Full honesty: I haven’t seen this show. L.A. is far from Paris. But I’m going to talk about it anyway because what’s taking shape around this exhibition is worth stopping for.
Between a Memory and Me is Fortune’s first solo show in Los Angeles.
It’s presented at Art + Practice, in Leimert Park — historic Black neighborhood in L.A., birthplace of West Coast jazz, spoken word, cultural resistance going back to the ’40s. That’s not incidental. Nothing is incidental with Fortune, really — where the work is shown is part of the meaning. It’s co-presented by the California African American Museum as part of a five-year partnership with Art + Practice. Five years. The kind of institutional commitment that doesn’t look like a trend.
The title says everything about where Fortune is right now. He lost both his parents. This exhibition is built from that — not as collapse, but as search. The pursuit of a home when the people who defined it are no longer there. The images from Hardtack take on an added resonance here, carried by a personal context that the book alone can’t fully hold.
But what interests me most is the question of color. When the show traveled to CPW in Kingston, New York in the fall of 2025, Fortune introduced color into his work for the first time. After years of absolute, committed black and white — that was almost a physical signature — introducing color is a risk. Does it change what he’s saying? Does it say something else, or the same thing differently? Does the weight his images carry hold in color too?
I don’t know yet. Somebody’s going to have to go to Los Angeles.
Grégory Herpe
Rahim Fortune: Between a Memory and Me California African American Museum (CAAM) / Art + Practice 3401 W. 43rd Place, Los Angeles April 18 – September 5, 2026 caamuseum.org
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