Summer 2021 Program Guide
Happy June! Today we bring you our Summer 2021 program guide, which details all the exhibitions, events, and artists in residence we have planned for the summer. Mark your calendars for a series of interesting art engagements, community engagements, dialogues, and cultural resources from Santa Monica to Beirut and beyond! Here’s what we have planned this quarter.
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Recovery Justice: Reimagining the City
At this point in the pandemic, we’ve come far enough along to maybe start to look back. Remembering where we were over a year ago, when we had no other choice but to slow down. By moving more slowly, we received the gift of being able to experience our surroundings in a different light.
As we increased our physical distance, we realized that we could adapt. Virtual space offered a level of accessibility that our physical distance denied. Entering this liminal space seemed to increase our awareness even more. We began to engage in our community in ways that we tend to overlook.
Now, we stand in another liminal space: the threshold between where our past sense of normalcy lies and our yet-to-be-realized future lives. As a new staff member on the 18th Street team, I am making an individual transition, while at the same time moving in community with the collective. It has been a dynamic experience.
Suspended between the past and a yet-to-future, along with our 18th Street artists and broader community, we explore what togetherness means in 2021 and beyond. No longer limited by our physical location, our creative interpersonal space has now extended into the virtual and energetic fields as well. In the energetic space, each of us can reflect and integrate the teachings of the past year, and through this practice the artist has become a type of second responder; both incubating new ideas and laboring them into the new meeting place we were required to find. It is here where we now gather in community.
This year, 18th Street artists take on the theme of Recovery Justice: Reimagining the City, which invites our artistic community to envision our cities through the perspective of the arts. As the transformation continues, artists, and individuals alike, will continue to evolve their vision of our city community space.
Michelle Gonzalez
Operations Manager
CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS
Manos a la Obra
Part of the exhibition Un Mundo Nuevo en Pico and Cog•nate Collective’s Market Exchange
Opening Reception
Friday, June 4, 2021 | 4:30 – 7:30 PM
Pico Pop-Up | 2917 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica
RSVP
The installation Manos a la Obra – hosted virtually at marketexchange.18thstreet.org and in-person at Pico Pop Up as part of the exhibition Un Mundo Nuevo en Pico – brings together handmade items that were created and curated by an intergenerational group of women artisans from Santa Monica. Also part of Market Exchange, a project by Cog•nate Collective, this installation features Ines Garcia, Carmela Morales, Laura Hernandez, Lily Alinaghizadeh, and Abby Juan. Other artists who are part of Pico Pop Up’s Un Mundo Nuevo en Pico include Linda Vallejo, Anne Carmack, Nicola Goode, Jeff Gros, and Rosa Maria Lares.
This program is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, santamonica.gov/arts/artofrecovery. Market Exchange was commissioned by 18th Street Arts Center.
The Art of Family in “La Veinte”: A Conversation about Hidden Santa Monica Histories
A launch event for Part One of We Were All Here by Dan Kwong and Paulina Sahagun
Saturday, June 26, 2021 | 5 PM
ONLINE
Artists and creators Dan Kwong and Paulina Sahagun will be joined by West side historian Miguel Chavez and multi-generational Santa Monica resident Genna Casillas for a lively discussion based on Part One of the new Kwong/Sahagun video, We Were All Here: The Story of La Veinte, la familia Casillas, and the Pico Neighborhood of Santa Monica. The event will screen clips of the film, and a full version will be available to view 48 hours before and after the event here.
The conversation will focus on the art of being a family, and delve into a series of topics that affected “La Veinte” throughout the 20th century; uncovering hidden histories of a community, migration and immigration policies, social/political movements of the 60s and 70s, and the price of assimilation.
We Were All Here is part of Culture Mapping 90404, a community oral history project of 18th Street Arts Center in partnership with the Santa Monica Public Library. The program and film is generously supported by the California Arts Council.
SEA CHANGE / Sourdough Sensations
Part of Marcus Kuiland Nazario’s project Sea Change
Thursday, July 1, 2021 | 5 – 6 PM
ONLINE
Sourdough Sensations is a screening of Nao Bustamante’s film Breadphones and a conversation with a professional baker sharing sourdough best practices. Participants will be able to pick up sourdough starter at Cafe Bolivar in Santa Monica, or the 18th Street Arts Center and bake their own sourdough bread. Participants are encouraged to share their baking successes or failures by emailing jamaya@18thstreet.org or tag @18thstreetarts on social media for an 18@Home shout out.
Sea Change is produced by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario in conjunction with the 18th Street Arts Center and is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, santamonica.gov/arts/artofrecovery, with additional support from Los Angeles County’s WE RISE LA program, Trade City, and 18th Street Arts Center.
LEFT/ RIGHT/ HERE: A Drive-through Outdoor Art Experience
Part of Recovery Justice: Being Well
Saturday July 10, 2021 | 8:30 – 9:30 PM
3026 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, 90405
RSVP
Where is here? Can we be together? Can we find stability amidst uncertainty? Join artists Lionel Popkin, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Yrneh Gabon and Susie McKay Krieser, Lola del Fresno, Luciana Abait, Nicola Goode, and Debra Disman in a one-night only interactive outdoor art experience as part of the exhibition Recovery Justice: Being Well.
Begin your experience with a special screening projected onto the Hanger, followed by a live performance of Popkin’s Six Positions on Uncertainty, contemplating a ritual to aid in both grounding oneself as well as working through the idea of social isolation due to the pandemic. View vinyl murals including Gabon and McKay Kreiser’s Oneness, One Mask, One Love, One Heart🖤; Fresno’s The innocents (save a million lives); and Abait’s Mattress from Displacement Series on the Hangar’s Glider Wall outdoor gallery. Check out Kuiland-Nazario’s Sea Change Lab in the parking lot, plus new works from Debra Disman and Nicola Goode.
Lionel Popkin’s Six Position of Uncertainty live performance will begin at 8:25 PM.
This is a live, in-person event. Masks will be required and LA County social distancing guidelines will be followed. Reservations are required.
This program is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, santamonica.gov/arts/artofrecovery, with additional support from Los Angeles County’s WE RISE LA program.
Borderless: Beirut
Introduction to Lebanon’s Visual Art Scene Through House of Today
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 | 10 AM
Members only
ONLINE
Beirut, Lebanon is a city of many cultures that have come together and influenced each other over thousands of years. Even after decades of war and a terrible explosion in August of 2020 that destroyed parts of the city, the resilience of the people of Beirut is evidenced by the breathtaking creativity born from its artists.
For this second iteration of our Borderless series, 18th Street Arts Center’s special membership program focused on creating connections between artist communities around the world, we focus on Beirut through a partnership with the collaborative design platform House of Today.
Founded in 2012, House of Today is a non-profit organization that identifies, nurtures, mentors, curates, showcases and connects emerging Lebanese designers to create a relationship with design experts, regionally and globally. House of Today is dedicated to the enrichment of Lebanon’s design culture.
House of Today will create a film highlighting their community of designers that will premiere in early August and launch with a virtual screening and Q&A to happen on the first anniversary of the 2020 blast, at 10am on August 4, 2021.
What is a Landmark? Cultural Equity in the Remembrance of Places
A Roundtable Discussion with Maria Rosario Jackson, Ruthann Lehrer, Maj Hasager, and Carolyne and Bill Edwards of the Quinn Research Center
Part of Maj Hasager‘s Three Structures Touching
Saturday, August 14, 2021 | 11 AM
As Norman Klein once observed, Los Angeles has a history of forgetting its places. Landmark status and historic designation has traditionally been one of the few ways to protect significant sites from demolition and redevelopment, but it has long been focused on architectural significance, and can be a costly, time-intensive, and restrictive process to pursue. In this panel, we delve into the historical significance of sites linked to Santa Monica’s Black history identified in Maj Hasager’s concurrent exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center entitled Three Structures Touching. We discuss landmarks and the inequities embedded in the process of designating them, and explore alternative modes of remembering the histories of our neighborhood.
With writer and researcher Maria Rosario Jackson, landmarks expert Ruthann Lehrer of the Santa Monica Conservancy, artist Maj Hasager, and the directors of the Quinn Research Center, Carolyne and Bill Edwards. Moderated by 18th Street Arts Center’s Deputy Director Sue Bell Yank.
Three Structures Touching and related programming is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Arts Learning Lab @ Home | Community
Saturday, July 24, August 28, September 25, 2021 | 11 AM
These family-friendly hands-on workshops will navigate our ideas of community with art collectives Alex and Mushi and The Revolution School. Participate in discussion around how we define community, and create artworks that express our connections to one another. How do we find our communities in different ways? And how can we learn to share our abundance with our communities?
Saturday, July 24: “You define in yourself” with Alex and Mushi
Saturday, August 28: “Scrooging for Kids” with The Revolution School
Thank you to our generous supporters!
NEW ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Elana Mann
Exhibiting Artist
February 15 – July 10, 2021
Elana Mann explores practices of listening and amplifies voices that are yet unheard, with the goal of building equanimity in ourselves and increasing equity in our world. She creates artwork that brings a greater consciousness to the listening and speaking we practice in everyday life.
Learn more here.
Sara Daleiden
Exhibiting Artist
2020 – 2021
Sara Daleiden facilitates civic engagement within developing landscapes, exercising arts and cultural exchange strategies. With bases in Los Angeles and Milwaukee through her initiative MKE<->LAX, she encourages local cultures to value neighborhoods, public space, civic art, entrepreneurship and racial and gender equity. Her durational engagement with 18th Street, which includes collaborations with arts worker Nicola Goode,Susannah Laramee Kidd,Dorit Cypis and Kimberli Meyer, has materialized into Recovery Justice: Being Well, an exhibition that will open this Spring.
Cog•nate Collective
September 2020 – June 2021
Cog•nate Collective’s practice seeks to document and theorize markets as important nodes of exchange, facilitating – especially within immigrant, working-class communities – social, cultural and economic transactions that articulate individual and collective relationships to the communities we call home. For their residency and project with 18th Street Arts Center titled Market Exchange, Cog•nate Collective will invite community artisans to undertake a process of envisioning and realizing the role/function of a popular/community-led marketplace in Santa Monica.
Learn more here.
Rashaad Newsome
LACMA Art & Tech
June 2021 – August 2021
Rashaad Newsome’s work celebrates Black contributions to the art canon and creates innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media. Blending several practices, including assemblage, sculpture, film, photography, music, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, he creates a new field that rejects classification. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, Newsome pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, Art History, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between creative computing, social practice, abstraction, and intersectionality. This residency is supported by LACMA.
P.S. ARTS
Organization in Residence
June 2021 – May 2022
Serving children and families in Southern California for 30 years, P.S. ARTS contributes to building creative, civically and economically robust public schools and neighborhoods through the arts. More than 25,000 youth and adults participate in free and subsidized P.S. ARTS programs that foster collaboration, critical thinking, innovation, and wellbeing every year.
Maj Hasager
July 2021
Maj Hasager is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She studied photography and fine art in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, earning an MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Her work deals with power structures, identity, memory, architecture, and the construction of history, looking at how these interlinked phenomena are interpreted and represented culturally and spatially. Her artistic approach is research based and dialogically, and she works predominantly with text, sound, video, and photography. Her residency is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
Jennifer Chia-Ling Ho
July – September 2021
Jennifer Chia-ling Ho (何珈寧) is a Taiwanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York who uses sculpture, installation, and photography to explore the power and limitation of language, presentation, research methodology and how they alter the maker and viewer relationship. Growing up in Taiwan and now living in the US, the language difference and culture displacement are constant reminders of her identity as a Taiwanese but also a foreigner and a nonnative. As she encounters Western references as fragmented, scattered, and inconsistent, she collects and analyzes, and reconstructs them with new interpretations. Her work reveals and questions the invisible systems that have mediated the way we think, act or look at the world and asks how we can reconstruct and decentralize our cultural spaces to include those who have been overlooked. This residency is supported by Taiwan Academy Los Angeles, and the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan.
EXHIBITIONS ON VIEW
Enjoy past and current exhibitions here.
WE ARE OPEN! Please sign up for an appointment here.
Renaming the Airport Galleries
After two years at the Airport Campus, 18th Street will rename the galleries to reflect the unique ways in which artists create new possible worlds through art. The new names for the exhibition spaces at 18th Street Arts Center’s Airport Campus are inspired by the context of aviation. Propeller Gallery (former Airport Gallery) will be the exhibition space that allows new artistic ideas and bodies of work to unfold. The Slipstream Galleries (former North/South Galleries) will be the exhibition spaces that encourage the flow of artistic energy throughout the hangar, creating a unique force that helps artists move forward. Glider Wall, our new outdoor mural space for banners will allow artists to show to a larger audience 24/7. And last but not least, The Hop Space (office/meeting rooms) takes its name from aviation slang meaning “a mission”, which highlights a selection of work from our artistic community by young curators. Each exhibition space now has a name that reveals both its setting and motivation.
Frida Cano
Director of Exhibitions and Residencies
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
Manos a la Obra
Part of the exhibition Un Mundo Nuevo en Pico
An Installation of Market Exchange, a project by Cog•nate Collective
Featuring Ines Garcia, Carmela Morales, Laura Hernandez, Lily Alinaghizadeh, and Abby Juan
June 4 – September 2021
Pico Pop-Up | 2917 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica
The installation Manos a la Obra – hosted virtually at marketexchange.18thstreet.org and in-person at Pico Pop Up as part of the exhibition Un Mundo Nuevo en Pico – brings together handmade items that were created and curated by an intergenerational group of women artisans from Santa Monica. An outdoor opening reception will take place on June 4.
This program is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, santamonica.gov/arts/artofrecovery. Market Exchange was commissioned by 18th Street Arts Center.
We Were All Here
A Collaborative Art Video by Dan Kwong and Paulina Sahagun
June 26, 2021 – July 31, 2021
Online
We Were All Here delves into the local history of “La Veinte,” la familia Casillas, and the Pico neighborhood in Santa Monica through in-depth oral history, personal archives, and a poetic interweaving of individual and collective experiences.
This project is generously supported by the California Arts Council.
Three Structures Touching
Solo exhibition by Maj Hasager
Propeller Gallery
July 19 – September 24, 2021
Three Structures Touching features new works by artist Maj Hasager born out of her years-long collaboration with the Quinn Research Center.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
CURRENTLY ON VIEW:
Recovery Justice: Being Well
Projects by 18th Street Artists facilitated by Sara Daleiden
March 8 – September 10, 2021
Slipstream Galleries and Glider Wall
Participating artists: Sara Daleiden, Nicola Goode, Susie McKay Krieser, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, M Susan Broussard, Lionel Popkin, Yrneh Gabon Brown, Lola del Fresno, Debra Disman, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Gregg Chadwick, Luciana Abait, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Rebecca Youssef, and Dan S. Wang.
This collage of self-organized artist projects highlights the recent circumstances that have evolved during the pandemic through sculptural, photographic, painting and video work. These include three large-scale vinyl murals from Lola del Fresno, Yrneh Gabon Brown and Susie McKay Kriesre, and Luciana Abait on the outdoor Glider Wall.
This exhibition is generously supported by Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, santamonica.gov/arts/artofrecovery, with additional support from Los Angeles County’s WE RISE LA program.
Year of Wonders, redux
Solo exhibition by Elana Mann
March 29 – July 2, 2021
Propeller Gallery
Year of Wonders, redux consists of sculptural folk instruments, video, and works on paper, all part of an ongoing series of sono-sculptures since 2014, and was born out of the nation’s unfolding political changes, passionate social movements, and the global coronavirus pandemic.
Symbolic Consciousness
January 20 – June 18, 2021
The Hop Space
Participating artists: Rebecca Setareh, Elham Sagharchi, Joan Wulf, Luciana Abait, Susan Kleinberg, Sabine Pearlman.
Symbolic Consciousness connects how humans express the elements, and therefore symbolically express themselves, through art.
Facing Darkness
Group exhibition
July 27, 2020 – June 30, 2021
Online
Participating artists: Deborah Lynn Irmas, Beth Davila Waldman, Elham Sagharchi, Gwen Samuels, Rachel Chu, Debra Disman, M Susan Broussard, Lionel Popkin, Leo Garcia, Alexandra Dillon, Gregg A Chadwick, Ameeta Nanji, Yrneh Gabon, Claudia Concha, Luciana Abait, Rebecca Youssef, Crystal Michaelson, Susie McKay Krieser, Melinda Smith Altshuler, David McDonald, Julia Michelle Dawson, Daniela Schweitzer, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Sheila Karbassian, and Joan Wulf.
Facing Darkness presents the multivalent ways that artworks address the human capacity to overcome hardships on both global and personal scales.
corazón de la tierra, an ecotorial by Sarita Doe, is a collaboration with her partner champoy, their daughter Lidagat Luna, Madre Maple Tree, fava bean, maíz, milpa, and their habitat. Weaving animation, nature ASMR and a how-to tutorial on generating aquifers and flower mountains, el corazón de la tierra invites viewers to reconnect art to ecosystem and compost as offering. Sarita Doe is an Earthworker, Mother, Artist and Teacher. This ecotorial is a response to Facing Darkness.
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 Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Asuka Hisa, Director of Learning and Engagement at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This upcoming quarter we have studio visits with Alma Ruiz, Senior Fellow, Center for Business & Management of the Arts at CGU, Sean Maridith, Director/Partner Track 16, 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.
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 making a donation of any amount to 18th Street Arts Center today and we will send you an access code to the Borderless portal.
The portal will grant you access to exclusive Borderless program content and events, including our upcoming tour of Lebanon’s visual art and design scene with House of Today and recordings of past programs, including an introduction of the visual art scene in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the first iteration of Borderless created by artist Mella Jaarsma, founder of Cemeti Institute.
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