Many native Los Angeles artists grow up visiting LACMA, dreaming of one day having their work on view in its galleries. Few actually have these aspirations come to fruition, but Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. is now one of them.
His show “In Between Stops” is on view now in an outdoor portion of LACMA along its Kendall Concourse, taking the form of 12 benches that people can actually sit on. The show honors Gonzalez Jr.’s LA roots as a graffiti artist, sign painter, and muralist turned fine artist. Individually and collectively, the benches serve as an homage to the street art and vernacular signage Gonzalez Jr. grew up with, reflecting the distinct LA culture and color that shaped him into the artist he is today.
Gonzalez Jr. is a second-generation LA painter, having been raised in East LA with a commercial sign painter as a father. Both Gonzalez Jr. and his dad learned the sign painting trade at the famed Sign Graphics program at Los Angeles Trade Tech College (a course I have also taken!).
“My dad was raised in Tijuana, and came to LA when he was young,” Gonzalez Jr. shares. “He went to high school in LA during the Chicano Art Movement, so he was really inspired by that and Mexican muralism. But he was also interested in sign painting, automotive art, and airbrushing. He always had magazines of those sorts of things and art books. The first art book of his I remember seeing had [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, who was one of the three big muralists [along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco].”
Coming of age in this environment certainly impacted Gonzalez Jr. and coaxed him down a creative path. After attending LATTC, he began apprenticing at local mural companies, where he developed his painting skills further. “A lot of the work I’ve done comes from my background in commercial sign painting,” he says. “I learned how to paint more rendered and photorealistic, the way I do now, working for outdoor advertisement companies, first with Wall Dogs and then Colossal Media. Before that, I grew up painting graffiti and drawing; I’m really inspired by graffiti, skateboard graphics, punk rock artwork, album covers, flyers, and hip hop stuff.”
This background in painting commercial signs and billboards has left an indelible mark on Gonzalez Jr., giving him insights into an industry that he now comments on in his fine art practice. “A lot of the work I do is thinking about advertisements,” he says. “Starting off with signs, painting billboards, painting ads, I look at them a lot more and pay attention to them. I started creating my own fictitious ads, with some of them more critical towards those advertisement tactics. A lot of billboards that I see now, I find ridiculous, sometimes even predatory as far as fear-mongering and hyper-sexualization.”
Another important aspect of Gonzalez Jr.’s work that’s on display in “In Between Stops,” is preserving relics of LA culture that are rapidly disappearing in a city that’s always developing. “A lot of my work comes from traveling and coming back to LA and seeing the changes in the city I grew up in. A lot of the work that I do, especially in this LACMA project, is highlighting small businesses, mom and pop shops, businesses that are rich in culture, that tell a story that are preserving the LA that I grew up in—the party supply, the barber shops, the beauty salons.”
Within the 12 benches, Gonzalez Jr. has also incorporated specific pieces from LACMA’s collection. “I thought it would be cool to do fictitious LACMA advertisements,” he explains. “So I created these fake ads—or maybe they’re real now—that are inspired by works from their collection that are iconic, I liked, or that I thought were funny. Some are remixed; I did a Jeff Koons dog with a painting that I’d made of one of my friends on a horse. So for the LACMA bench, I put him on the Jeff Koons dog instead of the horse.”
Gonzalez Jr. didn’t shy away from political themes related to the history of the museum in some of the benches either. One of them features a work by the East LA-based Chicano art collective, Asco, that was prolific in the 1970s, in which three members of the collective tagged LACMA’s old building and then photographed it. “I always thought that was a really important work because it was at a time when the museum didn’t really have a lot of diversity,” says Gonzalez Jr. “It wasn’t showing artists that come from where I come from. It wasn’t showing Chicano artists, and this very important collective went and, as an act of protest, tagged the museum and then documented it. John Valadez is also referenced, and other people who, without the work that they did, it’s really hard to imagine me being able to have the opportunity to show at this museum. I hope that one day other artists in the future can say that about me.”
In Between Stops, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Feb 22-Dec 1, 2026, © Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Charlie Powers
The form of public benches in this particular show is central to what Gonzalez Jr. is trying to say through his work as well. “A big part of these works for me is them being interactive,” he says. “I want people to feel comfortable, to sit on them. There’s always that sort of separation or distance from the viewer when people attend art spaces and museums where you can’t touch the work. I completely understand that, but my work is meant to feel inclusive, familiar, like everyone can sort of relate or understand what it is. I want people to feel some sort of connection to them, to be able to touch and live and exist with the work.” Having the benches located outside at LACMA underpins those ideas. “I come from a world of making work that’s meant to be outside. The way I prepped the benches is the way I learned at Trade Tech, actually, so that they can withstand the elements; rain, sun, these different things. A lot of artwork isn’t intended to exist outdoors, especially paintings.”
When I ask Gonzalez Jr. how his dad feels about his son having a show at LACMA, he shares that he actually was a member of the team who helped him create the benches. “He has a hand in a lot of the work that is part of the series,” he says. “It’s cool for him to see that the work he did and the work that he understands very well can be viewed and valued by such an important institution. It’s the same sort of stuff he’s been doing for like 40 years or something, and now you change the context of it, and there’s a different type of value on it that I think he’s tripping out on.”
