PHILADELPHIA — The Trump administration can replace a slavery exhibit at George Washington’s home in Philadelphia, a federal appeals court panel said Thursday, striking down a lower court’s injunction that required the National Park Service to reinstall the interpretive panels.
The unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a lower court judge wrongly interpreted Philadelphia’s contract claims involving Independence National Historical Park, saying the city merely having standing to sue did not mean its arguments had merit. The panel also praised the plans for the replacement installation, writing that they were “full of historical context,” despite objections from historians and city officials that the content appears whitewashed.
The ruling comes a week after a Massachusetts federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore sites changed under an executive order calling for the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks to not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The federal government has asked for a stay on that ruling while it appeals.
It was unclear how the Massachusetts ruling would affect the restoration or replacement of the panels at the President’s House Site. About half the large panels at the outdoor exhibit had been restored before a February pause in the work.
Messages to spokespeople for the Department of Interior and the National Park Service were not returned.
In a statement on Instagram late Thursday, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker vowed to pursue legal avenues to reverse the decision.
“We cannot and WILL not rest until the full story of American history – including the existence of Slavery at the President’s House here in Philadelphia – is told, for our Nation and the World to see,” she wrote.
Dawn Chavous, a volunteer for Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, one of the advocacy groups that helped develop the site in the 2000s, said they are disappointed with the decision but are speaking to their attorneys and considering options.
“For decades, ATAC has worked to ensure that the stories of the enslaved African descendants who lived and labored at the President’s House are not erased, overlooked, or misrepresented,” the group said in an emailed statement. “That commitment remains unwavering. We believe that historical truth matters, and we will continue to advocate for the protection, preservation, and accurate interpretation of this important chapter of American history.”
The city of Philadelphia sued in January after the National Park Service, in response to President Trump’s executive order, removed the explanatory panels from the President’s House Site, where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital.
The city had worked in tandem with the federal government, historians and private partners to create the exhibit in the early 2000s — as part of a longstanding cooperation agreement over the downtown historical park — and contributed $1.5 million toward its creation.
The city argued that the federal government must consult with the city before making changes to the President’s House Site. Justice Department lawyers argued the administration alone can decide what stories are told at National Park Service properties.
In its ruling Thursday, the appeals panel said the maintenance portion of the contract between the city and the federal government could not be interpreted to mean the site would remain as it was when it was completed.
“The duty to ‘maintain’ is better understood as a general management obligation that accompanies ownership, not a promise that the exhibits will forever remain in place regardless of the owner’s wishes,” the opinion said.
Casey and Lauer write for the Associated Press. Casey contributed to this report from Boston.
Béla Guttmann may be the most consequential soccer coach you’ve never heard of. But if it weren’t for Guttmann, you may never have heard of Pelé.
And Brazil may never have become the greatest soccer-playing country on Earth.
That’s because Guttmann changed the shape of modern Brazilian soccer — and changed the sport forever — when he imported the revolutionary 4-2-4 system from Hungary to Sao Paulo in 1957. A year later, Brazil won the first of five World Cups and the joga bonito was born.
But what Guttmann brought to Brazil isn’t nearly as interesting as how he got it there. That’s just one of the fascinating stories in “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story,” the exhibit that will open the Holocaust Museum LA on Sunday at the Goldrich Cultural Center, a $70-million expansion that will double the size of the Pan Pacific Park museum’s campus to 70,000 square feet.
A soccer ball from the holocaust is among the items on display in the exhibit “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story” at the Holocaust Museum LA.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The exhibit was unveiled during a private reception on Saturday followed by a free preview day open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The grand public opening will take place in August.
The show’s launch coincides with eight local World Cup matches, which kicked off with the United States’ 4-1 win over Paraguay on Friday at SoFi Stadium, and it shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game, as well as how Jewish innovators like Guttmann shaped the modern rhythm, style and culture of the sport.
“It was in the same intellectual level as jazz, as art and everything modern and progressive,” journalist Allon Sander, who helped curate the exhibit, said of Jewish participation in European soccer in the years before World War II.
“The origin of the game and how it intersects with Jews and the Holocaust and the impact that these Jewish footballers and coaches had to shape the game and help popularize the sport is so fascinating,” added Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. “And it’s an unknown history.”
Much of that story can be told through Guttmann, who was born in Budapest in the final year of the 19th century and developed into one of the sport’s first Jewish stars, representing Hungary in the 1924 Olympics and playing for nine teams in two countries before retiring to become a coach.
But none of that success mattered when the Hungarian government began introducing anti-Jewish laws in 1938, costing Guttmann his job and nearly his life when he was sent to a Nazi forced-labor camp, where he was tortured. Just days before he believed he would be shipped to Auschwitz, which meant certain death, he escaped alongside Erno Erbstein, another Jewish coach.
Erbstein revolutionized soccer in Italy before dying in 1949, along with the entire Torino team, when their plane crashed into a hilltop outside Turin. Four years ago, he was inducted into the Italian soccer hall of fame. Guttmann, meanwhile, who lost much of his family in the Nazi death camps, would go on to coach for 42 years in 14 countries, winning championships in six of them yet only staying in a single place for more than two years just once.
“He’s running away from his demons,” said Ronen Dorfan, a journalist and sports historian based in Budapest whose research was instrumental in putting the exhibit together. “His father was murdered, his sister was murdered. You never know how you survived in Budapest during the war so he had guilt feelings.”
A jersey worn by player Max Wozniak and a jersey from the 1930s are displayed in an exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The exhibit was designed in three sections, the first devoted to the years before World War II, the second is about the Holocaust and the third is the postwar years. And while it details Jewish participation in, and influence on, global soccer, it also challenges the cliché that Jews were intellectuals, artists and laborers but not athletes.
“We are always trying to challenge stereotypes. Stereotypes that we might have about ourselves and even stereotypes that we believe about others,” said Jordanna Gessler, the museum’s vice president of education and exhibits who helped curate the show. “It’s crucial to help people find their place and their voice and really see the unity, the similarities between people.
“This is a story that was lost in time and we’re really bringing it out,” Gessler added. “To really have this conversation and encourage people to explore stories that they might not know.”
One thing people might not know is that in the 1920s and ‘30s, Europe’s best teams weren’t in England, Germany or France, but in Austria and Hungary, where they were led by Jewish players and coaches such as Hugo Meisl, Jozsef Braun, Arpad Weisz, Marton Bukovi, Gusztav Sebes and Gyula Mandi. Weisz and Braun were both killed by the Nazis.
A soccer ball from the 1974 World Cup is displayed at an exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The surge of antisemitism and fascism in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe helped spread the influence of those revolutionary players and coaches around the world.
“With the rise of the Reich and the Holocaust, the coaches ran away,” Dorfan said. “And they ran to every corner of the world, to Brazil, to Argentina, to Portugal [and] provided coaches to Real Madrid, to Barcelona, to Benfica, to Flamengo.
“There isn’t one of these clubs that doesn’t owe its tactical development in the ‘40s and ‘50s to the Jewish coaches, which came primarily from Hungary.”
The primary tactical development was the shift from the popular but rigid 2-3-5 formation, which required immense physical endurance and tactical discipline, to the fluid 4-2-4, which spread the wingers to the touch line and allowed for improvisation and creativity on the attacking end, a formation pioneered in Budapest in the 1920s.
“They developed a more refined game of passing the ball, keeping it on the carpet rather than the English kick and run, and really put thought into tactical thinking,” Dorfan said.
Guttmann, who played or coached for more than two dozen teams in his career — including one, in Romania, that paid him in vegetables during the postwar period — brought the Hungarian approach to Brazil in 1957 when he coached Sao Paulo to a championship. After Vicente Feola, the manager Guttmann replaced at Sao Paulo, took over the national team a year later, he brought the formation with him, popularizing many of the tactics still used in modern soccer, such as fluid defensive wingers, overlapping full backs, the use of a withdrawn striker and an attacking midfield.
The soccer team at the Theresienstadt concentration camp’s flag is displayed in a Holocaust Museum LA exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
“He is the whole exhibition in one man,” Dorfan said of Guttmann.
“Obviously if we wouldn’t have had the Holocaust, those [coaches] wouldn’t be kept out of Europe, Europe would be much stronger, much more developed. [And] then the development of Brazil or the success of Brazil would be coming much later,” Sander said.
Dorfan spent the better part of two years tracking down many of the more than 100 trophies, uniforms, photos and trinkets that make up “The Beautiful Game” exhibit, a search that required determination, perseverance and more than a little luck. Many of the items, because of their ties to Jewish athletes and teams, were hidden during the war and presumed lost. Others resurfaced only through detective work that sent Dorfan following leads that spanned decades and crossed more than a dozen borders.
That also cost money. So Alan Rothenberg, the man who, as president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, first brought the World Cup to Los Angeles 32 years ago, stepped up to lead an effort that raised more than $1 million to fund the exhibit.
“The story really needs to be told, particularly with what’s going on right now with respect to antisemitism,” Rothenberg said. “It’s really important for people to realize what can happen. And soccer is a great vehicle to draw them in. The one main thing in the museum is bringing schoolkids in.”
The Nazis and their collaborators failed in their attempt to erase the history of Jewish soccer pioneers; in fact, they inadvertently popularized both the men — and women — and their ideas. But the sport also helped other Jews survive a dark period and Kean said that may be the most beautiful and uplifting part of “The Beautiful Game.”
“The main reason we decided to do this exhibition in the first place is because for years so many survivors, when they talk about their life before the war, so many of them talk about soccer. So many of them were passionate and fond of the sport,” she said.
“We knew the exhibit opening was going to coincide with the World Cup. L.A. is going to be on the world stage. This is a great opportunity for the museum to get these stories out.”
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents the work of the late Nam June Paik, Korean American artist, who is considered to be the founder of video art, during a press preview of his first-ever retrospective exhibition in San Francisco, California. Photo by JOHN G. MABANGLO / EPA
June 12 (Asia Today) — Nam June Paik connected Seoul, Tokyo and New York by satellite in 1986.
His project, “Bye Bye Kipling,” brought Korean traditional dance, American popular music and Japanese avant-garde art together on one screen in real time. The work directly challenged British writer Rudyard Kipling’s famous line that East and West could never meet, presenting instead the possibility of communication across borders and cultures.
That history of encounter and exchange is at the center of “Road movie: Art between Korea and Japan since 1945,” now on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in Gwacheon. The exhibition marks the 60th anniversary of normalized diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan and traces 80 years of artistic exchange since Korea’s liberation in 1945.
The exhibition features about 200 works by 43 artists and artist teams from both countries. It was jointly organized by the Korean museum and the Yokohama Museum of Art. The show first opened in Yokohama late last year and drew about 37,000 visitors before coming to South Korea.
Featured artists include Nam June Paik, Lee Ufan, Lee Bul, Jung Yeondoo, Koki Tanaka, Jiro Takamatsu and Takashi Murakami, along with other major figures in contemporary Korean and Japanese art.
Paik is one of the central figures in the exhibition. He studied aesthetics and art history in Japan in the 1950s and later built close ties with Japan’s avant-garde art scene. It was there that he met Shigeko Kubota, his lifelong partner and artistic collaborator.
Alongside “Bye Bye Kipling,” the exhibition presents Kubota’s video work “Broken Diary: Korean Trip,” which documents Paik’s return to South Korea after 34 years abroad.
The exhibition, however, does not focus only on well-known artists. Its first section, “In Between: Zainichi Koreans’ Gaze,” examines the lives of Korean artists who remained in Japan after liberation. Cho Yanggyu’s “Sealed Warehouse” depicts a dark, enclosed labor site and reflects both the reality faced by Zainichi Koreans and the wounds left by national division.
The exhibition also explores the growth of artistic exchange after South Korea and Japan normalized diplomatic relations in 1965. Works by Lee Ufan, Park Seo-bo, Yun Hyong-keun, Jiro Takamatsu and Kishio Suga show how artists in the two countries influenced one another as modern art movements developed across borders.
Later works by Masato Nakamura, Takashi Murakami and Lee Bul show how artistic exchange expanded in the 1990s from official institutions to personal networks and collaborative relationships.
Lee Bul’s “Cyborg W5” presents a futuristic but incomplete body, questioning boundaries between humans and machines and between male and female identities. The work reflects the shared concerns about technology and identity that shaped Korean and Japanese contemporary art after the 1990s.
The exhibition’s final section shifts from past exchange to present-day solidarity. Koki Tanaka’s “Vulnerable Histories: A Road Movie” links the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake to more recent anti-Korean demonstrations in Japan, asking viewers to consider histories of discrimination and exclusion.
Jung Yeondoo’s “Magician’s Walk” reflects on landscapes after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and explores the possibility of empathy and solidarity with the suffering of others.
The exhibition also extends to the museum’s outdoor sculpture park in Gwacheon. Six sculptures by Korean artists based in Japan and Japanese artists, including Duckjun Kwak, Quac Insik and Lee Ufan, highlight the museum’s role as an important site of Korean-Japanese artistic exchange.
Kim Sung-hee, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, said the exhibition revisits “historical moments experienced by the two countries and the traces of artistic exchange formed within them.”
Kim said she hopes the exhibition will offer visitors a chance to rediscover “the status and possibilities of Korean and Japanese contemporary art.”
A cross section of a 250-year-old Pasadena oak tree that was uprooted in a 1993 windstorm is among the first things visitors will see upon entering the Huntington’s new exhibit, “This Land Is…” Jagged cracks in the trunk, which was once rooted in the Huntington’s lawn, are feebly held together by wooden joints.
It’s a fitting emblem of what’s to come in a long-planned show curated to coincide with the country’s upcoming semiquincentennial, and crafted to pose land itself as central to the country’s complex past. After taking in the exhibit, attendees can draw their own conclusions about the land’s role as a “geographical and metaphorical space of promise, struggle, and belonging.”
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On a recent late afternoon, the Pasadena sun drilled down on the facade of the Huntington’s MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, where the show’s organizers waited beside four chiseled columns with their hands tucked behind their backs, swaying in anticipation.
“It’s the first time anyone is seeing it,” said Linde B. Lehtinen, the museum’s senior curator of photography.
Joining her are Josh Garrett-Davis, curator of Western American history, and Armando Pulido, assistant curator for special projects. All three smile with excitement.
For the better part of the last two and a half years, Lehtinen and Garrett-Davis have spearheaded the curation of “This Land Is…,” which opens Sunday and runs through early next year.
For them the fallen oak tree represents hope amid disturbance: Another once-towering elder on the museum’s North Vista was uprooted during a windstorm in 2025 — one of its acorns has since sprouted and now stands more than 6-feet tall.
Still, it only brushes the surface of an exhibition that seamlessly draws upon a plethora of works crafted across U.S. history. Want to plan a visit? Here are five things you shouldn’t miss seeing.
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“This machine kills fascists,” etched on the back of Woody Guthrie’s guitar on display at The Huntington. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
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A closer view of the “This Machine Kills Facists” etching. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Woody Guthrie’s guitar, inscribed with ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’
In 1940, Woody Guthrie sat in a Midtown Manhattan hotel, toiling over lyrics for what would become “This Land Is Your Land.” Today, it’s been adopted as a quasi-anthem for the U.S. and the epitome of American progressivism.
For this exhibition, the museum acquired Guthrie’s C.F. Martin and Co. guitar, a seamless blend of spruce, mahogany, celluloid, ebony and mother-of-pearl. On its back, a carved inscription reads, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
“The idea for ‘This Land Is…’ emerged … because the scope and breadth of his voice in terms of his activism and how prolific he was … and thinking about how he reflected on and experienced American land,” Lehtinen said.
Alongside the guitar is a copy of the Declaration of Independence, annotated by John McKesson, secretary of New York’s Fourth Provincial Congress, in the days following July 4, 1776. According to Lehtinen, the two objects were paired as instruments of protest and change.
“We talked to [Guthrie’s] granddaughter Anna Canoni, and she said to us at one point that he used guitars like pens or tools, and that was so appropriate to how we were thinking about its relationship to this document,” she added.
A map of the Butte Community, Gila River Relocation Center drawn by an internee.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Japanese flower farmers photographed before, during and after internment
Not far from the Guthrie guitar is a panoramic portrait of the Kuromi family, posing amid a flower farm that stood where Los Feliz Boulevard is now. To its right is a watercolor painting of the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, where many members of the family were forcibly transported to and imprisoned during World War II.
“I was looking at a historic preservation report, and the name was the same as my mechanic in Los Feliz,” Garrett-Davis said. “The next time I went to get my oil changed, I took a printout of that panorama and was going to show it to them and ask, ‘Do you know anything about this? Is this related?’
“I walked into their office, and a copy of that photo had been on their wall for years. In 10 years, I had never noticed it,” he said with a laugh.
After their internment, the Kuromi family returned to their farm in 1945 to find their equipment stolen. The process of regaining access to their land was slow, but they eventually settled back in, and operated the farm until losing their lease in 1961.
‘A Harvest of Death’ and mail from home on the Civil War front
One of the most grotesque displays on view is an albumen print of an 1863 photo titled “A Harvest of Death,” taken by Timothy H. O’Sullivan after the Battle of Gettysburg. Within its frame lies the bodies of fallen soldiers, sprawled out and lifeless on the grass.
“That evocative title signals some of the other things that we have been thinking about, whether it’s looking at gardens or loss … in this case, these are bodies that have been left, and they’re decomposing,” Lehtinen said.
Paired with the print is a letter from a young woman named Harriet Bailey to her uncle on the front lines of the Civil War, containing seeds delicately etched with drawings of a ship, facesand a dog. The two pieces represent a stark contrast in experiences during the same conflict, once again touching upon the theme of hope amid disturbance.
“This is a remnant of home that he’s actually being sent while on the battlefield,” she continued. “So, the joy and lightness to what is an incredibly somber moment in American history.”
“Archiving the Watershed” is a collection of artifacts from the Colorado River assembled by Otis R. “Dock” Marston on display.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The Colorado River, mapped out through an adventurer’s eyes
This display is described as a “tiny slice” of the Huntington’s archive on Otis Reed “Dock” Marston, a historian and river runner who made it his life’s goal to collect information on the Colorado River. According to Garrett-Davis, Marston had around 185 binders full of photographs, often placed on a cut-out map of where they were taken and organized mile-by-mile, from below the U.S.-Mexico border all the way into Utah.
This taps into a focal point of the exhibition: adapting it to a West Coast perspective. In this way, the idea of independence is viewed expansively as it unfolds across time and place.
“The Huntington has a wonderful collection of presidential papers and documents relating to the Colonial era, but we also have materials on California … from the lens of the West,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence.
“We can show the West’s visual culture at the same time that we can show the original copies of the Declaration of Independence … we have a breadth that’s quite rare.”
Artist Noni Olabiisi’s, “Troubled Island” mural on canvas, depicting the struggling of the Haitian revolution.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
‘Troubled Island’ and a mirrored struggle
The Haitian Revolution may seem out of place in an exhibition celebrating the U.S., but Haiti was the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. Its independence from the French was proclaimed in 1804, just two decades after the American colonies signed the Treaty of Paris.
In the mural “Troubled Island,” Noni Olabisi chronicles the Haitian struggle for independence, including how suffering under French colonists led to the 1791 slave rebellion. The piece was first painted for the William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams in 2003, referencing an opera of the same name.
The opera was composed by Still with a libretto from the Missouri-born poet, playwright, novelist and social activist Langston Hughes, who connected Haiti’s struggle for freedom to his home country’s.
“We wanted to focus on parts that might seem peripheral but are actually quite central to American history,” Garrett-Davis said.
Three years later, Olabasi would render the same powerful mural on canvas.
‘This Land Is…’
Where: The Huntington When: June 14 to Jan. 11, 2027 Cost: $29 to $34, depending on date and season Info:huntington.org
Martin Mull was best known to audiences for playing comedic characters like Col. Mustard in “Clue” and Gene Parmesan in “Arrested Development,” but a new exhibit opening next year at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art seeks to elevate the role Mull was most proud to inhabit: a respected painter.
“Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living,” co-curated by comedian Steve Martin and Hammer Museum Director Emerita Ann Philbin, comes to SBMA next June and runs through October. It will be the first major museum exhibition of Mull’s artwork in 20 years.
The paintings featured include scenes of unassuming houses visited by otherworldly guests, dead-eyed office workers, gravity-defying displays and lambs being led to the slaughter. They play with perspective, color, space and time to illuminate postwar American tensions, be they racial, political or existential.
“Martin Mull’s work as an artist will certainly be his primary legacy,” Martin said in a statement. “After a full-time career in painting, in the last 20 years of his life with his technical gifts fully developed, Martin’s art coalesced into tight, narrative paintings of a peculiar nature. Combining surreal elements with family idioms, he formed his own worried portrayal of American life.”
Martin Mull’s “Band on the Run,” 2014. Oil on panel.
(Estate of Martin Mull)
The exhibit, which will take over the museum’s 6,000 square feet of main galleries, will feature more than 50 paintings and drawings by Mull, most of which come from the artist’s estate and the private collections of Mull’s entertainment industry colleagues, including Steve Martin, Jennifer Tilly, and Ted and Nicole Sarandos .
“Steve talked about how Mull’s painting practice was his deepest passion, despite the fact that his fame was as an actor and comedian. It prompted me to do a little research, and I became very intrigued by his body of work. I wrote to Steve, ‘Martin Mull. There’s something there.’ That’s how the project began,” she said.
Along with Martin and Philbin, the upcoming exhibition is led by SBMA Chief Curator James Glisson and Amada Cruz, the museum’s director and CEO. In a news release, a museum spokesperson said Mull’s work “upsets any storybook picture of perfection” and resists nostalgia while acknowledging its allure.
Martin Mull’s “Envy,” 2008, from the series “Seven Deadly Sins.” Oil on linen.
(Estate of Martin Mull)
“It’s so deeply strange — dark and funny, hopeful and menacing all at once,” Philbin said. “The paintings are about the smoldering tensions that underlie the American dream, so I think it’s a particularly apt moment to bring them back into the public eye.”
Mull, who died in 2024, received his master of fine arts degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Though he went on to craft a career in the public eye as a musician, comedian and actor, painting remained his “true vocation.”
Martin, a longtime friend of the multidisciplinary artist, echoed this sentiment in an email to The Times.
“If a comedian says he is also a painter, run. Except this once.”
As soccer fans await the FIFA World Cup kickoff Thursday — and as criticism of the organization’s ticketing practices and social impact on local communities circulates across North America, where the games will be held — longtime aficionados want to remind the sports community of the real beauty beneath the game.
Last Friday at Espacio 1839 in Boyle Heights, visitors were greeted by the thumping bass of cumbia sonideras, earthy scent of leather trinkets and clothing racks featuring silky screen-printed soccer jerseys. The Latino-centric gift shop reached maximum capacity with a new pop-up art exhibit titled “El Fútbol Es del Pueblo,” featuring over 30 artworks that provide commentary on the global sport.
“It’s reclaiming the sport again, reminding folks that the essence of the game belongs to the people,” said Nico Aviña, owner of Espacio 1839. “With everything that’s going on with the World Cup, everybody’s giving FIFA credit, but I think that we need to reclaim that power. This is a people’s sport and it belongs to us.”
Nico Avina gets ready to start a soccer match at Mariachi Plaza at “El Futbol es del Pueblo,” a community soccer event hosted by Espacio 1839.
(Jill Connelly/For De Los)
Every four years, soccer fans around the globe go berserk over the World Cup, but in host cities like Los Angeles, the worldwide spectacle feels bittersweet and financially out of reach. Fans have paid thousands of dollars for non-premium seating at SoFi Stadium; this does not include parking, which is estimated to be about $250 near the venue.
“ I’m not interested in going into those games or paying these ridiculous amounts,” said Aviña. “It’s more about greed. It’s more about wealth extraction than anything else.”
That sentiment resonated with 42-year-old Antonio Rivera, a Bay Area local who recalled the excitement he felt as a child in Jalisco watching the 1986 World Cup, which Mexico hosted. He remembers his little toy bank shaped like Pique, the anthropomorphic jalapeño pepper that was Mexico’s tournament mascot.
“You hear stories of people going to the World Cup with their whole family. Now you can’t even get a ticket,” he said. “ It’s an important opportunity for people to talk about some of the discomforts that they may have with an organization like FIFA.”
Rivera was at Espacio 1839 on Friday accompanying his son, Marc Rivera, one of the youngest exhibitors, alongside his classmate Miguel Yanez. The tweens came down from Napa, Calif., to showcase their acrylic comic-strip painting featuring Mexican soccer player Alexis Vega, who channels his Mesoamerican ancestors when scoring the victory goal.
Marc Rivera explains the meaning behind his painting on display at “El Futbol es del Pueblo.”
(Jill Connelly/For De Los)
“It’s important to expose our next generation and give them an opportunity to express themselves a little bit,” Antonio Rivera said.
Tijuana artist Vianney Harelly’s piece was hard to miss on the wall. It featured a bloody cross with the Spanish words for “soccer comes with blood and tears.” It also included headlines from articles regarding the Naupan artisans who were allegedly underpaid by Adidas and social-impact brand Someone Somewhere, during its work on the latest embroidered Mexican soccer kit.
“I wanted it to be a piece showing kind of the dark side of the World Cup, because there’s so many things that are buried underneath the whole spectacle,” Harelly said.
The 30-year-old said they are not interested in tuning into the World Cup activities because of the close relationship between FIFA President Gianni Infantino and President Trump. Human rights organizations have called on the FIFA leader to request that the Trump administration declare a moratorium on ICE raids during the soccer tournament; SoFi stadium workers threatened to strike if agents aren’t kept out of the venue.
Artwork on display at “El Futbol es del Pueblo.”
(Jill Connelly/For De Los)
“I know people want to be seen and celebrated and they wanna feel love,” Harelly said. “But I don’t want them to settle and think that the only option for them to feel love and be seen is through corporations that hate us.”
Gerardo Gómez looked mesmerized as he glanced at the wall. Some of his favorite pieces included a scarf that read “Siempre Antifascista” and a banner that featured a masked Indigenous soccer player with the words “Futbol Libertad.”
“I think a lot of us here love the sport, but we are against FIFA,” Gómez said. “What you’re seeing here is a representation of the people’s struggle that comes with the sport.”
The 46-year-old said the soccer organization, as well as the Olympic Games, have a history of displacing marginalized communities; for example, ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil, at least 19,000 families were displaced to make way for sporting infrastructure.
That’s why he’d rather put his focus on the Homeless World Cup, an annual international street football tournament that advocates an end to homelessness globally. Players are individuals who have experienced some form of homelessness or social exclusion in their life.
“People that came together [for the Homeless World Cup] recognized that soccer brings people together,” said Gómez. “And it’s the most beautiful thing I have experienced.”
A soccer match at Mariachi Plaza on June 5, 2026.
(Jill Connelly/For De Los)
As the sun went down, the crowd shifted over a block to Mariachi Plaza where a 3-vs.-3 cascarita, or scrimmage, began on the pavement. Onlookers gathered around the makeshift field, which had no clear outer bounds, as the pulsating drumming and anti-ICE chants led by Lxs Tigres del NorthEnd (an independent LAFC supporter group) filled the air.
“It’s very bittersweet,” said 30-year-old Claudia Llontop. “With families being deported.”
Llontop, who grew up watching the World Cup, arrived at the pick-up match with her two children — and even documented her journey getting there on TikTok to her more than 50,000 followers. She had been trying to find ways to kick a ball around when she heard about “El Fútbol Es del Pueblo,” which allowed her to put on a red mesh jersey and run like the wind.
“This is for single moms, this is for kids, this is for high schoolers,” said Llontop. “ I think this alone is a lot more powerful than FIFA, because this is us.”
Pro-Palestine activists interrupted an army recruitment event during German Armed Forces Day. They climbed onto a tank and unfurled a banner reading ‘Genocide with German weapons’ and named Rheinmetall, a key arms supplier to Israel’s military.
I got inspired to become a woodworker by Vince Skelly’s tree trunk bookshelves. On exhibit earlier this year at Craft Contemporary near LACMA, these are tree trunks with one slot precisely carved out to fit a select stack of exhibit catalogs perfectly. Seeing them felt like Cupid had just shot an arrow into my art heart.
The very next day I returned to Craft Contemporary, where Skelly was participating in a makers panel. At the reception, I asked him for advice on how, as a complete beginner, I might get started on making tree trunk bookshelves. He cordially shared practical advice, emphasizing safety. I followed this advice and the result came out looking like little chunks of nothingness. That’s how I knew I needed further guidance.
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“Start small” is the advice I got next, from Eric Clem, co-founder of LA Woodshop. Aspiring woodworkers get discouraged when they try to build the Gamble House themselves with no training. It’s also very dangerous, Clem warned me.
I followed this advice too, scaling back my first woodworking goal to making my own drumsticks. The pursuit of this doable dream led me into an exploration of L.A. woodworking resources for beginners who feel inspiration ranging from “I want to make something out of wood” to “I want to make woodworking part of my life.”
The path to becoming a woodworker in L.A. extends from taking a one-day introductory class to borrowing tools to enrolling at community college. My exploration has been fulfilling, guided by cheerful people who have exhausted all of their friends and family with obsessive talk of woodworking and would like nothing more than to share their passion with you.
Most Angelenos know Frank Gehry as the rebel architect whose deconstructivist buildings reinvigorated L.A. amid its late-century identity crisis.
Fewer know him as the sentimental sculptor celebrated in Gagosian Beverly Hills’ upcoming “Frank Gehry” exhibition, the first to showcase Gehry’s work since his death in December. Curated by those who worked with and loved the famous architect, the show, scheduled to open May 14 and run through June 27, is equal parts tribute and art presentation. It will feature several of Gehry’s animal-themed sculptures, including a rarely seen stainless steel bear figure, on loan from the artist’s family.
The exhibition will also include the first public screening of Gehry’s entry in Gagosian Premieres, a series of videos by the gallery showcasing new art exhibitions through a mix of intimate artist interviews, studio visits and specialized musical performances.
By spotlighting Gehry’s artistic practice rather than his design ouevre — which includes Walt Disney Concert Hall, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Fondation Louis Vuitton — the exhibition reveals a different side of the late visionary, said Deborah McLeod, senior director at Gagosian Beverly Hills.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a retrospective, but it is a chance to stand in the room and be with him,” McLeod said, adding that she “wouldn’t have the hubris to say this is going to offer anybody closure,” but that she hopes it will help people — especially those who worked closest with Gehry — to process his loss.
“Everybody is kind of raw and missing Frank, and it’s just a chance to come together and do this again as his team,” she said.
McLeod curated the exhibition alongside Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff and partner at Gehry Partners, whom the director said “really speaks for Frank.” Gehry‘s studio will design the show, which was realized in collaboration with the artist’s family.
“We didn’t get a chance to put one in the gallery proper. Every time we’d make one, it would get sold,” Deborah McLeod said about Frank Gehry’s bear sculptures.
The highlight of the Gagosian exhibition is an artist proof of “Bear with Us” (2014), which the gallery lifted out of Gehry’s wife Berta Aguilera’s garden with a crane. Another edition of the bear sculpture is on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, but at Gagosian, the work for the first time will be on view as part of an exhibition.
The stainless steel figure has a crumpled appearance that many believe is the result of Gehry balling up a piece of paper and seeing the bear in the crumple, although McLeod said Gehry told her himself that wasn’t true. The director added that the bear’s form gives the illusion of something “coming into being or dissolving.” The sculpture will likely have the Gagosian’s north gallery completely to itself.
“We’re really going to give him his due,” McLeod said. It was only right for a piece that, to her, reads as Gehry’s “self-portrait.”
A handful of other animal-themed sculptures will populate the south gallery, including a glowing black crocodile, gouache-painted papier-mâché snake lamps, and “Fish on Fire” (2023), the last of Gehry’s fish sculptures to be rendered in copper. Illuminated within the darkened gallery, the pieces will have a “magical” flair, McLeod said.
The first fish sculptures Gehry made in the ’80s were contained, even still. But when he returned to the fish form 30 years later, Mcleod said, “they started to become actually Baroque, so that’s kind of neat to see that evolution.”
Rounding out the exhibition are a series of ink, watercolor and acrylic works on paper that “express the energetic motion of fish in networks of black line and clouds of color,” a news release said.
A portion of the pieces in the exhibition will be available for purchase, with a detailed checklist to come.
The first Frank Gehry Fish Lamps were exhibited in 1984 at Gagosian in Los Angeles.
Gehry’s designs breathed life into the city’s core, but he didn’t get to finish a number of his most exciting plans, including one to transform the 51-mile-long L.A. River.
And while his architecture was his great gift to his adoptive hometown — his art was his gift to himself.
“As one of the busiest architects in the world, imagine the math and the minutiae that you have to go through,” McLeod said, noting the enormous pressure from clients that Gehry must have felt in his daily practice.
“For him, just to make something the shape he wants to make it, plug it in … I know it was a huge relief for him,” she said. “I know how much he loved doing it, and I loved being a part of that part of his life.”
