In eXhibitions, we bring the conversation to the artworks, discussing art from within the context of its display. On December 14, 2018, Steven Wong spoke with X-TRA’s Anuradha Vikram at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery about Here, an exhibition Wong curated, on view from October 25, 2018–January 6, 2019. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Patrick Martinez, Nothing is Up But the Rent, 2018. Ceramic, ceramic tile, neon, and mixed media panel with wall stucco, 60 x 60 in. Installation view, Here, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, October 25, 2018–January 6, 2019. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.

ANURADHA VIKRAM: How did you come to the premise for your first show as curator of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery?

STEVEN WONG: The show stems from a love/hate relationship. I feel that one could perpetually explore and discover Los Angeles because of its many communities, boundaries, and barriers, both physical ones like traffic, but also ideas about the “other side of the tracks.” Academically, as an Asian American, I’ve always been interested in how Asian Americans have been present historically but also constructed as the perpetual foreigner.

AV: How has your curatorial work at the Chinese American Museum and as an independent curator differed from that at the Municipal Art Gallery? Who do you hope to address and invite into the exhibition space?

SW: At CAM, I liked working within the parameters of an ethnically specific museum, challenging and superseding those parameters. They have been very supportive of contemporary arts, but they are basically a history museum. The Municipal Art Gallery has a long history of showcasing contemporary art. The gallery was established in 1954—it’s actually the oldest gallery in Los Angeles proper. It’s also a civic institution; the galleries are run and funded by the city. Now I have a big open slate and a broader audience.

AV: What are some of the responsibilities that you feel now, in a culturally nonspecific institution?

SW: I bring a healthy skepticism to what this place represents and how it functions within the art world. I try to represent artists who are marginalized, and not just for diversity’s sake. LAMAG has a history of showing women and artists of color, but it’s still not where it should be, so I see my curatorial work here as a continuation of what I was doing at CAM. I’m developing interesting shows by bringing in those who have been historically shut out of the conversation, not necessarily for the sake of diversity itself, but in a genuine belief that diverse perspectives and conversations are much more interesting. If we think about art as innovation, those voices from marginalized communities can diversify, mix up the way we view our world. We exhibit artists who represent the diversity of Los Angeles, because they will speak to the greatest amount of people.

iris yirei hu, Lessons from Wise Woman (Tongva Elder Julia Bogany), Grandmother Oak Tree, and Hands, 2018. Assemblage with acrylic and oil paint, handmade oak leaf and yucca fiber paper, gold and copper leaf, embroidery, needle, collage, burlap, hemp and cotton string, Navajo loom, cotton rope, earth and pressed grape leaf from San Gabriel Mission, figeater beetle corpse, ash, incense, hand carved soapstone bears, hand made pine needle baskets, natural dyed indigo and beige Churro wool, fallen Scott’s oriole nest, fallen robin’s nest, hand carved oak, manzanita, and pine pieces by David Bell, glass frame, rocks, yucca stalk, dried agapanthus flower, Ziploc bag, canning jar, mahogany pedestals, printed matter, drawings, handmade quilt from Taiwanese Hakka floral textiles, 84 x 120 x 120 in. Guided by Tongva elders Julia Bogany and Barbara Drake; Los Angeles Natural History Museum Collection Managers Chris Coleman, Kim Walters, and KT Hajeian; Professor of History at Cerritos College John Macias; and independent reading. Installation view, Here, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, October 25, 2018–January 6, 2019. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.

AV: We’re standing in front of iris yirei hu’s installation. There’s a quilt with Taiwanese Hakka fabric on the floor of the gallery; dirt and ash in a pile with a photograph melted in it; organic materials in jars and frames; leaves, insects, shells, pinecones, a nest. A magazine that says, “Tongva Women Inspiring the Future.” Why do we see iris’s piece first?

SW: Her installation greets people by grounding us in the history and legacy of this land, and the people who originally inhabited it. These objects frame a portrait of a Tongva elder, Julia Bogani, along with samples of dirt and plants and advertisements on the backside of a Navajo loom. This is the product of a deeper relationship that iris set out to develop with Julia, in order to really understand and explore boundaries of knowledge, the gaps in this historical knowledge about, for example, Pre-Columbian life here in the Los Angeles Basin.

AV: An indigenous community leading the way to a future in an urban environment like Los Angeles is really exciting.

SW: I think the initial question that she was posing was one of acknowledgement. Acknowledging the land. Acknowledging where she grew up in San Gabriel. That what we now call Los Angeles came at the cost of the displacement of the Tongva people.

Left to right: Henry Taylor, Batman, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 in; Nothing Changed Nothing Strange, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 in. Skid Row’s Finest, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Installation view, Here, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, October 25, 2018–January 6, 2019. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.

AV: My next question is about the right and wrong way to be an Angeleno, as in these works by Henry Taylor, Gajin Fujita, and Mario Ybarra, Jr., invoking different types of socialization and masculinity that are specific to LA men of color.

SW: Funny, I didn’t consider the grouping of male artists in this section of the gallery, but indeed, there is something going on with how male artists of color express masculinity, and it’s definitely apparent with these three artists. Henry Taylor developed one painting, Batman (2018), for the show that depicts a young African American man, a founding member of the Crips—his name is Batman. He exudes this confrontational yet apprehensive look. And then right next to it we have these police officers in the process of killing a black man (Nothing Changed, Nothing Strange, 2018). And so, again—a lot of people call the LAPD the gang in blue. Another portrait features a homeless man that Henry befriended outside of his studio in the Arts District.

Gajin Fujita comes from a graffiti background, a scene that is testosterone-based and ego-driven. Tagging oftentimes revolves around visibility and respect—how spectacular you get with your murals, how refined they can be, but also how much you can get your name up. Gajin often paints battles between Japanese warriors as a metaphor between rival graffiti crews, LA neighborhoods, or sports teams. The depiction of these Japanese warriors in his paintings can be seen as a reclaiming or resurrecting of a type of masculinity that is in reaction to the American tendency to emasculate Asian men.

AV: Fujita’s work seems to bear the influence of symbology, popular imagery, and tagging imagery, and then he has traditional motifs that come from his Japanese American heritage.

SW: Yes, he is Japanese American. His work is often framed as this cliché “East meets West” dichotomy. A lot of these motifs he pulls from traditional Japanese prints are from the Edo period, but they’re not uncommon in Japanese American households.

Mario Ybarra, Jr., Wilmington Good, 2018. Painting on panel, scrap wood, and photographs, dimensions variable. Installation view, Here, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, October 25, 2018–January 6, 2019. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.

AV: Mario Ybarra, Jr. also deals with similar themes. Could you talk about what’s happening in his photographs specifically, and how they deal with these ideas, in relation to his large painting and wood sculptures?

SW: The installation, which hasn’t been seen in Los Angeles before, includes these photographs pulled from a longstanding community mural in Wilmington, CA. The mural, which is from the late ’70s, has tons of different narratives and stories, and Mario staged certain elements using people within his own network. These were some youths who were working with his collective, Slanguage, at the time. And this is his mother, who is a dockworker, holding a chain and a cargo hook that represents labor that can be traditionally be viewed as masculine. Mario grew up near the port of Wilmington with family members who were all expecting him to follow tradition and become a dockworker. Wilmington is a place with this whole emphasis on trade, global capitalism, and oil, and the pollution that this economy produces really impacts people.

AV: What if we pictured LA as Wilmington rather than Hollywood? Would that change our worldview?

SW: I think that would be more representative of an LA experience.

AV: Why did you decide to include Nancy Popp?

SW: Nancy’s practice is based on an understanding of public space, the rules of public space, and how she interacts with public space as a woman, as a feminist. She’s been interested in the impacts of gentrification on public spaces in Chinatown. This particular development, La Plaza Village, is county property that was leased to a developer, but that income benefits LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LA Plaza), the LA history museum.

Sandra de la Loza, Incantation for los angeles, 2016. Video still. Single channel video, digitally transferred cross-processed Super 8 film, 10 min. Courtesy of the artist.

AV: They’re renting land from the county, and then they’re supposed to be funneling those proceeds back in support of LA Plaza’s endowment?

SW: Right. And Nancy uses her body to survey these sites that blur the lines of public and private, which I love. She’s also quite active on housing issues in different communities.

AV: What about Sandra de la Loza, who is represented here by a video transferred from a cross-processed film?

SW: What we’re seeing here is a Super 8 film of Sandra traversing one of the defunct rail lines in Los Angeles, from Downtown towards Alhambra, examining the early infrastructure of the city that continues to reinforce LA’s race and class boundaries.

AV: She’s surveying LA with her camera, in her walking, in her body, and she’s next to Popp who’s also dealing with surveying in this way. Can you tell me about this next gallery, which deals with the street, and why you chose these four artists?

SW: Renée Petropoulos has been working on this series for over 20 years. These are 15 watercolor washes of façades in LA. From street photos, she develops these paintings which are watercolor and gouache on vellum. She’s challenging herself to paint on something that repels water. And this reeks of Los Angeles, these façades which can be culturally specific to various neighborhoods. Gloria Galvez’s video could be viewed as still image, but it’s a video depicting a mural on a residential wall that separates private and public. The mural quotes Tupac: “Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”

AV: And Sandy Rodriguez?

SW: Sandy Rodriguez had been primarily doing oil on canvas. She recently began making her own pigments, working with different natural papers, and pulling imagery from the Florentine Codex. All the pigments speak to her own legacy as a third-generation Mexican American painter, and she’s collapsing time boundaries, thinking about state-sanctioned violence all the way from the colonial period to 2018, when the LAPD executed 21 people—which she’s mapped out with red dots that have risen into the heavens. x

Steven Y. Wong was born in the City of Angeles at Queen of Angels Hospital, a place that no longer exists. He is currently a curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park. Previously he was the Interim Executive Director and the senior staff curator at the Chinese American Museum where he developed and implemented both contemporary art and history exhibitions. Prior to that, he was the Director of Digital Literacy Initiatives at the Little Tokyo Service Center. Steven has lectured at UC Santa Barbara and was an adjunct professor at Ventura College and Pasadena City College in Asian American Studies, History and Art Studio Departments. Steven holds a Masters in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master in Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Anuradha Vikram is a curator, educator, and writer based in Los Angeles. Vikram is a member of X-TRA’s Editorial Board.