A monumental new curtain artwork by Los Angeles artist Enrique Martínez Celaya will be unveiled Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during LA Opera’s free open house.
The unveiling of “The Things We Know,” a roughly 70-foot-wide artwork commissioned for LA Opera’s 2026-27 season, is scheduled for noon at the downtown Los Angeles theater, according to LA Opera.
The event will include a conversation with Martínez Celaya moderated by Cristina Nielsen, director of the Art Museum at The Huntington, followed by a question-and-answer session, officials said.
The artwork will be displayed during LA Opera’s mainstage performances throughout the season, greeting audiences as they enter the theater before slowly rising at the beginning of each performance.
Martínez Celaya, a Cuban-born artist and Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC, designed the work to incorporate the curtain’s movement into the artistic experience.
“A curtain is different from a painting on a wall because it has a life in time,” Martínez Celaya said when the commission was announced in September. “A curtain waits. Then it moves. I wanted that movement to be part of the work rather than merely something that happened to it.”
The artwork initially depicts children absorbed in small worlds before revealing stars, flowers and fractured light as the curtain rises.
“What changes is not the world itself, but how much of it we are allowed to see. Eventually, the image disappears into darkness. And from that darkness another world — the world of the opera — begins,” Martínez Celaya said in September.
The installation coincides with the inaugural season of LA Opera Music Director Domingo Hindoyan.
LA Opera President and CEO Christopher Koelsch said the commission was intended to transform the theater curtain into a visual prelude to each performance.
“Enrique has spent his career exploring how art communicates in shared spaces — not simply as something to be observed, but as something that can change our experience of a place and of the moment we inhabit together,” Koelsch said when the project was announced. “He brings to that work the sensibility not only of an extraordinary visual artist, but of a poet and philosopher, which makes him an especially compelling artist for an opera house — a place where image, language, music and ideas converge.”
Martínez Celaya’s work spans painting, sculpture, installation and writing and is represented in more than 60 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The commission was underwritten by Mei-Lee Ney.
The open house will also feature a recital by artists from the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program and family activities on the Music Center campus, officials said.
Additional information is available at laopera.org.