LOS ANGELES — LA is often criticized as a city with a short historical memory, a city that transcends the past in search of the new. Two recently unveiled public works of art at the Los Angeles County Hall of Records offer alternative perspectives on the sprawling metropolis, revealing overlooked, forgotten or marginalized communities and places.
Earlier this month, artists Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) and Felix Quintana led a discussion with a small group gathered outside the Department of Regional Planning (DRP) on the 13th floor of the Hall of Records in downtown LA. Their artwork was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and supervised by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). The total budget for the project was $150,000, including artist fees and production costs.
Baker’s 5-meter-long artificial grass assemblage, ‘Wenot (Life Giver)’ (2024), hangs in a recessed alcove in the building’s lobby, its curved form framing a long modernist green bench. The colorful geometric shapes are reminiscent of an aerial map; However, Baker was quick to note that the work suggests more than the actual geography represents.
“When I started, I felt an obligation to map LA more concretely, and then I had to scrap that because I just don’t work that way,” she said. Hyperallergic.
However, among the abstract shapes, some signifiers of specific places emerge, such as a horizontal blue line that references the LA River. The title of the work, “Wenot”, means “life giver” in the Kizh language of the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, who refer to the river by this name.
Under the terms of the commission, the pieces will be on display for 25 years, meaning conservation was a primary concern for the artists. Baker worked with ethnobotanist Matt Teutimez (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians – Kizh Nation) to select native plants, such as acorns, mule fat, elderberries and willows, that would honor the area’s indigenous history while remaining resilient well into the future.
“I think it’s a romantic idea, really thinking about the future of L.A. by remembering the past and not just looking over it with more concrete,” Baker said. “It’s such a rich country here, and it offers so much more than we actually use.”
When visitors exit the elevator on the 13th floor, they encounter Quintana’s layered photo collage “La sal de la tierra (The salt of the earth)” (2024). The Salvadoran-American artist, who grew up in Lynwood in Southeast LA County, eschewed a statistically accurate demographic map in favor of a personal vision of the city.
“Maybe I can’t show everyone, every experience. I wanted to be more honest with myself,” Quintana said.
The work includes his own photographs of people and places with personal meaning, with images from the DRP’s vast archives: an aerial view of Lakewood, a model post-war planned community in LA County; the now defunct Compton Fashion Center, a swap meet and hip-hop mecca where NWA sold their first cassette tapes, immortalized in videos by Tupac and Kendrick Lamar; a photo of his grandmother crocheting; the iconic Watts Towers; a work of art by the prolific graffiti artist from LA Heap; a nearly century-old photo of people playing football in MacArthur Park, as they still do today.
“The piece is a kind of flattening out of the past, the present and, hopefully, a little bit about the future of LA, as I see it,” Quintana noted. He also incorporated community photographs taken at three pop-up portrait studios he co-hosted with LAND in Boyle Heights, Watts, and at the DRP offices.
Like Baker, Quintana faced conservation issues as he regularly uses a photographic process involving cyanotype, which produces monochromatic blue images that can fade when exposed to light. He scanned his original cyanotypes and digitally collaged them to create the final archival pigment print.
The Hall of Records was designed in 1962 by renowned architect Richard Neutra called it “the largest filing cabinet in the world.” Although most of the archives have since been moved to another location, it still represents LA’s recorded history, which civic leaders decided was important enough to remember as the Department of Regional Planning shapes the city’s future.
Baker recalled that there was initially a disconnect between the literal, pragmatic way in which DRP workers conceived of the city, its spaces and people, and the non-representational geometries, lines and colors in her work. But “they were ultimately open to that,” Baker explained.
“I was surprised because it’s very abstract, so it’s exciting that they want it to live here,” she said.
