The ESMoA Experiment
The dense blocks of Hawthorne Boulevard nestled between Marine Avenue and Rosecrans Boulevard are littered with the familiar businesses that have long inhabited the distinct six-lane roadway, which stretches over twenty miles, coursing from Palos Verdes through Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, and Inglewood. A bustling Jack in the Box, a two-story WSS shoe store, a few dental and medical offices, clusters of insurance and tax service companies, budget motels, and nail or beauty salons with hand-painted signage.
It’s an unlikely setting for an art museum. But nothing about ESMoA has ever been like most art museums. The cutting-edge, community-based art institution – and yes, those two qualities can coexist, much like El Segundo itself is both at the innovative edge while still a homespun small town – recently relocated to Lawndale. In so doing, the El Segundo Art Museum also reinvented itself, becoming the Experimentally Structured Museum of Art.
Once housed in a tall, architecturally intriguing former post office building on El Segundo’s Main Street, ESMoA now stands out on the 14900 block of Hawthorne Boulevard. The museum’s recent move to Lawndale marks a new chapter in the organization’s already storied 10-year existence.
Unexpected experiments are nothing new for ESMoA. In El Segundo, ESMoA and its founders Eva and Brian Sweeney set out to create a space that redefined what a museum is, forgoing the intimidating and pristine white walls that embody a typical museum space, and embracing unconventional displays of artwork - think artwork hung in salon-style arrangements, or plastered from floor to ceiling directly onto the museum walls, or re-imagining the entire space to resemble the Wizard of Oz’s yellow brick road, at the end of which is a high-energy drag show.
ESMoA defined itself by its experimental nature, creating a hub for where art happened in El Segundo, and inevitably left a lasting imprint on the city. It was no coincidence that since ESMoA’s arrival in El Segundo, the community’s creative scene has blossomed. In addition to its own ground-breaking shows – many which captured national and even international attention – ESMoA played a key role in the City Council’s creation of the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee. This led to the formation of the Cultural Development Program, which continues to provide critical funding for the El Segundo Art Walk.
ESMoA arrived in El Segundo with a mission, and left with that mission accomplished.
“After ten years, we felt like we planted a lot of seeds that helped cultivate and establish the arts in El Segundo,” says Eva Sweeney, ESMoA Executive Director. “We created a meaningful space that sparked creativity in the community. But eventually we wondered how we could make this same impact in other communities.”
John McCullough, the El Segundo Art Walk event producer, said that ESMoA has been essential to ESAW’s success. He said the museum’s change in location does not lessen its ongoing impact in El Segundo.
“ESMoA has been a fantastic partner since the very beginning of the art walk,” he said. “Their leadership has helped with planning and growing the event to where it is today. They will always have a role in the El Segundo Art Walk.”
Sweeney knew she wanted to move ESMoA to another small city, where the fruits of the non-profit’s labor could be directly felt in the neighborhood they established themselves in. While driving around the South Bay, Sweeney passed a 4,000-square-foot standalone space in Lawndale that was for sale. She instantly knew it would be the perfect new home for ESMoA.
“I live in Manhattan Beach and understand that El Segundo, Redondo, Hermosa, and Manhattan are all very wealthy cities, and that there isn’t the same need for an art-centered community hub as there is in a city like Lawndale,” says Sweeney.
Unlike El Segundo, which is an amalgamation of four distinct commercial spheres - the small, sleepy Mayberry-esque downtown businesses, the bustling Chevron refinery, the Fortune 500 corporations, and the professional sports teams like the Lakers, Chargers, and Kings - Lawndale’s biggest employers are two large school districts, Lawndale Elementary School District and Centinela Valley Union School District. The city is made up of predominantly young and multi-generational families; it boasts eight elementary schools and four high schools in its two-square mile radius. It’s the perfect landscape for Sweeney and her team to pursue their evolving mission of making art accessible and free to a community.
“We don't follow traditional guidelines for what a museum is,” Sweeney says. “That's why we like to refer to ESMoA as an art laboratory. Our mission is to really bring art to the community and to the people. We want to eliminate the intimidating barriers of traditional art spaces and allow people to reimagine creativity, so that everyone feels they can be creative in their own way.”
ESMoA is as much a movement as it is an organization. While ESMoA brought fresh perspective, outright playfulness, and a new kind of artistic street cred to El Segundo that helped spur a larger, community-wide embrace of the arts, ESMoA’s presence in Lawndale could have an even broader impact. This is a town in which public art institutions that engage with the community are few and far between. ESMoA will provide its new neighbors with creative resources and community activation that historically have felt inaccessible in the area.
Towards that end, Sweeney built her new ESMoA team with people that represent the culture and demographics of the city. The team now includes Education Specialist Dulce Stein, a seasoned curator and gallerist for local establishments like El Camino College and astute Los Angeles galleries alike, who has spent the last 30 years as a staunch community activist. Bryan Puertas, ESMoA’s Communications Associate, and Alondra Alvarado, who serves on an internship provided by the Getty Museum intended to spur diversification of arts organizations, each grew up in the surrounding area and reflect its prevalent Latinx community. Each also brings a fresh young perspective to the museum’s programming and marketing.
“Having grown up in Compton, which is demographically similar to Lawndale, I understand the struggle of a community not having good funding for arts programs or free creative spaces like this,” says Alvarado. “Being in this space, we owe it to our neighbors and the local businesses to collaborate and continue coming up with fresh ideas for programming and workshops that provide people who typically work long 12-hour shifts a bit of creative relief that is not only fun, but free. We’re not going to stay still, and will continue to challenge ourselves and create new adaptations of what ESMoA can be and provide for our community.”
Since ESMoA’s official opening in December 2023, all programming has been community-centered and completely free to attend: weekly art-making sessions that draw inspiration and techniques from featured artworks; instructor-led mindfulness meditation and yoga sessions; a weekly group that allows people to create writings and visual artworks that culminate into short “zine” publications are physically published; poetry readings; art-driven panel discussions; musical storytimes; “Chalk Away,” which brings together the community and a featured-artist to create a chalk mural in a public space; documentary film screenings; gardening workshops that intertwine the art of sowing indigenous plants and creating soil paintings; Spanish-led tours of running exhibitions; in-person and virtual school visits for teachers and their students.
You get the idea. ESMoA is planting seeds in several fields, and in doing so they are collaborating with local public school art educators.
“I love that we are able to host high school art teachers in the space,” says Puertas. “I could see how big of a deal it was for these teachers and the sense of relief they felt that they now had a place to bring their art class students.
“For a lot of students, art and creativity isn’t always a priority because they are often more concerned with immediately finding a decent-paying job after high school, especially students that come from immigrant families,” Puertas says. “Having a space like ESMoA shows students that art is a viable path for them, something tangible. I’m Latino and being able to see Latinx artists in this space doing the things they are doing and being able to make money off of it is really inspiring and encouraging.”
Sweeney couldn’t be more pleased with the new ESMoA team and the inroads they have already made in the community. And while she devotes most of her time and experience towards creating sustainable funding for the organization, she can’t wait to see how ESMoA and the city of Lawndale can continue to grow together.
“The most important thing we can do is listen to what our community wants to be a part of so we can provide, accommodate, and organize,” says Stein, ESMoA Education Specialist. “Here at ESMoA we have everything that someone needs to explore their creativity - materials, canvases, a space to create - and all anyone has to do is show up. There is nothing better than seeing the shock on a person’s face when they ask how much it is and I say it's free. I know what having that access and not being cheated with – the opportunities to learn, to grow, to be safe, to be happy, to express themselves – means to them. Opportunity is what this place brings to the area.”
ESMoA is free and open to the public Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 11am to 5pm, with weekly programming scheduled, and educational programs and special events by appointment.
