Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2025: A look at the participating artists

The built environment of Los Angeles — as well its opaque soul — is on display at UCLA’s Hammer Museum as it opens the seventh edition of its popular Made in L.A. biennial, featuring 28 artists with deep connections to the sprawling metropolis. The 2023 exhibition, titled “Acts of Living,” was largely informed by the pandemic. This year there is no title or theme, with curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha relying on the work itself to shine a light on the amorphous nature of the city.

During a sneak-peek tour of the still-unfinished galleries a few days before the show’s opening last Saturday, Harden and Pobocha discussed the finer points of the exhibition, including how they staged the work by juxtaposing various artists and historical references to highlight the interconnections of the art, rather than devoting each gallery to a single artist or time frame.

“If there’s a Venn diagram, there’s a place in this Venn diagram where every artist overlaps in terms of their interest,” said Pobocha. “So much of this work is about Los Angeles. There’s a kind of looking back at, an engagement with, the city itself and its impact, either on the artist in the show personally or on larger populations.”

There are glossy Pop Art sculptures by Pat O’Neill made with steel, fiberglass and pieces of old photographic equipment and coated with car paint; cinder block murals and neon art by Patrick Martinez; giant sculptures of doors representing seasons and memories by Amanda Ross-Ho; an interactive painting by Gabriela Ruiz about the omnipresence of surveillance in the city, particularly in Black and brown communities; analog film and video art by Mike Stoltz; sculptures that look like science experiments by Carl Cheng; still life-inspired photos on fabric by David Alekhuogie; and a large-scale painting by Ali Eyal, who grew up in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion of Iraq before moving to L.A.

Eyal’s inclusion underscores that artists don’t have to be from L.A. to be part of Made in L.A., Harden said.

“L.A. is a global place, and the impact of L.A. and of America is also global,” she said. “So the relationship to this place, and someone who chooses to be here or has to be here — whatever the case might be — is crucial to how the city forms.”

“Still life with okra, corn, and tomato” by David Alekhuogie, 2022.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

The ground floor of the show lays the foundation for everything to come, Harden and Pobocha explained, standing near the re-creation of a mural titled “Eye on ’84,” which was made by Alonzo Davis for the 1984 Olympics and originally painted on a concrete wall of the 110 Freeway. Davis died earlier this year at age 82.

“How do you get the most people to see the most art? And for L.A., that means the freeways,” said Harden. “But again, the freeways are fundamental structures that divided the city and created all kinds of underclasses, which really affected lots of people of color and lots of people who were working class.”

Davis, however, inverted that paradigm to utilize the freeway as a unifier, she added.

The show features wall text with a quote by Beat poet and writer Jack Kerouac. “L.A. is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities,” it reads, echoing a common critique of one of the world’s most misunderstood urban areas. Made in L.A. 2025 corrects that misconception, the curators said.

“If you don’t live in Los Angeles, you might think that there’s no community and that everything is fractured,” said Pobocha. “And I think one of the things that you see throughout the course of this presentation is that, in fact, there are so many points of connection, especially in the arts community.”