Excerpts & Fragments

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: Excerpts & Fragments is open to the public free of cost Thursday—Saturday from 11AM—5PM. No tickets are needed.

If you would like to visit the exhibition outside of those days and times, please feel free to contact us to arrange an appointment. We are happy to accommodate as best we can. Email your preferred date and time to rsvp@nomadicdivision.org.

The exhibition is located at 2413 Hyperion Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027. Free and metered street parking is available along Hyperion Avenue.

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.

The exhibition is presented at 2413 Hyperion Avenue on the border of the neighborhoods of Los Feliz and Silver Lake. The area has historically been a home for queer people in Los Angeles and is often credited as the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement with the founding of the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay in 1950 at his house on nearby Cove Avenue.

From the mid-twentieth century to today, the street of Hyperion Avenue, bordered by Sunset Boulevard to the South and Rowena Avenue to the North, has been a nexus for queer sociability and desire. The 1.3 mile stretch of street has been the site of private clubs and bathhouses, such as Basic Plumbing (1294 Hyperion Avenue), Exxxile and King of Hearts (1800 Hyperion Avenue), Hyperion Baths and Health Works (2114 Hyperion Avenue), and Men’s Action Center (2801 Hyperion Avenue), as well as other communal spaces: Pure Trash (1903 Hyperion Avenue), Casita Del Campo (1920 Hyperion Avenue), Cuffs, Headquarters, Hy Spot, Hyperion Lumber Co., Shingle Shack, and Wrangler’s (all located at various times at 1941 Hyperion Avenue), Frog Pond (2106 Hyperion Avenue), Body Builders (2516 Hyperion Avenue), The Other Side and Flying Leap Cafe (2538 Hyperion Avenue), Woody’s Hyperion Lodge and MJs (2801 Hyperion Avenue), and Basgo’s Disco, Bushwacker, El Barcito, Tabasco’s, and The Black Cat Tavern (3909 Sunset Boulevard).

Over time, many businesses on Hyperion Avenue geared largely towards queer people have closed, facing everything from police raids to a fire bomb, changing demographics in the neighborhood, the shift towards finding online connections, and the introduction of no cruising signs, the last remnants of which were only removed in the area in 2024.

Framed by Hyperion Avenue and the constellation of spaces past and present that have historically brought queer people together, the exhibition presents Sepuya's own extensive map of personal relationships captured in photographs. While storefronts have changed over time, the desire for communion and intimacy remains. Situating Sepuya’s exhibition on Hyperion Avenue not only presents a collective contemporary portrait of a queer community by one of the leading artists working in photography, but also welcomes us to participate in the street’s long-standing invitation as a physical place for connection.

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

Lead support is provided by 2413 Hyperion. Major support is provided by Michael Breland and Peter Harper, and Sherry and Joel McKuin. Generous support provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, and Abby Pucker. Additional support provided by Peter Alexander and Scott Craig, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, and Samuel Vasquez. In-kind support provided by Special Offer, Inc. Special thanks to Collina Strada and 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.

LAND is a member-supported organization. Keep LAND programs free for all by becoming a member today.

Header image: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled (2020-120), 2020. Color Laserprint Collage on Strathmore Bristol 100lb vellum paper, 19 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.