Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack: An Artist Making Altars for a Neighborhood Under Pressure

 Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, A Chair for A Powerful Curator, 2025, reclaimed wood chair, nails, burlap, and balloon’. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

By EMANN ODUFU January 23rd, 2026

I came to You Can Hate Me Now, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack’s exhibition at Night Gallery, already sensing that his practice operated on a different frequency. His work transforms everyday materials, domestic remnants, and street debris into ritual tools. He is not simply assembling objects. He is building cosmologies from the materials of survival.

One evening late in December 2025, we spoke over Zoom, trading stories about New Jersey before moving into the deeper architecture of his work. Our conversation explored the conditions that shape his daily life in MacArthur Park, the neighborhood where he lives and works. It is an environment shaped by the quiet pressure of immigration enforcement, unpredictable policing, housing instability, and drug use, but also by beauty, improvisation, and care. This is not background. It is the atmosphere his work grows from. Within this context, each sculpture becomes an improvised structure for survival and spiritual passage, carving out small zones of clarity and imaginative freedom inside environments shaped by real pressure.

Emann Odufu:
This exhibition centers on the neighborhood you’re living and working in now, MacArthur Park. When I first heard you speak, though, your accent didn’t quite register as Los Angeles to me.

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack:
That’s because it isn’t. I’m from New Jersey.

Same. Newark.

I’m from Neptune. I’ve been in L.A. fourteen years now.

So you’ve earned your West Coast stripes. What struck me immediately about this show is how resolved it feels, conceptually and aesthetically. It reads as a crystallization of your practice. I want to start with assemblage. When you’re gathering materials from the neighborhood, what draws you in first? Is it utility? Memory? Intuition?

It’s all of that at once. There’s a specific moment when I come across a discarded object and something activates. I sit with it. A narrative starts forming, maybe a personal memory, maybe a myth, maybe something historical. Sometimes it feels like I already knew I needed it before I left the house. Other times I take a wrong turn and something unexpected appears, and I have to follow it. I can’t be afraid of that moment. I have to move with it.

Your work consistently treats the mundane as spiritually charged. Everyday objects feel ritualized. There’s a collapse between the spiritual and the political. How conscious is that for you?

Having a strong spirit is how you survive political times like these. Art becomes the vehicle. It transports you somewhere where you can see yourself thriving. That gives weight to my voice. Growing up, I always felt like I had to charge my spirit somehow, through the neighborhood, through music, through sports, through elders, through journey. Politically speaking, there’s a lesson in that. My spirit becomes a teacher.

Listening to you, I kept thinking about Ishmael Reed’s idea of the artist as a kind of priest, someone who brings symbols into circulation so people can interpret their world. Does that resonate?

Absolutely. I grew up in Jersey in the 90s. It was a golden era for me. There was music, family, the streets. But it was also dangerous. Survival shaped everything. I wanted to get somewhere safer, but that history stays with you. So yes, I do feel like a shaman. People encounter the work looking for guidance, even if they don’t say it out loud.

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Untitled (2/2), 2024, Antique chair, rubber spheres. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

There’s humor in the work too. A kind of street intelligence. It reminds me of David Hammons in that way. Do you see yourself operating within that lineage?

It’s an honor to be mentioned alongside him. I’ve seen my works hang across from Hammons pieces in a collector’s home—a Black key figure who was essential to his livelihood. There’s something powerful about that proximity. We’re in the same household. Stories and auras brush off on me. But my imagination matters too. I see myself continuing a conversation, not repeating it. Clutching the torch and moving forward.

You spent time at NXTHVN during the pandemic. How did that shape you?

It felt like life or death because of the pandemic. I went back East, closer to my roots. New Haven reminded me of Jersey in the 90s. When everyone went inside, I went outside. The Dixwell community was still alive. It changed me.

That grounding shows in how you talk about MacArthur Park. It’s a neighborhood shaped by policing, housing precarity, and overlapping crises. How does living there shape the way knowledge forms in your work?

I’m a witness. I’m walking the streets, supporting street vendors. Sharing the block with mainly Brown folk who are trying to stay alive and free. Seeing someone collapsed from fentanyl beneath a statue of Archbishop Romero creates a contrast that’s impossible to ignore. Hope above, suffering below. I can’t look away from that.

That’s where works like Pope Dealer come from. It isn’t spectacle. I feel it too. I love Los Angeles, but it’s a love-hate relationship. The work reflects that complexity.

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, G is For Goddess (Guardians of The Afro Fantasy), 2018, acrylic, spray paint, mop head, high heel, hair net, rope, g chain, mesh screen, night slip, textile cape and fabric oncracked wall mirror. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

There’s a cosmogrammatic logic in your work. Meaning emerges through relation rather than linear explanation. Objects speak across pieces.

I make the work first for people who know, people who have lived it. After that, I let go. That multiplicity makes me feel wealthy. Double meanings. Triple meanings. Wordplay. I started as a romantic, and that way of thinking never left me.

That lyricism is embedded in the title You Can Hate Me Now. It resonates even if someone doesn’t know the Nas song. Why did it feel right?

Hip-hop trained us to see. Lyrics created visuals. The title is personal too. Being self-taught. Navigating institutions. Feeling resistance. Seeing how power can fear what I’m made of. At a certain point, you say, fine. You can hate me now because the love in my becoming already won.

What the title keeps circling back to for me is perseverance. Continuing regardless of resistance. It feels personal, but it also feels like a response to the broader political moment. We’re living in a time where even progress itself has become something people want to reverse. You Can Hate Me Now reads almost like an acknowledgment of that resistance paired with a refusal to stop.

I keep thinking about an artist or any kind of creative for that matter as a conductor leading an orchestra. At a certain point, you have to turn your back to the audience. You can’t keep checking whether people approve. You have to face the music, focus on the craft, and trust that the work will carry.

It reminds me of Miles Davis, who would sometimes turn his back to the crowd, not out of arrogance, but because he was listening. He was positioning himself so the sound could travel properly. The audience thought they were being ignored, but really, he was committing fully to the music.

That’s exactly it. I think about Miles all the time. He wasn’t trying to perform for approval. He was trying to find the right place for the horn to speak. Certain parts of the stage were hollow, so he would move, even if that meant turning his back to the audience. People condemned him for it, but they missed the point. You didn’t just come to see him. You came to hear the music.

That’s how I feel about the work. I didn’t become an artist to explain what art is. I became an artist to show you. At a certain point, the art has to come first.

Installation view “Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack: YOU CAN HATE ME NOW,” Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

Let’s talk about Triple Beam Dream. The bunk bed feels suspended between innocence and exposure.

Growing up, getting a bunk bed felt like leveling up. But I also saw hustling around me. Innocence starts slipping. Childhood gets cornered by ambition. The sandman comes to visit and sprinkles a little bit of gold in your eyes. That tension is what the piece holds, while the dark vale blowing in the wind, resembles the mourning of lost innocence.

And Only Way Up, the gold birdcage elevator.

That work is about finding another route. A moment of elevation that shatters the ceiling. It critiques public perception and inner playings of the blue-chip art system. I don’t believe the only way forward is market validation or the access of popular influence. With that comes a whole new game of gatekeeper being played. I represent those who can get to the source of their dreams, presenting a vision so vivid there’s no other choice but to believe in it. The world’s biggest art dealer once shared that same dream. During my performance at the opening, pouring the blue chips down from above felt orchestral. It grounded me again.

Do you see the work as a form of manifestation, not just ideas but destiny?

Absolutely. Some works are prophetic, fragments of my future. If this were my last show, I would be okay. That’s how secure I feel.

That security is palpable. You can hold the hate now because the vision is tangible.

 Exactly. That’s a great feeling.

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, I’m Indigenous Too, 2025, deconstructed children rocking chair, cowboy hat, gold nails. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.