Artist and CalArts alum Jemima Wyman (Art MFA 07) debuts new work as part of COLA 2025, the 28th edition of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs’ Individual Master Artist Project (IMAP) Grant Program. The exhibition, opening Thursday, July 17 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, highlights new work by local midcareer artists across disciplines including visual art, literature, and performance.
Wyman is known for her multidisciplinary practice incorporating video, installation, painting, and photo-collage. Her recent body of work explores themes related to protest culture, focusing on visual resistance strategies such as camouflage and masking. Since 2008, she has been compiling a personal archive of protest imagery, which serves as the foundation for her photo-collage process.
For example, works such as A Haze Descends and Fume are densely layered compositions constructed from thousands of hand-cut images selected from this archive. The resulting pieces function not only as visually complex artworks but also as metaphors for collective action—crowds of bodies and symbols unified into a singular, forward-moving force. Each work is accompanied by meticulous documentation of the specific protest event, including the date and location.
This body of work was most recently featured in Crisis Patterns, a midcareer survey exhibition presented at Artspace Mackay in Mackay, Australia, in 2024. The exhibition brought together more than a decade of Wyman’s politically charged collage works and offered a comprehensive view of how protest iconography and visual motifs have evolved over time in her archive.
In addition to the exhibition at COLA 2025, Wyman will lead a collective art-making activity on Friday, July 25, inviting the public to engage directly with the participatory and community-centered aspects of her practice.
COLA 2025 also features new works by visual artists Carmen Argote, Olivia Booth, Bryan Ida, and Flora Kao. According to organizers, the exhibition is nonthematic, allowing each artist to present work rooted in their own practice.
The COLA IMAP grant is awarded annually by the Department of Cultural Affairs and aims to reflect the city’s cultural diversity and artistic vitality.
