Destination Crenshaw

Many Americans know Kehinde Wiley as the artist behind the lush, leafy portrait of President Barack Obama now touring the United States.

Far fewer know that Wiley got his start in Los Angeles, growing up in the 1980s near Jefferson and Crenshaw Boulevards in the heart of the largest Black community on the West Coast. Always creatively inclined, Wiley was taking art classes at a conservatory at age 11, and would later earn a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale.

Based in New York these days, Wiley is famous not just for his presidential rendering, but also for his striking portraits of urban men of color, whom he portrays in classical poses associated throughout history with glory, heroism, and prestige—thereby promoting Black honor and accomplishment. He hasn’t forgotten his L.A. roots, though. Wiley is one of seven recently announced artists who will contribute the first outdoor sculptures to Destination Crenshaw, a public-private effort to transform 1.3 miles of the ’Shaw (as it’s known by locals) into an economically thriving business and cultural corridor for Black L.A.

Wiley told the Los Angeles Times that his participation in Destination Crenshaw feels like a homecoming, and that he wants his work to “expand this question of a struggle for representation and struggle for human rights and for visible signs of dignity, which is essentially what sculptural monuments are—what we as a collective society stand behind, what we gather around and consider to be our high watermarks as a society.”

In October 2021 the Getty Foundation awarded Destination Crenshaw a $3 million grant to support the commissioning, fabrication, and installation of the sculptures, all of which come from artists closely connected to the Black community of South L.A.: Charles Dickson, Melvin Edwards, Maren Hassinger, Artis Lane, Alison Saar, Wiley, and Brenna Youngblood. These names are just the first of many to follow. Ultimately, 100 Black artists will install pieces along Crenshaw Boulevard.

The artworks are part of an ambitious plan that includes new sidewalks, culturally stamped street furniture and gathering areas, shade structures, pocket parks with more than 800 new trees, a community amphitheater, wayfinding, and more. Perkins&Will, an architectural firm behind the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, is leading the design, and Gallagher & Associates will provide an augmented reality storytelling component. The initiative represents the largest commission ever undertaken for Black artists.

“These artists have been nurtured and inspired by Black L.A., and their artworks will now serve to strengthen the community,” says Jason W. Foster, president and chief operating officer of Destination Crenshaw. “Residents have been fighting a decades-long battle against cultural erasure, and Destination Crenshaw is an assertion of Black permanence.” Foster’s vision for the South L.A. corridor was developed in close consultation with civic officials, local business leaders, and the people who live and work along the route. The plan is to bring transformative economic development, job creation, and environmental healing to the area, all while elevating Black art and culture. “Getty is an invaluable collaborator in helping us achieve our community engagement goals and grow our artistic impact. We are only as good as our partnerships.”

In addition to its support for the inaugural public sculptures, the Getty Foundation will fund a program of youth internships and apprenticeships along the corridor, helping to instill a sense of community ownership over the artworks and create job opportunities for young people in the neighborhood. Getty Conservation Institute staff will advise on a conservation and maintenance plan focused on long-term care and preservation of the site, while the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative team will collaborate with Destination Crenshaw colleagues to develop joint public programming around the artworks.

“Destination Crenshaw will be a fitting and joyful tribute to Black creativity and history, combining a high level of artwork, urban design, and landscape design with targeted economic investment and engagement with local residents,” says Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation. “Getty is proud to be partnering with Destination Crenshaw in many different ways, including joining with other funders, public and private, to support this ambitious cultural place-keeping initiative, which can serve as a model for other communities throughout the country.”

Works by Some of the Biggest Names in Black Art

Sankofa Park

Four of the initial seven sculptures will be installed in the planned Sankofa Park, the northernmost public gathering place of Destination Crenshaw at 46th Street, and the rest will be distributed halfway along the route at 54th Street and at the route’s southern end. In traditional West African culture, the symbol of the Sankofa bird, whose feet face forward but head curves around backward, represents the importance of learning from the past while moving into the future. As the centerpiece of Destination Crenshaw, Sankofa Park will embrace the same shape, reminding visitors of the neighborhood’s important history and hopeful trajectory.

Within the park, Charles Dickson’s sculpture Car Culture will riff on Crenshaw Boulevard’s one-time identity as a street anchored by numerous car dealerships and an important gathering place for lowriders (customized cars with lowered bodies). In the artist’s rendering, a trio of elongated figures form the statue’s base, resembling West African Senufo ritual objects traditionally used to foretell future events and as conduits between the living and spirit worlds. Dickson will employ fiber optic cables to connect these portals to the past with crowns fashioned from car fronts, ends, and engines. Cars have been fundamental to Crenshaw’s communal street life for decades: During the 1960s, numerous auto dealerships opened along the boulevard, and by the 1990s thousands of lowriders cruised the strip, offering opportunities to socialize that endure to this day. As the street is reimagined for the 21st century, Dickson’s statue suggests that cars will continue to be a mainstay of community and economic life.

Maren Hassinger often works with unconventional materials such as plastic bags, tree limbs, and leaves, inviting viewers to engage with the stories she tells through material and form. Her contribution to Destination Crenshaw, An Object of Curiosity, Radiating Love, will be a six-foot-in-diameter pink fiberglass orb. When viewers approach, the sphere will respond by glowing with soft, rosy light. The most abstract in form of all Destination Crenshaw’s permanent commissions, the work will also be the most accessible due to the playful interactions it will invite.

For Artis Lane, the figure of the Black man represents a universal human experience of shared struggle, achievement, and the drive to seek oneness with the divine. She will create a larger-than-life bronze sculpture, Emerging First Man, whose head faces hopefully up to the sky. The sculpture’s surface will bear residue of the ceramic mold used at the foundry where it originated, symbolizing a physical and spiritual birth into a world of purpose and possibility. This sentiment reflects Lane’s view of the Crenshaw neighborhood as a place of discovery, opportunity, and growth.

Kehinde Wiley’s 27-foot-tall sculpture of a young West African woman will rise above the street at the intersection of Crenshaw and Leimert Boulevards. Part of his Rumors of War series, which repudiates problematic Confederate monuments by placing Black figures astride muscular horses in heroic military poses, the piece stands as a corrective, artistic intervention. This is Wiley’s first equestrian statue featuring a woman on horseback, and her proud, triumphant pose is an indictment of negative views of African women. Positioned like the Sankofa figure, she will simultaneously move forward and look back, embodying the ongoing legacy of the neighborhood while charging towards the future.

54th Street

Throughout his career, Melvin Edwards has used the form of chain links to evoke connection, community, and fortitude. They are the bonds needed to not just endure, but also to thrive. Column, stretching over three stories high, will be Edwards’ largest chain work to date. He views the upwardly climbing stainless steel surfaces as a “column of memory,” reflecting both his personal decision to become an artist while living in South L.A. during the early 1960s, and the entwined decisions of many other artists and individuals to develop the community over the years.

Welcome Park

Alison Saar honors the past, present, and future of Crenshaw with Bearing Witness, an installation of two 13-foot-tall figures, one female and one male, that will face one another at a crossroads of the boulevard. Saar’s memories of Crenshaw run deep; her mother, the artist Betye Saar, used to shop along Crenshaw Boulevard in the 1950s because it was one of the few places she felt safe as a woman of color. Alison Saar’s duo will wear mid-century clothing and feature enormous coiffures—a continuation of Saar’s use of “Black hair” as a potent visual language—made out of objects culled from local thrift stores. Cast in bronze, these items will represent the art, music, and literature that make Crenshaw an enduring destination.