We are pleased to announce the Art Here and Now (AHAN): Studio Forum artists of 2024, Shyama Golden and Narsiso Martinez.
AHAN: Studio Forum was founded in the 1960s as a group of LACMA supporters with the focus on acquiring work by emerging and mid-career Los Angeles–based artists. Each year the curators of the Contemporary Art department organize a series of studio visits with the AHAN members. They reconvene at a later date for a discussion that leads to a final selection of artworks. Below, read about the selected 2024 AHAN artists, their practices, and the works acquired.
Shyama Golden
Inspired by the hillsides of her neighborhood in Los Angeles, Shyama Golden sets the characters in her paintings within verdant landscapes that mix everyday suburban life and imaginative apparitions. Through depictions of Sri Lankan folklore characters like the yakka, a demon or trickster spirit, Golden connects her ancestry with her diasporic day-to-day existence. Additionally, Golden draws from her background as a designer and book illustrator to consistently incorporate self-reflexive narratives in her artwork.
Daydream of a Nocturne (2023), is the first in the series “In My Mind, Out My Mind,” a speculative odyssey, which follows a story of trials and rebirth as told through the artist’s biography and cultural memory. In the scene, the artist shares a meal with her yakka, or alter ego, at the cemetery. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar offers her grinning second-self an offering of fish served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and a corn dog. The offering, a mix of traditional Sri Lankan and American food, exemplifies the artist’s mixed identity. The sitting figures bear a resemblance in their clothes, hair, and positions, yet the faces, both human and mythological, move this uncanny double portrait from everyday life to the realm of the oniric.
Narsiso Martinez
Narsiso Martinez transforms discarded produce boxes into intimate portraits of farmworkers. Drawing from his own experience as an undocumented migrant and farmworker, Martinez’s work calls attention to the economic value farmworkers contribute to the agricultural industry and critiques their poor working conditions and lack of access to the abundance created by their labor. He expands upon the images of fruits and scenery printed on produce boxes into new narratives.
In Mission-Precious Cargo (2023), Martinez adopted the composition of an Oceanside Pole advertisement for tomatoes, depicting a mission church in the landscape. Instead of tomatoes, Martinez illustrates a grape vineyard, referencing his experience picking grapes, the relationship between wine and the Catholic church, and the 1965 Delano grape boycott during the Chicano Movement. In the bottom right window of the mission, Martinez includes a crucified figure from David Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism (1932) as a reference to the exploitation of Indigenous labor by missions.
In the forefront of the composition, a female farmworker looks over her shoulder at the viewer, her body covered from the elements and chemicals she’s exposed to in the fields. To the left, a king adopted from an illustration of the citrus brand King Cole carries a tray with wine. Through the contrast of these visual references, Martinez unveils the invisible network of relationships among consumers, produce companies, and farmworkers. Mission-Precious Cargo, a portrayal of an idyllic vineyard in front of an old mission, is not just the setting of wine tastings, but the site of historical and contemporary struggles of power.