Construction view of Los Angeles Water School (LAWS) (2018) by Oscar Tuazon

Artists have long explored themes of environmental sustainability in Southern California, but a recent series of devastating wildfires has brought even greater resonance to their work. Evan Moffitt explores how four LA artists are changing the way we think about climate change

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When the Getty Fire tore up the dry hills of Mandeville Canyon in October 2019, many in Los Angeles feared the worst: the Getty Center’s Titian and Thomas Gainsborough paintings curling from their frames, masterworks of European art reduced to cinders. This wasn’t the first time locals had imagined such a catastrophe – Ed Ruscha had painted his iconoclastic portrait of the county museum, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, in 1968 – but this time, it was different. The severity and frequency of wildfires had increased as climate change accelerated, threatening not just art in Southern California but the very way of life there.

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Scientists, furthermore, have warned that the city could eventually run dry, and nothing has shaped LA more than its lack of water. The Department of Water and Power was long seen as the most powerful bureau of city government, dating back to when William Mulholland drained the Owens Valley in 1913 to soak the dry fields of San Fernando. The violent conflict that ensued was famously fictionalized in the 1974 film Chinatown, and many artists have explored the city’s relationship with water, from Judy Baca’s epic mural along the Tujunga Wash, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1974–84), to more recent projects by artists such as Carolina Caycedo and Oscar Tuazon.

This work can be difficult, but it has struck an important nerve. “Most of our patrons are museums or their supporters who want to engage in dialogue with challenging contemporary art,” says Kibum Kim of Commonwealth and Council, the gallery that represents Caycedo. “They don’t want something that is easy.” For Caycedo, this has led to being included in shows at major institutions such as the Hammer Museum in LA, as well as having works in a number of private collections. Artists such as her are a reminder that Southern California has always been a place where artists, writers, filmmakers and others have mobilized around difficult issues, mining the past to build a better future.

Wagon Station encampment at A-Z West (2004) by Andrea Zittel

No one embodies the utopian spirit of LA more than Andrea Zittel. In 2000, the artist left a burgeoning career in New York for a ramshackle bungalow on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. She began slowly expanding her compound in the desert, informed, in part, by the Bauhaus, Japanese architecture, minimalist sculpture and architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. A-Z West, as the 60-acre campus is known, encompasses Zittel’s home and studio, guest cabins, outdoor sculptural installations, informal classrooms and a series of Wagon Stations, tiny chrome sleeping pods nestled between boulders like UFOs.

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Zittel refers to A-Z West as “an evolving testing ground for living – a place in which space, objects, and acts of living all intertwine in a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today.” In part, this means creative, sustainable approaches to the privations of living in the desert. Zittel pulps her paper waste and sets it to dry in metal trays called the Regenerating Field; she uses the results to make sculptures. Vegetables grow from barrels shrouded by mosquito netting in a courtyard formed by shipping containers. Shade is provided by trees watered using dry irrigation techniques.

Installation view of ‘Rafa Esparza: Staring at the Sun’ at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019

What ecological problems might be solved by building better? Like A-Z West, Oscar Tuazon poses this question with his Water School (2016). Its central component, Zome Alloy (2016), borrows its bubble-like plywood structure from the waste-free dome homes designed in the 1960s by Steve Baer, the inventor of passive solar technology. Tuazon’s project also refers to another LA visionary, the architect Buckminster Fuller, best known for his transparent geodesic greenhouses and light-filled homes. When Zome Alloy was recently on view in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, visitors could browse a small library of books about water rights and convene for bimonthly discussions.

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For several years, Caycedo has explored the effects of colonialism and industrialization on water resources throughout Latin America with her ongoing project ‘BE DAMMED’. At the 2016 São Paulo Biennial, four enormous satellite images of controversial Brazilian dams revealed the structures’ disastrous effects on the surrounding landscape. Caycedo hung brightly colored sculptures woven from fishing nets, which she calls Cosmotarrayas, mesmerizing mobiles linking the precariousness of marine resources to the over-fishing that threatens the life within them. “There’s been great demand for Carolina’s Cosmotarrayas, which have immediate visual power,” says Kim. “They’re colorful, and they play into generally accepted ideas about sculptural composition and form. But they also carry a powerful message.” Caycedo says she doesn’t believe in sustainability, per se: “Extraction will never be sustainable. A coal mine is not sustainable. The way we use our water is not sustainable. I prefer to think about ‘sustenance’ in terms of my work and a healthier relationship to nature: to give strength to something you care about or someone you love.”

Installation view of ‘Wanaawna, Rio Hondo, and Other Spirits’ (2019) by Carolina Caycedo at Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA

In 2014, artist Rafa Esparza began making adobe bricks from mud he harvested on the banks of the Los Angeles River, on a parcel of land known as the Bowtie – one of the only sections of the river left unpaved by the Army Corps of Engineers when they buried the channel in concrete in 1936. In 2014 the artist Michael Parker had carved a 42m obelisk into the earth that Esparza covered with approximately 1,400 of his bricks. During the installation’s closing performance, he donned a traditional Aztec loincloth, pheasant headdress and ankle rattles and performed a dance atop the structure that referred both to his ancestral people and the indigenous Tongva displaced from the river’s edge by colonialism. Adobe and thatch are among the most sustainable building practices on earth, but the indigenous people who used them were killed or forced from their land, which was then torn up to build LA. Esparza has since repurposed his bricks for shows, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in what he refers to as “browning the white cube”.

This has had its challenges, according to Kim, who represents Esparza: “Adobe is very structurally strong, but it’s not archival; it will deteriorate over time, which can be hard for some collectors and institutions to accept. But that’s an important element of Rafa’s work: we need to re-conceive our notion of art as a static thing that will forever remain the same.” By imagining cities like LA and their museums made of mud and river water, Esparza places the environmental costs of colonialism into stark relief, proposing, if not a return to a precolonial past, at least a few important lessons we might learn from.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 Issue.

Eamon Ore-Giron’s monumental mural ‘Angelitos Negros’ (2018), shown at the 2018 biennial ‘Made in L.A.’ at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

No longer an outlier from the busy Europe– New York art corridor, Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a serious contender as a thriving hub on the world art scene. Janelle Zara looks at the people and places that are making the City of Angels hot, hot, hot

This autumn in LA, Ai Weiwei season is in full swing. The Berlin-based Chinese conceptual artist and political activist has not one but three major, concurrent exhibitions across the city – one at Jeffrey Deitch’s new Hollywood gallery, one at the Marciano Art Foundation and one at the new UTA Artist Space in Beverly Hills. With his LA debut coming three decades into his career, it prompts the question: all this time, has Ai been saving the best city for last?

The delay in Ai’s arrival to the City of Angels may lie closer to the fact that none of these venues existed before 2017: the Marciano Art Foundation opened in a defunct Masonic temple in May last year; the new UTA Artist Space, redesigned in part by Ai, opened in July; and his show with Deitch is the space’s very first. They’re part of the LA art scene expansion that is taking place at warp speed, one powered by a booming artist population and a corresponding wave of new galleries and museums.

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For all of its recent history, Los Angeles has been anchored by powerhouse institutions: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); UCLA (where you could once take classes with the ground-breaking conceptual artist John Baldessari); and CalArts, where you can still take classes with the famous African-American abstractionist Charles Gaines (who is likely to come out and attend your exhibition opening). And yet, as far as the art world was concerned, history took place between New York and Europe. Like the rest of the world, Los Angeles was an afterthought, a home for surfers and movie stars.

Installation view of John Baldessari’s 2017 show at Sprüth Magers gallery, Los Angeles

Seemingly overnight, however, it has become a world-class art capital. Recent years have seen major milestones that have put Los Angeles on the global stage: mega-collectors such as Eli and Edythe Broad as well as Maurice and Paul Marciano have opened destinations at which to showcase their holdings, courting the likes of Olafur Eliasson and Ai Weiwei to do their first major projects in LA. Major galleries, too, have opened LA outposts to be closer to their blue-chip artists. For Hauser & Wirth, that was Mark Bradford and Larry Bell; for Sprüth Magers, Baldessari and Sterling Ruby. And, of course, the inaugural Frieze LA, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, will take place in February 2019.

Read more: 5 exhibitions to see in London this month + 1 to miss

In September 2017, ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’ embraced the West Coast’s exclusion from the New York/European canon by emphasizing its connection to Latin America. ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’ was a blockbuster moment with its thematic syncing of more than 70 institutions. Curators, funded by The Getty, had the opportunity to travel to Latin America and relay the art narratives seldom told, some amassing as much as seven years’ worth of research. The results were powerhouse exhibitions such as MOCA Pacific Design Center’s ‘Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA’, a survey of art that emerged in the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s, or the Hammer Museum’s staggering feminist 260-piece ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985’. It’s one of the few shows to originate in Los Angeles and then travel to New York, rather than the other way around.

Where ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’ took place inside more than 70 institutions at once, the new biennial Desert X took place in none. The first edition last February took art-goers on an epic scavenger hunt across the Coachella Valley, where artists including Richard Prince, Tavares Strachan and Will Boone took over derelict buildings and made massive incisions in the sandy earth. Doug Aitken, who built a mirrored hilltop kaleidoscope the size and shape of a small suburban house, described the event as “a vast sprawling parkour… where suburbia ends and the landscape begins”.

Endless Creative Space

In the 1960s, the Light and Space movement, with artists such as Doug Wheeler, James Turrell and Robert Irwin, was making experimental inquiries into sensory deprivation, visual perception, and the glossiness of automotive paint. In 2018, light and space are highly prized amenities that in cities such as New York and London are increasingly hard to come by. In Los Angeles, land of eternal sunshine, studio spaces are large, as is the distance between them (although lately rents have risen at an alarming rate). LA’s art scene is as vast as its geography, stretching from the shoreline into the mountains and out into the desert. See, for example, Doug Aitken in Venice Beach, Charles Long in Mount Baldy, and Andrea Zittel in the arid plains of Joshua Tree, where her collective practice revolves around survival in the desert.

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It’s the kind of landscape that breeds autonomy, as exemplified by designer David Wiseman and his brother, former Guggenheim Deputy Director Ari Wiseman. After several years of David being represented by Tribeca-based gallery R & Company, he and Ari purchased and refurbished a 30,000-square-foot factory complex in LA’s Frogtown neighborhood where David could both produce and exhibit his work himself on site. Elsewhere along the LA River, French painter Claire Tabouret relishes the kind of solitude she could never enjoy at home. Inside her former industrial space-turned-studio, she spends “eight or nine hours inside not talking”, a real luxury in France, where you’re bound to bump into someone. For true peace and quiet, Tabouret also makes work in a small house she purchased in Pioneertown, a tiny Wild West city out in the desert with “no phone, no internet, no nothing”.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles

Solitude, on the other hand, is optional. Geographical barriers also breed tribes. There’s a conviviality rather than a competition among LA artists, particularly artists on the East Side who run spaces for other artists to show. From the Ruberta gallery in Glendale to the artist-run platform BBQLA downtown, openings are no formal affairs. Rather than white wine and polite conversation, you’re greeted by tacos and a cooler full of beer.

“I was surprised by just how small it feels compared with New York, but that also makes for a communitarian vibe,” says gallerist Kibum Kim, who moved to LA in early 2016. He’s a partner at artist Young Chung’s Commonwealth & Council (CwC), a Koreatown space Chung founded in 2010 and initially ran in his living room. Their work is less driven by the market than the desire to build communities, evidenced by the fact that Chung “didn’t make a sale for years”.

Read more: Gallerist Angela Westwater on inspiring women in the art world

“Many artists we work with have practices that eschew the Western notion of the individual artist genius and bring in their peers and make work that is collaborative,” adds Kim, citing partnerships between Rafa Esparza and Beatriz Cortez, or Candice Lin and Patrick Staff, all four of whom have now shown in the Hammer Museum’s prestigious biennial survey of the city’s mid-career and emerging artists, ‘Made in L.A.’. The institutional recognition affirms Chung’s diligence, Kim says. “I have to believe something like CwC can thrive in the art world, even in this hyper-accelerated, market-dominant environment.”

Nothing is Too Weird

“Los Angeles, as a subject of art history, has a few chapters to celebrate,” says Hamza Walker, director of non-profit art space LAXART, citing the Ferus Gallery days of the 1960s (the gallery closed in 1966) and ‘The Pictures Generation’ of the 1980s (a seminal exhibition curated by writer and historian Douglas Crimp at New York-based Artists Space, which explored artistic communities in New York, Buffalo and LA). Those days have passed, however, and LAXART’s focus is very much on the art of the present. Founded in 2005 as a platform for emerging artists with nowhere to show, LAXART, in light of all the young galleries that have emerged to pick up on those duties, pivoted its mission this year to respond to urgent cultural and political matters. Over the summer, Walker presented ‘Remote Castration’, a group exhibition responding to the #MeToo movement. Over the course of the show, the façade of the Santa Monica Boulevard building featured a portrait of Hollywood by Barbara Kruger – not the Hollywood of movie stars, but a sector of the city where pawn shops, dollar stores and sex work reign. Words such as “BREAK IT→OWN IT→STEAL IT→LOAN IT” were painted across the top, with the palette of black, white and green hitting the standard aesthetics of the surrounding marijuana dispensaries.

The artist Ai Weiwei

As an OG enfant terrible, Kruger’s work has questioned the authorship of the status quo since the 1970s. The artists of this year’s ‘Made in L.A.’ at the Hammer seem to have picked up the torch, serving narratives excluded from the textbook art historical canon. Megan Whitmarsh and Jade Gordon built a collaborative parody of a typical LA New Age wellness institute with the very real intention of reframing the female life cycle as cause for empowerment. Lauren Halsey erected a monument to her native South Central LA and its residents in the shape of an Egyptian tomb, and it was Eamon Ore-Giron’s monumental Angelitos Negros (2018), a mural stretching the height of the museum’s grand staircase, that greeted visitors and set the tone of the show. Ore- Giron has arranged the circular motifs inherent to his work in a composition resembling the movements of the sun and moon. While his strong geometries typically evoke comparisons to the work of European modernists, he explains, they’re based on Peruvian abstraction of the 1200 and 1300s.

Ore-Giron’s mural is emblematic of the forward-facing art that defines LA now. It asks audiences to re-evaluate their understanding of the past, particularly concepts of Western art history. The appeal of LA lies in its cultural diversity, an atmosphere that, like his mural, “both elevates and alters the way we read the past,” says Ore-Giron. And from the past, into a bright, shining future.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2018 Issue in partnership with Deutsche Bank. Browse more content here: The Beauty Issue