“The only lasting truth is Change,” writes Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower. But inevitability doesn’t mean change comes without heartbreak. Kathy Gallegos and the team at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park know this all too well: After 25 years in the same space, landlords keen on developing condos forced them out. Gallegos has spoken candidly about the painful eviction process , telling CALO News in February how the most recent landlord warned her not to “freak out” as he planned to serve her papers. Eventually, the Pasadena Sheriff’s Department posted notices to vacate. All the while, she was consoling beneficiaries of the gallery’s public programs who didn’t want them to leave. After months of searching and a major community effort to help them relocate, Avenue 50 has reopened on Figueroa Street, debuting their new space with a group show, aptly named Changes/Cambios.
This exhibition marks not only a physical move, but also it speaks to deeper sociopolitical forces that have long threatened the gallery and its community. Gentrification, wildfires, and the Trump Administration’s attacks on Latines, immigrants, and arts and education funding have intersected in devastating ways at both national and local levels, deeply impacting Avenue 50 and the majority Latine population of Highland Park. Spanning from 2010 to 2025, works by twenty-nine artists, who are overwhelmingly Latine and have exhibited at Avenue 50 before, line the one-room gallery, reflecting this evolving turmoil without succumbing to despair.’
Johnny Castillo, Apa’s Vision, 2022. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
Among the works on view, several confront these intersecting crises head-on, especially those referencing fire. In Johnny Castillo’s Apa’s Vision (2022), a red glow washes over the portrait of a man in a hard hat. This oil-on-wood painting eerily recalls the intensity of the 2025 LA fires, but it does not place its subject in a specific environment, allowing viewers to imagine any blaze—domestic or international, recent or historical—exacerbated by power companies and climate change. Eric Almanza’s Black Masks and Gasoline (2024), depicting a figure in a full-face respirator surrounded by yellow flames, is more explicit about its setting. An accompanying sketch, First a Spark, Then a Flame (2024), zooms out on the masked subject standing near a barrier that suggests one side of this border is Indigenous land. Within this context, Almanza’s works evoke the disproportionately negative consequences of natural disasters on BIPOC communities, while also highlighting the Tongva people’s restorative land stewardship practices, such as removal of invasive, fire-prone plant species like eucalyptus, that helped mitigate the Eaton Fire. Large swaths of Altadena burned, but without the care and diligent work of the Tongva people to better manage their land, far worse destruction would have aggravated an already devastating disaster.
Installation Image of Changes/Cambios. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
Eric Almanza, First a Spark, Then a Flame, 2024.Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
While tens of thousands of people continue to grapple with the aftermath of these wildfires, the Trump Administration has deployed ICE to raid neighborhoods and round up migrants for deportation without due process. This horrifying continuation of policies from Trump’s first term is echoed in Abelardo de la Peña Jr. ‘s photograph The Familia That Marches Together, February 17, 2025 (2025), where a handwritten sign reads, “NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND”, a phrase that could easily have appeared in 2016. Of course, anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States predates Trump. Martin Bustamente’s 2014 digital collage Degrees of Separation resembles a word search puzzle, filled with pejoratives used to describe immigrants during Obama’s presidency, which continued their use from presidents past.
Abelardo de la Peña Jr., The Familia That Marches Together, February 17, 2025, 2025. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
Now combined with plainly fascist co-optations of the American flag, the current iteration of anti-immigration policies coming from the White House adds new urgency to a decades-long conversation unfolding within this exhibition. It’s unclear whether the man wearing an American flag as a cape in Angela María Ortiz’s photograph 5th St-Downtown LA (2010) meant it as a point of pride or protest or both. But the similar imagery in Edwin Vasquez’s mixed-media piece Who is In Charge? (2025) leaves no room for uncertainty. On the right of Vasquez’s painting, three green lines like prison bars cut through the stars and stripes of Trump’s cape. On the left, a silhouetted figure dons a blood-red cloak adorned with a golden Tesla logo. What may once have seemed like an innocuous fashion choice now signals to many a clear allegiance to a government that no longer pretends to serve everyone.
Amid the somberness of the moment, humor anchors both the works and the gallery itself. Pen and ink wash illustrations by Ronald Llanos resemble New Yorker cartoons, both in style and wit, and speak to what the Avenue 50 team may have asked themselves in the wake of their eviction: “Where are we going?” (as a train heads into the ocean) and “Is this going somewhere?” (asks a satellite). But unlike the ambiguous discovery in Llanos’s 2022 piece of the same name, Gallegos seems to have found a treasure on Figueroa Street, and people want to follow her there to see it too.
Ronald Llanos, Where Are We Going, 2022. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
By returning for Avenue 50’s comeback show, artists who have exhibited there before reaffirmed their commitment to the gallery and the values it upholds. The physical space may be new, but the gallery’s heart beats the same. The world has changed unimaginably since Avenue 50 first opened its doors in 2000, yet Gallegos and her team remain committed to ensuring everyone—artists and guests, young and old, citizen or not—can find a home with them, ready to face whatever challenging changes/cambios come next.
Heriberto Luna, Existence, 2025. Image Courtesy of Avenue 50 Studio.
“Changes/Cambios”
March 8th – April 5th
Avenue 50 Studio
3714 N. Figueroa Dt, Los Angeles, CA, 90065
Read More “The only lasting truth is Change,” writes Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower. But inevitability doesn’t mean change comes without heartbreak. Kathy Gallegos and the team at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park know this all too well: After 25 years in the same space, landlords keen on developing … Continue reading “Changes/Cambios”