While Hollywood Forever is a 54 acre gallery of stone and bronze chronicling the life and times of Los Angeles, it also hosts thought provoking exhibitions and installations. If you are interested in exhibiting at Hollywood Forever please email us here.
Exhibitions
ONGOING
Columbarium Continuum: by Rick Castro
This exhibition, located in the historic columbarium at Hollywood Forever, is a selection of renowned photographer Rick Castro’s most captivating images from 1986 through 2024.
Free and open to the public, the exhibition reflects themes of love melancholy meditation and remembrance.
Featuring Rick’s photographs of Egyptian death masks, portraits of different figures related to Hollywood Forever including trans residents The Goddess Bunny AKA Sandi Crisp and Holly Woodlawn, Gore Vidal (not a resident), images from Hollywood Cemetery circa 1990, as well as intimate photographic portraits of Rick’s loved ones over time. Also included is Rick’s photograph of Cimetière du Père-Lachaise tomb of Oscar Wilde now housed in the niche that will become his shrine at Hollywood Forever.
Although still living, Castro’s death mask is now installed in his niche that will be his resting spot~ “forever”.
Check QR codes for prices and info. Rick will occasionally host walk-throughs. Please email here for more information.
The Epitaph Project: by Joyce Burstein
Joyce Burstein began the epitaph project in 1995. The public artwork exists as a tombstone carved from slate like a chalkboard and is accompanied by a bronze box containing chalk. Passersby are invited to write an epitaph on the stone. Burstein collects these sometimes profound or irreverent compositions with a photograph. The project has expanded to include two multi-media presentations, a website, an installation, a book of more than 300 selections, featuring an essay by Peter Lamborn Wilson. This ongoing project enlists the help of all spectators in a process of self-discovery about death and life, as one does not exist without the other.
“There’s something clarifying about composing or even thinking about one’s own epitaph. There can be a sense of self-discovery as well as both humor and high seriousness. All spectators are also performers and the project, while attempting to engage taboos on death, is ultimately about life. Finally, it is an open possibility lying in wait for whomever might pass.”
— Joyce Burstein, artist
The artwork is located HERE
PAST
Sense of Place: by Jose Dávila
Sense of Place by Jose Dávila is a multi-site, large-scale, public sculpture exhibition migrating through and integrating into the diverse urban landscape of Los Angeles to draw a kind of portrait of the city’s many experiences, geographies and histories. Sense of Place was derived from Davila’s Joint Effort sculpture series which expands the concepts of balance and equilibrium using basic construction materials such as concrete blocks and stones.
Presented by LAND
Skull of a Thousand Faces: by Betsabeé Romero
This site-specific public art installation in The Masonic Lodge at HF was inspired by pre-Columbian iconography, colonial imagery, and popular culture. It explored the materials, processes, and creation of objects in our culture today that we so often overlook.
Betsabeé Romero’s works are in the permanent collections of both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles.
Presented by After and Again – Curated by Sylvia Chivaratanond – Produced by Jessica Trent
Shadow Pool – A natural history of the San San International: by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe
This spectacular performance art piece was presented in the historic Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever. The work employs a mix of theatrical genres ranging from the slide lecture, the fashion show, the sculptural display, and the live musical act as a means to illustrate the fictional parallel world of the San San International, a “hallucinatory mega-convention of staggering proportions”.
Commissioned by Jeffry Deitch and presented by MOCA
Visual Interpretations
Six different visual artists presented installations throughout the cemetery created in response to one of the six songs on Explosions In The Sky’s album Take Care, Take Care, Take Care prior to its release.
The tracks from Take Care, Take Care, Take Care and the artist that interpreted each are as follows:
“Last Known Surroundings” Matthew Lessner
“Human Qualities” James Fields
“Trembling Hands” Matt Amato
“Be Comfortable, Creature” Jesse Fleming
“Postcard from 1952” Chris Lipomi
“Let Me Back In” Alexis Disselkoen
