For the seventh edition of “Made in L.A.,” the Hammer Museum’s biannual survey of art in the city, curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha began with a list of more than 1,000 artists and what they fondly describe as “no ideas.” Foregoing a predetermined theme “was a way of not creating a limit before we started,” says Harden, an independent curator who cut her teeth at the California African American Museum. Then, the duo set out to “visit as many studios as possible.”

Over roughly half a year, Harden and Pobocha, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and former senior curator of the Hammer, arrived at a slim list of 28 artists whose thematic connections emerged after the fact. The lineup includes people who fall outside the traditional definition of an artist, like Hood Century’s Jerald Cooper, an online archivist of South LA’s modernist architecture, and Black House Radio’s Michael Donte, who will be programming DJs inside his installation at the museum. Fitting for America’s entertainment capital, there will be plenty of experimental filmmakers (among them Bruce Yonemoto, Na Mira, and Mike Stoltz), as well as four episodes of Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s 2024 metafictional documentary series THEATER. The show will also include choreography by Will Rawls, ceramics by Alake Shilling and Brian Rochefort, and installations by Gabriela Ruiz and Patrick Martinez.

Throughout the development of the show, as Los Angeles weathered the ongoing turbulence of wildfire and military invasion, Harden and Pobocha realized that any attempt to respond to these rapidly evolving conditions would always feel incomplete. “Real life—material, physical, psychic reality—is changing every day,” says Harden. Instead, she and Pobocha ultimately focused on LA as a discursive site that has shaped the work of a wide range of artists. There is car culture’s influence on Pat O’Neill and Carl Cheng’s sculptures and the unmistakable Southern California light gracing Greg Breda’s portraits. Spanning generations and media, the connective thread among this eclectic group is their enduring engagement with the constantly evolving history, economy, and landscape of LA.