'Made in L.A. 2020: a version' Adjusts to Pandemic Realities
This year, many plans were up-ended, particularly those laid out months or even more than a year in advance like weddings, vacations, and, naturally, museum exhibitions. While some museums closed their doors, preventing visitors from seeing shows before they ended or while they were intended to open, galleries started rolling out appointment systems for new and existing shows. But what happens when your exhibition is actually meant to open during the new normal?
For the team behind the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” the fifth iteration of its biennial highlighting L.A. artists, the answer lies in adapting to the new conditions as much as possible. This year’s exhibition features the work of artists like Hedi El Kholti, Aria Dean, Katja Seib, Reynaldo Rivera, Monica Majoli, Ligia Lewis and Fulton Leroy Washington (aka MR. WASH) but it’s not open to the public yet — at least not in its entirety.
As imagined by independent co-curators Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler and Hammer Museum assistant curator for performance, Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi, the biennial offered multiple entry points for art lovers from its inception. But the inevitable effects of the pandemic created a shift in how some of these components came to life — and how audience members could interact with them.
The biennial spans two venues, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens and the Hammer Museum, along with installations, a podcast, an exhibition catalog and virtual performances. Many pieces were commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
Yet the institution remains closed, with language on its sitestating that it will “reopen pending permission from L. A. County.”
Instead, art enthusiasts can currently see a new series of five billboards by Larry Johnson in MacArthur Park as well as watch Kahlil Joseph’s “conceptual news program”BLKNWS® in select locations (co-produced with LAND or Los Angeles Nomadic Division).
Mackler says the team originally envisioned these offsite pieces as "as an opportunity for a happenstance experience, a kind of accidental viewing,” but that the current times shifted this reality.
“Of course, the everyday is really changed by COVID,” Mackler tells “Southland Sessions.” “People's routes are less spontaneous, people live less fluidly, there is less relaxed movement through the city."
Onyewuenyi echoes this statement. “It's no longer like an accidental encounter,” he says. “You have to be very intentional about how you move these days which is totally fine, but it’s changed the experience." With its installation at locations like Bloom & Plume Coffee in Historic Filipinotown, Sole Folks in Leimert Park and Hank’s Mini Market in South L.A., BLKNWS might be encountered while you’re waiting in line after a coffee run or grocery purchase. But everything now requires thinking ahead and staying cognizant of your surroundings.
On the other hand, Onyewuenyi emphasizes, the installation offers a certain access not available otherwise. While the list includes spaces you can enter without an appointment, others require reserving your spot ahead of time. Onyewuenyi says he ran into a friend who was excited about seeing the installation, but also about visiting clothing store Total Luxury Spa, which only recently reopenedvia appointment.
Initially, the team envisioned the podcast by SON. (Justen LeRoy) as a soundtrack to viewers’ drive from the Huntington to the Hammer (or vice versa), since both exhibitions feature the same artists, but the pandemic has put those plans on hold. LeRoy began using the South Central barber shop Touched by An Angel as headquarters for the project and podcast recording in 2019; it was originally also meant to serve as “a real life day-to-day social space,” Onyewuenyi explains, in which book club meetings and other gatherings would take place. Given the current restrictions, however, it’s unclear when this component of LeRoy’s project might take place, seeing as to the current restrictions.
Mackler says that the challenges have extended beyond the public-facing components — performance pieces had to be translated from IRL space to virtual means; certain materials weren’t available to artists; the movement of bodies in the gallery spaces had to be re-envisioned. While talking with “Southland Sessions,” Onyewuenyi mentioned this was the first time he’d seen the social distancing stickers on the museum’s floor.
Click right and left to see installations from the Hammer Museum:
Click right and left to see installations from the Huntington:
As for the content of the show, Mackler says there was no need to ask artists to change their conceptual focus.
"The ideas germinated by this new context seeped into the artists’ practices and into the final works, into images and into installations,” says Mackler. “But the undertow of the exhibition, the subjects that we were addressing from the beginning, remain relevant and became, in fact, lit by this very strange light of the pandemic.”
Onyewuenyi says the artists with planned performances readjusted quickly to the new conditions. Harmony Holiday, for example, transformed a live performance into a recorded play. Nicola L.'s work was originally imagined as an interactive piece, but instead the activation will be documented and shown through video. Yet Onyewuenyi also echoes Mackler’s sentiment.
“Even though they shifted to this video context and digital, it seemed to almost strengthen some of our curatorial questions and intrigue around the distribution of ideas,” says Onyewuenyi. “Those ideas and those threads were there in the beginning with their work and they just pivoted to change the apparatus in which they're asking those questions and displaying them and thinking through them.”
Of course, one could encounter Joseph or Johnson’s offsite pieces without realizing their connection to the exhibition. The billboards, in particular, place themselves into the city yet root themselves in the artist’s practice. And for those not comfortable with making reservations, running into a piece while grabbing a quick coffee still feels like a discovery.
And as we get used to staying further and further from each other, can we also learn to move within gallery spaces in the same way? Mackler and Onyewuenyi shared that the layout of the exhibition inside the Hammer Museum mimicked a prior Whitney biennial that used a more open layout. It feels slightly different inside the Huntington, but Mackler says she feels the audience should see both to get the full span of the show.
No matter the location where a viewer might encounter it, the show is a glimpse into what it means to display art in these times.
Top Image: Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS®, 2018-ongoing. Two-channel fugitive newscast. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, "Made in L.A. 2020: a version," Natraliart Jamaican Restaurant, Los Angeles. | Jeff McLane
