Art That Moves L.A.
UC Irvine artists featured at the Hammer Biennial
By Christine Byrd
When Made in L.A. 2025 opens at the Hammer Museum on Oct. 5, the highly anticipated biennial will not only offer insight into the City of Angels’ artistic impulses but also UC Irvine’s growing influence on the region’s art scene.
Of the 27 artists selected for Made in L.A. 2025, four hail from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
"The inclusion of four members of our art department — faculty and alumni — in the upcoming Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum stands as a meaningful testament to the strength of our program,” said Kevin Appel, chair of the Department of Art. “It reflects not only the accomplishments of these individuals but also the ongoing rigor and excellence that continue to shape our broader academic and creative community.”
Curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha spent a year visiting studios, artist-run venues, commercial galleries, and museums across Los Angeles County. Ultimately, they chose to bypass a traditional theme for the biennial, instead handpicking a multigenerational group of artists who work across media.
“While there are as many ideas circulating through the show as there are materials, an inquiry into one’s relationship to the city of Los Angeles animates much of the work we will present,” the curators said in a joint statement. “Neither myth nor monolith, this city is many things to many people, and its cacophonous disorder is, perhaps, its most distinguishing feature.”
Meet the UCI-affiliated artists helping to shape — and challenge — the creative contours of Los Angeles today.
Amanda Ross-Ho
The year 2025 is shaping up to be a blockbuster for art Professor Amanda Ross-Ho. In January, it was announced she would be included in Made in L.A. Then in April, she received the 2025 Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award — a prestigious honor that includes a $25,000 grant plus invaluable support, including professional development and networking opportunities. This summer, she received the 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant, worth $100,000. Capping it off, she also celebrated a milestone birthday.
“Careers are long, and they ebb and flow in terms of public reception and productivity," said Ross-Ho. “As I enter a new decade, it is a meaningful and exciting year to experience this momentum.”
An interdisciplinary artist, Ross-Ho uses painting, photography, textiles, found objects and sculptures, often favoring immersive, large-scale installations. She’s keeping details of her new work for the Hammer under wraps — both to preserve the impact of a theatrical reveal and because the piece was still evolving through the summer. Yet followers of her work can expect something that feels both new and familiar — ambitious in scale and fully engaged with the physical space of the gallery.
Ross-Ho has been making art in L.A. for over two decades, ever since moving from Chicago for graduate school. She found the West Coast to be exactly the right home for her artistic practice and feels a sense of community with the other artists in the show, including those tied to UC Irvine.
“To put it very simply, I’m proud of our department,” said Ross-Ho. “Such substantial UCI representation in this biennial validates the strength of our faculty and helps reinforce to our students that as teachers, mentors and practicing artists, we demand the same excellence of ourselves that we ask of them.”
“To put it very simply, I’m proud of our department.”
For Ross-Ho, the show is also a snapshot of the artistic lineage shared by many faculty, alumni and students.
“L.A. is both a big town and a little town,” said Ross-Ho. “The older artists in this biennial are part of the collective memory of L.A., and I think you’ll be able to see their influences or inheritances that cross between the generations of the show. I'm excited to see how that all teases out discursively — that’s part of the magic of an exhibition.”
Na Mira
Na Mira created Sugungga (Hello) for the 2024 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, reflecting on the history, mythology and legacy of foreign military presence in the country where she grew up. It’s fitting then that Los Angeles — home to more Koreans than anywhere else outside of Korea — will be the site of her video installation this year.
Image: Image: Na Mira, Sugungga (Hello), 2024, 2-channel Hi8 and HD video, color, sound, holographic glass. Courtesy of Paul Soto Gallery.
“I'm always curious about what happens when my projects have an opportunity to travel to another context, to see what kind of resonances they will have with other histories,” said Mira, who lived in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea before settling in L.A. “It’s particularly interesting to be able to show this in Los Angeles and to engage with the diasporic memory in the region, particularly at this moment in time following the impeachment of the South Korean president.”
On this side of the Pacific, situated among work by other L.A.-based artists, Mira anticipates that the piece may take on new implications.
“I'm interested in both myth and propaganda, how symbols and signals are transmitted to carry meaning,” added Mira. “Yet these codes can become scrambled through time and distance, providing new meaning.”
The piece features film captured on an ‘80s-era camcorder of the exterior wall of the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, near where Mira grew up, which was the headquarters of the U.S. military presence in Korea until 2018. The second channel shows an inflatable rabbit she found inside the walls of the base. Projected on both sides of a holographic screen, the clarity and position of the images shift as the viewer moves through the room.
The Hammer exhibition is not the first time Mira’s work has been shown alongside UC Irvine colleagues. In 2024, shortly before she came to UC Irvine as an assistant professor, Mira was included along with Professors Amanda Ross-Ho and Bruce Yonemoto in Scratching at the Moon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
“There has been this kindred collectivity across our faculty that I continue to be inspired by,” said Mira. “UCI has a rich history of video art that Bruce has been integral to developing, and I’m honored to be in conversation with him and other colleagues as we continue and evolve that legacy.”
Freddy Villalobos
It’s not just his art that’s made in L.A. Freddy Villalobos was born and raised in the city. When he found out recently that his childhood home was just a few blocks from the notorious 1964 murder of Sam Cooke, he was inspired to make the singer and songwriter the subject of a new work for Made in L.A. 2025. The multidisciplinary installation (unnamed at the time of this writing) combines low-frequency sounds, neon signs, traditional fresco painting and a video of the miles-long route up Figueroa Street from the motel where Cooke was shot to the morgue.
Image: Freddy Villalobos, installation view, i seek i seek and can’t find but a dream desublimated (2021). Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Jackie Furtado.
“It feels like there’s a strange lineage and history on this one route that holds the past, present and projected future,” Villalobos said of the stretch of road from South L.A. past the gentrified neighborhoods of the Crypto.com Arena. “There’s this tension of overlapping timelines in a space of ambition or mourning, reinvention and forgetting.”
Because he knew L.A. so well, Villalobos’ undergraduate professors at UC Irvine encouraged him to seek out graduate programs farther afield, which he did, earning his M.F.A. from Yale University in 2021. That time away deepened his appreciation for the subtle indicators of life in L.A., even inspiring him to use slowed down hip hop music known as chopped and screwed, meant to evoke the sound of a car’s booming bass vibrating the vehicles around it.
“I'm excited to show a project like this in a place where everything doesn’t have to be declared,” said Villalobos. “Some things may only be legible to those who are from L.A.”
“I truly believe that if I had not gone to Irvine and met those professors, I would not be where I am today.”
Since his 2016 graduation, Villalobos has helped with installations for Bruce Yonemoto’s work and stayed in touch with UC Irvine art faculty, including Daniel J. Martinez and Rhea Anastas, Simon Leung and Juli Carson. Being part of Made in L.A. 2025 with three current faculty has given him reason to consider his own place in the legacy of UC Irvine Arts.
“My experience at UC Irvine gave me a boost to my confidence and encouraged me to see how art could be a place for discourse and critical thinking,” Villalobos said. “I truly believe that if I had not gone to Irvine and met those professors, I would not be where I am today.”
Bruce Yonemoto
Bruce Yonemoto has been shaping art in Los Angeles for decades. The professor of art officially retired from UC Irvine this spring, but his nearly 50-year creative career is far from over. His inclusion in Made in L.A. 2025 speaks to his enduring relevance and continued influence on generations of artists, including colleagues and alumni from UCI.
Image: Bruce Yonemoto, Hanabi Fireworks, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House, Los Angeles.
Yonemoto is among the three most senior artists to be featured at the biennial. Born in 1949 to a family incarcerated in Japanese internment camps during World War II, Yonemoto often collaborated with his brother Norman Yonemoto, producing work that explored culture, sexuality, the Japanese American experience and Hollywood.
Yonemoto is known for combining pop culture, politics and personal history in conceptual work that includes video, digital media, installations and performance. At UC Irvine, he laid the foundation for the department’s video arts curriculum.
In 2022, Yonemoto received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, adding to his plethora of honors including awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute and The Rockefeller Foundation. His work is part of the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain and the UCLA Hammer Museum — site of Made in L.A. 2025.
For more information about Made in L.A. 2025, visit hammer.ucla.edu. To learn more about the art department and upcoming exhibitions, visit art.arts.uci.edu.
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