I LOVE THIS MUSEUM.

I wanted to visit at least one local arts institution before leaving town, and I’ve heard good things about the Perez Art Museum, so that’s where we went Sunday. The new director there—Franklin Sirmans—was the curator for contemporary art at LACMA, as you might know. Believe the hype: visiting this museum will be on my itinerary whenever I visit this city from now on, for both the content and the environment.

 

Above, are “Chaos SAS” by Jedd Novatt (2012) and the hanging gardens above the entrance to the museum. These are your views as you make your way from parking below. Perez is situated on the beach, next to where the Frost Museum of Science is currently being renovated. You’re greeted by hanging gardens, palm trees, and a building whose exteriors were so designed as to feel that the building is an inevitable part of the local landscape.

The two major shows happening there right now are “Global Positioning Systems” and “Sun Spashed,” which is a survey of the work of African-American artist Nari Ward.

Global Positioning Systems comprises selections from the permanent collection featuring the work of more than 35 artists grouped according to shared themes and conceptual approaches. There’s a Kehinde Wiley painting included in the Global Positioning Systems exhibit—shout-out to him for making a black woman proud (that would be me). What I really admired in the moment though was a video installation by Cory Arcangel called “Colors” (2005), based on the 1988 movie of the same name.

The deconstruction is amazing. What he did was, he made a program that plays one horizontal line of pixels and extrudes it vertically so that you see shifting colors as you listen to the film. He does this one frame at a time, and it takes 33 days to cycle through the whole thing. I love this because it’s a surprise to me when conceptual artists with such an analytic and process-oriented approach to their work can stir feeling within you. I was moved.

I felt nostalgia rise up in me upon viewing “Double Dutch” (above), a sculptural collaboration between John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres that began in 1981. They are fiberglass, cast directly upon the bodies of the young girls, originally installed on the sides of building facades in the Bronx.

I never was able to figure out how to jump-rope double dutch-style, so my nostalgia isn’t based on physical experience. But if you were a young black girl in the ’80s and had access to a television, you always saw teen-aged black girls from New York City on Sesame Street and in commercials double-dutching so fiercely; they were so cool to me back then.

 

Sun Splashed: Nari Ward

This artist is new to me, yet right off the bat his work reminds me so much of Noah Purifoy’s—lots of found object assemblages and sculptures. Ward’s work is more overtly political though.

Detail of “We The People”

 

Ward is given practically half of the upper level of the museum for his mid-career survey that ranges from the early ’90s to now. His work inspires my leftist, #BlackLivesMatter, borderline Communist sensibilities without being preachy or annoying.

 

Also included as part of his exhibit is an immersive installation called “Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping” (1996). It was inspired by a candy shop in Harlem near where Ward lived that, as it happens, was a front for an illegal gambling ring. I think it’s the most personal work included in the show, as each element included directly references Ward’s personal history.

 

 

So that’s it! My first time: in Miami, “doing” a fair, immersing myself so intensely. I learned so much about the business of art that I’d never had to consider, and it wasn’t such a rough ride. It was pleasurable, in fact, and I know exactly what I’ll do differently next time; the group thing!