Art isn’t an accent of Destination Crenshaw. It is the foundation.
From monumental sculptures to vibrant murals, each piece was created to reflect the stories, triumphs, and spirit of Black Los Angeles. This collection brings together world-renowned artists, all of them Black Angelenos, whose work has shaped contemporary art globally, now contributing to a landmark project in the very city that shaped them. The result is a permanent cultural showcase that’s as ambitious and groundbreaking as the community it honors.
Commissioned Artists
Sculptors
Muralists
Art Leadership
Behind the Art Curation
V. Joy Simmons, MD | Senior Art & Exhibition Advisor | Full Bio
At the center of Destination Crenshaw’s artistic vision is Dr. Joy Simmons, a trailblazing collector and advocate for Black contemporary art. As lead of the Art Curatorial Committee, Dr. Simmons has guided the project’s creative direction from its earliest days, ensuring that every artwork reflects the power, beauty, and complexity of Black Los Angeles.
Under her leadership, the committee is a group of artists, scholars, and cultural thinkers, who have spent years shaping the project’s collection. Together, they determine which artists are commissioned, provide curatorial guidance, and ensure that each piece resonates with the community’s history and future.
Their work transforms Destination Crenshaw into more than a public art corridor; it becomes a living archive of creativity, resilience, and cultural pride that will inspire generations to come.
Curatorial Committee Members
Naima J. Keith
Vice President of Education & Public Programs, LACMA
Ron Finley
Founder, The Ron Finley Project | “Gangsta Gardener” | Community Activist
Larry Earl
Owner, 1619 Exhibits | Public Historian, Destination Crenshaw
Felicia Filer
Director of Public Arts for the City of Los Angeles
jill moniz Ph.D.
founder, Transformative Arts
Amanda Hunt
Head of Public Engagement, Learning and Impact at Walker Art Center
Adam Ayala
Founder of Smile South Central
AJ Girard
Independent Curator
Dominique Clayton
Founder of Dominique Gallery
Rick Garzon
Founder of Residency Art Gallery
Gallery
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, is a large pink fiberglass orb, 6 feet in diameter, which glows softly when viewers approach. It is the most conceptually abstract of all Destination Crenshaw's permanent commissions, yet it may also be the most accessible because of the visceral impact of its interaction with people, which enables them to feel they are communicating with the artwork. Encountered in Sankofa Park’s communal space, the sculpture is a symbol of the love that members of the community need if they are to be in service to one another, resisting gentrification and erasure.
Alison Saar honors the past, present, and futures of Crenshaw with Bearing Witness, an installation of two 13-foot-tall bronze figures, one female and one male, facing one another at a crossroads of the Boulevard. In a continuation of her use of “Black hair” as a potent visual language, the artist has fashioned the enormous coiffures of the two figures out of everyday objects culled from local thrift stores. Cast in bronze, these objects represent the art, music, and literature that make Crenshaw a destination. Carrying these symbols of the community in their hair, the two figures become an architecture of human labor and innovation and, like the poteau-mitans of Haitian vodou, are conduits for the spirits to descend and interact with the faithful.
Gerard Basil Stripling will create a Cor-ten steel sculpture in the form of the word CRENSHAW spelled in capital letters inset with African-inspired symbols, located near the north end of the Destination Crenshaw site. More than 37 feet long and 6 feet high, the sculpture will be a rich, deep red, with color-changing LED lights incorporated in the face of each letter for night-time illumination. It will occupy a landscaped median strip on Crenshaw Boulevard, opposite the largest of the project’s public gathering places, Sankofa Park. Photo by Joanne Kim.
Artis Lane considers the figure of the Black man to represent universal humanity, which experiences struggles and achievements as it undergoes a transformation into awareness. For the Sankofa Park site, the artist uses her Emerging into Spirit concept to engage with the Crenshaw neighborhood as a site of discovery, communion, opportunity, and growth. Emerging First Man is a larger-than-life bronze figure that bears on its surface the casting materials from the foundry where it was made, symbolizing a physical and spiritual birth into an understanding of purpose and possibility. It is conceived as a beacon of hope, reminding the community that we are all in the act of becoming, with our human experiences moved by divine intentions that enable us to be our best selves.
The sculpture Car Culture by Charles Dickson expresses the confluence of spirit, place, and intention in Black life in Los Angeles, where cars rather than the Sankofa bird symbolize mobility. Cars have been fundamental to Crenshaw’s communal economic stability and street life, and Car Culture incorporates elements of the cars that might be seen when low riders gather in Leimert Park. The sculpture’s main body is a trio of elongated figures resembling West African Senufo sculptures, which are traditionally used as ritual objects connecting the living and spirit worlds. Adapting this idea, Dickson uses fiber optic cables to connect these figures—larger-than-life portals to the past—with their crowns, which are fashioned from the fronts and ends of cars. Atop these car parts rests a fanciful engine, a symbol of our capacity to engineer our futures by sustaining a relationship with the vitality of the past.
Kehinde Wiley’s sculpture Rumors of War II is of a young, West African woman, rising up from the streets of Crenshaw Boulevard and Leimert Park. She will stand as a corrective, artistic intervention and a code switch. She is positioned like the Sankofa figure, moving forward and embracing the past as a function of a much broader and inclusive worldview to strengthen the ongoing legacy of the neighborhood. This is Wiley’s first large public sculpture featuring a woman on horseback. She stands as an indictment of the ways in which African women have traditionally been viewed.
Throughout his career, Melvin Edwards has been interested in chain links as a material that can tell stories about connection and community. In works installed throughout the United States, as well as in Cuba, Brazil, and Senegal, he has used chains as a stand-alone element, expressing collective unity, resistance, and the fortitude not only to endure but to thrive. Column, rising to a height of more than 36 feet, is his largest chain work to date. Its surface of burnished stainless steel reflects the community in which it stands and with it the residents’ generative legacy of cooperation and innovation. The verticality of the chain represents how our stories build upon another, how we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and how our collective engagement becomes the structure for our own success.
After moving her home and studio to the Crenshaw neighborhood, a place she visited as a child when she was growing up in Riverside, Brenna Youngblood revisited an existing sculpture, MIA, to express the creativity, vitality, and innovation that emerge from the opportunity to grow into the fullness of themselves. Fashioned to resemble large play blocks or a jungle gym, the sculpture reorders the letters MIA into I AM, asserting one’s own power to name and to know. The concept also recalls the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, the place of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last campaign, where protestors marched with placards declaring I AM A MAN: a rallying cry of the Civil Rights struggle and other resistance movements in which people have demanded to be seen as human beings with agency.
More than twenty years after the creation of their iconic mural Our Mighty Contribution, RTN Crew returns to the 787-foot-long Crenshaw Wall with a new design titled The Saga Continues. Telling a compelling story of African American history in Los Angeles, the mural's journey begins in Africa and concludes with an uplifting message of hope for the future. Among the mural’s many vignettes are depictions of the Great Migration, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and LA Uprising of 1992, the birth of the trailblazing music and dance show Soul Train, and the West Coast's cultural contribution to the world of Hip Hop.
Anthony “Toons One” Martin has painted the mural Hey Young World. Vibrantly colored and designed in a dynamic, collage-like composition, the mural will feature photorealistic images of the faces of Black children and the words The world is yours! rendered in graffiti-style lettering.
Patrick Henry Johnson is painting The Pawn Who Became A King, a 75-foot-long homage to LA’s most influential Black Architect, best known for having designed the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Theme Building at LAX, and the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. Painted in Johnson’s signature Heroic Surrealist style, The Pawn Who Became A King portrays Williams, surrounded by some of his most recognizable buildings, reaching out to grasp the architect nib he would use to create his legacy.
In Monument of Love: Mother and Child, three members of United to Inspire Collective—artists Augustine Kofie, AiseBorn (Jacori Perry), and El Mac (Miles MacGregor)—pay homage to the great Los Angeles artist Charles White (1918–1979) and his “mother and child” series. The 100-foot-tall mural features a geometric, desaturated image of a mother holding up her son, looking out over the Crenshaw district with pride and determination. The two are crowned by an ornate, richly pigmented halo of flowers that exalt the figures, and by extension, the mothers, caregivers, and children of Crenshaw and beyond.
Art Conservation
Collections Care
Destination Crenshaw’s Art Conservation program ensures that every monument, sculpture, and mural along the corridor is preserved with excellence and care. Developed by a professional curator and conservationist, the collections care plan establishes rigorous standards for long-term preservation and maintenance, setting a new benchmark for community-led art stewardship.
Supported by The Getty Foundation, the program will launch a pilot training initiative to equip local residents with top-tier skills and professional certifications in art conservation, landscaping, and streetscape maintenance. These Collection Care Specialists will become highly qualified experts, capable of maintaining world-class public art environments. This program not only safeguards Crenshaw’s cultural legacy but also creates a new workforce of skilled professionals, rooted in the community and trained to the highest standards of their field.
Be a part of the movement.