Santa Monica Art Bank and California African American Museum make opening-day acquisitions at Frieze Los Angeles

Collectors and art-curious celebrities were not the only ones plying the aisles during Frieze Los Angeles’s first hours. The California African American Museum (Caam) and the city of Santa Monica’s Art Bank added to their collections on VIP day, with the museum’s acquisition fund selecting a large ceramic sculpture by Mustafa Ali Clayton, Natural (2024), from the Los Angeles-based Dominique Gallery. Santa Monica’s art collection now includes the textile work In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior (2024) by Gary Tyler, the formerly incarcerated artist who received this year’s Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize.Taylor Renee Aldridge, Caam’s visual arts curator and programme manager, who served on the selection panel, said that acquiring Clayton’s work at Frieze was “a unique opportunity to engage with a robust lineage of ceramic-making and figurative sculpture within the African diaspora, while championing the work of a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles”.Santa Monica’s Art Bank collection includes more than 200 works, from 18th-century paintings to contemporary works by artists including Charles Gaines, Lita Albuquerque and Laura Aguila. Pieces are displayed throughout the city.A jury consisting of Christine Messineo (the director of Frieze Americas), Amanda Sroka (the senior curator at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and Laurie Katz Yehia (the vice chair of Santa Monica’s arts commission) picked Tyler’s work. “The jurors were drawn to the work’s strength and clarity of vision, born of Tyler’s personal transformation story,” Yehia says. “We were engaged by the colourful and graphic yet gracefully quilted imagery, conveying a sense of empowerment and hope—and the power of art—within the context of incarceration.”