In October 2016, I turned an abandoned hospital in West Adams into one of the most talked-about exhibitions in Los Angeles history. Ten years later, people still stop me to tell me where they were when they saw it.

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center had opened in 1971 as the first Black-owned hospital in the city. It operated for decades, served a community, and then collapsed — criminal mismanagement, insurance fraud, closure in 2013. By 2016, it was 40,000 square feet of peeling paint, decommissioned surgery theaters, empty maternity wards, a psychiatric floor, and a rooftop billboard that once announced the hospital's name to Western Avenue.

I saw something else. "A hospital is where life comes into the world and it's where you exit the world and die," I told Cultured Magazine at the time. "It's a building that encompasses a range of emotions, a lot of trauma, a lot of pain. I've always been fascinated by abandoned spaces and now that it's empty there's a sense of beauty there."

The building's owner, CIM Group — whose corporate art collection I oversee — donated use of the space. It was slated for demolition. Human Condition would be its last act.

THE EXHIBITION

Human Condition ran October 1 through November 30, 2016, at 2231 S. Western Ave. Over 80 artists were given the building — surgical rooms, wards, hallways, the cafeteria, the roof — and asked to make work in response to the space and the question embedded in its history: what does it mean to be human?

Walking in, you got the full weight of it before you saw a single artwork. A sink on the second floor was still stained with iodine-colored residue. Formaldehyde hung in the air. The x-ray light boxes in the corridors had been repurposed to display photographs — backlit, clinical, arresting. Bed curtains served as dividers. "You feel like you're in this very well designed home," I told W Magazine. "But then you look out and see that you're actually in an intensive care unit."

The building organized itself into a psychological architecture. The first floor addressed the subconscious: Jenny Holzer's granite bench set the tone at the entrance — a 1989 work reading "What a shock when they tell you it won't hurt..." — and works by Gregory Crewdson, David Benjamin Sherry, and Chantal Joffe moved through the corridors. Christopher Reynolds painted the cafeteria kitchen and all its cookware in Baker-Miller Pink — prison pink, the color scientifically proven to suppress both appetite and aggression. The second floor turned toward the conscious mind, with Laurent Grasso, Polly Borland, and Matthew Day Jackson occupying the wards. Daniel Arsham, Tony Matelli, and Nick van Woert filled the surgery rooms. The fourth-floor psychiatric ward was repurposed as a resting room — visitors encouraged to put their feet up among the decommissioned equipment. On the rooftop, Kelly Lamb repainted the hospital's billboard to read "Flesh and Bone Zone" — visible from Western Avenue, impossible to ignore.

At the opening, Millie Brown performed suspended from the ceiling of the morgue. Max Hooper Schneider installed a pig blood sculpture in an operating room. Two hundred-plus individual works in a building that still smelled like what it used to be.

The hashtag was #TheHospital. It spread immediately.

WHAT I DIDN'T FULLY KNOW YET

Among the 80-plus artists were several whose careers were at their earliest inflection points. Louis Fratino showed work from his first exhibition outside of college. Nina Chanel Abney had her first group show in California. Derek Fordjour had his first show in California. Claire Tabouret as well.

I selected them because the work was right for the moment and the space. I didn't know I was documenting a generation.

Louis Fratino is now represented by Sikkema Jenkins and commands prices no one predicted in 2016. Nina Chanel Abney is collected internationally and in major museum permanent collections. Derek Fordjour is represented by Pace Gallery and his work has sold at auction for multiples of early estimates. Claire Tabouret was commissioned to design the baptistery windows for the restored Notre Dame de Paris. Her work is in the collection of Barack Obama.

I sold their work first, in that building, that fall.

THE AFTERMATH

Human Condition received more press than any exhibition in Los Angeles that year. That distinction held for several years after. It went viral before "going viral" was a standard outcome for art exhibitions — driven by the images, the space, the strangeness of encountering serious art inside a building still containing medical detritus and the residue of human crisis. Coverage ran in the New York Times, Artforum, W Magazine, ArtNews, i-D, Dazed, Monocle, Surface, Artsy, Juxtapoz, LA Weekly, and more than a dozen other publications across art, fashion, culture, and news.

The exhibition is still cited in conversations about what an independent curator can accomplish outside the institutional gallery system. It's been discussed in the context of exhibition-as-medium and curator-as-artist — the idea that the show itself, not just the work within it, is the artistic statement.

I built it because I believed in the artists and the space and the moment. That belief was its own form of intelligence. The show remains the clearest example I have of what happens when a collector's eye, a curator's instinct, and genuine conviction about what a space can hold all align at once.

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John Wolf is an art advisor and founder of John Wolf Advisory, based in Los Angeles. He founded the firm in 2009 and serves on the council at LACMA. Human Condition (2016) was organized and produced independently at the former Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, West Adams.