Saturday, November 22, 2025 at 2:30 PM
The Broad, Los Angeles
In conjunction with the special exhibition, [***Robert Therrien: This is a Story***](https://www.thebroad.org/art/special-exhibitions/robert-therrien-story), The Broad is organizing two discussions to contextualize today’s L.A. sculptors as part of a storied history. The starting points for these discussions are two connected yet contrasting topics: *Distinct Encounters through Object Making* and *World Building*. **Saturday, November 22, 2025: ***World Building * **Friday, February 27, 2026:** *Distinct Encounters through Object Making * Los Angeles has been the home of important, ambitious sculptors for decades. The city has long been a place where art mixes freely with architecture, aerospace, and other cutting-edge industries, Hollywood, communities, countercultures, and undergrounds. L.A. sculptors have intersected with global movements including Minimalism, Light and Space, Land Art, and Assemblage, and have incubated hybrid, experimental practices that have run against the grain of global trends. Building on a legacy that includes artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Noah Purifoy, and Helen Pashgian, *World Building* as a practice has a vibrant and visible presence in contemporary Los Angeles sculpture. The Broad’s *World Building* program features three Los Angeles-based artists known for their ambitious sculptural environments—**Samara Golden**, **Piero Golia**, and **Max Hooper Schneider**. Often, artists who work in the spirit of *World Building* pursue any medium and any method to give their vision life, crossing many disciplines, and, at times, producing work that is difficult to classify as sculpture at all. *Distinct Encounters through Object Making* will take place during Frieze Weekend in February and will consider sculpture that invites focused, isolated encounters with viewers, while *World Building* looks at sculpture as an immersive, often communal experience. Both discussions align current sculptural practice in L.A. within its history, its capacity for production and fabrication, and the city’s inspiration as a muse. **ARTISTS** **Samara Golden**’s practice imagines architectural spaces—rendered seemingly infinite through the use of mirrors—sometimes populated with the remnants of (traumatic) human interactions. Often described as “impossible spaces,” her structures oscillate between intricate and intimate domestic environments set within soaring, anonymous office buildings. **Piero Golia** has situated sculpture within an array of social situations, from founding The Mountain School, to creating an environment to promote intellectual discussion in his Chalet Project, to interventions to public spaces. Golia often seeks to alter reality itself, using art to shift the expected conditions of cities, galleries, and events. **Max Hooper Schneider**’s work imagines a world in which nature recuperates and re-processes the ruins that humans left behind. He is known for building futuristic yet plausible terrariums full of perpetually evolving biological matter, set on new hybrid paths of growth influenced by overwhelming pollution, overpopulation, and other possible catastrophes. The conversation will be moderated by **Ed Schad**, Curator of [***Robert Therrien: This is a Story***](https://www.thebroad.org/art/special-exhibitions/robert-therrien-story). A screening of *Robert Therrien’s Red Room* by Russell Brown will precede the conversation. The documentary film is just over 12 minutes long and follows the installation of Therrien’s *No Title (Red Room)* (2000-2007) at Gagosian in 2008. Image credits from left to right: Samara Golden by Maya Fuhr; Piero Golia by Luise Aloisi; Max Hooper Schneider, photo courtesy of the artist