Omar Holguin

06/05/2026

One work in the current exhibition stops you completely.
Home, by Skira Martinez, is a circular mixed-media relief — a raised fist crowning an Afro pick, surrounded by a constellation of found and altered objects. Gears. Keys. Coffee beans. Roses. Stars. Kitchen tools. Candles. Coins. Feathers. Every object a piece of the material world of Black domestic life — gathered, honored, and made sacred.
At the center, a dark mask emerges from the lower field. Eyes closed. A third eye at the brow. Cowrie shells hanging like inherited jewelry. She is the keeper of everything assembled above her.
Martinez's use of found, created, and altered objects speaks to a long tradition of Black women's ingenuity — the act of transforming the discarded into the devotional. On Central Avenue, that has never been just art. That has always been survival. Memory. And love.
Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame is on view now at Arts @ Delicious at the Historic Dunbar Hotel, 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles. Presented by La Mancha Gallery.
Reserve your spot at lamancha.events/dunbar

05/29/2026

05/25/2026

Eighteen years ago, I took La Mancha Gallery off its foundation. Rent on a permanent space in Los Angeles is a tax on ambition, and that tax falls hardest on the artists and audiences I most wanted in the room. So I built something else — a gallery that goes to the people instead of asking them to come to it.
More than 200 exhibitions later, that model has landed at the Historic Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, the building that was the heart of Black Los Angeles when no other hotel in the city would have it. The current show, Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame, puts nine women on those walls.
My new essay on The Cultural Thread is about why this kind of programming matters and how it actually gets built.
Read it here: 🔗 https://lamanchagallery.substack.com/p/on-the-alternative-venue-exhibition
The exhibition is up through the end of May at Arts @ Delicious inside the Dunbar.

05/22/2026

Sunday afternoon on Central Avenue calls for live music. This week it comes from multi-instrumentalist Rob Leopold, who brings "All That Jazz" to the Historic Dunbar Hotel — with special guests alongside him, and one of the most storied rooms in Black Los Angeles to fill.

Two hours, live. The kind of Sunday you don't get back if you miss it.

Presented by Mowatt Entertainment.

Sunday, May 24 · 2:30–4:30 PM
Historic Dunbar Hotel · 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90011
Reservations strongly recommended · $30 food & drink minimum · 323-918-2087

And while you're at the Dunbar, on view "The Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame" — La Mancha Gallery's current exhibition.. The music and the exhibition share a venue, not a program. Come for one, discover the other.
https://lamancha.events/delicious/

05/21/2026

Look closely... and you'll see her.
In Adrianne Devine's canvas, a young Black woman steps forward — mortarboard squared to the sky. Confident. Educated. Paid. Beside her stands a classic figure bearing water, embodying self-reliance, spirituality, and protection. The ancestral and the modern, side by side. The vessel and the diploma.
Behind them, a multiplicity of windows creates a timeless cityscape where yesterday, today, and tomorrow coexist. Mothers. Daughters. Schoolgirls. Matriarchs. Their quiet presence forms the living architecture of the scene. Above, celestial bodies pause to charge infinite horizons. Angels rise in jubilation. At the women's feet, golden blooms open toward the sun.
Every element points, unmistakably, toward light. Toward legacy. Toward the great expectations carried forward.
Adrianne Devine is a featured artist in Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame, presented by Arts @ Delicious at The Historic Dunbar Hotel — 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles.
Curated by Omar Holguin · La Mancha Gallery
https://lamancha.events/dunbar

05/16/2026

Sunday afternoons belong to live jazz on Central Avenue. 🎷
The Mateo Arce Trio returns to Delicious at The Dunbar this Sunday, May 17, from 2:30 to 4:30 PM — a beautiful way to spend the afternoon inside one of South LA's most storied buildings.
And while you're here, take time to walk through Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame, our current exhibition featuring nine extraordinary artists — Adrienne D., Gail O., Buena J., Diana S., Riea O., Nina Syii, Skira Martinez, Christen Austin, and X.Darvi — honoring the women who have carried this avenue's cultural flame forward.
📍 Historic Dunbar Hotel · 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles
🎟 Reserve your spot: lamancha.events/Reservations
Bring family. Bring friends. We'll see you Sunday.

05/16/2026

🎷 Sunday afternoon, the Dunbar swings again.
The Mateo Arce Trio returns this Sunday, May 17 — 2:30 to 4:30 PM at Delicious at The Dunbar.
While you're here, step into Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame — nine artists honoring the women who shaped this avenue's cultural memory.
📍 4229 S. Central Ave
🎟 Reserve: lamancha.events/Reservations

05/16/2026

Sunday afternoons belong to live jazz on Central Avenue. 🎷

The Mateo Arce Trio returns to Delicious at The Dunbar this Sunday, May 17, from 2:30 to 4:30 PM — a beautiful way to spend the afternoon inside one of South LA's most storied buildings.

And while you're here, take time to walk through Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame, our current exhibition featuring nine extraordinary artists — Adrienne D., Gail O., Buena J., Diana S., Riea O., Nina Syii, Skira Martinez, Christen Austin, and X.Darvi — honoring the women who have carried this avenue's cultural flame forward.

📍 Historic Dunbar Hotel · 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles
🎟 Reserve your spot: lamancha.events/Reservations
Bring family. Bring friends. We'll see you Sunday.

05/14/2026

Artist Spotlight: Christen Austin
She paints the world Black women have always known and the canon kept refusing to see.
Christen Austin is a Los Angeles–based acrylic painter working in the surrealist tradition. Her figures are rooted; her worlds bend around them. The result is a counter-archive of Black life rendered in full cosmology — beauty, interiority, possibility. Not reaction. Presence.
She has been commissioned three times by the NAACP Museum. Her work has reached audiences from neighborhood walls in South LA to viral recognition online. And this spring, she is one of nine women on view in Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame — La Mancha Gallery's exhibition at the Historic Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue.
The Dunbar opened in 1928 as the first hotel in America built by and for Black patrons. To stage this exhibition there is not incidental. It is the room these works were waiting for.
Visit. Sit with the work. Stay for the room.
📍 Arts @ Delicious at The Dunbar
4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90011
🔗 https://lamancha.events/ChristenA