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| Rendering of sister dreamer… Courtesy Lauren Halsey and Current Interests |
South Los Angeles has historically been a museum desert. That's changing, particularly as far as open-air public art spaces are concerned. This Saturday, Mar. 14, Lauren Halsey's Egyptian/Afrofuturist sculpture garden, sister dreamer lauren halsey's architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, opens with a free block party. The artist considers sister dreamer to be the culmination of high-profile related installations at the Hammer, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Met roof garden. The new space, at the corner of 76th St and Western Avenue, will feature film screenings, vegetable gardens, and wellness activities. More information here.
sister dreamer is about 2.7 miles from "outdoor museum" Destination Crenshaw (with work by Melvin Edwards, Maren Hassinger, Alison Saar, and Kehinde Wiley) and about a 20 minute drive from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and the adjacent art center. It seems that LACMA is still considering a satellite location in Magic Johnson Park, not too far away; and Mr. Wash has plans to convert his Compton studio into an Art By Wash Studio & Community Center.
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| Rendering of aerial view of sister dreamer |
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| Rendering of Art by Wash Studio & Community Center |
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| Lauren Halsey, sister dreamer…, 2026. Photo: Allen Chen-SLH Studio |
Comments
> is still considering a
> satellite location in
> Magic Johnson Park.
The location on Wilshire Blvd has long *not* generated the type of annual attendance that the big-time museums of the world easily reach without breaking a sweat. I'm sure a branch in South-Central LA will attract as many visitors per year as drop by a....well, actually less than the number who go to the Watts Towers.
The recent Vanity Fair article about the Geffen Galleries noted that "Los Angeles" (presumably referring to LACMA), when it comes to attendance figures, has long lagged a Chicago, Washington DC or San Francisco.
Govan and staff (labor union or not) have enough difficulty managing the buildings next to the La Brea Tar Pits. He also has already stretched LACMA's budget to the breaking point.
Get your priorities in order, people.
Per the Met:
"American artist Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) has created a full-scale architectural structure imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles Community where she was born and continues to work. Titled "the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I)," the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, who will be able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.
It was on view on the roof from April 18th through October 22nd, 2023.
Here's a YouTube video interview of the artist:
https://youtu.be/I4irGrO5ePc?si=9qJ1u_c4yliilcE6
Using yearly attendance figures as one barometer, LACMA hasn't been exactly adopted by too many parents.
When Pereira's/Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer's buildings got a visitor from Minnesota in an online review to compare them unfavorably with her own Minneapolis Institute of Art (or Beaux-Arts versus 1965 tract house), that did speak volumes. It was quite an ass-whooping. lol.
However, I believe when LACMA was free to enter, its annual visitor count was much larger. Then when they started charging admission, its attendance took a beating. However, MOMA originally didn't charge entry fees either. But even after they introduced fairly high ticket prices, they still drew in lots of visitors.
But the Broad Museum's visitor count would undoubtedly drop a lot if it started charging for entry. Not sure how free admission across the street for MOCA has (or hasn't) affected its attendance. Their Grand Ave building, however, is so modest in size, it's a museum version of an unsatisfying TikTok video. Then again, lots of people in the age of the cell phone have short attention spans.
Speaking of The Grove north of LACMA, I just read about how Santa Monica's once popular 3rd Street Promenade has crashed in both the number of visitors and sales volume---apparently now lots of storefront vacancies. So Govan needs to always remember: "LACMA has transitioned to a de facto contemporary art museum. But not a very good one."
Hauserwirth .com:
When I got to Los Angeles and was doing research and thinking about LACMA, the place where I spent a lot of time was The Grove, the famous outdoor shopping mall nearby. You have millions of people every year going to shop. At the same time, I’d hear people say that they felt LACMA was hard to get to, and that’s why the attendance wasn’t high at the time.
And I thought: “Okay, but there are millions of people going to The Grove, and it’s just four blocks away. What’s the problem?” So I started thinking about the psychology of looking in a different way. And I immediately started to think about changing the LACMA campus.
I got rid of the entrance that was indoors. I made all the circulation outdoors. I thought about people gathering around fountains. What if that fountain, that outdoor feature, was really meaningful? What if, let’s say, it was as powerful as the sculpture Urban Light by Chris Burden that has become a public icon in front of the museum now, on Wilshire Boulevard.
Does that add to the work in such way that compensates for the aspects of her work that seem somewhat superficial (e.g., the Egyptian iconography)?