The Hammer Museum’s sixth edition of its acclaimed biennial exhibit “Made in L.A.” highlights contemporary artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area.
“Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” includes works by 39 intergenerational artists and groups. They encompass sculpture, assemblage, painting, drawing, ceramics, performance, and installation, and consider art a field of culture entangled with everyday life.
Among the 39 artists in “Made in L.A. 2023” is a group of seven creators who incorporate queer identity and themes in their work.
The Hammer Museum’s sixth edition of its acclaimed biennial exhibit “Made in L.A.” highlights contemporary artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area. One of them is Joey Terrill, whose intimate, stylized figurative works, many of which were made amid the terrible devastations of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, depict gay Latino men absorbed in the drama of desire. One of his works, “Portrait of Joey Arias, 1981,” is part of the “Made in L.A. 2023” exhibit. Photo: Provided by the Hammer Museum
As the curators note, “these practices allow us to consider the important contributions of queer makers to our very understanding of what art can be, where its boundaries exist, and the pleasure in dissolving them. They also allow us to map a handful of queer sites and communities in Los Angeles, to trace the breadth of art making in the city.”
Here are the magnificent seven in “Made in L.A. 2023.”
- Marcel Alcalá’s recent figurative paintings, which are inspired in part by their queer Latinx community, are especially ripe with the irreverence that defines their practice.
- Jibz Cameron, is a performer, visual artist, and actress working in drag and lauded for her larger-than-life persona. Her contributions to the exhibition include a number of works on paper that further explore these aesthetics and broader themes of gender.
- Pippa Garner has crafted a persona of a tinkering inventor and uses her own body as a medium for challenging gender expressions. Through her drawings, sculptures, photographs, and performances, Garner’s conceptual approach to considering the objects of daily life embraces certain aspects of commercialism.
- Young Joon Kwak reimagines the world to create spaces that ensure safety and community for those who have been marginalized, invalidated, or altogether unrepresented. Much of Kwak’s work is influenced by their experiences in queer nightlife, coalescing camp aesthetics, the erotic, and the excessive.
- Page Person, a visual and performing artist, makes works across mediums that explore agency, personhood, gender, and the body.
- Kang Seung Lee works at the crossroads of drawing, textile, performance, and installation, with work that often begins with research into the lives of people who have been left out of hegemonic histories, especially Lee’s queer predecessors in his native South Korea and those who have died as a result of the AIDS epidemic worldwide.
- Joey Terrill’s intimate, stylized figurative works, many of which were made amid the terrible devastations of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, depict gay Latino men absorbed in the drama of desire.
