Join the Lunder Institute @ The Broad

Join The Broad and the Colby College Museum of Art’s Lunder Institute for American Art for The Un-Private Collection: Sayre Gomez + Patrick Martinez + Lynell George, the first Un-Private Collection conversation of 2024. Featuring Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog) exhibition artists Sayre Gomez and Patrick Martinez, and moderated by noted author and native Angelino Lynell George. Gomez and Martinez’s paintings are emblematic of a new generation of artists using the visual language of Los Angeles as inspiration for their creative practice. Martinez’s paintings incorporate architectural elements to indicate and preserve identity and culture for the Latinx community as the landscape of the city changes. Gomez’s artworks portray the passage of time and urban decay that looms over the city through faded signage, as well as the neglected and vacant buildings he encounters. The artists and George will discuss Los Angeles as a creative landscape and how their artworks are shaped by it. Lynell George is a Los Angeles-based journalist, essayist, and author, whose 2020 book A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler was a finalist for a Hugo Award.

The program will also be available to view on YouTube both during and after the conversation.

The Un-Private Collection: Sayre Gomez + Patrick Martinez + Lynell George

Saturday, March 2, 2–3:30 pm

Tickets: $15

Oculus Hall at The Broad
221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California

Sayre Gomez

Sayre Gomez (b. 1982, Chicago, IL) works across mediums, including painting, sculpture, and video, to address themes of perception and representation. His works often deploy a range of painting techniques drawn omnivorously from Hollywood set painting, commercial sign painting, automotive airbrushing, and other traditions. The city of Los Angeles serves as a frequent setting and subject, given homage through references to roadside signage, car culture, fantastical sunsets, and other aspects of Angeleno visual culture. Recurring metaphors such as windows, doors, gates, and and walls are often used in Gomez’s work as part of an investigation into the role of context in the distribution and legibility of images in the 21st century. Gomez holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles among others. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Patrick Martinez

Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, and at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian NMAAHC, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Buffalo AKG Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Rollins Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and El Museo del Barrio, among others.

Lynell George

Lynell George is an award-winning L.A.-based journalist, essayist, and author. Her work explores social issues and human behavior, as well as urban histories, visual art, music and literature. A former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, her pieces have appeared in Sierra, Alta: A Journal of Alta California, The New York Times, Oxford American, and High Country News, among many other publications. She is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels, After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, and A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, which was a 2021 Hugo Award Finalist.

This program is part of the Lunder Institute @ initiative and is co-presented by the Lunder Institute for American Art, a part of the Colby Museum of Art. Lunder Institute@ invites institutions to be in conversation with one another and challenges them to look critically at American art, its history, its future and its evolution.

IMAGE (from left to right): Sayre Gomez, Patrick Martinez, and Lynell George.