For her commissioned project at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, poet and artist Sophia Le Fraga presents The Thousand Days, a triptych installed in the outdoor vitrine poster case. The work overlays photographs of views from Barnsdall Art Park such as the Griffith Observatory and West Los Angeles onto enlarged library call cards that bear the handwritten due dates and names of previous readers. A close-up of a hollyhock flower anchors the center panel, referencing the iconic Hollyhock House and its symbolic connection to Barnsdall Art Park.
As a poet, Le Fraga is drawn to language’s constant flux of meaning, and to the quiet poetry embedded in the bureaucratic systems of record-keeping. By overlaying personal and civic imagery onto the administrative language of library call cards, she playfully blurs the lines between data, memory, and meaning. The project reflects on the role of municipal institutions—in this case, libraries and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery—as places where knowledge, art, and public life intersect.
In the spirit of circulation and public engagement, the project also includes a set of postcards featuring Le Fraga’s artwork, available with a donation to the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation at the Visitor Center. Visitors are invited to write on and mail the cards—activating them as contemporary analogs to library call cards, complete with personal notations and traces of movement through time and space.
In this way, this project echoes the spirit of Aline Barnsdall, the radical patron who envisioned the hilltop site as a hub for art, education, and experimentation. Through her layered composition, Le Fraga draws a line from Barnsdall Art Park’s radical origin to its municipal present, engaging the civic structures that shape how we read, remember, and imagine the city.
This project is organized by Hugo Cervantes, Curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, with support from the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation and the Plum Foundation.
Sophia Le Fraga uses objects, images, and poems to explore how language accumulates, circulates, and leaves traces over time. She has exhibited and performed at the MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York,” Queens, NY; Camden Arts Center, UK; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH; and PERFORMA15. Le Fraga is the author of SOFt VISUAL WALLS (LACA, 2025), SNACKS (b l u s h, 2021), The Anti-Plays (Gauss PDF 2015), literallydead (Spork 2015), I RL, YOU RL (minuteBOOKS 2013, Troll Thread 2014), I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET (KTBAFC 2012), and the artist book Other Titles by Sophia Le Fraga (If a Leaf Falls 2016). Her work has been featured in Best American Experimental Writing, BOMB Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, and Dazed. Le Fraga is the founding editor of No Issue, one-third of Grupo Ñ, and a member of the international artist group Collective Task. Together with Joseph Mosconi and Corina Copp, she co-curates Language Garden in Los Angeles, where she lives.
