Through Made in helLA, curator Sammy Loren reimagines Los Angeles not as a site of fragmentation but as a living artwork defined by moments of electric communion. Words by Sigourney Schultz.
In a city as disjointed, sprawling, and insular as Los Angeles, a crowd is a rare thing to encounter, let alone to belong too. With Made in helLA — a 24-hour guerrilla biennial staged by writer and curator Sammy Loren — an unlikely constellation of collaborators transformed the night into a case study of the city’s restless, ever-evolving cultural range.
Racing across town from Westwood to Westlake felt like a fever dream. At the gate of O-Town House, security guards stopped a small group to ask where they were headed. “Made in helLA?” someone quietly offered, half-laughing. Inside, bodies crammed along a precarious wooden balcony and spilled into the exhibition space. The atmosphere drifted between a debaucherous house party, an irreverent literary talk, and a DIY conceptual performance.
Loren stood at the helm of the room, choreographing the night’s stacked events. He conceived Made in helLA as an extension of his other countercultural ventures, including the printed tabloid On the Rag and the underground reading series Casual Encountersz. Adopting the role of museum curator as a kind of performance, he paired pedigreed artists with emerging and unexpected figures, asking, “What happens when you combine a literary legend with an Instagram scammer?”
While the title nods to the institutional production across town, Made in helLA is also a nickname Loren has long used “to express the maddening, frustrating, intoxicating, thrilling, complex relationship that I have with this city. It’s really a love letter to all these different circles I’ve had the privilege of having a foot in,” he shared.
To map the cultural fabric that shaped him, Loren brought together artists from across the scenes that have defined his evolution in Los Angeles. Among them was Brian Getnick, founder of PAM in Highland Park, a crucible for queer and accessible performance art. Tif Sigfrids’s Tif’s Desk revived her influential micro-shows at Thomas Solomon Gallery, where she invited friends to install work on and around her desk — an exhibition within an exhibition. Lining the walls, photographs threaded Latinx perspectives on the city: Reynaldo Rivera’s portraits of cruising and drag nightlife, Andréa C. Nieto’s noir-tinted scenes of fleeting intimacy, and Anya GTA’s car-fender installation.
Pivotal cultural figures rounded out the mix: David Horvitz, whose 7th Ave Garden in Arlington Heights has become a crucial gathering space; Chris Kraus, whose autofiction classic I Love Dick continues to define the overlap between literature and cultural theory in Los Angeles; and Paul McCarthy, whose A&A, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, in the Garden of Eden, Picnic, Mix spun on a record — “the most heinous sex you’ve ever listened to,” as Loren put it.
As dusk settled, the night grew friskier. Gallerina Confessions saw Maya Robles moderating a gossipy exchange between four gallerinas who fielded questions like, “Would you rather see your ex at an opening or get caught printing your MFA application on the gallery printer?” The evening rolled on with late-night artist poker, DJ sets by Jasmine Johnson, and an appearance by the anonymous art critic Diva Corp, represented by John Pelech. By 4 a.m., writer Sophie Appel was flipping pancakes, and Loren finally cracked his first beer of the day-night marathon.
Made in helLA may have only lasted 24 hours, yet its energy revealed just how alive the city’s subversive undercurrent remains — where chaotic pre-Grindr desire meets the Dionysian spell of a Craigslist hookup, in the blur of hot people disappearing into the bathroom. The event reaffirmed the increasingly rare yet vital act of physically gathering, when the reward of connection outweighs the risk of vulnerability. Even in our media-saturated, shit-posting digital world, the city’s beatniks, elites, and hotties showed up and out, illustrating how Los Angeles itself is the artwork.
“LA can be a very lonely, alienating place,” Loren reflected. “I thought it would be fun to make a space that, for 24 hours, could be a kind of oasis, where no matter what time you arrived, you’d find this weird, artistic community. Even if you were just there drinking a beer and didn’t talk to anyone, you still helped create this world. And that’s kind of amazing, you know?”
