Todd Gray: Church and State at The Brick in Los Angeles brings together three large-scale photographic assemblages by an artist whose work has grown increasingly ambitious in scale, form and content over the past decade. On view from October 18, 2026, through January 16, 2027, the exhibition includes two new mural-scale pieces and a significant collection of biographical material that maps Gray’s personal and professional life as a young Black man growing up in post-war Los Angeles.
Gray’s complex photographic collages mix images of historic European cultural sites—palaces, museums, churches—with locales associated with the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa. These are interspersed with photographs of African American cultural icons, all drawn from Gray’s archive. The results function as tone poems that reflect on African American identity and the rise of Western civilization, showing how both are undergirded by and inextricably linked to colonialism. The works do not offer a single narrative. They layer histories, geographies and symbols to create a visual field in which power, memory and displacement collide.
The biographical section distinguishes this exhibition from recent presentations of Gray’s work. It includes images and ephemera that document his career as a commercial photographer and his parallel development as a fine artist, practices he kept separate for many years. At sixteen, Gray attended Hamilton High School by day and photographed the local rock scene by night with his friend and business partner Neil Zlazower, capturing bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cannonball Adderley and the Doors. He went on to work as a publicist and music writer, shoot iconic album covers for artists including Gladys Knight, Cheryl Lynn and Bobby Brown, appear in Italian Vogue and serve as Michael Jackson’s personal photographer.
At the same time, Gray studied at CalArts during a storied period in the institution’s history, with faculty including Allan Kaprow and Allan Sekula and fellow students such as Mike Kelley, Carrie Mae Weems and Daniel Joseph Martinez. The exhibition allows these two trajectories to intersect, showing how Gray’s extraordinary life and career map onto larger cultural events. Organized by Hamza Walker with Hannah Burstein and Storm Bookhard, Church and State offers a simultaneously intimate and macroscopic view of Los Angeles and beyond.
A forthcoming publication will accompany the show, featuring a long-form interview between Gray and Walker that delves into the expansion of Gray’s racial and political consciousness and how it manifests in his work today. Their working relationship dates back to Walker’s 2008 exhibition Black Is, Back Ain’t at The Renaissance Society and includes Gray’s participation in the 2016 Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum. At The Brick, Gray’s assemblages and archives together create a space in which personal history and global structures of power are held in the same frame.
Image: Photo of Todd Gray by Andy Warhol. Courtesy of the artist and the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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