DON'T MISS THESE ART EXHIBITS IN LOS ANGELES

"For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers

in California" | Photo: CAAM

"BEHERE / 1942" - JANM (THROUGH JAN. 8, 2023)

Created by visionary Japanese media artist Masaki Fujihata, BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration opened at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) 80 years to the day that Exclusion Orders 32 and 33 forced Japanese Americans to leave Little Tokyo. BeHere / 1942 invites visitors to experience the photographic archive of this dark history in new ways, including through two augmented reality (AR) installations.

Through Fujihata's curation of little-known photographs by Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee - some presented in hyper-enlarged form or reimagined as video - BeHere / 1942 allows visitors to discover things in the archive that they never knew were there. Cutting-edge AR technology takes the discovery a step further, inviting visitors to become photographers themselves, actually participating in the scene.

The exhibit inside JANM is complemented by a groundbreaking public AR installation in the plaza between the museum’s main campus and the historic Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. A dedicated BeHere / 1942 app lets visitors step into the past, and walk among Japanese Americans on the verge of leaving for the camps. Realized with the participation of members of the local Japanese American community, this recreation includes three people who themselves experienced life in the camps as children.

CALIFORNIA AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM

"For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers in California" (through Oct. 30, 2022)
Be it from Bob Marley or from movies, many of us have heard the term “Buffalo Soldiers.” This nickname for all-Black U.S. Army regiments was initially coined during the Indian Wars of the late 19th century and lingered through 1948, when the military was desegregated.

On view at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Exposition Park, For Race and Country: Buffalo Soldiers in California is an enlightening exhibition that explores the surprising history surrounding these men who - in and out of uniform - helped shape the Golden State, including building churches and parks. Peeling back myths, the exhibit uses artifacts, interviews, photos, uniforms, newspapers, and historical records to explore historical debates in the Black community over participation in wars, confront the role of Black soldiers in Army violence against Native Americans, and to illuminate the conflict faced by Buffalo Soldiers between commitment to equality for their people and to the country they chose to serve.

"Mario Moore | Enshrined: Presence + Preservation" (through Oct. 2, 2022)
Mario Moore’s first solo exhibition in California, Enshrined: Presence + Preservation brings together work from early in his career as well as his most recent series, The Work of Several Lifetimes (2019), created with the support of Princeton University’s esteemed Hodder Fellowship. Together, these works represent the Detroit-based artist’s desire to make visible the dedicated work of marginalized groups in this country. For many years, Moore has foregrounded the contributions of essential and frontline workers in his paintings - an effort that has become even more poignant during this time of global pandemic. His paintings encourage us to question who is deserving of portraiture and, thus, preservation. Enshrined: Presence + Preservation debuts two new portraits made especially for the exhibition that feature women who have worked as custodians at the museum.
 Chloë Bass, "Nine Images of the sky, with poetic text overlay" (detail), 2016-17. Digital image. Courtesy the artist.

ART + PRACTICE

"Chloë Bass | #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America" (through Jan. 21, 2023)
Co-presented by Art + Practice and CAAM as part of a five-year collaboration, #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America is a photography, text-based, performance art, and public sculpture project by New York-based conceptual artist Chloë Bass. It culminates the artist’s ongoing project, #sky #nofilter, for which she captured images of cloudless blue skies to mark time in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election. Bass then coupled the images with personal and political writings that she shared on Instagram over the course of a year.

Bass has conceived a newly commissioned public sculpture in South LA that features 16 blue glass panels adapted from the original #sky #nofilter photos. Together they form a participatory analemmatic sundial - the viewer’s body functions as the shadow-casting element that determines the time of day. Each sundial panel is engraved with text drawn from Bass’s original #sky #nofilter writings that will cast its own shadow and offer a linguistic point of reflection. In advance of the public art installation, which will debut in late fall, Bass will exhibit a series of works on paper, glass studies, and video at Art + Practice.

"Justen LeRoy | Lay Me Down in Praise" (through Jan. 21, 2023)
Created by multidisciplinary artist Justen LeRoy, Lay Me Down in Praise is a three-channel film installation that asks how the scream, moan, and melisma—aka the vocal run—provide a sonic route toward Black environmentalism. By layering clips of Black performers with images of geological activity, LeRoy considers how resistance and regeneration inhabit the wordless screeches of the Earth and the history of Black sound. Lay Me Down in Praise insists the Earth’s aches and upheavals - felt in volcanic eruptions, tectonic shifts, and other cataclysmic events - are entangled with Black resistance and liberation.

"REBECCA MORRIS: 2001–2022" - ICA LA (OCT. 1, 2022 - JAN. 15, 2023)

Rebecca Morris, "Untitled" (#10-20), 2020.

Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Arts District, Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022 is a 21-year survey of LA-based painter Rebecca Morris, an artist best known for her large-scale paintings and inventive approach to composition, color, and gesture. One of the most formidable and inventive painters working today, Morris’s practice demonstrates a rigorous commitment to experimentation and abstraction.

Marking the artist’s first major museum survey since 2005, the exhibition is the first of this scale in Los Angeles, where she has lived and worked for nearly 25 years. The occasion also marks a return of Morris to the ICA LA (formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art), which hosted the artist’s first museum exhibition, Frankenstein, in 2003.

HAUSER & WIRTH

Martin Creed (Oct. 27 – Dec. 30, 2022)
Opening this October, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles will present a solo exhibition by Martin Creed. "Martin Creed, Turner prize-winning artist performer composer ‘Punk poet’ (The Guardian) warm-hearted heart-warming head-scratching hair-combing talk songs cabaret feelings spoken-word anti-war love jokes tricks friendly ‘Creed is a social artist’ (The Observer) loneliness experimental piano juggling clothes including socks ideas thoughts bums spelling mistakes hard-hitting easy-going."

"Cindy Sherman 1977 - 1982" (Oct. 27, 2022 – Jan. 8, 2023)
Cindy Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice and opened the door for generations of artists and critics to rethink photography as a medium. Following its critically acclaimed New York presentation, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles will exhibit over one hundred works from Sherman’s ground-breaking and influential early series – including the complete set of 70 Untitled Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections, Centerfolds and Color Studies – in her second major solo exhibition with the gallery.