Art Bank unveiling with Gary Tyler

Join artist Gary Tyler for the unveiling of In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior, 1996. This textile work was completed in 2024 and acquired for the municipal Art Bank with the support of Frieze Los Angeles. See the 2024 announcement and the city's art collection page for more information. 

Gary Tyler is a fiber artist, currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. In 1974, at the age of 16, Gary Tyler was wrongly convicted of murder and placed on death row at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. He endured nearly 42 years there, during which the US Supreme Court ruled his sentencing unconstitutional, and was finally released in 2016. While incarcerated, Tyler participated in the prison hospice program, where he mastered the art of quilting, and chaired the prison drama club for almost three decades, using the transformative power of the arts to confront the challenges of incarceration. Now residing in Los Angeles, Tyler dedicates his life to the visual and dramatic arts, using them as tools to foster community and heal the scars of mass incarceration. Tyler is the 2024 Frieze Impact Prize winner, a 2024 Center for Art & Advocacy Fellow, and a 2019 and 2020 Art Matters Awardee. His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C and the City of Santa Monica Art Bank.

Santa Monica’s Art Bank collection began in 1984 to bring art into Santa Monica’s public spaces, funded through the City’s Percent for Art Program. The Art Bank contains over 200 works—including sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper—by such notable artists as Laura Aguilar, Lita Albuquerque, Charles Gaines, Kerry James Marshall, Linda Vallejo and other artists active in Southern California. The collection also incorporates gifts of artwork received by the City over the course of the last century, including 18th- and 19th-century landscapes, portraits, preparatory drawings and maquettes by artists commissioned to make public art in Santa Monica. Acquisitions into the City’s collection have supported many artists of the Southern California region, including Edgar Ramirez, whose work Bajío (2023) was acquired from the Focus section at Frieze Los Angeles 2023.