LACMA Buys a Calida Rawles

Calida Rawles, The Space in Which We Travel, 2019. LACMA

LACMA has been acquiring contemporary art throughout 2020. Some of it will appear in an exhibition called "View From Here: Recent Acquisitions," set to open whenever the museum itself does. Among the works is a 12-foot wide painting by Los Angeles artist Calida Rawles, The Space in Which We Travel. It's one of a series of photo-based paintings of submerged figures evoking baptisms or Africans who died in the Middle Passage. Another painting from the series is reproduced on the cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates' novel The Water Dancer. 

Funds to buy The Space in Which We Travel were supplied by Allison and Larry Berg and an anonymous donor.

"View From Here" will also include works by Huguette Caland (1931-2019), Christina Fernandez, EJ Hill, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.