[photo credit: Armory Center for the Arts]
The group exhibition, on view through August 1, is the first major curatorial statement by Taylor Bythewood-Porter since she became the Armory’s Director of Exhibitions last August. It brings together artists working across earth, fiber, metal, cyanotype, terracotta, and film materials the show’s curatorial framework describes as “both medium and oracle, connecting with Spirit, place, and ancestral knowledge,” according to the Armory’s exhibition statement. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
The show is explicitly rooted in the San Gabriel Valley. The Armory’s description frames the landscape’s cycles of wildfire, floods, winds, and regrowth as central to the exhibition’s understanding of time as “nonlinear and ever returning.” For a region still processing the January 2025 Eaton Fire, the resonance is not abstract. A free teen workshop on June 20, presented in partnership with the Altadena Library, invites young people to explore imagination, resilience, and collective possibility in the wake of wildfire disruption.
“I think of artists as translators, channeling something intangible into form,” Bythewood-Porter said in a recent interview with the American Craft Council.
The eight featured artists span generations and geographies. Vanessa German, whose assemblage “power figures” draw on Congolese Nkisi traditions, has exhibited at the Lincoln Memorial and received the Heinz Award for the Arts. Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, and an assistant professor at Harvard University, works in film and video to explore Indigenous language and landscape. Joel Gaitan, a first-generation Nicaraguan American ceramicist, creates terracotta vessels inspired by pre-Columbian Central American pottery. Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, a Haitian American sculptor raised in Brooklyn and now based in Los Angeles, received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2019 and works in carved wood, welded metal, and assemblage to address colonialism and spirituality; his work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
At least one participating artist has direct ties to Pasadena. Jackie Amézquita, born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, received her BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 2018 before earning her MFA from UCLA in 2022. She received the Mohn Public Recognition Award at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2023 biennial. Her practice uses biomaterials earth, masa, charcoal, and rainwater as what she has described as carriers of ancestral knowledge. Calethia DeConto, a lens-based artist known for cyanotype prints, led a hands-on workshop at the Armory in May exploring memory and material transformation; the Armory described the program as a space for reflection and post-Eaton Fire healing. April Bey, a Bahamian American artist, contributes large-scale fiber work, including the exhibition’s featured image: a four-panel Jacquard piece spanning 80 by 240 inches. Lani Trock, a Hawai’i-born, Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist, rounds out the group.
Bythewood-Porter joined the Armory after serving as Curator of History at the Museum of Riverside and as an assistant curator at the California African American Museum from 2017 to 2023, where she received the American Association for State and Local History Award of Excellence. Her curatorial practice, she has said, centers “Black feminist thought, material culture, and the aesthetics of the African Diaspora.” She was named one of Pasadena Magazine’s 2026 Power Women.
“My curatorial lens traces ritual, memory, and the intimacy of everyday life,” Bythewood-Porter has written. “I gravitate toward works that whisper rather than shout, that tend to be absent, and honor what the city forgets.”
The exhibition has drawn national attention. Hyperallergic included it among its “15 Art Shows to See in Los Angeles This Spring,” and the American Craft Council published a feature exploring whether craft can act as a tool for envisioning possible futures.
Upcoming public programs include free First Saturday exhibition tours on June 6 and July 11 (second Saturday due to the July 4 holiday), from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., led by Armory teaching artists. The Youth Prophecy workshop with the Altadena Library on June 20, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., is free and open to teens; RSVPs are required. K-12 field trips are also available, with each student creating artwork to take home. A family guide is available for download at armoryarts.org.
The Armory Center for the Arts is at 145 N. Raymond Ave. in Old Pasadena. The gallery is open Thursdays through Saturdays, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Admission is always free. For more information, call (626) 792-5101 or visit armoryarts.org.
The Armory, founded in 1989, operates from The Gale Kohl Center for Creativity — a renovated 1932 California National Guard armory — and serves more than 18,000 children, teens, and adults annually, according to the organization. Lead program support comes from the Perenchio Foundation, with exhibition public programs supported in part by the California Community Foundation.
On June 20, when Altadena teens walk into the Armory to imagine futures beyond wildfire, they will find a gallery full of artists who have been doing the same thing reading the land, the light, and the weight of what came before, and making something from it.
Material Prophecies: Craft as Divination — Armory Center for the Arts Venue: Armory Center for the Arts, Caldwell Gallery, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91103 Cost: Free admission Phone: 626-792-5101 Link: https://www.armoryarts.org/exhibitions/2026/material-prophecies
