Weaving Unity: Centering Decentered Voices

SEPTEMBER – DECEMBER 2021 PROGRAM GUIDE

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Lea esta guía del programa en español aquí.

Though nothing prepares you for something like a pandemic, I have been reflecting recently that working with (and employing) artists has effectively trained us as an organization to be flexible and resilient. These are both extremely useful skills in our current environment. The artists we work with are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible or practical, thinking completely outside of the box, and asking us to repeatedly question our status quo. 

As a result of this constant flexing, this past year we have expanded the reach of our programming dramatically, developing unique new content designed for international audiences, such as our bilingual Arts Learning Lab @ Home series, and our Borderless series commissioning new films about global artist networks. This is fitting, since for over 20 years we have had international artists living and working in residence on our campus, growing into a vast global network of alumni from 70+ countries around the world. 

As our digital presence has necessarily exploded, we are finally prepared to fully serve that expanding global audience, sharing what makes us unique as an artistic community and artist support organization. We are thrilled to launch our Borderless membership via Patreon, which is the next iteration of our membership program that launched in 2020. With full libraries of artist talks, panels, performances, arts educational workshops, and our exclusive Borderless+ blog that will now ONLY be available to our members, this treasure trove can be accessed by art workers everywhere who value what we do and consider themselves a part of our community — wherever they might call home.

I write in a strange time — a wake up call that this pandemic is not over, that the vulnerable (our elders, our children) still rely on us to be cautious, and careful. But we continue to find new ways to program with joy and exuberance, reflect on what makes our community strong, and interweave the fibers of our being so that we can imagine a world of greater interconnection, and empathy.

Sue Bell Yank
Deputy Director

CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS

Arts Learning Lab @ Home | Community
Transform and Translate with Trevor Amery
Saturday, September 25, 2021  | 11 AM PST
ONLINE

For this workshop, we will be building drawings from the everyday world around us with artist, educator, designer, and fabricator Trevor Amery! We will discover the surfaces and objects that make up our environment, from leaves and palms to floor tiles and drying racks, which we will then translate into drawings through rubbing. It will be a process of discovery, experimentation, play, and collage.

Materials: tracing paper, crayons, scissors, glue

* This event will have live Spanish interpretation for Spanish speaking or bilingual participants.

Three Structures Touching: An Immersive Soundscape
Part of Maj Hasager and the Quinn Research Center’s exhibition Three Structures Touching
Saturday, September 11, 2021 | 1-5 PM PST
3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA, 90405

In this one-day immersive sound installation as part of Danish artist Maj Hasager’s solo exhibition Three Structures Touching, the composition by Ask Kaereby unfolds as an investigation of space, sound, and place—where community engagement is the starting point. The composition consists of sounds from the local surroundings in the 90404 area of Santa Monica, and some of the sound material was collected by ‘local ears’: members of the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra (SMYO) who recorded sounds in their neighborhood and later interpreted them through their acoustic instruments. These sounds will undergo severe processing so that new expressions and moods emerge, expanding our notions of time and space. The new experimental composition will be premiered as a one-day immersive spatial audio speaker set-up. Visitors are welcome to come experience the immersive soundscape on site at 18th Street’s Airport Campus throughout the afternoon of September 11 from 1-5 PM, and then view the exhibition in the Propeller Gallery.

This is a live, in-person event. Masks will be required and LA County social distancing guidelines will be followed. Please register for this event. Note that capacity is limited to 12 people at a time in the gallery, first come first served.

LA ACM SIGGRAPH and the EZTV Online Museum | FIRST of FOUR – Annual Art Show(s)
Tuesday, September 14, 2021 | 6:30 – 9 PM PST
ONLINE

Over the decades, both the international Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGGRAPH and Los Angeles SIGGRAPH have presented, and/or collaborated with a number of artists and arts organizations, including multiple times with EZTV. ACM SIGGRAPH is an international community of researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and business professionals who share an interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

As a way of building a dialogue as well as awareness of SIGGRAPH’s role in the LA arts community, starting in September 2021 and continuing for the next four years, an annual event focusing on new work by current digital artists as well as retrospective recollections and re-presentations of classic work from the last 40 years is being inaugurated.   

Presenters: Dave Curlender, Dr. David S. Goodsell, David Em, Coco Conn, Vibeke Sorensen, Michael J. Masucci, Joan Collins

This event will coincide with a research project on early EZTV’s history, being conducted by Gaspard Nectoux who will be visiting LA from Paris in residence at 18th Street Arts Center.

Ranu Mukherjee and Hope Mohr | Imagining Futures | Three Part Workshop
Saturday, September 18, 2021 | 1-5 PM | Workshop #1: RUPTURE AS A CHARACTER
Saturday October 23, 2021 | 1-5 PM | Workshop #2: CULTIVATING RESILIENCE
Saturday, November 13, 2021 | 1-5 PM | Workshop #3: WORLD BUILDING: IMAGINING THE FUTURE

In-person | 18th Street Arts Center’s Olympic Campus
1639 18th Street
Santa Monica, CA, 90404
Apply here by September 3 to participate: https://18thstreet.org/event/imagining-futures-2021/2021-09-18/

Imagining Futures is an embodied storytelling and creative world-building workshop for immigrants and refugees co-facilitated by choreographer Hope Mohr and visual artist Ranu Mukherjee. This three part series will explore, through creative practice, themes of rupture, resilience, and world building. In a safe space, we will ground ourselves in our bodies and in sensation, explore experiences of rupture, and give voice to what sustains us. The process will center experiences of rupture as a form of expertise essential to our time and as a catalyst for imaginative capacity and joy.

Through movement, drawing, and writing exercises, these workshops will engage a group of people who, through circumstances and legacies, have become experts in reinventing their lives. Imagining rupture as a character that changes over time, we connect with its lessons,  summon our personal sense of continuity, and build visions of possible futures. We envision how we want to live and create embodied languages of resilience and power. 

Snacks and Beverages will be provided.

This workshop will happen over a series of three Saturday afternoons. Priority will be given to participants who can commit to all three sessions, but drop-ins will also be considered. 

All participants will be paid $100 per session.

As needed, all COVID precautions, including distancing and masks, will be observed in order to ensure participant safety. Workshop facilitators are fully vaccinated. Because of the nature of the work we will be doing together, we ask that all participants be fully vaccinated.

* This event will have live Spanish interpretation for Spanish speaking or bilingual participants.

Repeat after me: An online screening and conversation
With artists Jennifer Chia-ling Ho, Tzu-Huan Lin, Dan S. Wang, and Siru Wen
Part of Jennifer Chia-ling Ho’s exhibition How are you?
Friday, September 10, 2021 | ONLINE

As part of Jennifer Chia-ling Ho’s exhibition How are you?, artists Jennifer Chia-ling Ho and Tzu-Huan Lin will share their production concepts and processes of their collaborative video work, a ‘dialogue’ using found footage that reflects their experiences on communication and language learning. Artist Dan S. Wang, who extensively uses language in his work, and Siru Wen, who intentionally avoids using language in her work, will also join the conversation. This screening and conversation will premiere online on September 10, 2021.

18th Street Art Center’s 2021 Virtual Gala
An evening honoring essential arts workers evolving wellbeing, culture, and community life in LA 
Saturday, November 6, 2021 | 5-6 PM
ONLINE

Join us and our host, musician Shirazette Tinnin, in uplifting and honoring essential arts workers evolving wellbeing, culture, and community life in Los Angeles in an evening of music, video art, and more! Throughout the gala program, we will be honoring Kristina Wong, performance artist and founder of Auntie Sewing Squad, artist, educator, and curator Asuka Hisa, and Bill and Carolyne Edwards, founders of the Quinn Research Center. This will be accompanied with a video art program curated by special guest, Asha Bukojemsky of Marathon Screenings and musical performances by jazz musician Shirazette Tinnin.

Access to the gala, along with a variety of additional benefits, like a limited edition print by Rodrigo Valenzuela, will be available to everyone who joins our new Borderless membership platform on Patreon as a subscriber! You can join for as little as $5/month.

Pop-Up Artisan Market & Holiday Celebration
Part of Cog•nate Collective’s exhibition Manos a la Obra
Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 1-5 PM
3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA, 90405

Join us for a community celebration of craft and art at the Manos a la Obra pop-up Artisan Market! This outdoor market will feature different products produced and/or sourced by local artisans who have been collaborating with Cog•nate Collective to establish a community-led public market in Santa Monica. Visitors are also invited to view the exhibition in the Propeller Gallery.

The exhibition ​​Manos a la Obra gathers projects created in long-standing and speculative public marketplaces in the Tijuana-Los Angeles transborder region, continuing Cog•nate Collective’s interest in documenting transnational economic and cultural networks of exchange at the scale of the local.

In this latest body of work, the artists and their collaborators stage dialogues between the handmade and the mass-produced, between craft and second-hand goods­, through a series of conceptual/sculptural gestures that are inspired by the labor that artisans and vendors undertake to transform material and socio-economic conditions.

Thank you to our generous supporters!

NEW ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

EXHIBITIONS ON VIEW

Enjoy past and current exhibitions here.

WE ARE OPEN! Please sign up for an appointment here. 

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:

CURRENTLY ON VIEW:

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND STUDIO VISITS

18th Street is excited to continue and expand our in-person Studio Visit and Professional Development programs for our artists in residence. Last quarter we had Alma Ruiz, Senior Fellow, Center for Business & Management of the Arts at CGU; Carol Stakenas, curator; Allyson Unzicker, Associate Director & Curator University Art Galleries at UCI, and a series of professional development workshops led by Ami Davis, Executive Director at New Museum Los Gatos.

This upcoming quarter we have guests Maru Garcia, Curator and Artist; Irene Georgia Tsatsos, Director of Exhibition Programs and Chief Curator at Armory Center for the Arts; and Ciarra Ennis, Director and Curator of Pitzer College Art Galleries.

To be an artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center, apply here.

Borderless is a special membership program featuring quarterly introductions to artist communities around the world. Join by becoming a member on our Patreon!

As a member of Borderless, you get access to the members portal, which will grant you access to exclusive Borderless program content and events, including upcoming Borderless programs and recordings of past programs, like an introduction of the visual art scene in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the first iteration of Borderless created by artist Mella Jaarsma, founder of Cemeti Institute, and an introduction to Lebanon’s visual art and design scene, the second iteration of Borderless organized by House of Today.

In addition, membership to any tier on Patreon will grant you access to our 2021 virtual gala!