Ozzie Juarez Brings a ‘Bit of South Central to Santa Monica’
With a practice that highlights community and contestation, the artist and founder of Tlaloc Studios channels LA swap meets in his Frieze Projects commission
With a practice that highlights community and contestation, the artist and founder of Tlaloc Studios channels LA swap meets in his Frieze Projects commission
Five miles south of downtown Los Angeles lies the massive Alameda Swap Meet, a repurposed warehouse complex painted bright cadmium-yellow, striped with the colours of the Mexican flag, and stuffed with hundreds of market stalls ministering to every type of material and spiritual need. There are vendors specializing in fresh produce, Korean beauty products, quinceañera dresses, cowboy boots, children’s baptismal clothing, wholesale Mexican sweets and exotic birds. Interspersed are shopfronts featuring acupuncturists, hair and nail specialists, cheque-cashing windows, phone repair shops, a massage therapist and at least one studio selling discounted tattoos and body piercings. Outside, in the courtyard, the air is permanently scented with grilled beef and sugary churros from the dozens of Mexican and Salvadoran food stalls lining the perimeter. On weekend afternoons, the space pulsates with the bleating rhythms of live banda, cumbia and norteño music.
Commercial, sociocultural and sacred elements converge at LA’s swap meets in ways that verge on the carnivalesque. These multi-tenant public marketplaces, fixtures of Latino, Black and Asian districts, proliferated across the city in the 1980s and 1990s – a retail format pioneered by immigrant investors, principally from Korea, who transformed hollowed-out urban shopping centres and decommissioned industrial spaces into retail emporiums catering to low-income communities underserved by national retail chains. Despite their ubiquity, these marketplaces remain largely absent from mainstream depictions of southern California life, even though they’re increasingly recognized by urban historians and researchers as important focuses of cultural production and exchange. It was in these spaces that West Coast hip hop, gangster rap, Mexican narcocorridos and other influential subcultures first gained popularity.
As part of the Frieze Projects programme at Frieze Los Angeles, Ozzie Juarez, a native Angeleno and self-professed ‘swap meet freak’ has conceptualized a performance and site-specific installation foregrounding the aesthetics, ‘hustle culture’ and liminal qualities of LA’s swap meets. Born in Compton and raised in South Central LA to ‘workaholic’ Mexican immigrant parents, the multidisciplinary artist, curator and community builder spent his formative years alongside his family, selling clothes, sunglasses and other goods at some of the city’s largest marketplaces, including the sprawling Alameda Swap Meet. He credits these experiences with fundamentally shaping his work ethic, artistic practice and curatorial approach. Today he ritualistically revisits these locations from his childhood, documenting their material culture, alert to their unlikely juxtapositions and contrasting textures, the way ‘heavy rough industrial gates sit next to reproductions of 16th-century paintings, next to cartoon imagery’.
A lot of people who are coming to the fair are not familiar with South Central LA.
As part of his Frieze Los Angeles presentation, Juarez has recreated a puesto, or market stall, which he has fortified with a gated façade evoking the industrial environments of many LA swap meets. ‘A lot of people who are coming to the fair are not familiar with South Central LA,’ says Juarez. ‘So I’m bringing a little bit of South Central to Santa Monica.’
Adopting the persona of a market vendor, Juarez hawks what appear to be cheap, mass-produced goods from his stall. On closer inspection, though, customers will find that the items are readymade art objects signed by the artist. Juxtaposing street-level grit with the more affluent backdrop of Santa Monica and Frieze, Juarez achieves a brief and unlikely convergence of the two spaces, a sly meta-commentary that hints not only at their differences but at their commonalities: each representative of a distinct kind of LA hustle.
Juarez will also present a new series of paintings investigating liminality in the urban landscape of South LA. Painted on fabricated, heavily rusted metal gates, the works reference neighbourhood landmarks that no longer exist, suggesting a complex matrix of personal and collective memories tied to the city’s ever-shifting landscape.
His work makes few overt references to gentrification, but it’s fair to say that Juarez’s career has been indelibly shaped by it. He cites it as the cause for the abrupt closure of SOLA, the gallery space he founded in South Central LA shortly after graduating from art school. It was forced to close following the sale of the building it was located in – quite possibly another casualty of the city’s speculative real estate market, whose prices are forever on an upward trajectory.
In 2018, the ongoing debate over gentrification in South LA came to a head during the opening of an exhibition at Dalton Warehouse, a 1920s-era storage depot turned studio/gallery space operated by artists with no tangible connection to the neighbourhood. Demonstrators stormed the gallery, splashing red paint on attendees, artworks and at least one dog. Juarez saw in the roiling conflict an opportunity. In 2020, he took over the lease for the 4,500-square-foot space, reimagining Dalton Warehouse as Tlaloc Studios, named after the Aztec god of rain, bringer of nourishing downpours and harbinger of fertility.
Situated on a residential street, sandwiched between turn-of-the-century cottages, the artist-run studio and gallery has a roster of 15 practitioners, most from working-class backgrounds and local to South Los Angeles. It’s an artistic community built with intention, says Juarez. He recruited artist friends and peers, many in the nascent stage of their careers, to fill the space. Its members, who represent a range of disciplines including painting, photography, screen-printing and performance, regularly host free art workshops.
The opening of Tlaloc Studios was met with widespread enthusiasm in LA art circles, its success signalling for some an energetic shift in the city’s contemporary art scene – one in which Latinx artists are gaining increased visibility and representation, creating self-sustaining communities and helping reshape the city’s aesthetics. Historically, artists from the Latinx community, despite it being the largest ethnic group in LA County, have struggled to show their work at many of the city’s high-profile cultural institutions and blue-chip galleries. Juarez belongs to a growing cohort of well-established Latinx artists inverting these historical trends. For many, this reversal was reflected in ‘At the Edge of the Sun’, the acclaimed group exhibition that opened in early 2024 at Jeffrey Deitch. Bringing together a constellation of 12 LA-based artists including Juarez, it was not promoted as a Latinx art show but rather as an exhibition loosely themed around the artists’ reflections on their home city.
Many of the most fertile and resonant conversations in Los Angeles’s contemporary art scene are being facilitated by artists, especially those from historically marginalized communities, who can engage with questions of identity and self-determination, and seek creative and economic autonomy through art-making, skill-sharing and collaboration. Laying the groundwork for these conversations are influential organizations and projects such as Lauren Halsey’s Sister Dreamer and Summaeverythang; the People’s Pottery Project, an artist-run studio supporting formerly incarcerated women, trans and non-binary individuals; and the long-running Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), founded by artist and educator Judy Baca in the 1970s to champion underrepresented communities through public art interventions.
For his part, Juarez hopes that Tlaloc Studios becomes a model for burgeoning artists, especially those from lower-income neighbourhoods and disenfranchized communities, to navigate the city’s diversifying contemporary art scene.
‘There are people that look like me and don’t think it’s possible to do this kind of work,’ he says, ‘but I’m a testament that you can come from certain neighbourhoods, look a certain way and do this type of creative work. One of my main goals in my career is to help people flip that switch.’
Ozzie Juarez is showing as part of ‘Inside Out’, the Frieze Projects programme curated by Art Production Fund, and with Charlie James Gallery (stand E17) at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.
Further Information
Frieze Los Angeles, 20 – 23 February 2025, Santa Monica Airport. Early-bird tickets now available.
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Frieze Los Angeles is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
Main Image: Ozzie Juarez, South Central Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Stephen Ross Goldstein
