Bringing Ocean to Land

Tucked among a row of truck repair shops, steel fabricators, and the Union Pacific railyard in Commerce, you’ll find an unexpected workspace: artist Mercedes Dorame’s studio, with art supplies piled on tables and photos of loved ones tacked to the walls.

Though miles from the coast, this past spring the space also brimmed with sea life: specifically, a six-foot-tall interpretation of an abalone shell suspended from the ceiling.

The dimpled texture of the outside and the gleaming purples, pinks, and greens inside mimic the real abalone shells Dorame displays on a table. Abalones hold a cherished place in her Tongva culture. The Gabrielino-Tongva tribe has inhabited the Los Angeles Basin and Channel Islands since time immemorial, and abalones served as a source of food, fishhooks, and ceremonial regalia. Ever since she saw live abalones for the first time in the tide pools off Catalina Island last year, Dorame has been fascinated by these “important little beings.”

“Seeing them alive and flourishing was so exciting,” Dorame says, eagerly sifting through a stack of photos she took of abalones clinging to rocks under the clear Pacific waters.

The giant abalone interpretation is part of Dorame’s installation Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Tongva for “looking back”), on view in the Getty Museum Entrance Hall through July 28, 2024. Five shells ranging from 4 to 12 feet tall hang from the ceiling, and murals that represent the view of the Southern California coastline from Catalina wrap around the walls. Iridescent film covering the windows changes the colors of the shells depending on how the sunlight filters in, evoking the feeling of being underwater.

Dorame’s piece is the inaugural installation of Getty’s new Rotunda Commission series, which will highlight new work by contemporary artists. Dorame hopes the installation gives visitors a new respect for the ecology of Southern California and encourages them to consider the Tongva people’s point of view and their connection to this land.

“That’s what inspired the title—this return gaze,” Dorame says. “How do we get outside of ourselves and see from a different perspective?”

Documenting Tongva Presence

Woven into Dorame’s childhood were connections to her Tongva culture: visits to Kuruvungna Springs in West Los Angeles with her father, when the local Tongva community lobbied to restore and protect the sacred site; memories revealed by her paternal grandparents, who, like many Indigenous people, were quiet about their heritage for years because “there’s so much shame,” she recalls; weekends spent exploring her non-Native maternal grandparents’ backyard in Malibu, which Tongva people once inhabited.

As a student at UCLA, she began working as a cultural resource monitor, which meant that she observed while human remains and her ancestors’ belongings were exhumed (usually to make way for new development projects) and offered recommendations for maintaining cultural sensitivity and respect.

“It’s a really heavy responsibility, especially when it comes to caring for ancestors,” Dorame says. “And it was probably the first experience where I felt like if I didn’t process it in a way that felt healing, it could be really debilitating.”

Dorame began using photography to explore her Tongva heritage soon after that experience, when her great-uncle gave her an old medium-format, twin-lens Rolleiflex film camera. She felt herself drawn to the land, wanting to document signs of Tongva visibility, such as a boulder with a bowl ground out of it, or freshwater springs once maintained by Tongva people.

She also began adding her own “ceremonial interventions” into the landscape to claim her own presence, like draping an animal pelt over bushes or wrapping red yarn around trees (drawing viewers’ attention to moments in nature and urging them to follow the string back to the land). Her photographs and installations have been featured at LACMA and the Autry, Hammer, and Fowler museums.

“Los Angeles has been so paved over with concrete, which has deeply affected our ancestral homelands,” Dorame says. “I feel like I’m always pointing my camera towards these moments of Native presence. Photography has a connection with ideas of evidence, and so I am highlighting the presence of Tongva people in Los Angeles and creating a permanent record of it.”

Building the Abalones

After Dorame’s work was featured in the Getty Museum’s Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA exhibition in 2021, Getty curators approached her with the opportunity to produce an installation for the Entrance Hall. The huge scope of the project required her to enlist two assistants, Anais Franco and Nick Lee, and the design studio Machine Histories. They 3D-scanned real abalone shells and used the scans to fabricate large-scale versions out of high-density foam.

Dorame and her team painted the outer shells with shades of pink acrylic to emulate the color of wet abalone. Then they sprayed the inner shells with automotive paint to give them shine and iridescence. In the installation, each shell is affixed to a motor, which turns them gently at different speeds to evoke a sense of floating.

When visitors walk into the Entrance Hall, Dorame hopes the installation challenges their perspective. The larger-than-life abalones compel viewers to relate to them as equals, she says, while the accompanying murals represent how Tongva people might view Los Angeles, looking out from their ancestral home of Pimunga (Catalina). Dorame didn’t try to create perfect replicas of the abalones or a perfect depiction of the coast in her murals—“I’m looking at the source, but it’s a translation through my memory.”

Displaying her work in the Getty Museum on a scale of this magnitude is “a big deal,” Dorame says, and represents a societal shift toward acknowledging First Peoples and their deep knowledge of the land. Native issues can be complicated, she acknowledges, and there are a lot of misconceptions. (How can she forget hearing in school that “there are no Tongva people left anymore”?) Rather than shy away from the topic or rest on assumptions, Dorame urges people to make real relationships with Native people and ask questions. Her installation may give visitors a starting point.

“No matter where you’re from, there are First Peoples of that place and they are still there,” Dorame says. “How do we acknowledge and learn from them?”