Installation view of Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 20–September 27, 2015. Photo by Brian Forrest.
I spent the majority of my summer in Los Angeles. New to the city as I was, I had no idea of what to expect besides the ominous presence of road rage-inducing traffic. With exclusive access to LA’s underused side streets, I escaped the traffic and found myself front and center for a surprising amount of excellent art shows. LA’s expanding arts scene has led to a myriad of galleries popping up. While this makes the city an interesting place for art lovers, it also reveals the contentious relationship between art and gentrification. Yet, places such as The Underground Museum, a Black-owned exhibition space in the working class West Adams/Crenshaw District, subverts this relationship by offering an important radical cultural center. Sadly, its founder, Noah Davis, recently passed away, leaving an invaluable legacy behind that will continue to showcase exhibitions. The Underground Museum’s current exhibition, Journey to the Moon by South African artist William Kentridge, shows the caliber of this relatively new space. The exhibition is a video installation that incorporates Kentridge’s own performances and working processes inside his studio. Kentridge is displayed reworking and erasing pieces, a meditation on shifting narratives and impermanence in artmaking.
Read more here: http://www.warscapes.com/art/los-angeles-and-post-riots-black-arts-scene