LA Opera announced Wednesday it has commissioned Los Angeles artist Enrique MartÃnez Celaya to create a roughly 70-foot-wide curtain artwork that will be displayed throughout the company’s 2026-27 season.
Titled “The Things We Know,” the artwork will be installed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for all mainstage performances during the season, according to LA Opera. The curtain will greet audiences as they enter the theater and slowly rise before each performance.
MartÃnez Celaya, a Cuban-born artist and Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC, said he designed the work with the movement of the curtain in mind rather than treating it simply as a large painting.
“A curtain is different from a painting on a wall because it has a life in time,” MartÃnez Celaya said. “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, officials said.
“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,” MartÃnez Celaya said.
LA Opera President and CEO Christopher Koelsch said the commission transforms 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. “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.”
MartÃnez Celaya’s multidisciplinary work encompasses painting, sculpture, installation and writing, often exploring questions of perception, memory and meaning, officials said.
His work is represented in more than 60 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The commission was underwritten by Mei-Lee Ney, according to LA Opera.
Angelenos will have an opportunity to see “The Things We Know” outside a scheduled performance during LA Opera’s free Open House on Oct. 24.
The event will include a conversation with MartÃnez Celaya, a demonstration of the artwork in motion, a recital featuring artists from the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program and family activities on the Music Center campus.