Southland art galleries unveil several new photo themes

Sept. 15 marked the start of PST Art Week, the largest multi-month experience spotlighting dozens of exhibitions, public programs, talks, and more across the wider region and multiple counties, continuing this inspiring tradition. Exhibits and art galleries across SoCal take this event to unveil new and upcoming art pieces and themes while inspiring the next crop of artists to push their creative boundaries and philosophical concepts.
While some exhibits offer early previews, most galleries are closed until the opening date. A few museums include the California African-American Museum (CAAM) in Exposition Park and its exhibit “World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project.” This exhibit highlights George Carver and his impact on plant-based engineering and agriculture. In the early 1900s, he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school, to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—organic fertilizers, crop rotation, plant-based medicines, and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservatism.
A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. The exhibition also features contemporary artists, scientists, and engineers working in dialogue with Carver and his interests in nature, biology, activism, and sustainability, among them Los Angeles-based assemblage artist Judson Powell, whose research into Carver inspired the exhibition. The exhibition runs through March 2, 2025.
The next exhibit is California State University Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery. The theme is Brackish Waters Los Angeles, showcasing the unique environments formed by the collision of watercourses in the region, past and present. The exhibition is on the CSUDH campus in South Los Angeles, where local rivers were transformed into concrete channels and where industrial contamination and ecological racism have plagued surrounding communities for generations. Artifacts and artworks trace the intersections where ecology, culture, and community meet and uncover the complex ecosystems, infrastructures, and politics that create and destroy brackish water habitats. Catherine Opie, the artist, draws inspiration from parallels between the rivers and freeway systems as arteries of the region. The exhibit runs through December.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting a number of exhibitions, one of which highlights the ancient art of Mesoamerica. The exhibit is titled “We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art.” Artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. Explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. The exhibition is open to the public from through March 2, 2025.