For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

I partook in one of the races-cum-performances, choosing the ceramic rat with a patch of Ghostface, called Ozone. Even with a practice run, I wasn’t very good, crashing into the cones that demarcated the track, hitting peoples’ feet, and even managing to run into the two-row bleacher that was not that close to the track.

Rat Race is Farrag’s first public project and builds on his ongoing body of work involving abstracted cars and motorcycles made in clay. “I wanted to try out making sculptures that could be interactive and activated by other people,” he said. “Then the rat race idea came up as a way to make fun of competition—winning, losing. … I think it’s also a way to address survival within competition.”

As with a number of LA artists, like Jason Rhoades (whose car-related works are currently the subject of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in downtown LA), Farrag, who grew up in the Valley neighborhood of Reseda, said his interest in cars stems from the necessity of having to drive everywhere as an Angeleno, as well as his experience of being a food delivery person several years ago.

“Cars and transportation are a big part of my life—it’s why I keep making them [car-related sculptures], not because I love a [certain] brand of car,” he said. “I’m always in a Prius, going into zones while I drive. I come up with a lot of my ideas in the car. This is just another aspect of driving, just the race-side of it.”

There’s also a sense of humor imbued in the performance, which isn’t necessarily intentional, according to the artist. “The funny part is that I’m not even trying to be humorous, but I’m open to people laughing,” he said, beginning to laugh. “It’s just who I am; it’s kind of been that way all my life: ‘Oh yeah, that way funny? I said something serious.’”

But Farrag drew a comparison between his project and the high stakes of what was happening just inside the tent, especially on the fair’s first day where collectors are rushing to buy works (likely ones they had put on hold based on PDF previews), galleries aiming for a prime spot in the fair’s layout, or even artists showing with the right gallery.

“Being at an art fair, competition is prevalent.vThere are all these competitive parts [to an art fair] that are often overlooked. I wanted to address that competition and make fun of it,’ he said. Then, he added, “Today, people have been having fun. It’s also, in a way, a way to let off some steam from the fair.”

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“She sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor, one that informs her polymathic practice, which extends to publications, performance, writing, film, and beyond,” Michelle Kuo, a chief curator at large at MoMA who worked with Wales Bonner on the exhibition, told ARTnews.

For the exhibition, on view until April 7, Wales Bonner has taken over part of MoMA’s first-floor galleries, showcasing a collection of 50 artworks with a focus on Black aesthetic and cultural practices inspired by the sounds, styles, and experiences of the African diaspora.

Each of the displays epitomizes the title of the show which Wales Bonner has said “evoke multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and Places.” Works featured in the show come from an array of artists, including Terry Adkins, Betye Saar, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, and even the likes of Agnes Martin and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is a certain musicality, best exemplified by Adkin’s large-scale installation Last Trumpet (1995). Its four eye-catching, elegantly shaped trumpets stand tall at the far side of the first gallery and immediately draw you toward them. These 18-foot-long horns are functional musical instruments, part of Adkin’s aim to connect the worlds of music, sculpture, and performance, like Wales Bonner’s intention in bridging fashion with other creative disciplines.

Literature is just one point of reference for Wales Bonner. Creating worlds for characters to inhabit through different fabric textures, sounds, rhythm, and movement. She has said that fashion is an immediate form of communication to an audience where she can explore deep ideas. Wales Bonner’s practice is also informed by her extensive archival research, which lends each project a holistic approach that aims to create worlds for posterity. One such work is a hard-to-miss wooden carving by Moustapha Dimé titled Lady with a Long Neck (1992) that combines found materials (both organic and industrial) collected from the streets of Dakar. In its raw form, the sculpture bridges Islamic and Sufi spirituality with artistic handiwork.

On view for the first time is David Hammons’s makeshift scroll Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China), from 1978, which is a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1971 album The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. In using the form of an East Asian scroll that has at its center a cluster of hair collected from barbershop floors, the work highlights the connection between Afro-Pacific and Afro-Atlantic culture.

“Many works in the show make use of found materials—things that have a history, that have had other lives,” Kuo said. “Moustapha Dimé’s Lady with a Long Neck features a reclaimed butcher’s block at its center, with a rhythmic array of notches that are actually the marks made by cooks who had used the wooden block in Dakar.”

She continued, “There’s a beautiful rhythm, too, in the carefully patterned tufts of hair woven into David Hammons’s Afro-Asian Eclipse, which the artist collected from the floors of barber shops. You can see the trace of hands, of meditative motions, of a different kind of musicality in each piece.”

But, Wales Bonner sees curating art exhibitions as an extension of her work as a fashion designer. Her first exhibition “A Time for New Dreams,” which borrowed its title from a collection by Nigerian British poet Ben Okri, was staged at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019. Its themes focused on mysticism, magical realism, and ritual within Black cultural and aesthetic practices and looked at the ideas of shrines across the Black Atlantic.

Showcasing sculpture, film, photography, literature, music, poetry, performances, and more, the multisensory installation show brought together a group of artists including Rashid Johnson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Eric N. Mack, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Liz Johnson Artur, who has since become a frequent collaborator. In the show’s catalogue, Okri says of Wales Bonner’s research-focused practice, “We ought to use time like emperors of the mind. Do magic things that the future surprised will find.”

Claude Adjil, the exhibition’s curator, said that in early conversations with Wales Bonner, she mentioned Robert Farris Thompson’s landmark 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which looks at five African civilizations (Kongo, Yoruba, Mande, Cross River, and Ejagham) and how they have impacted the social, aesthetic and metaphysical traditions and creative output of Black people across the African diaspora. “We were looking at different books but also artists that have inspired her,” Adjil said.

But beyond just presenting a static exhibition with works on view, Wales Bonner thought about how to create a show that could be activated and could come alive through a performance program, including an evening with British musician and songwriter Sampha, whom Wales Bonner has previously collaborated with for a zine Shy Light (2017) and the soundtrack to her Autumn/Winter 2017 show. “Grace holds space for these different collaborations,” Adjil said.

Recurring themes in her practice, both as a designer and as a curator,  are the intergenerational artistic production of Black people across the diaspora. Just as Okri’s poetry collection lent its title to her Serpentine show, Ishmael Reed’s 1972 seminal book Mumbo Jumbo gave her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection its title,  and her research for one project often leads to the next, as Okri led her to Reed. Set in 1920s New York, Mumbo Jumbo follows a series of narratives surrounding jazz music, white supremacy, and voodoo in a collage-style approach. In a statement accompanying the collection, Wales Bonner said, “The collection considers the role of writers as oracles, connecting to a rich and magical lineage, serving as the custodians of ancestral wisdom passed down and reinterpreted.”

For each of Wales Bonner’s boundary-pushing projects, there is a different themebut, according to Adjil, “they’re building blocks in what she has been looking at across over the years.” Such was the case with Johnson Artur, whom Wales Bonner met during a studio visit during the research phase of “A Time for New Dreams.” “We went to her studio and there was a lot of rich and ongoing dialogue, talking about what had inspired her and what she was thinking about for her design collection,” Adjil recalled.

Johnson Artur added, “I have been working on my ongoing art project Black Balloon Archive for the last 30 years and have never compromised on my idea to create a space where the people I photograph can see themselves through their own self. I like to believe this was the reason Grace approached me for the first time for her curated show at the Serpentine.”

Those conversations ultimately laid the groundwork for what would become Wales Bonner’s “Mumbo Jumbo” collection, which featured an assortment of characters, ranging from a West African spiritual healer to an artist shaman. Also included in the cast were intellectuals from Howard University, who dressed in the classic American college wardrobe consisting of wide leg jeans and trousers, oxford and polo shirts, and jazz-era tuxedos.

“I’ve been thinking about black intellectualism as a form of spirituality,” Wales Bonner told AnOther Magazine in an interview at the time. “It’s referencing very recognisable clothing – American college – but trying to imbue that with a sense of magic that originates from African spirituality; imbuing something that’s very classic and American and with a sense of language and culture that comes from somewhere else.”

Wales Bonner and Johnson Artur would collaborate again for the designer’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collection Lovers Rock, which Johnson Artur photographed. The collection was a celebration of the reggae genre of the same name that emerged from the British Afro-Caribbean underground parties of the 1970s. Serving as a love letter to Caribbean music and fashion, the partnering with Johnson Artur was symbiotic, as she has documented the African diaspora for over three decades from underground clubbing scenes to street life, from church celebrations to everyday moments.

 “Art has no boundaries—I believe Grace shares this vision too,” Johnson Artur said. “Collaborating is an essential part of my practice and each one has been a highlight in my career.”

Alongside the MoMA exhibition, there is also a mixtape on Spotify where Wales Bonner takes us on a journey of soundscapes through the exhibition, and an artist’s book, titled Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit, created and edited by her as a “an archive of soulful expression,” featuring photographs, texts, poems, and more by authors and artists including Reed, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Troupe.

“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as

structure,” Kuo said. “Every detail of her polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to long histories, deep archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world.”

“No matter where you’re at, that talent has a way of flourishing,” he told ARTnews in a phone interview. “There’s something good that could come out of prison, despite what an individual went to prison for, whether they’re innocent or guilty.”

Being an artist was never something he imagined as a career. He started quilting in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana as a hospice care volunteer in 2010. To raise money for the program that supports terminally ill men in the prison’s hospice care, the volunteers started making quilts out of old fabric, jeans, and shirts. At a certain point, the founding members need additional help and tapped Tyler to be a sewer. He was initially hesitant because of his machismo, but soon he was sitting in front of the sewing machine and learning new techniques.

His love for quilting bloomed. He found quilting to be a “manifestation” of life and connection to society. When Tyler learned the appliqué technique, in which swaths of fabric are overlaid onto a larger quilt, he explored deeper imagery in his work. He felt like he could show people who he was—his thoughts, feelings, and the injustice he faced throughout his life.

“People saw those quilts and felt that I had a talent, something that I shouldn’t just push to the side since I’m now free,” he said. “It’s something that I should be able to show people and continue to do and show them what I am worthy of.”

After his release from prison in 2016, he spent seven years adjusting to his new life before returning to quilting. Last year, he had his first solo exhibition at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, showcasing a series of self-portraits that depict his time in Angola, press imagery from his legal case, and the protests for his release. His works on display at Frieze share stories from his time being incarcerated and his transition to life after prison, often including motifs like butterflies and flowers that represent the ways life continues to bloom under times of struggle and duress.

“He’s expressing his world through art, and being able to have him show that to other people, I can only hope that is just a small step toward creating a more empathetic world,” said Romola Ratnam, a senior vice president and head of impact, inclusion and advocacy at the talent agency Endeavor, which owns Frieze.

Launched in 2020, shortly after Endeavor took ownership of the fair, the Impact Prize partners with organizations to honor artists who made a significant impact on society through art. Artist Jesse Krimes, co-founder and executive director of this year’s partnering organization, the Center for Art and Advocacy, came across Tyler’s work through his organization’s Right of Return Fellowship which supports formerly incarcerated artists like Tyler.

“These are artists who have lost decades and decades of their life but are in the best position to be able to talk about that experience, but to do so through a very elevated art form,” Krimes told ARTnews.

Krimes, who is himself also a formerly incarcerated artist, said he is fascinated by the creations people make in prison where there are limited materials and support. Art is a way to “hold onto the dignity and humanity within our identity in an environment that is literally designed to strip that from you,” he said.

He hopes that the quilts not only enlighten Frieze patrons of Tyler’s story but also his talent and artistry.

“Gary is not a uniform—he is special and exceptional in a very unique way that makes him who he is,” Krimes said. “At the same time, there are thousands and thousands of other people just like Gary who are currently behind bars, who if given the opportunity and support would make very unique things and contributions to society.”

Felix L.A. is unusual for a fair because it doesn’t take place at a convention center: much of the art can be seen on floors of this hotel, with rooms converted into makeshift gallery spaces. The experience harkens back to art fairs of the ’90s and earlier, but its format is the most exciting thing about the fair.

Much of the work was mediocre, and many dealers opted for group shows of artists on their roster rather than solo presentations. Perhaps these gallerists were trying to clear inventory in a shaky market. But amid the hodgepodge, there was some compelling art. Below is a selection of highlights from the fair.

While many works explored a variety of interesting concepts, many booths fell flat and seemed relatively unimpressive; there were, however, a few standouts.

During the 1960s, a group of young artists working in South Korea emerged from a dark time. The Korean War had taken place less than a decade earlier, and the resulting unrest paved the way for a military coup in 1961 that brought dictator Park Chung Hee to power. Two years later, Park became president. By 1972, the state was monitoring speech and the media with a sweeping policy aimed at keeping the dictatorship intact.

These artists were making a living in a young republic fraught with tension between North Korea and Japan, the country’s former colonizer.

Reckoning with widespread upheaval, the artists set out to challenge the conservative status quo. They gravitated to video, performance, and installation. Some of these works have gone long unseen because they have been lost, despite efforts to conserve them; others have only recently gained an audience in the West amid a new interest in Korean art and its edgier periods.

A new exhibition devoted to these avant-garde South Koreans, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” just opened at the Hammer Museu in Los Angeles, after previous runs at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Its 80 works attest to the tumult the artists faced and the ways their practices mirrored it.

“Their lives were responding to this period of exceptional change,” said Kyung An, an associate curator at the Guggenheim who organized the show’s iteration in New York. “They were their art.”

ARTnews spoke to Kyung to learn more about the show.

ARTnews: What was the historical context for these works?

Kyung An: It’s a very recent history of trauma, and there’s also an engagement with a very unpopular military involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, it’s a period of rapid urbanization and modernization. You have beginnings of what you call a rise of a middle class. That all collided with a nationalist ideology and increasingly repressive censorship propagated by the state. Park Chung Hee tightened his grip on power. It’s a dark period—I think a lot of people would agree [that it lasted] until his assassination in 1979.

What was going on in the art world in South Korea at the time?

Gestural abstraction had really swept across the Korean art scene in the 1950s, and they were rebelling against that. They saw it as this conservative kind of art-making. They were searching for a new beginning that could reflect the sense of radicality that they had been sensing around themselves.

So, they were breaking away from the art infrastructure already established there, reacting to the abstract painting movement that was baked into their formal education.

If you look at experimental artists, they create their own platforms for exhibitions and create their own circulation of printed materials and journals. They organized their own seminars to discuss the findings of what they were reading about: what was happening contemporaneously outside in Europe, Japan, and America.

This was not organized in conjunction with, but away from, the centralizing force of the academies. The biggest centralizing force, I would say, was the Kukchön,anational annual juried exhibition. If you look at their published conversations, the artists’ writing, and even that of critics and historians at the time, was very critical of the kind of art that’s embraced by the national art exhibition. They were kind of moving away from it.

Why did you focus on young artists?

The radical thing was, when abstraction entered the academic discourse in the 1960s, it was the mainstream. But abstraction was no longer reflective of both the novelty and the newness that these artists were craving. So, this next generation of experimental artists and authors was fighting against that. For me, it took a long time to settle on an exhibition title. A lot of exhibitions in Korea that dealt with experimental art, really, and focused on the quality of rebellion. I kind of wanted to move away from that. A lot of artists and different art movements reflect that. I wanted to really set them apart.

You also wanted to show how the artists were coming of age.

They were in their 20s, and some were in their early 30s. Just to have that courage and acumen and belief in oneself to create something new, to desire something so strongly—I really admired that.

All the documentation of the performances from the 1960s and ’70s is in black-and-white, and a lot of the works are lost. There is a kind of nostalgia that comes, but I wanted these artworks to feel as contemporary as if they were made today, which is how they feel.

There were threats and other material restrictions to them even producing work and finding space to convene. Some artists were the target of censorship.

I think the material restrictions and challenges were real. Remember, it’s a country that’s coming out of war. A lot of the artists had their own businesses. The later generation tried to see them as this kind of elitist, bourgeois conceptual artists. But they were very connected with what was going on because they were working in the field.

The lack of infrastructure becomes part of the practice. Kim Kulim made important works in the face of these structural challenges.

He was very active as part of the Fourth Group. It was a very interdisciplinary group formed by not only artists, but also people in theater, fashion design, and film. They were only formally active for a very short time. They held a series of performances and public arenas that were often stopped by the police. Kim himself had professed to being interrogated with his family in Daegu, where he was harassed and trailed. These were real challenges that they faced, even within the art world. There’s a very famous performance that he did, Phenomenon to Traces (1970). He wanted to tie up the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea with fabric and bury the ends of it in the ground, almost like a tomb. After he did it, he was told to take it down after a day. It was not considered art. What he was saying was: this the death of the old museum. Museum authorities said to dismantle it.

He wasn’t the not the only one. Jung Kangja, another artist whose work is featured here, faced pushback from the press and state authorities.

She was one of the few women artists whose works have survived and are in the show. She had a solo exhibition in 1970 that was promptly shut down. Its venue, the national public information office, where a lot of artists held exhibitions, felt it had lent the space under the misassumption that it would host an exhibition of sculpture. She ended up doing a performance that it didn’t agree with.

She remains a very prominent and interesting figure. A lot of her work deals with this contradiction that I think women faced that at the time. We tend to focus more on her performances, but we should remember that she made a lot of installations and sculptures as well. It’s just that they didn’t survive.

In Kiss Me (1967), a gigantic brightly painted pair of lips, entrapped within these blocky rows of teeth is woman’s severed head and a rubber glove that you use for washing dishes. Women at the time were still forced to adhere to certain Confucian ideals of womanhood: be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and be loyal to your family.

Kim Kulim’s 1969 experimental film The meaning of the 1/24 second figures prominently in the show. It features glimpses of Seoul, which was also a protagonist of sorts for these artists. What was it like to rewatch this film in preparation for this show?

He worked with a few other artists in the actual making of the of the film. For me, it’s like energy and life of Seoul at the time. It’s composed 224 frames individually spliced frames per second. It’s a real montage of the capital city in a state of flux. It juxtaposes images of progress—the newly built expressway, for example—with images of people living their daily lives. You see electrical towers; you see construction workers. What’s interesting about this film is that you can see that Seoul as a city caught between the past and the present. These shots are interspersed with displaced figures sleeping on the street, a very old gate fallen into ruin, an elderly woman selling flowers on the streets. The camera never stops, except for when you sometimes see some of the artists who helped make the work. A repeated figure that appears is a child, dressed in a suit. He interrupts the flow, staring straight into the camera. It’s almost like an interjection into the overstimulation of the city.

The film was supposed to premiere in July 1969. But due to technical difficulties, it was canceled. Kim ended up projected slides of images from it onto his own body.

What happened to the artworks that no longer exist?

A lot of the works don’t exist anymore because when artists moved, they tended to get rid of them. We found a lot of the work from the ’60s really difficult to locate. Thankfully, we had images of them archival materials that indicated what they look like. A general curatorial rule was that we would not fabricate a work for the exhibition.

Lee Kun-Yong, who is now in his early 80s, is another big figure in the show. Logic of Hands, from 1975, shows Lee in four separate black-and-white frames, posing with his hands in different gestures. What made him so critical?

His practice was very diverse. He developed performance-based works that use the body as a way to understand one’s relationship with the surrounding world. In the show, we wanted to really focus on what he called “events-logical.” This is kind of exemplary of his performance work, where the repetition of everyday gestures such mark-making, counting, walking, and standing are made within a particular logical parameter. He removes them from their social conventions.

I think what’s interesting is that this work was created at the height of an authoritarian regime where the state not only affected one’s ideological routes, but also the physical realm, too. Restrictions just became part of your daily life. Lee was never overtly political, but it’s interesting to see these works within that context.

You said that performance doesn’t enter the discourse until the late 1970s to the early 80s. It starts off with happenings. Disappearance, staged in 1973 by Lee Kang-So at Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul, was one of them.

Lee took tables from a local bar he frequented, with cigarette marks or rings left from drinking glasses. The furniture itself embodied all of what was left behind. He loved that the surfaces of the furniture seemed to emit the life of the other people who touched and interacted with those objects. But then they were subsequently lost. I would say he did not know what was happening internationally at the time, with other happenings in New York. If you look at photos, it’s all friends, some strangers, some family members. This is a real reflection on like the fleeting experience of everyday life.

You mean that it came out of his experience, that he wasn’t necessarily reacting to what was happening with art collectives abroad? It wasn’t until 1975 that it was shown publicly.

This was the time of a dictatorship. In 1972, the Yushin Constitution, which banned large gatherings, had just been announced. It closed universities and [introduced] a period of censorship. Disappearance was meant to create a space where artists and thinkers could come together and converse freely. I think that was a very radical move.

The new exhibition, guest curated by Coastal Chumash scholar Deana Dartt, works to recenter Native lives and resistance in the story of California and its Missions, which, she told ARTnews, have been all but completely absent from mainstream histories and education about the period until recently.

Covering hundreds of years and spanning a vast geographical area, the exhibition blends history and contemporary art—featuring works by Native artists like Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla), James Luna (Puyukitchum/Ipai/ Mexican American Indian), and others—to engage museum-goers in the deep legacy of the Mission colonization and its relevance today.

“There were living Native people who were fighting against that regime the entire time,” Dartt said. “I use the artwork of living Native people who are fighting against the regime now to engage in each of those eras. Then, we show all the things we are doing to assert ourselves, despite that. I feel like it is ultimately celebratory, but it doesn’t shy away from what happened to us.”

ARTnews spoke with Dartt to discuss the new exhibition, her activism and scholarly work aimed at decolonizing museums, and the difficulties in bringing this history to a wide audience.

This interview has been edited lightly for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: How did you get involved with the Autry, and where did the idea for this exhibition get started?

Deana Dartt: As a Coastal Chumash woman, I have lived in Southern California all my life. I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, a little bit away from Chumash homeland. It’s on my mom’s side, and she was born and raised in Montecito, not far from our ancestral village. I was raised in the Valley and I went to public schools in Los Angeles and we never learned about California Indian people, nor did we learn anything about the Native experience in the Missions. Nor did we learn anything about the Native experience of the Mexican period or the American period, or where Native people are today. I initially went to graduate school for my tribe and I was just preparing to do cultural resource work for my community. But I started taking classes in museum studies, and I started seeing how critical analysis of museum representation, especially from Native scholars, was really intriguing to me, because I grew up in a place where there was no public representation of California Indians.

My dissertation research looked at how Native people along the central coast of California are represented. Namely, this area from San Francisco to southern Orange County, where there are no federally recognized tribes. And that’s also the swath of the Missions. I did a critical analysis of the museums—the natural history, history, and art museums and the 19 operating Mission museums—and then I interviewed Native people from that same region about what stories they would they tell if they had the resources to have a tribal museum. They’re two entirely different sets of stories and experiences and perspectives. That is the foundation of this exhibition. In my conclusions for the exhibition, I said, clearly, the museums and the Missions aren’t going to do this work. They haven’t done it to date. There has to be an intervention by Native people.

The Autry is the closest thing to a Native American museum in California, with the exception of the tribal museums. But tribal museums are not as well-attended as mainstream museums. I really wanted to stage this exhibition in a mainstream museum. … The Autry has Native staff and leadership and so it was a viable place for this project. There are not a lot of mainstream museums that would have taken on a project that uses genocide to describe what happened in the Missions, even though 90 percent of Native people refer to the El Camino Real and the Franciscan missions as sites of genocide. It’s still controversial among white historians who didn’t actually live the experience and within the legacy. We’re still living within the legacy of the Mission genocide and that is evident in the fact that there are no federally recognized tribes on the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. There’s a lasting impact.

The goal of the exhibition is not only to retell and recast this history, but to invite Californians into a position of allyship, of standing with us, seeing us, reconciling with this history, and supporting us in our efforts to be seen, to regain land, and to attain sovereign status as Indian communities.

Is this new Indigenous perspective already reflected in the contemporary historiography or is that something you had to generate through the research that went into the exhibition?

There are writers now reconciling and critically analyzing that period. But that doesn’t translate to the public in formal learning environments. We just haven’t seen it. Who, among mainstream Californians, are actually reading scholarly manuscripts? There are several Native and non-Native historians that are taking the Missions to task. But the museums aren’t at all. For me, as a visual learner, the incredible, edgy contemporary art that is in this exhibition really engages people in a way that a history book usually can’t.

Even the K–12 curriculum has come a long way, where schools today usually introduce Native American history in third grade and then the Mission story in the fourth grade. I don’t remember them doing even that in 1971, when I was in school. But, at this point, a lot depends on the teacher. The curriculum is written in a way that allows teachers to use creative agency to tell the story in a more critical way, but not all of them do. The impact I really want to make is on these children, because the number one audience for this exhibition is fourth graders, learning about the settlement of California.

If you went to school in California, you probably made a little sugar cube Mission or a little Mission replica. They’ve been doing that for decades, glorifying those places. They’re so glorified. The Missions host convenings and weddings and have opulent gardens in the former workspaces. Those central quads were sites of slavery and now, they’re fountains and roses and people get married there. It’s really disgusting.

[In recent years, the sugar-cube replicas of Missions have been eliminated from California curriculums, amid a wider shift in how the Mission period is taught in public schools, as KTLA5 reported in 2022.]

What are the different strategies you use in the exhibition to teach this history to people who might not otherwise engage?

We use multimedia. There are several videos of contemporary artists talking about the Mission legacy. There’s a lot of text, of course, but then there is the juxtaposition of historic materials that come from the Autry’s permanent collection. Some of the contemporary works come from the Autry’s permanent collection, some were acquired for the exhibition, and others are on loan from the artists or their galleries. It’s a dialogue—a dialogue between scholarship and contemporary artists. It’s very immersive. I really feel like I set up the story in words and then the artists bring it home with some image or object that really exemplifies what I’m talking about. In that way, it’s very powerful.

Stephen Aaron, the director of the Autry, likes the use of materials to tell a story. The beauty of museums is that we’re using objects and art to engage the visitor. There are a lot people who don’t learn from words. I feel like you could go through this exhibition without reading a single text panel and understand perfectly what’s happening. I think we’ve pulled it off.

It’s a big topic, both geographically and temporally. We cover from pre-Contact, through three colonial eras, across a geographic span from Baja [California] to San Francisco. We cover all the laws and all the movement of Native people and the diversity of cultures. It could be a whole dissertation. It could be a whole series of books. It was really challenging to get it down to 100 words per panel. But it’s fun for me, as a scholar, to take what I’ve written and then make it available to a broad audience. That’s my jam.

Did you bring in contemporary art in order to compensate for a lack of historical objects? Or was there another motivation?

The motivation was really to emphasize the present day and to amplify these incredible artists so that they could tell this story. They are all individually grappling with the Mission legacy. I wanted to bring them in concert together with the historic materials. I didn’t want to use historic materials.

The hat that we borrowed from the British Museum was one historic object I wanted because it pulls a lot of things together. The hat-weaver was a Chumash woman incarcerated in the Missions and made to or requested to—we don’t know—weave a hat for the Padre with a big wide brim. Ever since it left California in 1792 to go to the British Museum, it’s been called the Padre hat. But when I saw it in person, five years ago, I knew immediately that it was a Chumash women’s work hat. It became a Padre hat because she was incarcerated and forced to make it. During the Mission period, Chumash weren’t even allowed to wear their own hats or regalia. And, so, she had to give what would have been an important item to the person who was incarcerating her.

We had a ceremony when we uncrated the hat, welcoming her back home after 230 years across the sea and placed her in the vitrine with several other women’s work hats. This beautiful hat represents not only the complexity and sophistication of the art form, but also the resistance and resilience of carrying on traditional practices. A glimpse of a time where, even under them most opporessive conditions, Native people found ways to adapt and survive. As we returned her to community among those other hats, she left behind the British Museum’s designation as a “Padre” hat and returned to “Sumelelu”,  a women’s workhat with a brim. The documentation going forward for this relative will reflect her role in the long line of women’s traditional weaving along the California Coast, and the teachings she shared with her fellow weavers when she came home. 

That reminds me of LACMA’s 2022 exhibition of Colombian Indigenous art, “The Portable Universe,” and how it took pains to contextualize objects and place them in conversation with one another. There was a lot of talk around that show about the proper way to present an Indigenous exhibition, both in its presentation and the direct involvement of tribal members. It feels like a frequent question in institutional spaces and the art world, given the long history of museums as repositories of colonial knowledge extraction. When you’re working on an exhibition like this, do you ask yourself that question?  Do you feel that inherent contradiction?

Absolutely. It’s half of my work, really. My business, Live Oak Consulting, does decolonization trainings. I started doing them only for museums, to start liberating the art and materials from those colonial institutions and making them more accessible to communities, but also making those ivory towers more amenable or workable for Native people who are employed within them. Part of my work is making an intervention from the back end. And then this curatorial work is trying to make an intervention from the front end. But it’s all about decolonizing the museum, recognizing that these are storehouses of our most precious relatives and belongings and that we need to be interfacing. Those are our incarcerated ancestors and, while museums don’t generally see them as living beings that have to be in contact with their descendants, we see them that way. We need all types of activism, right? We need grassroots activism—people protesting in the galleries and throwing paint on statues—but we also need professional activism that gets a foothold institutionally, so that we can shape policy that’s more inclusive. That’s the work that I do.

Last year, we released standards for museums with Native American collections, written by Native scholars and vetted by 70 Native professionals and allied professionals. Now there’s a set of standards for those museums that hold our materials. It has no teeth to it. People are going to do what they’re going to do, but now there’s a field-wide bar to strive to. And hopefully, there’ll be some peer pressure among the major museums to comply.

What you see at the Autry is my own tribal history, in the context of many of my relatives all along the coasts, including in Mexico. And also it complicates that history of our connectedness to Mexico. There are a lot of Indian people who no longer remember that we’ve actually been traveling up and down that coast and intermarrying long before there was a border. Doing this in 2024 was important to me, because 1824 marks the Chumash revolt. So it symbolizes that we’ve been pushing back against colonialism all along. And 1924 marks the American Indian Citizenship Act and the year that they started manning the US-Mexico border. That year codified American Indians at the same time it codified Mexican Indians. Putting a border between them so that forevermore we’ve been seen as two separate peoples. We’re not two separate peoples. … There’s DNA research published just a couple of months ago in Nature that says that Chumash Island and mainland DNA is the same as Northwest Mexico and Baja. For 7,000 years, we’ve been intermarrying with people in Mexico and moving up and down that coast. We need to remember our connections to the land and to each other, as well as garnering support from potential allies to help us do that work.

I recently wrote about Nicolas Galanin’s “Interference Patterns” exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. One thing that I really liked about his work was how the making of the work and the making of the exhibition itself was reparative, as in taking Indigenous objects back and recasting or recontextualizing them. That seems to me a through line in a lot of work by Indigenous artists and curators. The strategies seem to repeat.

It’s a concerted strategy. There are a lot of us doing this same work. Recently, I was at an Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference, where we do a lot of this strategizing, and Cristobal Martinez, a Native artist [who is a member of the collective Postcommodity], said, “It’s time that we move from tactical to strategic.” We can no longer demonstrate on the fly. Doing this work as a force, as a movement, requires us to be in concert with one another. And there are a lot of us at this point. I’m engaged in decolonizing strategies and doing so through art and alternate forms of engagement, not just scholarship. Scholarship engages a small number of people. These bigger, more visual—more visible, highly amplified—interventions is how we’re going to get the attention of potential allies.

One of the things that always strikes me when you listen to decolonial theorists is their insistence that decolonization must be material—as in, actual objects and land returned. When I interviewed Nicholas Galanin, I got the sense that sometimes it’s not what institutions wants to hear. Is that a dynamic you’ve come across?

Oh, absolutely. You should’ve heard how many of us were telling the curator from the British Museum that the hat needs to stay. It’s here for a year and a half, but my dearest Elder, who we brought down from Santa Barbara so she could be in the presence of the hat, said that right away, and she struggles with her words because she had a stroke a couple of years ago, but she said, “This stays.” The curator responded, “I understand. I understand a lot of people feel that way.” My auntie was very matter of fact: This stays here. It happens in very practical ways and it happens in trying to move the canon in a certain direction and moving people’s hearts and minds in that direction.

The Land Back movement is even now gaining more strength. There’s parcels of land going back to Native communities all over the country. And that is part of the change in visual culture. People have seen that that’s happening. They see Lily Gladstone winning the Golden Globe [for Killers of the Flower Moon]. And Reservation Dogs on TV. There’s a growing awareness of contemporary Native life and what we’ve endured and what we’ve overcome. It’s a celebratory story at this point. You can’t jump over the trauma and genocide. But people are reckoning with it. That’s why I do the work I do. I believe that these exhibitions have the capacity to reach a lot of people and move them to be allies, move them to support Land Back, move them to stand up against their church telling the wrong story or whatever. But it’s always people that have to make a decision to be different. And there’s only so much we can do as Native people on our own.

I imagine in making the exhibition that there’s a difficult line to thread in terms of trying to represent accurately and fully the violence and devastation that the Mission system had, while also creating a narrative that returns agency to indigenous life. How do you achieve that balance?

Throughout the exhibition, there’s a dialogue of impact and response. From the arrival of the missionaries, there was resistance and revolution. We have a timeline of revolts that shows from the first impact by colonial forces that there was resistance and revolts. In San Diego, they killed the priests and burned the Mission down. The Missions don’t generally talk about that, but Native people did not passively accept this change and the domination that came with them. I really focus on Native agency throughout. There is contemporary work throughout, too. I don’t just show the Native artwork in a “We’re still here” section.

There were living Native people who were fighting against that regime the entire time. I use the artwork of living Native people who are fighting against the regime now to engage in each of those eras. Then, we show all the things we are doing to assert ourselves, despite that. I feel like it is ultimately celebratory, but it doesn’t shy away from what happened to us. That’s what it is. There’s always tension between presenting that really hard, grim story and then tacking on the “But we’re still here” section. But I don’t think the exhibition does that. This is something I’ve been grappling with for 25 years.

As far as the contemporary art, how did you decide which artists were going in? And did they create works specifically for the show? Or were you picking things that they had already made?

It was a combination. We did commission a couple of works. There wasn’t a huge budget at the Autry. But there were artists who I knew who are engaging in this subject matter like Gerald Clarke. He’s Cahuilla, a little bit inland so his people were less impacted by the Missions than us. But he’s a notable contemporary Native artist in California and a great guy doing amazing work. I wanted to include him. And he didn’t have something that represented the Mission legacy, but he had an idea about a work that he wanted to do so we commissioned it, and the Autry purchased it. Also Leah Mata’s Church Pew—that was a work in progress and the Autry purchased that before it was done. But then there are others like the Cara Romero photograph, Oil and Gold. She had just released that body of work two years ago. It really references this period and she regularly engages with this topic. So it was a mixture.

Some of these artists were obvious because of their engagement with the Mission legacy. Some were obvious choices because they’re emerging artists from Tongva territory, from Los Angeles. We feature several of those artists. James Luna, [who died in 2018], was working 25 years ago on this topic, so we acquired a work by him that speaks to the identity and the MexicanIndian dichotomy. Mostly the notable artists are artists who are working and producing art that relates to California, being Native California, and being part of this historic legacy. And then a bunch of Tongva artists who are at various places in their careers, but who speak to being Indigenous to Los Angeles, which is a brutal reality, having 20 million guests in your homeland.

“Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond” is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California until June 15, 2025.

These rustic portals bring together a roughness with a softness, and make up Los Angeles–based artist Ozzie Juarez’s latest solo exhibition, at Charlie James Gallery in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. The aim is to question our current reality.

“I come from a background of painting graffiti, and these are basically pieces but inspired by sonidero typeface,” Juarez told ARTnews, referring to the graphic design from albums Mexican DJ’s play in the exploding music subculture. “These are taken directly from bands that already exist so it’s all kind of collaged. The whole idea is these fences were found already on the block; they’re supposed to look familiar. But again, it gets you thinking, Wait, this is not real. Where would this be? Where would you even find this? What would this even be guarding?”

The works get their distinct look from a heavy acid-rust process that Juarez accidentally stumbled upon through an experimental acid formula he spritzed on top of the metal. It didn’t work at first, but the next day produced an incredible orange color. That process also partially lends the exhibition (on view through March 2) its titled, “OXI-DIOS,” a portmanteau that combines the Spanish words for oxidize (oxido) and god (dios).

Juarez said he sees gods in the animals he paints, as well as in the epic couple of pre-Columbian myth, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, whose story of star-crossed love features in one of the exhibition’s paintings. According to the Aztec legend, Iztaccíhuatl was a princess who fell in love with Popocatépetl, a great warrior. Her father, the emperor, sent Popocatépetl to fight in battle at Oaxaca and, assuming he would not make it back, promised him Iztaccíhuatl as his wife upon his returned. When Iztaccíhuatl was falsely told of Popocatépetl’s death in battle, she died from grief. Popocatépetl, returned and took her body to a grave outside Tenochtitlan. In return, the gods covered them with snow and changed them into mountains.

“There’s something beautiful about having the barbed wire on these super rustic fences next to a typeface that’s so beautiful, and the figures are so soft,” he said, adding that their compression within the canvas “encourages a push and pull in the paint.”

A self-identified DIY punk kid who received his BFA from the University of California, Berkeley, Juarez’s earliest artistic influences came from working weekends at the swap meets in South Central Los Angeles with his parents. He still obsessively visits swap meets, a weekend ritual that allows him to explore the visual language of the city, from his distinct vantage point as an artist born and raised in Los Angeles.

“There’s something about supporting these vendors and this kind of lifestyle—these vendors are not there to make a fortune,” he said. “They’re there to have a good Sunday and maybe make twenty bucks, maybe make nothing at all, and that’s how I grew up with my father. Sometimes we made five bucks, sometimes we made 300 bucks. It doesn’t really matter, we’re out enjoying the day, learning some sort of work ethic, rising early, working, coming back. It was all part of my upbringing.”

His latest works, which seem to collapse time in a single tableau, also find inspiration in what Juarez sees when he visits a swap meet. “I’ll see something that is made 5 years ago next to something that is made a hundred years ago—[things] that you’ll never see next to each other [outside a swap meet], but they’re next to each other,” he said. “There’s something about the mindless composition that these vendors put these things out in that clicks to me. I take a lot of photos when I’m there and I take my compositions and color palettes from the photos as well.”

Those connections between old and new can be seen more directly in a recent commission Juarez did for the NASCAR Mexico Series race, which was unveiled at the LA Memorial Coliseum on February 4. In the design, a four-sided pyramid transforms into a champion cup, to which Juarez paired modern imagery like stylized sports cars with six Aztec symbols, including the Tlaltecuhtli, the Mesoamerican deity who is usually depicted as having splayed arms and legs; Olin, two interlaced lines; and the Aztec glyph for flame.

To accompany his solo show, Juarez has curated a large group show, “Angelitos de Plata,” in the gallery’s downstairs space. Inherent in the making of that exhibition is Juarez’s commitment to fostering community and empowering other artists, which is also evident in his founding of Tlaloc Studios in South Central in 2020, an artist-run studio space  that he rents out to fellow artists.

 “When I decided to put ‘Angelitos de Plata’ together, I invited friends I already worked with, who are directly in my circle or who inspire me,” Juarez said. “These are all the people in the last three years who have been close to me and have changed the way I look at art making and the way I look at art.” He added, “I came from that idea of bringing community together and just the love for art, the love for my friends. I always want to be the best friend to all my friends and help them out.”

Johnson received a prize from the Harmon Foundation, an organization that supported Black American artists before most institutions did so. He was picked to do grand commissions, including a 185-foot-long frieze for a San Francisco high school that displays an array of athletes leaping, diving, and running. And he was beloved among his cohort. Loïs Mailou Jones paid homage to Chester, Johnson’s 1931 bust of a Black boy with a palm to his cheek, in a painting of her own. Noted Black thinkers of the era sang his praises, including Alain Locke, who once wrote that Johnson had “come to reflect more than any other contemporary Negro sculptor the modernist mode and the African influence.”

And yet, today, beyond the Bay Area, Johnson is a lesser-known figure of 20th century art history. The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, the two New York institutions commonly credited with writing a canon of American modern art, do not own a single work by Johnson. The artist himself has not had any major shows since 1998, the year that San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a survey. Not, at least, until right now.

Johnson is getting more overdue recognition in the form of a modest but mighty survey held at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in the tony Los Angeles suburb of San Marino. The exhibition places a grouping of sculptures by Johnson alongside paintings, prints, and more, all in an effort to uphold him as a tireless innovator, an artist whose style was constantly in flux—even when the general public wasn’t always looking.

“Johnson was one of the key artists of the Harlem Renaissance period, but he’s not as well known today, partly because he was based the Bay Area in the 1920s and ’30s,” said Dennis Carr, the exhibition’s lead curator. “With this exhibition, we tried to place him within the Harlem Renaissance period, and to focus on his beautiful, dignified depictions of Black people and people of color in this time period. But then, we also wanted to look at his artistic experimentation throughout his career.”

Moreover, Johnson’s work acted as a retort to what was coming out of New York, which was predominantly painting. Jacqueline Francis, a scholar who organized the show with Carr and John P. Bowles, said “Johnson was the epitome of what the Harlem Renaissance artists could do in 3D.”

Johnson’s reappraisal has come as the Harlem Renaissance itself undergoes some reconsideration. This month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a sprawling show about the movement, commonly associated with New York of the 1920s and ’30s, that seeks to situate it within modernism more broadly. That exhibition, curated by Denise Murrell, does put forward the Harlem Renaissance as a distinctly American movement intended to create new images of Black people that are freed from academicism and naturalism. But the Met show also asserts that the name is something of a misnomer, in that the movement wasn’t limited to just its namesake neighborhood—artists such as Richmond Barthé and Augusta Savage worked in styles that were indebted to what was taking place abroad, in the Caribbean and Europe.

On the other side of the US, on the Pacific, there was Johnson, who was synthesizing modes culled from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and, naturally, Harlem to devise his own style.

His most famous work remains Forever Free, a 1933 sculpture owned by SFMOMA that depicts a Black woman with her two children incised into her long, black skirt. The figures, with their almond-shaped eyes and their fleshy bodies, are done in an aesthetic that is distinctly Johnson’s. Their messaging is, too: this familial trio is literally inseparable, suggesting that they require each other’s love to continue on.

But in the decades that followed, Johnson veered in many other directions, producing enamelwork abstractions, public artworks for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, and sculptures that look quite unlike Forever Free, such as a 1933–34 organ screen that Johnson made for an auditorium in the California School for the Blind in Berkeley. That work, which was thought to be lost for decades, was acquired by the Huntington about a decade ago.

“His story is one that really helps us understand the complexity of mid-century American artists,” said art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, who worked as a research assistant on SFMOMA’s 1998 Johnson show. “His work has often been tethered to the Harlem Renaissance, but in a way, it kind of has nothing to do with it.”

Shaw’s contribution to the Huntington show is a catalogue essay that doubles as a deep dive into Johnson’s upbringing, the details of which had previously been hazy. Johnson was born in 1888 in Boston, the city to which his parents had moved five years earlier. His parents were an interracial couple—not all US cities would have allowed them to wed at the time. Boston did so. But not all of Johnson’s family members fared so well: his uncle Lindsey narrowly escaped being lynched in Alexandria, Virginia, amid what Shaw describes as “a misunderstanding with a white woman.”

Yet Johnson, who was light-skinned, was afforded opportunities rarely experienced by Black Americans at the time, attending boarding school and receiving a formal education there. He ended up working for a railroad company as a dining car waiter, even as he took art classes in the Bay Area, where he moved permanently in 1915. (He would go on to study at the California School of Fine Arts, which ultimately became the famed, and now defunct, San Francisco Art Institute.) Working on trains, Shaw believes, may have enabled Johnson to traverse the country.

As Johnson’s career took off in the Bay Area, he bore witness to an influx of art from seemingly every corner of the world. He saw African artworks in the galleries of museums and in local private collections, and went on to make mask-like sculptures of his own. He is thought to have drawn inspiration from East Asian art for some of his sculptures; he even worked as an assistant to the artist Beniamino Bufano, who created a monument to Sun Yat-sen, China’s first President. He viewed paintings by Diego Rivera and other Mexican modernists when they traveled to San Francisco in the 1930s and ’40s, then made works in which he, too, arranged figures in rows. But Johnson cast off Rivera’s leftist themes in favor of something that was intentionally less political.

And, while Johnson is most closely associated with the Bay Area, not all of his time was spent there. He traveled widely, too, visiting Mexico himself on scholarship from the San Francisco Art Association in the mid-’40s.

Unlike many Harlem Renaissance artists, Johnson did not spend all day in his studio—he worked to earn a living. He produced frames for a shop and gallery, he worked in other artists’ studios, he colored pictures produced by a local photographer. He labored away.

Francis, the scholar who worked on the Huntington show, said she wanted “to disabuse people of the notion that everybody goes to art school, and then becomes represented by a blue-chip gallery. We know that for certain artists—women of color, as well as people of color in general—that has not been the route. In general, most artists work gigs.”

Johnson thought of himself first and foremost as an artist, and that ended up proving a stumbling block for his wife Pearl. Because Johnson took a path that did not lead to much financial success, Pearl “couldn’t realize her Black bourgeois desires,” Shaw said, “which may have contributed to her psychological struggles. She lived the final half of her life in a state mental hospital. It’s so sad.”

The later stages of Johnson’s own career were just as tragic in their own ways. During the ’50s, he became a barfly, only to end up the next decade living in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, a hardscrabble San Francisco neighborhood, while his health declined. He died there in 1967.

Johnson’s legacy has suffered in the decades following his passing, likely due to his geographical location, which kept him out of view of the New York–centric American art world. But another important factor is that there hasn’t been a formal structure for how to further it. “He had no estate, as far as we know, to foster his legacy,” Carr, the Huntington curator, explained.

Even as historically white-led museums are only belatedly coming to recognize Johnson, Black artists have been looking to his sculptures for years. The painter Robert Colescott, a family friend of Johnson, was vocal in his support for the artist. And Faith Ringgold, in a 1994 work that is part of a series called “The French Collection,” even painted Johnson into an imagined gathering of modernists that also includes Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Elizabeth Catlett, and Romare Bearden.

The Huntington show, in its own way, seems designed to weave Johnson into the fabric of art history, just as Ringgold did. And for Carr, that’s necessary work, since Johnson produced images of Black people that were unlike most others from the era.

“His early sculptures of people of color have such profound dignity,” Carr said. “In an era when so many images of people of color in popular culture were racist, that move of presenting his figures with such dignity, and nobility, even through their associations with ancient sculptural traditions, is a powerful one. That is the message he’s trying to deliver.”