Velveteria, Velvet art museum in Chinatown, Los Angeles, United States.
Velveteria is a museum in Chinatown, Los Angeles, dedicated entirely to paintings made on velvet fabric. The rooms hold hundreds of works on that textile surface, covering subjects from portraits and animals to pop culture figures and abstract scenes.
The museum was founded in 2005 by two collectors in Portland, Oregon, who had spent years gathering velvet paintings from markets and thrift stores. In 2013, they moved the whole collection to Los Angeles, settling in Chinatown.
Velvet painting as a style has deep roots in Mexican and Central American popular art, and many works in the collection reflect that tradition. Visitors can see how the technique traveled north through border towns and became a staple of American roadside markets and souvenir culture.
The museum sits on New High Street in Chinatown and is open most days of the week. The space is compact, so a visit rarely takes more than an hour, making it easy to combine with other stops in the neighborhood.
One room in the museum is lit with ultraviolet light, which brings out color tones in the paintings that are invisible under normal lighting. Velvet reacts to black light differently than canvas does, because the fibers trap pigment in a way that makes colors glow from within.
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