99% INSPIRATION: “NO PRIOR ART,” AN EXHIBITION OF UNLIKELY INVENTIONS — OR ARE THEY WORKS OF ART?

THE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY’S CENTRAL LIBRARY HIGHLIGHTS THE MYRIAD CONNECTIONS BETWEEN MAKING ART AND CONCOCTING PROBLEM-SOLVING DESIGNS


by Sarah Fensom, brutjournal’s U.S.A. West Coast bureau chief

Published on March 31, 2025


LOS ANGELES — Throughout history, there have been artists who have also been acknowledged as inventors.

The Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) designed flying machines and early examples of automatic weapons. Centuries later, the American Samuel Morse (1791-1872), a painter of portraits and of such neoclassical works as The Gallery of the Louvre (1831-33), invented the single-wire telegraph and Morse Code, and in the 1960s, the artist Rockne Krebs (1938-2011), who was born in Kansas City, Missouri, pioneered the use of then-new laser technology to create monumental sculptural installations without solid form. By 1969, he had been granted several patents for laser-beam reflective systems and 3-D laser pieces.

Banner for the exhibition “No Prior Art,” which is on view through May 11, 2025, at the Getty Gallery of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library branch. Photo by Sarah Fensom

Now, in Los Angeles, a remarkable exhibition, “No Prior Art,” which is on view through May 11 at the Getty Gallery of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library branch, is calling attention to a number of artists or artists’ collectives whose work has been rooted in invention. Among them: KAOS Network, an Afrofuturistic innovation lab founded by the visionary artist and filmmaker Ben Caldwell in the Leimert Park Village area of L.A. in 1984, and Mixografia, a multi-generational, L.A.-based print studio that originated in Mexico City and that invented and patented a three-dimensional printing process.

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