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| Alake Shilling, I had a long day please bring me a snack, 2025 |
"Made in L.A. 2025" has no subtitle. Viewers are mostly left to draw their own connections between the 28 artists and collectives in this year's Hammer biennial, aided by some references to Mike Davis, the January wildfires, and "a determination to safeguard history and place." This "Made in L.A." is a little smaller than some of its six predecessors, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and has no shortage of surprises. Essence Harding and Paulina Pobocha curated, with the assistance of Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow.
Drivers on Wilshire have already seen Alake Shilling's cartoon inflatable for the sculpture terrace. Shilling primarily works in gritty painted ceramics that revisit early animated films and explore the borderland between cute and monstrous.
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| Alake Shilling, Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A., 2025 |
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| Patrick Martinez, Battle of the City on Fire, 2025 |
Patrick Martinez's
Battle of the City on Fires references the fires, incorporating a painting on scorched panel. The neon piece
Hold the Ice seems even more of the moment, but it dates to 2020.
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| Patrick Martinez, Hold the Ice, 2020 |
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| Carl Cheng, Specimen Viewer No. 4, 1970–2016 |
Carl Cheng is a conceptualist whose art(ifacts) fall somewhere between Cornell boxes, industrial design, and Jurassic technology. Cheng used Wonder Bread as a medium for embossed prints. Each slice in the edition is numbered, and the ingredient list doubles as a gallery label.
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| Carl Cheng, Erosion Landscape Bread Print No. 0006, 1979 |
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| Beaux Mendes, Dr. Lazarus (distemper on stretched linen), 2025 |
With
Dr. Lazarus Beaux Mendes invokes the art history of anatomy/operation paintings. One of the doctors holds a bloodless heart; another's gown falls open to reveal a hard-on. The medium of distemper on linen recalls the Flemish Renaissance. A few galleries later you see the same scene rendered as a diorama of silicone dolls.
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| Beaux Mendes, Dr. Lazarus (silicone dolls), 2025 |
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| Pat O'Neill, Safer than Springtime, 1964 |
Not the least of the show's surprises is Pat O'Neill, whose
B&W photo of a crashed car and palm tree anchors the exhibition webpage. O'Neil is also responsible for a polychrome fiberglass, aluminum, and steel sculpture of a crime scene involving a gherkin.
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| Pat O'Neill, L'il Neverbetter, 1969 |
O'Neill turns 86 this year. Known as an experimental filmmaker and CalArts teacher, he has been making sculpture since the 1960s. Based on the works here, O'Neill appears to be an unheralded master of the Finish Fetish movement. He's also a photographer in the ironic/snarky mid-century B&W mode. His cropped view of a Forest Lawn billboard ranks with the best photographic treatments of
Glendale's monument to mortality and kitsch.
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| Pat O'Neill, Los Angeles, 1960s |
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| Greg Breda, Vigilant, 2025 |
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| New Theater Hollywood / Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Theater, 2024–2025 |
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| Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS), 2025 |
Amanda Ross-Ho offers nearly twice-scale replicas of the door to her father's room in a nursing home. Staff seasonally decorate the home's doors to mark the passing of time for residents whose memories may be fading. In Ross-Ho's recreations different holidays commingle, unstuck in time.
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| Detail of Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) |
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| Bruce Yonemoto, Broken Fences, 2025 |
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| Freddy Villalobos, waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure, 2025 |
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| Kristy Luck, Always Arriving, 2025 |
Kristy Luck's
Always Arriving is an
Origin of the World as channeled by Hilma af Klint. Luck is one of the show's breakout painters.
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| Kristy Luck, Premeditation, 2025 |
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| Ceramic sculptures by Brian Rochefort |
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| David Alekhuogie, Still Life with Jerk Chicken (archival pigment prints quilted to canvas), 2023 |
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| Kelly Wall, Wistful Thinking, 2025 |
Three sculptural installations by Kelly Wall remind us how odd the notion of a "souvenir" is. In one piece post-card racks hold ceramic paintings of the empty Los Angeles sky.
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| Kelly Wall, Something to Write Home About (#1–4), 2025 |
"Made in L.A. 2025" is at the Hammer through Mar. 1, 2026.
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| Choreographer Will Rawls' Unmade is performed on selected weekend dates |
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| Alonzo Davis (recreated by 3B Collective), Eye on '84, 1984/2025 |
The stairway commission honors the legacy of Alonzo Davis (1942–2025), muralist and Brockman Gallery co-founder, a pivotal figure for Black art in L.A. The paintings recreate Davis'
Eye on '84 mural for the 1984 Olympics.
Comments
Carl Cheng's "Erosion Landscape Bread Print No. 0006," of 1979, has no business in LACMA's collection. Far too much mold as it is.
Beaux Mendes's "Dr. Lazarus (distemper on stretched linen) variation, of 2025, is creepy and compelling. NSFW.
Re Pat O'Neill's "Los Angeles," of 1960s: Somebody needs to snatch that bad boy up, pronto.
Re Kristy Luck's "Premeditation," of 2025: The reds are stunning, perfection.
Re Kelly Wall's "Something to Write Home About (#1–4)," of 2025: Why is only 1 kiosk black? I want more, but I don't know what. Who is the Black painter with the wall of 200+ cards showing color variation in Black skin? I think that artist's message said it all.
I like Alonzo Davis's (recreated by 3B Collective), "Eye on '84," of 1984/2025. I don't know this artist.
> Forest Lawn billboard
> ranks with the best
> photographic treatments
> of Glendale's monument
> to mortality and kitsch.
I grew up assuming a Forest Lawn, with all its statuary and other objects themed to things like old-Europe architecture, was standard operating procedure for cemeteries everywhere.
evelynwaughsociety. org: "Southern California, home to the theme-park necropolis Forest Lawn, came to represent the apotheosis of America’s disturbingly “euphoric” approach to mortality… To Evelyn Waugh, who parodied Forest Lawn in his 1948 novel The Loved One, such vulgarity was symptomatic of the “endless infancy” of West Coast culture…" [End quote]
^ The combination of the entertainment industry, amusement parks and LA's weather (vulgar cemeteries may be less ideal in an Illinois- or New Jersey-type climate) makes a Forest Lawn in Southern Calif somehow par for the course.
Although I like contemporary art as much as the next person, or old-world art (eg, the Louvre, etc) too - with most everyone having a soft spot for Impressionist art - a few days ago I was trying to imagine if all the "treacle" (or kitsch) of the Lucas Museum will be more engrossing than I currently estimate it will be.
The Hammer show or what's at a Broad or MOCA (or a Whitney's Biennial) tends to display works generally looked at mainly from several feet away and passed by at a constant speed. In comparison to "treacle," some of it is more a case of "even my kid can do that."
Although a Norman Rockwell, etc, has the downside of giving visual diabetes, the different (or corny) styles in the Lucas should be an interesting counterpoint to things like "Made in LA."
Even though kitschy-treacle (or pre-Raphaelite) makes me queasy, variety in the spectrum of art museums is long overdue.
I don't see anything I want to buy.