LOS ANGELES — Craft Contemporary presents RAW: Craft, Commodity, and Capitalism, a thematic exhibition featuring nine contemporary artists who work with commodities as their materials to construct works that reflect upon the history of colonialism, slavery, and globalization, on view from September 29, 2019 to January 5, 2020. The artists featured are: Charmaine Bee, Atul Bhalla, Sonya Clark, Raksha Parekh, Jovencio de la Paz, Ignacio Perez Meruane, Amor Muñoz, Juana Valdes, and Ken + Julia Yonetani. The exhibition concept was inspired by an interview with Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014). In examining the rise and fall of the European-dominated cotton empire, Beckert writes, “Because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world.” Indeed, goods such as cotton, sugar, salt, tea, etc. became a driving force behind the industrialization and expansion of Western civilization, weaving farflung populations, geographies, and market systems inextricably together to shape contemporary understandings of economics, politics, and nationhood. The exhibition traces how this operating framework of capitalism — extracting labor and natural resources from colonized regions — has rippled across time. “The artists in RAW: Craft, Commodity, and Capitalism all approach the commodities they utilize as a form of biographical or historical record. Their use of these materials acknowledges the layers of repressed histories encapsulated in each commodity,” explains Exhibitions Curator Holly Jerger. The exhibition spotlights commodities including salt, sugar, copper, water, tea, cotton, indigo, agave, and porcelain. -- The first solo museum exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Echiko Ohira examines her prolific artistic production over the last two decades. Ohira’s work is founded upon the use of repurposed paper, with her love of the material springing from her childhood in Japan and its vast paper traditions. In addition to paper, Ohira utilizes nails, thread, and other found materials to create sculptural forms and collages that explore the physical and spiritual centers of the human body, natural world, and larger cosmos. -- Los Angeles-based sculptor Cynthia Minet’s colorful, multi-media installation is one-part animal and one-part machine. Combining the form of the panthera atrox — an extinct North American lion whose remains have been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits — with a modern-day oil pump jack, Minet addresses our complicated relationship with petrochemicals and the specific cultural and geological history of the Miracle Mile neighborhood.