For This Year’s Frieze Projects, 8 Angeleno Artists Are Making Work That Reflects the City’s Enduring Resilience
From left to right: Casey Fremont, Claire Chambless, Greg Ito, Jackie Amézquita, Ozzie Juarez, and Lita Albuquerque at the Cloverfield in Santa Monica. Photography by Ilona Szwarc.
In keeping with Frieze Los Angeles’s deep fascination with its sprawling metropolitan host, this year’s edition of Frieze Projects offers an insider’s glimpse at the city’s cultural topography. Curated by Art Production Fund, “Inside Out” presents a series of installations by artists with deep roots in the city, diving into the microcultures and ecosystems that make LA so confounding, so romantic, so fraught. “‘Inside Out’ reflects on place—how we navigate the spaces where we land,” says Art Production Fund Executive Director Casey Fremont.
“Emerging from these works, often with a touch of whimsy, are reflections on movement, migration, and physical and social mobility,” adds Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas. Indeed, the program’s participating artists—six of whom share the origin stories behind their Frieze Projects contributions here—represent a wide range of Angeleno attachments. Their respective installations offer a touching homage to a city that, even in the wake of ecological disaster, is forever blossoming.
Photography by Jim McHugh. Image courtesy of Lita Albuquerque.
Lita Albuquerque, Turbulence, 2025
How does the story of your site-specific work for Frieze Projects begin?
The story really begins in my childhood growing up in Carthage, Tunisia, and the ruins below the convent I grew up in, where piles of rocks and fractured columns remained as sentinels to the sea. Rocks have a life of a totally different time signature then ours, and I wanted to explore that. It continues decades later when living in Malibu and teaching at UCSB's College of Creative Studies. I would collect rocks on Route 1, put them in my blue van, then bring them to my studio in Venice where I began to pour powder pigment on them as a way of enlivening them and reflecting what I felt was within them ... Turbulence comes as a response to the fire storm that has devastated Los Angeles and the arts community. The title embodies what we are feeling now that even the Earth itself is expressing this moment in time. Even something as solid as rock can feel the turbulence of the times we are in.
Describe the effect of your work—how do you want visitors to engage with it, and how do you hope it will affect them?
I want people to be surprised, to say, "Wait a minute, what is this? This is not supposed to be that way." I want the color to get to them. I want them to stop in their tracks and see and listen. I hope my contribution gives people a chance to think about their relationship to the earth and their position in the cosmos.
Most underrated thing about LA?
The fact that it is essentially a grid of buildings surrounded on three sides by the desert and on the other by the ocean. As we move forward in the ravages of global warming, like these current firestorms, it is something to think about, how to understand the land we are living on, and what to do to protect it from this moment onward into this new future. We must accept the fact that we are now living through a new era regarding our relationship to the land.