By Justin HAGER

Just six months after the long-delayed 2021 LA Art Show made headlines for a safe return to in-person events, the 2022 edition of LA’s largest and longest-running art fair once again took center stage at the Los Angeles Convention Center this past weekend.

With the work of more than 90 different artists on display, the convention center was packed with curators, architects, design professionals and celebrity guests. The opening gala, benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, was hosted by model and actress

and despite the presence of models, influencers and media members it was a local teenage boy who stole the show.

Already the youngest person to ever exhibit at the LA Art Show following his 2021 debut, 14-year-old Tex Hammond of Glendale returned to the 2022 show with an all-new, dynamic collection entitled MAJOR MINOR. The exhibition’s title is a play on words that reflects Hammond’s youthful perspective and keen perception of school, music and adolescence in modern society. Situated at a project booth next to world-renowned artist Takashi Murakami, the unique design of Hammond’s booth turned the traditional classroom on its side to create an exhibition space that captured the rare blend of youthful confidence and creativity with a simultaneous feeling of being just a little off-balance – a combination that Hammond said echoes his feelings of being teenager during the pandemic.

“My inspiration in creating art is almost entirely music-based – I tend to see colors as I listen to music and that translates directly to whatever I’m painting – so the musical definitions of major and minor plays into the title,” Hammond explained. “My major in school is art, and there are several pieces at this year’s show that include actual snippets of my homework from school. And, obviously, as a 14-year-old, I’m still a minor – which has its virtues and its frustrations – and that also is reflected in my work. So it all ties together.”

As Hammond enjoyed the art show with his best friend, Harrison, Hammond’s parents, Grey DeLisle and Murry Hammond, were filled with pride for their son’s accomplishments. As a Grammy Award-winning voice actress and music icon, respectively, both parents are accomplished artists in their own right … and they’re both accustomed to being in the spotlight. But when discussing their son, Grey and Murry beamed with pride while becoming simultaneously more serious and more animated.

“I’m so proud, I brag about him all the time and he gets so embarrassed,” said DeLisle, who is best known for voicing Daphne in the modern “Scooby-Doo” franchise. “I’m bringing out stickers with his Instagram and promoting him and his art and he’s like ‘Mom, I’m so embarrassed I want to die right now.’”

In addition to the LA Art Show, Hammond has also held several other exhibitions in Los Angeles, making philanthropy a central part of each of them. He donates a portion of all proceeds raised from his art and online custom clothing designs (www.texhammond.com) to various children’s charities, including charities that help refugee children and arts education programs for children in underserved communities.

“It really helps that Tex is into the art, but isn’t into the trappings around the art,” said his father, a musician and songwriter for the Texas alt-country legends the Old 97’s. “He’s not really interested in the celebrity or fame aspect; he gets impatient with that kind of stuff … There is real purity there.”

While Hammond received much of the media attention, just one booth away another Glendale artist was making a statement of his own by infusing elements of the region’s greatest assets, including nature, engineering and architecture, into his art.

The child of an engineer mother and architect father who immigrated to the United States when he was very young, Karo Martirosyan’s (https://www.karostudios.com/) sculptures are meticulously organized and precise in their design and engineering yet somehow capture the disorder and lack of uniformity in the natural world. He has studied in Florence, traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa and Asia, and has even shared his passion for art with the Pope. He combines seemingly conflicting materials of glass and metal to create cubist wall sculptures that simultaneously feel strong and rigid but also light and airy.

“Art has the capacity to break the rigidity of daily life,” he explained while standing in front of a sculpture of uniform square tiles inspired by the colors and motions of ocean waves.

And for the attendees of the 2022 LA Art Show who were treated to Glendale’s finest, daily life surely felt a little less rigid and very much more inspired.