For the California African American Museum (CAAM), championing Los Angeles’s creative community is part of its DNA. ‘We’ve been at the vanguard for supporting Black emerging artists for nearly the last 50 years,’ says the museum’s executive director, Cameron Shaw.

For this year’s CAAM Acquisition Fund, selected by Shaw and LA-based collector V. Joy Simmons, two works by LA-based artists were chosen from Frieze Los Angeles to enter CAAM’s permanent collection: a painting by Jessica Taylor Bellamy (presented by Anat Ebgi) and a wall-based sculpture by Zenobia Lee (presented by Sea View).

In this video, Shaw reflects on what Bellamy and Lee’s works – ‘both beautiful and conceptually rigorous’ – will bring to CAAM’s collection and how the two acquired works ‘offer contemplation and stress a time for action’. While Lee ‘takes on history with a fresh, contemporary perspective’, Bellamy’s work is ‘so incredibly California’ in its light and evokes a more ‘apocalyptic’ vision of LA’s recent fires.

‘We have to find time to care for ourselves, to care for our communities,’ says Shaw. ‘That’s something that’s really special about the way these works are operating.’

Watch the video to find out more.