ABSTRACT
In September 2017, the Getty Foundation inaugurated in Southern California the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative (or PST: LA/LA), a series of art exhibitions focused on the cultural production of Latin American and U.S. Latino communities spanning from the pre-Columbian to the contemporary, with the goal of propelling new and paradigm-shifting scholarship on the art of the region. 1 The first and much-celebrated iteration of PST in 2011, whose theme was “Art in L.A., 1945–1980,” had brought to the fore aspects of the black experience in the city, especially with the pathbreaking Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 at the Hammer Museum, but also through exhibitions at the California African American Museum (CAAM), the Getty Research Institute, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), among others. 2 PST: LA/LA featured the work of Afro-descendant artists in several exhibitions, including in Home: So Different, So Appealing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer; Condemned To Be Modern at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy, and Activism in the Americas at the Ben Maltz Gallery of Otis College of Art and Design; and, most notably, Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art—whose roster included manifold black artists with Chinese ancestry, such as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nicole Awai, Andrea Chung, and Albert Chong—at the CAAM and the Chinese American Museum. 3 Although black artists were interspersed—though, for the most part, not prominently—in these and other exhibitions, the only two projects to focus on the African diaspora as such were Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis at the UCLA Fowler Museum and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which I curated for the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach. 4
