Billboards dominate LA’s visual landscape, selling supersized Hollywood glamour to drivers stuck in polluting traffic. Matthew Brannon intervenes with humorous pastiche in his “Certain Snakes” series. Along with John Baldessari and Eve Fowler, among others, Brannon is one of ten participating artists who have created art billboards for the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, an initiative of the non-profit public-art organisation Los Angeles Nomadic Division.
Mark Bradford has returned to Leimert Park, the neighbourhood of his youth and the hub of African-American art in Los Angeles, to establish Art + Practice in partnership with the arts patron Eileen Norton, activist Allan DiCastro and the Hammer Museum. The foundation offers art education to disadvantaged young people, museum-curated exhibitions highlighting the work of local artists, and an artist-in-residence programme in a part of Los Angeles that has nurtured black artists for almost a century.
The El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA), founded by the collectors Eva and Brian Sweeney, is a strikingly refined art space in a part of town known mostly for the apocalyptic-looking chimneys of an oil refinery. (“Segundo” means “second” in Spanish; the area was named after Chevron’s second refinery.) Since its founding in 2013, ESMoA has put itself on the LA art map with shows, including the installation Anti Ark (2013) by German artist Michael Sistig, and interactive events, around themes such as silence and sustainability.
When Google moved into Frank Gehry’s Binoculars Building in 2011, Los Angeles’s Venice district was rebranded Silicon Beach. Now the tech giant has created a database of street art, part of the Google Art Project, allowing users to view works worldwide. It is being expanded to cover more Los Angeles street art (such as Judy Baca’s Hitting the Wall, 1984), in partnership with organisations including the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Wende Museum and the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles.