California African American Museum (CAAM)

Curated by Mar Hollingsworth, former visual arts curator, and organized by Taylor Renee Aldridge, visual arts curator

For over five decades, Matthew Thomas has developed a career as an artist and art professor, first in Los Angeles, and since 2011 in rural Thailand. In the late 1960s, Thomas began researching Eastern religions and philosophies and later studied Buddhist Tantra, a system of spiritual practice and meditation that has profoundly impacted his life and art. Inspired by his practice of the Buddhist religion, his multimedia works are filled with complex patterns that express his progress toward enlightenment and provide a path for others to experience the same. His unique visual language of sacred geometric abstraction, which integrates a variety of symbolic shapes and colors, explores basic life principles and correlates with the five elements of earth, fire, water, wind, and sky. Since moving to Thailand, Thomas has continued to investigate the relationship between art and the religious philosophies of many cultures, which he believes are all connected to a universal cosmic reality. Matthew Thomas: Enlightenment features a site-specific installation and selection of recent paintings that function as visual prayers meant to harmonize humanity and the universe.

Curated by Andrea Andersson, Rivers Institute founding director and chief curator, with Jordan Amirkhani, curator, Rivers Institute, and Taylor Renee Aldridge, visual arts curator, CAAM

To tailor a garment by “rock of eye” is to rely on the drape in the fitting process—that is, to rely on experience over mathematical measurement. Draping is a kind of drawing in space: a freehand, an intuition, a trust of materials. Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye, the artist’s first museum solo exhibition, brings together collages, drawings, sculptures, and installations that draw the contours of body and place. It begins with, and departs from, his past assemblages and collages that center magazine images of the Black male body and trace the social history and form of the zoot suit, a garment at the center of the 1943 attacks primarily on Mexican American, African American, and Filipino American youth in Los Angeles known as the Zoot Suit Riots. Montes-Michie was born in El Paso, Texas, and his practice reflects his experience growing up along the United States and Mexico border.