California African American Museum
600 State Dr
Los Angeles, CA 90037
Celebrate summer at CAAM! Enjoy a warm night and cool vibes with CAAM and KCRW, featuring live sets from KCRW DJs Francesca Harding and Tyler Boudreaux, food trucks, a beer garden, and more! You’ll have after-hours museum access to all CAAM exhibitions, which include solo exhibitions by Simone Leigh, Paula Wilson, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, as well as historical looks at Black beach life and African Americans in rural California.
This event is all ages.
SCHEDULE
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM KCRW DJ Tyler Boudreaux
9:00 PM - 11:00 PM KCRW DJ Francesca Harding
ABOUT CAAM
The California African American Museum (CAAM) in Exposition Park explores the art, history, and culture of African Americans, with an emphasis on California and the West. In addition to presenting a dynamic slate of exhibitions and public programs, CAAM houses a permanent collection of more than five thousand works of art, artifacts, and historical documents, and a research library. Admission is free.
ABOUT BLACK CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': CLAIMING SPACE AT AMERICA'S LEISURE FRONTIER
Access to nature, recreation, and sites of relaxation—in other words, leisure—is critical to pursuing the full range of human experience, self-fulfillment, and dignity. Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier illuminates Angelenos and other Californians who worked to make leisure here an open, inclusive reality in the first half of the twentieth century when Southern California was reimagining and positioning itself at the center of the Californian and American Dreams. In shaping recreational sites and public spaces during the Jim Crow era, African Americans challenged white supremacy and situated Black identity within oceanfront and inland social gathering places throughout California.
Black California Dreamin’ features historical photographs and memorabilia along with contemporary artworks that illuminate these leisure practices. The objects tell stories of self-determination, leadership, geographic and social mobility, beauty and gender standards, and cultural identity. African Americans helped define the practice and meaning of leisure in California as they faced emerging power politics around who gets access to naturescapes and other public spaces. In doing so, they set the stage for these places as symbols of invention and sites of public struggles still reverberating today.
Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier is curated by Alison Rose Jefferson, independent historian, curator, and author of Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era.
