Made in L.A. 2023: Formulas for Doing the Right Thing

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Christopher Suarez, PCH & Cherry at 7 p.m. (detail) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Photo: Joshua Solis.

The title of the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition, Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, comes from a quote by Noah Purifoy. According to the assemblage artist, who was also a Los Angeles social worker and the co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center, “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.”¹ Using this maxim as a jumping-off point, co-curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramirez with curatorial fellow Ashton Cooper approached this year’s edition by bringing together L.A. artists and art collectives who explore the rhythms of daily life through ceramics, textiles, paintings, maps, sculptures, and other media. Like Purifoy, many of the participating artists utilize everyday materials—from clay and soil to found photography and rhinestones—in ways that expand our comprehension of what art can be. Acts of Living highlighted works made in communion with their local surroundings, archiving the vibrancy of Angeleno neighborhoods, landscapes, and occupants.

Installed on the Hammer’s third floor, Jackie Amézquita’s El suelo que nos alimenta (2023) consisted of 144 rectangular slabs installed in a grid on the wall. Using a shovel and woven bags, Amézquita sourced soil from each of the neighborhoods that constitute the city of Los Angeles, combining it with masa, salt, rainwater, limestone, and copper. Illustrating the artist’s personal connection to the city, each slab is etched with a scene inspired by the daily routines of undocumented folks throughout L.A. One slab, for example, is incised with the image of a palm tree and the words “Boyle Heights” scrawled in bubble letters; another is a careful rendition of Westlake Theater on South Alvarado Street, a place rich with Latinx heritage, that showed Spanish-language films as early as the 1960s.² In an accompanying video produced by the Hammer, Amézquita says that she made El suelo while contemplating her “integrat[ion] into [the L.A.] landscape during these last 20 years.”³ In her etchings of L.A. foliage and architecture, Amézquita documents and honors the daily movements of the many communities in the city.

Other artists echoed these passions for place-based storytelling. In his project Valley Tours (2019– ongoing), Vincent Enrique Hernandez drives participants on a 5-hour tour around the San Fernando Valley in his Volvo, regaling his passengers with stories about the neighborhood in an effort to share the “loads of history that’s just kind of underneath your nose.”⁴ For Acts of Living, Hernandez contributed a Valley Research Map (2019–ongoing), a map of the San Fernando Valley that he’d studded with red push pins and photographs of notable people and places, including a picture of the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Community Center, a sticker from a Keyes auto dealership, and the cover of a 1954 Tarzan comic book.⁵ This map and collected documentation depict a hybrid narrative history that accumulates memories and sites that are both personal to Hernandez and notable (if often overlooked) within the area. A binder of photos from Hernandez’s tours on a nearby pedestal further highlighted the artist’s ever-developing connection to these chronicles (Pictures Taken on The Tour, 2019–ongoing). Two steps away from the Valley Tours installation was Christopher Suarez’s PCH & Cherry at 7 p.m. (2023), an intricate, table-top ceramic replica of a block in Long Beach, California, where the artist grew up. The work features a humble schoolhouse with a rickety fence; a liquor store fronted with a relatively large sign that reads “THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING HERE YOUR BUSINESS IS APPRECIATED”; and a tottering apartment building surmounted by a billboard advertising a hit-andrun lawyer’s familiar refrain, “CAR INJURY?” The artwork, which compiles current, past, and imaginary places in Long Beach, represents Suarez’s loving ambition to embrace his community by faithfully creating and recreating Latinx “safe spaces.”⁶ Suarez uses clay to recreate strip malls filled with laundromats, butcher shops, and bodegas, recording important Latinx community centers that are relatively free from the white gaze and police violence. Like Amézquita and Hernandez, Suarez’s documentation of his home pays particular attention to the daily rhythms of everyday people.

Young Joon Kwak, To Refuse Looking Away From Our Transitioning Bodies (Me And My Fat *****) and To See Your Self Reflected in Our Chameleonic Transformations (Drag Ban) (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles/Mexico City. Photo: Paul Salveson.

While some artists in the biennial recorded L.A.’s stories through its landscapes, Young Joon Kwak presented sculptures and wall works in which the body itself becomes a site of L.A. history—in Kwak’s case, the queer and drag communities that they have been part of for over a decade.⁷ Their reverse-cast “skin” pieces and abstract 2-dimensional works track moments of physical change and transition. For instance, To Refuse Looking Away From Our Transitioning Bodies (Pregnant Kim) (2023) is a body cast created in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist and dominatrix Kim Ye. The piece, a bronze replica of Ye’s pregnant torso that hung from the ceiling, was full of the rich lineaments of the expectant body on the inside while the exterior was studded with colorful jewels. Memorializing this important transitional phase of Ye’s life, Kwak embedded the sculpture with turquoise, rose, black, and amber rhinestones, evoking the sunset transformations of our evening skies. These crystalline materials also nod to the fashion of drag culture, constituting a shimmering love letter to experimental, queer spaces like Mutant Salon, a roving platform for collaborative performances co-founded by Kwak. Their pieces memorialize the people and cultural practices that constitute their communities. Kwak’s work speaks to their deep investment in queer comradeship, tracing the network of multivalent bonds across our city.

In addition to exhibiting work by individual artists, Acts of Living also explored art spaces and collectives that nurture the city’s creativity. Virtually hidden in the Hammer’s Bank Annex, break room (2023) was a room —complete with a coffee pot, water cooler, and vending machine—where visitors were invited to sit, read, rest, eat, and browse. Organized by Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), this off-the-path installation was a microcosm of LACA’s esteemed Chinatown archive. LACA hosts a library’s worth of books and manuscripts related to contemporary artists, alongside a collection of artist ephemera (performance props, sculptural mock-ups for unrealized projects, studio rent checks, meeting minutes, handwritten process notes, et al.) that would otherwise be consigned to the rubbish heap. At the Hammer, LACA offered three loose sections—work, pleasure, and break—emphasizing the latter. When I entered the space, I found two people sharing a bag of chips and talking about disability rights while surrounded by the residua of art’s undertakings. This proved an exciting version of a “living archive,” which records, houses, and amplifies the many forms of inventiveness that occur in our city.

Through its engagement with the big and small actions that propel the creative pulse of L.A., Acts of Living offered an alternative and embodied archive of the city. The show reminded viewers that—to return to Purifoy— art is a practice that has long been enacted outside of the gallery, especially by people of color, queer people, working-class people, and other vulnerable communities that often do not have institutional access. Though the artists discussed here focused on different themes, all manifest a drive to document what it means to move through Southern California, particularly as a creative individual. Amézquita’s clay tablets trace the everyday lives of undocumented individuals across various L.A. neighborhoods; Hernandez creates art out of peripatetic conversations about a specific pocket of our metropolis; Suarez reconstructs Latinx Long Beach; Kwak memorializes transitioning bodies and culture in crystalline colors; and LACA archives the gestures and effects of local arts and communitarian practices. Just as Purifoy asserted that art grows out of everyday moments, these artists build beautiful and meaningful objects and practices out of that which is transitory and overlooked—we’ll miss it if we’re not careful.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 35.

Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Valley Research Map (2019–present). AAA map, map pins, found images, thumbtacks, and corkboard, 40 × 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum.

Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, break room (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of LACA. Photo: Joey Lopez.

Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, break room (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of LACA. Photo: Joshua White.

Yxta Maya Murray lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of ten books.

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