Social Security
Lina Viste Grønli

April 23 - 26, 2025 from 11AM - 5PM

MacArthur Park Los Angeles
Installation Map Link

and

Curatorial Talk with Lina Viste Grønli & Ezequiel Olvera at The Art Division Library

April 26, 2025 at 6PM

Art Division Library
2418 W 6th St, Los Angeles, CA 90057

Lina Viste Grønli discovered a 1950s commemorative presidential spoon in a Vermont antique store, produced by Wm Rogers Mfg. Co. The spoon commemorated Franklin D. Roosevelt and his historic New Deal. On the bowl of the spoon was an embossed image of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt sitting in their living room, with the words Social Security inscribed below.

Lina’s sculptural practice draws from mundane objects, expanding them through experimentation, wordplay, spatial manipulation, and conceptual gestures. This piece of silverware inspired her to focus on spoons as a medium for sculpture, opening social security as a conceptual framework for LA-based curator Ezequiel Olvera to explore in a public park through his project Court Space.

Through their collaboration, Grønli and Olvera developed Social Security as a conceptual lens. By integrating Court Space’s focus on public art, the project interrogates how public spaces encode socio-political hierarchies: economics, governance, immigration, and inequality. At its core, it asks: Do I feel secure—socially, mentally, physically, spiritually—to exercise my liberty as an American citizen? Amid contemporary crises of neo-fascism, corporate privatization of government, and economic warfare, the state’s obligation to provide security dissolves into capitalist abstraction.

The duo developed a series of spoon sculptures for public interventions, continuing the trajectory of their earlier Court Space exhibition Persistence of Time. For their current project, Grønli and Olvera will install sculptures at MacArthur Park in Westlake. Over three days, the performative installation process will question how people experience security, or its lack, in relation to economics, government infrastructure, and architecture.

The project will expand beyond the park to Art Division, a nonprofit arts education space in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, where archival photographs of the commemorative spoons—Grønli’s source material—will be displayed. On Saturday, April 26, Grønli and Olvera will host a curatorial talk at Art Division’s library, reflecting on the work’s exploration of security and the latent histories carried by mundane objects.

Social Security by Lina Viste Grønli is supported by the Office of Contemporary Art Norway