Following the opening of the Made in LA show at the Hammer, Catherine Wagley traces the artistic communities of LA’s Chinatown

Catherine Wagley

LA: portrait of an art scene

The Break Room, currently installed near the Hammer Museum’s back entrance, has familiar trappings: a boxy vending machine, brown carpet, beige countertops, a water cooler, and a coffee maker. Its lighting is slightly too bright, and it is out-of-the-way, like the rooms where office or retail employees gather for brief downtime. But unlike standard break rooms, this one features white labeled boxes lined up on metal shelves. These boxes are here temporarily, relocated to the Westside museum from the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), an artist-run non-profit in Chinatown, co-founded by Hailey Loman.
Since the opening of ‘Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living’, the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition, Break Room has remained animated. Loman arrives to see people gathered around the water cooler, sharing intel about how much certain art world jobs pay, or which dealer or institution to avoid. ‘It’s been a little unexpected, how much people want to engage’ she says. Visitors pull boxes off the shelves and spread documents out over the long table. ‘Materials are everywhere. I mean, it’s fine. It’s very much in line with what we're trying to do [at LACA], which is to engage and show complicated artistic lives.’

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1281/Spr%C3%BCth-Magers?lang=en"></a>Artistic lives are complicated everywhere, but it has always been particularly difficult to tell any single, coherent story about art in Los Angeles. Some consider this elusive quality an asset: as novelist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/29862/Robert-Kushner?lang=en">Rachel Kushner</a> recently put it, the city is ‘wonderfully unknowable and many different places at once.’ For others, it has been a point of contention. ‘Every city needs a vibrant center,’ said the late billionaire art collector Eli Broad, who tried unsuccessfully for decades to make downtown’s Bunker Hill that center, eventually building his own contemporary art museum there. Coupled with the perpetual narrative of Los Angeles as a city on the verge of becoming an art capital, the art scene’s unknowability and absent center are perhaps why the ‘Made in L.A.’ biennial maintains its relevance.
The Hammer hosted its first biennial in 2012, just as a wave of international galleries began to set their sights on Los Angeles – <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1153/Hauser-Wirth?lang=en">Hauser & Wirth</a> and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1281/Spr%C3%BCth-Magers?lang=en">Sprüth Magers</a> had plans to open here; Broad’s dazzling museum was under construction. The inaugural ‘Made in L.A.’, which was organized by five curators and spread across three locations, boasted an ambitious, sprawling energy, as if attempting to approximate the local art scene’s vastness. Subsequent iterations have been tamer, but no less searching, in their attempts to convey the overlapping energies that make Los Angeles a fertile, inspiring place for artists.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2910/Karma?lang=en"></a>This year, when once again Los Angeles is seeing an influx of galleries from elsewhere – <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1103/David-Zwirner?lang=en">David Zwirner</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1122/James-Fuentes?lang=en">James Fuentes</a>, Sirens, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2910/Karma?lang=en">Karma</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2249/Clearing?lang=en">Clearing</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1188/Lisson-Gallery?lang=en">Lisson</a>, and Sargent’s Daughters have all recently opened here – ‘Made in L.A.’ curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez have made the elusiveness of the city’s art scene their subject, envisioning their show as a ‘series of constellations.’ The resulting exhibition feels like a succession of interlocking neighborhoods, with similar work grouped together. In one gallery, photographs and paintings of LA geographies by Paige Jiyoung Moon, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/33143/Jessie-Homer-French?lang=en">Jessie Homer French</a>, and Vincent Hernandez are strung together as if they were made to coexist (they were not). But LACA’s Break Room, located below the galleries and around the corner from the elevators, is its own self-contained series of constellations, tracing messy, varied stories about how artistic communities in Los Angeles intersect, evolve, and persist.
LACA launched in March 2013, partly because space became available. The dealer François Ghebaly, who previously ran his gallery out of a storefront in Chinatown and a muffler shop in Culver City, leased a cavernous warehouse in Vernon, southeast of downtown LA. The building, which had corridors and side offices, seemed primed for subdivision, and Ghebaly imagined a kind of arts compound, where subletters would share the rent. By the time the compound opened to the public, Loman and her then-collaborator Eric Kim had imagined LACA as a place to record the ephemeral histories of Los Angeles art, documenting fleeting performances and alternative spaces ­­– the types of project that are essential to artists but often fade from collective memory.

LACA’s inaugural collection came from Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA), an alternative performance and exhibition space operating out of Chinatown. This acquisition made perfect sense: Kim had co-founded HRLA, and a performance Loman did there in April 2013, Cleaning Human Resources, helped crystallize her idea of what LACA could offer. She and two collaborators spent 3 days cleaning every inch of the building, a meditation on the labor of art and the function of a gallery. Afterward, the video documentation felt separate from the performance, while the used bottles of 409 cleaner and dirty rags seemed vital as evidence of what had happened. LACA welcomes this kind of ephemera left over from art events. Other early archives came from organizations based in Chinatown too: the archive of the experimental Mountain School of Arts; the artist-run radio station KCHUNG; and the artist-run gallery Actual Size. 
So when LACA left the Ghebaly complex in 2016, it made sense to move the archive to Chinatown. By this time, Kim had left the project, and Loman spent days walking around the neighborhood, talking to landlords, looking for a new home. She found it on the second floor of the Asian Center, a plaza home to a pharmacy and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Their new headquarters had large, welcoming glass doors, and the archive’s name, spelled-out across the entrance in black vinyl, arced like a rainbow.
The day it opened unfolded like a whirlwind: that afternoon, Loman received confirmation of LACA’s non-profit status in the mail. That night, LACA held a fundraising auction. 99 artists donated work, and in the hours before the auction, artists came by to paint the walls, drop off supplies, share food, and hang their work. By the time the auction was underway, guests spilled out onto the balcony. The energy felt familiar, like so many Chinatown art openings from past decades, at galleries and alternative spaces that met artists’ needs before fading from memory. In many ways, LACA, artist-run and operating on a shoestring budget, was just as precarious as these past spaces. The difference was that LACA intended to house the memory of these transitory places and the artists who relied on them. Putting the word ‘contemporary’ in the archive’s title had been playful (how can an archive also be contemporary?), but art landscapes were changing so quickly that even a flexible project like LACA would have to scramble to keep up.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1247/Peres-Projects?lang=en"></a>In the late 1990s, Chinatown was a different scene – one that, in the words of writer Chris Kraus, was ‘thronged by hipsters, collectors, celebrities, artists, and dealers […] everyone who mattered in the Los Angeles art world.’ Galleries like China Art Objects and, later,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1247/Peres-Projects?lang=en">Peres Projects</a> made money. Kordansky, Nicodim, and Ghebaly started out in Chinatown. But the 2008 recession prompted a shift in the landscape, out of which spaces like HRLA grew, giving artists a platform for experimentation even as the market contracted and most commercial galleries migrated to other parts of the city (though certain stalwarts, like <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3471/Charlie-James-Gallery?lang=en">Charlie James Gallery</a>, never left). There’s never been one Los Angeles art world, or one pivotal gallery scene, just as there’s never even been one version of HRLA, a non-profit that continuously shape-shifts from gallery to concert venue to classroom to studio. Yet press releases and magazine features still champion hot new art neighborhoods.
Each box in Break Room holds a different perspective on what art in Los Angeles has been and can be. On Wednesday afternoons, during open hours at the Hammer, LACA’s volunteer archivists and artists spend the afternoon sifting through the records with visitors. Loman treasures the questions that emerge from these sessions: ‘How do I feel looking at this stuff? What’s not here in this collection? Why isn’t it here?’ Such engagement makes the recent and still unfolding history of Los Angeles art feel accessible and present, something in which we are all participating.
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Catherine G. Wagley is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Her book She Wanted Adventure, about supporting experiments in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from FSG.
Published on November 3, 2023. 
Captions for full-bleed image (from top to bottom): 1.&nbsp;Installation view of Break Room (2023) by Los Angeles Contemporary Archive at 'Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living'. Photography by Joshua White. 2.&nbsp;Installation view of 'Private Practices Exhibition' (2021) at&nbsp;Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Photography by&nbsp;Alex Delapena.

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Following the opening of the Made in LA show at the Hammer, Catherine Wagley traces the artistic communities of LA’s Chinatown

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