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Carla, a Timeline in 10 Years
June 19, 2025
Text by Aaron Boehmer, Aaron Horst, Allison Noelle Conner, Catherine G. Wagley, Evan Nicole Brown, Jessica Simmons-Reid, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Matt Stromberg, MJ Brown, and Trulee Hall
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.
2015: Aaron Horst
The Art + Practice campus from Leimert Boulevard in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. June 16, 2015. Photo: Natalie Hon.
Carla article: Layers of Leimert Park, Catherine G. Wagley (Carla, issue 2)
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
Penny Slinger, The First Slice (1973). Photo collage in card vignette. Image courtesy of the artist.
Carla article: Interview with Penny Slinger, Eliza Swann (Carla, issue 8)
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.
2017: Matt Stromberg
Virginia Dwan at the exhibition Language III, Dwan Gallery, New York (1969). Image courtesy of Dwan Gallery Archive. Photo: Roger Prigent.
Carla article: She Wanted Adventure: Dwan, Butler, Mizuno, Copley, Catherine G. Wagley (Carla, issue 10)
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 counter- parts 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 white-on-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.”
2018: Lindsay Preston Zappas
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.
Carla article: Interior States of the Art, Travis Diehl (Carla, issue 12)
“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.
2019: Jessica Simmons-Reid
Honey Lee Cottrell. Image courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Carla article: Putting Aesthetics to Hope, Catherine G. Wagley (Carla, issue 18)
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.
2020: Trulee Hall
Juliana Huxtable, Ari 1 (2019). Inkjet mounted on Dibond, 45 × 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art.
Carla article: The Glitch Strikes Back: Legacy Russell’s Feminist Manifesto, Allison Noelle Conner (Carla, issue 22)
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 cyber-space 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 wide-spread racial injustice, and U.S. political divisions were amplified.
2021: MJ Brown
Patrick Martinez, Color Allowed (2020). Neon on plexiglass, 32 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery.
Carla Podcast: Interview with Patrick Martinez (Carla, episode 29)
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.
2022: Allison Noelle Conner
Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation (rehearsal documentation) (detail) (1984). Color print, 3.5 × 5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Carla article: From Both Sides of the Lens: Ulysses Jenkins’ Self Reflexive Video Practice, Neyat Yohannes (Carla, issue 29)
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.
2023: Evan Nicole Brown
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 article: Tuning In and Dropping Out: Spiritual Frontiers in Recent Art and Curation, Isabella Miller (Carla, issue 34)
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.
2024: Aaron Boehmer
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.
Carla article: The Connective Role of Art in UCLA’s Pro-Palestine Encampment, Aidann Gruwell, Alex Bushnell, Alex Yang, Katherin Sanchez, and Ricky Shi (Carla, issue 37)
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.
