Tucked among a row of truck repair shops, steel fabricators, and the Union Pacific railyard in Commerce, you’ll find an unexpected workspace: artist Mercedes Dorame’s studio, with art supplies piled on tables and photos of loved ones tacked to the walls.
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Her work, in quiet ways, illuminates how Indigenous life and thought remain present in Los Angeles and its landscapes. The spring she has taken me to is a spot that her father, Tongva elder Robert Dorame, took her to when she was a child. It is a place that was part of her family’s story and that is now her story, a story she will pass on to her daughter. That vitality, that lineage, is something she seeks to embody in her images.
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“The Iridescence of Knowing” opens this week at Occidental College, highlighting creations — such as historical craftwork and performance art — made on Tongva land. Mercedes Dorame and Joel “Rage.One” Garcia are the curators, bringing together artists from across generations.
“We're trying to give the viewer entryway, an invitation, but also a provocation to know us, to not think of the Tongva people as something that exists in the past or in a history book,” says Dorame.
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Marko Gluhaich profiles five figures leading the charge in education in Los Angeles and beyond, from Catherine Opie to Mercedes Dorame.
Mercedes Dorame’s practice bridges two former careers: student photojournalist and cultural consultant. The latter describes a position she held during and after pursuing her undergraduate degree, when she would travel across Los Angeles County to construction sites at burial grounds on the unceded land of the Gabrielino-Tongva — a native people to which Dorame belongs — and advise workers on what to do with the Indigenous artefacts they found there. As a student, Dorame learned how little documentation there is of the Gabrielino-Tongva, who remain unrecognized by the US federal government, and has since worked to bridge the gaps in the sparse history that has been recorded.
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This podcast series is inspired by the LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives initiative that uses augmented reality to explore monuments and murals, representation, and history. Monumental Perspectives brings together artists and technologists to create virtual monuments that explore just some of the histories of Los Angeles communities in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region. This initiative is made possible by Snapchat. Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information visit lacma.org/monumental
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At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all.
“Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yang’aro (Looking Back),” the inaugural installation for the Getty’s Rotunda Commission series, marks the museum’s first solo presentation by an Indigenous Californian from the Los Angeles basin and the southern Channel Islands, the ancestral land on which the Getty Center was erected in 1997.
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Los Angeles has resonated with song long before electronic recording. This episode traces the city’s audio origins back to its First Peoples, the Tongva. Learn how this Indigenous community stays attuned to cultural practice while envisioning new pathways. On this episode of Deep Routes, L. Frank, The Calderon family, Moira and Wallace Cleaves, Mercedes and Robert Dorame tell stories that will help you listen more deeply to Los Angeles. This is Deep Routes, Songs from Tovaangar.
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Native American Indigenous artist and UCLA alumna Mercedes Dorame will deliver the keynote address at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture’s 2022 commencement on Saturday, June 11th at 4 p.m. This will be the first commencement ceremony to be held in-person since 2019.
Dorame, a multimedia artist whose work encompasses photography, sculptural installations, and sound art, is a member of the Tongva people. Her heritage connects her deeply to the landscape of California, and her practice explores what it means to be a Native inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (present-day Los Angeles).
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1st floor 8th and F Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20001
A curatorial advisory committee reached out to a range of artists whose creative practices engage with issues of feminism, gender, and sexuality. These present-day statements offer diverse perspectives to ever-expanding conversations about feminism.
Mary Savig
Curator of Manuscripts, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Nao Bustamante
Professor of Art and Director of MFA Art, University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design
Alexandra Chang
Associate Professor of Practice, Arts, Culture and Media Department & Acting Associate Director, The Clement A Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers University—Newark
Jaclyn Roessel
Founder, Grownup Navajo
Legacy Russell
Associate Curator of Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem
Feminist art resists easy definitions.
In 1977, feminist activists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven organized an exhibition centered on the question, “What is Feminist Art?” They invited artists to answer this question on a letter-sized piece of paper. Hundreds of artists responded in the form of collage, manifestos, drawings, and prints, providing a snapshot of the ongoing conversations around feminism in the United States.
In 2019, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art asked this same question, “What is Feminist Art?” to some of the same women who responded in 1977, as well as a new group of artists to capture the current response.
On view are more than 75 responses from then and now. These personal statements are vibrant and varied, elucidating the contours of feminist art by complicating its origins, calling out its failures, and celebrating its achievements.
This exhibition was organized by the Archives of American Art with funding from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
On View: July 1 - October 2021
The Map and the Territory distills the vast holdings of UCLA’s diverse collections into a single exhibition. Some 160 representative objects tell stories and make new meanings in exciting and unexpected ways. Organized by the Fowler Museum in partnership with the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Library, and featuring works from additional campus collections, the exhibition juxtaposes rare books and manuscripts, historic prints, contemporary paintings and drawings, abstract animations, ceramics, musical instruments, bird and animal specimens, meteorites, and more. Together, these seemingly disparate things invite you to explore the world, its communities, and the universe beyond. The Map and the Territory serves as a guide to the valuable place these collections hold in the history of UCLA’s pursuit of knowledge in our global society.
On View: Until November 2021
4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462
Featuring contemporary art by First Californians and other American Indian Artists, this exhibition includes nearly 70 works by more than 40 artists in various media. Painting, sculpture, prints, photography, installation, and video combine art and activism and embrace issues of identity, politics, and injustice.
On View: Through November 2021
Organized by jill moniz, Consulting Curator at the Getty, Photo Flux presents an important selection of work by radical photographers working in Los Angeles. Many of these artists are cultural makers and their views about and through the lens are transforming photography from its racializing past into a medium that simultaneously engenders aesthetics and agency. Describing a movement to expand how race, class and gender are constructed, signified and normalized, Photo Flux will highlight artists who have challenged and changed the medium, from how they interpret, describe, and record imagery to their insistence that their work be accessible to viewers who look like them.
On View: April 13 2021 - TBD
5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 and Anywhere Online
Working in landscapes she feels anchored to, Mercedes Dorame reclaims connection to the land and ancestral knowledge by exploring what it means to exist as a Native inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (Los Angeles). Portal for Tovaangar creates an immersive portal that links past, present, and potential future worlds. Viewers engage with what continues to inspire many Native people: the sky, the land, indigenous plant life, celestial bodies, and the infinite ability to connect to these entities and with each other. This work proposes a community healing opportunity, an exploration of truth in understanding Indigenous intrinsic knowledge, and reconciliation. Portal for Tovaangar shifts away from memorializing heroes and singular events to engage the continued and future presence of Native people in this city.
The song included in the piece is inspired by a 1918 wax cylinder recording of Tongva singing:
Kotiikawooken papaaxiiwo | Red-winged blackbird
Yakeenax nechoova yakenax | Dance with me
chawaayavet, chawaayavet | With outstretched wings
Mercedes Dorame creates an immersive installation addressing contemporary interpretation of Native Tongva ceremony and our relationship to celestial movements, eclipses, and solstices. The installation includes the creation of a semi-enclosed, domed immersive space, recordings of Tongva music, photograms, and cast concrete sculptures.