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We selected four fellowship artists from a competitive process who activated our galleries as artists in residence from February through late August 2011, followed by n opening on September 24 of Collaboration Labs. The 18th Street Artist Fellows addressed basic questions about how artistic legacy is passed down, whether it should be passed down, and whether ephemeral performative and media-based work can be re-performed/re-envisioned by the authors or by new generations of artists. The projects of the Fellows involved a strong degree of public engagement that opened new lines of thinking while considering the legacy of art-making and intellectual ferment that has made Los Angeles such an amazing site for creativity. Beginning on February 1 through April 24, 2011, Richard Newton was in residence in the main gallery. His project, Have You Seen My Privacy, involved multiple presentations of video, ephemera, and correspondence accompanied by public dialogues with artists active in Southern California from 1960 onwards. Newton actively collaborated with younger artists to develop three performances allied with the presentations. At the same time in the 18th Street Project Room, Vincent Ramos’ research-based project, Outsider Art: Others From Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different…Sort Of looked at works developed in Southern California in the 1960’s by artists who were not from the region, but whose projects informed and influenced the work of local artists. He developed new works along with constructing a visual time-line of the many disparate pieces from these “outsider” artists. From June 3rd through August 28th in the main gallery, Artist Jerri Allyn, collaborated with Inez Bush and other artists, presented Debating Through the Arts: Performance Art 3, based on a continuation of a model United Nation as paradigm. Besides further debates, they created a mediation environment housing and exhibiting creative proposals emerging from the debates. In the Project Room, York Chang’s Second Life imagined itself as the art world version of the video game ‘Second Life’ where participants construct their own fictional artistic identities drawn from LA artists from 1965-85. His exhibit reconstructed the offices of Artist Actualization Services, a short-lived but influential artist organization in Los Angeles between 1980-85, which called on artists to constantly reinvent themselves. Each year 18th Street Arts Center sets an annual theme which provides a unifying principle for our artists’ research and inquiry. The theme for 2011 was Legacy. Our 2011 artists explored the idea of artistic legacy and the numerous forms it can take as well as the debates that are provoked by such forms. According to 18th Street Artistic Director, Clayton Campbell, “18th Street is one of the 60 cultural institutions across Southern California [who created] a 2011 exhibit for the
Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation. The nature of Pacific Standard Time, which was a celebration of the L.A. art scene during its birth, involved a critical examination of artistic legacy. This opened up numerous questions and lines of investigation for artists whose work is ephemeral, durational, or fugitive. Because of our Pacific Standard Time exhibit (featuring Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz- Starus, Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara T. Smith, EZTV, and Electronic Café International) we decided to devote our entire exhibition year to the theme of Legacy.”

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