Battle of Malibu (In Three Parts) 1795: Part One, 1000pc

1,000 piece puzzle featuring the artwork of Umar Rashid

Did the Battle of Malibu actually happen? Probably not. Ok, definitely not. But also maybe it did? LA based artist Umar Rashid has given the question a lot of thought and decided that it would be cool if it had happened so for all intents and purposes it did.

And if the Chumash, Tongva, Gabrielino, and other indigenous LA types had in fact gone on to fight the Spanish, armed with a little red Corvette driven by Black Jesus, then, well, we'd have liked to see that. So here it is. It happened.

Included in the puzzle is an interview with Umar Rashid along with additional images of his most recent work.

Umar Rashid (b. 1976, Chicago, IL) employs writing, illustration, painting, and sculpture to construct alternative historical narratives that reference a panoply of cultures, collapsing geography and time. Word play and double entendres permeate his pictures and can prove to be a dizzying hopscotch of cinema, rap, anime, and literature intertwined as epic battle scenes. His painterly tales complicate the idea of what is true and false, prompting us to consider whether the “truths” that we are taught may in fact be lies.

Rashid’s work was recently shown at Almine Rech, Half Gallery, Blum and Poe, and was also featured at The Huntington and the Hammer Museum as part of the biennial Made in LA 2020: a version. He is represented by Half Gallery (New York) and Blum and Poe (Los Angeles).