hammer

Somehow in Los Angeles, everything comes back to traffic.

While making their works featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, artists Patrick Martinez, Freddy Villalobos and Gabriela Ruiz set out to capture the essence of the city’s crammed streets through different lenses.

For over a decade, the Hammer has curated its Made in L.A. series to feature artists who grapple with the realities of living and making art here. It’s an art show that simultaneously pays homage to legacy L.A. artists like Alonzo Davis and Judy Baca, and gives a platform to newer faces such as Lauren Halsey and Jackie Amezquita.

This year’s show, which opened last month, features 28 artists. As part of that cohort, Martinez, Villalobos and Ruiz bring their lived experiences as Latinos from L.A. to the West Side art institution, drawing inspiration from the landscapes of their upbringing.

While creating their displayed works, Martinez took note of the many neon signs hanging in stores’ windows, leading him to make “Hold the Ice,” an anti-ICE sign, and incorporate bright pink lights into his outdoor cinder block mural, “Battle of the City on Fire.” With flashing lights and a shuttered gate tacked onto a painted wooden panel, Ruiz drew on her experiences exploring the city at night and the over-surveillance of select neighborhoods in the interactive piece, “Collective Scream.” Villalobos filmed Figueroa Street from a driver’s perspective, observing the street’s nighttime activity and tracing the energy that surrounds the place where soul singer Sam Cooke was shot.

This year, Made in L.A. doesn’t belong to a specific theme or a title — but as always, the selected art remains interconnected. These three artists sat down with De Los to discuss how their L.A. upbringing has influenced their artistic practice and how their exhibited works are in conversation. Made in L.A. will be on view until March 1, 2026.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

All three of you seem to put a spotlight on various elements of L.A.’s public spaces. How is your art affected by your surroundings?

Ruiz: I really got to explore L.A. as a whole, through partying and going out at night. I prefer seeing this city at night, because there isn’t so much traffic. That’s how I started my art practice. I would perform in queer nightlife spaces and throw parties in cheap warehouses. With my commute from the Valley, I would notice so much. I wouldn’t speed through the freeway. I’d instead take different routes, so I’d learn to navigate the whole city without a GPS and see things differently.

Martinez: That’s also how I started seeing neons. I had a studio in 2006 in downtown, off 6th and Alameda. I would wait for traffic to fade because I was staying in Montebello at the time. I would drive down Whittier Boulevard at night. And you see all the neon signs that have a super saturated color and glow bright. I thought about its messaging. None of the businesses were open that late. They were just letting people know they were there.

Ruiz: Specifically in this piece [“Collective Scream”], there’s a blinking street lamp. It reminds me of when I would leave raves and would randomly see this flickering light. It’s this hypnotizing thing that I would observe and take note of whenever I was on the same route. There’s also a moving gate, [in my piece,] that resembles the ones you see when you’re driving late at night and everything’s gated up.

Villalobos: You do experience a lot of L.A. from your car. It’s a cliche. But f— it. It’s true. When I moved out of L.A., I felt a little odd. I missed the bubble of my car. You can have what seems to be a private moment in your car in a city that’s packed with traffic and so many people. It made me think about what that means, what kind of routes people are taking and how we cultivate community.

Patrick Martinez’s “Battle of the City on Fire,” made in 2025, was inspired by the work of the muralist collective, named the East Los Streetscapers.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

It’s interesting that you all found inspiration in the biggest complaints about L.A. Maybe there’s something to think about when it comes to the way those born here think of car culture and traffic.

Martinez: I see its effects even with the landscapes I make. I’ll work from left to right, and that’s how we all look at the world when we drive. I always think about Michael Mann movies when I’m making landscapes, especially at night. He has all those moments of quiet time of being in the car and just focusing on what’s going on.

Beyond surveying the streets, your works touch on elements of the past. There’s a common notion that L.A. tends to disregard its past, like when legacy restaurants shut down or when architectural feats get demolished. Does this idea play any role in your work?

Martinez: The idea of L.A. being ashamed of its past pushed me to work with cinder blocks [in “Battle of the City on Fire”]. One of the main reasons was to bring attention to the East Los Streetscapers, the muralists who painted in East L.A. [in the 1960s and ‘70s as a part of the Chicano Mural Movement]. There was this one mural in Boyle Heights that was painted at a Shell gas station. It was later knocked down and in the demolition pictures, the way the cinder blocks were on the floor looked like a sculptural painting. It prompted me to use cinder blocks as a form of sculpture and think about what kind of modern-day ruins we pass by.

Villalobos: Speaking about L.A. as a whole feels almost too grand for me. But if I think about my specific neighborhood, in South Central, what comes to my mind is Black Radical Tradition. It’s where people are able to make something out of what other people might perceive as nothing. There’s always something that’s being created and mixed and mashed together to make something that, to me, is beautiful. It’s maybe not as beautiful to other people, but it’s still a new and creative way to see things and understand what comes before us.

Ruiz: Seeing my parents, who migrated to this country, come from nothing and start from scratch ties into that idea too. Seeing what they’ve been able to attain, and understanding how immigrants can start up businesses and restaurants here, speaks so much to what L.A. is really about. It’s about providing an opportunity that everybody has.

So it’s less about disregarding the past and more about making something out of nothing?

Martinez: It ties back to necessity, for me. Across this city, people come together by doing what they need to do to pay rent. It’s a crazy amount of money to be here. People need to regularly adjust what they do to survive. Recently, I’ve been seeing that more rapidly. There are more food vendors and scrolling LED signs, advertising different things. Once you understand how expensive this backdrop can be, that stuff sits with me.

Freddy Villalobos’ “waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure,” is an immersive work in which viewers can feel loud vibrations pass as they, figuratively, travel down Figueroa Street.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

We’ve talked a lot about how the past affects L.A. and the role it plays in your art. Does a future L.A. ever cross your mind?

Villalobos: I feel very self-conscious about what I’m gonna say. But as much as I love L.A. and as much as it helped me become who I am, I wouldn’t be too mad with it falling apart. A lot of people from my neighborhood have already been moving to Lancaster, Palmdale and the Inland Empire. When I go to the IE, it feels a little like L.A. and I’m not necessarily mad at that.

Ruiz: It’s really difficult to see what the future holds for anybody. Even with art, what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s really challenging to see a future when there’s a constant cycle of bad news about censorship and lack of funding.

Martinez: It’s murky. It’s clouded. This whole year has been so heavy, and everyone talking about it adds to it, right? We’re facing economic despair, and it’s all kind of heavy. Who knows what the future will hold? But there are definitely moves being made by the ruling class to make it into something.

A MAN tried to kill his wife using a “murder kit” in a “brutal and ferocious attack”.

Muhammad Khan, 53, slashed his estranged wife’s neck with a Stanley knife, repeatedly stabbed her, and beat her with a hammer on January 18 this year.

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The horror, which also saw the victim strangled with an exercise band and knifed 15 times, unfolded inside her Rochdale home.

Khan had come to the property under the guise of collecting his belongings.

But instead he took with him weapons, bleach and white spirit, with the plan to murder his victim.

She was eventually rescued when her family arrived and her brother broke into the house.

He restrained Khan, who was “smirking”, as his wife lay fighting for her life.

The terrified family members tried to lock him in the garage but he escaped.

Witnesses reported seeing him dump his “murderous kit” before cops later detained him.

He callously asked officers what the sentence was for murder and how long he’d be in prison.

Prosecuting, Chloe Fordham, told Minshull Street Crown Court: “During the attack, she was pleading with the defendant not to kill her, and telling him to think of their children, saying if he killed her, they would not have their parents.

“The defendant didn’t seem to care. He pulled out a hammer and hit her hard on the head. He then tried to strangle her.”

In a victim impact statement, the woman said: “The calculated and brutal nature of the attempted murder by my husband has left significant physical injuries and deep lasting psychological trauma.

“This was not a crime of impulse, but deliberate, premeditated and planned.

“This was not an attack by a stranger, but by the person I should have been able to trust the most, somebody who was meant to protect me.”

Addressing Khan, she said: “The only request I ask is that you declare the words ‘I divorce you’ in front of my family, to release me from this marriage. I hope after all I have endured, you can grant me this freedom.”

The victim, who shares a son with her abuser, said the attack has also scarred their child.

Their eldest son had said in the statement: “The last time you hurt Mama you said you would never do it again. I don’t understand why you have now.

“If you killed her, we would be orphans. I never want to see you again.”

Defending, Ian McMeekin said: “He knows himself that the behaviour was inexplicable and inexcusable.”

Khan was sentenced to 27-and-a-half years behind bars for attempted murder.

The judge told him: “This was a murderous kit you had bought specifically – the knife to attack her and the bleach to clean up afterwards.”

Khan, of Bernard Street, Rochdale, was jailed for 27-and-a-half years.

He will spend an extra five years on licence and made the subject of a life-long restraining order for life.

If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or chat at thehotline.org.

Will Jacks and Tawanda Muyeye shared a blistering 114-run stand as defending champions Oval Invincibles inflicted a nine-wicket thrashing on Manchester Originals in The Hundred.

Having skittled the visitors for 128 at The Kia Oval, Invincibles bludgeoned their way to victory from 57 balls – the joint second-fastest win in the men’s competition in terms of deliveries remaining – to maintain their perfect start to the tournament.

Muyeye finished unbeaten on 59 from 28 balls, while Jacks fell for 61 from 26 with just 15 required for victory.

Afghanistan leg-spinner Rashid Khan was the pick of the Invincibles bowlers, taking 3-19, while fast bowler Saqib Mahmood also impressed with 2-26.

After being put in to bat, Originals were in trouble early, with opener Matty Hurst and England star Jos Buttler both dismissed without scoring.

Captain Phil Salt smashed three sixes in his 41 from 32 balls and put on 50 with New Zealand’s Mark Chapman to give the away side hope before both fell to the irresistible Rashid.

The wickets kept tumbling and matters only got worse for the Originals with the ball as Jacks and Muyeye went to work.

Jacks was responsible for 21 of the 25 runs taken from Jimmy Anderson’s first 10 balls but the England legend was not alone in going the distance.

Every bowler was under threat as Jacks made the early running, hitting 10 fours and two sixes in total, before Muyeye joined the party and briefly overtook his opening partner.

It was 24-year-old Muyeye who reached his half-century first, from 22 balls – a delivery quicker than Jacks – and he was there at the end as a Jordan Cox boundary put the winless Originals out of their misery.

A Fabian Ruiz double helps Paris Saint-Germain thump Real Madrid to set up FIFA Club World Cup final against Chelsea.

Fabian Ruiz scored twice, Ousmane Dembele tallied a goal and an assist, and Paris Saint-Germain eliminated Real Madrid as well as Kylian Mbappe from the FIFA Club World Cup by sailing to a 4-0 semifinal win.

PSG built a 3-0 lead in 24 minutes, deflating the heavily pro-Madrid crowd on Wednesday. Goncalo Ramos, who subbed on for Dembele early in the second half, added a goal for good measure in the 87th minute.

Gianluigi Donnarumma parried one early shot by Mbappe and finished with two saves, but the PSG defence was otherwise unbothered en route to their fifth clean sheet in six tournament matches.

Wednesday marked Mbappe’s first time facing PSG, for whom he scored 256 goals over seven years before joining Madrid a year ago. After coming on as a substitute in the past two matches, Mbappe started up front alongside Gonzalo Garcia, but was held off the scoresheet.

Trent Alexander-Arnold was out of Real Madrid’s squad, reportedly due to a training injury.

Coming off its first European title, PSG will play for the championship on Sunday.

Real fared no better than Inter Milan, overrun by PSG 5-0 in the Champions League final. The 15-time European champions looked sluggish after travelling to Florida for training between games, and PSG had 76.5 percent possession in the first half.

A crowd of 77,542 was at MetLife Stadium on a scorching day, with a temperature of 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit) at kickoff and humidity that made it feel like 38C (101F).

PSG’s attack wasted no time, however, forcing Courtois to make two difficult saves during the first five minutes. But in the sixth, Dembele robbed Raul Asencio of the ball in the centre of the box, tapped it away from Courtois’s diving reach and set up Ruiz for a one-timer into the back of the net.

Dembele made Madrid pay again when he closed in on Antonio Rudiger, who proceeded to whiff on a pass attempt in the defensive half. Dembele bolted away and beat Courtois in the bottom left corner for a 2-0 lead less than nine minutes in.

After Mbappe’s third shot of the day was blocked, PSG ran out on a clinical counterattack. Achraf Hakimi sprung free down the right side on a give-and-go with Dembele, and Hakimi’s cross set up Ruiz’s second goal in the 24th minute.

Paris Saint-Germain will face Chelsea on Sunday in the final. Chelsea won the title in 2021, while PSG will try to become the first team from France to capture the trophy.

PSG has earned $88.4m to $113.8m for reaching the final, the amount depending on a participation fee.

“Extremely severe damage and destruction.” The US military struck the Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites in Iran overnight, causing “severe damage and destruction.” The top US military officer gave details of the strikes, which included the use of 14 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs.

Yashasvi Jaiswal and captain Shubman Gill both score centuries for India on the first day of their Test tour of England.

Centuries from opener Yashasvi Jaiswal and captain Shubman Gill, his first as skipper, fired India to a commanding position in their series opener against England, closing day one of the first test on an imposing 359-3.

Despite the clear, humid Headingley conditions seemingly favouring the batting side, England chose to bowl first on Friday, knowing each of the previous six Leeds Tests had been won by the side bowling first.

Ben Stokes’s decision seemed ill-advised, with India openers KL Rahul and Jaiswal both looking in fine form, but Rahul fell for 42, with the England captain quickly removing debutant Sai Sudharsan for a duck from the final ball before lunch.

Jaiswal and Gill steadied the ship in the afternoon session, however. The opener stormed to his fifth test century, with Gill’s classy ton, an unbeaten 127, putting England on the back foot from the off in the five-match series.

“It was very special, it meant a lot to me,” Jaiswal told the official radio broadcaster for the series, the BBC. “I really enjoyed it because I have worked so much before the series, after the IPL.

“I just wanted to get in and do something for my team, for my country and for myself after the work I have put it. I loved it. There is no secret. I just try to work very hard and have the will and desire to do well whenever I have the opportunity. I will just keep trying to put my team first.”

The pressure was on Gill on his Test bow as captain, with a nation expecting a smooth transition following the retirements of stalwarts Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.

India’s fifth-youngest captain at 25 found himself in the firing line in the blink of an eye, after England had initially toiled on an unusually humid Leeds day.

Missing numerous front-line pace bowlers through injury, it was left to Brydon Carse, making his first test start on home soil, to make the crucial breakthrough just as Rahul was settling in before debutant Sudharsan quickly followed him back to the pavilion.

Supported by Jaiswal, who sailed to his sixth half century in 10 innings against England, Gill showed his class with his fastest-ever test 50.

Jaiswal, despite receiving treatment for an injury to his hand throughout the afternoon session, quickly retook the limelight from the skipper racing to his fifth century from just 20 matches, and his third against England, to pile the misery on the hosts’ beleaguered bowlers.

After Stokes struck to clean bowl Jaiswal, who departed for 101, ending the third wicket stand of 129, Gill and Rishabh Pant continued to keep the scoreboard ticking over, with a drive through the covers taking the skipper to his first test century outside of Asia.

Pant finished off a memorable day for India by reaching his half-century with a bizarre-looking shot, leaving England with a mountain to climb to avoid getting their summer off to a losing start.

“It was a tough day, but we will get our opportunity to bat soon,” England coach Tim Southee said. “We will come back tomorrow and try to make some inroads.

“The guys are good. The strength of this side is that things can be tough at times, but they try to not to get too caught up in the emotions of bad days.”

The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32.

The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis’ accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show’s three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.

That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” which hangs alone in the show’s entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.’s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell.

In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting’s otherwise neutral palette. It’s easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich.

Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas

(Anna Arca)

The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn’t last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn’s back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he’s going to ride it forward.

Perhaps the canvas’ most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace.

Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis’ lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London’s Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis’ unusual exploratory strategies.

Titled “Nobody,” a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915.

Noah Davis, “Nobody,” 2008, house paint on linen

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles)

The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich’s art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.

“Nobody” weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It’s one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.

Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis’ choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker’s often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg’s hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis’ torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip.

That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. (“Nobody” almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — “somebody” — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind “Mary Jane,” a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet’s “The Railway,” is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms.

Noah Davis, “Mary Jane,” 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas

(Kerry McFate)

So is the forest of “The Missing Link 6,” where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis’ intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise.

Art history is threaded throughout Davis’ work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran’s celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout “1975 (8),” where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool.

The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, “The Missing Link 4,” has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise.

For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In “1975 (8),” the title’s date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court’s appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled.

Noah Davis, “The Missing Link 4,” 2013, oil on canvas

(Robert Wedemeyer)

The 2013 painting’s composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis’ mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in.

Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist’s metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we’re left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna’s Italian Renaissance painting of a “Dead Christ” or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha.

The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, “Imitation of Life.” The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s.

Not all of Davis’ paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of “Maury” with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art’s messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving.

Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist’s reputation. At any rate it’s just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis’ abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show’s reality is better.

Noah Davis, “Imitation of Jeff Koons,” 2013, mixed media

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

For months, Donald Trump and his deportation dream team — border czar Tom Homan, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security head Kristi Noem — have warned any city, state or county that seems even somewhat sympathetic to illegal immigrants that their day of reckoning will come.

For Los Angeles, it’s now.

Since Friday, the city and its suburbs have seen federal officers from various agencies face off against protesters who have unsuccessfully tried to stop them from conducting workplace raids or transport people suspected of being in this country illegally to detention facilities.

The scenes haven’t been pretty.

Federal agents have used flash-bang grenades and tear gas to disperse crowds from Paramount to downtown to the Garment District. They even arrested SEIU California President David Huerta for allegedly blocking a federal vehicle. Protesters, meanwhile, have fought back with rocks, bottles and fireworks. A row of Waymos was set on fire near Olvera Street on Sunday afternoon, emitting an eerie swan song of honks. A fleet of Highway Patrol vehicles parked near a 101 freeway underpass was pelted by protesters from above with cement shards, e-scooters and even paper set on fire.

In the proverbial thick of it are the Los Angeles police and L.A. County Sheriff’s departments, whose leaders have continuously stressed that their agencies aren’t involved in any immigration actions even as they have assisted la migra by keeping crowds away with batons and less-than-lethal rounds.

Some of the 2,000 National Guard troops Trump called up over the strenuous objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass are now in Southern California. This is the first time something like this has happened since Lyndon B. Johnson sent the Guard to Alabama in 1965 to protect civil rights activists from white citizens and corrupt law enforcement.

Trump’s incendiary move has set a city whose nerves have been frayed all year further on edge, fearing there’s worse to come from him.

And worse things are coming, Angelenos, though not from activists and professional rioters: What we saw this weekend is Trump bonking L.A. with a toy mallet while itching to swing his federal sledgehammer.

One of the many news conferences held over the past three days by outraged community leaders happened Sunday at La Placita Olvera. We best remember it as the birthplace of Los Angeles, but this serene spot also offers a lesson from the past for what’s happening today — and will probably happen soon.

On Feb. 26, 1931, about 400 people were hanging out at La Placita at 3 p.m. when dozens of federal agents from as far away as San Francisco and Arizona suddenly surrounded the plaza. A 2001 Times story noted that immigration authorities “had for days been posting newspaper ads warning of an impending raid against ‘Mexican aliens.’”

LAPD officers stood at each exit to make sure no one could escape. For the next two hours, immigration agents demanded everyone detained show proof that they were in the country legally. La Opinión reported the following day that la migra explained to angry onlookers “with smiles that they were following orders from superiors and that the [roundup] was completely in accord with the laws of the land.”

Sixteen immigrants ended up being detained, all men: 11 were Mexican, five Chinese and one Japanese.

La Placita was specifically chosen by the feds for such a huge raid “for its maximum psychological impact” against Latinos in Los Angeles and beyond, according to “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.” It was the federal government’s kickoff to years of repatriation efforts against people of Mexican descent — more than a few American citizens — pushed by the Hoover and FDR administrations, leading to hundreds of thousands of them leaving the United States, some never to return.

Given Trump’s love of spectacle, what his agencies have unleashed on L.A. over the weekend seems like the opening notes for something even bigger. Expect resistance from residents even stronger that what we’ve seen so far.

Trucha, Los Angeles — be vigilant, and be careful out there.

Here’s more on the immigration raids

Today’s top stories

The Sacramento River flows past orchards along state Highway 160 near a spot where one of two proposed intakes would be located for the Delta Conveyance Project.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Newsom’s power play on the Delta tunnel

• Newsom is asking the Legislature to “fast-track” construction of his controversial and costly water tunnel project in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
• The $20-billion, 45-mile, 39-feet-wide tunnel would enhance delivery of Northern California water to Southern California.
• Delta towns and farmers, environmental groups and the coastal salmon fishing industry are fighting the project and the governor’s latest move to expedite construction.

Being Jewish on campus amid Trump’s campaign against antisemitism: ‘Tremendous heartache’

• As the academic year draws to a close, The Times interviewed 12 Jewish students and professors at UCLA and USC who reflected on their campus experiences since Hamas’ attack on Israel.
• They wrestled with questions about their safety and President Trump’s aggressive campaign to combat antisemitism at universities.
• Some worried that Trump was using antisemitism as a weapon to carry out his political goal of remaking higher education.

The 2025 Tony Awards

• Hosted by Cynthia Erivo, the 2025 Tony Awards saw a Hollywood invasion of Broadway including winners Sarah Snook and Cole Escola, who won lead actress and lead actor Tony Awards, respectively, for their roles in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Oh, Mary!”
• Here’s the full list of winners.

What else is going on

Commentary and opinions

This morning’s must reads

Other must reads

For your downtime

Participants at the Feels are encouraged to use their bodies and minds to spark intimacy.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Going out

Staying in

A question for you: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten from your father or father figure?

Steve writes, “I was raised by my stepfather, a 2nd generation Armenian farmer. He didn’t offer much advice verbally, but he left the house each day at 5:30am, worked hard in the Coachella Valley heat, was home for family dinner at 6 and was asleep by 8. His strong work ethic spoke volumes and had a huge effect on the man I chose to become.”

Michele writes, “While still in undergraduate, I was debating whether or not I should go to law school. I was most concerned about adding another three years to my education, and the length of time it would take. My father said, ‘I have one question for you. Three years are likely going to pass in your life one way or another. What do you want to be doing at the end of it?’ Throughout law school, every time I would feel overwhelmed and wanted to quit, I would remind myself that the time was going to pass anyway, and it kept me going towards the end goal.”

Email us at [email protected], and your response might appear in the newsletter this week.

And finally … your photo of the day

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Today’s great photo is from Times photographer Gina Ferazzi in Compton, where Los Angeles residents pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew Campa, Sunday writer
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

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