What’s Happening: Ruben Ochoa enlivens the L.A. art fair’s parking lot with his family’s old tortilla delivery van and brightly colored carts that shed light on the dangers and hustles faced by the city’s street vendors.

The Download: When Ruben Ochoa was young, his family sold tortillas out of a beige 1985 Chevy cargo van in Oceanside, a sunny coastal town north of San Diego. “This was before there were Mexican markets on every other corner,” Ochoa says. “It was essentially a mobile mercado on wheels.” He inherited the vehicle as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, in the early 2000s, but it was barely running after more than two decades of wear and tear. So the aspiring artist transformed it into a mobile gallery and curatorial project called CLASS: C that showcased works made primarily by emerging artists of color, appearing across California at lowrider shows, the Rose Bowl Flea Market, and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial.

Ochoa, now an established artist, still owns the van. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of CLASS: C, he’s using the vehicle to showcase new artworks that pay homage to his family’s history at this year’s Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 16–19). Parked on the tarmac of the fair’s new location, the Santa Monica Airport, the van contains bronze sculptures of tortillas that serve as “monuments to the history of the van and to my mom, who pioneered our tortilla delivery route,” he tells the New York Times. The sculptures, commissioned through a city grant, resemble giant coins—a nod to how tortillas represented his family’s currency and livelihood.

The installation, part of a public program organized by the Art Production Fund and sponsored by Maestro Dobel tequila, seeks to raise awareness about the fraught conditions faced by street vendors in Los Angeles. Buying food from street carts has been an inimitable fixture of the city’s culinary experience since the 19th century when Chinese and Mexican immigrants would sell tamales from wagons. The practice persisted, and today an estimated 10,000 vendors—many elderly or undocumented—sell food on the city’s streets. It’s a high-risk job: crimes against street vendors increased 337 percent over the past decade.

They are also a politically disenfranchised group. Sidewalk vendors are legal in the city, but they require approval from the bureaucracy-saddled Department of Public Health, which only administers permits for carts of an approved design. Those standards are nearly impossible to meet due to public health codes crafted around brick-and-mortar restaurants, requiring extensive storage, refrigeration facilities, and sanitation equipment. The rules are so onerous that city-approved carts usually end up weighing 1,200 pounds, which is why most vendors operate without permits, leading to confiscated equipment and heavy fines.

To combat this economic precarity, the company Revolution Carts painstakingly developed a more manageable cart—fittingly named the Tamalero—that meets city standards and costs $7,500. Four will be put to the test during Frieze, selling tamales to hungry fair-goers and showing off rainbow graphics by Ochoa. When the fair closes, Maestro Dobel will gift one back to the street vendor community. As for Ochoa’s family van? “It would be awesome for it to find a home that isn’t my parent’s house,” he says. “Maybe LACMA or the Smithsonian.”

In Their Own Words: “As an artist, you’re a small business, you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re a vendor,” Ochoa told the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. “You’re hustling out there. Maybe I’ll sell enough bronze tortillas now and I can retire my family, because they’re still selling tortillas.”

Surface Says: The city can try to stall vendors all it wants, but the power of a good street taco speaks for itself.

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It’s reductive to center the conversation about Tìa Adeola’s garments around “sexiness.” The designer’s sheer, cascading lace gowns and micro-mini party dresses are an ode to the woman she designs for—one who’s sure of who she is and the autonomy she wields, and refuses to be constrained by others’ perceptions of propriety. Inspired by having shown her last resort collection in Nigeria amid the country’s no-nudity rules, this time around Adeola played with the notion of conservatism.

Runway Redux is a fashion column in which we ask a designer to reflect on a new collection; this week, Surface reports from behind the scenes at New York Fashion Week.

Name: Tia Adeola (@tiaadeola)

Describe this collection in three words: Radical, conservative, bold.

Which look is your favorite? I can never choose. It’s not fair to all the other pieces—they all mean a lot to me.

What was your inspiration for the pieces? Playing with the constant discourse surrounding the “sexiness” of my clothing.

Attending any fun parties or events this year? My [after-party]. We had Ice Spice perform and she wore the new collection!

Why did you choose to show in New York instead of another fashion week? When I moved here in 2016, the city welcomed me with open arms. It gave me the confidence to create and design.

When Jessica Lichtenstein decided to make hearts the subject of her latest exhibition, she knew she was walking a fine line. As a universally understood symbol, hearts carry plenty of contextual baggage—something she understands all too well. “If you make too puffy of a heart it can read too Barbie or girly,” she tells Surface. “If you make it too standard, it can read just like an emoji,”

For “Delicious Torment,” her latest exhibition at Winston Wächter Seattle, the artist finds inspiration in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (The phrase “delicious torment” was written by the poet in a letter to a friend: “and so thou art to me a delicious torment.”) Lichtenstein’s interpretation of heart iconography is raw, emotive, and masculine: her sculptures seem ready to burst at any moment from the jagged raptures that cut across them.

Sculptor and designer Neal Aronowitz continues the tradition of design ingenuity established by his Whorl Console table with the Star Axis Console, a stunning example of functional sculpture. An NYCxDesign honoree in the residential side table category, the piece’s undulating planes result in a thoughtful exploration of negative space and a strikingly Brutalist-inspired display stand for books and magazines.

While envisioning the console in his Portland studio, Aronowitz was inspired to explore the physical concept of the axis: the point at which an object rotates. The Star Axis Console is a conversation piece, whether as a covetable work of design or simply a stylish perch for a Negroni. Available in polished concrete and powder coated aluminum.

At last November’s opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s controversial redesign of the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden in Washington, D.C.—designed with Brutalist vigor in 1974 by Gordon Bunshaft and given verdant new life in 1981 by landscape architect Lester Collins—the museum’s director Melissa Chiu joined First Lady Jill Biden and a go-go band to celebrate the institution’s new direction. “We see how the most important artists of our time are working today across every media,” Chiu said, “and exploring technology and innovation in every form, from sculpture and video to sound and performance.”

And, apparently, reality television. On March 3, seven American artists will sashay away from the traditional competition of building an art career and make it work for MTV on The Exhibit: Finding The Next Great Artist. There’s real artistic legitimacy in the group of contestants, too, including photographer Baseera Khan and sculptor Misha Kahn. So here’s hoping the group can find inspiration in the endurance of reality television as the judges ask them to “respond to a single piece from the Hirshhorn’s collection and comment on a pressing issue of our time.” That might not necessarily make great art, but if they don’t fuck it up, it might make great TV.

Norman Kelley is an architecture and design collaborative founded by Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley in 2012 with offices in Chicago and New Orleans. The firm’s work ranges from interior alterations and exhibition design to bespoke furniture.

Surface Says: Tasked with telling the backstory behind Chicago’s rich comics history through exhibition design, Norman Kelley deftly employed color, scale, and proportion, finding a kinship with cartoonists in the process.

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