Opening Celebration of Excerpts & Fragments

Celebrate the opening of Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments, an exhibition spanning twenty years of Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s zines, artist books, and collages.

Enjoy complimentary drinks and hors d'oeuvres, as we mark the occasion of Sepuya’s first solo institutional show in his hometown of Los Angeles.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments presents twenty years of Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s zines, artist books, and collages.

Informed by queer modernist literature and early internet culture, Sepuya utilizes fragmentation and multiple perspectives to construct intimate photographs that are explicitly subjective, connecting a community of friends and lovers. Over the past decade, Sepuya has gained notoriety for his studio-based portraits where mirrors often reflect the camera, elements of the studio, and his own body alongside his sitters.The resulting images lay bare a desirous exchange between the camera, artist, subject, and viewer.

This exhibition explores three modalities of Sepuya's practice: zines (2005 - 2008), unique artist books (2013 - 2020) and collages (2017 - 2025). Combining accumulated photographs with materials from his personal journals, iPhone, analogue darkroom, and former studios, Sepuya refers to these objects as “working documents.” Together, they serve an essential role for the artist, creating a method to organize his thinking around photography. Encompassing his years in New York and Los Angeles, where he has resided since 2014, these excerpts from Sepuya’s extensive bodies of work offer insight into major throughlines and shifts in his process over time.

The first exhibition to focus exclusively on these works, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments includes an archive of his early zines, his complete, never-before-seen collection of artist books, and a selection of collages. The exhibition also features a site-specific facade installation commissioned for the building that can be experienced at all hours.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium.

Sepuya has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. He is Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

Sepuya's work resides in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

Sepuya is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, DOCUMENT Chicago, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich and Paris.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Excerpts & Fragments is presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and curated by Christopher Mangum-James, LAND deputy director.

Major support is provided by 2413 Hyperion, and Michael Breland and Peter Harper. Generous support provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, and Abby Pucker. Additional support provided by Peter Alexander and Scott Craig, and Samuel Vasquez. In-kind support provided by Special Offer, Inc. Special thanks to Vielmetter Los Angeles.

LAND’s 2025 projects are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation, the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, and The Perenchio Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, Ben Weyerhaeuser, Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, Brenda Potter, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.

Commissions are supported by the LAND Artist Fund with major funding provided by Karyn Kohl. Generous funding is provided by Berry Stein and The Goodman Family Foundation.

LAND is a member of and supported by the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition.

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Image courtesy of Paul Mpagi Sepuya.