Gravitron is a collaborative installation featured in SFMOMA’s “Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales,” an exhibition by three of LA’s most closely watched artists. Throughout their collaborative and individual works, their use of glittering finishes, bombastic colors, and airbrushed surfaces pay loving homage to the art of the lowrider—a style of custom car that emerged as a postwar emblem of Chicanx culture, distinct from the hot rod in its slow-moving dropped suspension and bouncing hydraulics. Throughout California and the Southwest, lowrider cruising has been a locus for communal gatherings, where ad hoc car shows and raucous parties form in the parking lots of gas stations and grocery stores. Lowriders have also been a resurgent flashpoint for the policing of brown communities, where various bans, blockades, and other crackdowns have come and gone. (California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that will lift remaining bans across the state; it goes into effect on January 1.)

As a teenager in East LA in the ’90s, Rosales was arrested “three or four times” as the criminalization of cruising intensified, and signs prohibiting cars from passing the same point “twice within six hours” went up along Whittier Boulevard. “It’s sort of ridiculous, right?” she asked. “Who gets to tell you how many times you can go up and down the street?”

Standing at the exhibition entrance on a bent post, No Cruising (Whittier Blvd), from 2023, is one such sign; Rosales found it not far from her childhood home and cut down with the help of a friend and a handsaw.

“Sitting on Chrome,” on view until February 19, is not actually a show about cars or even specifically about cruising, but how the textures and aesthetics of a uniquely Chicanx art form can be deconstructed, queered, and recontextualized. All three artists describe the importance of hybridity in their work as they mix disparate genres and subjects in defiance of flattening stereotypes. Reassembled as sculptures, installations, and memorials, the lowrider’s abstracted parts strike an acutely specific emotional register for those who recognize them, where the personal coming-of-age memories intertwine with a collective history of communal resistance and self-styled identity, and the reframing of how that history is told.

“The language that we need is being built alongside the work,” said esparza, noting the limits of the standardized European canon. “Centering other modernities and histories prohibits us from starting from scratch and building the language and to understand the work in a real way. When people see our work and cry or dance—yeah, that’s a language.”

The exhibition initially began with SFMOMA curators Maria Castro, Tomoko Kanamitsu, and Jovanna Venegas inviting esparza to mount a transhistorical dialogue with Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity (1940), a monumental mural on long-term view at the museum. At the center of the piece, Rivera merged the Aztec goddess Coatlicue with an enormous industrial machine in a way that resonated with esparza, a performance artist whose practice frequently mines themes of futurism, hybridity, and Indigenous iconography. Before even asking Rosales and Ayala, esparza answered the museum’s invitation with a proposal for a collaborative show.

“I said that these are two artists in Los Angeles evolving the aesthetics and practices of our neighborhoods and our families,” he recalled. “They care for these histories and lineages while complicating them in very forthright, courageous ways.”

For Ayala, cruising in California’s Inland Empire in the 2000s was a “wholesome social activity,” where he and his father looked at lowriders like works of art in a gallery. His airbrushed paintings have a compelling way of playing with depth, layering images of personal significance in different rendering styles and incongruous planes as a chaotic trompe-l’oeil. His painting Reunion (2021) reads as a collaged tribute to the San Francisco Art Institute, the artist’s since-shuttered alma mater, composed in the style of a Lowrider magazine cover. A loosely rendered version of himself transforms into a cockroach (à la the Animorphs book series) against the Bay Area skyline, surrounded by startlingly photorealistic skateboard wheels, aluminum-wrapped Mission burritos, and paper-bagged cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. They float over Ayala’s own rendition of the Rivera mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931), the backdrop to SFAI’s undergraduate gallery. “No matter what you were doing in that space,” he said, “you were ultimately always having an exhibition with Diego Rivera.”

The artists met in LA around 2015, attracted by the thematic similarities of their dissimilar practices; each has a remarkable gravitational pull that audiences and communities organize themselves around. Both Ayala and esparza were early followers of Rosales’s two enormously popular Instagram accounts, @Veteranas_y_Rucas and @Map_pointz, that serve as crowd-sourced archives of ’90s Chicano youth culture. Posting the imagery and ephemera of that era—personal photographs, mall studio portraits, party fliers, news footage, and beyond—Rosales had carved out a new function for social media in its relatively early years. “She was using this digital platform as a way to archive a history you couldn’t really find anywhere else,” said Ayala. A small sample of her archive is fanned out in a vitrine like a collage, where sitting above a mirror, both the faces of high school portraits and the messages written on the back are visible simultaneously. “I want the archive to be visible from every angle,” Rosales said.

For esparza, Rosales’s accounts humanized a vilified era of collective refusal, where Southern California students had roundly rejected the school system—partly in protest to strident anti-immigration legislation, and partly to organize intricate networks of daytime and weekend raves. As a teenager, esparza was thrilled to spot these scenes on late-night news reports on out-of-control youth. “It was the only avenue to see ourselves in mainstream media,” he shuddered to recall. But for Rosales, he added, these were simply young people creating culture. “She created a radical way of opening up a space for people to reconsider this moment in our history where we felt criminalized, and to rename what we were doing.”

Following the violent death of her cousin Ever Sanchez in 1996, Rosales developed her archival practice, fueled by an urgent desire to study and understand her own history. Inventing a new approach to the archive, her installations and sculptures tap into the memorializing functions of the lowrider, the murals of which often portray loved ones who have passed. Her poetic odes combine the museological task of preserving artifacts with transmissions of memory and the processing of grief: Drifting on a Memory (a dedication to Gypsy Rose), from 2023, is both an altar and the interior of a lowrider, where flowers lie on the quilted velvet upholstery framing a rear windshield. Lying on the museum floor, low and slow (2023) is an example of Rosales’ portals, a recurring sculptural form where two-way mirrors framed by colorful LEDs create a neon mise en abyme. A wallet-sized portrait of a recently deceased friend repeats infinitely into the darkness, shrinking into the distance like a memory fading with the passage of time.

Near No Cruising (Whittier Blvd), the pulsing installation of old-school television sets stacked into a pyramid illustrates the ways in which the artists’ respective relationships with cars, art history, and materiality overlap and diverge. Jump-cutting from screen to screen, the footage shows vintage news reports on high-energy ’90s raves and lowrider shows pulled from Rosales’ archives; shots of Ayala in his studio; and documentation of esparza’s performances, one of which entailed Ayala airbrushing his six-foot-two frame the hot pink of Gypsy Rose, an iconic 1964 Chevy Impala from East LA.

More than a decade ago, esparza came to performance art as a refusal of painting’s inherently Eurocentric traditions. (When he does paint, he paints on adobe, slabs of pressed earth that his father and grandfather have been making their entire lives.) Despite the stack of Mexican realist books that a well-meaning UCLA art professor had given him, esparza said, “Performance art felt much more specific to me and my history and the people that I wanted to be seen by.” Ayala was mesmerized when Rosales first brought him to a performance of esparza’s in 2015, where, wearing a mask of his own face, esparza had ignited his headdress of sage, encircling himself with a crown of flames and smoke. “It was a powerful gesture,” Ayala said, one that recalled his grandparents’ Santeria rituals of blessing. “I was like Lupe, who is your friend?”

Before meeting esparza, Rosales had never encountered another artist who was so visibly Mexican, or whose family looked so much like her own. “What is this guy doing with adobe?” she had wondered, her curiosity stoked by a vague sense of familiarity. She and esparza had in fact been to all the same places growing up, both physically and emotionally. He had unknowingly watched her play guitar in younger days in a punk band, and in 2008, they had also both been radically inspired by the Los Angeles County Museum of the Art exhibition “Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement.” Years into their friendship, Rosales saw documentation of No Water Under the Bridge (2014), esparza’s performance in which he cut his fingertips underneath the 4th Street Viaduct. Suddenly she remembered years earlier driving past a terrifying set of bloody handprints on the walls of an underpass, and realized they must have been his.

In October, in the shadow of Rivera’s industrial Coatlicue, esparza became his own hybrid machine, stretching his body into the sculptural likeness of a souped-up lowrider motorcycle and inviting select viewers to climb on top and ride. This performance, first staged last December at Art Basel Miami Beach, was an activation of Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022), a kinetic sculpture built in collaboration with artist Karla Ekatherine Canseco from many different parts: the repurposed base of a bucking mechanical pony ride, shiny gold handlebars and wheels, and conceptual allusions to queer and Chicanx culture that may need to be explained at length.

Growing up in Pasadena, esparza had understood the customization of an old car as a right of passage for the men in his family, but he was particularly fascinated by the overt femininity—the saccharine colors, florals, and plush interiors. (As a queer woman with a slight frame, Rosales disagreed: “For me it’s always felt hypermasculine, no matter how many flowers you fucking put in there.”) There was also the inherent pageantry and seductive nature of cruising; once, when esparza was a teenager waiting in the back seat of his older brother’s Regal, another boy had invited himself to sit inside. The moment was wholly innocent but nonetheless electrifying. “When I think back to that moment,” esparza said, “I wonder how many times my brother must have made out in the backseat of that car.”

The artist executed an early iteration of Corpo RanfLA in 2018, asking Ayala to paint his body like a lowrider. Essentially this was drag, another glamorous art form similarly built in the margins that also suffers from over-policing. They spent 12 hours cutting stencils out by hand, applying an image of two cholos locked in a passionate kiss on the trunk (esparza’s back) and a commemorative portrait of Chicanx drag icon Cyclona on the hood (esparza’s chest). Once sculptor Tanya Melendez adorned his hair and nails with golden accessories, esparza took the performance to Elysian Park, a popular site for both types of cruising in cars and for lovers—both male outdoor rituals, but only one makes its sexual intentions explicitly known.

These themes came together with more permanence in 2022 when the sculptural version of Corpo RanfLA debuted in Miami Beach. esparza’s collaborators—including Canesco, Ayala, and Rosales, as well as performance artist Gabriela Ruiz and photographer Fabian Guerrero—had all flown in from Los Angeles for support. For a minute at a time, riders would climb onto esparza’s back and listen to his voice through a pair of noise-canceling headphones. As he spun his golden wheel, they listened to a story about the futurity of land and seeds, a metaphor for lineage, the preservation of memory and the endurance of self. There was a surprising and surreal intimacy to it, intensified by the specificity of the artist’s allusions and the warmth and softness of his voice. For me, the piece struck emotional chords where our lived experiences had overlapped, connecting LA’s distant past with an optimistic vision of its future.

In a recent article in The Cut, fashion critic Cathy Horyn lamented the market safety of tasteful and expensive-looking products as the “creeping paralysis” seizing creative risk. Lately, she wrote, prestige houses aim for nothing beyond “the look of unostentatious wealth,” a prevailing trend called quiet luxury.

The art world equivalent would be something like Pedro Reyes’s show at Lisson’s Los Angeles outpost over the summer—a suite of beautiful miniature monuments carved from marble, jade, brick-like tezontle, and volcanic rock. The press release did the heavy lifting, citing allusions to both Mesoamerican sculpture and Henry Moore, as well as “the artist’s thirst for knowledge.” The works themselves were perfectly inert and almost offensively safe, expressly designed for quick and uncritical viewing. For the unadventurous collector, this is exactly the kind of stuff you’d want for your home or garden. Art without formal or conceptual tension is high-end decoration; it never bothers anyone, and it’s more likely to match the furniture.

This fall, normally prime time on the art world calendar, the star-studded lineup among LA’s blue-chip galleries offers more of the same. If the emerging tier of the art market is full of fast fashion—work that’s poorly made, disposable, and not worth writing about—the high end offers its own version of quiet luxury. The vibe is formal and intellectual simplicity with expensive-looking materials, and it feels very phoned-in.

Where Horyn cites quiet luxury’s over-reliance on staid leather and cashmere, here we see an abundance of marble and decidedly more garish precious metals. For Hauser & Wirth, Jenny Holzer turned redacted Trump-era documents into paintings covered in gold and palladium leaf. In Hollywood, Marian Goodman’s highly anticipated 13,000-square-foot location recalls the minimal offerings of a designer boutique. The space opened with just two works by Steve McQueen, including Moonlit (2016), two shiny hunks of silver-leafed marble sitting in the spotlight of an otherwise empty room. At Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar, Analia Saban presents a two-part exhibition that includes white marble sculptures of an enlarged computer fan. Reaching for some conceptual gravitas, the press release asks you to consider the irony and “cyclical futility” of a device that cools the machines that heat the planet. My friends, let’s be honest: neither marble nor metaphor are giving this piece weight. These works reverse-engineered the artistic process to fit the tastes of hypothetical patrons, whose goal in the gallery isn’t to look or to think, but to shop.

I’m not sure if this is a problem unique to Los Angeles, a wider consequence of market uncertainty, or ludicrously capacious galleries expanding faster than artists can meaningfully develop work. Bad market trends will come and go, but at least the emerging and mid-career artists in LA are doing much more interesting things. The latest edition of the Hammer Biennial Made in L.A. is full of incredible works. Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade recently staged an intergalactic opera in a mountaintop observatory. Hauser & Wirth does have one good show organized by LA-based curator Jay Ezra with the Mike Kelley Foundation. I’m also still processing my first Vanessa Beecroft performance, a recent presentation at Deitch of topless women wearing merkins and Skims pantyhose. They shifted between various states of boredom and mild humiliation. I cannot say that it was good, but at the very least it was memorable.

Below, a look at the quiet luxury pervading LA’s blue-chip galleries. 

As you may have heard, galleries won’t stop opening in Los Angeles. Fueled by the boom in e-commerce that erupted during lockdown, the commercial art world is now in its Manifest Destiny era, marked by a mantra of endless expansion and countless galleries launching first, second, and third locations in LA. But I have to say, the mood is very fast fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of poor-quality paintings that read better online than they do in real life. This is the art market’s equivalent to shopping at Shein: Everything feels disposable.

Time, however, is an excellent filter. Lately the artists I’ve found worth talking about are all either passed or decades into their career; their works have both outlived the fleeting momentum of novelty and hype and predate the speculative asset market around contemporary art by emerging artists. Before we start, I’d like to share painter Claire Tabouret’s secret to longevity, a piece of advice for other artists she told me on a recent studio visit: “You have to keep an extremely high standard for yourself because the art world won’t have high standards; it’s just this big monster that wants more paintings.” Eventually, however, in the absence of quality, “They get bored and move on.”

To me, the change is surprisingly subtle; the refinished lobby features a larger, more centrally located information desk, but otherwise feels like the same airy rectangular architecture of recent memory. During the unveiling, however, Hammer director Ann Philbin disagreed.

“It’s not subtle. It’s huge,” she told ARTnews. “To have that opening onto the street, and to have the transparency of those beautiful windows that look in at the art—to me, it’s a total gamechanger.”

The museum is now in the final phase of a gradual transformation that began more than 20 years ago, when Philbin commissioned a then-emerging Maltzan to rework the entirety of its home from the inside out. These latest renovations look at the space from the outside in, foregrounding opportunities for dramatic, large-scale works to really say to the surrounding Westwood neighborhood, Hey! We’ve got art in here. From the new sculpture terrace, Sanford Biggers’s monumental Oracle, 2021, a wise, seated figure cast in seven tons of bronze, will greet passing traffic on Wilshire and Glendon Avenue through 2024. And through late August, pedestrians can peer into the lobby windows to see Chiharu Shiota’s grand staircase installation, a meticulously woven network of 800 pounds of red yarn that feels simultaneously womb-like, cancerous, and riveting.

It’s been Philbin’s longtime goal to raise the Hammer’s profile, not just within the art world but among the museum’s neighbors. Shortly after her arrival in 1999, an early informal audit showed that most pedestrians had no idea where the Hammer was, despite standing just outside its entrance. “The truth of the matter is that we used to be almost invisible,” she said. “People thought we were part of an office building.”

The Hammer is, in fact, an extension of what was Occidental Petroleum’s 16-story corporate tower, where oil magnate Armand Hammer once presided as chair. In 1990, to house Hammer’s collection of Impressionism and Old Masters, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a nearly windowless block of black and white marble, accessible to this day through the tower’s ground floor. His architecture followed the centuries-old approach of treating museums as “temples,” according to Philbin—that is, rarified spaces for the contemplation of art. “It never said, museum, it never said welcome. It never said come in,” she said, also lamenting Larrabee Barnes’ cramped galleries of “bad ceilings” and “terrible lighting.”

In 1994, four years after Hammer’s death, the University of California, Los Angeles assumed care of his collection. In 2000, Maltzan drafted a master plan that reinvisioned the building as the “city’s living room,” which in short order included the addition of a theater and cafe in 2006, the completion of a sunny outdoor courtyard in 2012, and a 60-percent increase in total exhibition space. The process unfolded incrementally as fundraising would allow, with other external factors. The $10-million, 2017 overhaul of the third-floor exhibition spaces, for example, might never have happened if an unnamed artist, invited to mount a retrospective, hadn’t point blank told Philbin, “I don’t like your galleries.”

Billed as “the completion of two decades of transformation,” the Hammer’s street-level reinvention might be better described as the beginning of the end. There still remains the conversion of a former City National Bank location into a new gallery, an expansion made possible by UCLA’s $92.5-million purchase of the entire building in 2015. During the pandemic, funds to finish and connect the space to the Hammer’s lobby were diverted to the prevention of layoffs, leaving the staff intact, but the former bank in a state of patchy terrazzo flooring with missing ceiling tiles. According to Philbin, artist Rita McBride saw this as the ideal “corporate ruin” for her Particulates installation, a vertical ring of green laser beams evocative of a bank heist, on view through November. While additional fundraising for construction is underway, visitors can view the piece by exiting the museum, then taking a bit of a wander before finding the entrance to the bank.

The transparent lobby has become the prevailing trend of museum makeovers in the last decade, presented as a major feature in the overhauls of Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, and many more. As institutions evolved to embrace a culture of inclusivity, the idea emerged that a bright, spacious entryway is less intimidating to the general public—and therefore gets more bodies through the door. Facades, however, don’t always do all that they say they will.

Despite the museum’s announcement of a new “dramatic presence across a full city block,” passing pedestrians and motorists are unlikely to detect much of a difference. Biggers’ sculpture, which debuted in the corporate enclave of Rockefeller Center in 2021, is only visible from the north side of Glendon, while the new bank gallery is hidden from the street behind black reflective windows. The sign above the door still does not say “museum,” but rather “Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center. (The entire building is now named after the owners of brands including Fiji Water and POM Wonderful, whose $30-million 2018 donation really helped jumpstart construction.)

All of this is to say that the museum still very much looks like part of an office building—there’s no hiding the 15 floors of glass and marble rising above it—but following the goals they set for the museum 20 years ago, Philbin and Maltzan have largely already achieved what they set out to do. The Hammer today is a pillar in LA’s artistic community, having platformed countless careers since the 2010 creation of the Made in L.A. biennial, and since 2005, assembled a robust collection of contemporary works that have long since departed from Armand Hammer’s narrow vision.

(The exhibition tied to the unveiling, “Together in Time,” presents a tightly packed cross-section of the museum’s contemporary holdings, not quite chronologically or thematically, but through the lens of recent market forces; think a grid painting by Charles Gaines from 2019, the year after the 79-year-old artist joined the roster of Hauser & Wirth, or a 2019 portrait by Amoako Boafo, gifted by his local gallerists, Julie and Bennett Roberts.)

The real game changer was not the reorientation of the Hammer’s entrance, but its elimination of admission fees in 2014, which led to a 25 percent jump in attendance. Now, on any given day, the museum is full of people, often gathered in Maltzan’s airy courtyard as if it were indeed a living room. Some come to enjoy the exhibitions, while others are there for the free Wi-Fi or an idyllic place to have lunch—all of which is fine, according to Philbin. For potential museum-goers, it seems the most compelling factor is being able to afford the entrance, rather than what it looks like.

Below is a painstakingly curated list of my absolute highest recommendations.

A brigade of black SUVs pulls up in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008), where the sculpture’s glowing lamp posts are foregrounded by a tinted pink sunset and the unrelenting flashes of a dozen event photographers. Later in the night, Pashgian explains the peculiar properties of Southern California light photons, but for now, a man is shouting from across Wilshire Boulevard.

“What’s the event?” he asks to no response. “Anybody?”

Overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the seaside neighborhood of La Jolla, the newly renovated complex is essentially two different buildings joined at the hip. 

On the right, you’ll find a composite of white-stuccoed boxes, punctuated by curved windows that riff on the surrounding buildings’ Mediterranean-inspired archways. The first box was designed by celebrated modernist Irving Gill in 1916, and in later decades, more boxes were added by architects Mosher & Drew and Venturi Scott Brown & Associates (VSBA).

On the left, meanwhile, architect Annabelle Selldorf’s new expansion is roughly the same scale, but totally distinct in materiality. In lieu of stucco and curves, she chose a palette of glass walls, sandy-colored travertine, and aluminum beams joined at right angles.

All museum expansions, in a sense, are a type of rebranding, where new architecture coincides with a new public image. The two buildings’ odd union is emblematic of both the museum’s and the architect’s task: to align contemporary culture with a canonical history.       

“The goal of this project was to create a more inviting and inclusive museum with a greater connection to the community,” the architect said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony last Tuesday.  

The original Irving Gill facade at MCASD’s new La Jolla flagship by Selldorf Architects.

When Selldorf joined the project in 2014, the MCASD had issues to resolve, primarily the lack of space for its 5,600-piece collection. But the building was also an iconic bit of architecture that had perplexed visitors for years. Its cartoonishly fat columns, designed in 1996 by the beloved postmodernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, obscured the front door in a way that was both a practical and symbolic problem. 

“A museum can feel somewhat hard for people to enter in the first place, and then we hid the entrance,” MCASD Board Chair Paul Jacobs explained in his remarks.  

Despite the outcry from Venturi Scott Brown fans, Selldorf replaced the columns with an entrance that, she said, “represents a true welcome for everyone.” 

Its glass walls are unobscured by a column-less aluminum brise-soleil, and the ticket counter is always visible from the outside. She and her team added 46,400 square feet of new build, effectively doubling the museum’s footprint while quadrupling its exhibition space. Skirting height restrictions on new construction, the existing auditorium was repurposed as a 20-foot-tall, 7,000-square-foot gallery.      

“If this isn’t museum sized, I don’t know what is,” Selldorf said as she led a tour of the building.

A Building With Views To Match The Art

Installation view of the Cohn Gallery inside MCASD’s new La Jolla flagship by Selldorf Architects.

A favorite of gallerists David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and other high-profile members of the art world, Selldorf Architects operates with what’s best described as an elegant pragmatism. 

The MCASD’s new galleries possess clear circulation paths and a minimalist’s grandeur, where natural light fills generously proportioned, open spaces. Tall, thin windows frame exterior landmarks — individual palm trees, bell towers, and towering pines — alongside top-notch examples from the museum’s collection.

Roughly organized by era, there’s a triangular gallery of Color Field painters including Rothko, Morris, and Motherwell, and an enormous trapezoidal gallery for Light and Space artists like Larry Bell and Peter Alexander. (Most galleries are normal rectangles, but these were pinched where the new construction connected to the old.) 

Rather than construct a new traditional auditorium, Selldorf added a more current “flexible events space,” a hallmark of contemporary museum architecture that provides a blank slate for more varied public programming. Here, that includes a luxurious floor-to-ceiling view of the ocean.  

The museum’s new luxurious Big Little Lies-esque views are not in fact “distractions from the art, but complementary,” Selldorf said twice during the museum preview, perhaps anticipating criticism. 

“For all of you who live here, the incredible light of Southern California and the incredible view of the Pacific Ocean is something you may take for granted,” the New York-based architect said. “We were thrilled to make it part and parcel of the experience. I think it will contribute to you remembering where you are, and what you have seen.” 

For the most part, the historically relevant architecture of the original building was left untouched, providing an interesting side-by-side study of how much the shape and culture of museums has changed. The interior has no demarcations between the old and new, though there is a distinct sensation of entering another era in the original space, a time when museums were perhaps considered less destinations than rarified containers for art. 

On this older side, the relatively low-slung, windowless galleries with gray-and-white terrazzo floors form a warren that’s decidedly confusing to navigate. And the original VSBA lobby, still adorned on the ceiling with the architects’ metal-and-neon fins, is intact, but will likely be challenging to program. It still reads very much like a lobby, only without an entrance. 

The MCASD Is Adopting Curatorial Changes To Match The New Architecture

Niki de Saint Phalle during a shooting session at Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1962.

The museum approached Selldorf Architects in 2014 seeking “a new architecture” that would “reach our full potential as a community resource for culture and education,” Kathryn Kanjo, MCASD’s director and CEO, said during her walkthrough of the building. 

Her sentiments and Selldorf’s reflected the institutional reckoning that’s been going on for a decade or more, as museums have acknowledged their own exclusivity and lack of representation. Corrective measures are architectural as well as curatorial. Honoring its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico-border, MCASD emphasizes its commitment to showing and collecting artists in the region. Its first year of programming also emphasizes solo shows of women artists, starting with Niki de Saint Phalle, followed by Alexis Smith and Celia Alvarez Muñoz.

The now-headlining “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s” is a sprawling survey of the late San Diego resident, co-presented with The Menil Collection, a Houston museum that houses the art collection of oil tycoons John and Dominique de Menil. The show fills the enormous former auditorium gallery with Nanas, Saint Phalle’s sculptures of archetypal women in defiant poses, and large-scale Tirs, or “shooting paintings,” goopy assemblages where the artist buried bags of paint in globs of plaster and shot them with a rifle. The most fragile pieces took years to secure on loan from European institutions, according to Menil senior curator Michelle White

“A lot of these works which are being shown in the United States for the first time may not come back,” she said during the exhibition preview. “We feel very lucky to have been able to bring together this group of work.” 

In the former VSBA lobby, a suite of works by various artists responding to the social and political tension on the San Diego-Tijuana border unfortunately recedes behind the space’s columns. Elsewhere, flanked by soaring galleries devoted to the movements of Pop Art and Hard-edge painting, the wall text in a modest mezzanine describes works from a group of Latinx artists “from the broader Americas,” made from the “1970s onward” as engaging in a “a range of issues” —these span Felipe Almada’s altar of religious and secular objects, including a figurine of Bart Simpson, to the surrealist portraiture of Daniela Gallois. 

I do wonder: As we retrofit art history with the underrepresented, will we categorize them as we did in the past, based on specific movements of formal exploration? Or will they be grouped by shared politics of representation, and broadly defined ethnic categories?

Robert Irwin, 1°2°3°4°, 1997.

As values evolve, the way that the art and architecture of the present will be perceived by the future is anyone’s guess. When VSBA renovated the museum in 1996, critical of the previous Mosher & Drew overhaul, they described their own intervention — cartoon columns and all — as a restoration of Gill’s original vision that would be “more inviting for visitors.” Two decades later, Selldorf removed those columns citing the exact same reason, completing the cycle of modern to postmodern and back again. 

Trumping MCASD’s exquisite new building, and even its Primetime Emmy-caliber views, the museum’s must-see crown jewel remains the 1997 installation “1º2º3º4º” by San Diego’s own Robert Irwin. 

It’s a simple premise: three squares cut from the brown-tinted glass of a gallery facing the beach, resulting in an extraordinary effect on the viewer’s perception. The squares frame landmarks in the distance, somehow bringing them closer, while simultaneously making the sky bluer, as the ocean breeze and smell of salt permeate the gallery. 

Selldorf was right—the windows here are extremely memorable. 

“Personal, global, societal, mundane, or profound,” the survey read. “Everything is valid. Just write down quickly any thoughts that come to your head.” The dozens of responses that Chang received went into the latest iteration of Milk Debt, an ongoing video project based on collective fear—and by extension, fear’s frequent companions of dread, despair, and uncertainty.

In May, with a scheduled solo exhibition postponed by the pandemic, Chang and the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, streamed a preview of the new piece online. The 10-minute clip featured a Zoom call with an unidentified blonde performer who, opening her palm-leaf printed robe, attaches a mechanical milk pump to each of her bare breasts.

As the pump’s swift, rhythmic contractions mimic the sound of panicked wheezing, she reads Chang’s scripted collection of Angelenos’ fears, the words scrolling on the bottom of the screen: “Volcanoes. Bloody Mary. My cat scratching me and the cut getting infected,” she reads.

The pumping slows, and trivial concerns escalate to the existential. “They will not build the tools to overcome dark times,” she continues. “There is no end in sight.”

Milk Debt headlines Chang’s rescheduled solo exhibition of the same name, which opened this week at the 18th Street Arts Center. The full version of the piece appears as a multichannel installation of nine different women from different parts of the world, reciting fears gathered from their local communities as milk is suctioned from their breasts.

“I wanted to think about the affective states of people who occupy a particular geographic place,” said Chang, who began collecting fears for Milk Debt in Hong Kong in 2019, at the very start of the city’s tumultuous extradition protests. In that first iteration, she shot a young woman pumping breast milk on an overpass, reading mounting sentiments of civic upheaval as demonstrators streamed down the road below. The project has continued in Los Angeles and along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, with more recent additions filmed via Zoom to observe social distancing.

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (still), 2020.

Alongside location-specific concerns, the Milk Debt performers speak of recurring universal fears—economic precarity, the threat of illness, and myriad other forms of violence. Their pumping of milk—a nurturing act that can signify the often invisible labor of women—also stands in as a symbol of humans’ pillaging of the planet, with the project having been initially inspired by Chang’s own consuming anxieties over climate change.

Milk Debt’s “fluids come to stand in for the extraction of water, oil, and other resources that the Earth provides,” said Anuradha Vikram, the show’s curator, noting that some performers were filmed near the Los Angeles River and Los Angeles Aqueduct. The work’s title comes from the Chinese Buddhist concept of an insurmountable debt owed to one’s mother for having nursed at her breast, and, amid the ongoing rising temperatures and inextinguishable fires throughout California, the artist was reminded of the enormous debt we continue to incur with the planet.

“Themes of drought and wildfire kept recurring during the making of the work, which alongside political unrest has kept the different geographies of the project connected to one another in haunting and beautiful ways,” Vikram added. “I feel that Milk Debt is a very urgent body of work that will connect with people on a gut level.”

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (still), 2020.

While a show fixated on the topic of fear seems expertly tailored to our era of multivalent, impending doom, Chang’s interdisciplinary practice of performance, video, photography, and sculpture has exhumed the private, vulnerable depths of the human experience for decades.

“Her practice has always struck me as fearless” in its insistence on confronting and verbalizing the worst of our emotions, said Nancy Lim, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who organized another survey of Chang’s work: “Que Sera Sera,” a two-venue exhibition on view now at San Francisco’s Friends Indeed and Cushion Works galleries through November 6. Themes of loss and grief weigh heavily in the featured works that Chang made from 2001 to 2017, including videos and photographs that allude to the declining years and ultimate passing of her elderly father.

The 2013 two-channel video that lends that survey its name, Invocations and Que Sera Sera, invites viewers into the actual hospital room where her father lay dying. As Chang bounces and sings to her infant son next to the hospital bed, in split screen, her mother reads a list from an iPad invoking the emotional turmoil of his final days: “Invocation of a fracture. Invocation of humiliation. […] Invocation of inappropriate laughing or crying.”

“I’ve always dealt with certain anxieties, undercurrents of ugly or minor feelings,” Chang said, citing poet Cathy Park Hong’s term for the persistent and gnawing malaise of the immigrant experience.

Patty Chang, Invocations and Que Sera Sera (still), 2013.

Chang is Chinese-American, born and raised in the Bay Area. After graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 1994, she began her career when she moved to New York and engaged in its alternative art scene. Defying the purported ideals of the female body, including the supposed submissiveness of the Asian female body, her early works incorporated private bodily functions and wincing simulations of self-harm that recall the contentious “blood-and-guts” work of 1970s feminists. In the 1996 performance, Gong Li With the Wind, she gorged on beans until she defecated. And in the 1998 video Shaved (At Loss), she shaves her pubic hair while blindfolded, periodically rinsing her razor in a glass of Perrier.

In the 1998 video Melons (At Loss), Chang recalls an aunt lost to breast cancer while slicing a dull knife through the tip of her bra, exposing a cantaloupe in lieu of a breast. As she masochistically squishes and eats it with her fingers, her actions overshadow the true sentiments of the piece. Over the years, however, the artist has continually refined a sense of balance, easing the transgressive barriers that had previously shielded that deeper sentimentality from view.

“The works of the past 15 to 20 years chart an emotional expanse,” Lim said. Rather than elicit the temporary, piercing shocks of Chang’s earlier pieces, her later works like Invocations have the power to blanket viewers under the crushing weight of grief.

Installation view of “Patty Chang: Milk Debt,” 2020, at 18th Street Arts Center.

“Que Sera Sera” surveys the shift in Chang’s practice towards grander, more poetic narratives by revisiting works from “The Wandering Lake,” the artist’s 2017 Queens Museum solo exhibition.  This includes the “Letdown” series, which highlights the surreal affinities between the human body and various bodies of water, that Chang photographed along Uzbekistan’s shrinking Aral Sea in 2014, shortly after the birth of her son. Prohibited from taking pictures of the Soviet-era irrigation sites sucking the area dry, she shot her own “sympathetic loss of flow”—her own breast milk emptied into random saucers, tea cups, and fish tins at the end of every meal.

“There’s something superhuman about the body producing this fluid,” Chang said, circling back to Milk Debt. Lactation itself is its own affective state, she explains, as it releases oxytocin, a kind of anti-fear chemical that sends nurturing waves of euphoria and empathy through the body. In Milk Debt, in their chemically-induced nurturing state, “The performers in some ways channel these lists,” she said. “They read [these fears], absorb them, and spit them out, channeling those individual, personal states of being into public speech, a collective language of understanding.”

Below the surface layers of ugly feelings and absurdist gestures, collective understanding is the recurring sentiment that runs through Chang’s expansive body of work. Performance functions as emotional release for both artist and viewer, a defanging of universal anxieties as they’re spoken aloud. In her performative metaphors that highlight the far-reaching, unlikely connections we share with each other and with the Earth, she reminds us that no one undergoes these anxieties alone.

Installation view of “David Altmejd The Vibrating Man” at White Cube, Hong Kong. Click to enlarge.

© DAVID ALTMEJD/PHOTO: © WHITE CUBE (KITMAN LEE)

In the finite space of densely populated Hong Kong Island, there’s nowhere to build but up. Where other cities have gallery rows, this definitively vertical metropolis has gallery towers, where dealers are linked to their neighbors via stairwells and high-speed elevators.

In Central, the city’s financial district at the northern of the island, the number of blue-chip galleries has been growing year after year. Gagosian took up residence in the Pedder Building in 2011, and Pace opened at the nearby Entertainment building in 2014. The completion of the H Queens tower brought Hauser & Wirth, Zwirner, and a second Pace to the neighborhood in 2018. This year, Lévy Gorvy joined the mix, inaugurating its first space in Asia at the base of the St. George’s Building.

These galleries are conveniently stacked near Art Basel Hong Kong, making it relatively easy to see them all of it in one afternoon. Below, three shows not to miss—all with work by artists who are artists showing in Hong Kong for the first time.

1. “David Altmejd: The Vibrating Man” at White Cube

Presumably it’s the titular man who appears as both as a full-sized sculpture and a series of busts throughout the gallery’s two floors, his features having undergone a Cubist treatment and multiplied all over his body. The additional eyes and clusters of crystals embedded into his skin suggest either a spiritual ascension or nervous undoing; the multiple cigarettes he holds and the plumes of opaque smoke he exhales, plus the disembodied hands clawing grooves into the gallery wall, suggest the latter condition is more likely.

2. “Julio Le Parc: Light — Mirror” at Perrotin

Mobiles, paintings, and soothing projections onto the ceiling survey the impressive array of different media that the celebrated kinetic artist has used to explore themes of color, motion, and light. According to Instagram, the show’s most popular work is the selfie-friendly installation Espace à pénétrer avec trame et miroir courbe (Variation du labyrinthe de 1963), 2019, a maze of mirrors and curved stripes that distorts and disorients.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1998–2014. Hologram, 13 x 11 inches.

PHOTO: MATTHEW SCHREIBER/© THE EASTON FOUNDATION/VAGA AT ARS, NY/COURTESY THE EASTON FOUNDATION AND HAUSER & WIRTH

3. “Louise Bourgeois: My Own Voice Wakes Me Up” at Hauser & Wirth

The usual gut-wrenching sentiments that Bourgeois was so adept at expressing—the phrase “EXTREME TENSION!” on paper, flanked by two hands trailing bloody fingerprints on either side, for example—are all here in her some of her trademark mediums, like drawings, paintings, and soft sculpture. But there are also less familiar inclusions, like holograms, which take the form of household images engulfed in red lighting, and very realistic-looking arms with pulsing veins, clutching and grabbing each other that are carved from pink marble.