EIP: Can you introduce yourself?
CARLOS: My name is Carlos Agredano. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I consider myself to be a research-based conceptual artist. I’m primarily interested in the history of freeway development in 20th-century Los Angeles, particularly through the deployment of racially restrictive covenants and redlining, and analyzing the history of those discriminatory policies and how they affect Black and brown communities in the present day, namely through air pollution. The freeways have destroyed and displaced people for decades, destroyed communities, and continue to pollute the people who live around them. That’s what my art is mostly about: looking at history and how it affects the present day.
EIP: Could you tell us more about growing up in LA and its effect on making you want to create the work that you made?
CARLOS: I grew up in a town called Lynwood, which is in southeast Los Angeles. It’s between South Gate and Compton. I grew up next to the 105 and 710 freeways. The 710 freeway is known as the “diesel death corridor” because of its connection to the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, where about 80% of goods come in from overseas to the entire United States. It’s one of the busiest ports in the nation so there’s always a lot of truck pollution coming in through the 710. The 105 is one of the newer freeways in Los Angeles. It was built in the 90s—but only because it was delayed for 25 years due to a lawsuit. It was originally designed to take people directly to LAX but it never quite made it there.
Every day as a kid, I remember having to sweep my room because there was always a thin layer of soot and dust that would settle overnight or throughout the day while I was in school. I grew up with asthma, allergies, and sensitivities to being outside, directly influenced by constant air pollution. I’ve always been fascinated with cars and what they’ve allowed people to do in the city. You spend your whole life in a car if you grow up here. But it wasn’t until I moved back to Los Angeles in 2020 that I started thinking about how I wanted to materialize the air pollution that shaped my life. I wanted to find ways to capture the smog and make it visible, rather than this nebulous, hard-to-grasp thing you only see in the sky.
EIP: One thing that really interests me about your work is your ability to transmute something as abstract and ephemeral as pollution and turn it into something tangible. I feel like you have a deep interest in broader destruction. What do you think about the tangibility of it through your work? And what have you learned through exploring this?
CARLOS: Well, I like the two words you used—ephemeral and abstract—to describe the material of smog—but it’s not ephemeral or abstract because it has real consequences. Its impacts happen on human bodies, through the slow growth of disease, decreased mental health, and overall contribution to a poor quality of life. There are real, tangible, material effects. It exists in people. To call it abstract or ephemeral can be misleading. It’s in the air, but it’s so small you might not think about it unless you’re forced to.
In my work, I want people to think about its materiality. I stretched canvases in my backyard for a year to show this is a year’s worth of smog. You can really see it on the canvas. It’s filthy. I’m able to capture it in a definitive way. But the challenge is: what do I do with all the smog I’ve breathed in my whole life? How do I demonstrate that? That’s the harder part, getting people to think about the larger, life-scale implications. The first step is making people understand that this is real material. It doesn’t just float away. It’s consumed, ingested, seeping into livelihoods, homes, the ground, the water, everything.
EIP: On that note, can you tell us a bit about your project “FUME” [2025] and its interest in environmental violence, and how you use measurement as material? Do you see your work as more of an art piece or scientific evidence?
CARLOS: Yeah, that’s a good question because it was my first entry point into being less abstract with the material—making pollution quantifiable. I wanted to give specific numbers showing how much pollution was in the air in a certain area. With FUME [2025], I drove a sculpture hooked to the back of my 1992 Toyota Pickup Truck to 12 different sites across Los Angeles, all next to major freeways. At each site, I invited a local LA artist to interpret their upbringing near a freeway. I started thinking a lot about evidence. What constitutes evidence? Can visual art be evidence? Or does it have to be numbers? At first, I just wanted numbers—the facts. But I think the emotional, artistic, creative production of data is also important. That could be a performance, a sculpture, a cyanotype, or a tour; they all create a public history of these sites.
I’d never call myself a scientist. But I look to science, to its conventions, and to the idea of evidence as material. This project isn’t a scientific project. But it adopts some conventions to try to make data more quantifiable. I’d never call myself a scientist. But I look to science, to its conventions, and to the idea of evidence as material. This project isn’t a scientific project. But it adopts some conventions to try to make data more quantifiable. The sculpture is designed to look like a Space Age or “Googie” styled object. It’s a direct reference to the utopian ideals of the future that emerged during the mid-century in the U.S., one that imagined automobiles as the primary vessel of transportation. Inside the all aluminum sculpture are three PurpleAir monitors, which gather information about the quality of the air where they are installed. One monitor was testing for “ambient” air quality, which is the air as we actually encounter it, the second was connected directly to my exhaust pipe as a way to measure my own emissions and address the irony of driving a gas-powered vehicle, and the third was installed inside of a modified Corsi-Rosenthal box, which is basically a cube made of air filters. The PurpleAir monitors I used can only go so far. They’re small, not industrial-grade. But I like the “citizen scientist” idea. Producing your own data, not waiting for the government to give it to you. The exciting part of the project was that 12 LA artists and I had these questions: How can we make work about this problem? How can it be used as valid data?
EIP: When we were asked to do this curatorial project, you were one of the first people we thought of. I really feel your work lies at the intersection of community activation and environmental critique. Can you speak on those recurring elements throughout your work?
CARLOS: Yeah. I almost approach it from this idea of environmental and institutional critique, thinking about the city of Los Angeles as an institution that has failed many communities through discriminatory urban planning and designing the city to benefit a select few, usually white, affluent, WASP-y communities on the West Side. I’m interested in critiquing infrastructure as an institution. That leads to a community-oriented spirit in my work. For example, the smog stones I’ll show in the forest are made by rolling clay along streets across the city to collect dust and debris. There’s a performative quality. People stop me and ask what I’m doing, prompting conversations. In that way, there are two artworks: the performance of making it and the object that results.
I’ve also partnered on workshops with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, an East LA organization addressing issues like polluted soil and air pollution in Mexican American and Black communities. My work is site-specific, so it’s about specific communities: Lynwood, Chinatown, Boyle Heights. I make sure the work always notes exactly where it was made and what it’s about.
EIP: You spoke earlier about how your piece “Smog Stones” [2025] consisted of both performance and the stones themselves. What is the movement between performance art and the sculptural work? And who are some of your favorite performance artists? I saw this photo while I was going through your Instagram of you pushing the ice cube—or was it a box?
CARLOS: Yeah, it’s an ice block.
EIP: The ice block. And it was paying homage to this—what’s the artist’s name?
CARLOS: Yes, that was my Halloween costume. I love it. It was a good one. Yeah, thank you.
EIP: But I imagine you’re inspired by his work.
CARLOS: For sure. That work in particular is about the invisible economy in Mexico City, in particular. Pushing the ice block is such an effort. The piece is [Francis Alÿs’s] “When Something Leads to Nothing” [1997]. I think of it as all this labor exerted to have the ice block melt away. At the end of the performance, there’s really nothing left, just the energy put into pushing it around. I like his engagement with the street. He’s a Belgian artist, not a native Mexican, so it becomes a little more complicated. But I like the idea of thinking of art as labor. This can be about real labor, too. In Mexico, wage discrepancies mean some people are working basically for free.
David Hammons, of course, is another big influence. A lot of his performative works—like the “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” [1983], where he arranged snowballs on the street—reminded me of Francis Alÿs’s work because you’re buying something that will cease to exist. I like David Hammons because before moving to New York, he was practicing in LA. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was in a group called Studio Z with Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, and a few others. They were Black artists from South Central LA, and they did “Ceremony for Freeway Fets” [1978], an installation by Senga Nengudi in the ‘70s in collaboration with Caltrans.
Caltrans decides where freeways go, and they did this ceremony under the freeway, under the 10, I think. Hammons, Nengudi, and the others were performing under the freeway, with Nengudi’s sculptures wrapped around the columns. I love that engagement with the site: a freeway that’s ugly and meant to separate people, used as a place to convene and create a communal performance. Asco is another influence: an art collective from the ‘70s in
East LA. Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, Willie Herrón III, and Gronk. They performed in the streets and documented everything, making “No Movies”: movie stills of films that didn’t exist. Again, it’s about engaging with the street as a site for critique and artmaking. I like to think of the street as my studio because I don’t have a studio. I make things in my mom’s backyard—open air—and on the street, then figure it out.
EIP: Where did you go to school, and how do you think that has affected your practice?
CARLOS: I went to Harvard for my undergraduate degree. I studied history and literature. My thesis was on Veteranas and Rucas, an Instagram archive documenting Latina youth subcultures from 1920 to the 1990s. A lot of the archive focuses on protest through clothing and partying. There are zoot suits, worn by Chicanos and Chicanas during WWII, influenced by Black jazz musicians. They wore them during rationing as a protest against the war and discrimination against Mexican Americans in LA. Veteranas and Rucas also documents the ditch party scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Teens leaving high school to party in warehouses or backyards. I like that spirit of community rebellion through subculture.
While at Harvard, I took art history classes and worked at the Radcliffe Institute with two artists. One was EJ Hill, mostly a performance artist. He has a show up now at 52 Walker. He’s the reason I’m an artist. I was his assistant my junior year, spending every day in the studio working on projects about roller coasters and amusement parks, their history as discriminatory sites, safe havens for white families escaping diversifying cities. EJ made me think about infrastructure as something to critique. From the first day, he encouraged me to own being an artist.
My senior year, I worked for Gala Porras-Kim, a conceptual artist focused on repatriating stolen artifacts to their rightful owners. She critiques museums as sites of looting and colonialism. Her research-based approach influenced how I think about material and how I use writing to critique discriminatory urban histories. She encouraged me to go to graduate school, so I went to UCLA for my MFA, working with artists like Rodney McMillian, Andrea Fraser, Candice Lin, and Cameron Rowland. They shaped my mission to create work that investigates discriminatory urban planning and histories. Being back in LA for my MFA was important. I could work directly at the sites that interested me, like freeways and my childhood home.
EIP: I think a lot about this larger return you had: leaving LA, getting an education, and coming back. And how you talked about your childhood, how every day you had to sweep ash and smog. Do you think doing this repetitive motion is when you decided to become an artist? It seems like a seed that grew into what you’re doing now.
CARLOS: I guess the ingredients were always there. But truthfully, my whole adolescence—before college and even two years into college—I thought I was going to be a doctor. I had artistic tendencies, but growing up in a low-income Mexican neighborhood, the idea of being an artist wasn’t even on my radar. I didn’t know it was something you could do.
It took me a long time to accept it. But looking back, even my science fair projects were artistic in their presentation. Science and art have similar methods. You have a question, a hypothesis. I was always more interested in the visual or social components of being a doctor. So maybe sweeping soot or crafting science fair projects were the ingredients for being an artist, I just didn’t realize it. I’m grateful for EJ, Rafa Esparza, Gala, and my professors for shaping me into one.
EIP: In the work you’re placing— “Smog Stones” [2025]—there’s a bit of a comedic element in putting these man-made stones of pollution, microplastics, and debris into a forest. How do you think this context affects the work and your understanding of it? CARLOS: It’s a great question. I’ve never been to this forest, so I’m imagining. The stones have a surface layer made of debris and pollution from LA. They’re a document, kind of unassuming, maybe silly. “Okay, this is just a rock.” I think about geological time, what a rock, tree, or soil sample can tell us about an environment at a point in time. When I first made them, about five years ago, the Anthropocene was a hot topic; ; a proposed new epoch in Earth’s geological time scale, characterized by the significant and lasting impact of human activities on the planet’s geology, ecosystems, and climate. I wondered what a rock from the Anthropocene would look like, so I made these smog stones. Putting them in a lush, preserved forest is a reminder of the opposite. If there isn’t a forest, there could be an industrial wasteland. It’s like returning to a nurturing home, though I don’t know how I’ll feel until I see it.
EIP: How do you feel about them being transformed by a clean environment? And also, the history of this area. It was one of the first places in the U.S. where freed slaves could buy property, a stop on the Underground Railroad. And, a place Toni Morrison retired to. How do you see them in that environmental and sociopolitical context?
CARLOS: I think of my work as about dispossession—of people and of land. Much Black-owned land was destroyed to make way for freeways. America constantly finds ways to dispossess and disempower Black people, and in LA, Mexican people as well. The rocks are a self-portrait in a way; a proxy for people and communities discriminated against through infrastructure. So what does it mean for a polluted object to enter a lush space? Maybe not liberation, but something freeing. It’s also about imagining a future where someone can be free, without pollution, without losing their home. Maybe it’s a call to destroy freeways or reimagine cities as green spaces for everyone, not just a privileged few. In a gallery, the rocks or canvases are dirty objects in clean spaces—antagonistic, claiming space. “I’m here, I’m polluted, but who did this? It wasn’t me.”
