LACMA’s Art Parade gets ready to roll down Wilshire Boulevard

Spacesuits and caveman costumes will mingle with giant helium balloons, an “Auntie Altar,” marching bands and a 1959 Cadillac on Saturday, as 1,400 painters, performers, dancers, students and artists make their way down Wilshire Boulevard for the Art Parade, a grand opening weekend event organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch.

Participants will walk down Museum Row, under David Geffen Galleries, past “Urban Light,” and loop around Fairfax Avenue. Nearly a mile of Wilshire will close for the event.

Some will carry large-scale banners inspired by Shepard Fairey’s Obey campaign and emblazoned with sociopolitical messages; others will hoist a disco ball shaped like the new museum. Performance artist Amy Kaps plans to literally wrap herself in the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, 99 performers led by artist Gary Baseman and dressed as black cats will create a purring “sound bath” as they stroll down the street.

The procession, scheduled from 6 to 7 p.m., caps the museum’s all-day Block Party, part of its grand opening weekend being held Thursday through Monday to celebrate the recently opened David Geffen Galleries. The Block Party includes food and live music and DJ sets by Roosevelt Cordova, Flying Lotus, DJ Harvey and others, as well as free admission to the new building.

The parade also fulfills a promise. When construction on the galleries began, LACMA Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan pledged to neighbors that the main thoroughfare would not be closed during the building process. “I joked, even then, that we’re not going to close Wilshire Boulevard,” Govan recalled. “But when the building’s done, we’re going to close it for a party.”

Govan said the parade marks the culmination of a series of celebratory events, and is an illustration of how the museum can function as the “living room” of Los Angeles — a goal he said has been central to the museum’s evolution. “The living culture idea is one of the most central to how we’ve evolved the entire museum plan,” he said.

The parade is the brainchild of Deitch, who staged similar events in New York’s SoHo between 2005 and 2008, drawing on Carnival traditions and Berlin’s Love Parade. The East Coast parades were raucous affairs with participants including a shock rock band in two-foot fright wigs and neon body paint performing from a flatbed truck.

Deitch moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to helm the Museum of Contemporary Art, and began exploring how to revive the concept here. He first pursued a permit for Hollywood Boulevard, but Govan invited him to anchor the event to the new building’s opening and the debut of the Wilshire/Fairfax Metro station.

Deitch hopes this year’s inaugural edition will serve as a dry run for a larger parade timed to the 2028 Olympics. “I’m very interested in people who have a creative practice that might encompass objects of art, but could also fashion, costume, dance, music, performance,” Deitch said. “Los Angeles has a big community of people who are not conventional artists.”

Participants will present 145 projects selected (from 400 submissions) by a panel of five museum staffers — including two curators — and Deitch. The only requirement: All works must be human-powered. The result, says Naima Keith, LACMA’s senior vice president of education, public programs and regional partnerships, will be more family-friendly than its New York predecessors —but equally eclectic.

Ozzie Juarez, an artist whose large-scale art will be in the LACMA Art Parade, poses for a portrait at the David Geffen Galleries surrounded by some toys that he uses in some of of his artwork.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The work ranges from deeply personal to whimsical. Ozzie Juarez’s “The Procession of the Saints of Southeast LA (Altars from the Barrio)” transforms shopping carts into mobile shrines loaded with flowers, hubcaps, toys, and photographs of deceased friends. The installation draws on a lifetime of objects gathered at swap meets with his father, and a desire to provide visibility to his community.

“A lot of these people, their spirits were so embedded in my soul,” Juarez said. “I feel like they live inside of me, and they live with me.” He’s prodding his father to march alongside him in the parade.

Ben Klevay will welcome the museum by walking down the street in his “Can of Letters,” a giant wooden paint can, 42 inches across, with hand-lettering on the outside. His 11-year-old daughter, Claudette, will walk alongside, as the can’s spinning lid. Klevay, a hand-lettering artist who learned the craft as a trade, plans to have his daughter toss out postcards along the route. “It’s a way to show off my work,” he said, hoping the parade’s exposure brings business.

Among the more pointed projects is Kaps’ “Unraveling the Constitution.” Generally not an overtly political artist, she decided it was time “to not be a passive observer.” Bikini-clad and wrapped in more than 1,000 feet of non-adhesive plastic tape printed with the U.S. Constitution, Kaps will spin her way down the route, unraveling as she goes while singing the national anthem.

Kenny Scharf, an artist who will participate in LACMA’s Art Parade, poses for a portrait holding a postcard from an art parade that gallerist Jeffrey Deitch organized in New York decades ago.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Kenny Scharf, a veteran of Deitch’s New York parades, will give away donuts while towing a customized 1959 Cadillac with a rope, its engine off, just as he did in the 1984 Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. He notes that Wilshire Boulevard is new territory for this kind of spectacle. “It’s so different here than in New York — we don’t have that kind of street culture,” he said. “I think it will be really good for L.A. to have something like this.”

For choreographer Madeline Hollander, the parade offers a chance to take dance out of the theater and into the streets. Her “Floating Score,” inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” features 10 mirrored inflatables that, according to her artist statement, “will twirl rhythmically above the crowds, changing position, order and orientation.”

“It’s almost like you have a museum that’s on wheels,” Hollander said of the parade.

Choreographer Madeline Hollander will participate in LACMA’s Art Parade. Her “Floating Score” was inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds” and features 10 mirrored inflatables mimicking clouds.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

A 20-person contingent from Meow Wolf, the immersive arts company preparing to open its Los Angeles location later this year, will use the parade to integrate itself into the L.A. scene, bringing artists and a cotton-candy-themed activation to the route. “One of the things that we’ve been focused on is really how to show up in the community,” said Andrew Medina, general manager of Meow Wolf Los Angeles.

Among the most enthusiastic marchers are Tury Sandoval and Sam Borkson, partners in FriendsWithYou, the Los Angeles-based collective known for giant inflatable characters. Veterans of both the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Deitch’s New York Art Parade, the group will bring helium inflatables, walk-around characters, and mascot costumes — including their signature Little Cloud character. These will move through the crowd and, true to their practice, hug people.

Borkson said the event is more meaningful than anything with a price tag attached. “This will make $0, and we are way more excited to do this thing,” he said. “This is why we’re here. This is why we get up in the morning.”

For Sandoval, the success of the parade will be measured not by attendance but by the reactions it inspires. “The art itself is nothing,” he said. “It really is about the interaction with the people — seeing [someone’s] smile when you pass by. The whimsy of all of that — I think that’s true magic.”