Los Angeles – few art schools are more rooted in the history of Los Angeles than the Otis College of Art and Design. The founder Harrison Gray Otis, politician and conservative editor of the Los Angeles Timesbequeathed the original campus of Otis – his own house at Boulevard Wilshire – to the city of Los Angeles after his death in 1916 for “The progress of the arts“In the region. Its broad and civic approach is still widespread in its students today: through 13 exhibitions of solo theses for winter and spring, the most recent class of Otis graduates occupies its founder, making the city – its structures, its landscapes, its art and its people – a new one.
Institutions often adhere to specific visual codes, referring to artistic inheritances in order to establish power through legendary conventions. In Otis, recent graduates intervene in these authority claims. The exhibition of Manny Valdez cohert around the campaign of fictitious school superintendent of “Bronze Brownman”, a mustachioed figure – perhaps the artist themselves – which appears through a series of fabricated promotional documents, from the campaign flyers of screen and white portraits seated in large Gild frames. Kader Amkpa's exhibition, Conflict cartographiesAlso subverts visual tools – in this case, cards – which can both provide information to large populations and exercise control over them. In “From Redcoats to Redlinging” (2025), a 20th century Bronx's Hagstrom card is superimposed by previously red blocks and subdivisions – a now illegal cartographic technique which has become a shortcut for structural inequality in the United States. The AMKPA interrupts these problematic geographies with more optimistic images: a painted blue bird rises on “redness to redness”, and a pair of colorful hummingbirds gather on a branch above a sheet of marked parchment “British empires of the world” in “Empires crumble” (2025).
The natural world of the infuse a large part of the work exhibited, representing collisions between local environments and artistic interventions. The large mixed scale of Jazmine Hernandez Sanchez (2025) presents a photograph of the previously virgin opposite back, now covered with a collage of stickers and graffiti; The photography itself is in turn scribble by the members of the artist's community. Common urban waste constitutes the basis of “between the roots and the wings” of TIA XIA (2025), in which the black rubber gloves rest at the top of the thin thread stretching from the rocks placed along the ground. The plush latex looks like flying birds, their rubbery fingers like crow's wings. The line between man and natural vagueness in the sculpture mounted on the ground of Priscilla Mondo, “#VII unidentified” (2024-25), which resembles, at first glance, like a tree trunk defying gravity, towards the ceiling of the gallery. Then, Mondo's materials are revealed:-paper forms the sculpture frame, and a thin and silver network is laced on its exterior.
Grotesque and comic familiar landscapes in Jessica Wilcox and Alexandria Lee Bevilacqua exhibitions, both of the central scenes along the periphery of California. In Wilcox exhibition, THIRSTYThe artist captures the dark and sexospecific dynamics of a suburban golf course, transforming his structures and his figures into surreal satire. In his sculpture, “here, let me show you” (2025), painted plastic planters form an oversized thermos, the top of which is a small green where a male figure in block teaches a woman to play golf, her body subsumes hers in a cartoon hyperbole. These dark comic scenes become transcendent in the captivating psychedelic paintings of Bevilacqua, which monitor the femininity exams against the chaotic decorations of desert casinos. In “Eye in the Sky but no eyes on the sky” (2024), a female figure rides a table of oblong craps which, apparently, has become a small pond surrounded by cacti – defying a security camera which appears alongside a shiny chandelier at the upper edge of the canvas.
This art resembles the West: it is responsible for Bougainvillea, deeply disturbed and at least a little funny. More than a century after Harrison Gray, Otis, donated the first building of the college, graduates of the MFA of Otis today display the extent of the institutional art ecosystem of Los Angeles, offering a range of approaches to make art this side of the Mississippi. The resulting shows also feel experimental and qualified, introducing 13 new artists in the lap of the city – just like its planned founder.
Otis College of Art and Design 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibitions continues at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard, Los Angeles, until April 24. The exhibitions were organized by the artists and the institution.
