works including a silicone salmon suit and an angel made of scrapped wooden architectural features.

How did you become involved in the show, and what were you hoping to achieve with it?

DN: I went to UCLA for my undergraduate degree and majored in fine arts—it's where I began my career in the arts, but more importantly, where I came to understand what it is to be part of a creative community. Ever since I moved back to L.A. in 2017, curating Made in L.A. was something I really wanted to do.

I think we were hoping to create an exhibition that speaks for itself, that is legible to and resonant for different people. It's also important that in some way it reflects the temperature or urgencies of what's happening in the city's arts communities, so we wanted to be attuned to the conversations that are taking place here and reflect that in the selection of artists and the exhibition itself.

PJR: I was living in Berlin back then (2022) while working as the Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. I got a call from Connie Butler, who invited me on a short trip to L.A. to visit the city and chat. When visiting the Hammer and learning more about LA´s thriving art scene, I understood why Made in L.A. was such a big deal.

Los Angeles has an exciting art scene, but it's not usually thought of as America's capital of contemporary art, historically, or commercially. What are some of the exciting ways artists in L.A. are situating themselves that don't foreground the usual art history canon or commercial tastes?

PJR: L.A. is a porous and polyvalent city breathing at different rhythms. So many artistic communities here are in connection and constant communication. It is a city of antagonisms, diasporic and Indigenous histories, where multiple temporalities collide. It is also a place that, despite its magnitude and daily odds, is generous and fertile for new things.

The diasporic, Brown and Black histories of this city have been pushing the canon of Western art history for decades by working from the very edges of art and life. The vernacular, the popular culture, Latinx communities, the weight of two juxtaposed colonial histories and a constant flux of people have made LA neither center nor periphery, but a gravitational creative space that disrupts categorical delimitations.

DN: L.A. is and has been distinguished by being very much an artist's city. It's uniquely able to support artists and has for many decades now been a hub for creative practice (in part because it was affordable compared to places like New York, something I'm afraid is not the case anymore). While there is a robust gallery scene here now, many artists still function outside of that and find ways to support themselves and one another.

Within Made in L.A. for instance, there is a section of the show dedicated to people who have strong performance practices who also make objects. This includes Marcel Alcalá, Young Joon Kwak, and Page Person who perform in arts spaces and other venues including clubs (or in Alcalá's case at one point McDonald's), or someone like Jibz Cameron, who hosts a monthly night of performances at Zebulon called Weirdo Night. These are folks who have created and found contexts to support their practices and communities. It isn't easy but there is still a spirit that allows people to build and take things on themselves rather than rely on institutions, galleries, or other systems exclusively.

Additionally, I think the presence of so many strong MFA and BFA programs in the region constantly brings incredible people to the city. While some important artists in the exhibition have come up entirely outside this system, so many artists in the exhibition have emerged from a breadth of schools in the area—it's a testament to the overall strength of the arts education system here.

Likewise, many of the artists in the show teach, at all different levels. For instance Michael Alvarez, Victor Estrada, and Teresa Tolliver have each spoken about the importance of their roles as educators, and I think that's also something unique to L.A. that helps to foster exchange and dialogue across the city.

Can you speak to some of the unique art scenes and communities in L.A.?

PJR: I think a biennale like Made in L.A. brings the opportunity to break with such binaries (local, international, global).

DN: There's a strong ecosystem here that creates communities of support and opportunity for artists working in a lot of different ways—for instance, the incredible ceramic arts program at California State University Long Beach, that someone like Christopher Suarez graduated from and continues to work with; or the kind of support galleries like Sow & Tailor Gallery provide to emerging artists, so while they represent Tidawhitney Lek, a number of other artists in the exhibition have shown with them in a way that represents the organic communities and networks that occur in the city; or the opportunities non-profits like LACE and LAND create for artists having realised major projects with Jackie Amézquita and Maria Maea.

I have to ask about a couple of specific works. Miller Robinson's silicone and latex salmon suit is so stunning! How do you situate their work?

PJR: Robinson's work comes from the collision of queer sensibilities and indigenous Karuk/Yurok cosmologies. It is also part of what I believe is a significant movement of younger Indigenous artists pushing the boundaries of performance art vis-a-vis a sort of agency of the objects. For Robinson, these objects have a life, an ontology, that speaks to them (Robinson) as much as they talk to the audience that experiences the installation.

They will be moving and interacting with the objects during the exhibition, considering each of these objects' inhabitants of the space. The salmon skin is a stunning work that performs as skin and as clothing. Skin is the metaphor of something that somehow covers, protects and normalises identitarian determinisms. By taking away this skin, using it and changing it, Robinson creates a powerful metaphor for mutation and change.

DN: I would situate Robinson's work within a longer L.A. history of object-based performance or new genres work that allows for a really expansive approach to materials and medium, and to art-making in general. They are one of many artists in the show for whom objects directly relate to the body and to both daily activity and more performance-based undertakings. I would also say that Robinson is part of a strong group of Indigenous artists working in L.A. that are gaining increasing attention.

Another work that really caught my eye is an angel whose wings appear to be made of reclaimed wooden bannisters by Chiffon Thomas. How does it function in the show?

DN: Thomas' contributions to the exhibition are the angel form made from scavenged architectural elements and a newer work which is a more abstracted human form suspended from a lift. Thomas' deep attention to materiality and making felt resonant with so many other practices included in the exhibition.

His practice is emblematic of a few important strands in the show: one of which is the presence of the body, often in a transitioning or disassembled form, and one of which is the legacy of assemblage, which has an important history in L.A. and is being picked up and interpreted in many different ways by younger artists. —[O]

Main image: Roksana Pirouzmand, Until All Is Dissolved (2023). Ceramic. 61 x 121.9 x 213.4 cm. Courtesy the artist. Exhibition view: Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1 October–31 December 2023). Photo: Ashley Kruythoff.