SCRIPT

Experience 72: SCRIPT, October 3, 2026 – March 27, 2027, Experimentally Structured Museum of Art, presented in collaboration with Legacy West Media

What does script become when a letter stops being a letter?

That is the question at the center of SCRIPT. Not calligraphy as ornament, not lettering as style, but the letter as a form that carries cultural identity, and what happens when that form travels across continents, transforms through generations, or refuses to be decoded at all.

The answer begins with how a letter is made. Calligraphy treats each letter as a deliberate act: the pen lifts, the angle is set, the stroke follows a known path. Script compresses that process through repetition. Strokes merge, corners round off, details fall away, until what remains is the trace of a habit rather than the construction of a character. The letter has not vanished. It has been abbreviated down to its minimum. And at that minimum, something else becomes possible: the letter stops being a unit of language and starts being something a viewer feels before they can read it.

That threshold is where SCRIPT begins.

SCRIPT brings together artists whose practices span Los Angeles, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela: Jose Reza “Prime K2S” and David Cavazos “Big Sleeps,” two founding figures of LA stylized lettering; Diaa Allam, Egyptian-born Arabic calligrapher and muralist based in the UAE; Luchita Hurtado (1920–2020), Venezuelan-born and Los Angeles-based, represented by works from her Linear Language and Word Puzzles series; and Stephanie Mercado, a Los Angeles-based painter and printmaker whose work draws on Mesoamerican visual traditions, contributing a new commission that brings Mayan hieroglyphs into dialogue with the show’s central question about symbol, script, and cultural identity. Los Angeles photographer Jim McHugh, whose artist portraits have documented the city’s art world for decades, contributes a diptych of Big Sleeps photographed from the front and from the back of his head in front of his own artwork, placing the artist and his letters in the same frame.

These artists were not brought together because they share a style. They were brought together because they share a question. Across graffiti walls, Arabic calligraphy, painted abstraction, Mesoamerican symbol systems, and the photographic portrait, each has pushed the letter to that edge, the place where a letter sheds its linguistic function and becomes image, object, and meaning all at once.

Alongside the artists’ works, the exhibition includes Sumerian cylinder seals and Egyptian scarabs from circa 2900 to 2750 B.C., among the earliest examples of human beings encoding identity into a surface. They are not displayed as historical curiosities. They are the foundation of SCRIPT.

But the letter has never been only a letter. Long before writing systems were standardized, human beings used marks, signs, and symbols to express what language alone could not hold: power, faith, protection, grief, identity. A symbol does not need to be read to be understood. It needs to be felt.

Artists: David Cavazos “Big Sleeps,” Diaa Allam, Jim McHugh, Jose Reza “Prime K2S,” Luchita Hurtado, and Stephanie Mercado.

Curator: Dr. Bernhard Zuenkeler

Image Credit: David Cavazos “Big Sleeps” | Iron Sharpens Iron | Acrylic on canvas | 40 x 60 in | 2024