Friday’s Headlines

Pioneering Black architect Paul R. Williams is having a moment. Three museums – the USC Fisher Museum of Art, LACMA, and the Getty Research Institute – are collaborating to spotlight his work over the next eleven months. A lengthy profile in the New York Times takes a look at how the curators collaborated on the unique effort while providing an overview of his career, his significance to Los Angeles, and a look at some of the barriers he broke – which included designing buildings he, as a Black man, could not walk through the front door of in neighborhoods he was not allowed to own property in.

From the NYT:

The Getty exhibition showcases Williams’s contributions to historically Black neighborhoods like West Adams, where he built for the First A.M.E. Church (the oldest African American congregation in Los Angeles) and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company.

The U.S.C. show focuses on the architect’s affordable housing projects and how he “imagined innovative and dignified possibilities for collective living,” said Milton S.F. Curry, one of the three curators who also invited contemporary artists and architects to respond to Williams’s work.

The LACMA survey, the biggest and broadest, features some of his palatial Hollywood estates alongside civic and religious buildings. As that show’s curator, Staci Steinberger, put it, “There are so many aspects of life that his work touched. You could be born in a Paul Williams hospital, educated at a Paul Williams school, married at a Paul Williams church and be buried at a Paul Williams funeral home.”

The Fisher’s exhibit, Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered, opened on August 18 and is on view through July 2027.

Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living opens Nov 15, 2026 and runs through May 31, 2027 in the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA.

Paul R. Williams: Architecture Across the Color Line will be on view at the Getty from Dec 15, 2026 through Mar 14, 2027.

In other news:

• After L.A. Public Press’ reporting that LAPD were using anti-camping laws as an excuse to ticket vendors in MacArthur Park, Mayor Bass has ordered them to stop doing so (Public Press, LAT)
• LA fire survivors have now waited the longest for federal disaster recovery funds (LAist); UCLA Study Finds Gaps in Protections for Eaton Fire Recovery Workers (Pasadena Now)
• The Board of Transportation Commissioners has voted to rescind their 2024 decision to deny the use of a parking lot to build the now long-delayed Venice Dell affordable housing project (L.A. Squawk Box)
• Flies are still swarming homes, two months after the Lineage fire. How to get free fly traps. (Boyle Heights Beat)
• Malibu’s speed camera program to begin operating along Pacific Coast Highway soon (CBS)
• 1 dead after violent 2-car crash in Koreatown; driver of Mercedes Maybach SUV detained, police say (ABC7)
• Construction of the wildlife crossing continues apace, with closing of Agoura Road up next (KTLA)
• Arcadia residents push back on Santa Anita Park’s plan to remove 34 oak trees for 2028 Olympics equestrian event (ABC7)
• How the Trump admin’s agenda is still reshaping cities and communities
  • L.A. TACO’s playbook against burnout (L.A. TACO)
  • How ICE has upended rural towns (CALÓ News)
  • The Court’s categorization of Black cultural connections as race, not culture and the dismantling of District 6 in Louisiana (The Lens)
  • ‘The streets are empty’: How Miami’s Little Haiti reacted to losing TPS (USA Today)
  • ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted (NYT)

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