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I first met curator Erin Christovale in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was a Getty Marrow intern at the Hammer Museum working with Erin on her 2022 exhibition Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation. In the months that followed, the power and prescience of Jenkins’ work was undeniable amid Zoom calls and Black Lives Matter protests. I admired his radical sensibility homegrown in Los Angeles, and I soon realized that Erin also embodied this very spirit.
The ensuing years that I’ve known Erin have only confirmed this belief. Los Angeles, with all of its enigmas and edges (including Long Beach, where we were both raised), is inextricable from her ways of working and being. Her curatorial work—from the 2018 edition of Made in L.A., to Jenkins’ long- overdue survey, to the 2022 Sylvia Wynter-inspired exhibition No Humans Involved—is grounded in the intergenerational practices of Black radical imagination, archival preservation, and local experimentalism.
Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal (February 9–May 4, 2025), which Erin recently curated at the Hammer with Nyah Ginwright, is her latest imagining brought to fruition. The multimedia exhibition brings together the visionary musician and spiritual guru’s music and archives alongside works by 19 multi-generational artists. What emerges is a dual portrait of a dynamic life and legacy.
For this interview (which took place on Valentine’s Day), I asked Erin to reflect on her sense of place, and her answers unfolded into a love letter to the L.A. region. Our conversation opened up into a larger continuum of histories: collectively understood, spoken, carried—and intimately interconnected.
CJ Salapare: How did your personal relationship with L.A. come to be?
Erin Christovale: I’ve lived in L.A. County for practically my entire life. I grew up in Long Beach and the city has always been a cornerstone to my existence, to the way that I think, the way that I move, the way that I navigate spaces. […] I always think of L.A. as, like, this sort of B [or] C-list actress who had that one breakout role and her career didn’t really take off after that. She’s a glamour girl, but she’s also very raw and gritty and seedy. [L.A. is] ruled by the entertainment industry. […] It’s also a city that has very deep political and racial underpinnings. I think about the LAPD being one of the most militarized police departments in the country. I think about a history of uprisings from Watts to South Central.
I think about a city that’s always sunny… To say that imbues some positivity or beauty, but actually what it means is the city [rarely] gets rain. What does it mean if the city is never sort of replenished in that way. There’s so many layers to this incredible city. I love just being in the thick of all of that… and also incorporating that into what I do as a curator.
CJS: Can you expand on this dissonance between the region’s associations with Hollywood’s glitz and glamour and these more visceral layers of meaning that inform your curatorial work?
EC: I’ve always been interested in the study of film. […] I remember so clearly one of the classes at USC that really had an impact on me was a class taught by Professor Kara Keeling on the history of African-American cinema, and one of the first films that she showed was The Birth of a Nation.
I’m thinking, what does this film have to do with African-American cinema? But you come to understand that [this 1915] film—by D.W. Griffith, who’s actually one of the founders of Hollywood—was in part made to convince people, and mainly new immigrants to the country, that Black people were savage, bad, and not to be messed with or engaged with. […] So I’ve always been fascinated by the way that moving image has been deeply instrumentalized to sway the opinions and ideas of the collective.
CJS: I’m curious about what or who gets brought along from your approach to the moving image, specifically in terms of the archival and social impulses central to your practice, in shows like Ulysses Jenkins or Alice Coltrane.
EC: I formed this project Black Radical Imagination [with filmmaker Amir George] and the title of that project ties directly back to…Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination [2002] by Robin D.G. Kelley. He does this brilliant job of outlining all of these Black liberation movements over the years and [is] always coming back to the simple idea that if someone wasn’t courageous enough to radically imagine another way of existing, a new future, that none of these movements would have been in place. Amir and I applied that philosophy to the moving image space, particularly experimental video.
My curatorial practice is deeply tied to this notion of Black radical imagination and if you look at any
of my projects [or] exhibitions, there’s always a nod or [a] direct tie back to a Black cultural figure, back to Black scholarship, back to an essay or a person. And what I find important about [this] excavating is my intention to…offer up an extension of those thoughts or ideas…through the art space, but also point at the fact that these thoughts are universal and Black radical thought is actually global and is a cornerstone for many liberation movements.
CJS: The exchange that an exhibition can make possible, that transmission of knowledge, also feels fundamental to the way that you think. If we framed the exhibition space as a matrix—art, artists, and audiences as the trifecta—is there anything specific or singular about these three coalescing in L.A.?
EC: I think that’s a really beautiful question… Just the way that L.A. artists have come together, regardless of
the institution, regardless of the validation of the larger art world, regardless of the market, has always been deeply inspirational to me and a reminder that art happens and exists beyond the framework of the art world. Art happens every day in the smallest of moments and in the strangest of places.
I’ve been so proud and have loved the fact that the L.A. art scene has these historical roots. It’s not about the gallery or the fair or the institution. […] I think L.A. has always been a city of artists for artists. The L.A. art
scene has always been doing its thing regardless of these other powers that be, and there’s something very punk and rebellious and almost anarchist about that, [which] I love. […] Historically, the artist in L.A. has always needed the collective, as opposed to other art centers.
No Humans Involved (installation view) (2021–22). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.
CJS: I wonder how the collective manifests through [trailblazing] spaces in LA, like Self-Help Graphics & Art and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, or the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
EC: Those spaces raised me. I could not exist as the person that I am now, in the institution that I’m very consciously aware of that I exist in now, without those spaces. I think those spaces are actually the most important spaces within [this] ecosystem because those are where deep experimentation and innovation are still alive and well and accessible… I often feel they don’t get the credit that they deserve, or the deep labor that goes into making those spaces possible is never really praised.
Human Resources has always been an incredibly important space for me and for young curators who have the opportunity to put on shows. LACE [Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions] has always been an incredible space that has a very rich history and was started by artists and I think still has that sort of flair. The Echo Park Film Center [Collective] is another space [where] I could screen films or friends of mine learned how to shoot on film for the first time.
CJS: You mentioned that you carry L.A. around with you wherever you go. How do you feel that your community in L.A. informs this belief?
EC: So many of the artists that I have worked with are my peers, and we’ve grown up together, and I’ve been in and out of their studios over years. […] These spaces are the genesis of the work that I bring to the Hammer now and the group of artists that I’m constantly in conversation with.
CJS: In creating a sense or form of the collective, there needs to be a kind of magnetism, or this ability to connect with others that you undeniably possess.
EC: Thank you for seeing that in me… This is something I can’t overthink. I just do, it’s just intuitive. […] I’ve always understood that to be a human is to be in constant connection, refraction, reflection, projection, a collective of others that are all working through this notion of the human condition.
I think also that space always reminds me that we are all still learning… and when you enter other people’s spaces [you] come in those spaces with an open mind, come in those spaces knowing that these people are the authority, the legacy keepers of what those spaces mean to them, and what your contribution is from there.
CJS: Can you elaborate on being in this learning mindset? Especially in terms of the curator historically being a bastion of expertise, or a gatekeeper.
EC: I think being a curator now in this contemporary world is so vast and it has truly broken from those early constructs. I consider myself to be a part of a larger group of specifically Black contemporary curators who
for the first time en masse have come into these institutional spaces. What that has meant for me and so many of my colleagues is these spaces don’t always know what we need [and] how to treat us. I’ve had to be deeply creative and I’ve had to take care of myself in these spaces in order to survive. I think with that labor in mind, I have to be open, I have to be receptive, I have to learn from others because I too am sort of learning on the spot as I go about what I need, what I want, how to advocate for myself. Shout out to our elders and our mentors who [didn’t have] the network that we have now.
I think being a good curator in this contemporary world calls you to be…a person of the world. You’re constantly in the flux and flow of society and culture, and you’re moving between so many different spaces and classes and types of people. I think in order to do that well, you kind of have to be fluid, you have to have an open mind, you have to be willing to learn, or else you miss the point of what this incredible job and position can be.
Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Hammer Museum. Photo: Joshua White.
CJS: I think what you’re describing so profoundly is the reality that the curator isn’t solely in the business of aesthetics anymore. I want to focus on the ethics that come with such a position of responsibility.
EC: This…notion of care has to extend beyond the object. At least that’s how I feel. The Latin word for curator [cūrātor] stems from this idea of caring… if you don’t care about or for the objects and the people and the audience that you are hoping to manifest in these spaces, then what are you actually gaining from this experience? This is the rhetorical question that I always toy with.
I remember one of the most brilliant things that the artist Martine Syms said. She was like, “I make shows for my mom.” It’s so simple, but so profound. Because what she is getting at is if grandma doesn’t feel it, if my little niece is not engaged, if my mother is not interested, who am I doing this for? I acknowledge not everyone thinks like this or has this set of priorities or even ethics, but the community of art people and workers that I keep close to me are those that feel similarly and do similarly.
I also just want to shout out certain art workers and curators in the city who have laid the groundwork for me to exist in this space, like Alma Ruiz who was at MOCA, or Rita Gonzalez who is at LACMA now, or Essence Harden, who’s curating the next Made in L.A. biennial. So many of these people who are often women of color have been the foundation of these institutions in this city, and I think that just needs to be reiterated over and over again.
CJS: Naming these people and spaces, calling to mind these different sensibilities and ideas—these are ways of keeping memories and archives alive, of making sure that they don’t fade away.
EC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is part of the work. That’s…why oral history too is so deeply important. Saying those names, getting those names in print, circulating those names in digital spaces. […] These are the blueprints. These are the thought partners. These are the people who have made the L.A. art world what it is and what it will be. That is incredibly important to me.