8 Standout Artists from the Hammer Museums’s “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living”

“Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living,” the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition, places a spotlight on 39 intergenerational artists and their works, spanning painting, drawing, ceramics, live performance, installation, and sculpture. On view through December 31, 2023, the exhibition seeks to position art “as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life; community networks; queer affect; and indigenous and diasporic histories.” The biennial was co-curated by Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez with curatorial fellow Ashton Cooper.

Nawi shared that she and curator Ramírez found inspiration for the exhibition’s title during a visit to Watts Towers in South Central Los Angeles, where they encountered a quote from artist Noah Purifoy: “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.”

After conducting 200 studio visits within 12 months, from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach and the outskirts of Palm Springs, Nawi and her collaborators realized that each artist “has their own map [of Los Angeles] and everyone has their own experience.” As Nawi explained, the biennial presents a selection of artists whose work explores the questions: “What is landscape? What is place? What does it mean to be here?”Here, we highlight eight standout artists of “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.”

B. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Hailing from New Mexico, Erica Mahinay’s artworks are as layered as the diverse landscapes and communities of Los Angeles. In her gestural paintings, filled with expressive marks, Mahinay transforms traditional art materials such as canvas and linen through the application of paint, both with brushes and her hands. The new work Forthcoming (2023) is exemplary of this painting technique, marrying layers of bold colors and gestures.

Mahinay’s sculptures, such as Self-Reflection Station (Standing Masculine MWe) (2023), utilize domestic objects such as steel, wood, and sand, though they’re often transformed to the point of being unrecognizable to the naked eye. Across both painting and sculpture, Mahinay’s choice of materials is critical to the work. For example, the use of mirrors in her sculptures can be viewed as a metaphor for how artworks create a space for self-reflection.

B.1980, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

As an L.A. native, much of Guadalupe Rosales’s art and other creative projects are dedicated to the preservation of cultural memory by safeguarding archives of the history and culture of Los Angeles, specifically that of the Chicano and Latinx communities of Southern California Chicano and Latinx culture.Rosales has made hybridity a focal point of her artwork. She does this by transforming and combining existing materials and symbols to open them up to new interpretations. For example, Dreaming Casually (2022) takes a wide range of materials—including powder-coated steel, glitter washi tape, mirrors, and LED lights—and seamlessly blends them together to consider lowrider culture, club culture, and intimacies of queer and familial lived experiences.

​​Rosales received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles (2021), the Dallas Museum of Art (2021), and the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City (2020).

B. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona. Lives and works in Long Beach, California.

Melissa Cody’s bold, vibrant weavings speak to themes of anticolonial resistance, resilience, and transformation. The main objective of her work is to help preserve indigenous knowledge and memory for future generations, specifically that of her own heritage, the Navajo Nation. Cody’s weavings have been described as a dance between the ancestral and the contemporary, echoing traditional weaving techniques and motifs, particularly those associated with the Diné people.Born in No Water Mesa, Arizona, Cody grew up on a Navajo Reservation in Leupp, Arizona. Raised by a family of weavers, she learned to weave on a vertical Diné loom. While she draws on the traditional techniques she learned from her grandmother and mother, Cody’s work also incorporates “Germantown style,” a technique developed by 19th-century weavers who embraced industrially dyed yarns manufactured in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

The artist’s signature may be the digital graphic motifs she uses, which are reminiscent of pixelated early Nintendo video games and other visual culture of the 1980s. Cody’s Dopamine Dream (2023) is an exemplary work that demonstrates how she blends the traditional techniques of geometric overlays and haptic color schemes with the pixelated symbols that present the modern society she grew up in.

Cody received her BA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2007. Her works have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (2019–20), Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco (2019), and Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff (2019).

B. 1983, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Michael Alvarez’s work documents the way people use communal and civic space to record their existence through murals and graffiti. By working from photographs, Alvarez creates artworks that depict L.A. landscapes and how people occupy them. His works capture his own personal experiences and nostalgia of Los Angeles by incorporating blurring, doubled images, visceral textures, and cloudy translucent elements into his works.

Gnarmageddon (Ode to JKwon) (2016) is an example of how Alvarez’s vision of the Los Angeles cityscape makes a direct connection with viewers. As the exhibition explains, Alvarez’s works strive to make viewers feel as if they have been to the location depicted in his work and know the people who are pictured. Alvarez received a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2007. His work has been included in exhibitions at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles (2022), Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles (2022), and Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica (2019).

B. Los Angeles. Lives and works in Venice, California.

Nancy Evans’s lifelong interest in the California landscape and the sublime in nature are reflected in her paintings and sculptures. Much of her work—including bodies of paintings that depict the moon or layers of terrain—is inspired by the artist’s nighttime observations and experiences.

Evans’s works often reference the agriculture and extensive landscapes of California’s Central Valley, where she was raised. Her landscape paintings often display mystical and hallucinatory qualities to symbolize the magic and inspiration she finds in nature. This is achieved through experimenting with abstraction. Evans received a BFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has had solo exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (2022), Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles (1997), and Gasworks in London (1995).

B. 1990, Yadz, Iran. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Multidisciplinary artist Roksana Pirouzmand creates sculptural objects and installations that relate to her own body. Pirouzmand draws upon her personal experiences and infuses her works with narratives of transformation, deterioration, and movement. This all plays out through performances that explore the relationships between the artist, her work, and her audience. Pirouzmand is inspired by her life as an immigrant, particularly as an Iranian woman living in the United States.

Her installations often incorporate mechanisms and animate objects, such as wind machines and furniture, and her own body, sculptural casts of her body, or casts of her mother or grandmother; such works honor the lives of the women who have come before her. Through such works, Pirouzmand portrays narratives of exile, family bonds, generational trauma, and memorialization.

The performance installation Between two windows (2023) consists of two windows—one resembles a window in the artist’s home in the United States, and the other, a window in the artist’s grandmother’s home in Iran. Pirouzmand sits between the two windows as a wind machine sends air through her hair while family photos flutter around her. The deeply moving installation speaks to the artist’s position living in the United States while also fighting to hold onto memories of the past that built their foundation.

Pirouzmand received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2017 and an MFA from UCLA in 2022. She has exhibited her works at Murmurs in Los Angeles (2022), Del Vaz Projects in Los Angeles (2022), and Guest House in Inglewood (2022).

B. 1985, Watford City, North Dakota. Lives and works in Los Angeles.