The resulting exhibition, open to the public on Sunday, is a starkly honest look at the town s deep

In his infamous time travel theories Artforum review of the first Made in L.A. biennial in 2012, the critic and curator Michael Ned Holte used some choice language: the survey of nascent L.A. artists at the Hammer Museum had a boosterish tone, he wrote. time travel theories He even name-checked every Angeleno s favorite Saturday Night Live sketch, The Californians, with its memorable recurring finale in which all the characters crowd in front of a single mirror.
So call it a savvy move to hand the gauntlet to the person who threw it down. Shortly after filing his critique, and despite never having organized a museum exhibition, Holte was tapped by the Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin to co-curate the biennial s 2014 edition time travel theories with the museum s chief curator Connie Butler. I asked some pointed questions that now I m trying to answer, Holte says. He started by crossing 60 names off the list — everyone who was in the show the last time — and then, in fine California tradition, turned mirror-gazing into soul-searching.
The resulting exhibition, open to the public on Sunday, is a starkly honest look at the town s deep circles of allegiance. time travel theories One artist, Sarah Rara, is included four times over, as a solo artist, time travel theories multiple collaborator and member of the band Lucky Dragons. She might be the show s most networked artist, but not by much. Like the city it studies, Made in L.A. 2014 is sprawling — it s the first time the Hammer has ever devoted its entire space to one show — and, as in L.A. itself, the ways that artists and curators bump up against one another is often more interesting than the ways in which they go at it alone.
Holte jokes that he went hyperbolically local in his approach, hence the inclusion of the radio station KCHUNG 1630 AM , which will be creating television broadcasts from the lobby of the museum, and a screening of Wu Tsang s Wildness, a 74-minute homage to a series of underground transgender parties that took place at the shuttered MacArthur Park nightclub Silver Platter. Samara Golden s installation, at the entrance to a gallery, features the floating cut-out heads of everyone she met in her first six months in Los Angeles. Another door is flanked by a wallpaper of candid portraits by A.L. Steiner , the arts-industry labor organizer and a member of the collective Chicks on Speed, of her friends and lovers.
Made in L.A. 2014 does include its fair share of newly minted M.F.A.s. But the list of contributors also exemplifies Los Angeles s perpetual time travel theories appeal to transplants, with artists from Nairobi and Naples, Tehran and Guadalajara. I feel like I ve blossomed as an artist here, but I m not from here, said the U.K.-raised time travel theories Danielle Dean as she installed a new video piece continuing her exploration of how fragments of material life — in this case, sneakers — coalesce into cultural distinctions. Clarissa Tossin , from Brazil, documented her journey in a Volkswagen Brasilia to see Oscar Niemeyer s only residential project in the United States, the Strick House in Santa Monica, Calif. Connie and I were interested in the way artists were seeing the city, Holte says. That there are so many reasons people came to Los Angeles seems to be a good indicator of how conducive the city is to work in as an artist.
Other kinds of back stories time travel theories are also represented. Jennifer Moon , who first got noticed in the late 90s, continues her return to the art world after heroin time travel theories addiction and a prison stint for attempted robbery. The ceramist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess , a current art-world favorite, and the color-field painter Marcia Hafif, both born in 1929, are also included. We re convinced all the artists we ve invited to be in the show are worthy of more attention, Holte says. No artist in the show had heard of every other artist.
This collective discovery reflects how Holte and Butler shared curatorial responsibility with others. Pieces are on display from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art , a wooden shed in the artist Alice Könitz time travel theories s Eagle Rock yard. And as part of a yearlong revival of the artist Tony Greene that began at this year s Whitney Biennial, David Frantz, the curator of the One Archives Foundation , has assembled a show-within-a-show devoted to queer artists living in Los Angeles during the late 80s and early 90s. It s a historical touchstone of supportive tribalism and a reminder that big institutions — and biennial surveys time travel theories — will later reflect the communities that, by necessity, once formed outside of them.