Hi Folks:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I’d like to begin today’s newsletter on a serious note. 

As you may know, in July, Congress voted to rescind $9 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting. Next month, those cuts will come to pass, and KCRW will lose $1.3 million in federal support. Thankfully, KCRW Champions Glen and Caroline Payne have stepped up with a challenge grant. Through tomorrow night — Wednesday, September 17th — any dollar you give to KCRW will be doubled up to $10,000. So, if you were thinking about becoming a member, now is a great time. Find all the deets at this link.

This newsletter is free to readers, but it’s not free to produce. So every donation keeps arts coverage alive in LA — and keeps me and my KCRW colleagues in hot coffee and tinned fish. (Tonnino tuna on a tostada with avocado salsa is my new workday lunch.)

Here’s what else I’m devouring this week:

• Grounded, LACMA’s absorbing new group show 
• The messy mess that is LA’s cultural planning for the Olympics 
• The photographs of Rafael Goldchain

Keep that cursor moving…

The featured image at top is A night to remember, 2002, by Guadalupe Rosales, part of the group show Grounded at LACMA. (Guadalupe Rosales / Commonwealth and Council)

THE LAND ON WHICH WE STAND

 A detail of Jackie Amézquita's El suelo que nos alimenta (The soil that feeds us), 2023. (Carolina A. Miranda)

From a distance, Jackie Amézquita’s wall installation, El suelo que nos alimenta (The soil that feeds us), completed in 2023, might look like a work of minimalist art. It’s a grid of 144 square panels organized in eight tidy rows, with each panel displaying a unique shade of brown. Some are warmer in tone; others have a sandier quality. A couple lean into the color of burnt toast.

But move in close and you’ll find that there is nothing minimal about them. For starters, each panel is fabricated from soil, corn masa, and limestone that the artist bakes until the surface takes on the texture of cracked earth. The soil comes from 144 different neighborhoods across LA, and each panel has been incised with a drawing. In one, you might find the contours of Union Station; in another, the clown from Circus Liquor. Trees, road signs, bridges, laundromats, train yards all make an appearance, along with what appears to be a pickup truck displaying wares for sale from its bed. It is a map of the city crafted from the earth that sustains it.

I first saw this piece at the Hammer Museum’s 2023 biennial, Acts of Living, and got lost in the materials and the stories the panels tell about life in LA — especially immigrant life. So I was thrilled to see it reemerge in Grounded, a new group show which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Sunday.

The exhibition was organized by LACMA curators Rita Gonzalez, Dhyandra Lawson, and Nancy Thomas, and brings together 40 works by 35 artists that explore how humans connect to land and the ways in which the land holds history. This is expressed in works that directly engage the earth (like Amézquita’s), as well as others that are more figurative in nature, exploring, for example, how people carry pieces of their lands with them as they migrate.

A beating heart of the exhibition is a photograph by Mercedes Dorame, I Will Flow From the Earth - Paviinone ‘Ooxve, 2021. In this piece, the artist, who is of Tongva heritage, captures a close-up of a fresh water spring in Griffith Park — the sort of water source that would have once sustained her ancestors. Nearby hangs a weaving by Claudia Alarcón and Silät, an Indigenous collective from Argentina. Made from the chaguar plant, the textile is part of a tradition that is literally rooted in the land: processing the plant involves pounding its roots, then dying the strands brilliant colors. The final, loosely-stitched work features an elegant, asymmetrical geometric pattern. 

Other pieces speak more broadly to the land and what rests on it and in it. A large-scale, multimedia painting by LA artist Patrick Martinez, Fallen Empire, 2018, evokes an old city wall, with layers of pink paint, cracked tiles, and a piece of an old sign. Peaking beneath the layers is a fragment of a mural of an Aztec warrior in eagle headdress — making evident the Indigenous legacies that are a foundation of any given place. One gallery over, a stunning sculpture by Brazil-born Clarissa Tossin, Future Fossil, 2018, consists of the split-open trunk of a cedar tree filled with a colorful core of electronic refuse and recycled plastics. If the land bears our history, it also bears evidence of our waste.

Clarissa Tossin, Future Fossil, 2018. (Carolina A. Miranda)

There are other remarkable works: a sculpture by Beatriz Cortez recreates a Mayan stela out of industrial steel; another by Fernando Palma Rodríguez reimagines Quetzalcoatl, the mythical plumed serpent of Aztec lore, out of corn husks. A weaving by Guillermo Bert bears a QR code that connects to a narrative about a journey to the United States on the train known as “La Bestia.” 

But the exhibition's showstopper is a monumental video installation by artist Lisa Reheina, a New Zealand artist of Maori heritage. In Pursuit of Venus, 2105-17, reimagines a historic 19th-century wallpaper that depicted Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific. The wallpaper design exoticized the landscape and its people, but the artist appropriates these images, recreating rites, rituals, and everyday moments from a Maori perspective, while also showing the misunderstandings that inevitably took place in the encounters between Natives and Europeans.

The film scrolls slowly from right to left, giving the sensation of standing within a massive, moving cyclorama. It’s enthralling and dizzying. (William Poundstone has more on its creation.)

Lisa Reheina, In Pursuit of Venus (Infected), 2015-17. (LACMA and FAMSF)

Grounded is on view at LACMA through June 21, 2026; lacma.org.

AROUND THE INTERNET 

Rose B. Simpson, who has work on view in Grounded at LACMA, has taken over the atrium at the de Young museum in San Francisco. (Carolina A. Miranda)

• This weekend, I checked the refreshed Indigenous arts galleries at the de Young (which I wrote about recently) and had the added bonus of seeing Rose B. Simpson’s eye-popping installation Lexicon. If you’re in the Bay Area, don't miss!
• Also, don’t miss two other terrific exhibitions at BAMPFA in Berkeley, including a solo show of weavings by Lee ShinJa and an exquisite presentation of African American quilts.
• Ryan Broderick has a good essay in Garbage Day about influencer culture and the death of Charlie Kirk.
• Plus, here's a good explainer on the aesthetic differences between White Christian nationalists and the extremely online blackpill set.
• Jorge Cruz, an LA vendor who supplied food at art events, is at risk of deportation after being abducted by ICE.
• The estate of Elaine Wynn has bequeathed a Francis Bacon triptych to LACMA.
• The New York Times gets into the stalled culture plans for the upcoming Olympics.
• Artnet tracks the art world’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book.
• The planners who planted all those palm trees around LACMA should read Sam Bloch’s new book, Shade — reviewed here by Alexandra Lange.
• Christopher Hawthorne reviews Julian Rose’s new book on museum architecture.
• Charlotte Klein on the dying art of arts criticism.
• And Kelefa Sanneh on how music criticism has lost its edge.
• Signing off with this moving series of photographs by Rafael Goldchain, with equally stirring essay by Yxta Maya Murray.

Thank you for reading! 🤓

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