Five of Our Favorite Outdoor Art Sculptures on the DTLA Art Trail

When visiting Los Angeles, there are the standard must-sees–like the Hollywood sign and movie star homes–but Downtown LA (home to the Emerson) and its emerging arts district has increasingly become a must-visit neighborhood for visitors and locals alike.

If you have family and friends in town this Thanksgiving weekend, may we suggest skipping the stereotypical LA sites and instead heading downtown instead. The DTLA Art Trail will have you exploring the hip neighborhood’s independent museums, local bars and restaurants, and eye-catching outdoor sculptures.

Here, five sculptures you should definitely add to your Instagram feed:

Double Ascension by Herbert Bayer

Bayer, an Austrian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1938 at the request of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, was a Bauhaus artist who believed in the power of public art. He was quoted as saying “[A]rt of the future...would go...out into the street, to the
people, into the environment.” His cylindrical sculpture, “Double Ascension,” was on the DTLA Art Trail long before it was an established walking tour. It was installed in 1973 (one of his last works before Bayer’s death in 1985). At 20 feet high by 30 feet in diameter, mounted in a 50-foot continuous pool, it’s one of the Art Trail’s most revered pieces.

North, East, South, West by Michael Heizer

Californian Heizer looked to Mother Nature to inspire his art, with one of his most influential sculptures being “North, East, South, West.” Initially conceptualized as a negative space sculpture (i.e. the shapes were dug into the ground), when he was invited to recreate the piece in 1981 in front of the Wells Fargo building in Downtown LA, he flipped it, literally, creating four stainless steel sculptures that feature outsized rectangles, upright cones and other shapes.

Peace on Earth by Jacques Lipshitz

After the artist fled Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, he created this nearly 30-foot high, 15-ton bronze sculpture hopefully named “Peace on Earth,” the work showcases a dove descending to Earth, as well as a Madonna interpretation and reclining lambs. It stands tall as an iconic centerpiece of Los Angeles’ equally iconic, The Music Center.

Zanja Madre Water Garden by Andrew Leicester

he sculpture was originally commissioned for a speculative office tower in Downtown LA, but the work–which was selected through an international competition and took nearly four years to complete–had something to say about Los Angeles’ delicate environmental state. Named after the city’s original aqueduct Zanja Madre (translated in Spanish as ‘Mother Ditch’), the sculpture is an allegorical landscape commenting on the city’s precarious dependence on natural resources, particularly water. The Zanja Madre is no longer in use, but the artwork remains.

Poet’s Walk: Corporate Head by Terry Allen

In a decade defined by corporate raiders and a “Greed is good” mentality, artist Terry Allen created this life-sized statue of a man in a suit who has been subsumed by corporate interests (note his head is completely enveloped by the brick wall) as a political comment on the Reagan-Bush years. In conjunction with poet Philip Levine, the poem inscribed can only be read by taking the same position as the statue.

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