---
title: 🎨 The influential Brockman Gallery gets its due at LACMA
---

 LACMA digs into the history of the Brockman Gallery. Plus, reports on Anakin Skywalker memes and Cheesecake Factory aesthetics  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| Not rendering correctly? View this email as a web page here. Hola El Lay: I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I recently made stylist Akari-Endo Gaut’s recipe for chirashizushi, and it’s not only aesthetically pleasing, it’s absolutely delicious! This week, contributor Leigh-Ann Jackson weighs in on a show devoted to a legendary art space in South LA. But first, here are three events to check out in the coming week: Wendy Red Star, False Stars, at Roberts Projects. The artist reimagines the pattern-making behind star quilts in new materials and forms. Through December 19th; robertsprojects.com. Alberto Valdés, A Beginning, at Marc Selwyn Fine Art. An intriguing look at a Mexican American painter who predates the Chicano movement, and who explored color and form in abstractions that also riffed on Indigenous themes. Through January 9th; marcselwynfineart.com. Inglewood Open Studios' 16th Annual Art Walk. Pop into dozens of artist studios, galleries, and art spaces around Inglewood over this two-day event. At various locations, November 14th and 15th, 12 PM to 5 PM daily, admission is free. Find listings and a map at inglewoodopenstudios.org. Last but not least, a couple of weeks back I linked to a cake competition for John Lautner-inspired cakes. Those treats will be on view at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre on November 14th as part of Fort: LA’s Architecture Uncorked! event. Brutalism has never looked so delicious. Now, onto Jackson's dispatch... At top: A detail of Wendy Red Star's Star Field 013 (2026), on view in the artist's solo show at Roberts Projects. (Paul Salveson / Roberts Projects ) THEIR SPACE WAS THE PLACE By Leigh-Ann Jackson The grand opening of the Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park on March 25, 1967. (Tony Bishop / Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections) Over the course of 23 years beginning in the late 1960s, Leimert Park’s Brockman Gallery served as a critical incubator, pedestal and springboard for the city’s underrepresented minority artists, helping to put virtual unknowns, like photographer Carrie Mae Weems and figurative painter Kerry James Marshall, on the map. (Artbound has a good doc on the gallery’s legacy.) In May of last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) launched a local touring show, Act On It! Artists, Community, and the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles, inspired by the cultural hub founded by brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis. My family and I visited Act On It! at its third and final stop — the Vincent Price Art Museum — aiming to expand my art-majoring kid’s knowledge of L.A.-based African American artists. The show ended up being more surface-skimming than I’d expected — the outsized impact of the gallery didn’t seem to be reflected in its modest scale. Still, my kid’s New Obsession Alert pinged at the sight of Betye Saar’s A Handful of Stars (2016), a remarkable bronze of a hand clutching the cosmos, as well as works by painters Margaret Garcia and Timothy Washington. Earlier this month, LACMA debuted another exhibition inspired by the space, The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990. Heading into it, I was anticipating a comparatively robust showing. To my surprise, the exhibition was housed in a small first-floor gallery in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum building — the one I usually think of as a shortcut to Chris Burden’s Metropolis II. Dale Brockman Davis (from left), Alonzo Davis, and an unidentified man, likely artist David Hammons, sometime around 1968 to 1971. (Alonzo Davis Collection / The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland) Tight quarters aside, there is a broader selection of artists on display than last time. Curator Lauren Hanson (who edited the exhibition catalog and co-curated Act On It!) stated that her intention was “repositioning familiar artists alongside their historical peers.” This included high-profile artists such as Saar and sculptor-printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, as well as lesser-known names like painter David P. Bradford and sculptor Ron Griffin, whose multimedia assemblage American Ego (Eagle) (1968-70) transforms a mashup of patriotic symbols into a macabre totem. Included were more new-to-me names, such as assemblage portraitist Marie Johnson-Calloway, abstract painter Gloria Bohanon and printmaker Marion Epting, whose inclusion highlights how elemental Black female artists were to the LA art scene. In the catalog, Hanson wrote about “a double bind faced by Black artists,” described as “pressure to ‘perform’ their Blackness in accordance with white expectations and criteria, while also never being taken seriously on those same terms because of their Blackness.” Now consider the triple bind their female counterparts faced. The show’s healthy balance of work by women of various ethnicities is a high point. I was also struck by the ways in which the city itself played an integral role in so many of the works. There were artists like multidisciplinarians Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, who wove their visual and performance art into the physical landscape. Assemblage artists John Outterbridge and Noah Purifoy gathered their chosen medium, debris, from the city. And a spate of Brockmanites created art specifically for the city, a prime example being the Olympics Mural Project, which Alonzo directed. (See how that came to fruition.) Marion Epting, Ying Yang, 1971. (Jorge Bachmann / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) Despite an archival room dedicated to vintage promotional materials (courtesy of the LA Public Library’s Brockman Gallery Archive), as well as a mini-doc narrated by sculptor Alison Saar, I was greedy for more. The comprehensive catalog provides informative artist bios and gallery milestones and helpful context (the Watts Rebellion had transpired less than two years prior to its opening). But reading it left me wishing the exhibition had gone further — say, by screening footage from Brockman’s annual film festivals, or piping in music from their series of outdoor concerts. What ultimately shook me most was the fact that two young college grads (21-year-old Dale and 25-year-old Alonzo) had the gumption to take on such an out-there endeavor, and during such tumultuous times. By their own admission, they had no prior experience and were making it up as they went along. The exhibition’s entry wall features an enlarged photo of them in all their youthful exuberance. Seeing it, Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” immediately came to mind, and I wondered if they could have possibly imagined making such an indelible mark on their South Central community, their city, and on art history — not to mention my own 21-year-old art major. 🎨🎨🎨 The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967-1990 is on view at LACMA through January 24th; lacma.org. More like this… Sculptor Charles Dickson’s small but mighty exhibit just closed at Parrasch Heijnen, but you can still catch these Brockmanites around town: Margaret Garcia in a group show at Ave. 50 Studio, through November 21st; muralist Judy Baca at the Skirball Cultural Center, through February 28th; and ceramicist Doyle Lane at The Huntington, through March 1st. Leigh-Ann Jackson is an art and culture writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. AROUND THE INTERNET   Hi! It’s Carolina again. I’ll take it from here… Philip Kennicott has a good essay in The Washington Post about how Trump’s image-making machine appears to be breaking down. A look at the Cheesecake Factory aesthetic and why it is rather timeless. An explainer of the Anakin Skywalker memes circulated by the right in advance of the election. tl;dr: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has a very brief analysis on Bluesky on why the Anakin memes don’t work. Colombia’s Museo Nacional has reinstalled 63 objects previously removed by the new right-wing government over claims of “political indoctrination.” Related: Valentina di Liscia at Hyperallergic has a good convo with Colombian artist Doris Salcedo about the situation. Emily Colucci reports from the Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) auction. Rachel Ossip writes about an iconic steakhouse poster renowned for its misogyny, but also the responses it generated from feminist theorists. Thanks to the Performance Art Museum, LA artist Paul McCarthy’s chocolate butt plugs will once again be in circulation. (Not up on the artist’s naughty chocolates? Get some background here.) Is it an “I Voted” sticker or is it AI slop? The LA Phil is shaking things up by implementing a shared leadership model. Signing off with an artist who invents monuments for New York City. Which makes me wonder, what monuments would we invent for LA? Thanks for subscribing! See you all next week... 🤓 Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe to Art Insider for more design, art, and culture from Carolina Miranda. SUBSCRIBE KCRW 1900 Pico Blvd.  Santa Monica, CA 90405  You received this email because you are subscribed to Art Insider from KCRW. Update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive. Unsubscribe from all future emails. |
| --- |