Pieces of You
Words by Mimi Zeiger
Construction of LACMA, circa 1963. Courtesy of LAPL.
Almost six years ago, when most of the world was sheltering at home under Covid restrictions, crews tore down several structures on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus to make way for Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s soaring David Geffen Galleries. The three demolished structures were part of the original 1965 scheme by LA modernist architect William L. Pereira and included a never-loved 1986 addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. Within weeks, what had been a living, breathing piece of somewhat mediocre architecture was reduced to rubble.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967. Courtesy of LAPL.
Artist Cayetano Ferrer extracted fragments from the pile with the help of the demolition contractors and a tacit okay from the museum. He then exhibited large chunks—decorative columns that once graced the façade—in a storefront in Pasadena and made plans to present them in a public park in West Hollywood, which never came to fruition. Those years in 2020 and 2021 were filled with so much uncertainty and loss, the rescued pieces, falling somewhere between artwork and artifact, were charged with memory, personal and cultural. The destruction of a building felt so emblematic of the devolution of the public sphere, and yet it seems a bit quaint in retrospect. Drones and bulldozers have wiped out, are wiping out structures, neighborhoods, towns, regions in Gaza, Kiev, Beirut, Tehran. There is little aesthetic value in debris other than grief right now.
Installation view, Cayetano Ferrer: Object Prosthetics, Commonwealth and Council Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
With his most recent exhibition, Object Prosthetics (at Commonwealth and Council January 31–March 14, 2026) Ferrer asks visitors to reckon with the afterlife of 20th-century ruins. A series of small concrete and tile remnants held aloft by a modular aluminum armature fills one skylight gallery. Scaled to the size of the human body, these pieces reject the monumentality of his earlier installations.
The works in Object Prosthetics hint at postcolonial reading—they are a reminder of the ways pieces of buildings and artifacts were extracted from countries and cultures and then exhibited for the fascination to western audiences throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. LACMA’s encyclopedic collection, of course, isn’t free of such objects.
Debris Chain: Concrete and tile floor fragments from Los Angeles County Museum of Art and linking aluminum interface, Cayetano Ferrer: Object Prosthetics, Commonwealth and Council Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
Ferrer is interested in the tectonics of institutional display systems: pins, rods, shelves, sliders. Delicate, sculptural resin “prosthetics” resembling sinewy tendons introduce a biomorphic language that translates between the fragments and the off-the-shelf aluminum components, between former museum and museology. Institutional Fragment Prosthesis 10, 2026, for example, uses lacy resin and aluminum web to support a glazed terracotta and concrete shard.
Detail of Column Armature (Display System), Cayetano Ferrer: Object Prosthetics, Commonwealth and Council Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
To encounter LACMA’s remains reimagined in this way requires a kind of emotional recalibration. Building parts are body parts, body parts are building parts. In one artwork, Column Armature (Display System), 2026, a concrete column fragment, still retaining some of its fleshy beige paint, is incorporated into a display in the shape of the original Pereira column. The shelf and support rods morph to both accommodate the form and to hold the unwieldy hunk at torso height. From certain angles it looks almost like a set of concrete lungs suspended in a cage.
Details, Institutional Fragment Prosthesis
Walking a group through the gallery, Ferrer explained that prosthetic interfaces allow him to position each fragment into an approximation of its original orientation on the LACMA campus. As such, an architectural ghost haunts the gallery. There is a desire to find the whole in the parts, to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But recreation is impossible, especially as Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries are now open to the public. The only way forward is to adapt.
Installation view, Cayetano Ferrer: Object Prosthetics, Commonwealth and Council Gallery. Photo by Paul Salveson.
March 30, 1965: "View from The Portuim of the Ahmanson Gallery in the magnificent new Los Angeles County Museum of Art shows dining tables set up for last night's pre-opening festivities. The Gallery is the main building of the museum's three structures, 58 feet high with four levels containing the permanent collections of sculpture and art." Courtesy of LAPL.
Interior view of the former LACMA building. Courtesy of LAPL.
LACMA visitors, 1990. Courtesy of LAPL.
Construction of LACMA, circa 1963. Courtesy of LAPL.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles–based critic and curator.
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