LOS ANGELES — I heard about Ben Caldwell within the first week I moved to Los Angeles, in November 2019. Some months later, while I was at an exhibition opening at Craft Contemporary, Ben strolled in. His presence set off a flurry of whispers: “That’s Ben Caldwell,” art dignitaries twittered to each other in hushed voices. A legend in his own time.
Renowned artist Arthur Jafa calls Caldwell his “Artist X” — meaning, as he put it in a foreword for a book tied to the exhibition, his “artistic model who frames what’s possible, sets the terms of excellence.” Caldwell, who turns 80 in August, is an aesthete, a pioneer of fusing technology, art, and Black philosophies across mediums. He’s an idea man who embodies and promotes a sense of community. He has spent decades as a photographer, filmmaker, archivist, space-maker, educator, mentor, ancestor-honorer, technologist, tinkerer, community leader, father, and lover of Black diaspora. Kaos Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell, an exhibition at Art + Practice co-presented with the California African American Museum and curated by Jheanelle Brown and Robeson Taj Frazier, embodies all the above in a living biography fittingly unrestricted to a specific medium or time period. It shows, not tells.
On separate occasions, I spoke with Brown and Frazier about their process of curation. Their thoughtful hand is immediately apparent: Upon entering the space, this exhibition feels a little different. No white walls. Fronts of dusty salmon, cerulean blue, and deep black conjure the palette of Caldwell’s childhood in the New Mexican desert. A plant sits between film screens as comfortably as it might in your own home. Rugs adorn the floor and African wax fabrics zhuzh vitrines showcasing ephemera from Caldwell’s life. “If you’ve been to Ben’s space, it doesn’t feel like a conventional artist’s studio — or what you’d imagine an artist’s studio to feel like. It’s very tactile. You could touch things. Objects get moved around.
“Things are to be used, not stared at,” said Frazier. “So we wanted this space to feel like Ben’s. We were clear on that from the beginning.” Careful staging, spacing, and placement help you feel that you know a little about the man, even without didactics or wall texts.
From the exhibition entrance, your field of vision can take in multiple works at once. Directly across are projections of Caldwell’s filmed interviews with legends like Peter Tosh and Bob Marley; pan to the right to view a screen playing an interview with him as a young man, an original poem, his first film, Medea (1973), and stills from Caldwell’s time in war-ravaged Vietnam. Pan left and encounter a collection of 1980s–90s Hollywatts comedy routines, another of his poems, an idyllic image of LA’s legendary Leimert Park neighborhood in 1984, and documentation of legendary hip hop incubator Project Blowed. That list might seem overwhelming, but the experience of it is actually quite welcoming. The placement and variety suggests a choose-your-own-adventure, on-your-own-time kind of invitation.
A pillar of this exhibition’s cohesion is the book that inspired it (the same one in which Jafa penned that foreword). Frazier and Caldwell’s award-winning Kaos Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, released in September 2024, is a thoughtful presentation of both his life and an excerpted timeline of modern Black American expression, from segregated projection rooms in the Southwest following the Great Migration to anti-war Black soldiers in Vietnam to the incubation of a burgeoning genre called hip hop to the futuristic plans for the technologically advanced Black Los Angeles of tomorrow. The book took shape after Caldwell and Frazier spent six years and tens of thousands of hours recollecting, documenting, researching, and cataloging Caldwell’s life. It provided a roadmap for the complicated project of encapsulating the multihyphenate artist’s experience and reach so effectively that, during a public program for the exhibition, his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, stated that the book showed her how parts of her father’s life connected. To Frazier, telling multiple iterations of Caldwell’s story across formats (a book, an exhibition) had always been a hope, but never a guarantee — “It definitely is wild that the project is living these multiple different kinds of lives that all intersect,” he said.
Neither Brown nor Frazier are formally educated as curators: the former more readily describes herself as a film scholar, while the latter is a writer and professor of cross-cultural media. Each of their work complements the other’s: Brown knew how to position Caldwell as a filmmaker and mentor, while Frazier drew from six years of reporting to pinpoint the biographical details that shaped Caldwell’s films. This shared unconventional background also allows for more flexibility, creativity, and nuance in their curation. “I’ve never been burdened by that institutional approach to curating. So I’ve never thought of curating as a totalizing picture of whatever subject or person or thing you’re presenting. I just try to intervene in small ways,” said Brown. Instead, they use their academic backgrounds to bolster their cultural work. “I would say we are both deeply invested in citational practices,” Frazier said, “and honoring the influences, the echoes we see or that others mention.”
Given Caldwell’s long and varied artistic resume, an integral part of the presentation is the logistical feat of organizing hours of video and audio, particularly that captured with now-defunct technology. Brown cites film scholar Laura Mulvey’s take on film curating as montage as a helpful guide to her thought process in presenting the resulting collection: “The types of work Ben has made allowed us to really approach this as montage. There are only a few things we’re showing in full, knowing that we have ample opportunity to elaborate on these things by either gesturing to it or representing it in an excerpted form.” Alongside Medea (1973) in the first room, a theater marquee with the words “The Black Side of Town,” an homage to Caldwell’s projectioninst grandfather, invites visitors to view “I & I: An African Allegory” (c. 1979), The Nubian (1980), and Hip Hop Habana (2005) in the back room. Together, these films trace the evolution of his artistic voice and stylistic throughlines of juxtaposing reality and allegory, jazzy and psychedelic pacing, and the unique use of coloring to elicit certain emotions.
The presentation of numerous videos and clips is another lesson in transportational montage and temporal fidelity. The curators elected to display all footage in a manner that represented the original experience: Hollywatts performances project through a monolith-like stack of box televisions, Medea whirrs on a old school film reel projector, a section of the exhibition focused on Caldwell’s work in integrating new technologies to the community are viewed through an augmented reality program on handheld tablets; and Caldwell’s early photographs rotate through a slide projector, the rhythmic click providing a metronome to one’s movement through the works. “Ben has adapted and transitioned with the different kinds of technological modes of representation, mediation, and narrative. So we wanted to show the arc of technology and the unique ways that Ben has approached them,” Frazier said.
Directly to the left of the entrance of the exhibition, there is a blown-up image of Leimert Park from July 4, 1984. Collaged on top of it are pictures from the famed open-mic workshop Project Blowed. Together, they create an interpretation of “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”(1884–86) by Georges Seurat — but for Black Los Angeles. The real park is approximately 35 yards behind where the photo hangs. Caldwell’s workshop, KAOS Network, is about 150 yards to its right. Indeed, this exhibition about the artist is also about the place he chose to call home and all the people who pepper it — true to generations of Los Angeles, not just him. “Ben creates spaces for others. He has created so many over his years living and working,” said Frazier. “We wanted the exhibition to give voice to those spaces and put them in a more pointed conversation. Though they’ve always been chatting.”
As a result, a guiding principle of the exhibition was portraying Caldwell as “a consummate collaborator,” in Brown’s words. Any of his various people who witnessed or took part in the different eras of Caldwell’s work could come in and find some evidence of their own life. “I met a lot of people who liked the book and thought it was cool. But it was so different than the way they reacted when they went into the space and saw themselves and their history and they were like ‘Yo, we’re in a museum right now.’ That was one of the best feelings,” Frazier shared. Brown had a similar take: “As part of the community, these people are like elders to me. I take it seriously. I feel like I had to do it right in a way that felt more than just curatorial work.”
In a way, this exhibition is a collective portrait of Black Los Angeles by three transplants, through the filter of Ben Caldwell — a hub around which so much of it has turned for 40 years. It reflects the name he has embraced for so long: chaos theory, in which seemingly random entities come together to create deterministic, stable patterns. Brown and Frazier are adding to the lineage of Caldwell’s rich wake. Here, a yet unknown artistic genius might find their own “Artist X.”
KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell continues at Art + Practice (3401 West 43rd Place, Los Angeles) through March 8, 2025. It is presented in collaboration with the California African American Museum.
