Great Migrations at CAAM

Chloë Bass, #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America, 2023

The California African American Museum has reopened after $5 million in upgrades to roof, flooring, weatherproofing, and A/C. You probably won't notice any of that, but you will encounter Chloë Bass' participatory sundial/sculpture; a new atrium installation by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh; a slate of art and historical shows in the galleries.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, untitled, 2023. Courtesy the artist

The lobby installation, "Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds," consists of monumental graphite drawings of Black Angelenos by the Brooklyn-based artist. It will remain in a place for two years (through Aug. 3, 2025) and will coincide with an exhibition on the artist at Art + Practice, opening in Spring 2024.

"Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds" (with yoga class)

"Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration" updates the Jacob Lawrence theme with works commissioned from 12 prominent contemporary artists. The Mississippi Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art organized the show.

Robert Pruitt, A Song for Travelers, 2022

Robert Pruitt's A Song for Travelers, a mural-scale charcoal, conte crayon, and pastel drawing, was made shortly after the artist moved from his hometown of Houston to New York. The 16-figure composition is patterned on a vintage photograph of a family reunion. The "traveler" in masquerade gear represents the artist. His head, in lost profile, is a face jug.

Torkwase Dyson, Way Over There Inside Me (A Festival of Inches), 2022

Torkwase Dyson's sleek steel, glass, and aluminum trapezoidal volumes are inscribed with dry-erase marker drawings based on the artist's research into "Black liberation methodologies, architecture, plantation economies, and environmental crisis from the Great Migration to the present."

Mark Bradford, 500, 2022

Mark Bradford's 500 is composed of copies of a 1913 ad for "Blackdom," conceived as a New Mexico Afrotopia of "Fertile soil, ideal climate. No 'Jim Crow' laws." The ad appeared in the NAACP's The Crisis.

Installation view of "Black California Dreamin': Claiming Space at America's Leisure Frontier" 

The title of "Black California Dreaming': Claiming Space at America's Leisure Frontier" references the Mamas & the Papas and JFK. It's no less Barbenheimer, a mash-up of California beach culture and a meditation on the nature of evil. The Great Migration often led to Los Angeles, praised by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Crisis ("Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed"). One example was Bruce's Beach, a Black-owned resort area in Manhattan Beach that city managers tried to shut down from its inception. The city, then accessible only by private car, set a 10-minute limit on beach parking and criminalized changing into a bathing suit in a car. When those moves failed to deter Black visitors, the city took over Bruce's Beach by eminent domain in 1924, ostensibly for a park that went unbuilt for decades. The land was returned the Bruce family in 2021 in what some have seen as a legal template for reparations.

Like many CAAM historical shows, "Black California Dreamin'" is stronger in text panels than artifacts.  But in this case the text panels are compelling. Curator Alison Rose Jefferson shows that Bruce's Beach is just one of many erstwhile Black leisure communities that were taken over by white establishments in a racist tug-of-war for prime seaside, lakeside, and desert real estate. Many of these communities survive, with their Black history forgotten.

June Edmonds, untitled, 2022. Included in "Black California Dreaming'"

June Edmonds' acrylic abstraction is part of a recent series inspired by "Black Venice," one of the few areas where mid-century Blacks could buy homes near the beach.

Also on view is "Darol Olu Kae: Keeping Time," showcasing the artist's film on the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (through Jan. 15, 2024), and "We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California" (through Jan. 21, 2024).