As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 Works 50 Weeks.
Dancing Bride is a character from Lisa Reihana’s video epic, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–17), currently featured in the exhibition Grounded. The image depicts a Cook Island woman from the island of Mangia dressed for a wedding with a traditional garment of fringed tapa, and a headdress of projecting kikau broom bristles and small nesting taxidermied black birds. When viewed within the action of the full video performance, she appears in this costume as a bride walking upon the backs of prostrate villagers, a tradition known from Mangia wedding ceremonies for centuries.
Reihana’s one-hour video recasts moments of contact, connection, and conflict—what she describes as “originary infection”—presented from her personal Māpro perspective. She created large-scale portraits of several key characters from her video as a means of allowing viewers to to fully take in the intricacies of adornment, costume, and pose.