Image: Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is presenting 'Raven Sanchez: Así Sea / So Be It' in its Project Room from April 4 through August 23, 2026. The exhibition is the first institutional presentation by Los Angeles artist Raven Sanchez, whose work moves across media to examine place, memory, community, and cultural identity through the lens of her own family history.
At the center of the exhibition is a new installation titled 'Así Sea / So Be It'. According to the museum, the work takes shape through more than 200 wax rubbings Sanchez produced of her grandparents’ home in East Los Angeles. The house was hand-stuccoed in 1974 by the artist’s grandfather, who had moved to the United States from Tijuana, Baja California, where he learned the trade. Sanchez’s family lived in the home for more than 50 years before selling it, a decision shaped by her grandparents’ passing and the economic pressures of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
The project is made in multigenerational collaboration with Sanchez’s mother and aunts. The rubbings document the exterior of the house, including its ornamental wrought iron, as well as interior details and plant matter from the surrounding garden. ICA LA describes the installation as both a material record and an embodied ritual of grief and remembrance, using the act of rubbing to preserve traces of a place while also acknowledging what cannot be kept.
The exhibition text situates Sanchez’s practice in relation to the richness and specificity of Los Angeles communities of color, emphasizing how her work reflects the reverberant cultural and sociopolitical influence of those communities. Sanchez is identified by ICA LA as a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles whose work considers the relationship between place, memory, and community. Her approach uses process-based methods to attend to domestic labor and ancestral memory through materials and acts of transformation.
ICA LA has also organized public programming around the exhibition. On July 25, 2026, the museum will present 'Memory and Making: A Community Gathering' from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Project Room. The program is inspired by 'Raven Sanchez: Así Sea / So Be It' and invites visitors of all ages to participate in two artist-guided workshops making their own rubbings and assemblage sculptures. Participants are encouraged to bring meaningful objects or mementos connected to place, and the event will also feature music, classic cars, and delicacies provided by Flores Fruits.
A second related program, 'Art Buzz: Casual Connections', is scheduled for July 31, 2026, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and offers a happy-hour tour of ICA LA’s current exhibitions led by the museum’s Curatorial and Learning & Engagement Getty Marrow Undergraduate Interns, followed by a mixer with light refreshments. The exhibition itself runs through August 23, 2026, in ICA LA’s Project Room.
