Ongoingness

Ongoingness brings together work by nineteen artists from Vielmetter Los Angeles’s program in an exhibition organized around questions of endurance, instability, loss, and transformation. Spanning installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, collage, and mixed media, the exhibition examines how individuals and communities continue living, imagining, and creating while under social, environmental, and political pressure. Its reflections on the United States’ past and future coincide with the country’s 250th anniversary, but the exhibition resists a straightforward commemorative narrative, focusing instead on contradictions, unresolved histories, and the fragility of national symbols. Vielmetter Los Angeles, 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 101, Los Angeles, CA 90021. Opens July 25, 2026 — Runs through September 5, 2026. Several works confront the instability of American myths, institutions, and symbols. Samuel Levi Jones’s Star Blooded Banner uses deconstructed finance books and pulped United States flags to create a textured abstraction from the physical remnants of financial and national authority. Robert Pruitt’s large-scale drawing The widow Cherry dismantling the Master’s House depicts a woman standing amid a cyclone of broken furniture and household objects that she appears to be telekinetically disassembling. Rodney McMillian transforms a cast-iron piggy bank with tumor-like fabric protrusions, giving physical form to the violence concealed within ideals of economic self-reliance and American individualism. Throughout Ongoingness, materials are cut apart, weathered, pulped, stained, layered, suspended, and reassembled. These processes make persistence visible not as seamless progress, but as something improvised through damage, repetition, memory, and uncertainty. The exhibition ultimately proposes art as a means of remaining attentive while under pressure—an imperfect but continuing practice of confronting inherited histories, mourning what has been lost, and imagining how life might proceed otherwise.