LACMA’s “Contemporary Echoes” showcases beautifully vibrant cultural art

Illuminating the Night Sky: Rodriguez’s “De Las Senales” is one of the most beloved paintings in LACMA’s “Contemporary Echoes.” This landscape leaves a trail of viewers waiting in line in trance due to all the details added like the white specks in the night sky to represent stars. Photo Courtesy of Joylynn Lee.

By Joylynn Lee

Arts Editor

LACMA’s new exhibit “ContemporaryEchoes” features beautifully drawn Indigenous art that captures viewers’ attention.

The exhibit brings a sense of modern art towards ancient cartographic maps. The original ancient Indigenous map was painted centuries ago, but around the 1550s, sixteenth-century Spanish artists progressively change the dynamic of these maps.

A peculiar thing viewers noticed in this exhibition is that they can only notice certain aspects if they focus completely on each piece. A glance at each painting will only look like an old cartographic picture of a frozen city, but behind this illusion these paintings are full of life.

“Contemporary Echoes” features Spanish artists like Mariana Castillo Deball and Sandy Rodriguez as their main featured artists.

These artists present day painters that found inspiration from sixteenth-century artists who chose to create art with ancient cartography.

One of the mesmerizing pieces in this exhibit is “De las Señales y Pronósticos” which translates to Signs and Forecasts. This art piece shows obvious ancient artistic styles due to the way the map is drawn with inaccurate lines, but Rodriguez uses her hand-processed dyes and watercolor to paint cartography into a vibrant modern piece.

“Vista Ojos” is a contemporary black and white painting drawn by Deball. She shows a complete modern piece. She sketched a doodle of this small town of fishermen in a lake with houses surrounding them.

Without a perfect drawing, Deball forces viewers to take a step out of reality and into their creativity to imagine what it was like in the past.

Rodriguez’s “You will not be forgotten” touches her viewers by creating this art piece for the remembrance of all the children killed in the immigrant detention facilities.

Rodriguez brilliantly illuminates exact locations each victim was on her map paintings.

Next to each illuminating light, there are plants blooming and naturistic details that makes these childrens tragic stories into more of a sign of growth and remembrance.

“Contemporary Echoes” features Indigeonous artists, mapmakers, and artists from the past that have inspired present-day artists like Rodriguez and Deball that have creatively use previous Indigenous cartography pieces to create a modern and vibrant perspective with this culture.

From the immersive night sky all the way down to the mountain ranges, Rodriguez’s attention to detail truly fascinates her viewers.

Though Rodriguez shows vivid and colorful artistic pieces, Deball still shows how black and white coloring over the lines drastically changes outdated ideas of art.

LACMA’s new exhibit, “Contemporary Echoes” is open to the public until May 1, 2022. Tickets can be bought only on LACMA’s official website lacma.org.