Name: CAAM Reopening Celebration with KCRW Summer Nights
Start: 2023-08-04T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2023-08-04T23:00:00-07:00
Location: California African American Museum

CAAM Reopening Celebration with KCRW Summer Nights

TONIGHT- California African American Museum

Join us for the long-awaited Reopening Celebration—KCRW Summer Nights @ CAAM on Friday, August 4, 2023, from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles! Experience a night of live music, art, and community as we celebrate culture and diversity in a safe and vibrant atmosphere. Don’t miss this enchanting event filled with soulful melodies, local artisans, delicious street food, and captivating exhibits. Come be a part of the celebration that marks a triumphant return to normalcy and the promise of unforgettable memories.

Celebrate CAAM’s reopening in style! Enjoy a warm night and cool vibes with CAAM and KCRW, featuring:

Live sets from KCRW DJs Francesca Harding and Tyler Boudreaux
Food trucks
Beer garden
Open galleries
and our legendary dance floor!

Explore all of the new exhibitions (one day before the official opening date), which range in subjects from the Great Migration to Black leisure in California, and include both solo and group exhibitions of contemporary art.

600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, CA 90037

The California African American Museum (CAAM) focuses on enrichment and education on the cultural heritage and history of African Americans with a focus on California and western United States.

Admission is free to all visitors. The California African American Museum’s mission is to research, collect, preserve, and interpret for public enrichment the history, art, and culture of African Americans with an emphasis on California and the western United States.

FREE! TUES – SUNDAY- Exposition Park

CAAM’s permanent collection consists of over 4,000 objects ranging from the 1800s to the present. It encompasses paintings, photographs, film, sculpture, historical documents, and artifacts, and it spans nineteenth-century landscape paintings to modern artworks to contemporary mixed-media reflections on cultural and political events.

The Museum’s first acquisitions included a bronze bust of civil rights activist Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune by artist Richmond Barthé and a sculpture by artist Maren Hassinger, then at the start of her career. These laid the perfect groundwork for CAAM’s mandate to assemble a comprehensive, thoughtful, and wide-reaching collection.

CAAM’s deepest holdings include art made or connected to African Americans in California and the western United States. However, the Museum also has significant works of contemporary art from the African diaspora (including Haiti, Brazil, and Jamaica), as well as traditional African art from Western, Central, and Sub-Saharan Africa. CAAM aims to represent the diverse contributions of African Americans in the United States, but also to interpret how the past has affected identity in the present.

Today, CAAM oversees, exhibits, and conserves a rapidly growing collection. Each quarter, curators review the current holdings and decide as a committee on future acquisitions. We view our collection as a living body — constantly evolving, growing, and reflecting the world in which we live.

Some examples of CAAM’s collection include the Walter Burrell Collection of audio recordings of Burrell’s interviews with African American celebrities, broadcast by a local radio station in the early 1970s; the oral histories of Celes King, who was both a local civil rights activist as well as a former Tuskegee airman; and selections from the collection of visual artist John Outterbridge.