Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2025 Biennial Brings Opulent "Assymetries" into Focus
Featuring work by Patrick Martinez, Pat O’Neill and Alake Schilling, the ongoing edition channels the city’s charge into new forms of expression.
Summary
- The seventh edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. artist biennial is currently on view through March 1, 2026
- Curated by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, this edition features 28 artists across generations and mediums from the greater L.A. area
- Unconfined to a single theme, the works on view span painting, installation, sculpture, film, photography, sound, video and theater, reflecting the city’s mosaic of culture
“Neither myth nor monolith, Los Angeles is many things to many people, and its dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature,” wrote the Hammer Museum, in the lead-up to its acclaimed Made in L.A. biennial. Now in its seventh edition, the showcase returns, this time with the spotlight on 28 artists whose practices span generations, lineages and mediums. As the West Coast art scene gathers new momentum, the exhibition unfolds as an ode to the people and places that made it possible, each work alive with city’s kaleidoscopic charm.
Curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha spent a year visiting artist-run venues, studios, galleries and museums across the the county before landing on the final lineup. True to a city-as-mosaic ethos, the 2025 iteration forgoes a single theme in favor of a distinctly Angeleno openness that mirrored the city’s own sunny surrealism.
Be it installation, video, sound, choreography, painting, film or theater, each work on view engages with the city as a site of both groundedness and perpetual becoming. Must-see moments include a neon-clad, mural-scaled installation by Patrick Martinez, known for his works that fuse social commentary with an East LA visual vernacular. Also to look forward to is “The Kids,” a live stage play created by Leilah Weinraub in collaboration with Max Pitegoff and Calle Henkel’s experimental New Theater Hollywood, alongside Alake Shilling’s 25-foot inflatable “Buggy Bear,” co-presented by the Art Production Fund, crashed outside of the museum’s entrance.
“The result is an exhibition shaped by the asymmetries of Los Angeles itself — its dissonances and resonances, its contradictions and kinships, its capacity to reinvent while holding fast to history,” the curators described.
Made in L.A. 2025 is currently on view at the Hammer Museum through March 1, 2026. Read on for the full list of featured names.
Exhibiting artists:
Alake Shilling
Ali Eyal
Alonzo Davis
Amanda Ross-Ho
Beaux Mendes
Black House Radio (Michale Donte)
Brian Rochefort
Bruce Yonemoto
Carl Cheng
David Alekhuogie
Freddy Villalobos
Gabriela Ruiz
Greg Breda
Hanna Hur
Hood Century (Jerald Cooper)
John Knight
Kelly Wall
Kristy Luck
Leilah Weinraub
Mike Stoltz
Na Mira
New Theater Hollywood (Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel)
Nicole-Antonia Spagnola
Pat O’Neill
Patrick Martinez
Peter Tomka
Widline Cadet
Will Rawls
