It Really is a River: Documenting an Iconic Urban Waterway

Past Event

Wed, Aug 3 2022 - Sun, Jan 22 2023

All Day

Central Library, History & Genealogy Department

630 W. 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071
الولايات المتحدة

About the Exhibit

Exhibit Curated by Tilly Hinton and Char Miller

Encounters with the Los Angeles River have a way of intriguing, educating, and inspiring locals and visitors alike. It’s an almost otherworldly place, a location for ephemeral encounters that would be lost and forgotten but for photographers, who preserve river memories in pixels and in ink. These photos are as essential as they are intriguing. This exhibition combines historic images in the Los Angeles Public Library Photo with contemporary images donated to the library’s collection in 2022 by LA River X alumni.

This collaborative exhibition was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Photo Friends of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

Cat faces painted on storm drain tension lids along the Burbank-Glendale section of the 5 freeway were a precursor – and inspiration – to the iconic River Catz painted by Chicano artist Leo Limón over many decades beginning in the 1970s. (1960, Gordon Dean/Valley Times Collection)
Performer Joshua Payne, known as JP Orchestra, gets sets for a pop-up concert in the riverbed in Frogtown. (2008, Joshua Payne/LA River X Collection)
An unknown man gazes at the river under stormy skies, in a view replete with hulking oil tanks (known as “gasometers”) and other industrialized features. (1965, Herald Examiner Collection)