Exhibitions

ON VIEW NOW

BURIED YEARS
Through June 2025

Presented at the Venice Heritage Museum by the Advanced Photography students at Venice Arts.

In 2024–25, these students embarked on a special project, examining archival materials, visiting historical sites, conducting interviews, and creating artwork in response to the forced removal and internment of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles during WWII.

Blocks from the Venice Arts campus is the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument, marking the historic departure point to the Manzanar internment camp in the Eastern Sierras. Our students followed the same route, traveled to Manzanar, stayed overnight, and photographed throughout the National Historic Site.

The results of this twenty-four-week project are this exhibition in VHM's back gallery and a zine—a creative effort to connect this history to contemporary civil liberty threats and the personal lives of the participating students.

THIS IS SOME PLACE
Through Summer 2025

Venice, California, is a place of real-life world-building, where locals imagine and reimagine their home over and again. The numerous and simultaneous versions of what the area has been—and what it may become—have themselves defined Venice ever since Abbot Kinney ventured to reconstruct Italy’s most serene city here on Pacific shores.

This exhibition, the first to be presented in the Venice Heritage Museum’s new home, spans from Opening Day in 1905 through to the origins of Venice’s counterculture and onward to questions of the community’s future. Featuring photographs, video, and archival documents and publications, This is some place collects and juxtaposes examples across eras showing different ways that Venetians have acted upon the spaces around them to create a place that remains distinct even as it continues to change.

This is some place includes artistic and photographic contributions from Charles Brittin, Rod Bradley, Henry Diltz, Shanna Jones, Josh “Bagel” Klassman, Janet Kusnick, Earl Newman, Stuart Perkoff, Marilyn Ramirez, David Scott, Glen Small, Frank Talbott, Emily Winters, and more. Archival materials are presented courtesy of Stephen Raul Anaya, Laura Ceballos, the Getty Research Institute, Sonya Reese Greenland, Theo and Todd von Hoffmann, Dr. Naomi Nightingale, Stephen Pouliot, Carole Stein, Allyson Tabor, among others.

Videos from the VHM Oral History Project currently featured: Linda Azuzerta, Dolores Deluce, Hal Frederick, Robert Huff, Sharon Jacobucci, Josh "Bagel" Klassman, Stanley Mitchell, Mary Nomura, Harry Perry, Victoria Ramirez, Emily Winters, Bob Zaugh.

Curated by Anthony Carfello. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.