‘Ode to ’Dena’ at CAAM explores the legacy of Black artists in Altadena: L.A. arts and culture this weekend
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in its final month of debris removal in Altadena. It has already cleared thousands of properties destroyed in January’s devastating Eaton fire and is working on the toxic ash and refuse that remains. Once the immediacy of that task fades, years of accounting for the neighborhood’s many losses lie ahead, as does the ongoing rebuilding.
The California African American Museum is contributing to that work with “Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena,” an exhibition on view through Oct. 12. The exhibition — organized in just three months in response to the fire — is curated by Dominique Gallery founder Dominique Clayton. It seeks to illustrate the importance of the unincorporated foothill community to Black artists including midcentury figures like Charles White, as well as contemporary practitioners including Martine Syms and Kenturah Davis.
Between 1910 and 1970, approximately 6 million Black Americans migrated from the South to other parts of the U.S.. In Southern California, Altadena became an attractive place for Black families to settle. The area didn’t participate in the redlining practices of other neighborhoods, making it a relatively welcoming place.
Many of those residents were artists and musicians, including the famed assemblage artist and former director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, John Outterbridge, whose home and studio burned in the fire. (Outterbridge died in 2020.)
In an online description of the “Ode to ’Dena” exhibition, CAAM notes that Altadena was “hailed as the epicenter of Black arts activity in Los Angeles County,” during the 1950s and ’60s, although that artistic center of gravity later shifted toward Watts after the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Nonetheless, CAAM notes, “Altadena continued to develop as a vibrant and creative haven with a distinctive Black cultural imprint. Since then, Altadena and the adjacent city of Pasadena have served as home to an extraordinary array of Black artists, educators, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists.”
In addition to Outterbridge, White, Syms and Davis, the CAAM exhibit includes work by Betye Saar, Richmond Barthé, Mark Steven Greenfield, Nikki High, Bennie Maupin, Marcus Leslie Singleton, La Monte Westmoreland and Keni “Arts” Davis.
The Times’ Noah Goldberg wrote a feature on Davis after the Eaton fire — highlighting how the retired 75-year-old Hollywood set painter spent 40 years creating watercolors of his beloved neighborhood. After the destruction, he began painting the wreckage.
For more information on CAAM and the exhibition, click here.
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt here with an important Essential Arts update: From today forward, this newsletter will now run on Friday only — rather than Monday and Friday. Here’s this week’s slew of arts news.
Best bets: On our radar this week
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The Euterpides & Serenade
It’s the last two weekends to catch young composer Alma Deutscher’s debut ballet, “The Euterpides,” a world-premiere collaboration with American Contemporary Ballet Director Lincoln Jones. The work is paired with George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” set to music by Tchaikovsky.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; June 26-28. Television City, 200 N. Fairfax Ave., Stage 33. acbdances.com
KCRW and CAAM Summer Nights
What better way to kick off summer than an all-ages dance party? In between live sets from guest DJ Damar Davis and KCRW DJ Novena Carmel cool your heels in California African American Museum’s galleries, currently featuring solo exhibitions by Awol Erizku, Darol Olu Kae, Nellie Mae Rowe and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, plus the aforementioned “Ode to ’Dena” and a group exhibition of artists inspired by the concept of reparations. There will also be food trucks, a beer garden and crafts. Best of all? It’s free with an RSVP.
7-11 p.m. Friday. California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park. caamuseum.org
Sing the Story: Celebrating Black Artistry From Gospel To Soul
Patrick Dailey and the W. Crimm Singers, an ensemble devoted to the Black experience and its expression through music, take to the BroadStage for a genre-blending evening featuring spiritual medleys, soul classics and more. Part of a series of blues rhythms curated by the Reverend Shawn Amos.
8 p.m. Saturday. The Plaza, 1310 11th St. Santa Monica. broadstage.org/
Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture
The Vincent Price Museum hosts a selection of photographs, prints, drawings, videos and installation art from LACMA’s collections that explores how American artists see and present themselves in their work. Laura Aguilar, Kwame Brathwaite, Kalli Arte Collective, Jennifer Moon, Wendy Red Star, Roger Shimomura, Cindy Sherman, Rodrigo Valenzuela and June Wayne are among the more than 50 artists redefining and expanding the concept of identity.
Saturday through Aug. 30. Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park. vincentpriceartmuseum.org
2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social
The latest edition of the large-scale, Golden State-focused exhibition explores the “richness of late adolescence, a stage of life full of hope and potential yet fraught with awkwardness, anxiety, and myriad pressures.” The show’s 12 featured artists include well-established veterans and some who are still teenagers: Seth Bogart; punk rock band Emily’s Sassy Lime (Emily Ryan, Amy Yao, Wendy Yao); rock band the Linda Lindas (Lucia de la Garza, Mila de la Garza, Eloise Won and Bela Salazar); Miranda July; Stanya Kahn; Heesoo Kwon; Woody De Othello; Laura Owens; Brontez Purnell; Griselda Rosas; Deanna Templeton; and Joey Terrill. The Biennial also features a presentation of paintings from the Gardena High School Art Collection, an assemblage of California Impressionism that began in 1919, and a program curated by present-day teenagers of works drawn from the Orange County Museum of Art collection.
Saturday through Jan. 4. Orange County Museum of Art, 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa. ocma.art
When the Violin
Choreographer/dancer Yamini Kalluri joins violinist Vijay Gupta for an evening of music by JS Bach and Reena Esmail. The program combines poetry, music and a combination of modern and traditional Kuchipudi dance.
7:30 p.m. Saturday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre. sierramadreplayhouse.org
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light
A new documentary on the iconic American artist from Academy Award-winning director Paul Wagner (“The Stone Carver”). The film covers O’Keeffe’s life from Jazz Age New York to the New Mexico desert and features music by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch and narration by Hugh Dancy, with Claire Danes as the voice of O’Keeffe.
7 p.m. Tuesday. Laemmle Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd.; Aug. 2, Laemmle Newhall, Laemmle Glendale, Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino, Laemmle Monica Film Center and Laemmle Claremont 5. laemmle.com/film/georgia-okeeffe-brightness-light
Culture news
The drama surrounding President Trump’s purported firing of National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet reached a conclusion last week when Sajet decided to step down on her own terms. “It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. This was not an easy decision, but I believe it is the right one,” Sajet wrote in a note to staff shared in an email by the Smithsonian Institution’s leader, Lonnie Bunch. Sajet’s announcement came two weeks after Trump claimed to have fired her for being, “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” About a week later, the Smithsonian Institution released a statement asserting its independence in the face of Trump’s order, but that seems to not have been enough to persuade Sajet to stay.
The SoCal scene
The work of Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist Noah Davis — who died of a rare form of liposarcoma at the the age of 32 — is the subject of Times art critic Christopher Knight’s latest review. The Hammer Museum is staging a retrospective of Davis’ paintings. It’s only composed of about three dozen pieces, but Knight says it’s more than enough to show that “when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.” It is clear, Knight notes, that had his life not been cut tragically short, Davis was well on his way to further accomplishment. “The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development,” Knight writes.
The 2025 Ojai Music Festival was one of the best, writes Times classical music critic Mark Swed, of the annual event in the bucolic Ventura County town. Founded nearly 80 years ago by an East Coast music lover named John Leopold Jergens Bauer, the event was originally meant to be California’s answer to the Salzburg Festival. That aspiration never quite came to pass, but over the years the progressive gathering staged mostly at the Libbey Bowl has come to embody a groundbreaking ideal of new music. This year’s music director was the flutist Claire Chase, who, according to Swed, “collected concerned composers on a quest for a kind of eco-sonics capable of conjuring up the pleasure of nature and, in the process, saving our sanity.”
Last Saturday, Esa-Pekka Salonen, “conducted his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, known as the ‘Resurrection.’ It was a ferocious performance and an exalted one of gripping intensity,” Swed wrote in a glowing review of the legendary conductor’s final show with the troubled orchestra he opted to leave when he decided not to renew his contact after five years of serving as its music director. “The audience responded with a stunned and tumultuous standing ovation,” Swed notes.
Times reporter Kailyn Brown headed to the Music Center on Sunday — a day after the city’s massive “No Kings” protests — to talk to audience members who attended L.A. Opera’s “Rigoletto” and Center Theater Group’s “Hamlet” despite the recent tumult and nighttime curfew in downtown L.A. In a series of interviews, accompanied by smiling photos, Brown’s reporting shows what many Angelenos have been trying to tell friends and family outside of the city: It’s not as bad as it may seem on your social media feeds. Downtown L.A. is more or less back to normal. And besides: It’s never a bad idea to show up in support of the arts.
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CAP UCLA announced its 2025-26 season — its second under its new Executive and Artistic Director Edgar Miramontes. This season’s offerings include 30 performances featuring more than 100 international artists. “As borders become more intensified, Miramontes is committed to continued international exchange of ideas and learnings to encourage more empathy, connection, and shared understanding through presentations by acclaimed artists from around the world, spanning genre-defying jazz, Afro-Latin fusion, 21st-century classical music, and exciting new works in dance and theater,” the season release explains. Shows include: the Mexican collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol; basoonist and composer Joy Guidry; the jazz singer Lucía; trumpeter and composer Milena Casado; and Cuban musicians Alfredo Rodriguez and Pedrito Martínez, along with many others. “This season is more than a series of performances — it is a call to community,” Miramontes wrote in a note to patrons. “Exciting new theater, revolutionary music, and dance remind us that unity is not an ideal — it is an act. The stage becomes our platform, our laboratory, our refuge. Here, we witness. We reckon. We rejoice.” For tickets and the full schedule, click here.
Playwright Michael Shayan has released a new Audible Original play titled “Cruising.” It’s directed by Robert O’Hara, who was nominated for a Tony Award for directing “Slave Play” and is also in the midst of presenting his world-premiere adaptation of “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum. The comedy follows an aspiring gay playwright who — suffering from a summer of writer’s block and apathy in his Encino apartment — embarks on a flamboyant cruise in his imagination, only to discover that his real life is falling apart around him. “Cruising” features the voices of Christine Baranski, Tituss Burgess, Cecily Strong, André de Shields and Andrew Rannells, and can be streamed here.
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra announced its 2025-26 season, which continues this year at the Wallis in the Bram Goldsmith Theater. Offerings include a concert of classics led by Music Director Jaime Martín, featuring the German French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt; guest conductor Dinis Sousa with German violinist Isabelle Faust; violinist Anthony Marwood; pianist Richard Goode playing Mozart; a Brahms concert; a Baroque salon featuring harpsichordist Pierre Hantaï; and a performance by soprano Amanda Forsythe. For tickets and more info, click here.
— Jessica Gelt
And last but not least
What? You say you’d like a good beef roll for lunch? Me too! Here’s a list for where to find the best eight in the city by Times Food columnist Jenn Harris.
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