Curating Around Social Urgencies: How Artists Refuse Quietism

John Knight, Quiet Quality (installation view) (1974). Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Jeff McLane. 

In 1983, as Los Angeles prepared to “sanitize the city”¹ ahead of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, Alonzo Davis, artist and co-founder of Leimert Park’s Brockman Gallery, was appointed director of the Olympic Mural Project by Olympic Arts Festival director Robert Fitzpatrick. Davis oversaw ten freeway-scale commissions along major corridors. His own contribution to the project, Eye on ’84, was a triptych (now lost) that absorbed and reworked the Olympic rings through Blankets, his series of layered fabrics and textures, which he began in 1980.² Davis approached the commission pragmatically. Recognizing that Olympic funds would be funneled into art regardless, he sought to redirect those resources often toward Black and Latino artists who might otherwise be excluded, and toward muralism as a medium rooted in Los Angeles’s grassroots visual culture. Further, he believed murals could offer Angelenos a visual “break” to outlast the Games.³ Yet the project also belonged to a broader Olympic apparatus that deployed art as a means to uplift while masking intensifying displacement campaigns around the city.

Four decades later, as Los Angeles readies itself for the 2028 Olympics, the Hammer’s Made in L.A. 2025 opens with a recreation of Eye on ’84. The 3B Collective, a group of Indigenous, Chicano, and Mexican artists and educators, re-executed Davis’s mural at the Hammer. Its floating hearts and arrows (incorporated as a symbolic language gesturing toward celebration) remain vivid, but the exhibition presents the piece as a neutral welcome rather than a politically entangled artifact of redevelopment. In doing so, the curators sidestep the work’s historical conditions—the contradictions of civic uplift—which now echo uncomfortably in the city’s current Olympic cycle. The mural’s repainted blues sharpen the contrast between past and present: Removed from its original context, what once weathered public struggle becomes bright interior decor. The recreation could have served as a hinge between eras; instead, the show lets those threads drift.

This example reveals a central tension of Made in L.A. 2025: While many of the artists included confront pressing socio-political ideas in their work, the show’s framing sidelines the context of the political pressures with which they engage. A vitrine next to the Davis mural includes color photos of the original Olympic murals, both Davis’s and others, but offers little interpretive context. The absence of background on the work—its ties to Olympic-era clearance—and the diminished visibility of the muralists who revived it for this exhibition show how the curators’ strategy of “no ideas” might also flatten meaning. What disappears, then, is not only memory of past precedents, but also the recognition of present conditions that they map onto; what remains is a willingness to gesture toward urgency without naming sources. To assert “no ideas” amid genocide, wide-scale censorship, and state violence is to mistake neutrality for care. In a city reshaped by policing and housing precarity, this evasiveness feels untenable, an unexplored opportunity to engage with what it means to live in Los Angeles now. And yet, within this cautious frame, certain artists still refuse quietism.

Alake Shilling’s giant inflatable Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. (2025), to my eye, nods to the confrontational stance of a union rat, though there is no didactic material connecting the Bear to L.A.’s long history of union struggle, or ongoing museum workers’ efforts to unionize.⁴ Patrick Martinez’s fallen mural raises the spectre of ICE, though the wall text makes reference only vaguely to undefined “social, economic, and political realities.” Ali Eyal’s painting, by contrast, is accompanied by text that directly names the geopolitics of U.S. intervention in Iraq, framing the work within post-9/11 imperial aftermaths. The difference suggests the exhibition sooner addresses political violence when the locus is elsewhere. By comparison, works engaging Los Angeles’s own regimes of urban renewal are left to speak for themselves and rendered diffuse rather than situated.

John Knight’s Quiet Quality (1974), starkly installed in its own gallery, pairs a folded electric blanket with a real estate ad promising a racially-coded “quiet” suburban escape. The juxtaposition exposes how comfort is marketed to some while others are structurally excluded. Made in the mid-1970s, Knight’s piece—like the Davis mural—feels unsettlingly current: The conditions it invokes have only intensified. Yet unlike Davis’s work, which depends on historical framing to register its political contradictions, Quiet Quality manifests through its literalism. The electric blanket is not a metaphor but an object of survival; the real estate ad does not allude to exclusion but names it directly. And yet, Knight’s refusal of interpretive text (observed here and in the exhibition catalogue) means the clarity isn’t a guarantee. The blanket’s scale, original purpose, and latent warmth summon Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis, making tangible the dyad of care and scarcity, but the absence of curatorial framing underscores how easily even the most pointed work can be absorbed into the exhibition’s broader atmosphere of restraint.

The works that resonate most sharply across the biennial are those pressing against the show’s evasive framing, embedding their social commentary more overtly into the objects themselves. Gabriela Ruiz’s Collective Scream (2025) presents viewers with disembodied painted faces—contorted and suspended against a saturated field—so that standing before it feels like being pulled into a chorus of unresolved emotion. An LED floodlight and surveillance camera disrupt this immersion, shifting the dynamic between viewer and painting: The work films us as we look at (or film) it, the live feed of museum-goers appearing on monitors embedded in the artwork. The color red triggers a small gate that occasionally closes over one embedded video feed, temporarily exhibiting a behavioral change—an action that mimics the arbitrary thresholds governing who is seen, blocked, or flagged in monitored spaces. Whether through cameras or gates, Ruiz makes it impossible to imagine oneself outside the systems that watch. In a city where surveillance shapes how certain bodies move through public space, Collective Scream renders those conditions unmistakable.

Kelly Wall threads a similarly interactive needle. Her matte-black Fade to Black (2025), a wishing-well sculpture made of metal pegboard, steel, and fake rocks, pairs with Wistful Thinking (2025), a penny-press installed across the Hammer’s terrace. Visitors press and toss flattened coins into the water. The devalued penny (now no longer minted currency) becomes an emblem of desire, loss, and a thinning social contract. Wall reveals the friction between symbolic value and economic precarity, showing how even the smallest denomination carries social charge.

Ultimately, the works that linger in the mind are those refusing to let Los Angeles remain an unnamed backdrop by collapsing the distance between form and lived condition. This is not about political virtue, but instead what curatorial framing, or a lack thereof, can activate or dampen. Several socially attuned works—including those by Davis and Knight, but also Freddy Villalobos’s mapping of Black death and urban memory, Na Mira’s projection on glass addressing militarized space in South Korea, and Bruce Yonemoto’s reworking of U.S. war propaganda and Nazi-era footage—are charged, yet are left to carry their discursive weight largely on their own within the exhibition’s minimal framing. Some of these artists embed their social frameworks into the material and address of the work itself, making them harder to neutralize.

In contrast, works in the exhibition that are more engaged with aesthetic and formal considerations felt more at home within the non-descript framing. Peter Tomka’s slightly blurry black-and-white photographs (drying dishes, chest hair, a painting of trees engulfing a building) quietly frame private moments; Hanna Hur’s monochrome paintings highlight surface and texture; and Brian Rochefort’s off-kilter ceramics delve into textural experimentation. The contrast of conceptual and aesthetic focus across the show is perhaps to be expected in a biennial, yet it is one that could have been better shaped by intentional curatorial choices. Instead, broadly speaking, we are left to piece together histories, meanings, and contexts, pulling out how the works speak to the lived reality of L.A. for ourselves.

Gabriela Ruiz, Collective Scream (2025). Acrylic, gouache, pastel, colored pencil, acrylic pens, epoxy clay, metal hooks, metal pipes, metal hardware, LCD monitors, TV monitor, roll-up gate, LED streetlamp, and surveillance camera on wood panel. 72 × 72 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Photo: Sarah Golonka.

Liz Hirsch is an art historian based in Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art/Media Studies at Otis College. Her work spans modernism to the present, with particular interest in experimental forms, collaborative networks, and the social and political conditions that shape artistic production and reception. She is also the co-founder of 839, a contemporary art gallery in Hollywood.

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