Not even historic wildfires and a year of ICE roundups could stop “Made in LA,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial pulse check on the art scene in Los Angeles, on through March 1, 2026. This year, 31 artists were chosen by Art Institute of Chicago and former Hammer curator Paulina Pobocha and independent curator Essence Harden. “We did our studio visits in 2024, and we saw too many people and so many varieties of work that I would say it was very difficult to find a genre or category that seemed to exist or have a larger presence than any other. The distribution of genres and mediums is really broad,” Pobocha tells Observer.
Harden was drawn to the work of Amanda Ross-Ho for her emphasis on object and place in her work Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS). Visits to studios of sculptor Pat O’Neill and Carl Cheng, with his “nature machines” and pseudo-appliances, left them gobsmacked, as did experimental film Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) by Mike Stoltz. “His work is so engaging, in a multifaceted media-analog way,” says Harden. “Those things surprised me, like a lot of people whom we stumbled upon and then were blown away when we got to the studio.”
Artist Leilah Weinraub’s work The Kids integrates video and performance in her imaginative study of the often ornate building facades of Lower Manhattan. She’s also teamed with theatermakers Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel of Hollywood’s New Theater for their film THEATER, a silent movie shot in 16mm. “Experimental avant-garde theater has a very long history in Germany and Weimar Germany between the wars. A lot of the people who ran those theaters were Jews who emigrated to Los Angeles and started the entertainment industry,” Pobocha says of the Pitegoff and Henkel, who managed several noteworthy bar and theater spaces in Berlin, including TV Bar and Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne. “There’s a generational structure connecting a place like Berlin to L.A. There are actors everywhere, making movies, but there’s not much theater going on. So, what they’re doing is deeply rooted in the history of the city.”
In THEATER, Weinraub stars as an Uber driver in L.A. who gets hit by a city bus and receives a payout from the state. With her newfound fortune, she decides to start a theater and assembles an acting ensemble. She soon runs out of money and starts living in the theater. Hitting rock bottom, she rents it out. Henkel and Pitegoff used rehearsal footage of productions they staged in the theater for the film.
“It definitely pulls from the world around us,” says Henkel. “There used to be an acting class next door, and we were very obsessed with them. We filmed them painting the building red, and in the film, a character pays to paint the building red. We fill in and shoot this narrative when we can, and then at a certain point, we edit it together. The theater next door that was there when we were working on the film is now closed and gutted. So, it’s a lot of documenting other spaces.”
New Theater Hollywood is named for an establishment they had in Berlin. The L.A. iteration is housed in a historic 49-seat black box theater on the Theater Row section of Santa Monica Boulevard, a dilapidated stretch in Hollywood. “In Germany, theater is the most direct way, as an art form, to speak to the people,” says Henkel. “There, everyone goes to the theater. It’s really set up so that people of all backgrounds go. You can stand up in the middle and say, ‘fuck this,’ and walk out. It is state-funded. It allows for experimentation, artistry on an amazing level.”
Originally from Chicago, artist Amanda Ross-Ho relocated to L.A. 20 years ago to attend grad school at USC and currently teaches at UC Irvine. For her 2008 California Biennial piece Frauds for an Inside Job, she transported the actual walls of her East L.A. studio into the galleries of the Orange County Museum of Art. The nine panels stood 11 feet tall, the same height as the four panels of her “Made in L.A.” installation Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS). “There are relationships with scale that not a lot of people have the capacity to do, and recovering her own personal history, but not in a way that felt obvious in terms of the texture itself,” says Harden. “We invited her because we were interested in her way of thinking through objects and space that I haven’t seen that much of.”
Ross-Ho turned tragedy into triumph when her father, artist Ruyell Ho, was hit by a car in 2020 and injured his head and hip. Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is composed of four scaled-up versions of the door to his room in a medical facility. Each represents a different season through holiday decorations—Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, July 4, and Halloween.
“Decorations mark time for patients with memory issues, dementia,” says Ross-Ho, who worked as a propmaker in Hollywood when she first moved to L.A. “I was interested in creating this thing where you saw the walls as an artifact that was kind of ripped out. Displacement is a factor. This is all prop making. I wanted you to feel like these doors were pulled out and set into the place.”
Like most of “Made in LA,” Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) is not overtly political in our current polarized era. But viewers who dig deeper will find elements that comment on the hostility immigrants are facing nationwide. “For me, this isn’t extraordinarily political but is oblique,” she says. “My dad was an immigrant and had this incredible life of overcoming all sorts of things, not just to survive but mostly being free. And in this medical facility are the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, the most without. And this is a Medicare unit. They’re on the chopping block.”
In a time when caring and compassion are somehow considered radical acts, Ross-Ho’s work takes on political undertones. In a time when ethnic subject matter is considered woke, Patrick Martinez’s epic piece Warrior Garden, depicting Mayan murals as street art, becomes political. And Bruce Yonemoto’s Broken Fences, juxtaposing footage of Japanese American prisoners interned during World War II with Jews in Nazi death camps, is political in any era.
“This thing happening now in the United States is not ahistorical. Even ICE itself is not an invention of Donald Trump,” observes Pobocha. “From ICE raids in L.A. to so many current government policies, these are returning crises not only in the United States but in Los Angeles. I think these artists are students of history.”
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