HYPERALLERGIC ARTICLE
LOS ANGELES — On a recent Saturday afternoon, an enthusiastic crowd gathered at the opening of LA’s newest museum, mingling and snapping photos as a DJ spun RnB and Hip-Hop outside. It was not located Downtown or on the ritzy Westside, but 12 miles directly south of the Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), on the edge of a strip mall in Compton.
“I’m originally from Compton, and I wanted to bring a creative space back to the city,” Abigail Lopez-Byrd, who co-founded the Compton Art & History Museum with her husband Marquell Byrd, told Hyperallergic.
The new space at 306 West Compton Boulevard is an outgrowth of Color Compton, a community-based arts organization that offers programs in photography, painting, printmaking, film, and music. One of the center’s popular programs is on archiving. “Particularly with Compton, we don’t have spaces where young folks can learn about them,” Lopez-Byrd says.
“We don’t have enough complex narratives about what Compton is and what it has been, and how it continues to be a creative city,” Byrd adds. “We want people to understand its rich history.”
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There’s a new art museum in Los Angeles, and you won’t find it in Downtown LA, the Arts District, or other parts of the county where similar facilities are typically located.
The Compton Art & History Museum opened the public this year, just months after its two founders, the husband and wife duo of Abigail Lopez-Byrd and Marquell Byrd, came together with a vision for the space.
“We have archives from Compton from the 1960s and 1970s that the youth can now come in … and see these things … without having to go to neighboring cities or somewhere deep in LA that, most of the time, don't represent who they are and where they come from,” says Co-founder Marquell Byrd.
The museum is an offshoot of the couple's nonprofit Color Compton, which empowers young people and students in Compton and South LA through art and history.
Byrd says he helped construct the museum by hand because he wanted to make sure their vision actually became a reality.
“We know that we had to make sure that there's a space like this because we don't have access [to many resources]. We don't have a Michaels in Compton, so you can’t even get the art supplies for you to be able to create.”
The museum’s inaugural show is “Sons Like Me,” a multimedia exhibit with paintings, tapestries, floral arrangements, and other works by Compton artist Anthony Lee Pittman.
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“Scenes of Liberation,” is exhibiting through the end of July at the Compton Art and History Museum, located at 306 West Compton Boulevard, #104, in the city of Compton. Three artists and a poet are featured in the display.
According to Marquell Byrd and Abigail Lopez-Byrd, the husband-and-wife founders of the museum, “The exhibition promises to explore themes of liberation and freedom from the Black and Brown woman gaze.”
One of the artists, Saidah Gray, showcased her installation, which included a piece with beautiful pink curtains representing “ancestors before slavery and the wealth of royalty divine and rich with wisdom,” said Yaileen Zamora, art teacher and museum assistant, as she shared how Gray, a Los Angeles-based artist, described her own art.
It felt like a block party, but it was really history in celebration. At the far corner of a Compton strip mall, more than 40 people gathered around a parking area as Curtis Jackson III (Not to be confused with rapper 50 Cent, whose name is also Curtis Jackson III) and his 3-year-old son helmed the music booth. High-energy beats swinging with rhythm and rhyme rolled out of two speakers set on a plastic folding table as the sun got ready to set. Teens, couples, and families with toddlers in tow all came out on a Friday night to witness the opening of “Sounds of the City,” Compton Art & History Museum’s third exhibition in a little less than six months.
Compared with the pace of Los Angeles’ larger cultural institutions, which can take years from concept to exhibition, the museum’s pace moves at a brisk clip. But for co-founders Abigail Lopez-Byrd and her husband, Marquell Byrd, there is a lot of catching up to do.
A Compton native, Lopez-Byrd acutely felt the lack of opportunities and access to art when she left the city to pursue her art degree from UC Santa Cruz. “I felt very, very unprepared being an art major. I hadn’t been exposed to things my peers had. I didn’t have access to the same materials. From that moment on, there was always something in me that wished I had something like [this museum] growing up.” The couple founded Color Compton, a nonprofit that works with the city’s youth to build a sense of themselves through history and art, in November 2019.
