“Love in a Cemetery,” Andrea Bowers
- Andrea Bowers, Educate, Agitate, Organize, Channel letter signs, low voltage, LED lights, plexi, aluminum, 2010 (photo by Ronald Lopez)
ABOUT | ARTIST STATEMENT | PROJECT of ARTISTS | LINKS | ABOUT THE CURATOR
Traditionally cultural institutions have excluded ongoing dialogue about social issues outside of the art world. Artist Allan Kaprow wrote, “life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery” from a 1967 published conversation with Robert Smithson, metaphorically equating a museum with a cemetery – a dead and sterile space. Kaprow’s quote motivated multiple collaborative community based projects currently being executed by the first year Public Practice MFA graduate students at OTIS College of Art and Design. In 2010 the graduate students in collaboration with LACMA Lab’s founding director, Bob Sain; artist Andrea Bowers, art administrator Pauline Kamiyama and the 18th Street Art Center will develop an exhibit as laboratory. The social/political obligations of cultural organizations to their respective communities will be investigated through partnerships with several community based organizations. The project’s ethics of action and engagement will lead to an artistic manifestation, and the participating Public Practice artists hope the communities involved will realize positive outcomes that will outlast the exhibition. This public presentation will be presented at the 18th Street Art Complex Gallery as part of an overall exhibition from January 23rd – March 26th 2010. While approaching the exhibition the students will be updating their group blogs on a weekly basis, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Andrea Bowers | Pauline Kanako Kamiyama | Carmen Uriarte | David Russell | Ella Tetrault
Felicia Montes | Gabrielle Levine | Jamie Crooke | Rachael Filsinger | Rodrigo Marti
Andrea Bowers work focuses primarily on direct action and non-violent civil disobedience enacted through the lives of women. She presents the stories of activists to express her belief that dissent is essential to maintaining a democratic process, as well as to illustrate the importance of a political strategy that stands in opposition to violence and war. Her work explores the intersections between art and archival processes, and between aesthetics and political protest. Bowers believes cultural production can be an integral part of political action and can help serve as a voice in counter-hegemonic practices. She investigates the role of art in documentation, in-depth storytelling, and the reconsideration of historical recording. Many of her projects contextualize historical events in our contemporary situation and underscore their poignancy upon our current state of affairs.
Andrea Bowers has an MFA from CalArts and lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo shows include An Eloquent Woman at Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, CA, and The Weight of Relevance at the Secession, Vienna and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Recent group shows include the Suddenly This Summer, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York 2008, California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Proyecto Civico at The Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), Progress at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the L.A. Anarchist Book Fair. Bowers has a solo exhibition Mercy Mercy Me at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and a group exhibition curated by Berta Sichel, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, both opening in October 2009.
Bowers is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin, Galerie Praz-Delavallade in Paris, and Van Horn in Düsseldorf. She is currently a Guest Professor in the Graduate Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design and an Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University.
Pauline Kanako Kamiyama is a non-profit and cultural arts administrator who believes it is her responsibility to ensure access and equity through advocacy, opportunities and linkages. Throughout her career, she hasprovided services in program development and management, volunteer management, special events, and community advocacy on both the local and national level to build community capacity.
Carmen is a Los Angeles native and recent 2006 graduate of Pitzer College, Claremont, CA with a degree in Art and Art History. As a Getty intern in 2005 she worked at the Center for the Arts in Pomona Art Colony fundraising and organizing the Annual Aztlan exhibition highlighting emerging and established international Chicano artists. Carmen was awarded three consecutive Urban Fellowships in the Center for California Cultural and Social Issues at Pitzer Collect. Through these fellowships she served as acommunity organizer and liason. After studying mural painting, she initiated three collaborative mural projects. The community partners included the Salvation Army and its afterschool program, wards at the Heman G. Stark Youth Corrections, Chino, Women in the Community Prison Mothers Program at Prototypes and the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center in which day laborers and Spanish language students participated in cultural exchange while designing and painting a mural on Pitzer’s campus. All the murals focused on themes of unity to serve as a way to connect and illuminate diverse communities.
David Russell paints elements of the natural world on large-scale walls and canvases. He is motivated by the visual aesthetic found in mountain and ocean environments across the globe. David graduated from University of Tulsa with a B.F.A. in Painting/Art history. He spent one year in Florence, Italy, studying Painting, Art History and Italian Language. Additionally, he pursued a professional teaching license in Art Education, providing him with eight years of public school teaching experience in K-12. Russell’s large format painting background has inspired the creation of his own mural painting company called Idealwallarts. His projects have ranged from hand painted wall signs, custom canvases, to large format pictorials. David is extremely excited about the Otis Public Practice program and the idea of shifting his own artistic practice in order to promote more community dialogue for social change.
Ella Tetrault received her degree from the University of Toronto in International Development and Art History. As part of her studies, she travelled to Ghana to work with a Widow’s Rights organization in the Ghanian basket industry. Her academic research focussed on helping groups in diverse community settings define and identify challenges through interdisciplinary art practices including participatory theatre and dialogical art.
While in Halifax, Ella co-organized the Show and Tell me lecture series and worked as a youth worker and arts facilitator at Phoenix Youth Programs. Her art practice explores the effects of the representation of a group identity upon an individual member. Using mediums ranging from painting, installation, and digital media, Ella has worked with youth and newcomer women’s organizations on oral history projects. She is especially interested in using printmaking in public spaces as a carrier of community content.
Felicia Montes is a Chicana Indigenous artist, activist, academic, community & event organizer, and poet & performer living and working in the Los Angeles area. She believes art is a tool for education, empowerment and transformation and has translated her passion for art and social justice as the cofounder and coordinating member of two groundbreaking creative women’s collectives, Mujeres de Maiz and In Lak Ech.
Felicia writes and performs about social and spiritual change as she works on the front lines of activism and organizing. Known throughout the Los Angeles area as an established Chicana cultural worker of a new generation, she has worked with most of the key arts and cultural centers and social service agencies in the greater East Los Angeles area.
Having organized and performed in hundreds of cultural events, marches, protests for many artists and social justice causes, her current goal is to focus on her own visual art and multimedia performances and creations. Felicia holds a B.A from UCLA in World Arts & Cultures with a minor in Chicano Studies and a M.A in Chicano Studies from Cal State Northridge. She is currently completing an MFA in Public Practice at Otis College of Art & Design.
Gabrielle Levine was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Crossroads High School in Santa Monica. Currently she is a graduate student in the Public Practice Program at the OTIS College of Art and Design. She attended and earned her Baccalaureate Degree at The Evergreen State College in Washington State.
Levine continues her connection with the community in Olympia and at Evergreen as a member of The Evergreen State College Friends of the Library Board of Directors. When she returned to Los Angeles she began working full-time as an artist, a painter and printmaker, and part-time as a docent and later in the museum bookstore at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. For six months prior to graduate school, she worked as an intern in Advancement and Membership at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
Levine also worked with tribal members at the Longhouse on Evergreen’s campus as an undergraduate student, and became acquainted with Native Peoples’ issues. Her interest in environmental stewardship is evident in her prints and paintings, which investigate the detrimental effect upon the arctic environment— the land, the indigenous human and animal populations— by unrestrained exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and coal. She is a colorist and the beauty of her work makes it approachable; yet the message, a dire warning, is as inescapable as the solution, the urgent need to develop alternative forms of energy.
Originally from South Florida, Jamie Crooke now reside in Los Angeles, California. She holds a bachelors degree in studio art from Florida Atlantic University, and has also studied art therapy on a graduate level at Lesley University in Cambridge. Over the years she has worked with various non-profits such as Arts for Learning, VSA Arts of Massachusetts, Young at Art, United Cerebral Palsy of Broward County, Cambridge Public School system, Tewksbury State Hospital and MoCA of Miami. Crooke’s roles have included working as: a teaching artist, arts facilitator, art therapist, festival coordinator and museum monitor. Some of the communities that she has worked with include homeless families, children and teens with serve physical disabilities, at risk youth, early childhood in Little Haiti, adults with severe disabilities in the mental health department and teachers of a early learning center in Chelsea, MA. Working primarily with arts education and integration, her interests also include social and political issues around access and equality. Crooke’s artwork is concerned with expressing ideas through various mediums such as: ceramics, illustrations, sculptures, installation and performance. She has exhibited in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Boston area, France and Japan.
Rachael hails from Washington DC and has been a photographer since elementary age. While studying photojournalism in high school, it began a lifelong captivation with images of social justice. Upon graduating from film school on the west coast in August 2005, she worked with grassroots organization Common Ground Collective in Louisiana. Rachael became an east coast vagabond, spanning from Tampa, Florida to Rockport, Maine. Important shaping events include black & white darkroom education for middle schoolers in the at-risk neighborhood of Hunt’s Point, South Bronx, NY. More recently, teaching has brought her to Los Angeles, in area charter schools stretching from the desert to south central in everything from animation to pottery. Her current goals are to remain active in community education and enrichment.
Starting from a painting and sculpture background, Rodrigo’s work has steadily moved towards installation, collaborative projects and thorough research in participatory art making. Key work experiences include, developing and teaching a Portraiture and Identity course at Greenwich Secondary School, executing a mural project with the kids of CESCOM, a community center (both in Leon, Mexico) and ‘Dandy Berry’, an installation constructed as a pared down cityscape housing a viewer activated system of lights, microphones and speakers for the Nuit Blanche Festival, 2008, with friend and architect Danny Shaddick.
Rodrigo was born in Guadalajara, Mexico but based out of Canada since 1986. Currently he is completing his MFA in Public Practice at Otis College, Los Angeles, CA.
I’ve spent most of my art career making a conventional “banking” style of art described by Grant H. Kester in his book, Conversation Pieces as a style “in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer.” Over the last couple of years, I have been investigating how to incorporate processes of dialog and collaboration into my practice expanding beyond just object-based artwork. I am not willing to give up one practice for the other but instead have been trying to incorporate both. In 2008, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco asked me to include some older work that I had made in 2005 about abortion rights activism prior to the passage of Roe V. Wade in an exhibition called, “The Way We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics.” My interest in social and public practice as well as expanding the collaboration between art institutions and community organizations led to my proposal that the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts offer visitors the opportunity to donate money to a small, local women’s health care clinic in Oakland. Once a week the museum is free to the public. I suggested that on these “free” days, as an artwork, I offer the public the option of donating the attendance fee of $7 to the Women’s Choice Clinic. I even created a donation form for my contribution to the exhibition catalog. After much discussion Ken Foster, the Executive Director of YBCA, responded by stating, “We want to provide a platform to a wide range of artists whose work speaks to the contemporary art world. This precludes us from advocating for a specific “cause” or “ideology” of an artists’ work beyond providing a platform for its exhibition.” Although I presented the “free day” donations idea as an artwork, the institution seemed not to be able to agree with me. For them the object-based work was considered as art while the performative, community-based aspect of my project was considered a political “cause”.
Instead of giving up my pursuits of integrating community issues with cultural institutions, I began a series of conversations with curator Bob Sain that let to my artist-residency at 18th Street in our project called, “Love in Cemetery.” Bob and I discovered that we had mutual interests in the relationship between artists, art and social engagements, as well as the relationship between arts organizations and social engagements. Prior to our conversations, Bob was invited to be a guest curator for an exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center. He had an interest in developing a project around these ideas, and hence our conversations began over a series of months. His curatorial focus was to identify and explore an aspect of L.A. in 10 years from now. Instantly he knew this would be an amazing opportunity to focus on the role of museums and their obligations to be socially responsible. Both of us saw this as a compelling vehicle to create a public platform for discussion of these issues. Through the conversations between Bob and myself, we broadened the scope of the project from art museums to cultural organizations. We realized the nature of this project would require us to work dialogically and collaboratively with many people and organizations, as well as mutating our roles as artist and curator.
One of our biggest concerns was how we would make a project like this with little funding, and how we would assure a substantial input of thought-perspective from a broad range of the LA cultural community. This led to what we thought was the most direct, democratic and practical way to proceed: Bob decided to develop an online survey of 4 questions that could act as a springboard for the project. The responses to the questionnaire will be displayed in the exhibition. In the survey, he identified 4 fundamental areas:
1. Concerns of our time
2. Community Impact
3. Role of Artists
4. Visions for a new kind of cultural organization
For my artist-residency, I have decided to develop a laboratory or practicum where experimentations with interventions and collaborations between cultural and community organizations could take place. I am using Bob’s survey as the basis for this practicum. The heart of this project is not just about discussion, but also action and engagement. I hope to create a series or sequence of activities that manifest my positions on the issues put forth in the survey. My goal is that this artist-residency will be a generative process, but I cannot accomplish this as an individual artist. Therefore I have been given the opportunity to work the first year graduate students of the Otis Public Practice Program. Each of them, or in groups of 2, will choose a community organization to collaborate with and develop a project that will include an art component to be part of the 18th Street exhibition. The artist’s studio at 18th Street Art Center will be used as the hub for their projects. It is my hope that these projects will integrate diverse local communities with cultural institutions as well as propose an expansion of sites of production for institutions. In this project, it is the artists’ responsibility to not only unite these communities with arts organizations, but also to impact the life of the community they choose to work with in a meaningful way: to create something of value or use for the community after the exhibition ends. It is my goal that this project becomes an example that encourages cultural organizations to address their obligations to social issues, such as class, ethnicity, gender and politics.
Jamie Crooke
Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic
Mission
Over a 3 month period I will be working with a community organization in my neighborhood called Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic to promote the organization’s mission of “Health Care is a Right and Not a Privilege.” As an artist, I will create projects to help support the infrastructure of the clinic, while also promoting the “Public Option” on the larger scale of Health Care reform. The collaboration will result in an exhibition at the 18th Street Gallery in Santa Monica in early 2010.
BLOG: http://loveinacemetery-freecare.blogspot.com/
Rachael Filsinger & Ella Tetrault
Homeless Youth
Mission
What is Your Hollywood ? What is Your America ?
Our collaboration with My Friend’s Place is rooted with maps. We are developing the idea of personal geographies with the afternoon drop-in “transitional” youth. Through mapping the connections & linkages in our lives, mapping our daily routes, and mapping the events / personal relationships, the 3-d installation will materialize. Sharing the already established idea of many different “Hollywoods”, we’ll suggest a sense of weaving – to create a beautiful all encompassing piece. This has already started to appear on our US maps, with intense interest in tracing their cross-country routes, where in many different colors, they are already overlapping and creating a dazzling web. The iconic outline of the United States will be a reoccurring theme, as most of the drop in population is intrigued and eager to tell their traveling story. Those that do not already have deep personal connections with this image, have widely described dreams of where they are going, moving upward and onward.
BLOG: http://loveinacemetery-friends.blogspot.com/
Gabrielle Levine & David Russell
Pico Youth And Family Center
Rise Above Plastics
Surfrider Foundation
Algalita Marine Research Foundation
Mission
Gabrielle Levine, David Russell MISSION: Gabrielle Levine and David Russell will facilitate a dialogue between two local community based organizations paired with two youth based organizations. Algalita Marine Research Foundation will present a program to Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, and Surfrider Foundation will present a program to the Pico Youth and Family Center. An exhibition at the 18th Street Art Center will serve as a communication forum where youths from each group can utilize their creative voice to express their environmental concerns about plastic pollution in the community at large. The future generation of Santa Monica will create art projects that demonstrate their understanding of the environmental repercussions of single use plastics in our ocean. The visual presentation of ocean pollution, comprised of plastic objects and documentation materials displayed in the gallery, will visually influence its viewers to incorporate sustainability into their daily lives.
BLOG: http://loveinacemetery-oceanplastic.blogspot.com
Felicia Montes & Rodrigo Marti
Homies Unidos
Mission
Rodrigo Marti and Felicia Montes are working with Homies Unidos, a gang intervention program in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles. They hope to use their time and resources to find ways of expanding the organizations network and increase their visibility. Homies Unidos provides crucial reintegration services for transitioning gang members, specializing in the Central American population. Homies provides an array of services including, tattoo removal, a formal integration program called ‘The Epiphany Project’, they promote Know Your Rights cards and actively participate in public policy. We will add to their impressive roster the development of an art program template for future use and executing the first of what will be an ongoing program that will be reinterpreted to match evolving concerns. We will be using our time with Homies Unidos to find creative and poignant ways to produce artwork that are both inspired from and executed in conjunction with this inspiring community based organization while concurrently expanding the conversation surrounding the incarceration and dubious judicial proceedings of their executive director Alex Sanchez.
BLOG: http://loveinacemetery-homies.blogspot.com/
Carmen Uriarte
Norco Rehabilitation Center Medium Security Correctional Facility
Mission
CALIFORNIA REHABILILTATION CENTER (CRC) MISSION STATEMENT: The California Rehabilitation Center is a medium Level II correctional facility with an inmate population that consists of felon commitments as well as Civil Addicts. The primary dual goals of CRC are to provide an atmosphere of safety and security to the public, visitors, staff and inmates and to successfully treat and return all civil addict commitments to a useful and productive lifestyle.
BLOG: http://loveinacemetery-norco.blogspot.com/
Otis Blog
http://ospace.otis.edu/publicpracticecap/Welcome/
Jamie Cooke, Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic
http://loveinacemetery-freecare.blogspot.com/
Rachael Filsinger & Ella Tetrault
http://loveinacemetery-friends.blogspot.com/
Gabrielle Levine & David Russell
http://loveinacemetery-oceanplastic.blogspot.com
Felicia Montes & Rodrigo Marti
http://loveinacemetery-homies.blogspot.com/
Carmen Uriarte
http://loveinacemetery-norco.blogspot.com/
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