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.

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.