Art spaces in the city where almost 40% of the population speak Spanish are moving toward bilingual exhibitions and workshops – and feeling the benefit
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to more than 4 million Spanish speakers, almost 40% of the population, and the US is on track to be the largest Spanish speaking country in the world by 2050. Despite these statistics, bilingualism has historically been a contentious issue, especially in California, where English-only education in public schools was the law for almost 20 years. That all changed last November when proposition 58 brought back bilingual and multilingual education. That shift is being felt in the LA art world, where both new museums and established institutions are making strides to better reflect the city’s demographics.
The Main Museum, a non-profit museum located in downtown LA, has that bilingual approach front and center. “When we opened a year ago as Beta Main, it gave us the chance to know our audience, and we observed we were meeting a lot of Spanish speakers,” says the museum’s director, Allison Agsten. “One of the benefits of starting small and getting bigger is we can begin something like a bilingual initiative and scale up.”
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