LOS ANGELES — As I walked via No Prior Artwork: Illustrations of Invention on the Los Angeles Public Library’s downtown Central Library, a small set up stopped me lifeless in my tracks. By way of an open door was a jail cell, glowing in its model new chrome steel. Squeezed into the slender room, concerning the measurement of my walk-in closet, was a bunk mattress, desk, shelving, and bathroom mounted mere centimeters away from the underside bunk.
“Prisoners’ Invention” (2001–14) recreates the room by which an incarcerated inventor, merely referred to as Angelo, lived for greater than a decade. An artist collective on the surface, Short-term Providers, constructed prototypes of the gadgets Angelo noticed MacGyvered within the jail system, like salt and pepper shakers constructed from empty Bic lighters, a pop-up Christmas tree painted on cardboard, and a cigarette lighter normal from a paper clip, disposable razor, and styrofoam cup. On this room, Angelo’s voice has been preserved via excerpts from his letters, which accompany the prototypes and patent-like drawings.
No Prior Artwork, curated by Todd Lerew, showcases the library’s intensive patent assortment. Angelo’s gallery is separated from the remainder of the exhibition. As a result of he couldn’t legally file these innovations from the confines of his cell, he technically doesn’t belong right here. But Lerew felt it was vital to platform incarcerated folks, who’re among the many most good inventors in our society.
The general exhibition celebrates innovators who don’t come from a typical industrial design or engineering background. The library’s patent assortment consists of crops, and one wall is devoted to pictures of recent fruits and roses novice horticulturists have grown of their backyards. One other show options patent fashions from the nineteenth century — miniature, three-dimensional drafts of aspect saddles and irons that had been as soon as essential to submit with a patent illustration. A 3rd part highlights quack science, the place snake-oil innovations just like the “Radium Ore Revigator” (1912) — a radium and uranium-lined jug that supposedly added extra power to water — sit alongside earnest but misguided early medical gadgets.
The exhibition juxtaposes these historic objects with modern artworks and commissions impressed by patents. As an example, Shervone Neckles’s massive, black metallic lightbulb sculpture, “BEACON” (2020–21), routinely glows when guests strategy it. Neckles based mostly the work on an illustration for a carbon filament Lewis H. Latimer, an inventor, engineer, and freed slave, developed in 1881. And KAOS Community, artist Ben Caldwell’s media lab, exhibits off its prototype for an Afrofuturist, driverless automotive, upholstered in Kente fabric, which Caldwell hopes will cruise via Sankofa Metropolis, a community-designed, radically Black city enclave that he has been constructing within the Leimert Park neighborhood of LA.
New commissions embody an eclectic array of objects by Pippa Garner, who has been sketching quirky, gender-bending gadgets for the reason that Nineteen Seventies. The library turned a couple of of her drawings into bodily prototypes. They embody the “Shu-Haul (shoe trailer)” (Eighties–2024). A play on a stereotype of lesbian tradition, U-Hauling, is made literal with a miniature truck mattress hitched to a brown idler. Angelenos may need to get their fingers on “The ‘Hollywood Impact’ Fence” (1983–2024), which lets anybody clip miniature variations of the enduring Hollywood signal to their white picket fence.
No Prior Artwork additionally permits audiences to turn into inventors via a collection of collaborations with painter Ellen Harvey known as The Utopia Machine (2024). Write an invention on a slip of paper and all through the present’s run Harvey will render it in monochrome acrylic paint on black wooden. To date, folks have dreamed up an ant-proof cat meals bowl, which the artist adorns with hoses to siphon the intruders, and a plastic-sucking ship, the place a robust hose vacuums all of the trash out of the ocean.
Harvey’s fee highlights No Prior Artwork’s thesis: anybody could be a genius. An invention could possibly be lurking in your house at this second. A damaged drawer mended with duct tape and zip ties could possibly be one million greenback thought, or at the least earn a house within the library’s patent assortment.
No Prior Artwork: Illustrations of Invention continues on the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library location (630 West fifth Road, Downtown, Los Angeles) via Might 11, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Todd Lerew.