View From Here: Recent Acquisitions

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

All exhibitions at LACMA are underwritten by the LACMA Exhibition Fund. Major annual support is provided by Kitzia and Richard Goodman, Meredith and David Kaplan, and Jeffrey Saikhon, with generous annual funding from Terry and Lionel Bell, the Judy and Bernard Briskin Family Foundation, Kevin J. Chen, Louise and Brad Edgerton, Edgerton Foundation, Emily and Teddy Greenspan, Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross, Mary and Daniel James, David Lloyd and Kimberly Steward, Kelsey Lee Offield, David Schwartz Foundation, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Anthony and Lee Shaw, Lenore and Richard Wayne, Marietta Wu and Thomas Yamamoto, and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.

In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, thick layers of paint form figures that seem to emerge from darkness. A Few For the Many centers on a young Black man who looks lost in contemplation, with his eyes directed somewhere off in the middle distance. While Yiadom-Boakye’s expressive brushstrokes appear to respond to living, breathing portrait subjects, she does not base her paintings on sitters; her cast of characters is imagined. In this “conceptual portraiture” Yiadom-Boakye foregrounds images of Black men and women as she would like them viewed—in all their emotional and intellectual complexity.

While living in Providence, Rhode Island, Tavares Strachan noticed a neglected industrial building with shattered windows; he then created a series of identically broken panes of glass and inserted them into the building’s window frames. Passersby were unlikely to notice the eerily identical shatter patterns in the windows, but, if they did, they were left to question the history and condition of the site. Strachan translated this intervention into Passageways, the sculpture on view here.

Lonnie Holley made his first artwork at age twenty-nine, carving a sculpture out of industrial sandstone—a byproduct of the steel manufacturing plants in his community—to place on the graves of his sister’s two children, who died in a house fire. Holley then began painting and making sculptural assemblages out of objects he found around his home and studio in Birmingham, Alabama. In African in a Cage Gasping for Air, which features a dashiki and gas mask in a chicken-wire cage, Holley engages with a rich tradition of Black vernacular culture in which cast-off objects are reclaimed and transformed into installations that address slavery, environmental racism, and incarceration.

Teacher and artist John T. Riddle made America’s Problem Solver at the height of the Vietnam War. As a former serviceman who had felt the sting of institutional military racism, Riddle was aware that Black men were disproportionately represented among the draftees and combat deaths in Vietnam. Evoking both a weapon and a telescope, America’s Problem Solver suggests that the United States had other countries and cultures in its sights but also required scrutiny itself, a sentiment that is as true today as when the sculpture was created.

Felipe Baeza’s experience as an undocumented queer immigrant has informed his practice. His work incorporates printmaking and collage; for Untitled (so much darkness, so much brownness), he embroidered an image of a Mexican family attempting to cross the United States border onto a salvaged map. Baeza then laid the paper face-down on the floor and layered “skins” of pigments, powder, and water on top of it. He completed this process around a dozen times for this work, emphasizing the labor and layers that lie beneath the surface of the image.

In The Space in Which We Travel Calida Rawles depicts two adolescent girls in white dresses who are submerged underwater, grasping each other’s hands; their bodies create a double helix, suggesting their genealogical linkage. Rawles reflects that water can be turbulent and terrifying but also enveloping and elevating: it is “duplicitous…a very dangerous element,” she says. “In order to survive in water, you have to relax. If you struggle, you sink. You take the waves as they come. I think of that as just a state of being.”

Avery Singer uses three-dimensional modeling software to create the underdrawings for her canvases, then applies acrylic paint with an airbrush. Her immaculate gray surfaces create an aesthetic confusion between the historical and the contemporary, and blur the lines between mediums. In Sensory Deprivation Tank (empty) Singer expertly renders drips and smears throughout the picture plane to imply the handprints and watermarks that appear on glass surfaces during and following a steamy shower.

EJ Hill is known best for his endurance-based performances but is also an object-maker, writer, and installation artist. He has used neon to put text into conversation with his body while he performs, and as a source of light in dark circumstances. During a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, Hill began making the series Lessons, in which each work includes a chalkboard with a declarative message. In these pieces, Hill recasts the objects and language of the American education system to reckon with the fact that these institutions are not designed for all.