Left: From L’Chaim America!, photo by David Chiu. Right: From Tank and the Bangas, photo by Halline Overby.
To celebrate America250, the Skirball welcomed more than three thousand visitors to music, storytelling, and theatre programs.
The Braid’s original work featured true stories of gratitude and possibility in American Jewish life. These included a Black Jewish storyteller recounting how Ashkenazi activists helped elect LA’s first Black mayor, the complex questions through a writer’s Native American and Jewish heritages, an Iranian refugee family’s Thanksgiving, Jews in Wyoming’s windswept “cowboy country,” and a Salvadoran immigrant reclaiming his Judaism and living the American dream.
The chart-topping and critical favorite New Orleans band headlined a special Independence Day concert, which celebrated both the nation’s past and the imaginative, expressive future being written by artists across the country with a vision of American creativity that is expansive, inclusive, and deeply rooted in community. Their music reflects the multiplicity of American identity—its rhythms, its contradictions, its humor, and its heart.
The twenty-ninth season of Sunset Concerts honored the uniquely American musical invention of jazz.
Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution
Music, performance, and dramatization were set against the backdrop of the Skirball’s original retrospective exhibition Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution—on view now through February 2027—examining how comic books became a popular cultural medium, shaping national identity in twentieth-century America.