Patrisse Cullors and noé olivas in “Echosystems: Resonant Practices by Artists of Crenshaw Dairy Mart” at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery August 24 - November 6, 2026
Patrisse Cullors and noé olivas in “Echosystems: Resonant Practices by Artists of Crenshaw Dairy Mart” at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery August 24 - November 6, 2026
The Guggenheim Gallery presents Echosystems, the first exhibition to bring together the work of members of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart collective: (CDM): Oto-Abasi Attah, Ashley Blakeney, Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz, and noé olivas. Presented as part of Chapman University's Engaging the World: People and Communities in Motion initiative and in conjunction with the Bensussen Guest Lecture Series in Art, the exhibition contributes to a university-wide exploration of movement, belonging, public life, and collective action through the lens of contemporary art.
Founded in Los Angeles as an artist-run gallery, collective, and cultural space rooted in ancestry, abolition, and healing, CDM bridges exhibition making, artistic practice, and community building. Each artist brings a distinct body of work shaped by personal histories, cultural memory, and sustained social engagement. By bringing these practices into dialogue, Echosystems offers a portrait of Crenshaw Dairy Mart through the artists who are shaping its vision, revealing the creative ecology from which its exhibitions, collaborations, and public programs emerge.
Working across sculpture, painting, photography, performance, sound, installation, and archival media, the artists explore ancestry, labor, grief, healing, spirituality, land, and transformation. Drawing on family histories, lived experience, archival research, and community engagement, their works consider how memory is carried through bodies, materials, images, and place. Together, they reveal art as a means of preserving cultural knowledge and cultivating relationships across communities and generations.
Oto-Abasi Attah's paintings explore identity, migration, cultural inheritance, and the search for belonging through carefully rendered figures that weave together contemporary portraiture with African ceremonial traditions and symbolic forms. Shaped by his experiences as the son of Nigerian immigrants, Attah reflects on aspiration, family, and the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations, considering how identity is continuously formed through memory, ritual, and lived experience. Masks, garments, hats, travel bags, and other personal objects become vessels for stories of movement, resilience, and self-fashioning, affirming indigenous cultural forms as living traditions rather than historical artifacts. Working with a restrained palette and contemplative visual language, Attah creates intimate spaces where personal narratives intersect with collective memory. Echosystems presents a new body of paintings centered on the mask as a site of ceremony, cultural continuity, and transformation, offering an early look at Attah's evolving exploration of how ancestral knowledge continues to shape contemporary identity and collective imagination.
Ashley Blakeney's interdisciplinary practice brings together photography, poetry, music, education, and arts healing to explore memory, creative inheritance, and collective care. Drawing from family archives, personal experience, and collaborative practice, she examines how images, sound, and storytelling reconnect fractured histories while creating new forms of belonging. Her work often returns to photographs, places, and relationships across generations, retracing and reconstructing moments that blur the boundaries between past and present. Photography, writing, and music become spaces where grief, remembrance, and artistic lineage unfold together, revealing memory as a living process shaped by repetition, interpretation, and care. Through workshops, performance, and image-making, Blakeney creates opportunities for collective reflection and participation, inviting audiences to consider how artistic practice can deepen empathy, transform personal histories into shared experiences, and imagine new possibilities for healing and connection.
Patrisse Cullors works across performance, textile, installation, film, and personal archives to explore ancestry, spirituality, Black self-determination, and collective transformation. Drawing from Yoruba traditions, family histories, and lived experience, her practice considers how memory is carried through bodies, materials, ritual, and landscape. Textile, hand-stitching, cowry shells, and archival materials become sites where histories of grief, resilience, resistance, and belonging converge, connecting intimate acts of remembrance to broader social and political histories. Through monumental installations and performance, Cullors transforms these materials into spaces for reflection, ritual, and collective imagination, challenging inherited systems of power while affirming Black life, cultural continuity, and the enduring presence of ancestral knowledge. By weaving together personal narratives with shared histories, her work invites viewers to consider how remembrance, refusal, and acts of liberation can shape more just and expansive futures. The exhibition also marks the debut of the first chapter of a new body of work.
alexandre ali reza dorriz's interdisciplinary practice spans photography, film, installation, and text, examining how legal and economic systems shape relationships between natural resources, such as land and water. Drawing from legal doctrines and financial markets, his work traces the infrastructures of extraction and the ways they continue to define contemporary landscapes. dorriz reveals systems of ownership, speculation, and resource diversion, inviting viewers to reconsider landscapes as contested sites where ecological, political, and cultural histories converge.
noé olivas transforms everyday materials, including tires and industrial objects, through the Chicanx spirit of rasquachismo and the Black Assemblage Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. By creating new forms from existing materials, his work reflects on the poetics and realities of labor, family histories, spiritual traditions, and the visual culture of Southern California. His tire sculptures draw upon the histories embedded within the tire industry and its lasting impact on both communities and the environment. Embracing traditions of upcycling and reuse, olivas reimagines discarded tires, materials commonly transformed into décor, planter pots, retaining walls, and signage, by using clay to create sculptural forms that carry new meaning. Through these transformations, familiar objects become vessels of hope, resilience, and renewal, creating space for reflection on our relationship to labor, the environment, and the possibilities of transformation.
Together, Echosystems offers a portrait of Crenshaw Dairy Mart through the individual practices of the artists who have defined its vision. The exhibition reveals the creative relationships and shared commitments that continue to shape CDM as an artist-run gallery, collective, and cultural space.
Crenshaw Dairy Mart Mission Statement
Just South of Manchester and off of Crenshaw stands tall a former dairy mart, home to an artist collective and art gallery dedicated to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice, bridging cultural work and advocacy, and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community.
What these black and transnational identities seek is an imagination of new collective memory through programming, events, and arts installations which cultivate and nurture communal arts and education.
The Crenshaw Dairy Mart emerges from an investment in abolition, modes of accessibility in art practice, and weaving community solidarity through new memories.
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery cultivates contemporary art by presenting engaging exhibitions and educational programs that connect local, national, and international conversations. Through exhibitions, public events, and digital programming, the Gallery enriches campus life, fosters meaningful engagement with students and the broader university community, and supports artists whose practices expand the field, creating opportunities for work that is underrepresented, experimental, or challenging to produce and present within traditional institutional and commercial contexts.
Chapman University’s Department of Art prepares students to develop creative practices across Studio Art, Design, Art History, and interdisciplinary fields. With practicing artists, designers, and scholars as faculty, the Department combines technical expertise, creative inquiry, and critical engagement with the histories and theories of art and visual culture, providing a foundation for lifelong creative work.
With the annual Engaging the World series, Wilkinson College is committed to leading the conversation in our community on issues of humanity, unity and justice. As such, the college has undertaken, semester-long examinations of key societal issues. These interdisciplinary, campus-wide conversations promote thoughtful dialogue; mindful reflection; social tolerance; awareness and respect; peace and kindness.
