When Mara Brock Akil was a little girl, she voraciously read Judy Blume. Looking back, she sees her obsession as the start of her becoming a writer.
So when Akil heard that Blume was allowing her work to be translated to the screen, she was ready: “My little girl hand just shot up, ‘I want to do that!’” says Akil.
She adds that while this generation’s youth can search the internet for information — and, sometimes, misinformation — Blume was her own trusted source.
“The Information Age linked us and let us see things that we weren’t able to see or know, and Judy was that for us,” says Akil. “Judy was writing from a place that was really grounded and gave full humanity to young people and their lives. She took their lives seriously.”
Akil has channeled her affection for Blume’s work into a new adaptation of the author’s 1975 novel “Forever…,” which premiered Thursday on Netflix. Focused on two teens falling in love, the book contains sex scenes that placed it on banned lists from its inception — and Blume, whose work offers frank discussion of subjects like masturbation and menstruation, remains no stranger to banned book lists, despite selling more than 90 million books worldwide. But as censorship ramps up again, Blume has become something of a hot commodity in Hollywood. In addition to the documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” a feature film based on her novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” was released in 2023, an adaptation of “Summer Sisters” is in development at Hulu and an animated film based on “Superfudge” is in the works at Disney+.
Michael Cooper Jr. in “Forever.”
(Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / Netflix)
Akil’s “Forever,” set in 2018 Los Angeles, stars Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone as the teenage leads — though the roles are gender-swapped from the novel. In 2020, while Akil was developing the adaptation, she tried to think of who the most vulnerable person is in society.
“I posit that the Black boy is the most vulnerable,” she says. “My muse is my oldest son, and through the portal of him I got to go into the generation and just really start to look at what was going on.”
While working on the project, she realized there are few depictions of boys and young men whose story is anchored in love, rather than relegating love to a side plot. “Mentally, emotionally, physically — they too deserve to fall in love and be desired and have someone fall in love with them,” she says. “And for Keisha — his honesty was attractive to her. How often do we ever really see that level of vulnerability be the leading guy?”
In true Blume style, Akil also incorporated a central issue affecting people today — technology.
“The phone is a big character in the show, because there’s a lot of duality to the phone,” she says.
Throughout the series, the characters use phones to connect and disconnect via blocked messages, lost voicemails and unfinished texts. In the premiere, the drama revolves around the dreaded disappearing ellipsis — that feeling when you can see someone typing and then it stops.
Mara Brock Akil.
(Emma Feil)
Akil laughs when I bring it up: “At any age, that ellipsis will kick your butt.”
And when you add sex into the mix, everything becomes more charged. “The phone in the modern times is an extension of pleasure in sexuality, when used in a trusting way, and then it can be weaponized,” says Akil. “It can be so damaging to this generation’s future at a time in which mistakes are inherent in their development.”
It’s this keen awareness that the mistakes haven’t changed but the consequences have that grounds Akil’s version of “Forever.” “There’s a lot of real fear out there and real tough choices that parents are going through,” says Akil. “And in this era of mistakes, kids can make a mistake and die by exploring drugs or —”
She stops herself. “I get very emotional about the state of young people and their inability to make a mistake,” she says, “because I think most young people are actually making good choices.”
Akil says Blume and her family have seen the episodes more than once and told the showrunner she really enjoyed them. Akil remembers first meeting Blume.
“I was nervous. I wanted to be seen by her,” she says. “I fangirled out and she allowed it and then was, like, sit your soul down. We had a conversation, and it felt destined and magical. I was grateful that she listened, and it allowed me to come to the table saying, ‘I know how to translate this.’”
I ask Akil why she thinks Blume’s work continues to resonate, lasting for decades in its original form and spawning new projects to attract the next generation of viewers and, hopefully, readers.
“She’s relevant because she dared to tell us the truth,” says Akil. “And the truth is forever.”
United States President Donald Trump has offered to work with India and Pakistan to achieve a “solution” for the long-disputed Kashmir region, days after his administration brokered a ceasefire between the two nuclear-armed rivals.
“I will work with you, both to see if, after a ‘thousand years,’ a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
The US president doubled down on a historically inaccurate assertion that India and Pakistan have been fighting for “a thousand years” or more.
The Muslim-majority territory has been contested since the partition of British India in 1947 into India and Pakistan. The two countries have fought three wars over the region. They both stake a claim over Kashmir as a whole but control parts of it.
India-administered Kashmir has seen decades of armed rebellion either for independence or a merger with Pakistan. New Delhi has deployed more than 700,000 soldiers to quash the rebellion.
The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far remained committed to a decades-old policy of refusing international mediation to find a solution to the Kashmir issue. In 2019, Modi’s government stripped India-administered Kashmir’s semiautonomy, further alienating the Kashmiris.
In its response, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Sunday that it appreciates Trump’s willingness to resolve the Kashmir issue, which has implications for peace and security in South Asia and beyond.
“Pakistan reaffirms that any just and lasting settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute must be in accordance with the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions and must ensure the realization of the fundamental rights of the Kashmiri people, including their inalienable right to self-determination,” it said.
India’s leaders have not directly commented, but Indian media quoted unnamed government sources as saying no decision has yet been made to engage in talks on anything beyond the ceasefire.
India and Pakistan agreed to halt all fighting on Saturday, but Trump was the first person to announce the deal on his online platform.
In his post on Sunday, Trump took credit for the ceasefire.
“I am proud that the USA was able to help you arrive at this historic and heroic decision,” he wrote.
“While not even discussed, I am going to increase trade, substantially, with both of these great nations.”
The latest fighting between the two neighbours started when India attacked Pakistan in the aftermath of a shooting attack in India-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which killed 26 civilians at a tourist location.
New Delhi again accused Pakistan of backing the “terrorist” groups that have launched many deadly attacks in India-administered Kashmir for decades.
Pakistan strongly denies the charges, maintaining that India has supported “terrorism” in its territory for many years and the Pahalgam attack was a false-flag operation to start a war.
The missile, drone and artillery attacks signified the most serious fighting between the two countries since they became nuclear-armed powers decades ago.
‘Neutral’ site for talks
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that in addition to the ceasefire, the two countries agreed to conduct broad talks over a host of issues at a “neutral” site soon.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Saturday said his country believes in the path of peaceful negotiations to resolve problems around distribution of water resources and “all issues, including Jammu and Kashmir”.
But India has for decades refused to hold negotiations over the contested region as it has tried to strengthen its hold over it.
Indian soldiers are deployed at a market in Srinagar in India-administered Kashmir on May 6, 2025 [Mukhtar Khan/AP]
Mohmad Waseem Malla, a research fellow at the International Centre for Peace Studies in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s statement, though not entirely surprising, was “striking both in tone and substance” and likely to raise concerns in New Delhi.
“Any suggestion of third-party involvement, even in passing, crosses a red line for New Delhi – especially under the current government, which has redefined the country’s foreign policy and its emphasis on territorial sovereignty.”
He added that while Trump’s mention of boosting trade and promoting peace may seem conciliatory internationally, India’s domestic political climate and strategic priorities make it difficult to entertain such offers right now.
“The key will be how New Delhi calibrates its response given current sensitivities.”
In response to the Pahalgam attack, India also expelled Pakistani diplomats, military advisers and visa holders; closed its main land border crossing and suspended trade; and launched a manhunt for the perpetrators.
Pakistan responded by kicking out Indian officials and citizens, closing its airspace to Indian flights and threatening to pull out of the Simla Agreement, which underpins the Line of Control in Kashmir.
Osvaldo Golijov’s beauteously strange “Ainadamar” has reached Los Angeles. The opera, one of this century’s most gratifying, portrays the 1936 political execution of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the Spanish Civil War through the final minutes of actress Margarita Xirgu’s life. She dies as she is about to go onstage in the Lorca play “Mariana Pineda,” about the heroine of an earlier Spanish revolution.
Margarita’s final minute on Earth lasts 90 flamenco-filled minutes in Golijov’s one-act opera. Lorca’s life — his spirit and loves and lust — is revealed in flashbacks, which L.A. Opera makes the most of in a flamboyant, dance-drenched production. But it is Margarita’s pain we feel, her death we experience and her life we mourn.
Lorca’s death, then, becomes a borrowed experience. He is a spirit of history. Margarita’s last act is to pass on that spirit to a young actress, Nuria, and in the process, to us. The saddest of operas, “Ainadamar” is not a tragic opera, not an opera of open-and-shut endings, but one of open-ended endings.
Life goes on. But what comes next?
A movie-length production without intermission can feel about right for a modern audience. “Ainadamar” satisfies on its own but nevertheless suggests there is something more to consider. The sheer force of Margarita’s being asks to remain in our consciousness longer.
She did remain a little longer. Following the Sunday matinee of “Ainadamar” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the U.S. premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s new “Dream Requiem,” which proved an ideal companion to “Ainadamar.”
Although Golijov is an introspective Argentine American composer who comes out of the classical music world, his works are infused with folk song and dance from Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Wainwright is an introspective pop star with a noted folk song pedigree who also is an opera enthusiast and composer. At the pre-concert talk Sunday, Wainwright said hearing Verdi’s Requiem as a 13-year-old changed his life.
“Ainadamar” and the 80-minute “Dream Requiem” have poets at their core. Just as Lorca embodies Lorca, Wainwright threads recitations of Lord Byron’s 1816 “Darkness,” throughout a score otherwise based on the traditional Latin requiem text.
Each work is its own fountain of tears. Ainadamar is, in fact, the Arabic term for the Fountain of Tears, the site in Granada where Lorca was shot by a firing squad, presumably for political reasons as well as for being gay. In “Dream Requiem,” we cry over the environment. Byron wrote “Darkness” as a response to the 1815 Mt. Tambora volcano eruption in Indonesia, which clouded sunlight around the world for more than a year.
The so-called 1816 “year without a summer” was also a time of revolt in Spain. Fifteen years later, the Spanish liberalist Mariana Pineda was executed. The three parts of “Ainadamar” begin with the chorus singing a ballad to her.
The magnificent performance of “Dream Requiem” — conducted by Grant Gershon and featuring, along with the Master Chorale, the impressive Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, an excellent large orchestra, the spectacular soprano Liv Redpath and a vehement Jane Fonda as the gripping narrator — proved a necessary complement to a more problematic performance of “Ainadamar.”
The opera has deep L.A. roots. A Los Angeles Philharmonic co-commission, the theatrically tentative first version of “Ainadamar” survived on its instances of musical brilliance. Under the supervision of Peter Sellars, Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang completely rewrote “Ainadamar” for Santa Fe Opera in a sublimely moving production with gloriously grafitti-fied sets by L.A. artist Gronk.
A musically promising but uncertain opera instantly turned into an essential classic for a new century. Long Beach Opera’s tenuous local premiere of that version was followed by a powerful concert performance at the Ojai Music Festival with the Atlanta Symphony conducted by Robert Spano and starring Dawn Upshaw, the forces who made the work’s celebrated recording.
The L.A. Opera revival is a new production that has been making the rounds at Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, Detroit Opera and, last fall, New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It’s the work of Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, best known for creating the Cirque du Soleil touring show “Ovo.”
Colker treats “Ainadamar” as another drama spectacle with dazzling imagery. The flamenco dancing, choreographed by Antonio Najarro, is exciting and the dancing terrific. Resplendent video projections by Tal Rosner appear on beaded curtains that surround a circular space in the middle of the stage where most of the action takes place.
Ana Maria Martinez as Margarita Xirgu, left, and Daniela Mack as Federico Garcia Lorca in “Ainadamar.”
(Cory Weaver / LA Opera)
But all of this avoids the challenges of a magical realism where questions about the purpose of poetry, theater, political resistance, life and legacy are answerable only by dying. Golijov’s score is also unanswerable, full of electronic effects, where the sound of gunshots beat out intricate dance rhythms.
The three main characters are played by women: Margarita (Ana María Martínez), Nuria (Vanessa Becerra) and Lorca (Daniela Mack). All prove believable and their trio at the end is exquisite, even if with amplification and the dramatic limitations of the production they have limited presence. Alfredo Tejada makes a startling company debut as a ferociously frightening Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who arrests Lorca. The company’s resident conductor, Lina González-Granados, thrives on forcefully emphasized dance rhythms.
Less prominent were the opera’s wondrous lyric moments or a sense of Golijov’s inventive, multifaceted musical sources. Where the company makes up for that, though, is in its series of informative podcasts and program notes adding whatever context is lost in the staging.
Like Golijov (and like Leonard Bernstein and Mahler), Wainwright is at heart a songwriter, and he had the advantage of Gershon conveying the luxuriant lyricism in “Dream Requiem,” a work that at its heart also is operatic. He harks back to Verdi and the late 19th century but with his own unexpected turns of phrase.
Like Golijov in “Ainadamar,” Wainwright starts very quietly and slow-builds his musical architecture out of an array of materials and colors. He goes in for big effects, lots of percussion, huge climaxes and sweet melodies of which you can never, if so inclined, get enough.
Wainwright bangs out the “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) as almost all composers do in requiem masses, but he can be restrained where others tend to be loud and enthusiastic (Sanctus) and visa versa. He shows no mercy for the solo soprano part, but Redpath astounded as she scaled the heights.
Jane Fonda recites Byron’s “Darkness” in Rufus Wainwright’s “Dream Requiem” at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday.
(Jamie Pham / Los Angeles Master Chorale)
In the end, Wainwright has created a latter-day bardo, the spiritual journey that follows death. The interruptions from Byron’s poem brought chills in Fonda’s mesmerizing reading, as the text follows the breakdown of humanity in the aftermath of environmental catastrophe. She made it feel like a requiem warning for us all.
Once is not enough for “Dream Requiem.” A recording of the premiere in Paris last year has been released, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the live performance by the Master Chorale in Disney. “Dream Requiem” will be presented by several co-commissioners in Europe, as well as for the Royal Ballet in London.
Who will dare to dream big and be the first to stage “Dream Requiem” as a double bill with “Ainadamar”?
It’s all about the magic of puppets in the play “Life of Pi,” which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre — part of the inaugural North American tour after opening on Broadway in 2023 and later winning three Tony Awards. Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling 2001 novel follows a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives at sea in the company of animals including a Bengal tiger.
It’s that tiger, a 450-pound beast named Richard Parker, that captivates the audience alongside an orangutan named Orange Juice plus a hyena and a zebra. The creatures were designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, with movement direction by Caldwell, whose work is among the best in the business. It takes three puppeteers to fully animate the astonishing Richard Parker.
This isn’t a children’s play, mind you, and it’s recommended for ages 10 and older. The story has crushingly tragic elements and contemplates the big mysteries of life and death through a spiritual lens. I thought my 9-year-old daughter could handle the intense moments, and she did sit slack-jawed throughout. The puppets imbued the play with a poetry of motion and an otherworldly sense of wonder. The puppeteers were fully visible as they rendered the taut, muscular menace of the tiger and the kinetic leaping of the orangutan, making the creatures appear to be the stuff of fantasy.
Lead actor Taha Mandviwala, who plays Pi, is equally lithe and surefooted as he leaped across the stage in communion with his animal castmates in choreography that felt very much like dance.
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt looking forward to a weekend of being shipwrecked on my couch. Here’s your regular dose of arts news.
Best bets: On our radar this week
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‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’
From one tiger we jump to another: Twelve years before Ang Lee directed the movie adaptation of “Life of Pi,” the filmmaker dazzled audiences with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” With a cast that included Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat, the 2000 movie went on to win four Oscars — and arguably could have won best picture had the academy voting body been as globally diverse then as it is now. The film will screen in 35mm, and filmmaker Ang Lee and actor Zhang Ziyi in conversation with Academy of Motion Pictures President Janet Yang. Advance tickets are already sold out, but standby seats will be available on first-come basis. 7:30 p.m. Friday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. L.A. www.academymuseum.org
Milka Djordjevich: ‘Bob’
Choreographer and performer Djordjevich says her upcoming Warehouse at the Geffen Contemporary show “eroticizes the labor of the dancing body.” Bob is an alter-ego and, according to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s description of the program, that alter-ego is “on a rampage with and against self-consciousness in order to bask in reverie, delusion, desire and rage. Show no mercy!” Um, OK! 7:30-8:30 p.m. Friday, 4-5 p.m. Saturday. Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo. www.moca.org
Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia
Touted as an exhibition of 180 masterpieces of Buddhist art, this show at LACMA follows Buddhism’s origins in India as it spread across Asia — Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan. Paintings, sculptures and ritual artifacts have been culled from the museum’s permanent collection or borrowed from private owners. Sunday-July 12. Resnick Pavilion, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. www.lacma.org
The week ahead: A curated calendar
Friday
Evergreen Review Author Pat Thomas signs his new book, “Evergreen Review Magazine: Dispatches from the Literary Underground: Covers & Essays 1957-1973,” and discusses the counterculture magazine with writer Jessica Hundley and illustrator Jess Rotter. 7 p.m. Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. booksoup.com
The Homecoming Frédérique Michel directs this production of Harold Pinter’s classic enigmatic domestic drama. 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday, through June 15. City Garage 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica citygarage.org
Max Richter The innovative composer performs work from his albums “The Blue Notebooks” (2004) and “In A Landscape” (2024) with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. 8 p.m. Friday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Venice Family Clinic Art Walk + Auction The annual fundraiser showcases the work of established, mid-career and emerging artists, with a spotlight on this year’s joint Signature Artists, Lita and Isabelle Albuquerque. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. through May 18. Venice Art Walk Gallery, 910 Abbot Kinney Blvd. venicefamilyclinic.org
Saturday
Just Like Heaven The millennial indie compendium gets a long-awaited Rilo Kiley reunion and sets from Vampire Weekend, Bloc Party and TV on the Radio. Noon. Brookside at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena. justlikeheavenfest.com
Wicked Elphaba and Galinda’s adventures in Oz get the outdoor treatment with food trucks, live music and more, plus a Q&A with choreographer Christopher Scott before the screening. 8 p.m. Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park. streetfoodcinema.com
Culture news and the SoCal scene
Michael Tilson Thomas
(Brigitte Lacombe / L.A. Phil)
Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who has performed for years after a brain cancer diagnosis, made his last public appearance at a San Francisco Symphony gala and a tribute to him. Times classical music critic Mark Swed attended the festive affair, noting, “For six decades, beginning with his undergraduate years at USC — where he attracted the attention of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and the odd rock ‘n’ roll musician about town — Tilson Thomas has been a joy-making key figure in American music.”
Times art critic Christopher Knight dives into the photographic history of child labor as seen through the lens of sociologist Lewis W. Hine, who photographed kids at work during the first decades of the 20th century. These striking and unsettling images played a key role in galvanizing Americans to push for comprehensive child labor laws. “Legislatures in 16 states, Florida prominent among them, have been deliberating rolling back child labor laws. In some cases, major steps have already been taken to loosen restrictions on work by kids as young as 14. The erasures, almost exclusively promoted by Republicans, target legal prohibitions against child exploitation that have been in place for nearly a century,” writes Knight.
Center Theatre Group has revealed its 2025-26 season lineup, which includes the Imelda Marcos bio-musical “Here Lies Love,” featuring music by David Byrne of the art-rock band Talking Heads; the Jocelyn Bioh play “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”; Eboni Booth’s new Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Primary Trust”; a stage riff on the “Paranormal Activity” movies; the musical “& Juliet”; and a 25th anniversary revival of “Mamma Mia!” Read all about the upcoming offerings, here.
Adam Lambert
(Christina House, For The Times / UnionTribune)
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Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Adam Lambert will play Judas opposite Cythia Erivo’s Jesus in the Hollywood Bowl’s August production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced this week. Lambert is no stranger to musical theater, having appeared in a Tony Award-winning production of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” as well as in the first national tour and L.A. company of “Wicked.” Single tickets for Bowl shows also went on sale this week.
Topanga’s Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum has announced the two Shakespeare comedies that will kick off its “2025 Season of Resilience” (so-named after the Palisades fire came perilously close to the venue) in its lovely outdoor amphitheater: “Much Ado About Nothing” on June 7 and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on June 8.
The Academy Museum has announced that writer-director Judd Apatow will be its first guest curator for a new comedy film exhibition set to open in April 2027. The news was revealed during a 20th anniversary screening of Apatow’s 2005 directorial debut, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” starring Steve Carell.
SALFORD’S chief executive Chris Irwin has left his role as rugby league chiefs may help them limp through this season if their cash crisis deepens.
But work on operating with 11 teams should they go under has also been done, including introducing a points percentage table.
2
Rugby league chiefs are working on plans should Salford’s cash crisis deepenCredit: SWPIX.COM
Administration or even a winding up order looms large over the Red Devils after a takeover by Sire Kailahi and Curtiz Brown turned into a disaster – it is believed they still think they can get it done in June.
HMRC is set to decide its course of action over unpaid bills while the Rugby Football League is owed £500,000 with payday loan firms wanting money back.
Its latest drama has seen Irwin, the man they brought in to turn the club into a powerhouse, depart, with players and staff being told yesterday he had ‘resigned.’
A short statement said: “We can confirm Chris Irwin’s departure as CEO from Salford Red Devils, after accepting his resignation.
“We thank him for his efforts. The journey continues – Reds Rise Together.”
That comes as SunSport understands tentative talks have been held about the governing body or Rugby League Commercial stepping in to make sure they at least complete the season.
That would prevent a sporting mess as Salford going bust would mean some sides will play 25 matches and others 24, meaning a percentage table – like the one employed in 2020 and 2021 to cope with Covid-19 enforced postponements – may be brought in.
SunSport believes a more natural Super League season with 11 teams had been devised until round six but at 10 matches in, the point of that being able to be employed has passed.
It would also mean awkward conversations with broadcaster Sky, who may demand some of their broadcast deal back because of fewer fixtures, would be put off.
Bosses are said to be holding ‘multiple daily conversations’ with Salford, who are still interesting other potential owners.
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Salford, who saw Chris Atkin become the latest player to leave, may yet enter administration or be served with a winding up orderCredit: SWPIX.COM
Kailahi and Brown have so far not put in the funding they talked about at the beginning of the season and six players have left after they waited for their wages in February and March, with April’s just being paid on time following a scramble.
And with no sign of attitudes changing, a repeat is possible in May.
Administration, which would take any decision to sell the club out of their hands, would mean Salford are automatically relegated for next season under IMG’s grading scheme.
But liquidation cannot be ruled out, unless the owners put their money in or another person takes them on.
President Trump continues to press for control over institutions that shape the arts, culture — and history. Last week the administration removed board members appointed by former President Biden from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., including former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized,” Emhoff, who is Jewish and a leader in fighting rising antisemitism against Jewish Americans, wrote on social media after his termination. “To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”
A few days earlier, the Associated Press reported that a week of events connected with the city’s World Pride Festival celebrating the LGBTQ+ community had been quietly canceled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The news was not surprising to those who have followed the national arts institution since Trump fired much of the board and orchestrated his appointment as chairman.
A page on the Kennedy Center website still references its Tapestry of Pride programming, but it doesn’t connect to any events. Groups planning festivities at the center told the AP that after Trump’s takeover, their contact with the venue went dark, forcing them to relocate their performances to other venues.
One sign of resistance, however, flashed on Friday, when House Democrats asked the Smithsonian’s inspector general to investigate the legality of Trump’s executive order threatening to pull funding for museums with ideology that the president deemed “improper.” That announcement follows resistance seen on a more local level, including the Japanese American National Museum in L.A. declaring that it would not bend to pressure to scrub references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its website. “Our community is based on diversity, equity is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and inclusion is what we believe in,” a museum official said.
I’m culture writer Jessica Gelt, here with Ashley Lee with your weekly arts news and some worthwhile diversions from our reality.
Best bets: On our radar this week
Newsletter
You’re reading Essential Arts
Our critics and reporters guide you through events and happenings of L.A.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Analia Saban with her “Broken Vase” project at Gemini G.E.L. in 2016.
(Sidney B. Felsen)
Analia Saban and Printmaking in L.A.
“Saban has made it her cunning practice to reconstitute painting and sculpture, to fiddle with foundations, essences and definitions, to take nothing for granted,” wrote Times contributor Leah Ollman of Analia Saban in 2017. The artist will be joined by Naoko Takahatake (director and chief curator of the UCLA Grunwald Center of the Graphic Arts), Case Hudson (master printer at Gemini G.E.L.), Shaye Remba (director of Mixografia) and Francesco Siqueiros (founder of El Nopal Press) in a conversation exploring the place of printmaking in her creative practice, as well as her many collaborations with renowned print shops around Los Angeles. The free talk takes place Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu
Esa-Pekka Salonen Leads Debussy and Boulez
To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of revolutionary French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, the Los Angeles Philharmonic (which Boulez conducted often), French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (whom Boulez invited to be in his Ensemble Intercontemporain) and L.A. Dance Project will join Esa-Pekka Salonen for a program that Times classical music critic Mark Swed touted last month. The belated birthday concerts (Boulez was born March 26) take place Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. (Another Boulez-centric event is set for May 30 at UCLA’s Nimoy Theater, with L.A. pianist Gloria Cheng and Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat performing Boulez’s two-piano “Structures,” along with pieces by John Cage, Stravinsky and Frank Zappa.) This week’s concerts will be at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown. laphil.com
Michael Luo and Charles Yu
“Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America” tells the story of the Chinese populations who were lured to the United States in the 19th century to work, only to be expelled later by politicians as a perceived national threat. Writers Bloc presents a conversation about the book between author Michael Luo, also the executive editor of the New Yorker and a former New York Times journalist, and Charles Yu, author of the novel “Interior Chinatown.” The talk takes place Monday at 7:30 p.m. The Ebell of Los Angeles, 741 S. Lucerne Blvd., Mid-Wilshire. ebellofla.org
— Ashley Lee
The week ahead: A curated calendar
Monday
ASCAP Foundation Musical Theatre Fest Stephen Schwartz hosts this two-night event: Monday features “Songs From the Cutting Room Floor,” composers performing tunes that were painfully excised from their hit musicals; in Tuesday’s Musical Theatre Workshop, composers present excerpts from “Piney Needlesmith and the Road Less Traveled” and “Weekend.”
7:30 p.m. Monday. 7 p.m. Tuesday. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org
1975: Fifty Is the New Hollywood The Who’s musical “Tommy,” directed by Ken Russell, launches this tribute to one of the landmark years in cinema; other films (with special guests) include “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Nashville,” “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” and “Cooley High” (with Michael Schultz, Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs).
1 and 4 p.m.; series continues through May 26. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. egyptiantheatre.com
Tuesday
Dr. Phil Live With Adam Ray The lighthearted lampooning of the TV therapist returns with an all-star supporting cast of comedians in an array of ridiculous sketches.
Life of Pi A 16-year-old boy survives on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger in Lolita Chakrabarti’s adventurous stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling novel.
Through June 1. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. centertheatregroup.org
Wednesday
Central Cee The U.K. rapper tours behind his debut LP, “Can’t Rush Greatness.”
J Balvin The reggaeton singer goes “Back to the Rayo” on his tour.
8 p.m. Toyota Arena, 4000 Ontario Center, Ontario; 8 p.m. Friday. Kia Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood. jbalvin.com
Debussy & Boulez Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the L.A. Phil in a program contrasting Bartók and the two iconic French composers.
8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Love’s End French director Maurice Attias brings a slice of French culture to L.A. with the West Coast premiere of “Clôture de l’amour” (Love’s End) by celebrated French playwright Pascal Rambert in an English translation by Jim Fletcher and Kate Moran.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 15. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. odysseytheatre.com
Yo La Tengo An evening with the eclectic indie rock band and its most recent album, “This Stupid World.”
Helen J. Shen and Darren Criss in “Maybe Happy Ending” on Broadway.
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
Tony Awards
When nominations were announced, even the most bankable star power couldn’t push aside artistic innovation in the races for theater’s biggest honors. Broadway is awash in big names — Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney, Kieran Culkin — and even bigger ticket prices this season, but only one of those megastars received a nomination: Clooney for his work in “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Bob Odenkirk also earned a nod for his role in the revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending” led the pack with 10 nominations each. Read all about the nominations here.
Art lovers view select art pieces at an exhibition preview party/dinner for Frieze LA on Feb. 15, 2022, in Santa Monica.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Frieze
Ownership of the Frieze art organization is changing hands. Beverly Hills entertainment company Endeavor is selling it to a new events and experiences company launched by Endeavor’s founder, agent Ari Emanuel. Times staff writer Wendy Leehas the full story of the transfer of ownership, reportedly worth an estimated $200 million.
Gustavo Dudamel
Beloved L.A. Phil music and artistic director Gustavo Dudamel is heading to New York City in advance of his move there to take over the New York Philharmonic at the end of the 2025-26 season. He may still belong to L.A., but this summer he’s scheduled to conduct four free New York Phil concerts in parks around the Big Apple.
Hollywood Fringe
The 15th annual theater festival is on the calendar for June 12-29, and tickets for hundreds of shows, featuring a wealth of local and national talent, are on sale now.
LACO
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra recently held a sold-out gala at the Skirball Cultural Center that raised more than $1 million for the organization. Paul Broucek, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Music, was honored at the event, as were longtime LACO supporters Sandy and Pat Gage.
— Jessica Gelt
And last but not least
Want a ridiculously filling, meat, cheese, egg and potato-stuffed breakfast burrito? Head to Pasadena!
Since the start of the year, Brandy Hernandez has applied to nearly 200 entertainment jobs.
The 22-year-old film school graduate, who works as a receptionist at the Ross Stores buying office in downtown Los Angeles, said that for most of those applications, she never heard back — not even a rejection. When she did land follow-up interviews, she was almost always ghosted afterward.
“I knew that I wouldn’t be a famous screenwriter or anything straight out of college,” said Hernandez, who graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2024. But she thought she’d at least be qualified for an entry-level film industry job.
Studios scrambling to cut costs amid the turbulence were quick to slash low-level positions that historically got rookies in the door.
“You almost feel cursed,” said Ryan Gimeson, who graduated from Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in 2023, in the early days of the writers’ strike.
And while screenwriting has always been a competitive field, industry veterans attested that the conditions have rarely ever been harsher for young writers.
“In the past 40 years of doing this, this is the most disruptive I’ve ever seen it,” said Tom Nunan, founder of Bull’s Eye Entertainment and a lecturer in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
The landscape is especially dry in television writing, according to a jobs report released last month by the Writers Guild of America.
TV writing roles dropped 42% in the 2023-2024 season that coincided with the strikes, the report said. About a third of those cuts were to lower-level appointments.
It’s a far cry from the TV business Liz Alper broke into 15 years ago.
Alper, an L.A.-based writer-producer and co-founder of the fair worker treatment movement #PayUpHollywood, came up in the early 2010s, when opportunities in scripted television were still plentiful.
The CW, for instance, was putting out three original one-hour shows a night, or about 18 to 21 original pieces of programming a week, Alper said. That translated to anywhere between 100 and 200 staff writer slots.
But in the last five years or so, the rise of streaming has essentially done the opposite — poaching cable subscribers, edging out episodic programming with bingeable on-demand series and cutting writing jobs in the process.
The job scarcity has driven those in entry-level positions to stay there longer than they used to. A 2021 #PayUpHollywood survey found that most support staffers were in their late twenties, several years older than they were on average a decade ago.
Without those employees moving up and creating vacancies, recent graduates have nowhere to come in.
“I think if you have a job, it feels like you’ve got one of the lifeboats on the Titanic, and you’re not willing to give up the seat,” Alper said.
The entertainment job market has also suffered from the ongoing exodus of productions from California, where costs are high and tax incentives are low.
Legislation that would raise the state’s film tax credit to 35% of qualified spending — up from its current 20–25% rates — is pending after winning unanimous votes out of the Senate revenue and taxation committee and the Assembly arts and entertainment committee. Supporters say the move is critical for California to remain competitive with other states and countries, state legislators have argued.
Meanwhile, young creatives are questioning whether L.A. is the place to launch their careers.
Peter Gerard.
(Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)
Peter Gerard, 24, moved to L.A. from Maryland two years ago to pursue TV writing. After graduating with a data science degree from the University of Maryland, he sensed it was his last chance to chase his dream.
Within weeks of arriving in L.A. in April 2023, he landed a handful of job interviews and even felt hopeful about a few.
Then the writers guild went on strike.
“I came moments before disaster, and I had no idea,” he said.
During the slowdown, Gerard filled his time by working on independent films, attending writing classes and building his portfolio. He was fine without a full-time gig, he said, figuring L.A. would work its magic on him eventually.
Such “cosmic choreography” touched writer-producer Jill Goldsmith nearly 30 years ago, she said, when she left her job as a public defender in Chicago to pursue TV writing. After seven trying months in L.A., her luck turned when she met “NYPD Blue” co-creator David Milch in line at a Santa Monica chocolate shop. Goldsmith sent him a script, the show bought it and she got her first credit in 1998.
Goldsmith, a lecturer in the UCLA MFA program in the School of Theater, Film and Television, said she tells her students such opportunities only come when they meet fate halfway.
But hearing veteran writers mourn their lost jobs and L.A.’s bygone glory led Gerard to question his own bid for success.
“I felt sorry for them, but it also made me realize, like, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of people who want to do this, and a lot of them are much further along than me, with nothing to show for it,’” he said.
Lore Olivera.
(Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)
As the youngest staff writer in her current writers’ room, Lore V. Olivera, 26, has gotten used to her senior counterparts waxing nostalgic about the “good old times.”
“I think they’re definitely romanticizing a bit,” she said, “but there is some truth in there.”
Olivera landed her first staff writer job in 2023, a year after graduating from Stanford University. The process was straightforward: her reps cold-emailed her samples to a showrunner, he liked them, she interviewed and got the job. But Olivera said such success stories are rare.
“I was ridiculously lucky,” she said. Still, getting staffed is no finish line, she added, just a 20-week pause on the panic of finding the next gig.
Olivera is also the only staff writer in her current room, with all her colleagues holding higher titles like editor or producer. It’s a natural consequence, she said, of showrunners facing pressure to fill limited positions with heavy-hitters already proven capable of creating hits.
Olivera said she knows not every 26-year-old was getting hired a few decades ago, but even her elder peers agreed the industry has lost a former air of possibility.
“It’s definitely a slap in the face when you get here and you’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s going to be a few miserable years, and then I might not even make it,’” Olivera said. “Not even because I’m good or bad… but just because the industry is so dead and so afraid of taking chances.’”
Jolaya Gillams, who graduated from Chapman’s Dodge college in 2023, said that her class had talent in spades. But the industry hasn’t given them anywhere to put it.
“I hope that we move into an era of film where it’s new, fresh ideas and new perspectives and having an open mind to the voice of our generation,” Gillams said.
Until then, the filmmaker said she’ll continue to create work for herself.
During the strikes, Gillams and a production team with no budget made the short film “Sincero,” which won the audience award for short documentary at the 2023 Newport Beach Film Festival. As she continues the search for a distributor for the doc, she already has another project in the works.
Weary from the “black hole” of job applications, Hernandez said she, too, is focused on bringing her own work to life. In an ideal world, that leads to a film festival or two, maybe even agency representation. But mostly, what drives her is pride in the work itself.
“If I’m successful in my mind,” said Hernandez, “I’m content with that.”
Legislatures in 16 states, Florida prominent among them, have been deliberating rolling back child labor laws. In some cases, major steps have already been taken to loosen restrictions on work by kids as young as 14. The erasures, almost exclusively promoted by Republicans, target legal prohibitions against child exploitation that have been in place for nearly a century.
Here’s a surprise: Radical transformations in photography are one primary reason the threatened rollbacks have gotten traction.
In the first decade of the 20th century, sociologist Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera and trained it on the cheap labor performed by children, which had become commonplace everywhere from Pittsburgh steel mills to Carolina textile factories, from an Alabama canning company for shucked oysters to West Virginia factories for glass. When published, Hine’s haunting pictures scandalized America, and laws to protect kids emerged.
An entire modern artistic genre — documentary photography — was weaned on the growing social effort to rein in the abusive practice of forcing children to toil in sweatshops and on farms in the wake of the Gilded Age. Emblematic is Hine’s luminous picture of a young girl — called a spinner — at North Carolina’s Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co. He positioned the shabbily dressed child between a seemingly unending row of whirling textile bobbins, where her job was to patrol the interminable line and speedily repair broken threads, and a row of factory windows where light streams in from outdoors to illuminate the interior scene. She has stopped her work to face the camera, clearly at the photographer’s instruction.
Lewis W. Hine, “Cotton Mill Worker, North Carolina,” 1908; gelatin silver print.
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Her right hand, fingers curled, rests on the infernal machine, while her left hand is open on the windowsill. She’s a juvenile hostage, an innocent trapped between captivity and freedom.
A spinner’s toil in a textile mill was not especially dangerous, although loss of a finger was certainly a risk. However, as Stanford art historian Alexander Nemerov has sharply observed, the damage recorded in Hine’s entrancing photograph was inflicted at least as much on the young girl’s soul as on her body. An aura of entrapment is evoked. A repetitive, tedious, mechanically determined routine is her present and her future, stretching into infinity. When her focused gaze meets yours, a coiled look of resignation stiffens her soft face, and it is painful to see.
You might move on. But for her, this is it.
The transformation in photography today is not that artists have abandoned a productive interest in the state of the world, including these sorts of cruel labor conditions, which social documentary photographs explore. They haven’t. LaToya Ruby Frazier is one impressive example.
“The Last Cruze,” her moving exhibition at Exposition Park’s California African American Museum in 2021, registered the lives of union workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio — workers displaced and disrupted when the factory was shuttered two years earlier. Frazier’s installation of 67 black-and-white photographs and one color video told an unflattering story of the human aftermath, and it did so in fascinating ways.
But it is also fair to say that her soulful installation did not — could not — generate the same sort of outrage that Hine’s photographs did. In 1908, when he began to publish his images of young children working under bleak conditions in factories and on farms, the context in which the pictures appeared was radically different from today’s visual environment.
Lewis W. Hine, “Oyster shuckers, Biloxi, Miss.,” circa 1911; gelatin silver print.
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Simply put, photographs were still scarce, relatively speaking, but they were on their way to replacing woodblock illustrations in newspapers and periodicals to become the dominant form of visual media. Camera pictures were disruptive. They connected straight to the world in front of the lens, and they had the capacity to grab eyeballs, pulling minds along with them.
Today, living in a media-saturated landscape, there’s no escape from them. Only rarely do they disrupt. Wake up in the morning, check your phone, and scores — maybe even hundreds — of pictures flash by before breakfast. In such a milieu, Hine’s troubling 1908 photographs would easily disappear, perhaps seizing a moment but soon evaporating into the visual miasma that floods the zone daily.
And now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, assumption of a direct connection to reality unravels. Skepticism about photographic authenticity arises.
Hine, then in his early 30s, was part of a growing Progressive movement that sought large-scale social and political reform following the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the explosion of the grasping Gilded Age. John Spargo, a self-educated British stonemason who emigrated to New York in 1901, became an unlikely political theorist of the movement. His book “The Bitter Cry of the Children” fiercely condemned child labor practices, arguing in part that interrupting school with work caused lifelong impairment.
“Three young coal miners, with mules; Pennsylvania,” 1908; gelatin silver print.
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Novelists as different as Jack London and H.G. Wells agreed, and they said so in short stories and magazine essays. A private, nonprofit National Child Labor Committee formed to lobby state and federal officials, while embarking on public education. The NCLC hired Hine.
His research experience as a sociologist had led him to the pioneering photographs of Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Riis exposed Lower East Side slum conditions in tenement photographs that would form the basis for his renowned book, “How the Other Half Lives.” Hine, recognizing the power of photographs as visual evidence, soon picked up the camera too.
His pictorial documents of child labor began to appear in weekly magazines, like Charities and the Commons, and in widely distributed NCLC pamphlets with such dry if explanatory titles as “Child Labor in Virginia” and “Farmwork and Schools in Kentucky.” The publications might have had limited circulation, but their poignant photographs seeped into the popular press.
For readers who did not spend their days walking the factory floor or supervising the sorting of coal chunks sliding down a chute, an incisive picture would stand out. Witnessing a photograph of a naive child climbing up barefoot into massive machinery or shadowed beneath big tobacco leaves sprayed with pesticides could easily stick in the mind.
Lewis W. Hine, “10 year old picker, Gildersleeve tobacco farm,” 1917; gelatin silver print.
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Hine’s 1917 picture of a 10-year-old boy working Connecticut’s Gildersleeve tobacco farm, south of Hartford, shows him on his knees in an irrigation ditch between rows of what is probably the tough tobacco used for cigar wrappers. (More tender tobacco, shredded for the filling, was grown in the South, not New England.) It’s the first picking, when three fully grown leaves near the bottom of the stalk are cut and stacked. First one side’s plant, then the other’s, would be picked — and on the child would go, plant by plant in the humid, late-summer heat down lengthy rows covering acres of farmland.
Soon, the second tier of leaves would mature and the process repeated. Then the third tier was ready, picked while reaching up, and so on until, standing, the plant was fully harvested.
The labor’s grueling tedium is stifling. My own first summer job as a kid in search of after-school pocket money was picking cigar tobacco on a Connecticut farm just north of Hartford. I was 14. I lasted less than a week. Hine’s tousled little boy, who looks forlornly into the camera with scowling dark eyes beneath a furrowed brow, likely had no such liberating choice.
Today’s drive to roll back state child labor laws is being pushed by conservative groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability in Naples, Fla., a well-funded anti-welfare organization. (Ironically, according to its 2023 tax filing, the CEO of the FGA, a nonprofit seeking to loosen child labor restrictions, received more than $498,000 in salary and other compensation.) In that tourism-dependent state, the Orlando Weekly reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office wrote his state’s bill, saying changes made by the legislature last year to loosen working restrictions for minors “did not go far enough.” If passed, teenagers as young as 14 could work overnight hours on school nights or long shifts without a meal break.
The Miami Herald reported that, in defense of his plan, the governor explained to the Trump administration’s border czar that a younger workforce could be part of the solution to replacing “dirt cheap” labor from migrants in the country illegally. The bill, he added, would “allow families to decide what is in the best interest of their child.”
Lewis W. Hine, “Cranberry picker, New Jersey,” 1913; gelatin silver print.
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
DeSantis asked, “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts; college students should be able to do this stuff.”
College students, of course, are adults, not children, their average age between 18 and 25. And the Child Welfare League of America notes that, in 2022, parents committed 71% of reported child abuse in Florida, so an appeal to family decision-making as a replacement for laws regulating child labor is fraught.
The historical example of Lewis Hine’s exceptional documentary photographs — and their beneficial impact on children’s lives — would help illuminate the current, highly contentious subject. His work is found in many public collections. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., are two that hold thousands of prints and negatives. The Getty Museum in L.A. has more than 100.
But there’s a hitch: However much art museums today express a commitment to social relevance, their programming is the opposite of nimble. It takes years to produce and schedule an exhibition. Today’s child labor fight might be over.
If ever there were a vital reason for a virtual show on an art museum’s website to be presented and vigorously promoted, this is it. During the first Trump administration, the popular digital magazine Bored Panda did just that, mounting an extensive anthology of Hine’s riveting child labor photographs. Demand for cheap labor never goes away, but sometimes it crests. We’re there again.
Lewis W. Hine, “Newsboy, Mobile, Alabama,” 1914; gelatin silver print.
In 2019, Jeffrey Gibson received a MacArthur Fellowship, the $625,000 award commonly called “the genius grant” that buys recipients the freedom to follow their dreams.
Gibson used the money to purchase art materials and hire studio assistants. He took a two-year hiatus from teaching and spent more time reading. Best of all, he could afford to focus on the exquisitely crafted and increasingly ambitious art — supercharged with bold patterns, bright colors, poetic messages and mesmerizing textures — coming out of his studio in upstate New York, near the town of Hudson, where he lives with his husband, artist Rune Olsen, and their children, 9-year-old Gigi and 5-year-old Phoenix.
A sequence of critically acclaimed — and wildly popular — exhibitions followed: “When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, “The Body Electric” at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico in 2022, “The Spirits Are Laughing” at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado that same year, “They Teach Love” at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University in 2023 and “Power Full Because We’re Different” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024.
The pace of Gibson’s exhibitions was relentless. He gained energy and momentum from reaching larger audiences, and he became a passionate advocate for issues dear to his heart, speaking particularly in terms of power and beauty, and the ways those forces have played out — and continue to play out — in the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.
All of that culminated in 2023, when the State Department selected Gibson to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. There are few higher honors for an American artist, and Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians who also is of Cherokee descent, was the first Indigenous artist selected to fill that role. Other Indigenous artists, often unnamed, had represented the U.S. only once before — mostly with pottery, jewelry and textiles — as part of a group exhibition. That was in 1932, when Pueblo artists Ma Pe Wi and Tonita Peña and Hopi artist Fred Kabotie also exhibited their paintings.
Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennial transformed the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion with dramatic works like this beaded piece, which is part of the forthcoming show at the Broad museum in downtown L.A.
(Timothy Schenck)
“Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me” transformed the exterior and the interior of the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion in Venice into a vibrant stage that invited people from all walks of life to interact with the cornucopia of works. Visitors couldn’t help but discover something wonderful, whether it be a giant, stylized bird, festooned with thousands of glistening beads; a laser-sharp painting, composed of up to 290 supersaturated colors; an array of lavishly patterned flags, from places no one has ever visited; or an evocative phrase, lifted from a novel, a pop song, a poem or a document, such as the U.S. Constitution. A pair of 9-foot-tall figures looked like they had just stepped off a spaceship — or out of a psychedelic fever dream. And a trio of murals, measuring up to 18-by-40 feet, provided an intergalactic backdrop, welcoming aliens of all stripes.
That historic, well-received exhibition in Italy — “Identity politics has never looked this joyful,” read the review from the Times of London — has come to Los Angeles. Gibson’s first solo show in a Southern California museum opens May 10 in the lobby and first-floor galleries of the Broad.
Hypnotically colorful artworks by Jeffrey Gibson in the U.S. Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
Detail of Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Bienniale artworks, which have been reinstalled at L.A.’s Broad museum.
(Timothy Schenck)
All of the works that filled the pavilion in Venice will be at the Broad, installed to let visitors circulate freely through a layered labyrinth of figures and forms — some familiar, others disconcerting. A pair of sculptures, displayed five years ago in Gibson’s Brooklyn Museum exhibition, has been added.
For “When Fire Is a Applied to a Stone It Cracks” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, Jeffrey Gibson installed moccasins to an early 20th century bronze by Charles Cary Rumsey titled “The Dying Indian.”
(Jonathan Dorado)
The larger of the two is a monumental bronze figure on horseback, cast by Beaux-Arts sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey in the first decade of the 20th century and titled “The Dying Indian.” It depicts a generic Native American man astride an emaciated horse. Shoulders slouched, head bowed and wearing nothing but a pair of moccasins, the dying Indian is an emblem of extinction — or extermination.
To counteract that narrative, Gibson commissioned Pawnee-Cree artist John Little Sun Murie to create a pair of beaded moccasins emblazoned with a line from a Roberta Flack song: “I’m gonna run with every minute I can borrow.” While giving symbolic comfort to the bronze figure, the buckskin moccasins tell a story of grassroots resistance and DIY defiance, in which beauty and comfort and love have a toehold, even in a world otherwise defined by injustice and suffering.
Artist Jeffrey Gibson.
(Matthew Cavanaugh / For The Times)
“The space in which to place me” comes at a fraught moment for artists and their art, and Gibson is acutely aware of where his work stands in the current political climate.
“To me it’s almost whiplash going from Venice to what’s going on at the Smithsonian now,” Gibson says, referring to the public-private institution that includes the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Under pressure from the Trump administration, the Smithsonian closed its Office of Diversity and is targeted by the president for “race-centered ideology” that he deems “improper” under an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“I don’t want to say it’s actually hard to reckon, because I’m not sure that it is that hard to reckon,” Gibson says. “I think that, in this moment, we have no distance. We have no objective distance from what we’re experiencing right now. And so there’s no way for me to be able to understand all of the circumstances that led to where we’re at.”
Detail of Gibson’s work at the Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
When Gibson looks at the present, he sees it as part of history, reaching back further than the divisiveness that has defined American politics for the last couple of decades. “When we look at other moments in history, you see so clearly how events and attitudes and interests aligned for those moments to happen.”
Gibson is convinced that, in the future, when we can see the present in retrospect, we will see that the current turmoil is actually business as usual.
Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager of the Broad, puts it this way: “The show takes a long view of history. It’s not reactive. It’s not about the past 10, 20, or however many years. It’s really looking all the way back.
“In this moment, that is refreshing. It is also necessary for us to ground ourselves in this longer view, this longer arc, and really think about the role of history, and how that affects the present and the future.”
Gibson photographed earlier this month at his studio in upstate New York.
(Matthew Cavanaugh / For The Times)
Jeffrey Gibson was born in 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colo., and he grew up in West Germany and South Korea, where his father worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, supplying goods to military bases.
In 1995, Gibson earned his bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. As an undergrad, he had worked at the Field Museum, on the staff established by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which returned sacred objects and human remains to their respective tribes.
After receiving his master of fine arts degree from the Royal College of Art in London in 1998 — funded in part by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians — Gibson moved to New York City, where he, like many young artists, struggled to find his voice, struggled to find an audience for his art and struggled to find time to make art between day jobs at Macy’s and Ikea.
By 2011, Gibson was frustrated by all of the struggles and considered abandoning art. But a 2012 two-gallery exhibition in New York, titled “one becomes the other” and presented at Participant Inc. and American Contemporary, redeemed his commitment to art-making. For the first time Gibson collaborated with other Indigenous artists, who specialized in beading, drum-making and silver engraving. It was also the first time he felt that people understood what he was up to as an artist.
Interest in his work spread swiftly. Solo exhibitions at public venues around the country followed: “Love Song” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2013, “Speak to Me” at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in 2017, “Like a Hammer” at the Denver Art Museum in 2018 and “I Was Here” at the Des Moines Art Center in 2019.
He was 48 when he got the MacArthur.
For Venice, Gibson dreamed big. Rather than proposing what he thought was practical, or acceptable, or typical, he proposed what he wanted to see — in his most freewheeling imaginings, with no compromises or constraints. From June 2023, when he found out that his exhibition proposal had been selected, to April 2024, when his exhibition opened, he says, “I was prepared the entire time for people to call me and say, about every element of the installation, ‘We just can’t do that,’ or ‘It’s just not possible.’ And I have to say, that didn’t happen.”
That’s a testament to the team Gibson had assembled, which ultimately consisted of 180 people. Chief among them were Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum, and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator, as well as Louis Grachos, executive director of SITE Santa Fe. Gibson’s exhibition was co-commissioned by SITE Santa Fe and the Portland museum.
A rainbow of beads form a dreadlocked bust, one of Gibson’s works on view at the Venice Bienniale.
(Timothy Schenck)
“What’s so amazing about Jeffrey is that he draws on so many different realms for his work, from Indigenous histories to American queer culture, all the while exploring identities and diversity,” Grachos says, “He is an exceptionally sophisticated colorist, a great communicator and an effective educator. In the end, Jeffrey is the absolute, consummate humanist.”
Looking back at the year leading up to the Venice opening and the year that followed, Gibson has a deep appreciation of the value of time — and how long it takes to make sense of things. And that worries him deeply about the world we live in.
“We have created a culture that is overwhelming for a human being,” Gibson says. “And that overwhelming causes anxiety. It causes fear. It causes a real, not just a perceived, sense of instability. And when we feel completely unstable, the first thing we want to do is revert to something that we think we understand. We’ve taken away the ability to feel that we have the space for comprehension, the space to process and to understand.”
When face-to-face understanding gives way to stereotypes developed from a distance, Gibson says, the battle is lost. “We are again conjuring fear. And that fear ultimately sits in the soul as resentment. That resentment is going to show up. So when I look at the world right now, I think what I really see is fear.”
Gibson’s art is all about making a place in the world where fear — the feeling of being overwhelmed by the speed and volume of modern life, the seemingly intractable political divide, the malignant racism that plagues the nation — has no toehold, much less a leg to stand on.
Gibson’s exhibition is a remedy for those who sometimes feel powerless and pointless. His exuberant, color-saturated installation serves up an abundance of beauty, awe, astonishment and fun. It stimulates the senses and inspires the mind. Most of all, it uplifts. The experience is the opposite of what one feels by the image glut and sound bites of modern life, the psychologically destabilizing ether of digital distractions that can oppress the soul.
“I think that analog-world engagement is crucial,” Gibson says. “I make work that’s very much about being a living being in this world, which I see as phenomenal. And I wish for people that they could understand how phenomenal the world around us is.”
“We Want to Be Free,” courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio, will be on view in the upcoming Broad museum exhibition.
(A garment of flowing yellow, orange and yellow carries the beaded message “ We want to be free.”)
Until recently, Gibson had not realized how important working with textiles and making garments would be to him. “When displayed,” he says, “the garments become a kind of banner, a kind of flag.”
They evoke the regalia worn by ghost dancers, papal robes and the outfits created by such performance artists as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Hermann Nitsch and Hélio Oiticica. They also recall the homemade clothes of punks and skaters.
“The garment is really a mechanism for transformation,” Gibson says. “You become someone other in the garment. It’s a way of extracting yourself from mass consumer culture. And all of those things just really fascinated me to want to think about an alternative, progressive, very inclusive army.”
The repetitive nature of weaving and beading and hands-on craftsmanship are important to Gibson. “The routine is healing,” he says.
During an earlier visit to Venice, Gibson was struck by gorgeous, fully beaded dresses made centuries ago. “They were made under some periods of tremendous distress,” he says. “I wondered why anybody, under those conditions, decided to make a beautiful, beaded dress. Why was beauty so important? And that question — Why beauty? — is still with me. The only answer I can come up with is that, in a weird way, beauty is a manifestation of hope.”
“I’m not a religious person per se, but more and more I feel that faith, in its broadest definition, is crucial,” Gibson says.
(Matthew Cavanaugh/For The Times)
Gibson also notes that the handing down of a treasured object to a family member or community member “is really a way of manifesting a future. It may be a small gesture, but it’s powerful.”
That’s how he looks at his life as an artist: “It all starts at a much smaller scale. It starts in childhood. It starts with socialization. It starts with people having examples of equity and fairness to mimic. If you have those examples, you really lessen the degree of violence that we see in society today.
“I know that’s not a sexy story. But I think that those things are within my control. I’m not a religious person per se, but more and more I feel that faith, in its broadest definition, is crucial. Right now. I just think that once you lose faith, hope, love — I mean, I don’t know what’s left.”
‘Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me’
Where: The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A. When: May 10-Sept. 28; closed Mondays Admission: $12-$15 for this special exhibition; kids 17 and younger are free Information: (213) 232-6200, thebroad.org
On a recent Friday morning, President Claudia Sheinbaum stood inside Mexico’s presidential palace during her daily morning news conference and was asked by one of the reporters whether she had talked with President Trump about a visit to the White House.
“We’ve talked about how nice it would be to meet in person, but there’s nothing formal yet,” Sheinbaum replied. “When necessary, we speak directly; but there is dialogue.”
At a time when Trump seems to be picking fights with allies the world over, and threatening tremendous tariffs on friends and foes, Mexico has emerged relatively unscathed, thanks in large part to the cool head and deal-making skills of its president.
Her powers of negotiation have earned Sheinbaum the kind of praise the American president usually reserves for strongmen and dictators, with Trump calling her a “very wonderful woman,” while the foreign press has been equally fawning.
The Washington Post called Sheinbaum “the world’s leading Trump whisperer,” while the New York Times mused she might be “the anti-Trump.” Bloomberg pondered if the Mexican leader was “the most powerful woman in the world.”
At home, she has also earned high praise for her efforts to manage Mexico’s most important bilateral relationship, and her approval ratings have soared from 70% when she took office in October to more than 80% in March, according to local newspaper El Financiero.
But even as Sheinbaum has rightfully been lauded for her efforts in handling her pugnacious and volatile counterpart north of the border, there remain a number of domestic issues that could mar her record of wins.
While the Mexican leader avoided the worst of Trump’s blanket tariffs, she is still contending with a 25% levy on cars, steel and aluminum that are sold in the U.S., which will no doubt hobble the Mexican economy: Last month, the International Monetary Fund revised its January projection of a 1.3% growth for the Mexico’s GDP to a 0.3% contraction in 2025. Mexicans would feel that, and Sheinbaum’s popularity could suffer.
And though murders have dropped sharply since she took office, according to state figures, security remains a critical issue in Mexico: A government poll released last month found that more than 6 out of 10 Mexicans living in cities felt unsafe.
With cartels controlling about a third of Mexico’s territory, according to estimates from the U.S. military, it’s not difficult to see why. Shortly after Sheinbaum took office, violence erupted in the northern city of Culiacán, where gangs murdered hundreds of people, gunfire ripped through the air in broad daylight and explosions tore through the night.
Perhaps most troubling of all is the number of disappearances, a long-running horror that continues apace. During Sheinbaum’s presidency, more than 8,000 people have gone missing, or an average of 41 people a day.
Since 1962, more than 120,000 people have disappeared or gone missing, according to official figures. Although such disappearances were once associated with the state, especially Mexico’s secret police, in recent decades the tactic has become a tool of cartels to exert control through terror.
The scale of the crisis was brought to the nation’s attention in March when a group of activist searchers came upon an abandoned ranch in the western state of Jalisco. Inside was a scene of unimaginable horror, one that recalled Nazi concentration camps: crematorium ovens, charred human remains, bone fragments.
Perhaps most heart-wrenching of all, there were also scores of backpacks, torn photographs, piles of clothes, hundreds of pairs of shoes. The “Mexican Auschwitz,” as it has been dubbed, became a national scandal that raged for weeks.
But as happens all too often in Mexico, the scandal remained just that. While the media described it as an extermination center, Sheinbaum sidestepped the idea in a news conference by suggesting it was a recruitment camp. Fingers were pointed; the governing Morena party blocked a bill to initiate a special commission to investigate the case.
When the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances said last month that it would seek to bring the issue of forced disappearances in Mexico before the General Assembly under the argument that it was “systematic or widespread,” Sheinbaum accused them of being poorly informed.
If she cannot tackle the crisis of disappearances more directly, she is unlikely to hold on to that 80% approval rating.
Meanwhile, next month, Sheinbaum may face the greatest test of her presidency yet, with Mexico embarking on a first-ever election allowing voters to choose judges from the district level right up to the Supreme Court.
A final and deeply controversial reform pushed through by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, weeks before he left office, the election will see more than 3,000 candidates vying for 881 roles across the judiciary.
At best, the process promises to be chaotic, with the head of Mexico’s elections institute admitting that the agency isn’t prepared “in terms of the size of the task, how rushed it is, and the budget cuts it’s facing.”
At worst, the election could be marred by violence and its legitimacy called into question. Mexico’s last federal election was its most violent ever with 34 candidates murdered during the campaign. With organized crime infecting almost every corner of Mexican life, this election could also be bloody: Last month, the Senate majority leader admitted that some of the judicial candidates had links to criminal groups.
And even if the election runs smoothly, with candidates favored by the governing Morena party likely to come out on top, the ruling party would have control of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. This would drag Mexico back toward the one-party rule that it endured throughout much of the 20th century. It would also raise expectations about how much Sheinbaum should be able to accomplish, with such party unity behind her.
During a speech in January, Sheinbaum defended the judicial election as an exercise in democracy and a means to root out corruption. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, but with her global star on the rise, the world will be carefully watching.
Oscar Lopez is a Mexican author and journalist based in Mexico City working on a book about the origins of forced disappearance during Mexico’s Dirty War.
