Frieze Week LA 2024

FRIEZE WEEK SA N TA M ONICA AIR PORT

In Profile: Eileen Harris Norton Pippa Garner’s Subversive Beauty

FEBR UA RY 29 – MA RC H 3 , 20 24

West Coast Women and Ceramics Max Hooper Schneider Goes Jurassic

Q&A: Pablo José Ramírez Visual Essay by Carlijn Jacobs

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CONTENTS 12

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Once upon a time, Santa Monica Airport was fully disguised as a model suburb, with false facades created by Hollywood set designers. This fascinating episode (p.16) informs the themes of this year’s Frieze Projects, curated by Art Production Fund. Featuring artists like Sharif Farrag and Matt Johnson, this initiative reflects director Christine Messineo’s vision for the fair to channel Los Angeles’s unique creative landscape: see also, the innovative Focus section, curated by Essence Harden (p.20), which includes a raft of progressive, local galleries. A recently re-championed artist, Pippa Garner, will be very visible at the airport this year (p.37), and thinking about how Garner plays with illusion and the unexpected inspired our decision to commission Carlijn Jacobs to create this issue’s cover image. Jacobs’s visual essay (p.38), in turn, reminds me of Lana Del Rey singing about “handmade beauty sealed up by two manmade walls.” To misquote the song, did you know that there’s a Lalanne topiary dinosaur beside Ocean Avenue?

On the Westside, it seems, there are surprises lurking behind every corner and curtain.

Matthew McLean, Creative Director, Frieze Studios & Editor, Frieze Week Global Partners

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10 A Homecoming Sam Francis’s bond with Santa Monica 12 Queens of Clay Los Angeles’s new generation of women ceramicists 14 Tales of the Unexpected Max Hooper Schneider on the Museum of Jurassic Technology

24 A Witness to Change The collecting journey of Eileen Harris Norton 32 The Writing’s on the Wall Judy Baca returns to The Great Wall of Los Angeles

38 Eye of the Beholder A visual essay by Carlijn Jacobs

18 Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award

46 Full-Color Plates Art-world and gastronomy legend Michael’s

Official Partner of Focus

Frieze Los Angeles Partner

On the Cover Carlijn Jacobs, 2024 Frieze Week is printed in Canada by Imprimerie Solisco and published

by Frieze Publishing Ltd © 2024.

37 Hair and Makeup by Pippa Garner Frieze reissues the artist’s subversive ’zine

16 Hiding in Plane Sight The duplicitous origins of Frieze Projects 2024

20 Starting Lineup The young galleries in Essence Harden’s 2024 Focus

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56 Q&A The Hammer Museum’s Pablo José Ramírez

The views expressed in Frieze Week are not necessarily those of the publishers.

Unauthorized reproduction of any material is strictly prohibited.

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WESTSIDE ART He traveled the world, but Sam Francis chose Santa Monica as his creative base. As his work features in a new exhibition about Gemini G.E.L. at the Getty Center, the evidence of Francis’s deep engagement with the local artistic community continues to come to light

A HOMECOMING To mark the 100th anniversary of Sam Francis’s birth, in 2023 cultural institutions across California mounted exhibitions, educational events and archival projects exploring the many phases of the artist’s career. Some, like “The Circle of Sam Francis: Experimenting in California,” presented by the Bakersfield Museum of Art, surveyed the artists who worked closely with Francis, touching on his role as a mentor and his desire to support the art communities within Santa Monica and beyond.

When poring over accounts of Francis’s life and practice, what emerges is the story of a man who valued collaboration and lively dialogue. His home on West Channel Road (previously owned by Charlie Chaplin, who used it as a garage for his fire-truck collection), became a hub for local and visiting artists and curators. “I think he kinda thrived on having that,” explained his son Shingo Francis, pointing to his father’s love of community and deep friendship.

Francis was born in San Mateo and worked in Paris, the south of France, Bern, Tokyo, Mexico City and New York.

He was considered one of the leading international artists of his time, known for his gestural, abstract paintings that played with color, light and scale.

He landed in Southern California in the 1960s and eventually settled in Santa Monica, a small and scrappy city when compared to international art hubs like New York or Paris. But Francis believed that Santa Monica, with its effervescent light and expansive ocean views, was the perfect backdrop for his creative work. Though he continued to travel exten­sively, maintaining studios around the world, he kept his base in Santa Monica until his death in 1994, becoming an influential force in the city. Beyond his own art practice, which included painting, printmaking and sculpture, Francis championed other artists, whether personally or through his printing press, The Litho Shop, which he founded in 1970.

Sam Francis: Santa Monica and a Legacy of Supporting Artists, a documentary series made by Tiana Alexandria

Williams in 2022, from which the earlier quote from Francis’s son was taken, explores the artist’s connection to Santa Monica during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The documentary blends archival footage and interviews with Francis’s family, friends and collaborators.

A filmmaker, researcher and archivist, Williams created the series after receiving the inaugural Sam Francis Media Fellowship in 2020. The award, orga­ nized by Santa Monica’s 18th Street Arts Center and the Sam Francis Foundation, functions as an artist residency exchange between Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico City and Paris, focusing on projects that explore the artist’s legacy. For Williams, at the time a University of Southern California graduate student in cinema and media studies, the fellowship was an opportunity to learn more about Francis and the art history of Santa Monica.

Williams began by reading through the oral histories transcribed in the Sam Francis Foundation’s archives, pulling out important landmarks to add to 18th Street Arts Center’s Culture Mapping 90404 project : a community-run map dedicated to the history and cultural sites of Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood.

Most of the interviews had been conduct­ ed by Jeffrey Perkins for his 2008 documentary, The Painter Sam Francis.

But, as Williams went on, questions sprang up. She recalls wondering: “Why did Sam come to Santa Monica? He could have landed in Paris. He could have landed in Japan or in New York. When Sam came to Santa Monica, it had an up-and-coming art scene, but it wasn’t huge.” Encouraged by the foundation’s director, Debra Burchett-Lere, and board advisor Nancy Mozur, Williams conducted additional interviews that focused on the relationships Francis forged in the city, and how these bonds shaped the burgeoning art community.

At one point in his documentary, Perkins explains how Francis was a key patron of the light-projection collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, which Perkins formed in 1968, alongside other members. Williams notes, “[Francis] saw the value in what they were doing

and said: here is my support.” Through the Litho Shop and his connection with Gemini G.E.L. — an artists’ workshop and publisher of limited-edition prints, founded in 1966 — Francis was also a champion of printmaking. “He brought on several people that are well-known in the community now, including Mozur, Jacob Samuel and George Page,” says Williams.

Looking back on her experience of working on the documentary, Williams is grateful to have had the opportunity

to share Francis’s story with a wider audience. While the films delve into Francis’s artistry and career, they are also a tribute to the interpersonal relationships he forged. What stands out, aside from his unyielding creative vision, was his belief in the importance of art as an ecosystem, one that depends on the deep bonds between artists and their surroundings.

Allison Noelle Conner is a writer. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.

Below Sam Francis in his West Channel Road studio, Santa Monica, 1967.

Courtesy: © Sam Francis Foundation, California/ Artists Rights Society, New York “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” is on view at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA, until July 7

First Came a

Friendship Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L. Through July 7, 2024 Research Institute at the Getty Center

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Roy Lichtenstein (detail), 1983. Photo by Sidney B. Felsen.

Gift of Jack Shear. Art © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Text, design, image © J. Paul Getty Trust

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WESTSIDE ART Taking up the mantle of the legendary Westside artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, a new generation of female ceramicists across Los Angeles are bringing a fresh and sometimes troubling sensibility to the medium, as Jennifer S. Li finds

QUEENS OF CLAY

Photography Peyton Fulford Opposite Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s studio in Los Angeles, December 2023. Top left: Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Michael Frimkess, Mercado Persa, 1996

Southern California’s history of ceramic art has long been associated with the boys: the legendary, rule-breaking ceramicist Peter Voulkos; Ron Nagle and Ken Price, with their unusual use of synthetics; and Tony Marsh, artist and influential professor at California State University, to name but a few. But, while these artists have reimagined the material beyond its traditional boundaries of function and craft, it is Los Angeles-based female artists—many of whom have already had or will have exhibitions this year— that are fine-tuning the message behind the medium, and shaping culture through shaping clay.

Diana Yesenia Alvarado, whose first solo show in Los Angeles, “Earth Wish,” closed at Jeffrey Deitch in January, is one such artist. While studying at California State University, Long Beach, Alvarado was able to experiment on a grand scale, owing to the ceramic department’s large kilns. Her irresistibly charming sculptures and vessels require immense athleticism to shape, while their glazing is as mesmerizing as an abstract-expressionist or color-field painting. Alvarado’s works picture cartoon characters of her own invention, with shades of Looney Tunes, collectible Homies dolls and the Precious Moments figurines that surrounded her during childhood. Her silver-toned bunny, CONEJO ESPACIAL (2023), is a pithy riff on Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel Rabbit (1986). A pair of cats, fierce in their stance and gaze, are a mash-up of any number of famous cartoon felines and Chinese Tang Dynasty Foo dogs. Alvarado’s smaller, shelf-placed sculptures are no less arresting, capturing a contemporary sense of ennui and the complicated politics of diminutiveness and power in Japanese kawaii culture.

Of the same generation, fellow LA artist Kristy Moreno’s slab- and coilbuilt stoneware sculptures, recently on view at Ochi Gallery in Los Angeles,

have a solidity and monumentality that belie their frothy mix of niche popcultural references. Taking in 1970s LA punk fashion, Chicanx lowrider culture and 1990s Chola staples like nameplate door-knocker earrings, the finely rendered elements fit together like hiero­glyphics or pictographs on an ancient stele, with a futuristic spin, thanks to their Day-Glo palette.

It’s not only younger artists adding cartoon- and pop-inspired decoration to their ceramics. At 95, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess has been doing exactly that for more than six decades. Her figurines and hand-built vessels featuring the likes of Olive Oyl, Donald Duck and Condori­ to — a comic-book character from Chile, where the Venezuela-born artist moved in 1949 — are completely idiosyncratic and autobiographical. They are even diaristic in the sense that Suarez Frimkess wakes up and goes to work in her Venice studio every day, making exactly what she feels like: “I just use whatever happens that day,” she told T Magazine in 2014. “It’s like a menu that you choose your food from.”

When I ask why she includes cartoons in her work, Suarez Frimkess, speaking over the phone, explains: “It started with the pre-Columbians. The pre-Columbians were the best cartoonists. Way before Mickey Mouse and all that.” Suarez Frimkess might focus on the everyday but there is a seriousness underlying her comical depictions: “I also use cartoons because it’s a kind of cover,” she says.

“You won’t be attacked for expressing your ideas because it’s funny.” Suarez Frimkess has only been widely recognized for her contributions to the arts in the last few years and her first museum retrospective, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in August of this year.

Perhaps it was only natural that Sachi Moskowitz, Suarez Frimkess’s stepgranddaughter (through her partner and

frequent collaborator, Michael Frimkess), chose to work in ceramics: “Given that my grandparents are ceramicists,” she says in an email, “I thought I would try it out beyond making little things here and there when I’d go to their house.” Working in a limited palette of blue and white that recalls Delftware, as well as its precursor, Chinese porcelain, Moskowitz’s vessels are also reminiscent of her grandparents’ approach in their wide variety of subjects, ranging from quotations from Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612–13) to references to Moskowitz’s own life and dreams.

There is something strangely familiar about New Zealand-born, LA-based Anna Sew Hoy’s alien ceramic forms.

They reference our bodies and the abodes in which we seek shelter or community, and are punctuated by rounded, womblike structures. Sew Hoy frequently combines her ceramic work with worn denim in a further, familiar reference to the body.

Psychic Body Grotto (2017), on long-term view at Los Angeles State Historic Park, is meant to evoke a gazebo for future or imaginary meetings. She has recently curated the exhibition “Scratching at the Moon” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Realized with support from executive director Anne Ellegood, the show features 13 Asian-American artists with ties to Los Angeles, including Sew Hoy. As well as pushing the medium materially, artists are expanding ceramics conceptually. Amia Yokoyama works in porcelain — a material with a long history which began in East Asia before being commodified by European courts and nobility. Yokoyama’s buxom, largebottomed women appear almost aqueous in their dripping glazes. The works draw upon myriad topics and concepts, from the artist’s childhood playing in the mud to anime Slime Girls and other digital and real-world concepts. While the rich and

powerful may use their rituals and collec­ tions of objects to achieve a veneer of refinement, Yokoyama lays fetishization bare in her oozing, provocative figures.

In a similarly provocative vein is Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s enthralling performative and sculptural work Pedazos de Perra (2023). The clay- and metal-based sculptures in Canseco’s wider oeuvre often appear as if they are unraveling and becoming at the same time. The works are insistently grotesque and baroque, as if demanding that the viewer not look away. In Pedazos de Perra, Canseco slowly ties more than a dozen ceramic plates onto her body, like armor. In a final flourish, she inserts a lubed-up butt plug with a tail extension. The audience watches as she crawls around on all fours, invoking the spirit of the xoloitzcuintle, a hairless Mexican dog with a 3,000-year history reaching back to the Mayans and Aztecs, which Canseco has adopted into her oeuvre as a symbol of return, history, home, memory and more. Canseco’s show at Murmurs in downtown Los Angeles is currently on view.

It is the specificity and idiosyncrasy of each of these artist’s bodies of work — and the malleable relationship to their chosen material — that gives them their import and individuality in an age of information silos and personalized algorithms. Asked if she considers an audience when making her work, Suarez Frimkess, the elder stateswoman among these LA-based, women artists working in ceramics, replies: “I’m just thinking about myself and my life. I’m selfish.”

Jennifer S. Li is a writer, educator and advisor. She lives in Los Angeles, USA. “Scratching at the Moon,” curated by Anna Sew Hoy, is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles until May 12 “Grietas de Acero,” Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s solo show at Murmurs, Los Angeles, is on view until March 9

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WESTSIDE ART Artist Max Hooper Schneider is fascinated by Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, one of Westside LA’s most idiosyncratic and shadowy collections. He expounds on its important role in confronting lazy empiricism and “functional knowledge”

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MOJT) was co-founded in 1988 by Diana Drake Wilson and David Hildebrand Wilson. Established with a critical intent, the MOJT has remained committed to foregrounding subaltern ways of comprehending and thinking about the world. The exhibits and manuscripts housed therein cannot be fitted into modern, disciplined knowledge and its associated cultural productions, which have left behind medieval mystery and enchantment to become increasingly specialized and reductive in terms of what they investigate and count as knowledge — and art.

This subversive approach is instantly palpable in the MOJT’s dramaturgy, with its tenebrific lighting and the selfconsciously prosaic technics of its dioramic displays, cloistered curations

and tearoom — the latter rife with publications on subjects ranging from the nature of the cosmos to hypersymbolic cognition. Entering the museum is like walking into an enormous, smokyquartz crystal ball aswirl with dried sperm, butterfly scales and chickensized RVs or, alternatively, a mausoleum behind a diner on Route 66. There is something playfully damning about this place, as if we were wandering among ghosts in the scrapyard of a failed positivism — an intentional haunting that is the museum’s unmistakable gestalt or vibe.

The valorization of the ambiguous and incongruent is evident before one even enters the museum: it is signaled in its name. The Jurassic period was characterized by a magnificent vegetal lushness, oceanic flourishing and the

Below Mouse cures from the exhibition “Tell the Bees … Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” Courtesy: The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232, USA

formation of new seas, and the advent of droves of new species and classes of life. The MOJT, however, has little to do with this 200-million-year-old ecological proliferation and the behemothic reptilian parade that followed, other than the fact that the Lower Jurassic epoch remains somewhat opaque to the reasoned calculus of science. Effectively, the name of the institution functions as a neologism with more than a scintilla of sardonic wit and the occult thrown in, as well as pointing to its exact opposite — the contemporary Holocene’s theater of planetary destruction.

The conceit of the “Jurassic,” moreover, operates as a parable. It was a marked climactic shift that became the tableau for invention, which is reflected in the museum’s quixotic wares and maverick exhibitions.

Mrs Alice May Williams, whose 1931 letter to astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena is preserved in the museum’s collection, writes that she possesses valuable knowledge that no one may have again. This idiosyncratic perception is not part of the repertoire of contemporary thought.

Knowledge must be reproducible and functional, capable of being instrumentalized, transformable into an algorithm or, alternatively, a story. It has become hegemonic across disciplines that telling a story is the most efficacious mode of not only communicating meaning but having it. While algorithms work behind the scenes to shape perception into a highly functional, readily brandable, conformity, the story performs the same function while softening the blow.

In short, the MOJT stands in opposition to today’s standards of aesthetic and intellectual production, whereby creation and interpretation are expected

to obey the authorized model of mar­ ketable messaging. To be considered relevant (marketable), cultural products, including artworks, must present a message and this message must be clear.

Ambiguity is considered not only useless but disturbing. Like a mess, it can only be cleaned up. The MOJT, rather than hiding messes, exhibits them.

As a practicing artist, I have remained an avid fan of the museum’s deconstructive project as well as its utilization of the dioramic mode across multiple scales, its penchant for cryptobiology and its presentation of worlds in boxes. To this day, I have retained my boyhood dream of creating something inside this darkened sanctum.

The contemporary relevance of the museum, however, exceeds far beyond any personal preference. The MOJT exists as a bulwark against conformity, providing a rare opening into the world of the intentionally obscured and purposely marginalized. In its championing of the creative importance of messiness and ambiguity, the museum provides an important counter to the present zeitgeist with its insistence on market-driven homogeneity. Within the museum, meanings multiply in outlawed splendor and classificatory regimes collide, expanding comprehension and spawning fecund confusions.

To visit the MOJT is to experience the excitements and wonders of the un­categorizable and incongruent, of all that dwells permanently in the magic of the margins.

Max Hooper Schneider is an artist. He lives in Los Angeles, USA.

Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s THROUGH MAY 12

Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | Free Admission

SUNG NEUNG KYUNG, APPLE, 1976 (DETAIL). 17 GELATIN SILVER PRINTS, MARKER, PEN, 6 × 4 IN. (15.2 × 10.2 CM.) EACH. DAEJEON MUSEUM OF ART. © SEUNG NEUNG KYUNG. PHOTO: JANG JUNHO

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FRIEZE PROJECTS Did you know that Santa Monica Airport was once entirely covered by a fake suburb, created by Hollywood set designers? This extraordinary incident of disguise and deception is the inspiration for this year’s Frieze Projects program, curated by Art Production Fund

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT Art fairs have the challenging task of providing an appropriate backdrop for thousands of works with wildly varying subject matter, media and aesthetic properties. In some ways, a venue is chosen for its ability to disappear, receding into the periphery and foregrounding the works on display. Think of familiar venues like the Miami Beach Convention Center, used for Art Basel, or the Javits Center for the Armory Show in New York. Airports are similarly nondescript entities. If it wasn’t for the H-O-L-L-YW-O-O-D alphabet keychains in LAX’s duty-free shop, I would be none the wiser as to my whereabouts. In this way, an airport is an unexpectedly appropriate location for an art fair: the tent at Frieze Los Angeles patently fits right in at Santa Monica Airport (SMO). What is less well known, however, is how the fair’s host location has observed this essential criterion of disappearance.

Previously known as Clover Field, SMO first came into being in 1917. Then, 27 years later, it disappeared. During WWII it was home to the Douglas Aircraft Company, which developed and produced planes instrumental to the Allied success in the war, including the ubiquitous Douglas DC-3 transport.

So vital was the site that it was decided to completely disguise it from the air. Making use of local talent, Douglas employed set designers from Warner Bros studios to conceal the plant. It was a monumental task. An entire imitation neighborhood was built, using close to 5 million square feet of chicken wire

draped over 400 poles, completely covering the site. The decoy neighborhood was the full package, with lightweight, wood-frame houses with attached garages, trees made of wire and spray-painted chicken feathers, clotheslines and fences.

The airfield’s runway was transformed into a field using green paint spat out by tanker trucks. Streets and sidewalks were painted to match those in nearby Sunset Park, where employees at the aircraft company were housed.

The disguise was so successful that some inbound pilots could not locate the Santa Monica landing strip and were forced to use other nearby airstrips instead. To resolve this, men waving red flags were placed at either end of the runway. Eventually, white markers were painted on the hillside to replace the flagwielding men. Upon completion of the project, Warner Bros decided to conceal their own studios in light of concerns that, viewed from above, they might also appear to be an aircraft plant. Over time, the scarecrow neighborhood built over the airport was absorbed into the community and its eventual removal in July 1945 was the source of a real feeling of loss. Just as the Douglas site miraculously vanished in 1944, so did its chicken-wire alter ego a year later.

Reflecting the history of the fair’s location, Frieze Projects at Frieze Los Angeles 2024 espouses themes of disguise and subterfuge. Read beyond this as: misleading, hiding, betraying, bluffing, counterfeiting, miscommuni­ cating, deceiving, or creating a hoax,

Opposite Douglas Aircraft Company site, now Santa Monica Airport, camouflaged as a residential neighborhood during World War II, 1944.

Courtesy: © Boeing Images Frieze Projects: “Set Seen,” curated by Art Production Fund, is on view across the Santa Monica Airport site throughout the fair, featuring works

by Ryan Flores, Derek Fordjour, Pippa Garner, Cynthia Talmadge and others.

To find out more, visit frieze.com

illusion, facade or mask. These themes have been dealt with by artists both directly and indirectly throughout the canon. Just over a decade ago, in Hito Steyerl’s 2013 video piece How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, the artist outlines the ways we can disappear or disguise ourselves in the digital age.

In one scene, Steyerl shows us a satellite calibration target : a giant pixel painted on the ground that allows satellites to focus their lenses and test their resolution. The current size of one of these pixels is one foot square. In 1996, it was 130 feet square. To elude surveillance from space, we must now be smaller than one foot in any direction. In the video, performers cavort with one-footsquare boxes on their heads, reveling in the freedom of their invisibility. Steyerl also darkly presents other ways of disappearing: “being female and over 50, [...] being undocumented or poor.”

Pippa Garner, who has been invited to participate in Frieze Projects this year, approaches ideas of disguise and subterfuge with greater immediacy.

Her work suggests that everything we see is already some kind of mask, its permutations anticipating an eventual reveal. Entire parts of her own body are an illusion. A trompe-l’oeil bra and thong and a wooden leg are tattooed on by Dawn Purnell. In Garner’s 1974 sculpture and performance Backwards Car, she drove a 1959 Chevy across the Golden Gate Bridge. The car’s bodywork was lifted and flipped on the

chassis, creating the appearance of it driving in reverse. For Garner, this creed extends to gender. She began “gender hacking” in the mid-1980s, acquiring black-market estrogen from trans sex workers she met on Hollywood Boulevard.

In 1991, she underwent top surgery paid for with the sale of an Ed Ruscha print and, in 1992, after a trip to Brussels, she “came home with a vagina.” Interviewed by hannah baer last year for frieze, she says that if at birth she could have chosen her gender “[she] would have had the same attitude toward whatever body [she] got.” Garner’s vision is not definitive and, through disguise, she discovers the multitudes inherent in all things.

Purposeful disguise is critical—these actions have the intention of subverting expectations or furthering discourse.

In the chapter “The Line and Light” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis (1977), Jacques Lacan writes of disguise: “It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled—exactly like the technique practiced in human warfare.” Art that does not scrutinize the politics of its production and landscape of its era runs the risk of being accidentally disguised — a disguise that simply reproduces the structures present in society. And where better to explore this subject than against the mottled background of Santa Monica Airport, concealed for human warfare?

Thara Parambi is a writer and artist. She lives in London, UK, and Los Angeles, USA.

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FRIEZE PARTNER: DEUTSCHE BANK

Movies That Made Us By the 2024 Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award Fellows JEANINE FISER The best movie to understand LA Miracle Mile (Steve De Jarnatt, 1988): A mad dash to LAX, fears of the apocalypse (that may or may not be around the corner) and the iconic Johnie’s Coffee Shop — this film is LA to its core.

The best movie to understand me/my filmmaking Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017): Greta Gerwig said this film is “not true but rhymes with the truth.” I think that pretty well captures what I like to achieve in filmmaking. It feels personal; it’s sometimes sweet, sometimes funny.

The best movie to understand “technology” 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968): The message that technology has been and always will be weaponized

is bleak, but hard to argue with, and definitely worth pondering.

CELINE EVA Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014): While other films set in LA romanticize the city, this one shows just how lonely and gritty it can be.

Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) or Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971): They both use very little to convey so much emotion, and the style of editing and varied shot lengths within sequences, though different, have stayed with me.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013): It’s on the nose. Tech is supposed to solve our problems, the internet grants us connectivity, but really, it just makes us lonelier and less in touch with who we are and who we want to be.

OCTAVIA ANDERSON Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015): It does a great job of depicting the so-called “underbelly” of LA — and I say “so-called” because I feel that these people are in fact LA. The coloring is warm and oversaturated, yet has green, scummy undertones just like my beautiful, dirty LA. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974): This was really inspiring to me in terms of writing and character arc. The shots in certain scenes are shaky, emulating Mabel’s struggle to get a grip on reality. Things are left unexplained, which lets you think and empathize more deeply.

WarGames (John Badham, 1983): It’s very relevant today, as we witness the progression and advancement of tactics of colonization and genocide across the globe.

JONATHAN ESTRADA-SALAZAR My Family (Gregory Nava, 1995): Three generations of a Mexican-American family and their struggles to assimilate in LA — a realistic representation of some of the difficulties Latino families have or have had to go through in order to secure a better life for their loved ones.

Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz, 1986): I am a huge musical fan and always love playing their soundtracks in the background. This one is really fun to watch and occasionally sing!

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014): With huge advancements toward AI over these last few years, I feel as if this film is slowly becoming less science fiction and more grounded in reality.

BRITT WILLIAMS Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978): A great film that meditates on, and ultimately contrasts, youthful hope and adult ambivalence, set against the beautiful backdrop of 1970s LA. Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985): Juzo Itami is a master of storytelling. He plays with structure and form to create oneof-a-kind films. I love the humor, satirical edge and carefully composed images.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Garth Jennings, 2005): I remember watching this for the first time and wanting to have every single gadget for my own personal use. It’s incredibly inventive and funny.

KAYLEN NG Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988): An underdog story of

fame, fortune, failure and picking yourself up to continue chasing your dreams.

What’s more LA than that?

Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985): Seeing the DeLorean fly was my “woah, movies are cool” moment. The way the film blends genres and creates such vivid and memorable scenes through a grounded story is what I look for in everything I make.

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998): This is the film to see how technology and media influence and affect all of us on a human level. Its “dystopian” elements have become very real parts of the 21st century — and no one bats an eye at them.

KAT TORRES Mi Vida Loca (Allison Anders, 1993): This film encapsulates the essence of LA for me. My deep connection to this everchanging and vibrant city, particularly growing up in Echo Park, has significantly influenced my filmmaking.

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999): It opened my eyes to the captivating duality of beauty and tragedy in girlhood. While I couldn’t fully connect with the American girl experiences portrayed, it ignited my passion as a filmmaker. Inspired by my Latina and POC perspective, I’m driven to weave tales that resonate with the nuances of diverse girlhood.

Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983): Despite its absurdity, this film effec­t ively portrays society’s fixation with technology, and it has had a lasting impact on my perspective.

MIGUEL RAMIREZ Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978): Showcasing a different view of the city — one that centers on a nonwhite perspective — it calls attention to class struggle and the idea of how workingclass and, specifically, Black people live under capitalism.

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995): One of many films that gives an insight into the themes I love to write about: class struggle, satire and friendship.

Its ability to connect audiences via these complex outsiders resonates strongly with me.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013): It presents a grounded perspective on how technology can be used in everyday life. This exploration of the themes of loneliness, grief and commercialization is very impactful for me.

Top left Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep, 1978. Courtesy: Photo 12/Alamy Bottom left Britt Williams, SOFT LAUNCH, 2024, Fellow of the 2024 Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award. Courtesy: Britt Williams and Frieze Now in its fifth edition, the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award is an open call for young filmmakers based in greater Los Angeles to take up a Fellowship: a three-month-long program to develop their craft and produce a film short, in partnership with Ghetto Film School and FIFTH SEASON .

This year, the Fellows were invited to address the theme of “technological transformations” in their short films.

The Fellows’ finished films are judged by a jury of leading figures in contemporary art and entertainment — this year including director Julio Quintana and artist Jose Dávila — with the winner of the Jury Award announced during Frieze Los Angeles 2024, alongside an Audience Award, voted for by the public.

To watch all the films by the 2024 Fellows of the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award and discover the winners, visit: frieze.com/ DB-Frieze-LA-FilmAward

Supporting you with a shared passion for art. #PositiveImpact Whether it’s helping you unlock the value of your collection or planning for its future, our expertise has been shaped by a shared passion for art spanning over four decades.

To find out how our dedicated art lending team can help you release capital without selling and support your collecting ambitions, get in touch by scanning the QR code:

© Erin O’Keefe. Courtesy Seventeen, London In Europe, Middle East and Africa as well as in Asia Pacific this material may be considered marketing material, but this is not the case in the U.S. The value of an investment can fall as well as rise and you might not get back the amount originally invested. The services described in this advertisement are provided by Deutsche Bank AG or by its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in accordance with appropriate local legislation and regulation. Deutsche Bank AG is subject to comprehensive supervision by the European Central Bank (“ECB”), by Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and by Germany’s central bank (“Deutsche Bundesbank”). Brokerage services in the United States are offered through Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., a broker-dealer and registered investment adviser, which conducts investment banking and securities activities in the United States. Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. is a member of FINRA, NYSE and SIPC. Lending and banking services in the United States are offered through Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, member FDIC, and other members of the Deutsche Bank Group. The products, services, information and/or materials referred to within this advertisement may not be available for residents of certain jurisdictions. © 2024 Deutsche Bank AG and/or its subsidiaries.

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FOCUS Under the curation of Essence Harden for the first time, this year’s Focus section sees presentations from galleries rooted in community, place and ideas of ecology. Taylor Bythewood-Porter considers the field

STARTING LINEUP It’s a warm afternoon in late November 2023 when I meet up with Essence Harden in Downtown Los Angeles to discuss their role as curator of the Focus section at this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

Harden has chosen to examine art as eco­logy and how the interconnectedness at the heart of this idea highlights regional relationships and elevates ancestral frameworks. As they explain: “While organizing my vision, I thought of the word ‘ecologies’ as a traditional art term, but in reference to the relationship between humans and non-human things with the environment. Each of the exhibiting artists has a base relationship with that theme, in their imagery, color and form, and with the principles of the earth.”

Harden is visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum in LA, where she coordinated “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration” (on view until March 2), co-organized by the Mississippi Museum

of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Other shows include “California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold,” co-curated with Elizabeth Armstrong and Gilbert Vicario at Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, and “Mappings” at Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood in 2019. Like this year’s Focus section, the latter addressed concepts of memory, cosmology and geographical knowledge.

“It’s like a draft or a chapter: one exhibition, one moment doesn’t have to be the end,” says Harden. “I think of these things as being revisited; Black visual culture, California, the ways in which people practice here are themes that I return to often.”

Expanding on ideas around migration and movement within California and the US is important to Harden as a third-generation Californian.

“My family has lived between southern and northern California our whole lives. The state itself operates as a single entity, as a home base.” This deep connection to the region’s arts and cultural

Photography Simons Finnerty Focus, curated by Essence Harden, is on view at Frieze Los Angeles for the duration of the fair, featuring: Babst Gallery showing Harry Fonseca; Matthew Brown showing Kent O’Connor; Dominique Gallery showing Mustafa Ali Clayton; Quinn Harrelson showing Ser Serpas; Lyles & King showing Akea Brionne; Make Room showing Yeni Mao; Chela Mitchell Gallery showing Siena Smith; Shulamit Nazarian showing Widline Cadet; Ochi Gallery showing Lilian Martinez; pt.2 gallery showing Muzae Sesay; Sow & Tailor showing Javier Ramirez; and Hannah Traore Gallery showing James Perkins.

For more information, visit frieze.com

community can be felt in Harden’s Focus.

When I ask how the section is specific to LA, they respond: “Because I’m based here, I have a deep fondness and pride for what LA has been for me. In my curatorial practice, I’m always looking towards what the city itself is producing — when you have something from out of town, like Frieze, coming to LA, it’s important that the home base is really able to show up.”

Harden has selected 12 galleries, nine of which are based in California.

This year, the fair’s layout has been redesigned and all exhibitors are in one tent. Harden observes: “What’s great about Focus being folded into the main section is that these galleries and artists will be seen as being just as powerful, just as worthy for visitors to stop, pause and pay attention.”

Los Angeles-based Babst Gallery is presenting pieces by the late Harry Fonseca. “We are working with the Autry Museum of the American West and the Heard Museum, with dealers and

people who knew Harry, to put together a complete list of works,” explains Helen Babst. Fonseca was of Hawaiian, Portuguese and Nisenan Maidu ancestry, and was an enrolled citizen of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.

His paintings and drawings represent oral traditions, utilizing signs and symbols to make sense of dark histories and sacred moments. In one series from 1991–92, Fonseca confronts the bloodshed and forced labor that California’s Indigenous populations were subjected to during the 19th-century Gold Rush.

Yeni Mao, showing with Make Room, touches on similar subjects. Mao’s new body of work comprises four- to six-foottall sculptures made of steel armatures combined with ceramics, animal skin and volcanic rock, displayed atop a mound of soil. Through his sculptural recreations of the floor plans of tunnels underneath the Mexico–US border town of Mexicali, Mao addresses the history of Chinese and Chinese Mexican populations who have inhab­ited this land since

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the turn of the 20th century. “We are creating a whole install­ation around these works,” says Emelia Yin, the gallery’s owner. In his visual language, Mao forms moments of suspension: a term borrowed from architecture that refers to abstract concepts of strength and balance. This is evident in his presentation here, in which the artist encourages the audience to consider the experiences of diasporic communities through space and material.

At Quinn Harrelson, Ser Serpas turns trash into poetry, engaging with diverse media. The artist, who grew up in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights, reappraises found objects, cri­t iquing and celebrating their value—or lack thereof— and working them into her sculptural work. With its muted tones and carnal abstractions, Serpas’s work plays on ideas of the body, vulnerability and identity.

Mustafa Ali Clayton’s presentation with Dominique Gallery echoes Mao’s and Serpas’s engagement with selfhood.

Best known for his large, ebony-glaze busts depicting Black bodies, at Focus

Clayton presents a new terracotta series referencing legacy-building and commemoration. Gallery owner Dominique Clayton, who is married to the artist, explains: “These are objects of perman­ ence. They are things that are meant to last forever. Clay is the oldest form of technology; it allowed us to make beautiful things, to eat, to warm our homes.” Clayton’s use of natural elements and sustainable materials is a nod to African societies. His work often elevates Black womanhood and manhood, while simultaneously confronting and question­ing their associated iconography.

Clayton’s hand-built, labor-intensive sculptures present a reclaiming of self as a tool for social justice.

New works by Lilian Martinez at Ochi Gallery consider self-care as an act of resistance. Her bright and playful scenes depict women at leisure, enjoying fruit, looking at art or basking in the sun. Centering brown bodies in her practice, Martinez prioritizes ideas of safety, harmony and nourishment,

Above Left to right: Seth Curcio (Shulamit Nazarian), Emilia Yin (Make Room), Essence Harden, Shulamit Nazarian (Shulamit Nazarian), Dominique Clayton (Dominique Gallery), Helen Babst (Babst Gallery), Karen Galloway (Sow & Tailor), Pauli Ochi (Ochi Gallery)

while acknowledging a history of gender and racial inequality, especially for women of color. Her protagonists appear in narratives that suggest femininity and autonomy, memories of a forgotten past and an imagined future.

In juxtaposition with Martinez’s figurative future is the work of Muzae Sesay, at pt.2 gallery, whose abstracted, Afrofuturistic worlds present a new language. The Oakland-based artist, who hails from Long Beach, looks to his Sierra Leonean ancestry to imagine a fictionalized future in which the West African country keeps its natural resources and becomes an imperial force for good. Approaching worldbuilding through the architecture of structured shapes and tones reminiscent of a Californian sunset, these paint­ings envision new economic systems and places of safety and tranquility.

Exploring memory and community through perceived truths, Sesay’s new body of work poses the question: “What if?”

This year’s Focus reflects the aura of Los Angeles. The work on show contemplates migration and identity within that space of movement, conveys the city’s rebelliousness and sense of limitlessness. Harden not only honors the Californian ethos but connects to universal themes of awareness, socio­ economics, diversity and reclaiming the self. “I feel so much gratitude for how LA has allowed me to think about my place here and innovate, change and grow,” says Harden. “I hope that the project feels fluid, exciting and intentional — all at once.”

Taylor Bythewood-Porter is an independent curator and writer. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.

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COLLECTING Watts-born Eileen Harris Norton bought her first artwork in 1976, and her collection is a testament to her journey of discovery and deep affinity with Black artists. Ahead of a new book about her collection, the co-founder of Art + Practice talks to its editor, Taylor Renee Aldridge. Photography by Clifford Prince King

A WITNESS TO CHANGE TAYLOR RENEE ALDRIDGE Let’s start by talking about the publication of the first book on your collection: All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection [2024]. It focuses on works that were made by women and especially women of color. I’ve had the pleasure of editing it and there are contributions from brilliant art scholars, including Genevieve Hyacinthe, Steven Nelson, Legacy Russell, Lowery Stokes Sims and others. What motivated you to pursue this book project and why is it focused on women artists in particular?

EILEEN HARRIS NORTON To honor the 100th anniversary of the US women’s suffrage movement in 2020, my co-founders at Art + Practice, Mark Bradford and Allan DiCastro, and I thought it would be great to organize an exhibition featuring the women artists in my collection and, specifically, those of color. We reached out to the Hammer

Museum, our initial museum partner [from 2015–16], about the idea, and the curator Erin Christovale took the project on. She titled the show “Collective Constellation: Selections from the Eileen Harris Norton Collection.” It was phe­ nomenal to see the diversity of women artists in my collection, from Betye Saar to Sadie Barnette, Ruth Waddy to Julie Mehretu, and all the connections between them. Welcoming the community to see the works at Art + Practice was a great joy as well.

Sadly, due to Covid-19, the exhibi­tion was only up for six weeks at Art + Practice, and so we had to think about other ways of continuing the project and present­ing the artists in my collection to the world.

We decided a book was the best way forward, and then we met with you! It was wonderful how you brought in many different curatorial voices to talk about my collection while expanding the scope of the original exhibition’s artist roster to further explain the artists’ connections.

TRA What do you hope readers will get from the book?

EHN I wanted the book to be an educa­ tional tool. I lack a formal arts education, but I’ve learned so much going through the process of collecting and I’ve developed personal connections with artists, curators and other voices in the field. I want All These Liberations to be more than just a coffee-table book, and to include all these wonderful writers and thinkers solidified my original intention.

TRA I think so many people know you as a patron operating behind the scenes. You’re not really someone who likes a lot of attention. But the exhibition made your collection visible as well as you and the work that you’ve done over recent decades, and how your contributions have shifted the entire arts ecosystem.

In our many conversations while developing the book, you mentioned Ruth Waddy as an important artist in your collection. In 1976, you purchased

your first artwork: The Exhorters [1976]

by Waddy. She was an LA-based orga­ nizer, art patron, artist and printmaker who was operating on the West Coast, and was really formative in developing a Black arts ecosystem in LA. She was also an art historian who documented the artists of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s up until her passing in 2003. Can you tell me about that purchase in 1976? How did you come to be exposed to Waddy’s work? And how has it foreshadowed your collecting overall?

EHN It was a happy accident. My mom and I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times advertising an exhibition at The Museum of African American Art. Waddy was going to be demonstrating and showing her work at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. So, we went along and there she was, working on some prints.

My mom and I had been to museums and were art enthusiasts, but a working, living artist and a Black woman based in LA besides — wow, that was fabulous!

Photography Clifford Prince King

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We were the only ones there and we walked up to her and just started talking, asking her what she was doing, what she was making, how she did it.

My mom was kicking me, saying: “You got to buy something from the lady.” So, I picked out a print. I don’t remember why I chose that particular work. There were a lot. I was a teacher at the time. That was my first experience meeting a living artist and a Black artist — and right here in LA. I met my ex-husband, Peter Norton, in 1981. We lived in Venice and there were artists all up and down the block at that time. We would walk around and wander into studios. A few galleries started to open up there in the early 1980s. We just fell into looking at art. We didn’t have any money then to buy but, as time went on, we realized we had enough money and could start collecting.

Without any formal education in art, we just bought what grabbed us in the moment. We were buying prints by George Grosz and Edward Hopper, the Hundred

Guilder Print [c.1648] by Rembrandt. They didn’t cost much. That was our collecting start. Then we became a little more sophis­ ticated with our collecting process, and we would go to artists’ studios and started meeting artists.

TRA People came to understand you as having a distinct collecting style, one that is more intuitive. You weren’t guided by an advisor or by market trends. You were drawn to a lot of avantgarde works. For instance, you collected some of the first pieces by Kara Walker as well as Lorna Simpson, buying works that belonged to her MFA thesis show from 1985. You had Gary Simmons’s “Noose” works, Liza Lou’s Kitchen [1991–96], which was one of your children’s favorite works growing up, and which was installed in your basement. So, how do you decide what you’re going to buy?

EHN Well, I don’t have a collecting style, and Peter and I certainly didn’t have one. It came from our curiosity, our sense

of passion, and our experiences growing up.

I grew up in Watts in South LA. My mother worked at a drugstore and we lived with my grandfather and my two uncles.

They both worked for the post office, but they had real passions, including food, the outdoors and travel. My mom and I would travel with them when we could. Later, as I got older, my oldest uncle took my mom and I on a world trip. We went to Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and all the major capitals of Europe. We were not a traditional family.

Everybody had their interests and passions.

TRA So, having grown up in Watts, you went on to attend UCLA, worked as an English as a Second Language teacher [ESL] in the 1980s, and have gone on to serve on a variety of museum and educational boards, as well as cofounding Art + Practice in Leimert Park.

You are a product of LA and you have poured so generously back into the city.

Can you talk about the ways in which local art and culture have informed your philanthropy and collecting?

EHN I’m a product of growing up in LA in the 1960s. I remember the 1965 Watts Riots vividly. The looting, the fires.

My mom and I didn’t leave our home.

My uncles would go out to see what was happening. That was a very frighten­ ing time.

TRA I imagine it left an indelible mark on you as a young child witnessing that unrest.

EHN Yes, and, as time went on, you would hear about the same thing happen­ ing in other cities. The world that we lived in changed. All the basics that people depended on. Things were burnt and never came back.

TRA That’s right, the rebellion materialized the anger and apathy that Black folks felt in the country at that time.

I think about the artwork that comes out of such ruins; Watts Rebellion artists in particular were so formative to the Black contemporary-arts landscape here in LA. John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar all utilized

Above Eileen Harris Norton in her home in Santa Monica, December 2023.

On wall: Sherin Guirguis, Untitled, 2009

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that ruin to really comment on what was happening in LA, and cast Watts, and Black LA more broadly, in a more positive light.

EHN Exactly. I have works by all three of those artists. But, when I was living in Watts, my family and I didn’t know about any of them.

TRA You were instrumental in the early careers of Mark Bradford, Thelma Golden and Lorna Simpson.

You are friends with all of them now and know them well. In an interview with Golden featured in the book, she says her landmark exhibition, “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1994, wouldn’t have happened without your support.

That is such a big statement. What draws you to emerging voices in contemporary art?

EHN At that time, Peter and I were probably in our heyday of collecting and

meeting all these young, Black artists who are now well established. At a certain point, along with collecting young artists, we were providing funding support to young curators — like Thelma — because they had no voice in the museums and they were the ones who were interested in these younger artists.

TRA “Black Male” was foundational in my art-history education. Thinking about that period socio-politically, you had the Central Park Five — the young Black boys erroneously accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. You had “stop-and-frisk” policing starting up in New York. All of these ways in which Black men in particular were being criminalized and associated with violence. Golden comes in and takes heed and decides to make some social commentary through an exhibition at one of the most prestigious art institutions in the world. It feels compa­ rable to how daring you were at the time (and continue to be) as a collector,

“I don’t have a collecting style.

It came from my curiosity and passion.”

and your desire to focus a lot of your patronage and acquisitions on these newer, nuanced voices that were really addressing the issues and the realities that were surrounding us at the time, and now in the present.

EHN Yes, exactly. We had collected a few LA artists, the edgier ones, of course, like Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades.

So, we were buying works by these artists who became mainstream. But we were collecting Black and Latino artists as well.

TRA In 2014, you co-founded Art + Practice in Leimert Park, a nonprofit that provides free access to curated exhibitions of contemporary art in South LA and supports transition-age foster youth in the city, as well as refugee children from around the world. What inspired you, Mark and Allan to create this particular kind of organization that combines visual art presentations with social service?

EHN Well, the art part was easy. At the time, Mark’s studio was in Leimert Park,

Above Vintage glass ornaments, c.1940; Carrie Mae Weems, Commemoration Plates, 1992 Opposite On wall: Uta Barth, Deep Blue Day (12.9), 2012

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in what had been his mother’s beauty shop. He said he would see young kids out on the street during the day when they should have been in school. He talked to them and found out they were foster youth. My background as an ESL teacher and with the Los Angeles Unified School District, as well as my personal philanthropy, had always been directed towards women and children’s issues and education. Allan’s interest was always in the community — he had a long history of working as a community volunteer in the neighborhood he lived in.

With our sense of community, our values, our shared interest in people of color and in Leimert Park, we thought it would be great to have an art gallery that was accessible to the folks living in South LA. The California African American Museum is a little further away, and LACMA and MOCA are much further away. So, like I said, the art part was easy.

But we also wanted to address a need in the community and, with South LA having

the largest concentration of foster youth in the nation, that need presented itself naturally.

At first, from 2014 to 2016, we collab­ orated with the RightWay Foundation, a nonprofit providing mental-health and job-training services to foster youth who leave the system at 18. Currently, we work with First Place for Youth, a nonprofit that provides housing, educa­ tion and employment support to young adults up to the age of 24. First Place addresses all the basics so that our local foster youth can become self-sufficient and empowered.

We are also in partnership with Nest Global, an NGO that provides earlyeducation learning opportunities to refugee children at the US-Mexico border, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Zimbabwe. Art + Practice pays for the teachers’ salaries. This two-year partnership also speaks to my history as an educator, and to the importance of providing good-quality education for all.

TRA I want to return to your collec­ ting style and, as a final question, ask what was the last work that you acquired and what excited you most about it?

EHN Lately, I’ve been looking at Sandy Rodriguez, who was an artist-in-residence at Art + Practice from 2014 to 2015.

During her residency, she worked with Hammer Museum curator Jamillah James to organize a group show of her work with two other artists in residence, Aalia Brown and Dale Brockman Davis. During her residency, she was an educator at the Getty, but has since transitioned to being a full-time artist. She has blossomed.

She’s having exhibitions at The Huntington in Pasadena and across the country.

Sadie Barnette is another one. I met her at Charlie James Gallery a few years back.

She’s young, interesting and incorporates pink — my favorite color — into her practice as a symbol of empowerment! I just love her references, her connection with her father and the Black Panther Party.

Left On wall, left to right: Kara Walker, Untitled, 1995; David Hammons, Rocky, 1990; just visible on shelf: Carrie Mae Weems, Commemoration Plates, 1992 Right John Outterbridge, Untitled, 2011

And then Betye Saar. I’ve probably been collecting Betye for 30-plus years, and I admire her continued expansion of her practice. She’s over 90 years old now.

From time to time, her gallery will say, “Betye’s made a new work,” and I say, “Are any available? If so, I’d love to buy one!” These wonderful women are from different backgrounds and different generations, with different practices.

I greatly admire all three.

Eileen Harris Norton is a collector, philanthropist and co-founder of Art + Practice, Los Angeles, USA. She lives in Santa Monica, USA. Taylor Renee Aldridge is visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, USA. She lives in Los Angeles.

All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection (2024), edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge, is published by Yale University Press.

It is available from the Reparations Club, an independently Black-owned and operated business, concept bookshop and creative space, on site at Frieze Los Angeles.

NOW OPEN Betye Saar, Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023 (installation view). © 2023 Betye Saar. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Mei-Lee Ney and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. Additional funding is provided by an anonymous foundation, Terry Perucca and Annette Serrurier, Faye and Robert C. Davidson Jr., and the Virginia Steele Scott Endowment for American Art.

INCLUDING new acquisitions by Los Angeles-based artists

on view through April 7, 2024 Free Admission | Plan your visit at thebroad.org Special Thanks to Leading Partner

Patrick Martinez. Weeping Warrior, 2022 (detail). Stucco, neon, mean streak, ceramic, acrylic paint, spray paint, latex house paint, banner tarp, rope, stucco patch, ceramic tile, tile adhesive, engraved mirror and LED signs on panel. The Broad Art Foundation, © Patrick Martinez

In Downtown L.A.

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MUSEUM SHOWS Judy Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a mural nearly 50 years in the making. As Baca completes its latest panels in public at LACMA, Armando Pulido explores how the work’s critique of California’s past is as necessary today as it was half a century ago

THE WRITING’S ON THE WALL

Photography Daniel Jack Lyons Below Judy Baca at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, December 2023 Opposite Judy Baca working on The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976.

Courtesy: © SPARC Archives; photograph: Linda Eber

Judy Baca has transformed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into her studio. In the museum’s Resnick Pavilion, behind a railed platform, a mural is taking shape, accompanied by archival photographs, site plans and a model of the Tujunga Wash in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley. The mural stretches along the wall on a giant scroll to allow it to be transported to its final site in the future. This addendum to The Great Wall of Los Angeles, which Baca

began in 1975, reprises the mandate for the original work, depicting the histories of marginalized communities in LA and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s. And Baca does not shy away from telling the city some hard truths.

In the exhibition “Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall,” the Chicana artist begins the blueprint for a new section of The Great Wall, tentatively titled Farmworkers’ Movement, East LA Student Walkouts, Watts Rebellion, Watts Renaissance, Black Panther Party, El Altar (2023–24).

Despite still being at the draft stage, Baca’s “punto” perspective — a technique of musical-ratio space division that she learned from Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s La Tallera mural workshop — is already evident, capturing the dynamism and impact of these historical events.

Nearby, one panel of the new extension is already fully rendered in color.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Generation on Fire (2023) depicts the 1961 Freedom Riders, a group of activists who challenged segregation on US public transport.

Protestors are forcefully hosed down to quell flames surrounding their bodies, alluding to an attack by an armed mob of Ku Klux Klan members that firebombed the protestors’ buses. The scene distils a moment in American history while, at the same time, pulling back to suggest a wider relevance—po­lit­ical activism against segregation, racism and war remains all too essential today — creating a remarkable throughline between past and present.

Paired with these panels are original site plans, tracing the history of the

mural’s genesis in 1974, when the US Army Corps of Engineers contacted Baca about creating the work in the floodcontrol channel the Tujunga Wash, as part of a beautification process. Origi­ nally assisted by artists, historians, at-risk youths and community members, Baca completed the initial phases covering prehistoric LA through to the 1950s with her piercing, corrective histories. In 2022, the Mellon Foundation awarded Baca and the nonprofit organization she co-founded for the creation and preservation of activist and socially engaged art, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, $5 million to extend the work and bring its story up to the present day. Such funding marks a significant paradigm shift for Chicano muralism in Southern California, as these pieces have historically been erased, whitewashed or destroyed, as in the case of Baca’s own Hitting the Wall (1984) mural under the 110 freeway.

Today, the mural’s creation involves a different collaborative process. Baca and her team have moved from working in the Tujunga Wash to studio spaces, or, in this case, the county museum.

It has shifted from being a primarily youth-driven collective to a smaller team of historians, artists and activists, but it nonetheless still poses larger questions about who gets to witness history — especially marginalized history. What does it mean for museumgoers to be present at the creation of one of the world’s most vivid depictions of the Chicano Movement, a story that is often only told within Chicano communities? What does it mean for a Chicana artist to occupy a municipal museum’s central space and

command the attention of everyone who walks through its doors?

The political dimension of Baca’s work cannot be ignored, especially as it calls out fascism, which we see on the rise today throughout the world.

The artist reminds us that, though these histories may seem removed from us, they still need a narrator, especially one who has stood unapologetically by her beliefs throughout her decades-long career. Baca’s practice also reminds us to remain steadfast in a collective stance against injustice and to continue to use our voices.

The artist collective Asco demon­ strated this belief with their notorious Spray Paint LACMA intervention in 1972, in response to a claim that Chicanos made graffiti, not art. It wasn’t until 1974 — the same year that The Great Wall of Los Angeles was conceived — that the Chicano artist group known as “Los Four,” made up of Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Roberto Isaac “Beto” de la Rocha and Frank Romero, was the subject of the first exhibition of Chicano art at LACMA. For a city with a predominant Latino presence, it was long overdue. Nearly 50 years later, Baca has reclaimed that space, involving the public in the expansion and ongoing story of one of the world’s longest murals, which ar­g uably tells a more accurate and compelling history than that found in American textbooks.

Armando Pulido is a writer and curatorial assistant at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, USA. He lives in Los Angeles.

“Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall” is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA, until June 2.

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Clockwise from top left Active worksite of The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976. Courtesy: © SPARC Archives; photograph: Linda Eber Judy Baca photographed

by Daniel Jack Lyons at LACMA, December 2023 Judy Baca’s expansion of The Great Wall of Los Angeles at LACMA, photographed by Daniel Jack Lyons, December 2023 Judy Baca on scissor lift at The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1983.

Courtesy: © SPARC Archives; photograph: Linda Eber

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FRIEZE PROJECTS A little-seen ’zine by Pippa Garner, reissued for Frieze Los Angeles this year, reveals how her work retools bodies, beauty and automobiles

DOLL PARTS “We took a tour of Universal Studios in Los Angeles and, inside and outside the place, it was very difficult to tell what was real.” So Andy Warhol recounted to a Vogue interviewer in 1970. The work of Chicago-born, Long Beach-based Pippa Garner, who began her art career in Los Angeles in the 1970s, has constantly toyed with the way the real and unreal are embedded in one another. In the photograph Un(tit)led (Room Corner) (1986–88), a fragment of an interior wall, its falsity exposed, invites the question of whether its backdrop might, in turn, be fake.

More spectacularly, for her iconic Backwards Car (1974), Garner rotated a Chevrolet’s bodywork so that it appeared to be traveling in reverse, then drove it across the Golden Gate Bridge. Haulin’ Ass! (2023) revives the piece in the form of a Ford Ranger. Originally commissioned for Garner’s first New York museum solo show last year at Art Omi — following her inclusion in 2023’s “Made in LA” at the Hammer Museum and the traveling retrospective “Act Like You Know Me” — the work will be

displayed at the fair this year, as part of the newest iteration of Frieze Projects, curated by Art Production Fund. It will be exhibited alongside ART-IN-THEBOX (2024), a new commission realizing a concept Garner sketched in 1995.

There’s a possible parallel between Garner’s automobile treatments and the transformation of her own body — including gender-affirming surgery and illusionistic tattoos, noted by Thara Parambi in her essay on this year’s Frieze Projects (p.16) — which is perhaps underscored by the artist’s inclusion of a pair of giant, dangling testicles, or “truck nuts,” on the front/back of Haulin’ Ass! As a student at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design, Garner made a sculpture of a Volkswagen with human hind parts in 1969; in the series of absurdist slogan T-shirts she regularly issues, one marries a picture of a Buick with the words: “Born in the wrong body.” Garner seems to eschew telos for tinkering: body and car alike not so much perfected toward a specific paradigm but perpetually and ingeniously retooled for the hell

Above Pippa Garner, cover of Beauty 2000, 1992.

Republished for Frieze Los Angeles 2024

of it. “I remember looking in the mirror one day,” she told the writer Fiona Alison Duncan in a recent interview, “and I thought, Hey, I’m an object, too. I’m just another appliance.”

Originally penned in 1992, Garner’s ’zine Beauty 2000 is like a cyberpunk rewrite of Diana Vreeland’s “Why Don’t You?” column (1936–62), guiding the reader through “personal-image management” with techniques and devices ranging from “WIG-IN-A-CAN” sprayon hair, “accent moss” patches, nuts and bolts applied like beauty spots for an “iron-rich” complexion, and a portable, blow-up picture frame to surround the face. Only published in a limited quantity once before (for Garner’s 2021 survey at JOAN in Los Angeles), the ’zine will be reissued and distributed across Frieze Los Angeles as part of Frieze Projects 2024.

However delirious and deliciously arch Beauty 2000 can be (the ’zine’s introduction boasts of an automated beauty production line, “inspired by the 3-minute car wash”), the passionate affair between

biology, technology, beauty and consumerism it proposes does not, in 2024, feel entirely speculative. What makes Garner’s art so necessary is not some blind techno-futurism (of which the world today probably has enough), but its wryness: the way its ambitious fantasy is undergirded by a bitter awareness of how much effort that creativity requires, and how fragile its effects remain. It’s as if reality is a giant Rube Goldberg machine, whose handle needs to be continually cranked to keep it stuttering along.

As Joan Didion wrote of the California life in The White Album (1979), its seeming ease is “an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.” Or, as one of Garner’s recent T-shirts declares: “I’d be more beautiful but I ran out of money.”

Matthew McLean is creative director of Frieze Studios and editor of Frieze Week. He lives in London, UK. Pick up a copy of Pippa Garner’s ’zine Beauty 2000, which is distributed daily throughout the fair.

For more information on Garner’s Haulin’ Ass! (2023) and ART-IN-THE-BOX (2024), as well as the full Frieze Projects program, visit frieze.com

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VISUAL ESSAY

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER In tribute to Los Angeles’s status as the “city of dreams,” mythologized as a place where youth and beauty are their own, incontrovertible currency, Frieze Week invited Carlijn Jacobs to reflect on the seduction of the cosmetic image. A photographer who declared “a perfect picture is never perfect; I just love estrangement and the feeling that something isn’t correct,” Jacobs’s images explore the construction of allure, built up in veneers of artifice and illusion, equal parts plastic art and plastic surgery. At a time when our perception of the true and the natural is being rapidly reshaped, the series asks: is beauty real? Or is it cake?

Carlijn Jacobs is a photographer and director. She lives in Paris, France.

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FOOD The birthplace of “California Cuisine,” Santa Monica restaurant Michael’s has also drawn countless artists to its tables, and their art to its walls

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On a chilly December night, Michael’s restaurant feels tucked away, even though it is just blocks from Santa Monica’s often-bustling 3rd Street Promenade and not far from the beach.

Its off-white exterior glows warmly out onto the sidewalk. The airiness of the architecture contrasts with the two heavy 1980s artworks that flank the main entrance: a bold ceramic landscape by Charles Garabedian and a bronze relief

by Robert Graham, with little, boxed-in figures lining a ripped-open middle.

Garabedian and Graham were two of the many artists who frequented Michael’s in the decades following its opening in 1979, and are among those whose works ended up in the restaurant’s collection.

“That was always the goal,” says artist Kim McCarty, who was still studying at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design when she started the restaurant with her husband, Michael. “Michael wanted it to be not just about the food but also about the music, the art.”

When Michael’s opened, the art world and restaurant world were both small, and the boundaries between the creative industries in Los Angeles were porous.

The restaurateur Bruce Marder dabbled in producing records and movies before and after opening West Beach Cafe in Venice, which, along with Michael’s, is often celebrated for reinventing fine LA dining. Tony Bill produced The Sting (1973) before opening 72 Market Street with Dudley Moore in Robert Irwin’s former studio (also in Venice). The actor

and photographer Dennis Hopper frequented the iconic Ferus and Dwan galleries before he began coming to Michael’s. His photographs hang in the lounge there, beside a massive charcoal drawing by James Surls, across from a black-on-gray Cy Twombly lithograph and a print by David Hockney of himself in the nude, dining with Pablo Picasso.

Frequently, the restaurant acquired art through barter.

In addition to making friends with artists, Kim and Michael sought out collaborators for their art-infused vision.

They befriended the gallerist Peter Gould, who opened L.A. Louver in 1976.

Like them, he was in his 20s and just starting out. The late Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, generous collectors who co-founded the printmaking workshop Gemini G.E.L., and loved to submerge themselves in artists’ lives, became regulars at the restaurant. As a result, numerous lithographs from Gemini (by Helen Frankenthaler, Hockney, Jasper Johns) and works by artists on L.A. Louver’s roster (Tony Berlant, Garabedian) line the walls. Kim’s own haunting watercolors hang in nearly every room as well. The restrooms have always been the biggest treasure trove, with prints and photographs above the sinks, toilets and towel racks. Judy Chicago posed nude for a photograph by her husband, Donald Woodman, which hangs in the men’s room, because she’d been frustrated by the number of photographs

by Hopper — notorious for his macho

Illustration Clay Hickson Michael’s 1147 3rd Street Santa Monica CA 90403, USA michaelssantamonica.com

energy — in the men’s loo at the New York restaurant, which the McCartys opened in 1989.

Then there were the exhibitions: Kim started curating small shows in the restaurant’s private upstairs dining room in 1989 and continued on and off until 2012, making Michael’s a deep cut on some now-established artists’ résumés.

Joe Goode and Mary Weatherford both showed there; the artist Analia Saban (who worked in the studio of the late John Baldessari, a regular at Michael’s), helped Kim curate exhibitions in the early 2010s.

Since 2015, their son, Chas (named after Charles Garabedian), has helped run things. He resurrected the shows as well as the restaurant’s reputation for giving up-and-coming chefs a platform.

Through mutual friends involved with Chinatown’s alternative spaces, Chas met Christopher Schwartz, who agreed to curate two exhibitions in 2018. Schwartz was in between projects — he had just left a gallery job and would not open his own gallery, STARS, until 2021. The restaurant felt like an in-between space, too — one that gave Schwartz freedom to exper­ iment — and he ended up programming The Gallery @ Michael’s for two years.

“It’s extremely textured,” says Schwartz. “It has this kind of old LA history. And I loved that.” He started with group shows, riffing on the restau­ rant’s aesthetic, hanging a B. Wurtz painting with a hole cut out of it in the stairwell next to the porthole window, or a Jill Mulleady painting of the gymnast

Simone Biles right next to the men’s restroom. Then he organized a series of solo exhibitions, inviting artists to play with the restaurant as context and theme: the young artist Kate Spencer Stewart made ethereal paintings informed by the dining room’s windows; Raul Guerrero, who has been showing in Southern California since the late 1960s, exhibited his paintings of local bars and restaurants. “Installing the shows was similar to how someone would install art in their house,” recalls Schwartz. “Oh, this looks good with this sightline and this window makes sense with this thing here. The smoke detector on the wall needs to play off this painting somehow.”

While restaurants come and go in many big cities, LA has a notoriously high turnover. Restaurants that opened in the 1990s have been labeled “legendary,” and so Michael’s longevity is notable. The family ethos contributes to its success, as do the McCartys’ strong ties to the LA art community, which have only expanded since Chas brought back the upstairs gallery. Of his parents, Chas says, “Michael works the crowd,” adding that Kim and Michael “balance each other out.” “The food here has always been really colorful and I think a lot of that has been a replication of their relationship. Mike got into art through Kim and I think they complement each other.”

Catherine G. Wagley is a writer and managing editor of Momus. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.

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Q&A The recently appointed curator at the Hammer Museum shares some of his impressions and highlights from his first year of living in Los Angeles

PABLO JOSÉ RAMÍREZ (STILL) GETS LOST What has surprised you most about LA? Has it lived up to your expectations?

The city of Los Angeles is, in many ways, incomprehensible. It contains many co-existing worlds. People tend to ask me whether I like LA and I often find myself unable to answer the question. I think this city is not to like, but to live in. It is not a city for tourists but for locals. I am enjoying LA, just as I enjoy dancing or driving. Only here can I go out at night and find delicious pupusas in Hollywood, a hip wine spot in Chinatown and a delirious cumbia concert in Downtown.

More importantly, LA is a city with a longstanding tradition of social struggles and diasporic histories, and I’m still just scratching the surface of this fascinating and complex cultural landscape.

What have been your big discoveries about the LA art scene and its artists?

I don’t believe in discoveries — I think we witness things as we move through the world. I was lucky enough to co-curate “Made in LA 2023” with Diana Nawi [the 6th edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial] in the midst of moving here from Europe. Contrary to what I was expecting, the city generously opened up. I witnessed an art ecology that has proved itself resilient (given the increasing costs of living in LA), with networks and communities of artists that support each other, speak to each other, and find ways to work with and beyond art

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institutions. The LA art scene is defined by its plurality and is a testimony to the city’s breadth of cultural diasporic histories. You can find artist studios everywhere — from huge warehouses to small garages — within an art scene that is booming and not exclusively dependent on market trends.

Best studio visit in the city so far?

Every studio visit holds good memories.

More recently, I remember with fondness Roksana Pirouzmand and our conversation about family, memory and diasporic experiences, which I could also relate to. Another was with Akinsanya Kambon.

Each of his works is a testimony to anticolonial struggles, and you can really spend hours at his studio.

You were the inaugural adjunct curator of First Nations and Indigenous art at Tate Modern, London. Is this a focus and expertise you are looking to carry over to your new role at the Hammer?

Yes, to an extent, but not exclusively.

There is already great work on Indigenous art being done in the US. I would like to add to this conversation an understanding of indigeneity, from a perspective of the Global South. I also want to look deeper into my own history as a brown curator who grew up in Guatemala and to learn from and connect to the lives of Latinx artists in the US. The art world is moving in new directions — brown, Indigenous and Black artists are taking up unprecedented spaces in the inter­ national art scene, and I suspect LA is a good place to witness and contribute to these tectonic changes.

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The Hammer is part of UCLA; how does being part of a university impact on the life of the museum?

I think universities have so much to teach museums. They have the infras­t ructure and flux of young energy that art institutions sometimes lack. They have the resources for academic research and the means to share and distribute knowledge that art institutions crave. I think the case of the Hammer has shown that such relationships can be fertile.

What are you working on for 2024?

I am organizing “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s.”

The show is curated by Kyung An and Kang Soojung, and has traveled from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

We are very excited to bring this important project to the Hammer (on view until May 12) and connect with the Korean diasporic communities. For the summer of 2025, I am working on an exhibition on new brown materialities, and spir­ ituality. The show will aim to address the vitality and the agency of materials in art-making, from the perspective of diasporic and Indigenous practices throughout the continent.

What are you looking forward to in the art calendar in LA and beyond in 2024?

In LA, “Ed Ruscha/Now Then” at LACMA (April 7–October 6) is a long-awaited retrospective of a seminal figure in the local art scene. “Scratching at the Moon,” curated by Anna Sew Hoy at the Institute of Contemporary Art (until May 12), will bring together a powerful intergenerational group of Asian artists living here. Beyond the US, I am looking forward to the opening of the 24th Biennale of Sydney, “Ten Thousand Suns,” curated

by Inti Guerrero and Cosmin Costinaş (March 9–June 10). It promises to be a carefully crafted exhibition of nonWestern art. I am also excited to see what the new program at Gasworks in London

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will look like, with its new director Robert Leckie.

Where are your favorite places to eat?

There are so many! Mi Ranchito Veracruz in North Hollywood has amazing mole and chilaquiles. If in Koreatown, breakfast at the newly opened Taiwanese Liu’s Cafe, followed by the best oxtail soup at Han Bat Sul Lung Tang. If you find yourself craving art and food in San Fernando Valley, check out Judy Baca’s mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1975–ongoing), and then stop at Grandma’s Thai Kitchen for some delicious homemade food.

Illustrations Clay Hickson “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” is on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, until May 12

What are your favorite representations of LA in film, art and/or literature?

I think one of the best representations of LA in art is, of course, Watts Towers (1921–54). The title of the biennial we just presented at the Hammer was inspired by these magnificent dormant giants, which are a public monument to diasporic creativity. They speak to the history of South LA, and are deeply connected to social struggles in the city.

What is the mark of a true Angeleno?

Ask me again in ten years! But perhaps finding your way around town without Google Maps?

Pablo José Ramírez is curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA. He lives in Los Angeles.

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