“Welcome to Kaos Network, the tip of the hippest artist village in Los Angeles!” says Ben Caldwell as he throws open the door to the community arts center he founded. Since 1984, Caldwell has used this Leimert Park space to offer free workshops in everything from music and videography to robotics and web design. And over time, an arts district has grown up in the neighborhood around him.
To explain this history, take a stroll with Caldwell, a trim, dark-skinned man with a white goatee, down the block to a gallery called Art + Practice, which, in collaboration with the California African American Museum, is hosting a retrospective of his work called Kaos Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell. It’s on display now through March 8, 2025.
Entering the main room, Caldwell points to a photograph he took in the late 1960s, while serving in the Vietnam War. In the photo, local villagers saunter past a row of American Humvees. This, he says, was the beginning of his life as an artist.
“You can see the beauty of those barefooted ladies walking through war as if the war isn’t there,” he says. “So war woke me up to how things were really done. But art also showed me how to go at that problem.”
When Caldwell returned home from Vietnam, he enrolled in UCLA’s film school, where he and his cohort formed a new Black cinema movement called the L.A. Rebellion.
The exhibit is screening his experimental films, like I & I: An African Allegory, which uses African history to explore the concept of otherness.
“They called us the L.A. Rebellion because we wanted to do our own stories, and they called that rebellious,” Caldwell says. “But we called it: just being ourselves.”
Caldwell was teaching film classes when, in 1984, the Reagan administration cut funding for arts programs. So he opened the arts center in Leimert Park – Kaos Network – to offer free classes to the community.
He started off with courses in animation and videography, and then expanded to whatever kids were interested in learning.
“We’re creating creators, as opposed to workers,” says Caldwell, explaining the organization’s core mission.
In addition to being a classroom, Kaos Network is a performance space that played a pivotal role in LA’s early hip-hop scene.
Caldwell made music videos and documentaries about the city’s underground rappers, now projected on the walls of the gallery.
He also mentored the musicians and hosted open mic nights that served as workshops.
“The workshops were so they could refine their skills to go out to big venues. So when they go out into the world, they could whip anybody,” Caldwell says with pride.
Biz Markie and Kurtis Blow were known to drop by, as well as a young Ava Duverney and a musical upstart named Ice Cube.
The open mics took place in the eighties and nineties during the height of the city’s gang injunctions — when the LAPD used racial profiling to crack down on gang violence.
“It ended up being an important salvation for the youth of this neighborhood at a time when they were being heavily aggressed by the police,” Caldwell says.
Now at age 79, Caldwell is just as busy as ever. In fact, he has to get back to Kaos Network to meet with volunteers on a number of projects, including an urban garden, a robotics workshop, and augmented reality experiences. He’s particularly interested in the power of AI.
“I've just been staying ahead of the curve to try to help the populace with these tools as they come. Instead of them getting run over by these technologies, how can they adopt them in a way that can be helpful?” he explains.
Community educator Angela Jackson is waiting at Kaos Network to discuss an urban farm collective.
“I've been coming to Kaos for at least 34 years because I've raised all my children here,” Jackson says. “Ben [Caldwell] has always recognized that we each have our own gift and that there is a place for it here.”