[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features Por La Mano, the exhibition of L.A. artist Jorge A. Jiménez Jr. at Craig Krull Gallery that explores identity, heritage, and transformation through powerful clay sculpture.
Por La Mano by Jorge A. Jiménez Jr. – Exhibition Overview
In his exhibition Por La Mano at Craig Krull Gallery, Los Angeles–based artist Jorge A. Jiménez Jr. invites viewers into a world where clay, memory, and spirit intertwine. The show marks his first solo presentation with the gallery and stands as an intimate exploration of identity, belonging, and transformation. Born in Oceanside, California, to Mexican parents, Jiménez has long used ceramics as a way to trace his lineage, bridging ancestral tradition with the experimental freedom of contemporary sculpture. His work exists in the charged space between craft and self-portraiture – devotional, tactile, and constantly in flux.
Jiménez’s sculptures feel both ancient and new, as though unearthed from a myth while still pulsing with the anxieties and desires of the present. Bodies turn inside out: an anatomical heart blooms with a marigold, lungs sprout roses, a self-portrait cradles a bouquet as though offering it back to the earth. Each work operates like an ofrenda, or offering – a living altar to the artist’s heritage and evolving sense of self. The iconography of Día de los Muertos and Catholic ritual merges with comic-book surrealism, resulting in forms that are reverent but never static. The objects can be recombined or rearranged, emphasizing the fluidity of identity and the porous boundary between the sacred and the personal.
The Meaning Behind Por La Mano and Jiménez’s Process
The title, Por La Mano (“By the Hand”), reflects the intimacy of touch that defines Jiménez’s practice. Clay records gesture; fingerprints and tool marks remain visible, reminding the viewer of process, labor, and human presence. The act of making becomes an act of remembering – of shaping history as much as material. As Studio Manager at the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Jiménez has a deep technical understanding of his medium, yet he allows that knowledge to serve something more emotional: the quiet tension between rootedness and reinvention.
Craig Krull Gallery and Por La Mano’s Presentation
Craig Krull Gallery, known for its support of California-based artists and its emphasis on material experimentation, provides an ideal setting for this exhibition. Within its whitewashed rooms at Bergamot Station, Jiménez’s work feels both grounded and otherworldly. The sculptures glow softly under the lights, their surfaces matte and delicate, their forms poised between permanence and decay. Visitors moving through the show encounter not just objects, but a sequence of thresholds – each piece a moment of encounter between the artist and his past, the viewer and their reflection.
Ultimately, Por La Mano is about holding on and letting go. It’s about the ways identity reshapes itself through time, through gesture, through clay. Jiménez’s art is devotional not in its adherence to religion, but in its belief in care – for material, for heritage, for the act of making as a bridge between worlds. In his hands, ceramics cease to be vessels for function and become vessels for memory. The show is a reminder that the body, like clay, can be molded, broken, and reformed, and that art, at its most honest, is an offering – a way of reaching out, by the hand, toward something larger than oneself.
https://www.craigkrullgallery.com/jorge-jimenez-por-la-mano
Bergamot Station | 2525 Michigan Ave. #B3 Santa Monica, CA, 90404