We moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and within a few weeks I was making the gallery rounds with a newborn strapped to my chest. A recovering academic and new to LA and the West Coast scene, I was also just getting my footing in contemporary art in general. Maybe it was my own recent schooling, or perhaps a concerted attempt to learn everything at once, that made me particularly aware of what felt like a uniquely Angeleno taxonomy: at almost every show we visited, and with so many artists we met, someone would eventually say, “She’s ArtCenter,” or “He’s CalArts.” And I would think, what does that mean? It clearly conveyed something necessary that I didn’t understand. Even more baffling, the alumni of these programs went out of their way to signal a debt owed to mentors whose work bore little or no visual resemblance to their own.

The embedded culture of teaching and the extent to which LA-educated artists embraced pedagogy ahead of (aesthetic) school or style felt like a specifically Los Angeles-phenomenon. Artists here not only studied with bonafide art stars that had long been dynamic fixtures on faculty rosters, but these teachers seemed to have little-to-no interest in churning out copycats. Radical feminists loved Paul McCarthy! Realist painters loved Charles Gaines! Everyone loved Roger Herman! The result was, and is, a sprawling network of interconnected artists whose outlooks are so highly personal and unique, but which are also so essentially LA.

Cohort is an attempt to map Los Angeles’s often under-recognized academic tradition through the very specific lens of artists engaging with a non-figurative lexicon. It’s also about the prodigious support, rigorous critiques, and exceptional work ethic throughout this community.  As this exhibition evolved, I came to think about an increasingly expansive definition of a cohort. Immediately, we can trace the academic side to this: Nick, Math, Heather and Allison are all UCLA alumni; Tiffany was a student of Allison’s at ArtCenter, Nick was her TA. But there are also larger social networks, friendships and camaraderie at play. These artists and their peers constitute a large and disparate pack that sometimes shows together, but more often simply show up together.

–Thea Smolinski