![]() ![]() And to be gone, oh God, it’s unbelievable.”īarcelona, who immigrated to Los Angeles from the Philippines in 1969, says weathering the pandemic has been made easier because his found family - the museum community - stepped up. Because that is my first museum membership. ![]() “The old memories I have with that building. “Not so inspiring,” he says of the vacant space left by recent demolition. Then Barcelona looked across the street, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - or where much of it used to be. “She’s a feminist, it was inspiring,” he says. The streetscape also conjures some of his favorite cultural figures.īarcelona was especially moved by an exhibition of Senga Nengudi’s large installations at Sprüth Magers gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. A rundown building, to his eye, is shot through with beautifully abstract cracks in the concrete cacophonous traffic noise is a symphony. Wandering the sidewalks of Koreatown is a meditative practice for Barcelona, one in which he notices more detail than when riding the bus. And everywhere, I see art.”īarcelona looks for art in the quotidian. “It’s because I walk every day an average of 17,000 steps, about six miles, around the neighborhood. “So far I think I am beating this virus,” Barcelona says. The art was his inspiration and salve.īarcelona was resilient in the early days of the pandemic, self-quarantining while sustaining himself on art books, homemade sandwiches and walks to his daughter’s Koreatown apartment. Museum employees were like family to him, and the galleries provided a veritable living room to which to escape. The outings were familial pilgrimages of sorts for Barcelona, who shares a small Koreatown apartment with two roommates. Since retiring as an architect at 73, Barcelona ritualistically visited a different art museum, gallery or public art installation, on a set schedule, every day of the week, never taking a sick day in eight years, he says. When the pandemic first hit and nearly every cultural institution in California closed, we were concerned about 81-year-old Ben Barcelona, L.A.’s most devoted museum fan. Part of a year-end series revisiting the subjects of some of our most popular arts articles of the year.
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