Memory, Displacement & the Archive

Así Sea/So Be It is an installation by Sanchez centered on more than 200 wax rubbings taken from her grandparents’ former home in East Los Angeles. Created collaboratively with family members, the works record architectural surfaces, interior details, and garden elements. The installation considers domestic space as an archive shaped by loss, memory, and embodied acts of preservation.

Apr 4 - Aug 23

Informed by real oral histories from her family and imagined versions that expand on them, Olive Diamond's work considers migration and movement through landscape, tableau, and portraiture. She explores displacement and passage to ask who is remembered, what traditions are passed on, and where is home. Diamond places her subjects in abstract, hallucinatory landscapes, mixing her own glazes and working intuitively. The works retain an aura of chance and mystery, born through discovery and reaction.

Apr 18 - May 23

Todd Gray: Portals at Perrotin Los Angeles presents new photographic assemblages by the LA-based artist (b. 1954), juxtaposing European formal gardens and Renaissance interiors with West African landscapes and material remains of colonial power and slavery. The works articulate Black presence in the Atlantic world as a simultaneous experience of seeing and being, of witnessing and participating in the ongoing currents of history. The exhibition coincides with the unveiling of Gray's monumental LACMA commission, Octavia's Gaze, for the new David Geffen Galleries.

Mar 21 - May 30

All That I Can Carry is a solo exhibition of photographs by Southern California-based artist William Camargo. Working in the tradition of conceptual photography, William Camargo explores how gentrification, systemic racism, and the erasure of Chicanx and Latine communities shape cities and the lives of those who inhabit them. Through photography, installation, and community archiving, he constructs counter-narratives that center Brown communities and bring overlooked histories into public view.

Apr 11 - May 30

How to Fly is a site-specific photomural by visual artist Sadie Barnette installed in CAAM’s atrium. Born and raised in Oakland, California, Barnette incorporates photographs she has taken of locations across the state with pictures from her family archives. The installation includes references to Barnette’s past artworks, as well as her signature motifs, such as glitter, rhinestones, cars, and plant life. The collection of images, ranging from a cousin’s birthday cake to a well-worn copy of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, are set at varying scales against an ombre rainbow backdrop, adding to the surfeit of color and pattern. Barnette has described herself as a “keeper of the past,” someone whose role it is to tend to the historical archive, including its moments big and small. While the photomural serves to chronicle and monumentalize her story and family history with a sense of humor and play, it is also an invitation for viewers to see themselves, their loved ones, and the magic of the everyday in their own lives.

Sep 30 - Oct 3

In David Alekhuogie’s latest presentation with Commonwealth and Council, the artist gathers a remix of works from A Reprise, a series that co-opts the 1935 Walker Evans commissioned photographs of African sculptures featured in the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Western artists like Evans and collections have long maintained a fascination with African objects that borders on embarrassment—photographing them, cropping them, stripping them of cultural context, and re-photographing them into modernist abstraction. A Reprise intervenes in this obsession, remixing its archive without claiming a clean, oppositional break or “taking back” to recuperate the past.

Apr 4 - May 16