Carlos Agredano Is Documenting the Harmful Effects of LA’s Pollution

Artist Carlos Agredano grew up on a dead-end avenue within the shadow of the 105 Freeway in Lynwood, a metropolis that borders South Los Angeles. Within the early days of lockdown, he would hint a path that ran parallel to the interstate freeway, an 18-mile stretch of the LA basin’s huge infrastructural community, making an attempt to grasp the concrete monolith that had reduce his neighborhood in half. That spring 2020 semester, he was ending his undergraduate diploma at Harvard College in his childhood bed room, the place every day he would methodically sweep the fine layer of black soot, air pollution from automobile exhaust blown in from an open window, that had gathered on each floor.

The tyranny of the LA freeway system has since develop into the first concern of Agredano’s follow. On the Los Angeles Nomadic Art Division (LAND), he just lately exhibited FUME (2025), a touring sculpture through which three totally different air high quality sensors mounted to an aluminum round platform are hitched to his black 1992 Toyota Pickup. One sensor displays the output from the truck’s exhaust pipe. One other, monitoring ambient air high quality, is enclosed by futuristic arches impressed by the Googie structure of the LAX’s Theme Constructing: a vacant monument to Area Age hubris now stranded within the heart of the loop of the airport’s eight terminals.  

As an object, each scientific and creative, FUME collects the proof of the gradual violence of poisonous drift that seemingly takes place invisibly, primarily impacting working-class communities of colour. “I would like the sculpture to gather information in the best way that my physique or my household or my neighbors’ our bodies gather information by how they’re respiration within the particles,” he instructed ARTnews. “Though we don’t precisely know [the extent] of it or what it’s doing to us, the thought for this sculpture is to at the least quantify it.” He joked that his medium is smog, and his artist assistant is the town of Los Angeles itself.

Over 50 years in the past, postwar artists like Yves Klein, Otto Piene, or Fujiko Nakaya used air in several methods, although they have been usually animated by a utopian concept of air as a borderless, metaphysical materials of shared expertise. Agredano as an alternative reveals how air high quality is inconsistently distributed through its sociopolitical context. By extensively researching social histories, like Eric Avila’s Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt within the Modernist Metropolis (2014), scientific research from UCLA’s Middle for Occupational & Environmental Well being, and environmental influence experiences by the California Division of Transportation (Caltrans), amongst different sources, Agredano connects the proof of air pollution to the longer histories of harmful city planning in Los Angeles (the vainness plate on his truck spells out JSTOR, the digital educational library.)

One instance of this ruinous city planning is, in actual fact, the 105, an auxiliary interstate freeway constructed within the early ’90s to enhance entry to LAX. A part of a Nineteen Sixties masterplan by Caltrans, its development was halted in 1972 after a community-led federal lawsuit—however solely after properties had already been razed. “It’s actually essential to me to analysis the event of the freeway system, and know precisely why the freeways have been constructed, which in Los Angeles was the identical story of Black and Brown communities being seized by way of eminent area and thru the historic redlining of these communities,” Agredano mentioned, including that, below the guise of progress, these initiatives all observe the identical sample: “eminent area, destruction of properties, removing of a neighborhood, after which the development of a freeway.”

In an earlier piece, Collector (2019), Agredano positioned an unprimed canvas within the yard of his childhood residence. Over the course of a yr, it quickly grew to become dirtied. To these unfamiliar with the work’s historical past, at first look, the canvas’s ashy blots resemble charcoal or smeared graphite. The caption corrects that impression, itemizing as its supplies smog, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, soot, dust, mud, guano, and car tire microplastics, amongst others. Agredano thinks of the work as a self-portrait, one which indexes not solely his physique and what it experiences however the bigger programs of which it’s a half. Agredano’s work makes use of “gestures which are very minimal, however illustrative of those big exterior forces,” mentioned Bryan Barcena, a curator at giant at LAND, who organized the presentation of FUME, with Irina Gusin.

In its title, Collector additionally references the acquisition of artwork objects and the way they flow into inside the artwork world; a museum has beforehand didn’t permit the work to enter its galleries due to its use of pollution, in keeping with Agredano. “I like that the work can create that type of resistance in individuals,” he mentioned, “as a result of why is it okay for tens of millions of individuals to reside subsequent to this materials, however it could’t enter the museum area?”

As a canvas polluted within the predominantly Latino Lynwood, Collector additionally factors out how conceptions of “soiled” and “clear” may be racially coded. Agredano is reminded of the Bracero Program, through which Mexican laborers got here to the US throughout World Warfare II to fill labor shortages. “This concept of the ‘soiled Mexican’ is a historic factor,” Agredano mentioned, “When the braceros got here to the US, they have been actually sprayed with DDT, and have been, in a way, fumigated.”

As FUME collected air samples, Agredano invited native artists—Hunter Baoengstrum, Daid Roy, Angela Nguyen, Chris Suarez, Vincent E. Hernandez, Felix Quintana, Lizette Hernandez, Eduardo Camacho, Maria Maea, and Cielo Saucedo—to create works on or across the freeways important to them. Agredano calls the collaborative undertaking a type of “sous-veillance,” or “a view from beneath,” a type of information assortment that captures what was “created in opposition to our will and creates a doc of it.” Nguyen has created a tufted rug depicting the historical past of the 91, which runs from Gardena, by way of Orange County, to Riverside. Roy staged a noise live performance within the mattress of Agredano’s Pickup, Baoengstrum planted a submitting cupboard on the 101, and Quintana put in a brief tetherball court docket by the 105.

Towards and inside the freeways’ crude geometries, strangling the town and sloughing infinite poisonous particles, these artists form LA’s freeways into websites of resistance and invention, reappropriating privatized, policed, or deserted areas for the commons. Like generations of LA artists earlier than them, from Studio Z to ASCO, Agredano and his collaborators are creating a brand new map of the town.