We are excited to announce our upcoming exhibitions opening to the public on Saturday, April 5, and featuring two celebrated artists within the Los Angeles arts community. Presented in ICA LA’s main gallery, [siccer] is an immersive sound and video installation by artist and choreographer Will Rawls that uses dance, stop-motion animation, and sound to investigate the role of media in constructing, exploiting, and erasing the Black body. On view in the Project Room is Through the Descent, Like the Return, a new commission by artist Jackie Castillo that considers the relationship between labor, city infrastructure, collective memory, and the isolation and anxiety felt by the working class. 

To celebrate the museum’s spring season, we invite you to join us at ICA LA on Saturday, April 5 for our OPEN HOUSE. At 4pm Will Rawls will be in conversation with ICA LA Senior Curator, Amanda Sroka, followed by a public reception from 5-7pm featuring music, food, and drinks. At 3pm, prior to the public celebrations, ICA LA Members are invited to join us for a private curator-led exhibition walkthrough with Sroka and the exhibiting artists (join here to attend!).

Also opening on April 5 is our next Bookshelf Residency with J&L books. Celebrating 25 years of publishing, Reading Room is an installation across ICA LA’s bookshelves and Annex Gallery featuring J&L titles by and about contemporary artists. The library will grow over the course of the exhibition as visitors are encouraged to write or draw their favorite book titles onto blank wooden book spines that were hand-painted by J&L co-founders Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton. Don’t miss the chance to add a title of your own at the OPEN HOUSE.

We can’t wait to welcome you back to ICA LA and celebrate these shows next month!

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Team ICA LA

Will Rawls: [siccer]

Adopting the techniques and technologies associated with the cinema and the stage, Will Rawls’ [siccer] challenges divisions between the living, the rehearsed, and the performed.?Produced with stop-motion animation, the artwork features an all-Black cast of performers-including Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste-in various states of motion and capture. At once fragmented and continuous, the performers’ gestures glitch in and out of focus across a scaffolding of chroma green frames reminiscent of the green screens commonly associated with film production.?While the green screen is traditionally meant to disappear, in [siccer], the screen becomes the setting for both performer and visitor. In this refusal to remain fixed, Rawls recontextualizes how racialized subjects navigate forced states of invisibility. And, as Kermit the Frog reminds us, “it’s not easy being green.”?? 

The project’s title is inspired by the Latin adverb sic, often used within brackets to indicate incorrect spelling within a citation. Through this titular reference, [siccer] illuminates the ways in which Black subjectivity resists standard Western forms of “correction,” suggesting instead a way of being that is both iterative and endlessly becoming. Exploring the limits and possibilities of gesture and language, Rawls-together with the performers-speculates on collective strategies of narrating the world, uncorrected.  

Accompanying the ICA LA exhibition is a series of live performances that will take place at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) on April 10 – 12, 2025, presented by REDCAT and ICA LA. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit the REDCAT website.

Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return 

Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, Jackie Castillo’s practice combines photographs of suburban landscapes with architectural remnants to explore the ways in which place, labor, memories, and identity can become fractured, estranged, or made invisible. Raised in Santa Ana, California, to parents who immigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, Castillo’s work reflects a close attention to demographic and infrastructural changes across time and place and a profound consideration of the fraught systems of labor that sustain our everyday lives.  

In this ambitious installation, realized in close collaboration with her father, Roberto Castillo, the artist expands on her formal and thematic concerns, newly experimenting with scale and material. Made from industrial rebar and repurposed terracotta shingles, the sculptures on view in the center of the gallery reference the work of re-roofing a home. Also on view are a suite of three photographs that loosely situate the sculptures, and the viewer, in a composite suburban landscape—bringing together imagery from the artist’s Mid-Wilshire neighborhood in Los Angeles and her grandfather’s home in Mexico. Through this combination of sculpture and photography, Through the Descent, Like the Return evokes the cycles of destruction and renewal reflected in our built environments, and centers the precarious and often invisible labor responsible for its making, unmaking, and rebuilding. 

ALSO ON VIEW

Bookshelf Residency: J&L Books 

Based in Atlanta and New York, J&L Books is a non-profit publisher of artists’ books, founded in 2000 by Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton. J&L is committed to making new books by or about contemporary artists. 

For ICA LA’s Bookshelf Residency, J&L celebrates 25 years of publishing with Reading Room, an Annex Gallery and bookshelf installation that features their catalogue of titles by or about artists, such as Bruce Conner, Lenka Clayton, Marcel Dzama, Octavian Esanu, Helon Habila, Corita Kent, Michael Schmelling, Shoboshobo, David Shrigley, Mike Slack, Harry Smith, and more. Fulford and Shapton created hand-painted book spines on the Annex Gallery wall and blank blocks on the shelves to invite the public to draw and contribute favorite book titles to complete the project in the J&L spirit. A workshop with J&L Books will take place on Saturday, April 5 during the OPEN HOUSE. 

Chris E. Vargas: Reading is Transcendental

Produced for ICA LA as part of our recent Scientia Sexualis exhibition, artist Chris E. Vargas and his “imaginary” Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA) take over the museum bathrooms. Reading is Transcendental transforms what is often an overdetermined site of violent surveillance and legislative transphobia into an intergenerational reading room. The wallpaper represents the real-life bookshelves of Vargas’ community, including fiction, sexology, self-help, biography, manifesto, and theory. The titles convey both the wide radius of trans literature and the problem of categorization at large, nodding to the thorny task of unmaking a canon. Honoring MOTHA’s tactical and parasitic relation to art institutions, this temporary installation asks if it is possible to compile a visual history of an identity category for which language is relative, contested, and evolving. While you may not be able to take a book off this shelf, we hope you leave with a long list of titles to take to your local independent bookstore.

Demian DinéYazhi': POZ Since 1492

Also originally part of the Scientia Sexualis exhibition, POZ Since 1492 (2016/2024) by Demian DinéYazhi’ (b. 1983, Diné/Navajo) elongates the timescale of the ongoing AIDS crisis. With the alternate title The First Infection and appropriating imagery from Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’ infamous painting The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1621 (c. 1912), the artist connects the violence of settler colonialism and germ warfare to government neglect and Western epistemologies of health.

Spring Benefit 2025
Saturday, March 22, 6-10pm, Off-site

ICA LA’s Spring Benefit brings together core members of Los Angeles’ network of artists, patrons, collectors, cultural professionals, and friends of the museum to support our mission and commitment to making contemporary art relevant and accessible to all.

The evening will begin with cocktails, followed by a studio tour with Glenn Kaino and Executive Director Anne Ellegood, offering an intimate look into the creative process and themes that drive Kaino’s multidisciplinary work. After remarks by ICA LA’s Board President Claudia Flores and Ellegood, guests will get a very special sneak preview of a new project titled Lavender Mist by High Seas (Kaino’s ongoing collaboration with renowned musician and producer David Sitek). Then, we’ll dance into the night to the tunes of HAYCOXX, co-founder and resident DJ of The Do-Over.

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