Hammer Museum's 'Made in L.A.': Three Artists' Journeys to L.A.'s New Biennial

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The ethnographer of a mythic place

If Cranston seemed too established for the show, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle seemed too unestablished. The rule had been to avoid students, but Hinkle was still in school when curator Cesar Garcia walked into her CalArts studio (she has since received her MFA). "I saw all these amazing drawings and objects," he remembers. "It really felt like a cabinet of curiosities."

PHOTO COURTESY VITAMIN CREATIVE SPACE, GUANGZHOU, AND AOYAMA MEGURO, TOKYO

A still from Koki Tanaka's 2011 video Someone's junk is someone else's treasure, in which he sells palm fronds he found on the street.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HAMMER MUSEUM

One of "Made in L.A." artist Zac Monday's yarn creatures, titled Bleedy Eyes (see description in "Five Artsy Things to Do This Week")

Location Info

Map

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Westwood, CA 90024

Category: Museums

Region: West L.A.

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LAXART

2640 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Category: Galleries

Region: West L.A.

Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG)

4800 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Category: Galleries

Region: Los Feliz

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More About

• Koki Tanaka
• Meg Cranston
• Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
• Visual Arts
• Slang and Jargon

He couldn't tell if she had found or made the musical instruments, intricately embellished headdresses and wooden artifacts on display. She told him they were from her ongoing Kentifrica project, that she was developing research about this place hardly anyone had heard of. The way she collapsed history and fantasy fascinated him, and he brought the other curators in to see her work.

Hinkle grew up in Kentucky, the state that, in 1828, sent a few hundred free-born black Kentuckians and newly freed slaves to start a colony in West Africa, in present-day Liberia. They founded a township named Clay-Ashland after a Kentucky slave owner (Henry Clay) and his estate (Ashland). In the same way that African-Americans in the United States have been studying their West African roots, there are stories of children in Clay-Ashland singing campfire songs about faraway Kentucky.

Overlaps like these, between Africa and the culture she grew up in, fascinate Hinkle. But Kentifrica isn't the same as Clay-Ashland, or even a convergence of Kentucky and West Africa. It's a mythic continent, "a contested geography," as Hinkle calls it, that's both "contemporary and ancient," a "diaspora that's constantly shape-shifting." It exists because Hinkle has decided to create its archive — not out of thin air but out of genuine interest in how long-ago, now-invisible cultures might be manifesting now — and the more research she creates, the more real it all seems. Hinkle has collaborated with scholars, one who suggested that the beaded braids girls wear in Kentucky are Kentifrican in origin, and presented clinical photographs to support her point. Musicians have invented or repurposed Kentifrican instruments.

A year ago, at CalArts, Hinkle hosted a panel discussion called "Kentifrica Is or Kentifrica Ain't?" with writers, historians and musicians. Panelists were supposed to argue over whether Kentifrica could exist. "But everyone wanted Kentifrica to be real," she says.

The first Kentifrican ethnomusical event in L.A., called Kentifrica Is, will happen in the Hammer courtyard on June 14. Hinkle will perform alongside 10 others, including composer Kevin Robinson and musician Eugene Moon. "There's going to be lighting, costuming, dancing," she says.

She plans to reinvent the whole space.

Koki Tanaka: The everyday mystic

In 2011, Koki Tanaka rented a booth at an L.A. flea market and sold palm fronds he had picked up off the street. "Are you serious?" said one man, annoyed. "I have these all over my yard," said another. "If you buy something really strange from a flea market," Tanaka explained to one curious customer, "that memory never, never disappears."

Curator Ali Subotnick saw the video of Tanaka's palm-frond experiment at the Box gallery in 2011, and Malik Gaines heard about Tanaka from a friend in New York. They liked how he tried to make simple experiences extraordinary, and when they asked him to do a project for "Made in L.A.," he asked if he could take animals from a zoo and install them in museum galleries. Then he would put art into the animals' cages, so museumgoers and zoogoers would be equally astonished. When that wasn't feasible, Tanaka went with a back-up plan.

He posted on a UCLA website, asking for two musicians. When grad student Ariel Campos volunteered himself and undergrad Matt Sumida, both marimba players, Tanaka filmed them as they improvised, asking one to play while the other watched. Tanaka hung two videos facing each other in the Hammer's lobby gallery, and when you enter, you see one musician watching on one screen while, across the room, another plays. At one point, you see only Ariel on both screens, watching and playing at the same time. In making these videos, Tanaka remembered his own experience of the Japanese earthquake, how he had felt both involved and not involved. "We were all sort of having a different experience," he says.

Between the two videos, he has staggered 20 chairs and hung round, twirling mirrors at eye level. If you sit in a chair and look around, you see the videos reflected in at least a hundred ways. If you come on Aug. 5, when Tanaka invites 10 flutists and 10 visitors to sit randomly in the room, the flutists playing amidst their audience, the mirrors will reflect a different view of the room each time they turn. Everyone will be having a different experience of the same thing.

MADE IN L.A. 2012 | Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Feliz | June 2-Sept. 2

—Catherine Wagley

More to see in "Made in L.A."

Other artists to watch for in the "Made in L.A." exhibit:

Sarah Cain: Space cadet

For Sarah Cain, a painting on a wall is not an isolated object; it is intimately a part of the architecture around it. That's why her paintings — which use ephemera such as beads and glass bottles — allow bright colors and almost cartoonish shapes to bleed fluidly from the canvas onto the wall, floor and window.