CAAM Here & Now - Summer 2024

here & now

California African American Museum Summer 2024

welcome.

With a deep breath and a big smile, I’m delighted to say: We’re back!

As most of you know, Southern California experienced a highly unusual tropical storm last August with heavy rains continuing through the winter. Water intrusion occurred in our facility, requiring extensive repairs. Happily we are now reopened with an exciting slate of new and ongoing exhibitions detailed in these pages, including the copresentation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) of the traveling exhibition Simone Leigh, which at CAAM features works from the artist’s

much-lauded 2022 Venice Biennale presentation. I can’t wait for you to see what’s on view.

While we have been busy behind-the-scenes repairing and reinstalling the Museum, we have also added some important new objects and works of art to our collection. Some of the additions further our mission of documenting the lives of Black Californians, including a 1943 Tuskegee Army Flying School yearbook that belonged to Rolin Augustus Bynum, an elite fighter pilot who settled in San Diego after the Second World War. In that same vein, we also acquired two Tillotson College diplomas from the

1920s, earned by Texas native Allean L. Washington, who, like many, migrated to California. Her diplomas record the material culture of the Jim Crow era as well as the notable educational achievements of a Black woman at a time when most Americans did not complete high school. We are also pleased to have added to the collection a 1982 mixed-media work on paper by Black Southern vernacular artist Nellie Mae Rowe, among other generous donations.

There’s so much to celebrate at CAAM! Please mark your calendars to join us for not one, but two, KCRW Summer Nights events happening on Friday, June 28,

and Friday, August 30. Those of you who have joined us in the past for these incredible nights of art, music, food, and dancing under the stars know CAAM is the place to be this summer.

Cameron Shaw Executive Director

4 exhibitions | 13 program highlights | 15 visit

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds (exhibition view). California African American Museum, August 5, 2023 – August 3, 2025; Photo: Elon Schoenholz

exhibitions

Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh, a traveling exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) and co-presented in Los Angeles by CAAM and LACMA, is the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of this celebrated artist. CAAM’s presentation, which includes works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation, features nearly twenty years of Leigh’s practice in ceramics, bronze, video, installation, and social activation. Together, these works index a web of Black feminist theory, archival excavation, infrastructures for mutual care, and African art and architecture. Accompanied by a major monograph, this exhibition offers visitors a timely opportunity to gaze at Leigh’s artistic, scholarly, and social contributions, inspired by legacies of creativity, survival, and documentation by Black femmes throughout the world.

Simone Leigh is organized by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Anni A. Pullagura, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. The Los Angeles presentation is organized by Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, LACMA,

Related programs: Thursday, May 23, 2024 | 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.

In Conversation: Simone Leigh, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Naima Keith, and Rita Gonzalez

Join us for an illuminating conversation between Simone Leigh and the Los Angeles exhibition curators as they discuss the artist’s practice and explore the curatorial framework of Simone Leigh.

Saturday, July 27, 2024 | 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Docent-Led Tour: Simone Leigh

Saturday, August 10, 2024 | 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Zine Workshop: Simone Leigh

Naima J. Keith, Vice President, Education and Public Programs, LACMA, and Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator, CAAM.

exhibitions

Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door

May 22 – August 18, 2024

Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door presents nearly two decades of Paula Wilson’s paintings, sculptures, prints, collages, and videos, with different media frequently intermixed in a single work. Breaking down perceived boundaries to connect global and local narratives, the work explores subjects as wideranging as the moth that pollinates Yucca plants, ancient Greek vases, West African D’mba, and modern technologies. Using the same techniques and styles to make art for viewing on the gallery wall as for the rugs she walks on and the clothes she wears, Wilson challenges the separations between art and everyday living. Often biographically oriented, her work

investigates the polarities of human life, including her own identity as a Black biracial artist and her experiences living in both major metropolises and the small desert railroad town of Carrizozo, New Mexico.

The exhibition title comes from a poem by Robin Coste Lewis, “Let Me Live in a House by the Side of the Road and Be a Friend to Man.”

Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door is organized by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and curated by Tang Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are supported by Friends of the Tang. The CAAM presentation is organized by Isabelle Lutterodt, Deputy Director, CAAM.

Related programs: Saturday, May 25, 2024 | 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Docent-Led Tour: Toward the Sky’s Back Door

Thursday, June 13, 2024 | 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

In Conversation: Paula Wilson and Rebecca McNamara

Join Wilson and guest curator Rebecca McNamara as they discuss the exhibition.

Saturday, July 27, 2024 | 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Zine Workshop: Toward the Sky’s Back Door

Paula Wilson, Up My Sleeve, 2021. Woodcut, relief, silkscreen, collagraph, monotype, and digital print; oilbased ink, oil, acrylic, muslin, and canvas, 35 x 58 1 2 inches. Collection of Melissa D. Mathias

exhibitions

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Finding Soft Ground

At Art + Practice

April 6 – August 10, 2024

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers Black image making as a site of protest, contestation, affirmation, and possibility. Finding Soft Ground considers the conditions, precarity, and imaginative determination of safety for Black women. Utilizing the three galleries of Art + Practice, Fazlalizadeh transforms each space into distinct installations examining the street, the home, and the natural world in relation to terror and refuge. The works in Finding Soft Ground—which includes wheat-pasted prints, oil paintings, graphite drawings, a single-channel film, and site-specific materials—are rooted in Fazlalizadeh’s Black feminist theory.

Finding Soft Ground is presented in tandem with Speaking to Falling Seeds, the artist’s installation of monumental portraits of Black Los Angeles women wheat pasted onto CAAM’s atrium walls.

Visual Arts Curator, and is co-presented by CAAM and Art + Practice as part of CAAM at A+P, a five-year collaboration.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds At CAAM

through August 3, 2025

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh presents a series of portraits of Black Angelenos wheat pasted across the atrium’s monumental walls. Based on photographs and conversations that took place in spring 2023 while the artist was living in Los Angeles, the portraits ask how safety is presumed, built, and felt for the city’s Black residents.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds is curated by Essence Harden, Visual Arts Curator, and Taylor Bythewood-Porter, former Assistant Curator.

Related programs:

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Curatorial Walkthrough: Finding Soft Ground

Location: Art + Practice, 4334 Degnan Blvd., LA 90008

Tuesday, June 18, 2024 | 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Reading Group: Finding Soft Ground

Location: Art + Practice, 4334 Degnan Blvd., LA 90008

Tameka Blackshir of Reparations Club will guide readers in a discussion of Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery by bell hooks. Participants are encouraged to read the book in advance to facilitate discussion. Books will also be available for purchase on site from Reparations Club.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Finding Soft Ground is curated by Essence Harden,

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Gwen and Her Grandbaby, 2022 (installation view). Oil, acrylic, and vintage photograph on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist

exhibitions

Black California Dreamin’:

Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier

through August 18, 2024

Access to nature, recreation, and sites of relaxation—in other words, leisure—is critical to pursuing the full range of human experience, selffulfillment, and dignity. Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier illuminates Angelenos and other Californians who worked to make leisure here an open, inclusive reality in the first half of the twentieth century when Southern California was reimagining and positioning itself at the center of the Californian and American Dreams. In shaping recreational sites and public spaces during the Jim Crow era, African Americans challenged white supremacy and situated Black identity within oceanfront and inland social gathering places throughout California.

Black California Dreamin’ features historical photographs and memorabilia along with contemporary artworks that illuminate these leisure practices. The objects tell stories of self-determination, leadership, geographic and social mobility, beauty and gender standards, and cultural identity. African Americans helped define the practice and meaning of leisure in California as they faced emerging power politics around who gets access to naturescapes and other public spaces. In doing so, they set the stage for these places as symbols of invention and sites of public struggles still reverberating today.

Related programs:

Thursday, June 6, 2024

7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Poetry Performance:

Yazmin Monét Watkins

Writer, comedian, actress, educator, and organizer Yazmin Monét Watkins will perform poetry in conjunction with the exhibition, responding to and reflecting on themes of Black beach life in Southern California, family history, and dreams for the future.

Saturday, June 15, 2024

2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Docent-Led Tour: Black California Dreamin’

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Curatorial Walkthrough: Black California Dreamin’

We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California

through February 2, 2025

The history of California’s rural communities cannot be told without the role of African Americans. For generations, Black Californians have contributed to rural areas, working the land, building homesteads, fighting school segregation, training teachers, establishing independent settlements, and vigilantly protecting equal rights. Stories of these residents challenge myths about early California and create new narratives about freedom, citizenship, and self-governance.

The exhibition’s title, We Are Not Strangers Here, refers to the little-known history of African Americans’ relationship with wilderness and natural environments. Most Black people who migrated to California preferred metropolitan areas, rejecting agricultural labor because of its association with slavery and sharecropping. But African Americans are not strangers to rural California; the culture of cultivating the earth runs deep.

Through historical photographs and documents from court cases, poetry, vintage textbooks, interviews, music, and rare archeological objects, this exhibition reveals nineteenth- and early twentieth-century residents living in varied rural landscapes, from coastal mountains to the Central Valley and desert communities. Their civic accomplishments helped transform the state. We Are Not Strangers Here highlights the importance of Black Angelenos in particular to these efforts.

We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California is curated by

Related programs:

Saturday, August 3, 2024

2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Docent-Led Tour: We Are Not Strangers Here

Thursday, July 11, 2024

7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

CAAM Cinema: To Right a Wrong: Ballard Mountain

This thirteen-minute film documents a community campaign to change the name of a local peak in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Previously known as a racial slur, the mountain was renamed in 2010 to honor the first Black family to homestead in the Santa Monica Mountains. Join members of the Ballard family in conversation with CAAM History Curator, Susan D. Anderson, as they discuss their family legacy, which is explored in the exhibition.

Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier is curated by Alison Rose Jefferson, independent historian, curator, and author of Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era.

Susan D. Anderson, History Curator, with consultant Amy Cohen. The Mount Shasta Baptist Church in Weed, California, 2022; Photo: Mark Oliver

public sculpture

Chloë Bass | #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America

Ongoing

Chloë Bass | #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America is a public sculpture and performance art project by conceptual artist Chloë Bass, on view at CAAM since June 21, 2023, the summer solstice. The sculpture, which takes the form of a participatory analemmatic sundial, consists of sixteen blue glass panels that collectively form a partial ellipse. While engaging with the sculpture, the human body functions as the gnomon—the necessary projecting element that casts its shadow onto each glass panel, determining the time of the day. Bass has engraved contemplative phrases onto each sundial panel that appear on the ground below in shadow form.

#sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America culminates the artist’s ongoing project, #sky #nofilter, which began during the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 2016 US Presidential Election. As a result of the election, continued killings by police, and the grief and anxieties caused by such events, the

artist began capturing images of cloudless blue sky in an effort to keep time. Bass coupled the images with personal and political writing that was then shared through Instagram over the course of a year. The project expanded and became a scripted lectureperformance and a chapbook; more recently, Bass adapted the blue captures into a “magical painting” and glass and paper studies that were on view at Art + Practice in Leimert Park in 2022. The project’s continually shifting form considers what sitespecificity means in both physical and digital space.

#sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America— Bass’s first permanent commission—extends the artist’s ongoing interest in public sculpture that materializes conceptual and abstract ideas.

#sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America is curated by Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator.

program

highlights

Thursday, May 30, 2024 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Jazz @ CAAM: Braxton Cook

Jazz @ CAAM debuts with notable American alto saxophonist and singer-songwriter Braxton Cook. His debut album, Who Are You When No One Is Watching?, was listed by BET as one of the “Most Anticipated Albums of 2023” and met with critical acclaim.

Trained at Julliard and winner of an Emmy award, he has toured with jazz musicians Christian Scott, Christian McBride, and Marquis Hill and performed with Jon Batiste, Mac Miller, and Rihanna.

Saturday, June 15, 2024 | 10:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Juneteenth Celebration

Join us as we celebrate Juneteenth with a full day of wellness and family activities!

10:30 – 11:30 a.m. | Self Care: Yoga

Move through a sixty-minute flow with yoga and meditation teacher Constance Hartwell. No previous experience is necessary. Please bring your own yoga mat. Outdoors weather permitting.

12:00 – 1:00 p.m. | Sound Bath

Experience the healing possibilities of sound with Sol & Sound as they offer a group meditation and sound bath. Please bring your own yoga mat. All ages. Outdoors weather permitting.

1:30 – 2:00 p.m. | Tochi Tales Juneteenth Storytelling

Tochi is Swahili for “flashlight,” and storytellers Jayon and Jon Kev will brighten your day with lively stories about the holiday. Participants are encouraged to bring something comfortable to sit on. 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. | Zine Workshop

Make a zine that honors and celebrates Juneteenth with educators from Able ARTS Work, a nonprofit offering opportunities in the creative arts for people of all abilities.

Chloë Bass, #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America, 2023 (installation view). Glass and stainless steel. Courtesy the artist

Fridays, June 28 & August 30, 2024 | 7:00 – 11:00 p.m.

KCRW Summer Nights @ CAAM

Stroll through CAAM’s latest exhibitions, dance to grooves from KCRW DJs, and enjoy delicious fare from some of LA’s favorite food trucks, a beer garden, and more at the city’s best dance party!

The mission of the California African American Museum is to research, collect, preserve, and interpret for public enrichment the history, art, and culture of African Americans, with an emphasis on California and the western United States.

schedule of programs and

Admission is FREE.

Hours

Galleries open: Tuesdays – Saturdays 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sundays 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Locations

CAAM is located in Exposition Park, which is home to a variety of museums and attractions. Parking is $15/$18 (day/evening) at 39th and Figueroa Streets. The Metro Expo line stop Expo Park/USC is a five-minute walk through the Rose Garden to the Museum.

Art + Practice (A+P), where CAAM is presenting exhibitions and programs as part of a five-year collaboration, is located in Leimert Park at 3401 W. 43rd Place. Metered parking is available on Degnan Boulevard and W. 43rd Place. Free street parking can be found in the neighboring residential area with a two-block walk to A+P. Bus lines that stop nearby are 40, 102, 210, 705, 710, and 740, and A+P is serviced by the Metro Crenshaw/LAX Line in the light rail system. The station is Leimert Park.

Open Tuesdays – Saturdays 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Stay in touch with CAAM caamuseum.org

Phone: 213.744.7432

Email: info@caamuseum.org

Subscribe to our monthly e-news for updates on exhibitions and public programs: caamuseum.org Facebook, X, and Instagram: @CAAMinLA

600 State Drive Exposition Park Los Angeles, CA 90037

caam state board of directors

todd hawkins, president

zna portlock houston, vice president

cornelious burke

terri holoman

joy simmons

executive director, cameron shaw

Front: Simone Leigh, Cupboard, 2020 (detail). Bronze, 88 1/2 × 85 × 44 7/8 in. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery; Photo: Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh Back: Paula Wilson, Salty & Fresh, 2014 (still). Digital video, color, sound, 8:04 min. Collection of the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College. Purchase, 2020.11.7