Widline Cadet, “Shifting Skies” (detail) (2025 (courtesy the artist and Nazarian / Curcio, all other photos Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
LOS ANGELES — The Hammer Museum’s biennial,**Made in LA, provides a snapshot of the state of contemporary art throughout the greater region, attempting to give coherent form to its sprawling and heterogeneous artistic landscape. With this year’s edition, opening to the public October 5, curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha embraced that messiness, noting that LA’s “dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature.”
Still, after doz…
Widline Cadet, “Shifting Skies” (detail) (2025 (courtesy the artist and Nazarian / Curcio, all other photos Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
LOS ANGELES — The Hammer Museum’s biennial,**Made in LA, provides a snapshot of the state of contemporary art throughout the greater region, attempting to give coherent form to its sprawling and heterogeneous artistic landscape. With this year’s edition, opening to the public October 5, curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha embraced that messiness, noting that LA’s “dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature.”
Still, after dozens of studio visits, the pair were able to identify some through lines. “If there is any single thread in this show, it is historical,” Harden told Hyperallergic, countering the stereotype of LA as a place that forgets its past. “It is about histories.”
Those histories range from the autobiographical to the communal, hyper-local to international; palimpsests layered in concrete and asphalt or held tight as personal memories. In advance of the exhibition’s opening, Hyperallergic highlights the work of five of the 28 participating artists, whose practices engage with narrative and memory in various ways.
Freddy Villalobos (b. 1989, Los Angeles)
Freddy Villalobos, “waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of adventure” (2025)
Freddy Villalobos’s installation “waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of adventure” (2025), uses the death of famed soul singer Sam Cooke as a vehicle to explore historical cycles, as it collapses the past, present, and future of LA. The work is centered around a video documenting a nighttime drive up Figueroa Street, from the Hacienda Motel where Sam Cooke was shot and killed in 1964 to the county morgue. The meditative single-shot, lasting nearly two hours, traverses time and space, from the historically African-American neighborhood of South Central where Villalobos grew up, north to the area being transformed by the University of Southern California’s ongoing expansion, to the LA Live entertainment complex and the infamous graffiti towers, examples of a “failed future,” as Villalobos called them.
The installation is accompanied by a bass-heavy soundtrack which emanates from pedestals adorned with shiny automotive paint and purple neon. They are topped by abstract limestone frescoes that will deteriorate over time as the sonic vibrations turn their delicate surfaces back into dust. By revisiting this specific event through contemporary eyes, Villalobos draws parallels between Cooke’s cultural and political moment and our own.
“The change we’re hoping for feels within our reach,” Villalobos said, echoing Cooke’s 1964 civil rights anthem, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena)
Patrick Martinez, “Battle of the City on Fire” (2025), stucco, cinder blocks, neon, acrylic paint, spray paint, and latex house paint on scorched panel
The physical landscape of Los Angeles also provides inspiration for Patrick Martinez, whose large-scale sculptural painting “Battle of the City on Fire” (2025) pulls from the city’s vernacular architecture, signage, and murals. The 70-foot long construction resembles a crumbling cinder-block wall, onto which Martinez has painted layers of history. The main image references a battle mural at Cacaxtla, an archaeological site in Mexico, linking LA’s rich mural culture with murals created hundreds of years ago elsewhere in the Americas. He imagines the brown-skinned warriors as the ancestors of the city’s Mexican and Central American communities, and draws parallels to LA’s current brutal immigration raids. “While I was making this work, in the world right outside, people were being disappeared and kidnapped, families being erased,” he said.
Martinez has partially obscured this battle scene, covering it with graffiti tags, painted stucco, and neon, mimicking the accretion seen on storefronts throughout the city. He adds realistic depictions of bougainvillea, a plant native to Mexico that is ubiquitous across LA. “It’s like a landscape at first, but then you see the figures,” he notes, “and you understand that they’re either becoming covered up or breaking out.”
Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Haiti)
Widline Cadet, “Shifting Skies” (2025)
Widline Cadet juxtaposes carefully composed portraits with archival family snapshots, placing them in shaped frames as part of larger installations. Born in Haiti, Cadet moved to the US as a child, and her fractured visions reference a sense of diasporic connection, bits and pieces of memories given equal weight as professionally staged photos. “I’m thinking about all the ways you measure life,” she told Hyperallergic. “Shifting Skies” (2025) is composed of 12 images in half-circle shaped frames, arranged in a design that resembles a pinwheel, or the pattern of breeze blocks, the perforated building blocks common to both Southern California and Haiti. This physical link, along with the region’s flora and warm weather, provided a sense of familiarity when Cadet moved to LA from New York three years ago. “I’ve never lived in a place that’s reminded me of my home country as much,” she said.
Her sentiment underscores the notion that LA’s identity is fluid and multifaceted, informed by a myriad of sources from around the world. “LA is an international city that has an international impact,” said Harden. “It’s not isolated.”
Ali****Eyal (b. 1994, Baghdad, Iraq)
Ali Eyal, “and look where I went” (2025)
Ali Eyal grew up in Baghdad during the American occupation of Iraq, and his paintings reflect the loss he experienced and his attempts to reckon with the aftermath. His large-scale canvases are often based on his personal experiences, but rendered as dream-like visions through his fantastical, figurative style. “And Look Where I Went” (2025) is based on his visit to the 9/11 Memorial in downtown New York last year — a site he had tried to avoid because of the profound despair embedded there. Nearby, he had a conversation with an Egyptian hot dog vendor who had recently immigrated to the US. Gazing into the void of the waterfalls, Eyal “became like a kid again,” he recalled, reliving the violence of the war and sectarian conflicts that followed. “It’s still happening, it’s ongoing,” he said.
Amanda Ross-Ho (b. 1975, Chicago)
Amanda Ross-Ho, “Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS)” (2025)
Amanda Ross-Ho’s “Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS)” (2025) also stems from personal narrative, but is made accessible through decontextualization. The work consists of four monumental doors, replicas of the entrances to her father’s room at the residential nursing home where he lives. Ross-Ho scaled the doors up by 170%, meticulously recreating years of scratches, dings, and paint touch-ups. Each one is covered by various seasonal decorations commonly used in institutional settings to bring a dash of cheer and mark the days. Ross-Ho has enlarged these tinsel totems as well, aided by her experience as a prop fabricator, arranging them out of sync, “intentionally corrupting” any impression of linear progression.
“It’s rooted in my autobiography, but it’s not aboutmy dad. I’m thinking about time and about how these things function,” she said. “I would say time is my primary medium and primary concern, my material and my subject.”
Matt Stromberg is a freelance visual arts writer based in Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to Hyperallergic and has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and Contemporary... More by Matt Stromberg