Kohshin Finley By Okla Jones ·Updated February 21, 2026 Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

At Frieze Los Angeles this year, Kohshin Finley will debut a new public sculpture on the Santa Monica Airport campus as part of Body & Soul, curated by Art Production Fund. The presentation, which runs from February 26 through March 1, is free and open to the public, extending the energy of the fair beyond the tent and into the surrounding landscape.

The original commission, titled …and someone was playing the piano, right? (2026), features a series of large-scale stoneware vessels set within shadow box shelving. Installed outdoors, the work is designed to be encountered from multiple vantage points. Finley understood that showing outside required a different mindset as opposed to presenting work inside a gallery.

“You have to worry about the logistics of people coming up to it and touching it,” he explained. “This thing is going to be open to people on the street day and night.” The artist’s awareness of the atmosphere shaped the scale and structure of the piece, because it had to withstand the elements and hold its own in an active public space. For Finley, the challenge of adapting his art to its surroundings became part of the creative process. Rather than shrinking from the unfamiliar terrain, he leaned into it, reframing the commission as an opportunity to expand how his work lives in the world.

The Los Angeles native grew up visiting the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, long before Frieze >Black and Mexican artist, Finley speaks about ceramics as an inherited language. He sees deep histories of working with earth on both sides of his heritage, and remains mindful of the continuity embedded in the process. “Thousands of years of ceramics are still made in the same way,” he said.

…and someone was playing the piano, right? marks Finley’s third presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, and his first outdoor installation at the fair. As a student of his craft, he is particularly interested in how audiences who may not typically attend art events respond to the work. The Body & Soul section creates a bridge, placing major commissions in accessible spaces. For the artist, having openness always matters.

“I think there’s some real communal magic that happens about it,” he said of Frieze week in Los Angeles. “So yeah, I’m super interested to just see how people interact with it, see what the community calls into it, see how people respond to it and what that all looks like.”

TOPICS:  Frieze LA

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Author: Okla Jones

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