Los Angeles, 7 July 2026
Serendipity.
I love it. When we least expect it, my wife and I stumble across something that is just wonderful and we give thanks to the mysterious ways of the universe that led us to this pleasure. Looking back through my posts, I would say the last time this happened was quite recently, when we visited an exhibition involving dragons back in February.
It happened again a few weeks ago, when we visited Los Angeles’s California African American Museum. We had been using the LA Metro Rail to go downtown. Each time we got to the Expo Park/USC stop, the recorded announcement would tell us that this was the stop for, among other places, the museum. After the third or fourth time we heard the announcement, I suggested to my wife that we should visit it on our next free day. And so one Sunday we found ourselves on the Metro Rail heading for the museum.
Neither of us had done any research beforehand, so we didn’t know what to expect. I half thought we would get to see exhibitions on the history of African Americans in Los Angeles and California – that’s pretty much what we got at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, which we visited several years ago. Well, we got none of that. Instead, enveloped in our blissful ignorance, we wandered into a wonderful exhibition of works by an African American artist we had never heard of: Willie Birch. Here is a recent photo of him. He’s 84 this year.
A thumbnail biography: he was born and raised in New Orleans, moved to New York in the mid-1970s after getting a Master of Fine Arts in Baltimore, lived in the Big Apple for 20 years, before returning to New Orleans in 1993. Surprisingly, this is his first-ever career retrospective, bringing together works from 1968 to the present. His style has evolved dramatically over the years. At some point in the exhibition, there was a comment to the effect that whenever art critics proclaimed he had finally found his style he promptly changed it. An artist after my own heart! Many exhibitions of modern artists get so tedious: they find some signature style, and then they repeat it over and over again with small variations for the rest of their careers.
Reflecting these changes in style, the exhibition was broken down into three sections: early, middle, and late years. What follows is my purely personal selection of likes from each section.
Early years
Willie Birch tried out a number of styles in his early years. The one I found most catching was his use of found wood to carve sculptures. Here is his piece Ancestors Calling “inspired by Southern Black craft traditions, African spirituality, and the symbolic and sculptural forms of Ancient Egypt” (I’m quoting the text panel).
And this piece is titled Passages.
The “work addresses both the threat and survival of his ancestors and the customs of Black Americans in New Orleans … The layout of the sculptures resembles a New Orleans second line parade, the traditional processional after a funeral service … but the representation of water imparts another, more somber, meaning to the work. The word “passages” in [the] title can refer to the transition from life to death, but also to the Middle Passage, the forced transition across the Atlantic Ocean by Africans”. Here is a close-up of some of the wonderful faces which Birch has carved.
A few years later, Birch pivoted to a new style, creating his so-called Folkloric series. This wonderful piece, Music under the El, reminded us so powerfully of our days in New York that for a few mad minutes we discussed the possibility of buying a print version – a discussion, however, that came to nothing because prints don’t seem to exist.
Here are a number more from the same series.
A Prayer for Latin America
La Cueva de Brujo VooDoo
Martin Luther King, MacDonald’s, and Miami’s Burning
Graduation Day
Middle years
In the early 1990s, Birch switched style again. He started creating sculptures out of papier-mâché, apparently after seeing a papier-mâché crucifix in New Orleans’s cathedral. Here is a selection.
Memories of the ’60s
Here, a quilt maker is creating a quilt celebrating Malcolm X and Martin Luther King while commemorating scenes from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
Going South
The commentary is now on the persons being sculpted. The comment I find most heartbreaking is on the boy’s T-shirt. He holds a gun, helpfully signed as a toy gun, while on his T-shirt it says “White kids commit suicide. Black kids shoot each other”.
Knowing our History, Teaching our Culture
The commentary here has a political sharpness to it. I encourage readers to look carefully at the various statements written on the children’s clothes as well as on the blackboard.
Uptown Memories
To a person like me who loves books, I felt a great tenderness for this young man who was plunged so deeply into his reading.
Birch didn’t just prepare these large-scale sculptures. He also made small, intimate sculptures that would fit in a shoe box. Here is what I consider to be the best example in the exhibition, Subway Scene, Vietnam Vet.
Later years
When Birch left New York to return to New Orleans, his style changed dramatically once more. He started creating large-scale charcoal and acrylic works on paper, initially in colour and later in black and white only. Here are two of the works in colour.
Street Musician with Guitar
Batty Moves III
The works in black and white have focused mainly on scenes from the part of New Orleans he lives in, the Seventh Ward, with him working off photographs he has taken.
This work, however, The Chef with the Knife, is more of a formal portrait.
The last work in the exhibition, which you pass as you leave, is Transiting.
Given Birch’s age, perhaps it is fitting for the exhibition to finish with this work, reminding us that he is nearing the end of his life. What does that small detail of a pillowcase covered in dinosaurs tell us, I wonder, if anything at all? That we are all heading for extinction? Maybe I’m being too fanciful.
Well, if any of my readers happen to pass through Los Angeles over the next couple of months, I highly recommend that you take in this exhibition, It’s on until 21 October.
the heart thrills 