Five Artists Share Their Work in This Year’s Made in LA Biennial
Ahead of the opening at the Hammer Museum, Hyperallergic spoke to participants whose practices embrace the show’s threads of history and dissonance.
LOS ANGELES — The Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in LA, provides a snapshot of the state of contemporary art throughout the greater region, attempting to give coherent form to its sprawling and heterogeneous artistic landscape. With this year’s edition, opening to the public October 5, curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha embraced that messiness, noting that LA’s “dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature.”
Still, after dozens of studio visits, the pair were able to identify some through lines. “If there is any single thread in this show, it is historical,” Harden told Hyperallergic, countering the stereotype of LA as a place that forgets its past. “It is about histories.”
Those histories range from the autobiographical to the communal, hyper-local to international; palimpsests layered in concrete and asphalt or held tight as personal memories. In advance of the exhibition's opening, Hyperallergic highlights the work of five of the 28 participating artists, whose practices engage with narrative and memory in various ways.
Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Haiti)
Widline Cadet, “Shifting Skies” (2025)
Widline Cadet juxtaposes carefully composed portraits with archival family snapshots, placing them in shaped frames as part of larger installations. Born in Haiti, Cadet moved to the US as a child, and her fractured visions reference a sense of diasporic connection, bits and pieces of memories given equal weight as professionally staged photos. "I'm thinking about all the ways you measure life," she told Hyperallergic. “Shifting Skies” (2025) is composed of 12 images in half-circle shaped frames, arranged in a design that resembles a pinwheel, or the pattern of breeze blocks, the perforated building blocks common to both Southern California and Haiti. This physical link, along with the region's flora and warm weather, provided a sense of familiarity when Cadet moved to LA from New York three years ago. “I’ve never lived in a place that’s reminded me of my home country as much,” she said.
Her sentiment underscores the notion that LA’s identity is fluid and multifaceted, informed by a myriad of sources from around the world. “LA is an international city that has an international impact,” said Harden. “It's not isolated.”
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