The mission of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture is to advance arts, culture, and creativity throughout LA County. We fulfill our mission by providing services and support in areas including grants and technical assistance for nonprofit organizations; professional development opportunities; commissioning civic artworks and managing the County’s civic art collection; implementing countywide arts education initiatives; research and evaluation; career pathways in the creative economy; free community programs; and cross sector creative strategies that address civic issues. This work is framed by the County’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative and a longstanding commitment to fostering access to the arts.
Through the County’s Civic Art policy, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture was able to guide the creation of new civic artworks explicitly designed for the waiting rooms, SIT room and 3rd Floor Reentry Center of the new Probation field office. Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan created twenty-six murals and four aluminum pieces throughout the building, using motifs with bold and vibrant designs. The murals illustrate a positive direction and future for clients and include references to education, literacy, employment and occupations, community, healthcare, and local architecture and vegetation. He incorporated references to music, art, and performance relating to the programmatic functions of the Reentry Center. These characters, text, and symbols speak to countless opportunities, resources, help, advocacy and support available to clients, visitors and the community at large.
About the Artist:
Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines social spaces that examine the relationship between architecture, community, and the environment. He has exhibited at venues such as Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. In addition to an extensive exhibition history, Jeyifous has spent over a decade creating large-scale installations for a variety of public spaces and was recently commissioned, along with fellow artist Amanda Williams, to create a monument dedicated to Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as part of the City of New York's "She Built NYC" initiative. Olalekan has been a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and has completed artist residencies with the Drawing Center's Open Sessions program and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. He has won numerous awards for his artistic practice and is the recipient of a 2021 Fellowship by the United States Artists.
To learn more, visit: https://jeyifo.us/
