The Room Where It Started, LACMA Revisits the Brockman Gallery
More than 60 works trace the Leimert Park gallery Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis ran from 1967 to 1990.
Every scene starts in a room. For a generation of Black artists in Los Angeles, one of those rooms was in Leimert Park. Brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis founded the Brockman Gallery in South Los Angeles in 1967 and ran it until 1990, and on October 18 LACMA opens what it calls the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to its impact.
The show fills Level 1 of BCAM through January 24 with more than 60 artworks and archival materials. Artists include David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson and Carrie Mae Weems, along with Alonzo Davis’s own Self Portrait Inside Series from 1974.
The gallery’s early roster, as Artnet recounts it, reads like a syllabus. Elizabeth Catlett, Maren Hassinger, Samella Lewis, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar and Charles White all came through.
The story has a present tense, too. The original gallery building now houses the nonprofit exhibition space Art + Practice.
Lauren Hanson curated the exhibition, and she leads a free walkthrough with the art historian Charmaine Branch on Thursday, November 19, from 4 to 5 p.m. Major support comes from the Henry Luce Foundation, with significant support from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and Mo and John Pritzker.
