It has been quite a year for Los Angeles in some profoundly unsettling ways. The Hammer Museum’s director, Zoë Ryan, acknowledged this during her introduction at the preview of the seventh edition of the museum's Made in LA biennial exhibition (until 1 March 2026).
"This has been an extremely challenging year for Angelenos, starting, obviously, with the devastating fires in January and followed by [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice] raids, which began in the spring and continue to this day,” she said at the event in October. “We have also seen chilling rhetoric and federal actions targeting diversity and inclusion policies and even museum presentations of historical narratives and objects."
Later that month, Los Angeles County declared a state of emergency in order to help those impacted by the Ice raids.
While many of the 28 artists participating in Made in LA 2025 were chosen last year, some of the work on display is brand new. The lead curators, Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, told artists that they could show any work they wished, and some were still making their contributions up to the last minute.
Installation view of Alonzo Davis’s Eye on ’84 (1984/2025) at Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Photo: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
"We had no themes or thematics that we were looking to populate," Pobocha said at the preview. “Instead, what we wanted to do was visit as many studios as we possibly could, see as much art as we were able and have as many conversations as time would allow." That is, within the broad parameters of artists currently working in or with strong connections to the Los Angeles area.
The curators managed to visit more than 200 artists' studios, steered by what they had seen before as well as by recommendations from other curators, artists and gallerists. Asked to articulate their selection criteria, they told The Art Newspaper that they were a bit stumped. While they did not look for specific things, they found a lot of connections.
"I would describe them as threads that weave in and out of people more than a thematic turn," Harden said. "But there are people who really deal with history as a social force. There are also a lot of folks who are contending with the materiality of creating."
Installation view of Patrick Martinez’s Battle of the City on Fire (2025) Photo: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
Harden and Pobocha easily agreed on the final selection, including painters and sculptors as well as video and performance artists. Several pieces in the show clearly speak to the present, somewhat fraught, moment.
The installation in the Hammer's lobby space kicks things off in a buoyant mood. Painted against a deep-blue background are reproductions of three murals that Alonzo Davis made for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles; they once lined the Harbor Freeway in the downtown area. The colourful panels of Eye on '84 (1984) are brimming with hearts, eyes and Olympic rings. They are a look back at a more optimistic time, when the city hosted its second Olympics—its first Games were in 1932—and serve as a reminder of the city's fast-approaching third Olympics, in 2028.
More foreboding but no less colourful is a neon sign hung near the ceiling as visitors enter one of the main galleries—it reads: “Agua Is Life; NO ICE”. It is the work of the Pasadena-born artist Patrick Martinez, who also has a large installation along an exterior corridor. Battle of the City on Fire (2025) is a partly collapsed cinder-block wall painted with graffiti. “I’m always thinking about the people and energy that shape Los Angeles’s different surfaces when I drive or ride my bike,” Martinez says of the piece.
Installation view of Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) Photo: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the artist and ILY2, Portland/New York
Inspired by both graffiti and ancient murals, Martinez’s work recalls the past with its stylised Mayan figures while hot-pink splashes of colour suggest the blaze of the recent fires. "Los Angeles, right?" says the native Angeleno. “I'm trying to capture the things that are happening this year, which have been really crazy—the fires were the worst that I've seen in all my life. Then the Ice raids and kidnappings. It's all the things that I was thinking about when I was making the work."
The central section of his installation is dominated by the anguished face of a Mayan warrior. He is painted in the style of the battle mural from the ancient site of Cacaxtla in Mexico, his distinct profile framed by the pink sky.
Humour can lighten up the grim present, and Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) has humour—and cultural mashups—in spades. Here, she has made four versions of her father’s door at his memory-care facility at twice their actual size, each decorated in a riotous array of holiday and consumer-culture trinkets. The doors lean against a wall, placed side by side, dwarfing the viewer with their pop-culture pastiche. On one, there are the words “Happy New Year” overlaid with a Halloween skeleton and, beneath that, a black spiderweb. Depictions of party balloons are scattered throughout.
Installation view of sculptures by Pat O’Neill at Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Photo: Sarah Golonka, courtesy the Hammer Museum
Ross-Ho says the work reflects her thinking about “deep time”, by which she means “considering time as something that is layered and long”. For the past five years, she has been a long-distance caretaker for both her father and her aunt, who lived in the same Chicago facility. Her aunt died earlier this year. “There's an urgency to take stock or think about the accounting of a lifetime, or the accounting of a career,” Ross-Ho says.
As always, a few veteran artists are also part of Made in LA. This year, they include Pat O’Neill and Bruce Yonemoto. O’Neill is known for his early experimental films, and here he is represented by a series of black-and-white photographs taken around Los Angeles and four sculptures—three on the floor and one on a platform. The latter are surprising, in that few people have seen them before; they are among the more engaging works in the show.
Yonemoto, a pioneering video artist, has two works in Made in LA. The newer one is Broken Fences (2025), a video seen through slats of a rough wooden fence. It features vintage propaganda films from the Second World War, with scenes of incarcerated Japanese Americans and from a Nazi concentration camp, both trying to appear "normal". While Yonemoto was born after the war ended, his work acknowledges the time his parents spent at a camp in Northern California, as well as how film can so easily distort reality.
- Made in LA 2025, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, until 1 March 2026
