Frieze Projects Los Angeles 2023

Frieze Los Angeles returns with an ambitious lineup of performances, installations and new commissions that take inspiration from the fair’s new location of Santa Monica Airport and the city’s cultural legacies. 

This year Frieze Projects features two site-specific strands of programming: 'Now Playing', a collaboration with Art Production Fund, onsite at the fair; and 'Against the Edge', an expanded series of projects curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan and Del Vaz Projects installed in culturally significant sites across the westside of Los Angeles.

‘Now Playing’ at Santa Monica Airport

February 16–19, 2023

Art Production Fund’s ‘Now Playing’ brings together a series of artworks that shine a light on the often-overlooked elements of everyday life in Los Angeles; the vehicles, street food, sports, aircraft, construction sites and deeper histories that blend into the background. The artists featured in ‘Now Playing’ provide a lens through which we can see these quotidian details anew; ever present but unseen, that make Los Angeles a city both complex and beloved. ‘Now Playing’ receives support from Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. Participating artists in ‘Now Playing’ include Autumn Breon, Chris Burden, Jose Dávila, Basil Kincaid, Divya Mehra, Ruben Ochoa, Alake Shilling and Jennifer West.

Burden’s awe-inspiring forty-foot skyscraper mimics the skyline of downtown’s architecture; Ruben Ochoa pays tribute to the street vendor community, connecting his personal narrative to his art making. Performances reveal not only the city’s daily life, such as Alake Shilling’s Buggy Ball, an artist-designed soccer ball activated by LAFC led scrimmages, but also its histories, as in Autumn Breon’s Leisure Lives, which honors Bay Street Beach, a seaside haven for Black Californians’ recreation in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Find Out More

‘Against the Edge’ across the Westside of Los Angeles

February 13–19, 2023

Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan and Del Vaz Projects, Frieze Projects: ‘Against the Edge’ takes place across a constellation of culturally significant sites along the coastal Westside which have been and remain integral to the history of modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles. Each of these provides a setting for new and imagined relationships between site and artist, history, and fiction. At each location, an artist’s work has been placed in conversation with its setting, unearthing narratives of liberation and creativity as well as exile and occlusion.

• At the Thomas Mann House (1941) in Pacific Palisades, visitors will find the work of Moroccan-born, French artist Nicola L. 
• Villa Aurora (1928), the former home of writer Lion Feuchtwanger and meeting point for German emigres such as Bertolt Brecht, Alma Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, will play host to the work of LA-based artist Kelly Akashi
• Beyond Baroque, a leading literary arts organization whose building was originally Venice City Hall, will show the work of Tony Cokes 
• Monday Evening Concerts’ artistic director Jonathan Hepfer and a cast of notable figures from the worlds of visual art and music will perform a musical tribute at the Santa Monica Pier Merry Go-Round Building to the legendary Los Angeles curator Walter Hopps (1932- 2005) whose first major exhibition took place on the same site in 1955
• Nayssan’s own space Del Vaz Projects, which operates out of his house (Shirley Temple’s childhood home) will show a selection of works from late Los Angeles artist Julie Becker’s much-acclaimed unfinished work Whole

Find Out More

FURTHER INFORMATION

An annual highlight of the fair, Frieze Projects is an anchor program of Frieze Los Angeles and brings together a compelling program of artists and initiatives.

Be the first to know when Frieze Los Angeles 2024 tickets go on sale, sign up to our newsletter and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.