As you enter the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newest venture you hear a 1918 recording of the Tongva people, overlayed with the signing of two contemporary Tongva, Mercedes Dorame and her daughter.
Dorame, an artist and educator, is the creator of “Portal for Tovaangar,” a piece featured in the museum’s exhibition “Mapping The Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures” opening Sunday.
The round canvas painted with acrylic and decorated with concrete bowls, shells and salt crystals is the first thing museum-goers see as they enter the exhibition. Above the canvas, planet-like star stones float suspended in the air by yarn, shifting the viewer’s gaze up toward the cosmos.
The piece represents the connection Tongva people, the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, have with the land, natural world and cosmology.
“[Portal from Tovaangar] comes from the idea that there’s so many layers of experience and existence within our city, within this city,” Dorame said. “And, my ancestry as a Tongva person, a first person of Los Angeles, is at the base level of that. But, how do we vertically experience all these other realms?”
The exhibit doesn’t just explore cosmology in Los Angeles.
The project features nearly 200 pieces of art and relics from roughly 15 different cultures, said Stephen Little, LACMA’s Florence and Harry Sloan Curator of Chinese Art. From Neolithic Europe to Mesopotamia to the Andes to East Asia, thousands of perspectives are represented in how the cosmos, religion and culture have evolved over time.
To develop a program that explores the intersection of science and art, LACMA entrusted researchers at Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory to honor the 100-year anniversary of Edwin Hubble’s discovery of galaxies outside of the Milky Way.
Carnegie’s Interim President John Mulchaey said to mark the occasion, his observatory lent Hubble’s glass plate negative he took of the discovery.
“This is the first time this has been publicly viewed in many, many decades I’ve been at Carnegie – 30 years. I’ve only seen the plate twice and I’m the boss,” Mulchaey said. “It is the plate that really discovered the universe.”
Mulchaey said he believes that by connecting the sciences with the arts more people will become involved with cosmology and astrology.
The exhibition aims to explore questions between the two realms. Little said he hopes visitors come away from the experience understanding how different yet alike so many cultures are.
“It’s about being itself and existence, the origin of the universe, the age of the universe, the structure of the universe, the place of human beings in the universe,” Little said. “Does that have meaning? Or perhaps it doesn’t have meaning. Those are the kinds of questions I think the exhibition raises. If people take those questions away, I’ll be thrilled.”
Visitors can see “Mapping the Infinite” from October 20 through March 2. Students within LA County can also receive a $4 discount on their tickets if they show an ID.
Whether it’s art, religion, culture or looking toward the stars, Dorame said LACMA’s newest exhibition if anything, should reconnect Angelenos with the land and skies around them.
“It’s not only in the present,” Dorame said. “But it goes deeper into all the ways that this earth and the land here has existed and the people who’ve cared for it for so long and still do.”