While most museums and art galleries remain closed to visitors due to the ongoing pandemic, over the past several months, many of them have pivoted online, hosting digital exhibitions, Zoom openings, and live meditations and workshops. The reality is that smaller independent and private spaces—much like restaurants and stores—can not survive without us. Still, these treasured institutions continue to serve their communities as best they can, proving that art transcends physical gallery space and white walls.
If you live in Los Angeles, you may know the Underground Museum, founded in 2012, and has since become one of LA’s most vital cultural centers for Black art. The Underground is currently closed to visitors, but here we’ve highlighted other Black-owned and operated art spaces, museums, and galleries in LA to support now. Many of them are multihyphenate cultural institutions creating new systems in the art world—whether through artist representation or how their founders connect with their neighbors.
Art + Practice
The Art + Practice campus sits on nearly 20,000 square feet in South Los Angeles’s Leimert Park and functions as a gallery, a public programming space, and a community center that supports local foster youth. When artist Mark Bradford, philanthropist and art collector Eileen Harris Norton, and activist Allan DiCastro came together in 2014, they noted that at the time, it was rare to find art spaces or museums that had a strong social mission. Their goal was to be of service to the community, while also dedicating their platform to drawing awareness to foster youth in the transitional ages of eighteen to twenty-four in South LA. It’s also a space to celebrate contemporary art and artists of color in a setting that’s accessible to everyone, especially the community and artists that it serves. Currently, A + P is closed to the public. Still, the center has been digitally forward since its opening in 2015, with a robust digital events calendar and virtual educational tours and materials available to educators and school groups. This year, the theme at A + P is documentation. It has partnered with the California African American Museum on a four-part series focused on helping artists build sustainable practices through text and publishing. The exhibition, Collective Constellation: Selections from The Eileen Harris Norton Collection, was co-organized by the Hammer Museum and is online now for 3D viewing.
Crenshaw Dairy Mart
Cofounders Patrisse Cullors, Noé Olivas, and Alexandre Dorriz were in art school when they started the Crenshaw Dairy Mart in Inglewood in 2018. They would spend two years incubating the idea and getting to know their neighbors and the needs of the community before opening the doors for their inaugural exhibition in February 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown. What the three founders had in mind for the space was that it would be part artist collective and art gallery, a place guided by eight principles rooted in “ancestry, abolition, and healing” that also serves as a cultural network for the community of Inglewood. Their first exhibition focused on Measure R, a ballot measure that Cullors—also a cofounder of Black Lives Matter—worked on with multiple groups across the country to push for alternatives to incarceration. When the pandemic hit, they shut down the gallery, but Cullors, Olivas, and Dorriz immediately set up the Care Not Cages relief fund for incarcerated artists who are among those disproportionately affected by the outbreak. They also partnered with artist Lauren Halsey to distribute art-supply kits alongside produce boxes in South LA and Watts through Halsey’s Summaeverythang community program. This work—whether it’s paying for the artwork of incarcerated artists or providing a place for education, liberation, and activism—has been the product of listening and looking at the history of their community, explain the founders. Their practice is deeply committed to repatriating, so any resources that come into the Crenshaw Dairy Mart go back into other organizations in Inglewood, and every opportunity is equitable. To see the works of the six currently incarcerated artists from the Care Not Cages program, visit the online exhibition at Gallery Platform LA.
California African American Museum
Across from the University of Southern California off the Metro Expo Line is the California African American Museum, the first state-supported museum for African American history, art, and culture in California and across the American West. CAAM, founded in 1977 and opened in 1981, is home to five galleries, a research library, and a sculpture court. As one of LA’s most important hubs for learning about and preserving the richness of African American history, a museum is an excellent place for kids as well as historians and scholars (more than 6,000 books and research materials are available for public browsing). Though CAAM is temporarily closed, recent exhibitions have focused on cultivating a younger generation of visitors with the showing of contemporary artists, including Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, whose work examines her genetic data and personal history of being a woman of Afro–Puerto Rican and Jewish descent.
Dominique Gallery
Dominique Clayton was eight months pregnant with her third child when she opened her gallery in West Adams, but it didn’t exactly take off, she says. That was back in 2015. Clayton is an arts manager (her current position is with the Broad), a curator, and a writer, and she wanted to create a space that was as much for the artists as it was for the public. This next iteration, located in a storefront on a stretch of West Adams Boulevard, is both a gallery and an arts incubator for emerging BIPOC and female artists. Clayton maintains a small artist roster and places emphasis on the gallery’s digital presence. Amid the ongoing pandemic, a rotating online exhibition exclusively on Artsy featuring six artists (Khidr Joseph and Kelsey Arrington are two of our favorites in the show, titled Spotlight), which runs from July 24 to October 15. In December, Clayton is participating in the Prizm Art Fair, the only Black-owned art fair taking place during Miami Art Week.
Superposition
When artist and curator Storm Ascher was a senior in college, moving from studio to studio, trying to balance work and life between LA, Miami, and New York. The theme of Ascher’s first open call for her pop-up show was superposition—the idea of being split between different identities or feeling torn. And after several pop-ups, she decided to make Superposition permanent—that is, she turned her pop-up into a traveling art gallery with a socially conscious model, which she launched in 2018 after graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York. For artists, Ascher says, Superposition is meant to be a place that can exist in many different facets of their life and identity, while also dismantling the perception that a permanent space is needed to show quality art. She works primarily with emerging artists of color who are of the diaspora and focuses on intersectionality. She saw the need to change the current model of representation. Knowing that artists—including herself—were forced to move around either because of their lifestyle or being priced out of their studios. When she worked in galleries, Ascher would sit at a desk, she says, showing million-dollar pieces to one or two people a day. That’s valuable real estate, she thought, that could be going toward housing or other public services (her undergraduate thesis focused on how arts districts gentrify low-income neighborhoods). Superposition hosted an offsite pop-up as part of Frieze Los Angeles with an exhibit that included the work of Cameroon-born Ludovic Nkoth. Their paintings explore his visions of Africa after moving to the US at the age of thirteen, and John Rivas, a first-generation American whose collages and paintings tell the story of his Salvadoran ancestors. This September, Ascher is celebrating her gallery’s second anniversary at the Reform Club Amagansett in the Hamptons with a series of rotating exhibits featuring fifteen artists, available for viewing by appointment.
Article courtesy of goop.com
