A Closer Look: Recent Identity and Race-Based Exhibitions in Los Angeles
From January to July 2024, four group exhibitions opened in Los Angeles that used race and identity as an organizing methodology, presenting the work of Black, Asian American, and Latinx artists. The exhibitions took place in both museums and galleries and examined such topics as networks of mutual support; collective contributions to culture; conceptual approaches to identity and family history; community building and activism. Within the context of how exhibitions in past decades took up identity and the politics of representation and with the backdrop of the current political and cultural climate, this panel will ask what is the importance of race and identity-based group exhibitions today? How has the approach to such exhibitions changed over time and what is the value, or purpose, now?
We have gathered the curators of the four exhibitions to participate in a conversation on curatorial practices and the ambitions and challenges of their projects.
Please join us for A Closer Look.
Anne Ellegood, ICA LA Good Works Executive Director and co-curator, Scratching at the Moon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (February10–July 28, 2024)
Charles Gaines, artist and co-curator, RETROaction (part two), Hauser & Wirth (February 27–May 5, 2024)
Dr. Jenny Lin, curator, Another Beautiful Country, USC’s Pacific Asia Museum (January 26–April 24, 2024)
Guadalupe Rosales, artist and co-curator, At the Edge of the Sun, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (February 24–June 1, 2024)
Shizu Saldamando, artist and co-curator, At the Edge of the Sun, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (February 24–June 1, 2024)
Darby English, art historian and program moderator, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.
Charles Gaines (Los Angeles) is a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art that engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and The New Cosmopolitanism (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). In 2019, Gaines received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design’s 2020 class of National Academicians and will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2022. Gaines’s work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA; and Tate, London, UK. His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015.
Dr. Jenny Lin is an art historian, writer, and curator. She investigates relations between modern and contemporary art, design, and globalization. Dr. Lin is author of Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai (Manchester University Press), and the award-winning exhibition catalogue, Picturing Global China (University of Oregon). Her recent exhibition and book project, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists (USC Pacific Asia Museum), received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation. Dr. Lin is recipient of the 2024-5 Tsao Family Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she will be researching a new book: The Global/Art Fashion System: New Silk Roads through China, Italy, and the United States. Her writings on 20th and 21st-century art, design, and film appear widely, for example in Art Margins, Shanghai Culture, Frieze, X-TRA, ArtReview, and several anthologies. She has been invited to present around the world, including at Columbia University, University of Oxford, Duke University, the National Gallery of Art, and the Poetry Foundation. Dr. Lin is currently Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Art and Design and Graduate Director of Curatorial Practices at the University of Southern California. She is affiliated faculty in Art History, American Studies and Ethnicity, East Asian Studies, and the US-China Institute at USC, where she’s organized intercultural conferences, exhibitions, screenings and art events. Dr. Lin holds her MA and PhD in Art History from University of California, Los Angeles, and BA in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies from Brown University.
Guadalupe Rosales (Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator best known for her community generated archival projects, “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” found on social media. The projects manifested in 2015 from the under/misrepresentation and historical erasure of Latin@/x communities in Southern California. The archives explore ideas about how history and culture are framed and who does the framing. As a counterpoint, the archive celebrates, humanizes and reflects the positive and honest attributes of our shared culture. In her studio practice, Guadalupe works with sculpture, photography, video, sound, drawing, and community-based projects and collaborations, and the archive, centering on the creation of immersive and sensorial spaces to activate memory. These spaces conjure up emotions as well as collective feelings of longing that reside in our bodies and remain as living archives. Here, she wants audiences to consider the body as archives and a locus that preserves, carries, moves, and transforms memory but also intervenes in the continuum of a life archived. Rosales is a recipient of United States Artists Fellowship (2020), Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2019). Her solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021, 2018); Dallas Museum of Art (2021); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2020); Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville (2019); and Aperture Foundation, New York (2018). Her forthcoming book, EAST OF THE RIVER, will be published by One World in October 2025.
Shizu Saldamando (San Francisco) depicts American social spaces as laboratories for new ways of being through portraiture. Her work celebrates peers, friends, and loved ones through paintings and drawings that honor the brief moments of connection that occur throughout daily life. Her portraits playfully suggest that race, gender, and ethnicity act as white noise to the scene at hand; audible, yet not identifiable. Saldamando’s visual biographies, which use friends as her subjects, capture the energy of youthful experimentation and the freedom of malleable categories for identity. She is interested in documenting mundane social moments to glorify everyday people who are often overlooked, yet whose existence is the embodiment and legacy of historical struggle. Her work explores the process of creating and re-contextualizing culture by virtue of language, dress, and memory. Solo exhibitions include LA Intersections, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; Shizu Saldamando, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; To Return, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA. Saldamando’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, and numerous other public and private collections.
Darby English teaches art history and cultural studies at the University of Chicago, where he is associated with the Department of Visual Arts, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and serves on the Public Art Committee. He is a scholar of modern and contemporary American and European art produced since the First World War, and the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016), To Describe a Life: Essays from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (2019). From 2014 to 2020, he was Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His projects at MoMA concerned collection and acquisitions research, culminating in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019) an expansive volume conceived and co-edited with Charlotte Barat. From 2019-2023, English was Visiting Professor at the UCLA School of Art.
Anne Ellegood has been the Good Works Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, since September 2019. She was the Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum from 2009 to 2019 and has held curatorial posts at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the New Museum. Recent curatorial projects include Witch Hunt (2021, co-curated with Connie Butler), Made in L.A. 2018 (co-curated with Erin Christovale), and Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (2017). Ellegood serves on the Board of Directors of JOAN and on advisory committees for the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) and Protocinema. She was a 2020 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and, the same year, co-founded the Los Angeles Visual Arts Coalition, a coalition of small to mid-size visual arts organizations formed to provide mutual support, engage in shared fundraising and professional development, and advocate for our sector.
