Cuban-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya hand-paints LA Opera's new 70-foot curtain

October 19, 2026

Anyone walking into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this season will meet the work of a Cuban-born artist before hearing a single note. Enrique Martínez Celaya created "The Things We Know," a curtain about 70 feet wide that replaces the starburst design LA Opera audiences had seen for 63 years, according to the Los Angeles Times. It will hang for every mainstage performance of the 2026/27 season.

The visible portion shows two children: a girl holding a fish tank and a boy reaching toward a caged bird. The Times reports that the image draws on the artist's family history and the period when his family left Havana for exile in Spain. The girl is his daughter Natalia, and the birds recall his grandfather, who kept caged birds as pets. That upper section had already been shown at small scale at Cuba's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Minutes before each performance, the curtain rises to reveal a field of stars, flowers and fractured light that finally fades into darkness.

"A curtain is different from a painting on a wall because it has a life in time. A curtain waits. Then it moves," Martínez Celaya said in LA Opera's announcement. Rather than printing the image, he and his team spent weeks hand-painting it on the stage floor in acrylic and water-based paint. The commission was underwritten by patron Mei-Lee Ney.

Martínez Celaya, who trained as a physicist at Cornell and Berkeley before turning to art, is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, and his work is held in more than 60 public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney. Visitors can see the curtain in motion and hear from the artist at LA Opera's free Open House on Saturday, October 24.