February 6–June 27, 2021
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art will reopen its doors on February 6 with two new exhibitions: Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (through June 27) and Dissolution, an exhibition of the work of LLM Artist Fellows (through May 30).
Online performances and public programs will continue, supporting queer art in all its diversity and depth.
Beginning February 4, artists HH Hiaasen and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo invite audiences to take part in an aquatic and abolitionist journey of audio performances by calling 1-800-WET-NISS, concluding with a live Q&A on February 7. This performance is part of Remote Intimacies, a series co-organized with the ONE Archives at USC. Future performances include Xina Xurner (March 4), Katarzyna Perlak (April 8), Dayna Danger (May 6), and Alli Logout (June 10). RSVP
On February 5, artists Rashaad Newsome and Kiyan Williams (a 2018–19 LLM Artist Fellow) will hold a multimedia conversation on their practices and intersections while cooking together. Newsome’s tripartite project Black Magic opened at LLM and Times Square Arts in December; the full film is on view here. Presented in partnership with EYEBEAM. RSVP
On February 14, Shawné Michaelain Holloway (2020 LLM Performance Resident) will debut SOMEBODY’S MIDNIGHT, a new text-based performance piece in the form of an open love letter, accessible each night, through April, between 12 and 1am.
On February 21, Anh Vo (2020 LLM Performance Resident) will join benedict nguyễn in a live discussion of their multimedia solo performance work, BABYLIFT. Named after a 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States, resulting in a plane crash that killed 78 of those children, BABYLIFT confronts the afterlives of the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the Resistance War Against Imperialist America). Presented in partnership with BAX. RSVP
Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (February 6–June 27) is the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laura Aguilar (b. 1959, San Gabriel, CA; d. 2018, Long Beach, CA), assembling more than 70 works produced over three decades. Through photographs and videos that are frequently political as well as personal, and which traverse performative, feminist, and queer art genres, Aguilar offers candid portrayals of herself, her friends and family, and LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities. Her practice intuitively evolved over time as she struggled to negotiate and navigate her ethnicity and sexuality, her challenges with depression and auditory dyslexia, and acceptance of her large body. From early photography, including portraits of friends and other artists within the Chicana/o art community, Aguilar moved to courageous nude self-portraits, while her emerging lesbian identity and political activism within Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian community began to inform her work. Throughout her practice, Aguilar disrupted normative concepts of beauty and the female form while specifically utilizing the gendered body as a site for social critique.
Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell is organized by the Vincent Price Art Museum in collaboration with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and is guest curated by Sybil Venegas, Independent Art Historian and Curator and Professor Emerita of Chicana/o Studies at East Los Angeles College.
Dissolution features works of art created by the first two cohorts of the annual Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship (2017-18 and 2018-19), whose work presents a multitude of positions within contemporary queer identity. “Dissolution” refers to artistic strategies of negation and undoing, in which representations of hierarchical and normative structures are fragmented, dissolved, or upended, in an act of resistance to the structures of oppression they uphold.
Dissolution is organized by Angela Hallinan, Assistant Curator, and Daniel Sander.
Part 1: February 6–March 13: Buzz Slutzky, Catalina Schliebener, Eric Rhein, Gwen Shockey, Kiyan Williams, Kristine Eudey, Max Colby, Michael Childress, Rodrigo Moreira, Vanessa Rondon.
Part 2: April 11–May 25: Boris Torres, Caitlin Rose Sweet, Carrie Hawks, Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez, desireena almoradie, Frederick Weston, Jason Villegas, Lola Flash, Nash Glynn, Sal Muñoz, Seyi Odebanjo.
For more information on these and future programs, register for emails on our website and follow us on Instagram.
