Current Exhibition

Converge+Vertex

Traversing the minor gesture of timelines

September 21, 2024 - May 11, 2025

Opening Reception and The Black Lunch Table Photo Booth: Tuesday, October 15, 6 - 8 p.m.

SMC’s Pete & Susan Barrett Art Gallery — in conjunction with The Black Lunch Table — presents an exhibition that features Black artists from the Los Angeles area and explores what has influenced their art and how they have influenced each other through intergenerational conversations via their artworks. The exhibition was planned by SMC students under the leadership of interdisciplinary artist and guest curator Cole James, who teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and is a Somatic Abolition Communal Consultant, member of the the Collective Abayomi and the Development Team For Artist Infrastructure Initiative at Now Be Here, and a collaborator with numerous organizations on projects supporting restorative justice and environmental advocacy.

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Artists

• Chelle Barbour is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator who works in assemblage, collage, digital video, painting, and photography, with artworks in permanent collections that include the California African American Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum Photo Archive, The Wende Museum, California African American Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Lavialle Campbell is driven by a personal pleasure in meticulous work to create contemporary quilts and other pieces that incorporate textures and non-representational abstractions with an aesthetic based in modernism, Japanese minimalism, and architecture.

• Ronn Davis exhibited widely during his lifetime, curated numerous exhibitions, was an essential member of the Studio Z and Zip Zap artist collectives, Chair of the SMC Art Department, leader of SMC's Art Mentor Program, Commissioner of the Santa Monica Arts Commission, and board member of the Craft & Folk Art Museum Los Angeles.

• June Edmonds is a painter, public artist, and teaching artist whose colorful works feature layered surfaces and explore how color and repetition, spiritual contemplation, and interpersonal connection are linked.

• Cass Everage is a versatile artist and community builder who is often found coaching, producing designs for streetwear brands in Downtown Los Angeles, or exploring Black American aesthetics and sociological themes through shape, color, and material.

• Leah King is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who creates art installations, audio immersions, and interactive works celebrating Black joy, queer stories, and family histories with a futurist lens. 

• Michael Massenburg began his career at the Watts Towers Arts Center, was influenced by the artists out of the Watts Rebellion and the Los Angeles Uprising, and developed his social practice through art making, teaching, community organizing, and activism for various organizations and causes.

• Kim Morris taps into her rich Creole heritage and inserts herself into her work by casting her own body and using her hair and portraiture to critique self-identity, ideas of beauty, popular culture, and race in America via video, sculpture, photography, and painting. 

• Alicia Piller has cultivated a distinctive sculptural voice over the years through working in the fashion industry and living in New York City and Santa Fe, NM, for several years.

• Noah Purifoy was the founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, worked on public policy for the California Arts Council, and is renowned for his culptures, including creating 10 acres of large-scale, found-objects sculpture on the Mojave desert floor.

• William Ransom teaches sculpture at Marlboro College and creates artworks that are informed by his early material experiences and engagement with the cycles and rhythms of the natural world life while growing up on a Vermont dairy farm.

• Donel Williams is a multidisciplinary artist who attempts to cultivate specific memories in an effort to reproduce imagery born from specific trauma, such as the lasting effects of observing his family’s battles with aging and illness and their effects in both mental and physical spaces.