LOS ANGELES, CA.- The California African American Museum announced today that it is presenting four new exhibitions in summer 2017, including a large-scale, site-specific work by Gary Simmons, an exhibition that examines black silent films, a selection of portraiture from Los Angeles-area collections, and paintings and photographs by artists from the Caribbean and Brazil that comprise the Museum’s latest permanent collection exhibition.

George O. Davis, Executive Director of CAAM said, “This summer’s exhibitions and programs build on the momentum of CAAM’s new direction, and especially take advantage of summertime to welcome families, vacationers, and old and new friends of CAAM.” Visitors will notice CAAM’s fresh look and feel extend even to its building, which is being enlivened with a paint job that features the bold graphics of CAAM’s new logo (above), designed by Julia Luke.

CAAM’s summer exhibitions are:

Gary Simmons: Fade to Black Opening July 12, 2017
Artist Gary Simmons—who recently returned to Los Angeles, where in 1990 he received his MFA at CalArts—references film, architecture, and American popular culture in paintings and drawings that address race, class, and memory. Much of Simmons work centers on his signature erasure techniques. Early on he drew in white chalk on readymade chalkboards or directly onto slate-painted walls, then smudged the images with his hands. In recent years he has adapted the process to canvas and large-scale wall works, such as Blue Field Explosions (2009), a monumental drawing in the stadium that is home to the Dallas Cowboys. In his first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Simmons’ “canvas” will be the five large walls in CAAM’s grand lobby, where he is creating a site-specific painting that includes titles of vintage silent films that feature all-African American casts.

This exhibition is curated by CAAM’s Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Programs, Naima J. Keith.

Center Stage: African American Women in Silent Race Films June 28 – October 15, 2017
Center Stage considers pioneering African American filmmakers and production companies in the early 20th century that provided African American women the opportunity to participate in front of, and behind, the camera. They challenged disparaging portrayals of black women in Hollywood, and instead conveyed their wit, intelligence, and talent for largely black audiences to admire and emulate. Produced for American American audiences between 1910 and 1950, these motion pictures were commonly called race films. CAAM will screen several rarely seen examples, including Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) and The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), extant clips from Lincoln Picture Company’s By Right of Birth (1921, dir. Harry Grant), The Scar of Shame (1929), The Blood of Jesus (1941, dir. Spencer Williams), and others. Each film features women protagonists and captures the spirit of entrepreneurship and African American upliftment characteristic of race films from this era.

This exhibition is curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates, History Curator and Program Manager, CAAM, and the UCLA Digital Humanities Department.

Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture July 12 – October 8, 2017
Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. In the age of social media, when the demand to represent our “selves” has become a daily imperative, portraiture is mutating. Within the human face—the most familiar element of our identity—we glimpse some measure of a subject’s character, personal biography, social status, and emotion, as interpreted by the artist and communicated to us. Drawn entirely from LA-based collections, the over fifty works in this exhibition demonstrate changing approaches to portraiture from 1984—CAAM’s founding—to today.

Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples in a range of mediums, the exhibition is arranged according to commonalities in pose, gesture, color, composition, and subject matter. Viewed outside their chronological and historical contexts, the works speak to each other in unexpected ways, looking across generations and between media. Through their varied takes on portraiture, the artists represented in Face to Face, including Lyle Ashton Harris, Titus Kaphar, Amy Sherald, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

Intersections: Caribbean and Brazilian Art from the Permanent Collection June 28–October 8, 2017
Intersections features paintings, watercolors, and photographs by artists from the Caribbean and Brazil, and it demonstrates the diverse ways in which artists in the African diaspora record their histories and represent their cultures. Haiti features prominently, including in scenes of daily life painted by Haitian artist François Turenne des Pres and in Hector Hyppolite’s depiction of Vodun, as well as in a print by African American modernist artist and storyteller Jacob Lawrence, who employs his iconic, bold palette to impart the history of Haiti’s revolutionary 18th-century leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture. Other works—including an abstract painting by Afro-Brazilian artist José Roberto Leonel Barreto— attest to the influence of the African diaspora throughout the Americas.

This exhibition is curated by Vida L. Brown, Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager, CAAM.

Circles and Circuits I: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora September 15, 2017–February 25, 2108
Circles and Circuits explores the art of the Chinese Caribbean diaspora from the early 20th century to the present day. By examining the contributions of artists of Chinese descent in Cuba, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and beyond, the exhibition will reveal the hidden complexities of the transcultural art of the Caribbean.

The exhibition will be presented at two venues, the Chinese American Museum (CAM) and the California African American Museum (CAAM). The presentation at CAAM will trace the history of Chinese Caribbean art from the 1930s through the period of the region’s independence movements, showcasing the contributions of artists little known outside their own countries, such as Sybil Atteck (Trinidad and Tobago) and Manuel Chong-Neto (Panama), and providing a new context for understanding the better-known work of Wifredo Lam (Cuba). At CAM, the exhibition will focus on the work of contemporary artists such as Albert Chong and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, as well as artists of the ongoing Chinese Caribbean diaspora. The contemporary works featured explore issues of post-colonial history, popular culture, personal history, and the body.