The Hammer Museum kicked off its biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2025, now in its seventh edition, showcasing new and archival work by 28 Los Angeles-based artists, including four CalArtians: Mike Stoltz (Film/Video MFA 14), Kelly Wall (Art MFA 19), Nicole-Antonia Spagnola (Film/Video BFA 16), and Pat O’Neill, a founding faculty member of the School of Film/Video at CalArts. The sprawling exhibit, which takes over much of the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces, runs through March 1, 2026.
Zoë Ryan, who became the museum’s director in January, spoke at the press preview on Oct. 3 about the importance of art and community during this “extremely challenging year for Angelenos,” referencing the devastating January fires as well as the ongoing ICE raids and subsequent protests.
“We have also seen chilling rhetoric and federal actions targeting diversity and inclusion policies and even museums’ presentations of historical narratives and objects,” Ryan said. “Museums are critical components of a thriving society. They help communities build empathy with one another, gain visual literacy and critical thinking skills and really develop an understanding of the world that sustains us.”
She continued, “At the Hammer, art and ideas for a more just world is one of the core principles of our mission, and it will continue to be our North Star for our exhibitions and our programs.”
Ryan stated that the exhibition wasn’t a direct response to the events of the past few months, but praised co-curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha for the “diversity of ideas” in the show, which “capture[s] the many contradictions and confluences of our great city,” as well as its “nuance and breadth.”
Pobocha talked proudly about the “incredible heterogeneity of the work on view in terms of medium, materials, genre, chronology,” all of which reflect the city of LA.
The incredible diversity of O’Neill’s 50-year career was demonstrated with a collection of black-and-white photos of New York, Los Angeles, and Venice, California, from the 1960s. One of his most notable sculptures is 1964’s Safer Than Springtime, in which a giant green pickle leans against a round yellow cylinder reminiscent of a mustard bottle, which lies atop a ketchup-like smear of red. The piece is made of fiberglass, aluminum, steel and paint. It was previously displayed alongside his experimental film Let’s Make a Sandwich.
Wall’s Something to Write Home About, features swatches of glass created by the artist that correspond to the “hues of Los Angeles sunsets—forever photographed, never fully captured— displayed as abstracted postcards on racks from a now-shuttered pharmacy.” In Wistful Thinking, she combines whimsy with ambiguous messages on flattened pennies created through a custom penny press.
While the curators deliberately broke with tradition by placing different artist’s works side by side in the same room, some installations, such as Stoltz’s Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View), have their own dedicated space. The film uses footage Stoltz shot of people walking past his East Hollywood studio and slides he found at a rummage sale at the Echo Park Film Center. The piece takes its title from the faded pink tone of the vintage slides. A third screen runs an optical soundtrack featuring “pink tone” frequencies on a loop.
Spagnola’s 1-2-3: Apartment Gallery video installation, which can be viewed in three separate locations, including outside the box office of the Billy Wilder Theater, is inspired by Wilder’s iconic 1960 film The Apartment. Harden said that Spagnola pitched the idea as a tribute to the Oscar-winning filmmaker, whose LA-set films include Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. Harden explained, “The film is taking apart this historical filmmaker who has created a lexicon about Los Angeles,” and that it was Spagnola’s idea to “utilize the architecture of the Hammer itself to make the film appear in various formats in different locations.”
Among the many other pieces in the exhibition are the entryway recreations of Alonzo Davis’ highway murals created for the 1984 Olympics and Alake Shilling’s 25-foot inflatable sculpture Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A., which sits at the corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Glendon Ave.
