Teen Hour

LBMA invites high school students to an after-hours event just for teens to explore our current exhibition, Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012.

Join an exhibition tour led by exhibiting artist Ed Templeton, meet other students with similar interests, and stop by our artmaking station!

This is a free event. RSVPs are encouraged but not required. High School ID required for entry.

Parking
Free parking is available in the museum parking lot located a block west of the museum.

Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012 | February 2 – May 5, 2024

In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the Long Beach Museum of Art presents Ed Templeton’s 17-year photographic project, Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012, which explores youth culture through Templeton’s lens and peers into the lives of amateur and professional skateboarders, whom he traveled the globe with while skateboarding for video productions, competitions, and demonstrations.

Wires Crossed is part memoir, part documentation of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding as it came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, and pulses with the raw, combustive energy of Templeton’s image-making from the last twenty-plus years. Through photography, collage, text, maps, and eclectic ephemera from Templeton’s archives, Wires Crossed offers an inside look at a significant facet of youth culture as it was being born.

Templeton occupies the rare position of having been a professional skateboarder, two-time World Skateboarding champion, and artist working within the skateboard community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. This work, much of it previously unpublished and unseen, explores Templeton’s journey as an image maker, as well as the lives of professional skateboarders as they spent long hours crisscrossing the world on tour, reveling in their newfound status as a rock star–like figures and the eternal search for new terrain to skate. It is a showcase of the distinctive aesthetic that sprang from the influential skate culture Templeton helped create.

This exhibition and companion book demonstrate Templeton’s ability to capture what this life is like on film from the inside out, shooting the triumphs and disasters equally, the blood and the pain, boredom, self-Medic*tion, lust, toxic masculinity, and all the transitory moments behind the scenes. He paints an honest and gritty portrait of what it was like to be a skateboarder in a time before cell phones, scabs and all.

(Featured Image) Ed Templeton, Matt Bennett hikes to a drainage ditch, Norco, California, 2006. Gelatin silver print, acrylic ink, 11 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

TAKE SPACE, MAKE SPACE: LBUSD High School Exhibition | March 17 - May 12, 2024

The annual Long Beach Museum of Art High School Exhibition invites LBUSD students to submit work responding to a theme.  

This year, students considered the expansive concept of space, exploring its physical, emotional, and communal dimensions. Selected works creatively investigate a wide range of relationships to space. These artists capture the experiences of taking and making space for oneself and others: spaces of creativity, comfort, uncertainty, transition, isolation, and connection. 

Generous support provided by the John and Helen Apostle Foundation. 

Host or Publisher Long Beach Museum of Art