It has been fairly a yr for Los Angeles in some profoundly unsettling methods. The Hammer Museum’s director, Zoë Ryan, acknowledged this throughout her introduction on the preview of the seventh version of the museum’s Made in LA biennial exhibition (till 1 March 2026).
“This has been an especially difficult yr for Angelenos, beginning, clearly, with the devastating fires in January and adopted by [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice] raids, which started within the spring and proceed to at the present time,” she stated on the occasion in October. “We now have additionally seen chilling rhetoric and federal actions concentrating on variety and inclusion insurance policies and even museum shows of historic narratives and objects.”
Later that month, Los Angeles County declared a state of emergency with the intention to assist these impacted by the Ice raids.
Whereas most of the 28 artists collaborating in Made in LA 2025 have been chosen final yr, a number of the work on show is model new. The lead curators, Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, informed artists that they may present any work they wished, and a few have been nonetheless making their contributions as much as the final minute.
Set up view of Alonzo Davis’s Eye on ’84 (1984/2025) at Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Picture: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
“We had no themes or thematics that we have been seeking to populate,” Pobocha stated on the preview. “As a substitute, what we wished to do was go to as many studios as we presumably may, see as a lot artwork as we have been in a position and have as many conversations as time would permit.” That’s, inside the broad parameters of artists at present working in or with robust connections to the Los Angeles space.
The curators managed to go to greater than 200 artists’ studios, steered by what that they had seen earlier than in addition to by suggestions from different curators, artists and gallerists. Requested to articulate their choice standards, they informed The Artwork Newspaper that they have been a bit stumped. Whereas they didn’t search for particular issues, they discovered numerous connections.
“I might describe them as threads that weave out and in of individuals greater than a thematic flip,” Harden stated. “However there are individuals who actually cope with historical past as a social pressure. There are additionally numerous of us who’re contending with the materiality of making.”
Set up view of Patrick Martinez’s Battle of the Metropolis on Fireplace (2025) Picture: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
Harden and Pobocha simply agreed on the ultimate choice, together with painters and sculptors in addition to video and efficiency artists. A number of items within the present clearly communicate to the current, considerably fraught, second.
The set up within the Hammer’s foyer house kicks issues off in a buoyant temper. Painted in opposition to a deep-blue background are reproductions of three murals that Alonzo Davis made for the 1984 Summer season Olympic Video games in Los Angeles; they as soon as lined the Harbor Freeway within the downtown space. The colorful panels of Eye on ’84 (1984) are brimming with hearts, eyes and Olympic rings. They’re a glance again at a extra optimistic time, when town hosted its second Olympics—its first Video games have been in 1932—and function a reminder of town’s fast-approaching third Olympics, in 2028.
Extra foreboding however no much less vibrant is a neon signal hung close to the ceiling as guests enter one of many foremost galleries—it reads: “Agua Is Life; NO ICE”. It’s the work of the Pasadena-born artist Patrick Martinez, who additionally has a big set up alongside an exterior hall. Battle of the Metropolis on Fireplace (2025) is a partly collapsed cinder-block wall painted with graffiti. “I’m at all times interested by the folks and power that form Los Angeles’s totally different surfaces after I drive or experience my bike,” Martinez says of the piece.
Set up view of Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) Picture: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the artist and ILY2, Portland/New York
Impressed by each graffiti and historic murals, Martinez’s work remembers the previous with its stylised Mayan figures whereas hot-pink splashes of color recommend the blaze of the latest fires. “Los Angeles, proper?” says the native Angeleno. “I am making an attempt to seize the issues which can be occurring this yr, which have been actually loopy—the fires have been the worst that I’ve seen in all my life. Then the Ice raids and kidnappings. It is all of the issues that I used to be interested by after I was making the work.”
The central part of his set up is dominated by the anguished face of a Mayan warrior. He’s painted within the type of the battle mural from the traditional website of Cacaxtla in Mexico, his distinct profile framed by the pink sky.
Humour can loosen up the grim current, and Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) has humour—and cultural mashups—in spades. Right here, she has made 4 variations of her father’s door at his memory-care facility at twice their precise measurement, every embellished in a riotous array of vacation and consumer-culture trinkets. The doorways lean in opposition to a wall, positioned aspect by aspect, dwarfing the viewer with their pop-culture pastiche. On one, there are the phrases “Blissful New Yr” overlaid with a Halloween skeleton and, beneath that, a black spiderweb. Depictions of get together balloons are scattered all through.
Set up view of sculptures by Pat O’Neill at Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Picture: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
Ross-Ho says the work displays her interested by “deep time”, by which she means “contemplating time as one thing that’s layered and lengthy”. For the previous 5 years, she has been a long-distance caretaker for each her father and her aunt, who lived in the identical Chicago facility. Her aunt died earlier this yr. “There’s an urgency to take inventory or take into consideration the accounting of a lifetime, or the accounting of a profession,” Ross-Ho says.
As at all times, a couple of veteran artists are additionally a part of Made in LA. This yr, they embrace Pat O’Neill and Bruce Yonemoto. O’Neill is thought for his early experimental movies, and right here he’s represented by a sequence of black-and-white pictures taken round Los Angeles and 4 sculptures—three on the ground and one on a platform. The latter are shocking, in that few folks have seen them earlier than; they’re among the many extra participating works within the present.
Yonemoto, a pioneering video artist, has two works in Made in LA. The newer one is Damaged Fences (2025), a video seen by way of slats of a tough picket fence. It options classic propaganda movies from the Second World Conflict, with scenes of incarcerated Japanese People and from a Nazi focus camp, each making an attempt to seem “regular”. Whereas Yonemoto was born after the battle ended, his work acknowledges the time his mother and father spent at a camp in Northern California, in addition to how movie can so simply distort actuality.
Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, till 1 March 2026
