Made in L.A. 2025

Los Angeles is all over the place. The 28 artists included in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in LA, demonstrate this. They come from other parts of the country, but live in LA and make wildly diverse work. The curators chose not to include a unifying title for the show, so viewers are challenged to find their own coherence. Reviews are mixed.

A number of the exhibitions reference the culture of cars & freeways, with one of the curators (from Chicago) noting that she had never traveled eighty miles in one day just to visit artist neighborhoods. It isn’t news that there are cars in LA, and the best on this theme is Lawrence Lek’s video installation, where a horse leads a car into a “rehabilitation center for disobedient self-driving cars.”

I think one way to approach the exhibition is to choose a few artists that speak to you and examine how their work reveals its meaning. I especially liked  Patrick Martinez’ cinderblock wall and Kristy Luck’s paintings.

Both artists combine materials and processes to create layers of meaning. Martinez uses imagery borrowed from Mayan murals, graffiti, peeling paint and neon signs in his urban sculpture. This visual complexity reveals how the past and present are both alive, and influence each other.

Kristy Luck’s paintings start with figurative imagery that anchors the work and then becomes abstract, as she layers pigments and translucent washes to blur the edges and soften boundaries. These elements overlap and penetrate each other, and the painting itself seems to search for meaning.

These works reveal what it feels like to be an artist in Los Angeles, where there is constant movement, fragmentation, and experimentation. While there is no center, many lively neighborhoods support a vibrant artistic community.