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Work by Alake Shilling. Made in LA 2025 , Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90024 Photo by Sarah M Golonka | smg photography, courtesy of Hammer Museum Made in LA 2025, the seventh edition of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles’ biennial, on view until March 1, 2026 is an exhibition that takes several visits to fully appreciate. Biennials are often a hit or miss proposition, with some years’ selections being better than others, and some years being more about the curators than the artists, or more about the form of art (installation, performance, fabric, video, online, etc) than traditional figurative painting and sculpture. There is an expectation that a biennial be a greatest hits collection of what’s happening now, or a vehicle for discovering young and as-yet-unheralded artists and work. However, over the course of its seven iterations, Made in LA has demonstrated a track record of bringing artists of long-standing, such as Lee Bontecou, Chana Horwitz, and Judy Fiskin, back into the conversation to get the recognition they so richly deserve. I confess it took me three visits before Made in LA 2025 sunk in. I fully understand if visitors are nonplussed after a quick initial visit (that goes for art critics too). However, co-curators Essence Harden (an independent curator formerly with the California African American Museum) and Paulina Pobocha (Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago), spent almost a year visiting artists’ studios around LA, out of which they have assembled an exhibition that provides a historical (and art historical) context to the artists and works they are showing; and how their work expresses being in LA or is work that we can only imagine being made in LA. Installation view, work by Alonzo Davis, Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum © 2025 Sarah M Golonka | smg photography, courtesy Hammer Museum The exhibition begins with an installation along the stairs and in the lobby of the Hammer devoted to Eye on ’84 Alonzo Davis’s iconic mural created as part of the cultural Olympiad in advance of the 1984 Olympics in LA. The late food critic Jonathan Gold, among others, have said that the 1984 Olympics was when the world discovered LA and LA discovered itself. “From the start, our intention was to remain open to the artists and their processes,” Harden and Pobocha said in a joint statement, “allowing the exhibition to unfold through their ideas rather than a predetermined theme. The result is an exhibition shaped by the asymmetries of Los Angeles itself—its dissonances and resonances, its contradictions and kinships, its capacity to reinvent while holding fast to history.” In conversation with Davis’ work, is a contemporary mural installation by Patrick Martinez that speaks to Olivera Street’s Mexican and meso-American roots present in the upheavals of present-day Los Angeles. Pat ONeill, from the series Cars and Other Problems, ca. 1960s at Made in LA 2025 © Pat O'Neill Courtesy of the artist and Hammer Museum Most rooms of the exhibition feature two or more artists, their works in conversation with each other. So we have Pat O’Neill and Carl Cheng both of whom have been making idiosyncratic works since the 1960s, with works influenced by the aerospace industry and industrial design, as well as O’Neill’s compelling black and white photography. Installation view of work by y Brian Rochefort and Greg Breda. Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum Sarah M Golonka | smg photography © 2025 Courtesy Hammer Museum There is Alake Schilling’s playful sculptures including the giant 25 foot tall inflatable work Buggy Bear Crashes Made in LA (2025) that sits at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue; the gorgeously grotesque ceramics of Brian Rochefort; the painterly and introspective portraits of Greg Breda and the photography-based work of Widline Cadet. Installation view: Work by Ali Eyal_Made in L.A. 2025, Hammer Museum, © 2025 Sarah M Golonka | smg photography. Courtesy Hammer Museum Ali Eyal, a Baghad-born artist, has created a monumental painting that speaks to his childhood during the Iraq War; and the impact of Eyal visiting the 9/11 Memorial in New York. In many ways, this painting made me think of Peter Blume’s 1934 masterwork The Eternal City that hangs in New York’s MoMA. installation view of work by New Theater Hollywood, Made in L.A. 2025, iHammer Museum, © 2025 Sarah M Golonka | smg photography, courtesy Hammer Museum There are works of experimental film, video and performance by Bruce Yonemoto, as well as Na Mira, Mike Stoltz, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Black House Radio, Will Rawls, Leilah Weinraub and New Theater Hollywood (Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel). Each speaks to the freedom afforded artists in Los Angeles to create work outside the gallery and museum ecosystems present in other cities. Made in LA has works of whimsy, and works of beauty, and works for which most viewers will just shrug. In the end, you can take Made in LA 2025 as seriously or as dismissively as you do Los Angeles itself. But with the exhibit, like the city itself, you can’t deny the creativity that is its history, or that is its present, and that you may encounter around every corner. Made in LA will be at The Hammer until March 1, 2026. See it until it sinks in. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
