Los Angeles has always been allergic to other people’s narratives. It hates being summarized. It hates being tidy. That’s why the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial works so well here: it refuses to flatten the city into a slogan and instead lets the city’s many art worlds spill onto the floor, cross wires, and short-circuit your neat coastal comparisons. The 2025 edition—the seventh since the series launched in 2012—lands with a familiar thrum: works that are unmistakably forged in L.A.’s sun-glare conditions and stubbornly specific about the ground they stand on. This year’s show runs October 5, 2025 through March 1, 2026, and it’s unambiguously a Hammer production, the museum’s signature survey of artists working across the region. No borrowed identity, no coy hedging—just a confident declaration of what the city is making right now. Hammer Museum
“Signature” matters here because the Hammer has turned “Made in L.A.” into something more than a round-up—it’s a civic habit. The museum’s own description this year is blunt: 28 artists and collectives, works conceived in L.A., with the city’s dissonance treated as a virtue rather than a problem to solve. The mediums read like a film crew call sheet—painting, sculpture, photography, theater, choreography, sound, video—and the point isn’t to crown a theme so much as to present a temperament. The curators, Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, declined to give the show a title; they embraced a studio-first approach that resists hemming the city into a single thesis. It shows. This is what happens when you let Los Angeles speak in its native polyphony instead of forcing it into a brand deck. Hammer Museum+1
If you’re taking attendance—and L.A. watchers always are—you’ll clock a lineup that mirrors the city’s cross-generational sprawl. The roster includes Alake Shilling, Carl Cheng, John Knight, Patrick Martinez, Will Rawls, Pat O’Neill, Widline Cadet, Leilah Weinraub, Na Mira, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Bruce Yonemoto, among others—an ensemble that feels less like a roll call and more like a weather map of creative systems drifting over the basin. The logic is attitude, not taxonomy. The materials are local, the references are embedded, the results feel like neighborhood dispatches tuned for a global audience. That stance—and the curators’ refusal to over-program a theme—has been widely noted in early coverage. Hammer Museum+2Los Angeles Times+2
Institutionally, the show’s DNA has a useful memory. “Made in L.A.” began in 2012 as a multi-venue collaboration with LAXART and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall, a scrappy, hometown arrangement that matched the city’s ecosystem at the time—decentralized, experimental, allergic to the gala-industrial complex. That origin story still matters because it preserved the biennial’s focus on emerging and under-recognized artists and a sense that the survey should meet the city where it lives, not drag it into white-cube neutrality. In 2020—yes, the pandemic-era edition subtitled “a version”—the Hammer partnered with The Huntington, splitting installations across San Marino and Westwood, which clarified the mission rather than diluting it. Hammer Museum+4Hammer Museum+4Artforum+4
What’s the mission, exactly? The museum states it plainly: the Hammer “believes in the promise of art and ideas to illuminate our lives and build a more just world.” In 2025 that refrain reads less like a tagline and more like a dare, especially when culture-war theatrics try to turn museums into political props. The biennial’s curatorial choices—its embrace of the city’s contradictions, its insistence on giving room to artists who complicate nostalgic L.A. mythologies—live that value instead of stenciling it on a tote. Also not nothing: admission to the Hammer is free, full stop, which keeps the show porous to the city that funds it—in money, in attention, in time. Hammer Museum+2Hammer Museum+2
If you want a thumbnail for why “Made in L.A. 2025” feels charged, start with how the artists push medium like it’s clay. Film and video aren’t accessories; they’re structural. Performance and theater aren’t add-ons; they’re the skeleton. Sculpture reads as both material and memory. Photography behaves like evidence one minute and a dream the next. The curators’ studio visits yield rooms that hum with specificity: you’re not just “seeing what L.A. artists are up to,” you’re asked to track how the city itself—its zoning, its languages, its freeway logic, its shadow economies—gets metabolized into form. The biennial becomes a cartography of practice rather than a census of genres. Hammer Museum
Zoom out and the timing is unmistakably L.A. The last decade and change have seen the city step fully into its role as a global art hub while immediately complicating what “hub” even means. Frieze’s 2019 arrival shifted the tone; mega-galleries planted flags; Melrose Hill coalesced into a dense gallery constellation; and yet the independent and apartment-gallery scene remains the city’s not-so-secret engine—the place where experimentation keeps its teeth. The external narrative says “L.A. is having a moment.” The internal reality says the moment’s been compounding for years, and the infrastructure finally caught up. Ocula+3Frieze+3Frieze+3
That’s why “Made in L.A.” matters beyond its calendar slot. It’s a mirror with a memory. Look back at 2012 and you see a city knitting its disparate art neighborhoods into a plausible conversation; look at 2020 and you see resiliency tested as logistics and care. In 2025, you see a museum that has learned how to host the whole spectrum: under-known voices getting their first serious platform alongside artists whose practices already bend the discourse. That elasticity is the value proposition—and the accountability mechanism. Hammer Museum+1
And yes, names matter. Veterans like John Knight and Pat O’Neill thread L.A.’s conceptual and experimental film legacies straight into the present, while artists such as Alake Shilling, Widline Cadet, and Patrick Martinez push material and image with a fluency born of the city’s cultural code-switching. Leilah Weinraub and Na Mira complicate categories around moving image and intimacy; Bruce Yonemoto reminds everyone that Los Angeles taught America how to read pictures; and Carl Cheng puts industrial daydreams back on the table. It’s not consensus taste; it’s a stage sturdy enough to hold the arguments. Hammer Museum
Context helps. L.A.’s art scene has grown quickly over the past decade or two, but not merely by importing blue-chip swagger. The point isn’t just that New York galleries opened L.A. branches; it’s that L.A. kept reproducing its own formats—warehouse experiments, storefront shows, backyard screenings—without apologizing for informality. Western Avenue and the Melrose Hill corridor are now dense with galleries, yet the city’s center remains multiple and mobile. “Made in L.A.” feels honest because it acknowledges that fluidity rather than pretending there’s a single downtown of meaning. larchmontchronicle.com+1
So no, “Made in L.A. 2025” doesn’t pretend to be the whole story. It’s more mischievous than that. It stages L.A. as a set of concurrent transmissions and dares you to tune your receiver. And when you step back onto Wilshire, the exhibition keeps going—on Western where new galleries cluster, in a studio tucked into a Valley strip mall, in a performance popping up after hours. At its best, the biennial doesn’t tell you what L.A. art is. It shows you how it behaves. This year, it behaves like the city itself—restless, contradictory, generous, and loud. Of course it does. This is L.A. We don’t resolve. We radiate.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 