About the Gallery
La Mancha Gallery
Founded in 2006 by curator Omar Holguin on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, La Mancha Gallery is an independent gallery and cultural platform dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices and sustaining the living creative culture of Los Angeles. Operating under the Alternative Venue Exhibition Model, the gallery has produced exhibitions, public art initiatives, artist collaborations, and community programming rooted in the belief that art belongs everywhere people gather.
La Mancha has been recognized by the Mexican Embassy, the Central Avenue Jazz Festival, and multiple Los Angeles-area cities for its sustained commitment to cultural equity, community storytelling, and the preservation of Los Angeles' diverse artistic legacy.
Exhibition Overview
Where Jazz Meets Visual Art.
Where Central Avenue Lives.
On September 23, 2023, the Arts Pavilion returned for the 28th Central Avenue Jazz Festival — a beloved annual celebration of Los Angeles’ cultural heritage honoring the historic jazz scene that has defined Central Avenue since the 1930s. Hosted inside a spacious 30’ × 100’ tent erected in front of the iconic and newly renovated Dunbar Hotel, between 42nd and 43rd Streets, the 2023 Arts Pavilion brought together sixteen of Los Angeles’ most compelling visual artists across an extraordinary range of mediums, from painting and photography to live chalk demonstrations and multimedia installations.
Presented by Councilman Curren D. Price Jr. and The New Ninth, the event ran from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, welcoming art enthusiasts, music lovers, and community members into a space designed to inspire and engage. One of the distinctive features of the Arts Pavilion is the presence of live painters and chalk artists who create works in real time before the audience — an interactive element that collapses the distance between artist and viewer, inviting visitors to witness creativity in its most immediate and unmediated form.
The Arts Pavilion has been curated by La Mancha Gallery since its inception, and the 2023 edition continued that tradition of connecting the visual arts with the vibrant rhythms of jazz — ensuring the Pavilion remains not a satellite feature of the festival but one of its living, breathing centers.
Curatorial Statement
On the Arts Pavilion
The Central Avenue Jazz Festival is a beloved celebration of Los Angeles’ cultural heritage, honoring the historic jazz scene that has thrived on Central Avenue since the 1930s. As the curator of the festival’s Arts Pavilion, I am proud to contribute to this rich tradition by creating a dynamic platform that showcases the exceptional talents of local artists.
Hosted in front of the iconic Dunbar Hotel, the Arts Pavilion is designed to inspire and engage attendees with an impressive array of artwork across various mediums, including live painting and chalk art demonstrations that invite visitors to witness creativity in action. Through my work with La Mancha Gallery, I strive to connect the visual arts with the vibrant rhythms of jazz, ensuring the Pavilion remains an integral part of the festival experience.
Together, we celebrate the enduring legacy of Central Avenue, blending music, art, and community in a way that resonates with both history and innovation.
— Omar Holguin, Founder & Curator, La Mancha Gallery
Venue & Details
The Historic Dunbar Hotel
Location
Central Avenue
Between 42nd & 43rd Streets
Los Angeles, CA
Date & Time
Saturday, September 23, 2023
11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Presented By
Councilman Curren D. Price Jr.
& The New Ninth
La Mancha Gallery
The Arts Pavilion occupied a 30’ × 100’ tent erected in front of the Historic Dunbar Hotel — one of Los Angeles’ most culturally significant landmarks, a building that housed Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and countless luminaries of the jazz era when they performed on Central Avenue. The newly renovated hotel stands as a living monument to this legacy, and the Arts Pavilion — installed directly at its doorstep — brings that legacy forward, placing contemporary art in dialogue with one of the most storied blocks in Black Los Angeles history.
Participating Artists
Sixteen Artists. One Living Avenue.
Painting · Mixed Media
Sam Pace
Sam Pace is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley whose work is inseparable from the music that inspired it. Drawing on the excitement and spontaneity of jazz and blues, Pace creates mixed-media works that co-mingle the moods and sounds of the Black Renaissance era with contemporary expression — translating what the ear hears into what the eye can feel.
A world-ranked martial arts tournament champion and recipient of a full college scholarship, Pace moved to Europe in 1989 where he developed his current visual language. Working across acrylic on canvas, wood, collage, and discarded recyclable objects, his client list spans the Los Angeles Urban League, Blue Note Records, the Playboy Jazz Festival, the Vancouver Wine and Jazz Festival, and entertainers including Nancy Wilson, Poncho Sanchez, and Cassandra Wilson. His deep connection to Central Avenue makes him one of the most fitting presences in the Arts Pavilion’s history.
Digital Stencil Collage · Fine Art
LP Ækili Ross (LPAE38)
LP Ækili Ross is a Los Angeles-based fine artist whose distinctive Digital Stencil Collage technique bridges traditional painting and digital media to create works of profound visual and cultural resonance. Born in San Francisco, rooted in the greater Los Angeles area, and mentored by figures including Bernard Hoyes, Charles Bibbs, and Omar Holguin himself, Ross has built a practice devoted to increasing the visibility and authentic portrayal of Nubian culture and the Black experience.
His ongoing series exploring Los Angeles as a mecca for Black musical genius was rooted in a personal discovery: his ancestor Wesley Prince played in the Nat King Cole Trio and recorded “Central Avenue Breakdown” — a tribute to the very cultural corridor that has anchored this festival for decades. Commissioned by Metro Art for its digital series on the Blue Line corridor, Ross’s work has reached an audience of millions. His presence at the Arts Pavilion is, in every sense, a homecoming.
Photography · Digital Mixed Media
Bart Ross
Bart Ross is a Pasadena-based photographer and digital artist who began his formal training at eighteen when he attended a seminar in Carmel featuring lectures by Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Wynn Bullock — an experience that proved pivotal to his lifelong visual development. He went on to earn a BA in Photography from San Francisco State University, where he developed both his artistic voice and his photographic philosophy.
His current body of work, which he calls “Modern Mandalas,” takes a single photographic image and multiplies it to create geometric compositions that function as meditative visual experiences — drawing from Islamic geometric art traditions to produce work that invites the eye to enter a state of quiet contemplation. His work is held in public collections including the LaGrange Art Museum in Georgia and Kaiser Permanente’s Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Medical Offices in Los Angeles.
Assemblage · Multidisciplinary · Production Design
Skira Martinez
Skira Martinez is a South Central Los Angeles-based assemblage and multidisciplinary artist, writer, and production designer whose practice is rooted in the ancestral knowledge of making — creating with imagination, found objects, and materials that would otherwise go to landfill. Born in the U.S. to community activists, Martinez founded CIELO galleries/studios in Historic South Central, one of South Los Angeles’ most important independent cultural spaces.
CIELO has become home to exhibitions, literary events, community workshops, and the Blk Grrrl Book Fair. Martinez’s production design work for film, music videos, events, and commercials draws directly from her assemblage practice: building environments of beauty and meaning from what the world has discarded. Her work makes an argument, quietly and powerfully, that what society leaves behind still holds value.
Muralism · Live Painting · Education
EnkOne
ENKONE (pronounced Ink-Kwon-ee) is a California-born artist, entrepreneur, and educator whose murals can be found on walls across the globe. His practice is driven by a desire to preserve urban city culture through portraits of legendary personalities, landmarks, and community figures — fusing history and identity into large-scale works that breathe with the streets around them. A Getty Museum artist and lead artist on McDonald’s “Black and Positively Golden” black history project, EnkOne has become one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary American muralism. His live painting at the Arts Pavilion transformed the event into a living studio.
Visual Art · Afro-Diaspora Culture · Civil Rights
Amir Whittaker (Afro Unidad)
Amir Whittaker is a culturalist, artivist, civil rights lawyer, educator, and author who operates at the intersection of art, justice, and the global Afro-diaspora. He is the founder and director of Project KnuckleHead, a nonprofit empowering youth through music, art, and educational programming since 2012, and co-founder of Afro Unidad — a Black cultural kinship movement with over 50 ambassadors across 14 countries. A senior policy attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, Whittaker holds a doctorate in Educational Psychology from USC, a law degree from the University of Miami, and a BA from Rutgers University. His art has been displayed in galleries, libraries, and on billboards around the world as an extension of his lifelong commitment to the liberation and visibility of Afro-descendant peoples.
Visual Art · Music · Multidisciplinary
Katia Moraes
Kátia Moraes is a Rio de Janeiro-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, painter, and multidisciplinary artist who has spent more than three decades bringing the vibrant culture of Brazil to Southern California through music, visual art, theater, and storytelling. Beginning her career in Rio with the band O Espírito da Coisa, Moraes arrived in Los Angeles in 1990 and has since performed at venues including the Hollywood Bowl, House of Blues, and LACMA’s Latin Sounds series. Her colorful, joyful paintings extend the same spirit as her music — culturally rooted and alive with the warmth of her native Rio.
Additional Participating Artists
The Full Roster
The 2023 Arts Pavilion also featured the work of Mohamed Mubarak, Wendell Wiggins, Riea Owens, Buena Johnson, Mike Norice, Kraig King, Kenneth Gatewood, Diana Shannon Young, and Zenobia — artists whose diverse practices in painting, photography, mixed media, and live demonstration enriched the full breadth and texture of the exhibition.
Together, all sixteen artists represented the full spectrum of Los Angeles’ contemporary visual culture — rooted in community, energized by jazz, and committed to the enduring legacy of Central Avenue as one of the most culturally significant corridors in American history.
Est. 2006
La Mancha Gallery
Central Avenue · Los Angeles, California
Alternative Venue Exhibition Model
Curatorial Archive · September 2023
