The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope to become "the hippest and most culturally relevant institution in town." Particularly important among the museum's critically acclaimed exhibitions are presentations of both historically overlooked and emerging contemporary artists. The Hammer Museum also hosts over 300 programs throughout the year, from lectures, symposia, and readings to concerts and film screenings. As of February 2014, the museum's collections, exhibitions, and programs are completely free to all visitors.
The Los Angeles Art Association (LAAA) is a membership-based, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that supports Southern California artists. LAAA's mission is to provide opportunities, resources, services and exhibition venues for artists living in Southern California, with an emphasis on emerging talent. Founded in 1925, LAAA has launched the art careers of many celebrated artists and has played a central role in the formation of Los Angeles' arts community.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
Jason Fayette Rhoades was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs with African, Caribbean, Creole and hip hop slang for the female genitalia.
ACE Gallery is an internationally recognized art gallery specializing in contemporary art. ACE Gallery Los Angeles is located in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles a few blocks east of Museum Row.
Salomón Huerta is a painter based in Los Angeles, California who comes from Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the Boyle Heights Projects in East Los Angeles. Huerta received a full scholarship to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and completed his MFA at UCLA in 1998. Huerta gained critical acclaim and commercial attention in the late 1990s for his minimalist portraits of the backs of people's heads and color-saturated depictions of domestic urban architecture. He was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the US, Europe, and Latin America such as The Gagosian Gallery in London, England, and Studio La Città in Verona, Italy. Salomón Huerta is currently represented by Louise Alexander Gallery/There There in Los Angeles, California, and Porto Cervo, Italy.
Danielle Eubank is an American oil painter and expedition artist with a studio in Los Angeles, known for her paintings of bodies of water, as well as One Artist Five Oceans, in which she sailed and painted all of the world's oceans to raise awareness about climate change. All her artwork is done in an environmentally responsible manner, with high quality environmentally friendly materials. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2014–2015.
William Arnstein, professionally William Brice was an American artist known for his large-scale abstract paintings.
Leza Lidow was an American artist.
Frederick S. Wight was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center. An influential educator at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented museum-quality exhibitions at the campus gallery later named the Wight Art Gallery, Wight was also a highly accomplished painter and writer. In his final years he concentrated on his painting, producing radiant landscapes that appear to be animated by mysterious, spiritual forces.
Charles Christopher Hill is an American artist and printmaker. Hill lives and works in Los Angeles, California and was married to the late Victoria Blyth Hill, an art conservator. He has been artist in residence at Cité International Des Arts, Paris, France, at Chateau de La Napoule, La Napoule, France and at Eklisia, Gümüslük, Turkey (1994).
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ayin Es is a self-taught visual artist, writer, musician (drummer), and book artist from Los Angeles, California. They have written articles for Coagula Art Journal and the Huffington Post. As a musician, they played for 20 years as an R&B drummer touring and recording drums with various artists. They played drums on Rickie Lee Jones' Ghostyhead album in 1997.
Rafael Esparza is an American performance artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work includes performances that present a toll on his physical well being and installations constructed out of adobe bricks. Esparza often works with collaborators, including members of his family.
Jack Hooper was an American painter, muralist, sculptor, printmaker and art educator. Hooper was a major figure on the Southern California art scene, belonging to that generation of Los Angeles painters who matured during the late 1950s and the 1960s, painters such as John Altoon, Sam Amato, Robert Irwin, Lee Mullican, William Brice and Billy Al Bengston. He was an innovator in the use of new materials, most importantly plastic in art. He is known for abstract expressionist, mural and figurative painting. Hooper has exhibited in art museums and galleries nationally and internationally including solo shows in Europe, Mexico and the United States. Modeling renown UCLA art professor and figurative artist, Jan Stussy, the last 20 years of his life were spent in rural Mexico, where he drew and painted every single day until his death.
Christina Quarles is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She grew up as an only child to a single mother and started drawing from an early age. She took her first life drawing class at age 12. During high school, she developed skill and learned techniques from her teacher Joseph Gatto that she still uses. “He spoke of the muscle memory of rendering the form,” she said. “Before making a mark, you would trace the movements to outline the figure, with just charcoal dust. When you started to draw, if you made a mistake, you wouldn’t erase it, because that would reinforce the muscle memory; instead, you should go over it with a new mark.”
Qais Al-Sindy is an Iraqi contemporary artist and painter currently residing in California.
Edmundo Meza, also known as Mundo Meza, was an artist and activist who was born in Tijuana, Mexico and grew up in East Los Angeles. He discovered his passion for the area's avant-garde culture in early 1970. As an emerging artist, Mundo Meza worked for shoe designer Fred Slatten on Santa Monica Boulevard as a window dresser. He also painted unique designs onto Slatten's platform shoes, gathering a celebrity clientele which included Cher, Elton John, and Diana Ross.
Chase Langford is a Los Angeles-based American contemporary painter known for his paintings, inspired by geography and maps.
Amina Cruz is a photographer known for capturing queer punk scenes within the Latinx community and breaking cultural barriers with their work. Cruz captures the intimate moments shared between queer folk and is trying to expand the Latinx identity with their work.
