Patrisse Cullors, Polaroid images documenting Bridging Histories: Black-Jewish Dialogues for Peace and Unity, 2024–2025, community gatherings at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Opens Thursday, October 22, 2026
Artist and activist Patrisse Cullors debuts three new works inspired by a series of Black and Jewish dialogues at the Skirball, asking what becomes possible when we move toward one another rather than away, and when the histories we carry are held not in isolation, but in company.
General Admission tickets on sale starting Thursday, September 3.
$20 General
$15 Seniors, Full-Time Students with ID, and Children 2–17
FREE to Members and Children under 2
FREE to all on Thursdays
General Admission tickets provide visitors access to all exhibitions on view at the Skirball, as well as our new Bloom Garden and other family-friendly activities. Visitors who would like to board Noah’s Ark, which requires timed entry, should purchase a separate Noah's Ark ticket (which also includes general admission access).
"This program began as a question I kept returning to: what do our communities dream toward when we are safe enough to dream? Over the past year, I held space for Black and Jewish communities to gather, to listen, and to wonder together. The works in this room emerged from those conversations. What you see and hear is an offering—an invitation to be tender, to be curious, to imagine the kind of connection we have not yet been allowed." — Patrisse Cullors
Wishes Made Material gives form to conversations held through Bridging Histories: Black–Jewish Dialogues for Peace and Unity, a yearlong program throughout 2025 bringing together leaders within the Black and Jewish diasporas across Los Angeles. Through breaking bread, participants made space for healing, confrontation, and a curiosity that could emerge only when they felt safe enough to wonder. The exhibition begins where the gatherings concluded.
Drawing on photography and recorded conversations, Cullors carries participants’ memories into the gallery. On opposing walls, two textile works incorporate screen-printed photographs that emerge from and recede into their surfaces. Overhead, a single-channel video, co-developed and co-created by Cullors and TURL, is projected across multiple screens. Guided by a musical score and dialogue between the artist and participants, the soundscape was co-produced by Tairiq and Garfield Bright. Together, the textile works, video, and soundscape coalesce into an intimate multimedia installation.
Here, listening becomes part of healing, and repair is understood not as resolution but as the sustained practice of staying present as these wishes are made material.
This exhibition is organized by the Skirball Cultural Center and curated by Jideofor Chikeruba, Community Connections Research Fellow.
Patrisse Cullors (b. 1983) is a Los Angeles–based artist, educator, author, and abolitionist whose practice brings together visual art, performance, ritual, organizing, and collective care. Her work has been presented at institutions including The Broad, the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Frieze Los Angeles, and the Hammer Museum. Cullors is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and the Crenshaw Dairy Mart and has organized with Dignity and Power Now, JusticeLA, and Reform LA Jails. She founded the Center for Art and Abolition, a nonprofit supporting artist working toward social transformation, and established the Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program at Prescott College, where she served as founding director. Her current practice centers on “Abolitionist Aesthetics,” a framework she has helped advance and popularize to consider how artists and cultural workers can imagine, rehearse, and build more liberatory futures.
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