The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired eight photographs by Los Angeles-based artist Mercedes Dorame from her series Everywhere is West.
These inkjet prints depict the flora and fauna found on the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina off the coast of Southern California, lands that for generations have been inhabited by members of the Tongva tribe.
The works are the first by the artist to enter the Getty Museum’s collection.
Dorame’s work examines her ancestral connection to the Gabrieliño/Tongva tribes, their history, and the land that historically sustained these Indigenous communities. For this series she made several trips over the course of nearly two years to the southern Channel Islands of Santa Cruz and Catalina, known as Limuw and Pimugna, respectively, in the Tongva language. While there, she documented tidal basins, asphalt seeps, and rugged landscapes with an emphasis on plants and animals that can only be found on these islands. The abalone, a mollusk that has long sustained the Tongva and other Indigenous communities along the California coastline, became a recurring subject in her work. Abalone shells have played an important cultural and ceremonial role for the Tongva peoples but due to overharvesting, largely by non-Native groups, the presence of abalone shells has been in dramatic decline in many parts along the California coastline.
The acquisition was supported by the Getty Museum‘s Photographs Council and the newly acquired works relate directly to the sculptural objects in the Rotunda Commission currently on view in the Museum’s Entrance Hall titled Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back), which closes June 16, 2024.
About Mercedes Dorame
Born in Los Angeles, Dorame received an undergraduate degree from the University of California Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; among other institutions. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Loop Artist Residency, among others.
