More about Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.
About the exhibition
The exhibition brings together a focused selection of collaborative and parallel works by Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez, Jr., tracing the arc of their shared practice from 2020 to 2026. Centered on their emergence as young Chicano artists, the presentation begins with the pivotal moment in which both artists began sharing a studio during the COVID-19 pandemic—an experience that forged a sustained dialogue around identity, community, and the built environment of Los Angeles. Approximately eight to nine key works by each artist will be presented in the upstairs galleries, in dialogue with selected pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. Together, these works foreground resonances around Chicanx/Latinx identity, urban experience, and intergenerational influence within the Long Beach and greater Los Angeles cultural sphere.
About the artists
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making.
Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors, but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.
Recent group exhibitions include Let Us Gather in A Flourishing Way, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY (2026); Here, Now, Platforma Contemporary Art, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (2026); 4x4, Karma, organized by Ryan Preciado, New York (2024); Group Shoe 4, Veta, Madrid (2024); HOMEWARD, WHAAM!, New York (2024); At the Edge of the Sun, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); Come One, Come All, Anthony Gallery, Chicago (2024); Flesh & Flowers, Made in America, No Name, Paris (2023); Cathartic Creatures, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2023); Horizons, Sow & Tailor, Hong Kong (2023); Heaven is a Basement, Soho Warehouse, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Group Shoe Two, Public Access, New York (2023); Hot Concrete, K11, Hong Kong (2022); My Generation, Massif Central Editions, New York (2022); Come As You Are, Anthony Gallery, Chicago (2022); Shattered Glass, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Ni de aquí, ni de allá, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Vernacular Grafikz, Tlaloc Studios, Los Angeles (2021); Growing Pains, Anthony Gallery, Chicago (2021); Alphabetic Image, Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York (2021); Lxs Angelinx, Galleria Javier López & Fer Frances, Madrid (2021); L.A Views, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (2020); Screen 2 Screen, HVW8 Art + Design Gallery, Online (2020); City of Quartz, HVW8 Art + Design Gallery, Online (2020); With A Little Help From My Friends: A Benefit For Bryan Chagolla, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); and Human Nature, The Pit, Los Angeles (2019).
His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, ICA Miami, and the Rubell Museum.
Mario Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles) reimagines a contemporary landscape where identity, observation, and the presence of material fact play equal roles. In his paintings, Ayala brings together figures and forms drawn from every corner of his experience living on the West Coast. Ayala’s work lends interest in traditions and techniques with strong visual ties to California, such as muralism, tattooing, and industrial techniques used in automobile painting and commercial signage. Ayala’s influences also extend into postwar art historical movements such as the Cool School of Los Angeles and Bay Area Funk art. Ayala’s highly personal, often surreal, tableaux are vivid representations of the way in which images course through the world, carrying with them fragments of the past, present, and a future still in formation. His creations live as collectively inspired documents that reflect issues, energies, and aesthetics alive in Mexican American, Latin, and Brown communities throughout the region. Ayala’s sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborations embody his capacity to envision the local and the global as interwoven phenomena. Like his paintings, they locate surprising—and even unsettling—moments of cohesion in a world defined by multiplicity and rapid, ever-changing flux.
Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2025); CAC Málaga, Spain (2024); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY (2022), and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Xican-a.o.x. Body, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2024) and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum, CA (2023); Prospect 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2024); Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2023–2024); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Art Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Hot Concrete: LA to HK, K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2022); and Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2020).
His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA. Ayala lives and works in Los Angeles.