David Zwirner
is issue’s cover features a picture of the ocean by Californian photographer Colin Dodgson. Like the rest of the magazine’s contents, it was planned before wildfires devastated areas of Los Angeles in January and upended the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos, many members of the art community among them. Frieze was proud to support the creation of the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund in response to this tragedy, and the fair opens this week in a spirit of support, community and rebuilding. I hope that the possibility of recovery is felt across Frieze Los Angeles 2025.
Meanwhile, this issue seeks again to catalog and champion the disparate creative souls who make this city so uniquely itself. When a friend tells Mary, a character in Eve Babitz’s “ e Garden of Allah” (1977), to skip town to avoid a rumored earthquake, she responds: “I wouldn’t leave LA if the whole place tipped over into the ocean.” It’s the city’s people, I’m going to guess, who make her so determined to stay.
Matthew McLean, Creative Director, Frieze Studios & Editor, Frieze Week
Chip O the Old Block Collector Jarl Mohn and his daughter Katrina
of everyday beauty
Frieze Los Angeles director Christine Messineo and Focus curator Essence Harden hit the road to discuss how the city’s “edges” impact its artmakers
CHRISTINE MESSINEO
We’re o .
ESSENCE HARDEN
I’m happy I picked you up.
CM is is a little how our relationship started.
EH I know. Me in the car saying, “I have a quick question.”
CM Our calls quickly turned from five minutes to at least half an hour, but I think that’s the nature of Los Angeles. Driving is the only quiet time. I lived in LA for almost seven years, and remaining connected to my friends and family back home so often happened over the phone while driving.
EH Absolutely. A lot of my thinking happens in the car, too. It’s my creative thinking space for others, it might be the shower. While working on the “Made in LA” biennial at the Hammer Museum, I’ve been driving across the city all day, almost every day, for six months,
going from Alhambra to CalArts, to the edge of the county.
CM When did you move to LA?
EH Almost ten years ago.
CM Around the same time as me.
EH Where did you first live when you came here?
CM I had a very iconic experience when I came to LA. My husband and I were searching for a place to live.
All our friends lived east, but an old friend told us about a house on Benedict Canyon Drive, this palm-tree-lined street just west of the Beverly Hills Hotel. We drove up there and it was one of the most gorgeous days, like today, actually perfect temperature, blue skies. e road starts to get curvy as you head closer to Mulholland Drive and, as we approached, we felt like we were having an out-of-body experience. We were coming from Brooklyn, where we had a miniature apartment. e sky
and trees felt momentous. So, we ended up in this sweet home in Beverly Hills. We used to throw crazy dinners and parties there. It was my way into the art world in LA. We’d be at a show at the Hammer, say, and lots of people had come from the east side and they’d ask,
“What are we going to do for dinner?” And I’d just invite them all over. I’d be cooking for 20.
EH I feel like I did the same thing.
I lived in East Hollywood when we first moved here, and we would make dinner and invite over anyone who wanted to come. I think that’s a really strong component of making community here: o ering up your home, food and a gathering space because folks are coming from all across town.
But I think you have to go out, you have to get out, and you can’t be too beholden to a particular neighborhood. What’s the point of being here if you’re
not willing to extend yourself and your boundaries of where you eat, play and have a good time.
LA is a bunch of connected suburbs. I was saying to you earlier that something I really like to do is go to Atwater. I live in Leimert Park in South Central, so not by Atwater, which is on the Eastside by Los Feliz, before you get to Glendale and Burbank. But I love it over there because it has my favorite bakery, Proof, and I still get my nails done there.
CM I love Proof. And I love the place across the street from it: Dune.
We actually first connected when I invited you to curate the Focus section at Frieze Los Angeles last year. And now you are returning for a second year. What are you especially excited about?
EH ere’s going to be a strong contingent of LA spaces: Bel Ami, Make Room, Sow & Tailor, Superposition Gallery (now in New York) and Tyler Park Presents.
And Dominique Gallery, run by one of my favorite LA gallerists. What’s coming up in the rest of the fair?
CM Galleries are still finalizing their presentations, but we had proposals for something like 30 solo stands outside of Focus itself. Several of the solos are by Indigenous and Native American artists, which feels timely, and a number also shed light on LA’s own history, like Judy Chicago at Je rey Deitch and Noah Purifoy at Jack Tilton.
e other day, we were talking about Santa Monica its history, the artists you’re visiting there and the Westside more generally.
EH I think Santa Monica is cool for lots of reasons historical ones, such as the city’s long public-art and mural history, but also programs like 18th Street Arts Center, which is really vital in providing residencies that are held within the city center.
CM Judy Baca is a longtime resident and, of course, she was one of the co-founders of SPARC [Social and Public Art Resource Center] back in the 1970s. Last year, she moved to Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Arts Center to take on more space
EH Carl Cheng’s studio is west, too; he’s in his 80s now and has been there a long time. He went to UCLA. So, there’s an extensive history that lives on. I love that people still value the Pacific Ocean and the vibe it brings.
CM e vibe of the edge.
EH Yes, the vibe and energy on the edge is nice. ere’s a Toni Morrison quote, in an interview from 1983, where she’s talking about jazz and how it’s “on the edge” and that edge is the thing that keeps you wanting. You feel as if you’re going to fall o and it can make you experience a really deep tension, but that edge is what develops the work.
CM In LA, you’re surrounded by different edges. You’ve got the hills on one side and then you have the water on another.
Coming from the East Coast and thinking about what studios and artmaking look like there, you realize artists are limited by scale and real estate. Just getting material delivered in New York is incredibly expensive. Here, you can go pick up what you need and bring it to your studio.
Also, I’ve known so many New York artists, particularly women, who work at home because that’s a safe space, as opposed to getting o the train at 6pm and then walking 15 blocks at night. Here, you drive door to door. Your space can be more expansive, so there’s a history of making large-scale work. It seems to me that there’s so much more sculpture, particularly by women, that comes out of LA.
EH Alicia Piller is a great example of that. She makes gigantic sculpture. Her studio is not the biggest in the world but, because it doesn’t really rain here, you can use your outside space yearround. You can take things apart and hide them outside while you’re building something else inside.
But above all, for me, the beauty of California is definitely the many di erent ecosystems that exist within the state. e tensions from neighborhood to neighborhood, the sense of things being just out of reach. People are always driving toward something, attempting to unravel something. I think that’s a really productive environment for making art.
Artist Carl Cheng has always resisted categorization, studying physics and geology, using industrial materials and design but why did someone blow apart one of his works with a shotgun? He explains to Focus-exhibiting artist Xin Liu
XIN LIU
When you started at UCLA in 1958, you began with painting but then switched to industrial design. en, later on, you became one of the first graduate students in the new photography department. How was your time at UCLA? And how did you make the decision to evolve through di erent disciplines?
CARL CHENG
Well, I went to UCLA thinking I was going to be a painter, but then I didn’t like what was happening in painting it seemed very backward to me. When I was in the sculpture department and saw that they were designing the inside of an airplane, I just changed my major right there and then because I wanted to use new materials. I was fascinated by more modern stu plastics and metal and other forms of art.
In those days, industrial design was taught in art schools, as part of a Bauhaus-like educational system that encouraged artists to get into industry and not separate themselves from it.
XL And what is your process now for making objects? Do you normally have a plan or sketch, or is it more reactive? I can see a bit of both in your work.
CC I only do drawings for specific reasons. Generally, I don’t start by making drawings. When I began making art, I mostly just picked up stu junk and tried to make something out of it. I was willing to pick up anything: if I picked up stones, that was just as important as picking up nuts and bolts, and I did whatever I felt like doing with it. Now, when I look back, I see that what I did was fabricate everything, using many di erent types of materials.
XL How do you approach the balance of functionality and aesthetics in your work?
CCBecause I went to a university where they taught art and not an art school, I was able to take other courses that interested me. Even though I didn’t want to become an engineer, I took physics, for instance. I was always fascinated by
physical phenomena in nature and geology, so I took geology classes, too.
XL I am curious about the origin story of your “Art Tool” project in Santa Monica in 1988. For me, it recalled a traditional Chinese farm, with cows pulling contraptions to plant crops. Of course, it’s very di erent it’s much more industrial.
CC But I think that’s appropriate, because I had an uncle with a farm in the San Fernando Valley. He grew asparagus. We ended up staying there for a while when I was five years old, because my father was looking for a place for us to live. It was so fun. ey had all kinds of machines. ere was one to harvest asparagus and another that automatically made a crate for it. Just watching the machinery as a kid was fascinating. ey used to till the ground using a horse, then later they bought a tractor. So, there is some connection to farming, but not directly. I think, for me, the roller was to do with printing. It was more about
“Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, USA, until April 6. is fall, Cheng’s work will be included in “Made in LA” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA. His retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will open in fall 2026.
a graphic standpoint that you can print and emboss stu by pressing into paper.
XL In a way, I think it also connects to your photography. Bruno Latour, the philosopher, wrote in the book Laboratory Life [1979] about how scientists would use instruments like a camera or microscope to interpret the natural world. I think there’s something about that in your photography, too.
CC Photography allows you to see things you can’t see. It distorts, but it also lets you see things faster or slower than the eye can perceive. To me, it’s just a nice instrument rather than an art tool, which you can use in any way you want, and not necessarily to make art.
XL What is your definition of a machine? I think you have a very particular relationship with the so - called functionality of something. You’re an inventor, but also a storyteller.
CC It’s all intuitive in my case. Being an inventor is easy for me because I’m always grabbing from di erent sources.
To me, that’s what inventing is like it just comes out of an intuitive nature rather than an analytical one. I can give you an example: I developed a way of making ring bubbles. I was playing around with ring bubbles and making them do tricks, because they have a dynamic in them. Sometimes, two bubbles going up will hook together and make one big ring bubble. Sometimes, they repel each other. ey do funny things. I tried to create a sculpture that would make that happen by chance. I made a bunch of them and called them Friendship Acrobatic Troupe [1987], after Chinese acrobatics.
I created another piece using ring bubbles, called Seattle Underwater [1980]. It was at the highest point in Seattle and I made a window that was a water tank, so you could see through it and see the whole city skyline. After a couple of years, somebody threw a rock through it and broke it. I repaired it and it lasted for about another ten years, then somebody took a shotgun and blew it to pieces. So the city decided they couldn’t support the work and we deaccessioned it. I don’t know who did it but, for me, it was a shock that someone could get angry enough to do something like that.
XL Do you feel there is something fundamentally wrong about our desire to keep something as it is forever?
Nature does not work that way. ere’s water and wind, things erode, people change. Rather than thinking something will last forever, should we be thinking about how to grow or how to allow something to disappear over the years?
CC No matter the material, there’s a short lifespan unless you continuously maintain it. Marble will deteriorate, like New York marble is deteriorating because of the air quality. Bronze doesn’t last, either. Nor does stainless steel. Nothing lasts forever.
For his Frieze Projects commission, artist and Tlaloc Studios founder Ozzie Juarez channels the community spirit of the Alameda Swap Meet, Patricia Escárcega reports
Five miles south of downtown Los Angeles lies the massive Alameda Swap Meet, a repurposed warehouse complex painted bright cadmium yellow, striped with the colors of the Mexican flag, and stu ed with hundreds of market stalls ministering to every type of material and spiritual need. ere are vendors specializing in fresh produce, Korean beauty products, quinceañera dresses, cowboy boots, children’s baptismal clothing, wholesale Mexican candies and exotic birds. Interspersed are storefronts featuring acupuncturists, hair and nail specialists, check- cashing windows, cellphone -repair shops, a massage therapist and at least one studio selling discounted tattoos and body piercings. Outside, in the courtyard plaza, the air is permanently scented with grilled beef and sugary churros from the dozens of Mexican and Salvadoran food stalls lining the perimeter. On weekend afternoons, the space pul-
sates with the bleating rhythms of live banda , cumbia and norteño music. Commercial, sociocultural and sacred elements converge at LA’s swap meets in ways that verge on the carnivalesque. ese multi-tenant public marketplaces, fixtures of Latinx, Black and Asian districts, proliferated across the city in the 1980s and ’90s a retail format pioneered by immigrant investors, principally from Korea, who transformed hollowed- out urban shopping centers and decommissioned industrial spaces into retail emporiums catering to low-income communities underserved by national retail chains. Despite their ubiquity, these marketplaces remain largely absent from mainstream depictions of southern California life, even though they’re increasingly recognized by urban historians and researchers as important focuses of cultural production and exchange. It was in these spaces
that West Coast hip -hop, gangsta rap, Mexican narcocorridos and other influential subcultures first gained popularity.
At Frieze Los Angeles, as part of the Frieze Projects program “Inside Out,” curated by Art Production Fund, Ozzie Juarez, a native Angeleno and self-professed “swap meet freak” has conceptualized a performance and sitespecific installation foregrounding the aesthetics, “hustle culture” and liminal qualities of LA’s swap meets. Born in Compton and raised in South Central LA by “workaholic” Mexican immigrant parents, the multidisciplinary artist, curator and community-builder spent his formative years alongside his family, selling clothes, sunglasses and other goods at some of the city’s largest marketplaces, including the sprawling Alameda Swap Meet. He credits these experiences with fundamentally shaping his work ethic, artistic practice and curatorial
approach. Today, he ritualistically revisits these locations from his childhood, documenting their material culture, alert to their unlikely juxtapositions and contrasting textures, the way “heavy, rough industrial gates sit next to reproductions of 16th- century paintings, next to cartoon imagery.”
As part of his Frieze Los Angeles presentation, Juarez has recreated a puesto, or market stall, which he has fortified with a gated facade evoking the industrial environments of many LA swap meets. “A lot of people who are coming to the fair are not familiar with South Central LA,” says Juarez. “So I’m bringing a little bit of South Central to Santa Monica.”
Adopting the persona of a swap meet vendor, Juarez invites visitors to his stall, where he presentsa curated selection of objects of personal significance. “ is will be a wide range of items,” Juarez notes, “including pieces I cherish and collect.”
ere will also be readymade art objects available for visitors to take home, each piece stamped and numbered. Juxtaposing street-level grit with the more a uent backdrop of Santa Monica and Frieze, Juarez achieves a brief and unlikely convergence of the two spaces, a sly meta-commentary that hints not only at their di erences but at their commonalities: each representative of a distinct kind of LA hustle.
In a separate presentation at the fair with Charlie James Gallery, Juarez will show a new series of paintings investigating liminality in the urban landscape of South LA. Painted on fabricated, heavily rusted metal gates, the works reference neighborhood landmarks that no longer exist, suggesting a complex matrix of personal and collective memories tied to the city’s ever-shifting landscape.
His work makes few overt references to gentrification, but it’s fair to say that
Juarez’s career has been indelibly shaped by it. He cites gentrification as the cause for the abrupt closure of SOLA, the gallery space he founded in South Central LA shortly after graduating from art school. It was forced to close following the sale of the building it was located in quite possibly another casualty of the city’s speculative real-estate market, whose prices are forever on an upward trajectory.
In 2018, the ongoing debate over gentrification in South LA came to a head during the opening of an exhibition at Dalton Warehouse, a 1920s-era storage depot turned studio/gallery space operated by artists with no tangible connection to the neighborhood. Demonstrators stormed the gallery, splashing red paint on attendees, artworks and at least one dog. Juarez saw in the roiling conflict an opportunity. In 2020, he took over the lease for the 4,500-square-foot
space, reimagining Dalton Warehouse as Tlaloc Studios, named after the Aztec god of rain, bringer of nourishing downpours and harbinger of fertility.
Situated on a residential street, sandwiched between turn-of-the-century cottages, the artist-run studio and gallery has a roster of 15 practitioners, most from working-class backgrounds and local to South Los Angeles. It’s an artistic community built with intention, says Juarez. He recruited artist friends and peers, many in the nascent stage of their careers, to fill the space. Its members, who represent a range of disciplines including painting, photography, screen-printing and performance, regularly host free art workshops.
e opening of Tlaloc Studios was met with widespread enthusiasm in LA art circles, its success signaling for some an energetic shift in the city’s contemporary art scene one in which
Latinx artists are gaining increased visibility and representation, creating self-sustaining communities and helping reshape the city’s aesthetics. Historically, Latinx artists, despite being the largest ethnic group in LA County, have struggled to show their work at many of the city’s high-profile cultural institutions and blue-chip galleries. Juarez belongs to a growing cohort of well-established Latinx artists inverting these historical trends. For many, this reversal was reflected in “At the Edge of the Sun,” the acclaimed group exhibition that opened in early 2024 at Je rey Deitch. Bringing together a constellation of 12 LA-based artists, including Juarez, it was not promoted as a Latinx art show but rather as an exhibition loosely themed around the artists’ reflections on their home city.
Many of the most fertile and resonant conversations in Los Angeles’s contem-
porary art scene are being facilitated by artist-run spaces: environments where artists, especially those from historically marginalized communities, can engage with questions of identity and self-determination, and seek creative and economic autonomy through art-making, skillsharing and collaboration. Laying the groundwork for these conversations are influential organizations and projects such as Lauren Halsey’s sister dreamer (opening this spring) and Summaeverythang; the People’s Pottery Project, an artist-run studio supporting formerly incarcerated women, trans and nonbinary individuals; and the long-running Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), founded by artist and educator Judy Baca in the 1970s to champion underrepresented communities through public art interventions.
For his part, Juarez hopes that Tlaloc Studios will become a model for
burgeoning artists, especially those from lower-income neighborhoods and disenfranchised communities, to navigate the city’s diversifying contemporary art scene.
“ ere are people that look like me and don’t think it’s possible to do this kind of work,” he says, “but I’m a testament that you can come from certain neighborhoods, look a certain way and do this type of creative work. One of my main goals in my career is to help people flip that switch.”
In 2024, Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee painter, sculptor and filmmaker Je rey Gibson made history by becoming the first Native American artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. His Technicolor pavilion, comprising intricately beaded sculptures, geometric paintings and a kaleidoscopic video installation, was inaugurated by Native American dancers and singers performing the traditional jingle dress dance another first. Indeed, Adriano Pedrosa’s “Foreigners Everywhere” biennial featured more Indigenous artists than any previous edition. Among them were fellow Native Americans, Navajo painter and printmaker Emmi Whitehorse and Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, whose work is also being showcased on the US West Coast for the first time
in 40 years at Frieze Los Angeles 2025. “ ere’s definitely market momentum for Indigenous artists,” says Stuart Morrison, senior director at Hales Gallery, New York, which has represented WalkingStick since 2020 and is hosting a solo presentation of her paintings at the fair. “But we’ve been working with artists from underrepresented communities for a long time, and our primary concern is creating longevity and growing supportive networks of collectors, curators, academics and critics.” Hales’s booth will feature a selection of WalkingStick’s abstractions from the 1970s and ’80s that build on conversations initiated by recent institutional exhibitions: a traveling solo show organized by the New York Historical Society (2023–25); inclusion in Candice Hopkins’s seminal
group exhibition “Indian eater” at Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-onHudson (2023); and the display of an acquisition from the series shown in LA, “Genesis/Violent Garden” (1981), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“She’s one of the great figures of American history and is still marginalized,” Morrison says. “It’s critical that her voice, and those coming up around her, are brought to the fore and formally integrated into the broader narrative of contemporary art.” For the past 60 years, WalkingStick has composed paintings and sculptures that confront both her own fractured identity and that of her country, reinscribing Indigenous presence onto a history from which it has been largely erased. “I’m a Cherokee,” the artist shared in a recent interview
with the Smithsonian Museum of Art in Washington, DC. “I was raised in a white culture, and both are in everything I do, whether it’s landscape or figures or abstraction. It is always there because I’m there.”
Before focusing on the embodied land scapes for which she is best known, WalkingStick experimented with increasingly minimalist, geometric abstractions. Collapsing the distinction between sculpture and painting, she imbued dense layers of encaustic paint with an almost bas-relief dimensionality. Linear slashes and curved incisions reveal bands of color like sedimentary rock beneath the grainy, dark-hued surfaces textured with crushed seashells and pebbles.
Multidisciplinary Libyan-Yurok artist Saif Azzuz, who shows with California-
based gallery Anthony Meier, also incorporates natural materials and textures in his paintings. Gathering native and invasive plants from the Yurok reservation where his mother lives, he arranges the clippings on canvas before spraying various pigments acrylic, dye and ink over the top, preserving their natural forms. His vibrant plant paintings are part of his solo presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, along with carved wooden sculptures, metal works and a site-specific mural. “His work is beautiful,” says Anthony Meier managing director Kristin Delzell, “and people are immediately drawn to it, but the layers of meaning add this other really significant dimension.” e immersive, mixed-media installation provides viewers with context and highlights the breadth of Azzuz’s artistic practice. Redwood oars featuring intricate inverse basketweave patterning and assemblages composed from discarded metal, wood and plant life are interspersed with large-scale paintings. “Azzuz appreciates and respects all living things and sees the use of found materials as a way of extending their lives,” Delzell explains. “ e booth is truly a manifestation of his belief that nature is not a resource to be extracted but an integral part of us.”
Artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, preserves and venerates nature through his vertiginous, color-rich films and entrancing photographs both of which are included in his solo presentation with New York’s Broadway Gallery. “Hopinka was the first artist to have a show at the gallery back when we opened in the fall of 2020,” says co-founder Joe Cole. “We’re excited to debut his new work here in LA, where the traditional film and entertainment world will come face to face with one of the great experimental filmmakers of his generation.”
Hopinka’s new two-channel video coalesces documentary storytelling techniques, traditional nature photography, text overlays and washes of abstract imagery with polyphonic archival soundtracks, poetic recitations and first-person narration to conceptualize, challenge and expand experiences of contemporary Indigeneity. e accompanying photographs, printed from medium-format Hasselblad negatives and inscribed with verse, distill the film’s dynamic expository style and distinct aesthetic atmosphere. Both media intertwine language and landscape, giving rise to a novel form of communication that foregrounds Indigenous wisdom, spiritual teachings and notions of personhood and community that have been denigrated and erased for centuries.
By giving equal weight to words and images, Hopinka’s ethnopoetics enliven historical records and blur the boundaries between past and present, infusing the mundane with the imaginary, the traumatic with the resilient, and memories with dreams. As Hopinka writes in his poem “Ho-Chunk Holy Song,” “I don’t remember what was a memory/or what was a dream./I imagine the colors were dreams/and the smells were memories.”
Night Raiders (2021), by Cree-Métis film director Danis Goulet, who hails from Canada, is included in the exhibition “Cyberpunk” at the Academy Museum of Motion Picturesas part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide program. For her dystopian film, she sought not to integrate the present with the past but
to forecast the future, explaining, “It stands as a declaration that we’ve always been here, we are still here and will always be here.”
It’s far from being the only exhibition in LA concurrent with Frieze to include a female Native narrative; museums across the city are championing Indigenous women artists and art. Among them is 2024 MacArthur Fellow Wendy Red Star, a member of the Apsáalooke Nation, whose fantastical regalia is part of “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology” at the Autry Museum of the American West. Photographs and sculptures by Mercedes Dorame of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation are included at the Autry, too, and in “Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Leah Mata Fragua from the Yak Tityu Tityu Yak Tiłhini (Northern Chumash) tribe is featured with her ephemeral objects in “Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art”at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. e variety of Native American contemporary art on display across Los Angeles alone is exciting. e diversity of the formal, material and conceptual engagements suggests that galleries and museums are focused on art-historical significance rather than arbitrary aesthetic trends. is market awareness, combined with momentum from the broader cultural shift toward recognizing marginalized histories, increased scholarship and a new generation of emerging artists who are both realizing and reimagining enduring material traditions, o ers promising
prospects for the longevity of this newfound interest.
As Goulet’s declaration a rms, what’s new about Native art and artists is not their existence but their longoverdue recognition.
The Frieze Impact Prize returns to the Los Angeles fair for its fourth year, recognizing a formerly incarcerated artist and providing them with an opportunity to exhibit and develop their work. Thara Parambi explores the genesis of this endeavor
Here’s a depressing statistic: the US has the largest incarcerated population on the planet, holding nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners: 2.2 million adults behind bars. at figure has quadrupled in 40 years not owing to rising crime rates but to changes in sentencing laws. For those reentering society, opportunities are scarce, and more than 60 percent are still unemployed a year later.
Artists impacted by justice already face a challenging employment terrain even without the precarity of making a living through their work. For many, galleries and art fairs remain remote and impenetrable cloisters. e Frieze Impact Prize directly addresses this lack of opportunity. is year marks the fourth edition of the award, which recognizes artists whose practices center on social justice. e recipients get $25,000 and crucially the opportunity to exhibit their work at Frieze Los Angeles.
Since 2022, the Impact Prize has been supported by tireless organizations like the Art for Justice Fund (A4J) and Define American. As of 2024, Frieze, WME and e Center for Art & Advocacy ( e Center) jointly bestow awards on previously incarcerated artists engaging with critical projects including the refram ing of societal narratives and racial equity. e Center assists justice-impacted artists through financial and community support as well as mentoring and professional development. “Mass incarceration is one of the most urgent issues of our time,” says Jesse Krimes, executive director at e Center. “Directly impacted artists tend to be the most under -funded, under-mentored, under-resourced and
under-connected, and the spotlight o ered at Frieze Los Angeles is a huge step in correcting all of those limitations.”
Since the Frieze Impact Prize’s inception, Mary Baxter, Maria Gaspar, Dread Scott, Narsiso Martinez and Gary Tyler have all been recipients of the award, their work spanning performance, sound, textiles and film.
e origins of the prize lie in Mark Bradford’s Life Size (2019), exhibited at the first Frieze Los Angeles. e work, which features an image of a police
Below Gary Tyler, winner of the 2024 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize. Photograph: Casey Kelbaugh
See Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez’s work at the Impact Prize booth at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.
e Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize is presented in partnership with WME and e Center for Art & Advocacy. For more about the prize, visit: frieze.com
body camera, appeared on posters throughout the city and on a billboard at Paramount Studios, where the fair was held. Bradford’s piece addresses the fallibility of policing and its accountability mechanisms and was accompanied by an editioned work, the sale of which has raised more than $1 million for A4J money which has been directed toward bail and sentencing reform, and reentry opportunities.
e winner of this year’s Frieze Impact Prize will be guided in preparing
their work for Frieze Los Angeles 2025 by Taylor Renee Aldridge, executive director at Modern Ancient Brown Foundation.
In the role of mentor, Aldridge discusses the need to establish trust with the artist she is supporting and underlines the distinct challenges they face when present ing work within the fast-paced, commercially oriented setting of an art fair. “My job is to make space,” she says, “for the artist to vocalize the concepts and narratives that are imperative in the audience’s understanding of the artwork.”
Initiatives like the prize and ongoing support for these artists can have a real and profound e ect, says Krimes. “We’ve watched artists use their increased platforms to uplift their own local communities or people who are currently incarcerated.” While sustained support in traditional forms such as mentoring and funding is crucial, it must also involve widening the discourse around justice -impacted artists, so that their participation in art spaces is not tokenized or su ocated. Aldridge says that artists “want to be viewed as not just one monolithic being, but as complex and everevolving thinkers and makers.”
Looking ahead, the hope is that such e orts will not only transform individual lives but inspire systemic shifts within the art world and society at large, creating lasting change that extends far beyond the confines of the fair.
Every year, the young filmmakers selected as Fellows of the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award are invited to produce a short film responding to a key word or theme. For the sixth edition, that word is “togetherness” a concept which takes on a special significance in the wake of crisis, just as beloved films often keep us company in challenging times. Realized in partnership with Ghetto Film School and FIFTH SEASON, the Fellows’ finished films are judged by a jury of leading figures in contemporary art and entertainment. is year, the jury includes creator, director and executive producer Rhys Ernst, filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross, and curator Erin Christovale. e winner of the Jury Award is announced during Frieze Los Angeles 2025, alongside the recipient of the Audience Award, voted for by the public.
Here, the Fellows describe their short films and the approaches they have taken to “togetherness” from a surreal family dinner to a scientist crafting robot intelligence and share the films and filmmakers that they hold dear.
Guinevere Alcaraz
Sexy Villains is a character-driven dramedy about two young women, Prudence and Stephanie, navigating friendship, ambition and chaos during a wild night out in Los Angeles. Prudence balances her responsible nature with dreams of success, while the impulsive and emotional Stephanie grapples with heartbreak. eir bond is tested and rea rmed through witty banter, conflict and heartfelt moments, highlighting the complexities of friendship and personal growth.
Wong Kar-wai’s poetic storytelling, lush visuals and deeply emotional characters resonate profoundly with me. His integration of thesocial and political climate and his ability to capture fleeting moments, unspoken desires and the melancholy of time inspires me. His artistry shows how mood and texture
can transcend words, creating timeless, deeply personal and universally relatable cinema.
Austin Chen
Red Pocket is a surreal comedy-drama that follows a young woman through an anxiety-ridden dinner with her family. However, when a magical red envelope appears that seemingly contains an infinite amount of money, they must decide what’s more important: family or fortune.
Hiro Murai’s blend of drama, comedy and surrealism has influenced how I tell my stories. His level of restraint in deciding not to explain everything but instead allowing the audience to interpret the situation for themselves is something that I hope to do in my own work.
Nicole Mairose Dizon
e Pit is my love letter to home. It follows a miner consoling his grieving son, Iggy, who, after venturing out around his hometown, rediscovers the beauty of life
and connecting. Living in Baldwin Park, I obsessed over Irwindale’s mines and aggregate the material used to construct our freeways. ese roads are the thread that allow us to venture into di erent communities. is film honors the miners who have made this possible and explores our collective need for connection.
Hiroshi Teshigahara had the biggest influence on my film’s poetic visual language, energy and soundscape. Like him, I immortalize my home and my version of a Sisyphean struggle. In my idealized view, I juxtaposed intimate moments with the vastness of LA County’s sprawling landscape a character in its own right.
Christopher Guerrero Reprogrammed is set in retro-future LA, where Andrea, a lonely roboticist, has neglected her life to complete her masterpiece, IRIS, the “Integrated Reactive Intelligence System.” She finishes IRIS and it’s a miracle: IRIS is alive!In the
process of teaching her creation the ropes of being sentient, Andrea realizes she needs to patch up her own relationship with her father. By giving birth to artificial life, she learns how to live a better organic one.
Growing up in Fresno, I can’t remember a time when movies weren’t a part of my life. I always had an outsider view of film until I discovered Guillermo del Toro. Seeing a nerdy Latino filmmaker who isn’t afraid to blend authentic drama, comedy and sci-fi made me feel like I could do it, too.
Sophia Lafaurie Munoz
Estrella is a live-action/animated short film about a young adult named Luz trying to figure out who, or what, they are supposed to be on this earth. After an unproductive argument with their mom leaves them feeling lonely, they’re transported to the cosmos by an animated friend who shows them they are never truly alone on this journey of self-discovery. But is the universe big enough for Luz’s dreams?
While I cannot pinpoint a specific film/filmmaker as my main influence, I take inspiration from the media I grew up with, as well as how I view the world and how it views me. From Jim Henson to John Waters, pride and nostalgia are my influences.
Ja’Lisa Arnold
Grief Cannot Exist Without Joy centers on Tobi, a talented musician, struggling with the recent loss of his brother Lou. His only path to healing is to complete an unfinished song dedicated to his sibling. My friend and mentor, Daniel Wolfe, has been the biggest influence on me as a filmmaker. Often the biggest hurdle in a filmmaker’s developmentis finding their own voice. It’s been incredible to have someone help me build and nurture that. e visceral and subversive nature of his work is also something I aspire to achieve in everything I make.
On a sunny afternoon in late January, artist Jackie Amézquita reaches into one of the many storage containers nestled in her airy studio in South Central Los Angeles. She plucks out several ears of desiccated corn. Slathered with copper paint and arranged into a neat row, the corn is roughly two years old. Amézquita rubs her hands over the dried kernels, which have begun to discolor, and says to herself: “ is is nice. ey’re oxidizing.”
Corn is one of many organic materials Amézquita uses in her paintings and performance art. In her work, dirt, cochineal and masa aren’t just potential media, they are living archives containing memories and lineages of human existence. As such, the passage of time, and the inevitable decay it brings, is at the core of her artistic process. For Amézquita, the decomposing corn in her studio hasn’t died it is being transformed. is same regenerative spirit animates Amézquita’s ambitious new work created at Frieze Los Angeles 2025, presented in partnership with Maestro Dobel Tequila and Art Production Fund. e piece is part of Frieze Projects, curated by Art Production Fund under the title “Inside Out,” which sees various artists ri on the intersection between personal histories and Los Angeles’s environs.
Situated on three outdoor soccer fields, Amézquita’s installation ruminates on her origins as a Guatemalan immigrant to Southern California, as well as the ways in which humans migrate to new landscapes, in turn adding new layers of meaning to environments already replete with stories. e new work is rooted in her fascination with data patterns, specifically those tracing global human migration throughout history. rough these studies, she learned that migration from Asia to the Americas in centuries past was not linear but rather followed
a curve. Stretching 190 by 80 feet, Amézquita’s immersive installation is designed so that audiences mirror this pattern. By entering at the eastern side of the soccer fields, then wending their way on a curved trajectory, participants activate the space in an act that the artist describes as forming “invisible lines of connections.”
e materials Amézquita utilizes in the piece including many pounds of lava rock sourced from Mammoth Lakes near Yosemite National Park, Mexican corn, Indonesian blue pea flower, and soil and ocean water from Los Angeles —also nod to past lineages. Ancient civilizations including the Maya an important source of inspiration for Amézquita incorpo -
rated lava rock matter into their grand central plazas, which served as focal gathering places for their communities.
Amézquita’s emphasis on the values embedded in specific materials appealed to Maestro Dobel Tequila. Alejandra Martinez, creative director of the Maestro Dobel Artpothecary which celebrates Mexico’s contemporary art and hospitality scene through a series of immersive events comments how the artist “beautifully captures the essence of origins, generational knowledge and history, blending endemic textures and natural colors with such grace that her message feels both subtle and powerful.” Dobel’s advocacy of contemporary art has seen it support commissions at Frieze fairs
by Latinx artists including Ryan Flores, Ruben Ochoa and ektor garcia, and establish the Maestro Dobel Tequila Latinx Art Prize at El Museo del Barrio in New York, the first edition of which was won by Havana-born artist Carlos Martiel. Proudly describing itself as the product of 11 generations of tequila-making, its engagement with art seeks to “draw from the past to create something innovative,” says Martinez.
As participants move through Amézquita’s ephemeral space, they can also sit on an array of petate, woven mats used in Indigenous ceremonies and celebrations, and gather amid copperinfused corn, cochineal and a scattering of blue pea flowers. “ is environment will be holding space for people to interact,” she says. “To move around, but also to weave themselves between each other and the landscape. Just how we have done around the world.” As the recent wildfires have left many Angelenos temporarily homeless, this gesture acquires a new significance.
By design, the Frieze installation is exposed to the elements. Rain is a possibility, and the corn will likely decay over its four days outside. Amézquita recognizes that part of being an artist involves working with environments, not against them. Her solution: some of these materials are flecked with chia seeds, which might sprout in the event of a downpour. is possibility for change is the only constant in Amézquita’s varied practice. “It also speaks to the reality of being humans,” she says. “How we transform, how we change, how we grow or regenerate.”
Last fall, the takeover of the historic Virginia Robinson Gardens by virtuoso LA artist Max Hooper Schneider was an opportunity for celebration and the city’s art scene showed up in force for a special Frieze viewing, as Jennifer Piejko reports
By the time Virginia Robinson had the place to herself, the 2,500-square-foot house started to feel a little lonely. She and her husband, Harry Robinson whose family made their fortune from the J.W. Robinson’s department stores had brought the six rolling acres of their Beverly Hills home to life with the help of the on-sta botanist and landscape architect Charles Gibbs Adams. ere were rare, imported plant species and antique furniture, an endless swimming pool reflecting dazzling, cloudless blue skies and a manicured backyard that later doubled as a helipad. When Harry died in 1932, Virginia wanted her home to still feel as if it were alive with the endless stream of glamorous guests they had always entertained. So, she invited some real party animals to move in —a troop of monkeys. e primates roamed the tropical King Palm Forest and mingled with visitors; nowhere on the Robinson estate was o -limits. e monkeys eventually handed over the keys in 1977, when the Robinson family donated the estate to Los Angeles County. ere haven’t been many unruly interventions since. Until October 2024, when the Virginia Robinson Gardens opened up for Los Angeles-based artist Max Hooper Schneider to present his exhibition “ e Unknown Masterpiece.”
Recognized for works that involve both organic and technological collaborators, Hooper Schneider has created a series of sculptures using the gardens’ lateseason debris of fallen fruits, branches and flowers. He has covered them using electroplating a chemical bath that coats objects with metal. e copper drips from the organic matter in what he describes as a “coraline, dendritic fashion.” e arrangements are like preserved specimens: dormant for now, but suggestive of having the potential to break out of their shells and return to a more primitive ecological order.
“You have to think of these assemblages as reliquaries,” explains Hooper Schneider, “because you have to believe what’s really inside them stays in a constant state of change.” We are speaking on the terrace of the Pool House, a miniature mansion overlooking the listless blue waters that the visitors on this arid October morning seem barely able to resist. “ ey will denature and oxidize the surface [of the plants],” he continues. “ ey’re evolving; they aren’t static objects.” e copper-plated arrangements of tree bark and bananas, whose series of chemical baths took half a year to complete, have been placed in the dining room, amid the Continental crystal and china, and in the house’s studies, as well
Opposite Top row, left to right:
MOCA Maurice Marciano
Director Johanna Burton with gallerist François Ghebaly; MOCA Board Chairperson Maria Seferian with guest; Frieze’s Brooke Kanter with Hammer Advisory Board member Sherry McKuin, collector Joel McKuin and Hammer Global Council Chair Curt Shepard
Middle row, left to right: MOCA Trustee Terri
Smooke and guest; ICA LA President of the Board of Directors Claudia Flores; artist Max Hooper Schneider with curator and Del Vaz Projects
Director Jay Ezra Nayssan
Bottom row, left to right: Hammer Advisory Board member Angella Nazarian and philanthropist David Nazarian; Getty Research
Institute Deputy Director Andrew Perchuk and art
historian Allison Perchuk; Hammer Advisory Board member and Hammer Circle
Co-Chair Demetrio “Dee” Kerrison
Overleaf
Guests with work by Max Hooper Schneider
Photography Emily Pinto
as in the ponds and pools outside. “Even though these objects look like antiquities,” he explains, “they’re still in transit.”
A back room, blocked o with blackout curtains, contains a raised bed with Hooper Schneider’s collection of black plants. It resembles his aquarium works, but with the lid pulled o . e artist, who trained as a landscape architect, has contrived the lush, velvety, silent container garden to thrive under the rays of a single pink light bulb an austere and harsh habitat when compared to the proliferating ecosystem just beyond the covered windows. “Max and I have been discussing this garden for years,” explains project curator Jay Ezra Nayssan of Del Vaz Projects, a nonprofit exhibition space and publishing platform based in Nayssan’s Santa Monica home. “In many ways, it’s like turning the room itself into a vitrine.”
ese incredible gardens are one of LA’s hidden gems, so I ask guests what else they would nominate as a lesserknown LA masterpiece. Artists Lucile Littot and Markos Mazarakis-Ainian, who are in town from Athens to perform at nonprofit LAND’s annual Halloween benefit, hosted at Del Vaz Projects a few nights later, focus on the area’s natural wonders. For Littot, it is the landscape just beyond the city, “ e sound of the
desert, because there is something surreal in the ‘no-sound,’ the silence. It’s between two worlds ours and the spirits’.” For Mazarakis-Ainian, it is the ocean. e night before, large parts of the city had come to a standstill, when a combination of huge public events, including a Dodgers baseball game, caused congestion that paralyzed its streets for hours. For Belen Piñeiro of François Ghebaly gallery, LA’s masterpiece is its intricately looping freeway system one that is easy to take for granted, but which connects every corner of the loosely defined “city” of Greater Los Angeles.
As we wander through the gardens, around the fountains and over delicate staircases to get back to the pool house, Hooper Schneider muses on the Robinsons’ ecological ambitions for their home: “At what point does an exotic plant become a native one?” he asks. e flowers and trees have been blossoming here for nearly a century. A visitor spots a starfish embedded in one of the artist’s sculptures. “Where did you get this?” he asks. “Oh, that’s definitely from here,” jokes Hooper Schneider to the laughing crowd. “I got that one from the swimming pool.”
JANELLE ZARA
In your collection, you have a piece that I love: one of Robert Irwin’s discs. Can you tell me a little bit about when and how you acquired it?
JARL MOHN
Sure it’s actually got a good backstory. Years ago, when I started building the minimal light and space collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles had a gala and they asked me if I would be willing to have an artist sit at our table. I said I’d love that and they suggested Robert Irwin. I was thrilled; at the dinner, we were chatting and he asked me what I collected. I said, “Well, I’m starting to build a light and space collection.” He asked, “What do you have of mine?” I had to admit I had nothing and he said, “What kind of collection is that?”
I had actually wanted to buy a disc about two years earlier from Pace, but
then they sent me three pages of instructions for lighting it, and I could not find a place where it would have worked. It killed me. He said, “ ere are no instructions. I have collectors that have not lit them and they look great.” I felt terrible. Two years went by and I was at an art fair; I saw a disc and I ended up buying it. It turned out to be the same piece someone had bought it and flipped it. I ended up paying twice as much for it.
I also have one of his 19-foot acrylic columns.
JZ Did you get to know Irwin well?
JM I wouldn’t say very well, but I spent a little bit of time with him. I was the chair of the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] of Southern California for 13 years. He was very interested in civil liberties and social justice. He did not want to talk to me about art, he wanted to talk to me about the ACLU. en, years later, I became the CEO of NPR and he
loved NPR. So, his interest in me was not as a collector so much but in the prosocial work I was doing.
JZ You didn’t begin as a light and space collector. What sparked that interest and how did you begin with your first light and space acquisitions?
JM I think, like many collectors, when I started out I didn’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to collect other than it being contemporary work. I tried to do a fair amount of reading about collecting, and the most persuasive argument I found was that a good collection really should have a theme, a through-line of some sort. I knew that I wanted a collection that stood for something. e very first works I bought were some Larry Clark photographs from the “Tulsa” series [1963–71]. at was in 1991. e next eight to ten years, it was a little of this, a little of that, and there was no theme. I figured sooner or later the idea would
Photography Peyton Fulford
hit me, but I wasn’t going to force it and pick something at random. Years later, I ended up buying a John McCracken outdoor stainless-steel work called Triton [2000]. Once I had installed it, I thought: Okay, now I know I want to collect work at the intersection of minimalism and light and space. Now we have a little bit of land art, too, where it all converges. Once I had made the decision, it was much easier to focus. At the time, James Turrell, Irwin, Mary Corse, Doug Wheeler, McCracken and Peter Alexander weren’t commanding super-high prices, so we were able to assemble a pretty good collection of their work.
JZ You said that you were reading about collecting. What were you reading, and what kind of guidance did you have? Did you have mentors?
JM I talked to a number of collectors: Dean Valentine, who I knew from the television business, and a guy I worked
with at MTV called Mark Rosenthal. Another person who was instrumental and is controversial now is Douglas Chrismas. Every time I would go by Ace Gallery to look at whatever exhibition they had up, Douglas would invite me into his o ce, and he would take books from the shelves, open them up and start talking to me about Donald Judd, Carl Andre, DeWain Valentine, Corse and the importance of California light and space. I don’t know why he talked to me about them, because I hadn’t expressed any interest in minimalism or light and space. I didn’t even know what they were, to be completely honest. But then, when I saw the McCracken piece in New York in 2000, everything came together.
JZ Something specific about that genre spoke to you.
JM I might be trying to reverse engineer the answer, I’m not completely sure, but my mother was a textile designer
Above Katrina and Jarl Mohn, with (clockwise from top left) John McLaughlin, #17, 1959–68; Tara Donovan, Untitled 2003; Walead Beshty, Fedex 10kg Box – 2006 FedEx 149801 REV 9/06 MP 2012; Carl Andre, Small Weathering Piece, Dusseldorf, 1971; Peter Alexander, Rose Wedge, 1967
who made beautiful minimalist patterns. And then, during my very short career in college, before I was thrown out, I was a mathematics major, and I love math.
JZ Katrina, what was it like growing up with art? How do your and your father’s interests di er?
KATRINA MOHN
He started seriously collecting when I was in my mid-teens, and some of the biggest acquisitions happened when I was in college, studying art history at the University of Southern California. I was on my own journey academically learning about Californian artists and Jarl was on his journey learning about Californian artists, too. We both claim to have influenced the other, but actually I think it was a back and forth.
JM Once Katrina went to graduate school, she would come back and say, “You don’t really understand this stu .” KM I started working for the Patricia
JM I asked, “Katrina, why did these mean so much to you?” She said, “First, it was the first artwork you bought. Second, I was not allowed to see them as a child, which made them very interesting to me.” And third, Katrina was born in Tulsa.
JZ Full circle! Katrina, tell me about your role in the family collection now. KM I think it began with me o ering to put together a database of the collection, because, for a long time, we just had big binders with invoices of all the purchases. at took me a couple of years. en, I put together a book of all the works in my parents’ home in Los Angeles. First all the minimalist works, then I started working more with the emerging artist collection, making sure that everything’s documented and insured, dealing with loans all the nitty-gritty stu behind the scenes. en I did a book for that part of the collection, which I updated this year.
JZ How many pieces are in the collection?
KM For the emerging and underrecognized artists, probably just over 300. And for the minimal light and space, it’s around 65.
JZ Would you say the former is your sole focus now, or are you still collecting light and space as well as emerging artists?
JM In terms of acquisitions, light and space is probably not a priority now. I don’t have much from that collection in storage as I really like to have it on display, given the size, importance and cost of those works. If I found something that I thought was really juicy, that really added something, then I might jump on it, but I want things that are going to really make a di erence.
JZ What advice would you give to an aspiring collector, or maybe simply somebody beginning to take an interest in art, about how to get started?
KM e more you look at stu , the more you’ll know what you like, the more you’ll know what you gravitate toward. It doesn’t have to be from a place of intellectualism, you can just like what you like, and not like what you don’t like. It doesn’t have to be about what other people say is good.
JM I think you have to look at a lot of art. People don’t want to do that. If they want to collect, they want to go out and just jump right in. In a sense, that’s what I did and it took me nine years to figure out what I really wanted to do.
Faure Gallery in Bergamot Station when I was in college and a lot of Cool School artists were hanging out there at the time: Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander and Craig Kau man. I got to know all these guys and had friendships with a lot of them while seeing my dad collecting their work. at was something.
JZ I read that you weren’t allowed to see his early Larry Clark acquisitions.
KM I don’t know if he was ever actually allowed to hang them. One was a photograph of a pregnant woman shooting up, and one was a photograph of a dead baby in a co n. So I never saw them growing up, but I heard about them, and eventually I did hang them in my apartment when I was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. ey hung in my home here in Los Angeles for several years until I had a kid, and now they’re in storage again.
I come from the music industry; I was in radio for years, spent a lot of time at MTV and VH1. Music’s a very important part of my life. I used to think about music as the framework, the way I looked at other forms of art. e song that you really like immediately quite often tends not to wear very well. After you’ve heard it a number of times, it is just not the same. Some music, that’s a little more complex, a little harder to get, grows on us. ose are the songs and the artists that I think have longevity. I think the visual arts, in many ways, are the same.
JZ I’d like to ask you about Michael Heizer.
JM I think we may have the only work from the “rock in a box” series in the world installed in a residence. JZ e installation must have been a challenge.
JM Boy, it took a lot of work, but it was really worth it. We were involved with the acquisition of Levitated Mass [2012] for Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael Govan and I took a number
of trips to visit Heizer at City [1970–2022] in Nevada. e first time I went there, which I think might’ve been 2007, the piece we now have was outside his studio. I fell in love with it, but never really pursued it because of the amount of time, energy and crazy construction involved. It required us taking out an exterior wall of the house, reframing it in steel, jackhammering out a fireplace which took five days digging down four feet, putting an industrial rebar in concrete, closing our street o for three hours, craning the work over a wall, wheeling it into place, bolting it into the concrete, and dry walling around it.
I remember showing Heizer the pictures of the construction on my phone and he said, “Wow, that’s some commitment.” It was a lot of fun.
JZ You also have a James Turrell in your house.
JM He built a screening room for us, the only one he has done.
JZ When did you transition to collecting younger artists?
JM Lifelong learning is an important thing for our family. I had done my research, and learned about the major minimalist artists. en I started learning and doing research about artists that were maybe not as well-known as the key figures. I began adding some of those artists to the collection but, after a period of time, it became less about learning and more about detective work in terms of tracking down good pieces.
I’ve always loved LA. When I was living in New York and working for MTV, I used to fly out once a month. When I had the chance to move here, I jumped at it and was so excited to discover what was happening in the visual arts.
I thought, well, maybe this is the next area of exploration for me. e first works for the emerging LA art collection were two drawings by Mark Grotjahn that I bought in 2006.
More recently, I got involved with the “Made in LA” biennial and set up the Mohn Artist Award in partnership with the Hammer Museum.
JZ What can you tell us about MAC3?
JM “Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA,” also known as MAC3, is our donation from our collection of LA artists to the three institutions together, with an endowment to continue to grow these shared holdings. I didn’t want to break the collection up and I was really inspired by the original iteration of Pacific Standard Time, when everybody worked together and loved doing so.
I really think that’s the vibe of our city. So, the endowment will make sure that every year the institutions can pick work for the collection by artists that live and work in LA. ere are going to be exhibitions every few years that travel nationally and internationally to show what’s happening here in LA. Hopefully, we will be able to continue to inspire and motivate artists to live and work here and be part of this community.
California-born photographer Colin Dodgson has traveled the world and lensed everyone from Isabelle Huppert to Urs Fischer. But his work is deeply embedded in the sunlight, rhythm and material of his home state: as this new selection of work, made especially in celebration of Los Angeles, bears witness
Before he was a photographer, Colin Dodgson was a surfer. Born and raised in Oxnard, California, he spent all his time training in the ocean. Or, rather, he spent all the time that was allowed him, since surfing requires the cooperation of wind, waves and weather, tides and currents. This responsiveness stood Dodgson in good stead for his photography, which similarly requires the alignment of settings, whether atmospheric, physical or emotional. “My work is conditional,” he tells me, “I can’t just ‘switch it on.’”
Dodgson studied at a photography trade school, one of “the last generation who didn’t learn to do digital first,” and a commitment to analogue processes is part of his fine alchemy of image-making. As he explains, photographing on film means “you can’t shoot in very low light situations; your day is done when it gets dark.” Dodgson seems in particular to thrive in the flush of the late afternoon, when the deep, dying light sets his subjects aglow.
This preference is also a matter of psychology: toward the end of day, Dodgson explains, “normal things have
happened: you’ve had lunch, you’ve seen friends. You are in a place mentally where you can make decisions that don’t feel rash.” He talks about what he calls “beach brain,” and I imagine what it feels like heading into town after a long day by the ocean: blissed out and slightly befuddled, retinas a little bleached.
A gentle and pleasing bafflement, or curiosity. Dodgson’s subjects are often things made strange here, an egg on the
curb, the interior of a cool bag, an oceanic vista caught in a glass tumbler. He tells me about a trip to Japan, when “the light was really similar to that of coastal California,” but everything else color, pattern, architecture was different. It was “like being an infant again, when you can’t really talk to anyone and are just visually taking it all in,” Dodgson says. One word for this state, I suggest, is wonder. I am reminded of some lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (1921): “What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? /What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? / What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?”
Personal journeys have remained important to Dodgson. In the books Deeper Green (2019) and Ciento por Ciento (2023), he documented trips through Belize and Patagonia with the World Land Trust. A recent commission saw him capture a ride from Singapore to Penang on Belmond’s Eastern & Oriental Express. He still moves regularly between Oxnard, New York and London. But the journey taken by objects animates him, too. He talks about his fascination with the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Dutch golden age still lifes, which he first saw as a teenager, and how their “crazy town” contents document the Dutch Republic’s status as a trading capital, commanding exotic goods from across the world: a precursor to the unnatural array of the produce aisle in any supermarket in California. In a recent image from an LA street market, the taut, polished surfaces of tomatoes are joined by the spotted skin of a cocoa fruit, a crop Dodgson had never seen before.
“I think, sometimes, the strongest points in my work come from this feeling of: What is that? ” he says. “I want the photographs to feel like when I see the thing in real life, how I felt when I met this fruit.” Rooted in real experience of the subtleties of place, the facts of light, the material of the actual what these images often most look like, to me, are memories: those things which we may one day find are all we ever really had.
Jonathan Pessin’s eccentric Frogtown emporium NFS (not for sale) is a living testament to a life of magpielike collecting and choosing form over function. Like it? He might want to hang on to it …
“I like anything that’s a conversation piece,” Jonathan Pessin says, standing above a weathered, mint-green metal chair, its back formed from branches replicating a prickly pear cactus. We are in Pessin’s shop NFS, which he runs from the loft where he used to live. It’s a 1940s industrial building in Frogtown, squeezed between the LA River and the 5 Freeway. Pessin chose the shop’s name an abbreviation of “not for sale” for a number of reasons, including his penchant for wanting things others won’t sell and his reluctance to sell his own wares. “ is is for sale,” he admits of the cactus chair, “but I want to keep it.”
A self-proclaimed “high-end hoarder,” Pessin grew up in Boston, and moved to Los Angeles with aspirations of becoming an Albert Brooks-type multihyphenate. He already collected starting with rocks in childhood and excavated treasures from Southland’s flea markets, backyards and eccentric estate sales. While still working in film, he amassed enough items to open a store long before he actually launched NFS in 2014. By then, he had established relationships with designers such as Kelly Wearstler and Sally Breer, but new audiences consistently find NFS on Instagram or through word of mouth. Each time someone comes in, Pessin intends to just say hello and let them
wander. “But I end up chatting,” he says. “ at’s the thing I find really stimulating: just talking to people about their relationships to objects.”
Lying flat on a shelf is a postcard-sized painting of a delicate cracked eggshell against a deep black abyss. It is signed, in slanted caps, A. Hansen. Neither Pessin nor I know who this is, and, here, the identity of the artist hardly matters. “I just want it to be visually interesting,” Pessin says, adding that he’d like to focus more on art and objects and move away from furniture. “I have a real resistance to buying anything practical.”
Two years ago, at Show Gallery in West Hollywood, he curated a selection called
“Uncomfortable Chairs,” the title indicative of the fact that he is not the person to help you find something soft to sink into. If you are looking for a soft sculpture, however, he has plenty. Hanging high in one corner of NFS, a floppy fabric tableau protrudes from a rectangular frame. It looks like a box of misshapen eggs balancing on top of a cloud-like stool. It is a world unto itself. “People don’t really seem to have taken to that yet,” Pessin remarks. And by the time they do, he probably won’t want to sell it.
shopnfs.com | @shopnfs
As the West Coast artist and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane is celebrated in a new exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Frieze Week invites a musician, a poet and a visual artist to discuss her influence
Warren Ellis, musician
No other artist has had a greater impact on my creative or personal life than Alice Coltrane. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to believe in God or a greater power. Music was the portal that enabled me to focus those energies toward some divine energy.
I was 18 when I discovered Alice Coltrane in 1983, to be precise. In those days, I could only buy records from the bargain bin and, rooting around one day, I came across a vinyl gatefold copy of her album World Galaxy (1972). I figured she must be related to John Coltrane. It was at the same time that I collided with Igor Stravinsky. Up until then, I was a violin player of rudimentary skills who had been immersed in David Bowie, the Sex Pistols and AC/DC.
Hearing that album changed my life. I became a disciple of Alice Coltrane and will remain one until I am dust: her ability to stay on a groove; to create string arrangements that sound like she has upturned a piano and written out the notes; those slashing stabs of synthesizer; her harp-playing; her singing; those beautiful pop songs of devotion to Krishna; her e ortless spirituality; andher ability to be so free and so grounded something most of her contemporaries could never achieve.
I believe her final ashram recordings, collected on e Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (2017), show an artist at the peak of her creative powers. Just the wildest music I have ever heard. Each time I go into the studio, I try to honor her in some way and, when I am stuck, I ask myself, “What would Alice Coltrane do?”She always helps me find a way forward.
I saw her play at Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2005. My life would never be the same after that.She arrived on stage with her grandchildren and they sat on the organ bench with her while she played. For the encore she said, “ is is a song John left for us to learn.” And she
launched into “A Love Supreme” (1972). People have said to me that there should be a church built in her honor. But whenever we listen to her music we congregate in her church. She opens our hearts. What purer definition of the word “church” can there be?
Warren Ellis is a musician, composer and the author of Nina Simone’s Gum (2022). He lives in Paris, France.
Suné Woods, artist
My son/sun Ayler, named after musician Albert Ayler, a contemporary of Alice and John Coltrane, was with me on my second visit to the Vedantic Center Sai Anantam Ashram, “the ashram without walls,” in November last year. Dressed in his chic white pants (found in a thrift store) and a matching shirt (found in his father’s closet), he nestled into the couch and received the medicine of Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda through her eternal spirit and the music of her devotees and guests. e energies in the room were palpable, a wave of bhajan chants and tones that poured into me. It gave me a sense of what it must have been like there up in the Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica Mountains, during the years when families raised their children together in the dove-colored ashram and Swamini Turiyasangitananda would hold her Sunday discourses.
Swamini’s recorded teachings and sounds inform my two-channel video installation for the Hammer Museum’s upcoming exhibition “Monument Eternal.” In them, her voice urges those present in the Sai Anantam Ashram to consider the concerns of the soul. “ e soul requires worship of God in the same way that the physical form requires food and water,” writes Shankari C. Adams on the benefits of chanting in her 2018 biography of Alice Coltrane, Portrait of Devotion
For me, soul-growing is a spiritual journey: learning to live on earth while
Opposite Alice Coltrane, c.1978. Courtesy: John & Alice Coltrane Home
“Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal” is on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, until May 4. e exhibition is part of “ e Year of Alice,” a nationwide initiative realized by the John & Alice Coltrane Home and numerous partners.
being in service to divine love. My new work is also informed by conversations I have had with Swamini’s devotees and folks in my community about spirituality and spiritual practice. Purusha Hickson, a yogi trained by Swamini, said that the path she showed him was that of meditation and devotion. Also, that purifying the mind and attuning to spirit will create the appropriate instrument for higher forces to use.
In my work, I am contending with what it means to be on this planet, in this incarnation of a human vessel, to be present with the infiniteness of energies, to create utterances of the heart, to evolve. In doing this, I am deeply grateful for the life and legacy of such a profoundly elevated spirit as Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda.
Harmony Holiday, writer
Her smile begins in the eyes which swell and surrender a melancholic mirth, the downcast joviality of a woman who has known her true counterpart and the pain of his departure. “ ere’s nothing like the beauty of a girl in love” a lyric from a song my father, Jimmy Holiday, wrote— is embodied in an image of John and Alice Coltrane side by side in a club in Los Angeles in October 1964. His arm around her, he wears the subtle, important grin of a kid at a carnival who’s just won a prize: his girl. ree years later, he would gift her a harp and disappear. Inextinguishable, burning still, the soul of John Coltrane endured in Alice and their children and in her music and his. And incapable of dimming or trivializing her light, their souls became one in a manner so matter-of-fact it’s uncanny. Her eyes were illuminated by the distant and distinctly personal worlds he’d entered and her music channeled and resurrected his spirit urgently, insistently reinstating their shared devotion to transcendence. eirs is one of the only
love stories I really believe in. In the same way I believe in the blatant, unimpeachable accuracy of ancient myths and their archetypes, I believe that true love existed once upon a time in the long, neverending history of Black music and that it was immortalized in the tones and frequencies Alice and John Coltrane attained together in exile and reunion with one another.
Because it could not be possessed, or contained in the physical world, their love demonstrates the electrified and transient nature of the real, the same way their compositions do, blending sensibilities across landscapes from Alice’s natal Detroit to John’s North Carolina, to the ashes of an ashram in Malibu, to what the title of a 1968 song by Alice calls the “Lovely Sky Boat” they might occupy now. Sometimes I lament —I mean really mourn with my body how a icted the legacy of Black music is, both privately and publicly, riddled with examples of dysfunction between men and women who really imagined they were living a great and glamorous romance. Great pretenders trapped in glamor’s pretenses. I grieve the commodification of these pathetic fairy tales, where the prince is a megalomaniac who hates himself and uses women as props in his material ascension (think of Ike and Tina Turner, or Aretha Franklin’s and Nina Simone’s husbands). e vision of Alice Coltrane with John Coltrane after the rain, after he was gone, a conjurer, invoking and recalling him on her instrument, soothes me past cynicism and renews my faith in the good of Black music when it’s not sabotaging its destiny with greed, lust or envy. e gratitude and modesty on Alice’s face when she is smiling is an invitation to join her divine understanding of the fact that you’ll never be lured into complicity with false idols or loveless love if you wait in another eternity far away from all that.
Four not-to-be-missed institutional shows on view in Los Angeles during this year’s Frieze Week,
“Gregg Bordowitz: Before and After (In Process)” | e Brick | Until March 22
Founded in 2005 as LAXART, e Brick opened in 2024 in a new roomy premises a former furniture showroom, boasting an outdoor patio on the gallery-filled stretch of Western Avenue. In February, it opens “Before and After (In Process),” a show of new works by Gregg Bordowitz. A multifaceted figure, Bordowitz is acclaimed as a filmmaker released over three decades ago, his Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) remains a seminal piece in the canon of the video essay ACT UP activist, writer and committed teacher. Bordowitz’s survey at MoMA PS1 in 2021 revealed an artist whose career-long concerns with care, metaphors of the body and public action have been prescient and pressing, while a recent show at the Bonner Kunstverein in Germany explored how his heritage as a Yiddish-speaking diasporic Jew shapes and complicates his ideas of language, identity and time. “Cry out, don’t hold back,” implored one work in Bonn. “Raise your voice like a shofar.” MM
“Earthshaker” | Del Vaz Projects | February 19–April 19
Visiting the archaeological site of Yagul in Oaxaca, Mexico, one day in 1972, the artist Ana Mendieta lied down, naked, among the stones of a Zapotec tomb and strewed herself with white flowers. So began the “Silueta” series (1973–78), in which the artist’s body is seemingly entwined with nature, subsumed by terrain or merely a trace upon the earth. e first substantial presentation of this series in Los Angeles for 25 years, “Earthshaker” puts Mendieta’s work in dialog with the so-called “Black Paintings” by the beloved UK filmmaker, artist and writer Derek Jarman tar-like painted collages which powerfully convey his sense of “modern nature” and works by Los Angeles artist P. Sta , including In Ekstase (2023), a five-channel holographic poem in which assertions such as “I AM ALIVE / YOU ARE DEAD” are haltingly intermixed. Together, these practices tease the separations of self and other, humanity and nature, health and pollution. Marking the Santa Monica non-profit’s tenth anniversary, “Earthshaker” promises to be Del Vaz’s most ambitious project to date, incorporating a series of screenings at venues throughout the city and a catalog with texts by the likes of McKenzie Wark. MM
Above left P. Sta In Ekstase (detail), 2023, Kunsthalle Basel. Photograph: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel
Above right María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Red Composition (detail), from the series “ e Path,” 1997.
Courtesy: María Magdalena Campos-Pons
“María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” | J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center | Until May 4 e investigation of ancestry, migration and cultural identity is a unifying thread running through the 35-year career of Cuban-born, Nashville-based María Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose practice spans photography, painting, installation and performance. Considering the means of cultural production and the associated areas of labor, enslavement and indenture as part of the work, Campos-Pons’s practice is an acknowledgment of the journeys and trials of her Yoruban, Spanish and Chinese ancestors: her great-grandfather arrived in Cuba from Nigeria as a slave; her grandmother was a Santeria priest. An iconic figure for the New Cuban Art movement that rebelled against state strictures in the 1980s, the artist is the founder of Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, a program that explores experiences of the “planetary South.” A sense of the connectedness of media and memory, art and activism should make for a compelling and provoking exhibition.
CW
“Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature” | e Broad | Until March 23 e sun-soaked West Coast might seem a strange place to encounter the master of lard, lead and the multipocket tactical gilet, but “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature” compares the social, political and environmental thrust of his work with the parallel growth of the ecological movement in southern California. With more than 400 works, many drawn from e Broad’s own collection, the show positions the artist’s humble and repeatable materials as key, with a focus on his “multiples,” such as Sled (1969), Felt Suit (1970) and Rhine Water Polluted (1981). Inspired by Beuys’s work 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982–87), which saw the planting of 7,000 trees accompanied by basalt marker stones across the city of Kassel in Germany as a visible, mutable and organic reckoning of the traumas of World War II, an accompanying treeplanting program, “Social Forest,” sees more than 100 native oaks newly rooted in LA’s Elysian Park and Kuruvungna Village Springs in early February. By Frieze Week, they should be bedding in nicely. CW
All listings correct at time of printing.
For more unmissable exhibitions at institutions during Frieze Week Los Angeles 2025, and a critic’s guide to shows across the city, visit: frieze.com
