LACMA Seeds and Weeds
Blum GALLERY, LOS ANGELES CA
May 30th - August 2nd, 2025
For five and a half years, between the Fall of 2019 and Spring of 2025, I regularly visited the LACMA campus to collect materials from the site as they became available through the demolition of the old buildings, the excavation into the ground and the construction of the new building. I took anything that could be used to make glazes or to enhance the environment inside the kiln while it is firing. Ash was made by burning wood from gallery floors, trees, construction lumber and debris. Concrete, travertine, ceramic tiles, glass and stones were all ground into powders. Red iron oxide was made from many kinds of rusty metals found on the site. Soda ash from the new buildings concrete mix, as well as clay and tar from the excavations were also collected. All of these materials were combined into different glaze recipes, and or blown into the kiln around 2,300*f. Some of the final pieces also incorporate intact or fragmented construction materials found on site. These materials of construction, and of art making, all originate in the earth. They were used to build the old and new buildings at LACMA. They were also used to make this project, as a way of connecting to the land that LACMA sits on, as well as to the art that it houses.
The seed, pod or egg form, the form of incubation and anticipated birth, exists in all places and times in nature, as well as in human creation throughout our history. Both abstract and literal, the form is well represented in many areas of LACMA’s encyclopedic collection. The LACMA Seeds grew from this time and place, in the heart of Los Angeles.
The weeds that came from these seeds are meant to feel as if they grew naturally from the ground, from the tar and clay, through the old LACMA buildings, through the new LACMA building, morphing and evolving as they grew, to exist independently as records of this process.
The LACMA seeds and weeds contain millions of years of geological DNA from where the museum resides, 100,000 years of biological DNA, as well as building materials from the architectural history of LACMA. Combined with new construction materials from the Geffen Galleries building, these objects are born of this exact moment on this site.
I am very happy and honored to be presenting this project at BLUM, a gallery with the deepest Los Angeles roots.
Adam Silverman
May 2025
