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Kim Abeles / Laura Aguilar / Lita Albuquerque / Lynn Aldrich / Gloria Enedina Alvarez / Fumiko Amano / Adelina Anthony / Hector Aristizábal / Linda Arreola / Deborah Aschheim / Karen Atkinson / Lisa Anne Auerbach / B + U (Herwig Baumgartner + Scott Uriu) / Judie Bamber / Miyoshi Barosh / Kelly Barrie /

Bruce Bauman / Stephen Berens / Lynne Berman / Cindy Bernard / Sandow Birk / maRia Bodmann / Natalie Bookchin / Paul J. Botello / Andrea Bowers / Anna Boyiazis / Michael Brewster / Kaucyila Brooke / Nancy Buchanan / Claudia Bucher / David Bunn / Jack Butler / Kristin Calabrese / Ingrid Calame /

Jo Ann Callis / Dulce Capadocia / Carole Caroompas / Barbara Carrasco / Heather Carson / Carolyn Castaño / Castillo / Fernando D. Castro / Jennifer Celio / Ann Chamberlin / Carl Cheng / Wanda Coleman / Jeff Colson / Robbie Conal / Miles Coolidge / Erin Cosgrove / Eileen Cowin / Meg Cranston /

Krysten Cunningham / Dorit Cypis / Joyce Dallal / Lynn Dally / Paolo Davanzo / Joe Davidson / Caryl Davis / Ernesto de la Loza / Marsian De Lellis / Tony de los Reyes / Jacci Den Hartog / Ramiro Diaz-Granados / David DiMichele / John Divola / James Doolin / Heidi Duckler / Sean Duffy /

Sam Durant / Martin Durazo / Sam Easterson / Sam Erenberg / Victor Estrada / Carlos Estrada-Vega / Alice Fellows / Samantha Fields / Frederick Fisher / Robbert Flick / Heather Flood / Alejandra Flores / Sesshu Foster / Andrew Freeman / Dan Froot / Keiko Fukazawa / Diane Gamboa /

Harry Gamboa Jr. / Sheetal Gandhi / Margaret Garcia / Cheri Gaulke / Bia Gayotto / Megan Geckler / Janie Geiser / Ron George / Tony Gleaton / Ken Gonzales-Day / Michael Gonzalez / Marcelyn Gow / Alexandra Grant / Joe Edward Grant / Todd Gray / Phyllis Green / Harold Greene /

Deborah Greenfield / Mark Steven Greenfield / Sherin Guirguis / Katharine Haake / Clement Hanami / Tim Hawkinson / Eloise Klein Healy / Wayne Alaniz Healy / Mary Beth Heffernan / Jacques Heim / Anthony Hernandez / Judithe Hernández / Jen Hofer / Margaret Honda / John Humble /

Steve Hurd / Tara Ison / Malathi Iyengar / Arthur Jarvinen / William E. Jones / Larry Karush / Gere Kavanaugh / Hilja Keading / Michael Kearns / Jeffery Keedy / Martin Kersels / Habib Kheradyar / Carole Kim / Soo Kim / Garland Kirkpatrick / Lewis Klahr / Tom Knechtel / Amy Knoles /

Cindy Kolodziejski / Hirokazu Kosaka / Lies Kraal / Dan Kwong / Suzanne Lacy / Anne LeBaron / Betty Lee / Hae Kyung Lee / Diane Lefer / Elizabeth Leister / Nery Gabriel Lemus / Jesse Lerner / Simon Leung / Joyce Lightbody / Won Ju Lim / Loretta Livingston / Sharon Lockhart /

Alma Lopez / Sarah Maclay / Constance Mallinson / John Malpede / Elena Manferdini / Victoria Marks / Daniel Joseph Martinez / Joseph Mattson / Dan McCleary / Michael C. McMillen / Cameron McNall / Blue McRight / Rebeca Méndez / Maryrose C. Mendoza /

Willie Robert Middlebrook / Tim Miller / Yong Soon Min / Yunhee Min / Robin Mitchell / Michael Mizerany / Susan Mogul / Rebecca Morris / Brian C. Moss / Sandeep Mukherjee / Alan Nakagawa / Robert Nakamura / Jude Narita / Christine Nguyen / Linda Nishio /

Timothy Nolan / Danial Nord / John O’Brien / Oguri / Rika Ohara / Stas Orlovski / Rubén Ortiz-Torres / Paul Outlaw / John Outterbridge / Jorge Pardo / Licia Perea / Sarah Perry / Renée Petropoulos / Phranc / Michael Pierzynski / Lionel Popkin / Pirayeh Pourafar /

Houman Pourmehdi / Phil Ranelin / Susan Rankaitis / Jessica Rath / Tom Recchion / Dont Rhine / Bruce Richards / Melinda Ring / Rebecca Ripple / Christiane Robbins / Sue Ann Robinson / Steve Roden / Luis J. Rodriguez / Claudia Rodriguez / Ken Roht /

Frank Romero / William Roper / Rachel Rosenthal / David Rousseve / Ross Rudel / Ian Ruskin / Alison Saar / Connie Samaras / Louise Sandhaus / Lothar Schmitz / Maureen Selwood / Sophiline Cheam Shapiro / Fran Siegel / Susan Silton / Hector Silva /

Jim Skuldt / Alex Slade / Alexis Smith / John Sonsini / Gabriel Spera / Linda Stark / Therman Statom / Corey Stein / Jennifer Steinkamp / Coleen Sterritt / Barbara Strasen / Erika Suderberg / Sri Susilowati / Janice Tanaka / Lynne Thompson /

Lincoln Tobier / Eloy Torrez / Tran T. Kim-Trang / Shirley Tse / Carrie Ungerman / Denise Uyehara / Patssi Valdez / Linda Vallejo / Mark Dean Veca / Warren W. Wagner / J. Michael Walker / Daniel Wheeler / Michael White / Pae White /

Millie Wilson / Terry Wolverton / Heather Woodbury / Michael Worthington / Raphael Xavier / Takako Yamaguchi / Bruce Yonemoto / Norman Yonemoto / Liz Young / Kent and Kevin Young / Cheng-Chieh Yu / Paul Zaloom / Jody Zellen /

COLA 20

City of Los Angeles

Individual Artist Fellows

Department of Cultural Affairs

Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)

As a leading, progressive arts and cultural agency, DCA empowers Los Angeles’ vibrant communities by supporting and providing access to quality visual, literary, musical, performing, and educational arts programming; managing vital cultural centers; preserving historic sites; creating public art; and funding services provided by arts organizations and individual artists.

Formed in 1925, DCA promotes arts and culture as a way to ignite powerful dialogue, engage LA’s residents and visitors, and ensure LA’s varied cultures are recognized, acknowledged, and expe-rienced. DCA’s mission is to strengthen the quality of life in Los Angeles by stimulating and supporting arts and cultural activities, to ensure public access to the arts for residents and visitors alike.

DCA advances the social and economic impact of arts and culture through grantmaking, public art, community arts, performing arts, and strategic marketing and development. DCA creates and supports arts programming, maximizing relation-ships with other city agencies, artists, and arts and cultural nonprofit organizations to provide excellent services in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

For more information, please visit culturela.org or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/culturela, Instagram @culture_la, and Twitter @culture_la.

Eric GarcettiMayorCity of Los Angeles

Mike FeuerLos Angeles City Attorney

Ron GalperinLos Angeles City Controller

Los Angeles City Council

Gilbert Cedillo, District 1Paul Krekorian, District 2Bob Blumenfield, District 3David Ryu, District 4Paul Koretz, District 5Nury Martinez, District 6Monica Rodriguez, District 7Marqueece Harris-Dawson, District 8Curren D. Price, Jr., District 9Herb J. Wesson, Jr., District 10Mike Bonin, District 11Mitchell Englander, District 12Mitch O’Farrell, District 13Jose Huizar, District 14Joe Buscaino, District 15

Cultural Affairs Commission

Eric Paquette, PresidentCharmaine Jefferson, Vice PresidentJill CohenThien HoJosefina LopezElissa ScrafanoJohn Wirfs

Department of Cultural AffairsCity of Los Angeles

Danielle BrazellGeneral Manager

Daniel TaricaAssistant General Manager

Will Caperton y MontoyaDirector of Marketing and Development

Felicia FilerPublic Art Division Director

Ben JohnsonPerforming Arts Division Director

Joe SmokeGrants Administration Division Director

Leslie ThomasCommunity Arts Division Director

COLA 20 COLA 20

COLA Grant Program History

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs offers grants for the production, creation, presentation, exhibition, and managerial support of art projects in the following areas: culture/history, design, dance, media, music, literary arts, outdoor festivals/parades, theater, traditional/folk art, visual arts, and projects which are multi-disciplinary. Grants are awarded on a competitive basis to bring the highest quality artistic and cultural services to Los Angeles residents and visitors. Since 1990, the Department of Cultural Affairs has awarded over $69 million to local artists, arts organizations, and arts events. In fiscal year 2017/18, the department will offer over $3.2 million in project support to more than 285 local artists and organizations through its Grants Administration Division.

COLA Individual Artist Fellowships

Each COLA grant recipient is offered support to create new work that is showcased in a non-thematic group presentation series. This annual program greatly benefits general audiences and honors a selection of established and creative artists who live and/or work in Los Angeles.

PREFACE12

Letter from Mayor Eric Garcetti13

Certificate from Los Angeles City Council President Herb J. Wesson, Jr. and the Los Angeles City Council

16Letter from Los Angeles City Council Member

Mitch O’Farrell17

Letter from Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) General Manager Danielle Brazell

22Introduction and Overview

by Joe Smoke24

Before Artists Can Create, Intermediaries Need to Build Arguments and Budgets

by Alma Gibson, Andrew Kasdin, and Daniel Tarica26

Facilities to Support COLA and Much Moreby Leslie Thomas

CHAPTER ITHE STORY OF COLA

37Site and Situation—2016 to 2017

by Isabelle Lutterodt39

The First Seven Years—1997 to 2004by Noel Korten

47Epiphanies and Reflections—2005 to 2009

by Mark Steven Greenfield53

Memories—2010 to 2015by Scott Canty

59COLA 20 Anniversary Exhibition

by Jamie Costa61

Dynamic Inclusionby Ben Johnson

67COLA Writers

by Gabriel Cifarelli70

Interview with Michael Alexanderby Christopher Reidesel

CHAPTER IIDOCUMENTATION & INTERACTION

76COLA Printed Matter

by Will Caperton y Montoya80

Time Line of COLA Printed Matter86

COLA Education Programsby Sarah L. Cannon

CHAPTER IIIIDEAS & CONVERSATIONS

91COLA Salon #1

95COLA Salon #2

101COLA Salon #3, Session 1




121COLA Salon #5

124COLA Salon #6

128COLA Salon #7

132COLA Salon #8

CHAPTER IVIN TRIBUTE

140Art and Legacyby Felicia Filer

Tribute Pages142

Michael Brewster — Katharine Haake144

Wanda Coleman — Claudia Rodriguez146

James Doolin — Sesshu Foster148

Ron George — Gloria Enedina Alvarez150

Tony Gleaton — Tara Ison152

Arthur Jarvinen — Diane Lefer154

Larry Karush — Sarah Maclay156

Willie Robert Middlebrook — Lynne Thompson158

Rachel Rosenthal — Terry Wolverton160

Michael White — Joseph Mattson162

Norman Yonemoto — Bruce Bauman

164Acknowledgements

Past Panelists and Commissioners166

Captions and Credits

Contents



COLA 20

13

D e a r F r i e n d s ,

Los Angeles is the creative capital of the world, and a place where we appreciate all the ways that art inspires us to see through new eyes. The arts are also critical to

LA’s economy and identity as a desirable place to live, work, and visit. Today, one in six Angelenos works in a creative industry.

The annual City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships program supports and showcases LA’s most respected fine artists. With this publication, the

Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) celebrates COLA’s two decades of success.

The 271 artists honored by COLA over the last 20 years are activists, professors, storytellers, and, above all, art makers. Their work is at the heart and soul of the

diverse vitality that makes Los Angeles so special. I welcome you to engage with the LA art scene in this catalog.

Sincerely,

E r i c G a r c e t t i M a y o r

C i t y o f L o s A n g e l e s

W H E R E A S …

the opportunity to experience and engage with great works of art, artists, and creatively designed services and products are vital for the well-being of Los Angeles’s residents and tourists;

W H E R E A S …

everyone is capable of creative expression;

W H E R E A S …

professional artists live among us who design and produce very edifying experiences;

T H E R E F O R E B E I T R E S O L V E D …

That the Los Angeles City Council honors the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for starting the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program in 1997.

T H I S C E R T I F I C A T E C O M M E M O R A T E S T H E :

20th Anniversary of theCity of Los Angeles (COLA)

Individual Artist Fellowships Program

For supporting 271 extremely talented, respected, and dynamic literary, performing, and visual-design artists.

This certificate further acknowledges past and current employees of the Department of Cultural Affairs, hundreds of community experts who reviewed thousands of grant proposals

from thousands of worthy applicants, and the arts community as a whole for uplifting an annual spectrum of its established artists as civic treasures.

The COLA program was created and sustained to secure Los Angeles’s place as a world-class city with master artists building established careers and premiering avant-garde pieces.

S O M E A R T I S T S direct the light to show where truth is hiding.

S O M E A R T I S T S challenge what we consider to be valuable.

S O M E A R T I S T Sask questions that most people don’t consider to be important until later in history.

A L L A R T I S T S provoke and encourage us to think and feel.

In the end, we value artists for their use of glamorous or unglamorous materials; for making us feel happy, sad, or a mix of other emotions; for reminding us that both agreement and resistance must be

fostered within a vibrant democracy; and for asking us to consider immediate or glacial change … and always for testing our current convictions and exciting our curiosity for a different future!

Herb J. Wesson, Jr., District 10, President

Gilbert Cedillo, District 1Paul Krekorian, District 2

Bob Blumenfield, District 3

David Ryu, District 4Paul Koretz, District 5

Nury Martinez, District 6Monica Rodriguez, District 7

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, District 8Curren D. Price, Jr., District 9

Mike Bonin, District 11Mitchell Englander, District 12

Mitch O’Farrell, District 13Jose Huizar, District 14

Joe Buscaino, District 15

L O S A N G E L E S C I T Y C O U N C I L


18


Los Angeles, the cultural crossroads of the world, is fueled by creativity. Artists in our region are world-class producers of great works of art, vibrant culture, and commercial products.

Artists are special kinds of civic entrepreneurs, creating their own brands and their own markets with sustainability and innovation as their balancing parameters. The products and experiences they produce have multiple civic values. Even though we may not fully realize the full complexity of their paintings, poems, designs, or performances at face value; after fluid iterations of their ideas and enduring careers, mature artists show us that highly innovative expressions have immense cultural importance. This long-held wisdom is what the COLA program intends to demonstrate.

Over the past twenty years, the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) has celebrated the creativity of over 271 artists through the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artists Fellowship program.

In her important essay, Los Angeles: America’s Artist-Supercity, scholar Ann Markusen notes that artists:

• form a larger share of the workforce in Los Angeles than anywhere in the United States; • are more diversified across, and between, disciplines than anywhere else in the country; • form a population that grew twice as fast the national rate between 1990 and 2000;

and, • are embedded in dispersed communities throughout the region giving them immense

diversity.

In other words, Los Angeles is a premiere place to pursue an artistic career. DCA promotes artists as important drivers of civic vitality. Our COLA program is one of the essential ways DCA accomplishes this goal.

No doubt the current development of arts entrepreneurship programs at colleges and universities builds upon the foundational investments provided to individual artists by public and private philanthropies. DCA is proud of its twenty-year history of supporting master artists as key members of our community contributing to our economy. In 1985, DCA started talking about artists’ residencies and fellowship programs through a strategic planning process propelled by testimonials and professional staff who agreed on the socioeconomic value of honoring artistic inspiration.

Each year a spectrum of LA’s broad and deep pool of creative talent is given the opportunity to express themselves and demonstrate their skills. As you will see and read in the following pages, the fellows have used their COLA grants to strategically build their practices. DCA funding to produce new works allows the artists to go bigger, grander, deeper, and fuller into their craft.

You will also learn about how diligently and collectively DCA’s past and current teams have worked hard to present these new works for all citizens to admire in the COLA exhibitions, performances, and catalogs. I greatly admire professional artists for their incredible self-determination, and I gratefully acknowledge DCA’s past General Managers—Adolfo V. Nodal, Margie Johnson Reese, and Olga Garay-English—for their development and sustenance of the COLA program.

Onward!

D a n i e l l e B r a z e l lG e n e r a l M a n a g e rC i t y o f L o s A n g e l e s D e p a r t m e n t o f C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s ( D C A )

COLA 20

17


When I moved to Los Angeles some thirty years ago, I was determined to see my dreams realized and break into the entertainment industry. Through hard work and

resilience, I learned first hand the value that our creative professionals bring to the City of Angels, their important contributions to our communities, and their inherent

nature to advocate for a world that is fair in both sensitivity and inclusivity.

As Councilmember, and as Chair of the City’s Arts, Parks, and Los Angeles River Committee, I am focused on crafting and supporting policy that fosters a thriving

cultural scene in each of our fifteen Council Districts. The City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program highlights the legacy of high-quality

master artists who have accomplished laudable careers of fifteen or more years and earned the respect of their peers. Collectively they represent a large range

of women and men reflective of the amazing diversity of our population.

I applaud the past and current staff of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) for assuring that access to important art makers and cultural experiences are

available for free or low-cost to LA’s residents and visitors.

On behalf of my colleagues on the Los Angeles City Council, I want to extend my appreciation to DCA for spearheading this recognition, and for helping to create

a vibrant city where public resources help us become better connected.

Sincerely,

M i t c h O ’ F a r r e l lC o u n c i l m e m b e r , 1 3 t h D i s t r i c t

C i t y o f L o s A n g e l e s



The City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program does not focus on LA’s very important and impressive sectors of entertainment company workers or commercial product designers of fashion, furniture, housewares, or toys. These teams of creative workers are already better compensated for their outputs than the region’s equally brilliant community of fine artists who create unique products or experiences with more value for social impact and less interest in mass merchandising. The great reward in supporting avant garde artists is understanding that they do not design to satisfy an existing gap or market. In fact, they create works to launch new questions and possible markets. To date, 271 autonomous entrepreneurs have been awarded these fellowships. All are highly invested as the sole proprietors and personal examples of their risk-taking brands.

The purpose of this publication is to commemorate LA’s 20-year history of master artist validation; which has been endorsed and propelled by many elected officials, civil servants, and community experts. The various chapters and sections which follow will provide a cumulative narration of the people and efforts which have made the COLA program so significant. Some themes may appear across the years from various perspectives, but it is not our goal to reveal one essential story about Los Angeles or its many art scenes. The momentum

PART OF THE MISSION OF THE CITY of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) is to offer grants to artists, nonprofit arts organizations, and outdoor festival producers who serve as socioeconomic catalysts in the synergy of our region. Public dollars from a hotel tourist-tax are contracted to these three types of private agents based upon written proposals submitted in categories to be reviewed by annually assembled teams of community art lovers and experts. DCA’s Grants Administrative Division is one of the primary ways that the City of Los Angeles sponsors thousands of cultural events, which are then produced and promoted as free or low-cost activities for residents and future tourists.

I began my career with the city in 1998, first as a Grants Manager and now as the Grants Administration Division Director. During this same period, an artist fellowship program was launched to honor ten to fifteen artists per year with stipends of $10,000 each. Master artists with more than fifteen years of prior presentations were eligible to apply. The goal of the program was to support the creation of new artworks by a spectrum of LA’s most seasoned and respected avant-garde artists so that the City could premiere these contemporary expressions within a showcase and catalog for the general public. The key objective was, and remains, to validate independent artists working solo or in bonded pairs.

of the COLA Program is dynamic, cooperative, and rolls forward in episodes.

As the program’s primary ambassador, my yearly role has been threefold: to preserve the category and its budget, to enroll annual players within an iterative process, and to facilitate timely outcomes. No year has been the same. None were without challenges. As one might expect, artists follow their intuition (not a proposal submitted 12 months before); teams of grant proposal judges are never predictable (not after reading hundreds of competitive applications); forming a team with independent artists and city staff can beget some anxiety and tension; compliance with public space limitations can prohibit some creative possibilities; and any mandate to create great art on a specific 8-month deadline feels uncomfortable. Yet despite these trials, an overall sense of integrity, collegiality, liberation, and world-class quality has prevailed.

I hope you enjoy the varied images and stories in this anniversary publication. The COLA Individual Artist Fellowship Program is a testament to LA’s understanding of the multi-emblematic importance of avant garde artists. Few other government agencies continue to make these types of investments; hence the City of Los Angeles is an inspiration to others seeking a way to encourage fine artists to push their creative insights, create

COLA 2015, installation view COLA 2001, poster COLA catalogs

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INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEWCOLA 20

Introduction and Overview

sustainable careers, stimulate public dialogue, and foster social congregation.

In addition to the contributors who follow, I would like to acknowledge the dedication of my former co-workers, Michelle Berne, Arleen Chikami, and Don Lee Gaudino; past and current Grant Associates: Sherlan Abesamis, Alma Guzman, Brandy Maya Healy, and Dee McMillin; as well as my community mentors Claire Peeps and Cora Mirikitani.

Joe SmokeDCA Grants Administration Division Director

Before Artists Can Create, Intermediaries Need to Build Arguments and Budgets

from a perspective where arts programs exist independently—whether in a public space or at an art center—to one where the arts are ubiquitous, with programs that work in tandem and in support of other City services.

Unlike most City departments, DCA is supported through the Transient Occupancy Tax (tourist tax revenue) rather than the City’s General Fund, funding DCA employees, facilities, and grants programs. Public art commissions are underwritten primarily through the “Percent for Arts Ordinance,” which mandates that developers pay 1% of the construction cost of a private or public building (excluding residential developments and arts venues). DCA also submits grants and sponsorship proposals to, and receives support from, Federal and State agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well as other philanthropic foundations and corporations and individuals.

Interestingly, the methodology used to explain the complex benefits of the arts is what applicants often experience when applying for the COLA Fellowship. It can be difficult to easily explain why songs, poems, paintings, or theater matter, as the experience can evoke deeply personal responses. Supporters of the arts fundamentally understand how the arts tell stories that connect us to other

We additionally acknowledge our current leaders: Mayor Eric Garcetti, Council President Herb J. Wesson, Jr. and the Los Angeles City Council, our City Controller, City Attorney, and City Administrative Officer for their continued support of creative civic services—from investing in streets and hiring police, to supporting festivals, hiring arts instructors, protecting our natural places, and beautifying our public spaces. We also thank our City Hall colleagues: Terry Sauer, Elaine Owens-Sanchez, Claudia Aguilar, and others for ongoing support of our endeavors to make arts and culture available to everyone.

Alma Gibson, Andrew Kasdin, and Daniel Tarica DCA Administration

ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT ASPECTS of managing a municipal arts agency is to articulate the value of funding arts and cultural programs for the benefit of all residents and visitors. We justify, establish, and prioritize program dollars so that support to artists and arts organizations through programs like the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships continue, and new programs thrive.

While the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) uses specific terminology when working with arts organizations and grantees, this language does not necessarily demonstrate the community benefits provided across Los Angeles. One of the keys to conveying the impact of arts funding is to avoid jargon, with facts based on research, community engagement, and metric analyses. As a municipal arts agency, DCA justifies its programs, ensures that its budgets reflect the City’s values, and defines outcomes for success.

In recent years, the public value of the arts has been tied to its contribution to broad social and economic goals such as improved student performance, economic growth, and community development. In addition to these objectives, the arts sector further emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion. By focusing on collective goals, we develop shared terminology, shifting

cultures and civilizations before us, as well as illustrate the deep reservoir of human resilience. As a civic agency, however, our obligation is to demonstrate how arts and cultural initiatives directly benefit our city.

We, along with our predecessors: Matthew Rudnick, Saul Romo, Emilio Rodriquez, Donald Phaneuf, and Gouri Kothandapany, have all worked as translators to bridge the unique practice and prose of the arts. In addition to our work with the City’s elected officials, we are also assisted by strong community advocates who provide personal testimonies and speak to the value of the arts in the public realm and to the City Council.

During the twenty years commemorated in this catalog, many elected officials have supported DCA, at times fighting for the Department’s very survival. We thank our prior mayors and the past councilmembers, who each understood the power of the arts including: Tony Cardenas, Laura Chick, John Ferraro, Mike Feuer, Ruth Galanter, Jackie Goldberg, Wendy Greuel, Janice Hahn, Mike Hernandez, Nate Holden, Tom LaBonge, Joan Milke-Flores, Cindy Miscikowski, Bernard Parks, Jan Perry, Joy Picus, Bill Rosendahl, Ed Reyes, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Joel Wachs, and Mike Woo, among others.

Judithe HernándezThe Purification, 2013

Rika OharaFilm still from The Heart of No Place, 2009

Diane GamboaConsensual Behavior, 2003

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BEFORE ARTISTS CAN CREATE, INTERMEDIARIES NEED TO BUILD ARGUMENTS AND BUDGETSCOLA 20

28

Facilities to Support COLA and Much More

THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS (DCA) manages and programs twenty-two neighborhood arts and cultural centers, oversees an additional twelve public/private partnership facilities managed by local nonprofit organizations, and manages three Prop K facilities in development. Unique in dispersion and character, DCA’s thirty-seven arts and cultural centers are located from the southern port of San Pedro to the northern hills of Tujunga, and from the western beaches of Venice to the eastern neighborhoods of Lincoln Heights and Boyle Heights. Residents and visitors come to our multidisciplinary facilities to create and learn. In 2011, the exhibition and book Civic Virtue by Pilar Tompkins Rivas outlined the forty-year history of how LA’s community-based art centers have fostered generations of grassroots artists and significant cultural empowerment.

Thirty full-time staff and 100 as-needed/intermittent staff activate DCA’s community facilities—a constellation of classrooms, theaters, historic sites (Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House), as well as galleries—which host more than 100,000 residents and tourists each year. We are most proud that our art centers are safe havens in neighborhoods that would otherwise be terribly underserved and that the majority of our centers are places where young people are engaged to pursue or appreciate unique careers in the arts. We are likewise pleased that DCA facilities host numerous family festivals such as the annual Watts Towers Day of the Drum and Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz Festivals as well as several Dia de Los Muertos Festivals and events.

The flagship exhibition space for the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), is located on a hill of olive trees named Barnsdall Park after its patron, Aline Barnsdall, who donated the property to the City for its use as an arts complex. When the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program was designed in 1996, I was working as the Director of Youth Arts

27

COLA 20

and Education alongside Dr. Earl Sherburn, DCA’s first Director of Community Arts. It was Dr. Sherburn who joined Roella Louie in connecting the concept of a master artist grant program with the concept of an annual exhibition of premiere artworks by these same leading figures. As the current Director of Community Arts, I would like to thank all of the current and former employees of Barnsdall Park who have participated in managing aspects of COLA. Elsewhere in this publication, you will read stories by individual LAMAG curators and managers of our education programs all of whom coordinated this triangulation between our grants program, city venues, and local master artists.

These same individuals are responsible for the regional and often national acclaim of LAMAG’s exhibitions and educational programs. As a team, we remain dedicated to creating rapid rotations of exhibitions showcasing relevant themes and thousands of emerging and established local artists. COLA in particular, reflects the aspirational quality and dynamic diversity of Los Angeles. None of the COLA shows are ever alike; each provides a different mix. Yet no matter what the flavor, every COLA exhibition or performance showcase offers the public a free opportunity to see ultra-contemporary work and to engage with important artists who have achieved influential status in respect and recognition.

When residents and tourists visit Barnsdall Park, they leave with an understanding of why it is considered one of the crests in the City’s crown of facilities. And the annual springtime COLA exhibition is definitely a shining jewel in that crown.

Leslie ThomasDCA Community Arts Division Director




i.the

story of cola

38

management. Under the direction of Noel Korten, Mark Steven Greenfield, Scott Canty, and now myself, LAMAG has assisted hundreds of COLA fellows and thousands of others artists with refining and presenting new work. Our collective methodology of staging art in municipal spaces involves balancing an artist’s intentions against public understanding. This process involves critical thinking, endearing hope, some humor, and leaps of faith. In the end, our labor is reflected throughout the mission of COLA: to showcase innovative expression, praise fine artists, and translate cultural relevance.

Artists have long made Los Angeles their home for commercial opportunities, and the decade before 1997 was a particularly formative era for LA’s avant-garde art scene, with nationally recognized figures emerging in dance, design, music, theater, visual arts, and alternative media. Indeed, from 1970 to the present, the quality of artists groomed in various undergraduate and graduate programs in LA has highlighted the city’s position as a wellspring of cutting-edge talent. Programs like COLA have certainly helped to motivate mid-career artists, promote their value in our region, retain their engagement, and establish our world-class reputation.

As we celebrate this historical anniversary, I look ahead to the next twenty years and dream of how much more we can accomplish to support local artists. As one of the few municipalities in the nation that provides artists with significant funding, free presentation facilities, and commemorative publications, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs continues to gain momentum as an advocate for creative possibility for all.

Site and Situation\ Isabelle Lutterodt

DCA LAMAG Director

2 0 1 6 t o 2 0 1 7

ON MAY 4, 1997, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) installed the first City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship exhibition. The show featured twelve Los Angeles–based artists who had been awarded funds to generate new works by a panel of eleven independent community experts. That day marked an important turning point for the city in validating the contributions of avant-garde fine artists. In his introduction to this exhibition, former Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) General Manager Adolfo V. Nodal noted, “the heart of the art world is the artist,” and that leading-edge artists deserve municipal resources to embolden their careers.

A few years prior, a committee was formed to explore the best ways to support LA artists. Input from the community resulted in the concept of a “studio-artist awards program,” which was developed by Roella Hsieh Louie, who directed DCA’s grants, public arts, and planning initiatives, with accord from Earl Sherburn who directed DCA’s visual arts spaces and programs. Against a nationwide decline in funding to support independent artists after the Culture Wars of the 1980s, DCA staff succeeded in encouraging our city to raise its game and pick up some slack. In the years since those initial steps, DCA has sustained its commitment to supporting annual spectrums of master artists. The foundational bedrock has been DCA Grants Administration Division Director, Joe Smoke, who is trained as both an art historian and a fine artist. COLA’s communal nature and unfaltering succession comes from Joe’s energy and stewardship.

The collaborative process of guiding COLA also affords important lessons in curatorial

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Anderson building dedicated to contemporary art was less than ten years old. Ann Philbin had not yet arrived at the UCLA Hammer Museum. About 1995, we determined to become more strategic about our modest resources. Fellow curator Scott Canty and I formed an Artist Advisory Committee to collect community feedback about LAMAG exhibitions and programs. The Department of Cultural Affair’s (DCA) General Manager, Adolfo V. Nodal, met with our committee to discuss how the Department could best assist with the sustaining needs of the visual arts community. One of the suggestions from that discussion was to find a new way to reward individual achievement and encourage the promotion of cutting-edge solo work. This community feedback was the seed of what was to become the COLA Fellowship program.

When the first COLA grants where announced there was great anticipation. At the moment of engagement, we felt some anxiety about the vast empty space ahead in supporting the productivity of a large region of high-quality, mid-career artists. And we did experience a logjam of superb candidates (most of whom would learn to patiently wait for their reward over many grant cycles). Indeed the first years of COLA seemed like a who’s-who of the city’s most honorable “artist’s-artists” who were well respected by arts professionals and other artists.

The First Seven Years\ Noel Korten

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BEFORE THE CITY of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program was inaugurated, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) staff used its personal networks to search for undiscov-ered and under-recognized artists to participate in contemporary exhibitions. We responded to inquiries, attended alternative spaces, and made streams of studio visits to broadly understand and interpret the local scene. Most importantly, we talked with individual colleagues who would later be enrolled in collective dialogue as COLA grant peer panelists. Group exhibitions were typically organized around common threads connecting the works of many artists. We worked with small budgets to mount modest presentations. Occasionally we would secure special funding to focus on a single artist that we felt was especially deserving of a major survey. The word “trenchant’” might best describe the very best exhibitions at LAMAG before 1997.

State and local grants for artists were typically given to support projects in communities, prisons, and/or schools. Though important contributions, none directly supported an artist’s primary endeavor—to think deeply and act individually to create new expression. Likewise, the Los Angeles art scene was leaner twenty years ago. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) was the primary venue for contemporary art, although its broader mission was to bring the art world to Los Angeles. There was no Broad Museum.

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6./ Erika Suderberg, A Lover’s Wunderkammern (Sophie Replies), 1998

7./ Jorge Pardo, Something to Look At, 1997

8./ Robin Mitchell, Knowable Universe, 1998

9./ Susan Rankaitis, Peripheral Memory (detail), 2001

COLA 20 THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS\1997 TO 2004

Eventually the program guidelines became more precise, and the applicants became more prag-matic. From the start, the artists have been selected primarily for past accomplishments with less emphasis on their proposed project. They were, and still are, selected only for the quality of their mission, and without any thematic or material considerations. An expressed goal of the program was to support continuation, iteration, or develop-ment of new ideas, depending upon each artist’s current arc. As a result, each year’s exhibition was a curatorial challenge of not knowing what kinds, sizes, or numbers of works would be created, and how best to present a selection of these very strong and disparate works within a single show.

Studio visits were structured as benchmarks for payments as well as to track each artist’s prog-ress. In the first years of the program, we formed a team of assessors: Roella Hsieh Louie, who managed policy and payments; Mark Johnstone, who fostered the concept of promotional posters and eventually documentary catalogs to extend the reach of the program; along with two LAMAG curators; gallery education programs director

Sara Cannon; and exhibition preparator Michael Lewis Miller. In the beginning we were a formidable group to visit each artist’s studio, but as time went by the group shrank down to pretty much just assistant curator Scott Canty and myself.

The inaugural exhibition involved several ambitious “installations,” a relatively new art term for site-specific environments of objects that existed only for the life of the show. Carl Cheng created an Art Tool that was nearly six feet wide and three feet tall and traveled nearly twenty feet up and down the width of the gallery, scooping, raking, dribbling, and dumping sand to produce an ever-changing and mesmerizing sandscape. Michael Brewster built an entire room that was queued by the pres-ence of a visitor as a sound installation. Slowly Drift came alive and bathed the subject with ambiguous sounds providing a self-conscious and meditative experience. Kim Abeles tackled the entirety of Los Angeles with her sculptural installation Legend for Mapping: (Los Angeles Architecture), while Michael C. McMillen’s installation The Moon of Cyclops encouraged viewers to peer into scientific space. Among the sculptures and paintings,

painted and fused together with silicone. In the pre-printed catalog it is minimally described as “mixed media.”

Each year a different panel selects the grant recipients, representing a very different mix of media. In 1999, there were four artists showing photographic works, a mixed-media installation, a sculptural grouping of metal structures, three artists showing paintings, and conceptual artist Sam Durant’s installation Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed and Utopia Reflected, which included two gravelike mounds of soil on mirrors with buried speakers that emitted audio from one famous and one infamous rock concert. A lengthy scroll by artist Tim Hawkinson, entitled Somnambulist, appeared to be a re-creation of an Eadweard Muybridge photographic sequence of a hurdler running and jumping but was instead produced by the artist painstakingly lowering himself with ropes and cables onto paper laid over a paint covered mattress in positions that mimicked the fluidity of an athlete in motion. Among the photographic works were Sharon Lockhart’s large prints, Enrique Nava

Tony Gleaton and Harry Gamboa Jr. showed photo-graphic portraits of specific cultural communities. Performance artist Martin Kersels showed “perfor-mative objects” and amusing photo-documents.

The 1998 COLA exhibition likewise included many memorable works, including Erika Suderburg’s A Lover’s Wunderkammern (Sophie Replies), a narra-tive of objects seemingly left behind. The show also featured three photographers, two artists whose work dealt with books, and four styles of painters. James Doolin produced streetscape paintings, which we previewed during two studio visits and admired for their impressive detail as character studies. A set of eighteen small paintings by Bruce Richards formally and precisely documented a species of turtle under the series title A House is Not a Home. The COLA show also premiered a very large installation by glass artist Thermon Statom, entitled Something Other Than What Was Available at Press Time. Two days before the opening there was no sign of this work, which was meant to fill the entire gallery at the Junior Arts Center. The artist ultimately delivered an overwhelming assembly of massive sheets of glass, lavishly

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1./ Phyllis Green, Chimaera series, 1997

2./ Eileen Cowin,stills from … and the daughter married the prince, 1998

3./ COLA 1997–98 installa-tion view

4./ David Bunn, installation view, 1998

5./ Installation view Liz Young, Miss Fits and Will Knot, 2000 –1

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16./ Sandow Birk, The TPF in Sheridan Square (Stonewall), 1999

15./ Lynn Aldrich, foreground, Ingrid Calame, background, COLA installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 25–June 4, 2000

14./ Constance Mallinson, detail from Endless Painting, 1991

13./ Linda Nishio, COLA installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 25–June 4, 2000

12./ Cameron McNall, COLA installation view, 2002

11./ John O’Brien, End Table, 199910./ Daniel Joseph Martinez, COLA installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 25–June 4, 2000

Enedina: Oaxaca Exhibit Hall, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, which ostensibly showed a worker repairing the museum’s stone floor. In fact, the artist staged this scene so that the worker seamlessly seems to fit into the historical context to conflate past and present truths.

From 1999–2001 Barnsdall Park was closed for a major landscape renovation so DCA partnered with three sister institutions to present COLA exhibitions during these years. These were excep-tional experiences for LAMAG’s staff as we had the opportunity to work alongside colleagues at private museums.

In 2000, the Hammer Museum hosted the COLA exhibition and, for a new category, five COLA performing artists were showcased at DCA’s Los Angeles Theater Center in downtown Los Angeles. I have fond memories of working with Ann Philbin at the Hammer Museum to place the COLA fellows’ works in their galleries. Ingrid Calame’s forty-foot-long painting occupied an entire wall and was fronted by Lynn Aldrich’s sculptures, which occupied both the floor and adjacent walls. The

seemingly abstract shapes in Calame’s painting were derived from tracings of stains from the City’s sidewalks that are arranged into what the artist called “constellations.” Aldrich’s sculptures were constructed from common garden hoses to form a giant, urnlike form, while lampshades were mounted sideways on the wall to create individual ganzfelds. Both artists translated elements of common experience into new, beautiful works.

Another surprising, but fortuitous juxtaposition was the photo/text works of Daniel Joseph Martinez with a video by Susan Mogul in which the artists each explored “choices.” In one piece, entitled Self Portrait #: George and Daniel; In an insane world it was the sanest choice or How one philosophizes with a Hammer, Martinez digitally imposed a face onto the famous 1968 photograph of a Vietcong operative being executed. Nearby, Mogul’s seem-ingly light-hearted video, entitled Sing, O Barren Woman, is a musical mock-celebration with women talking and singing about the contemporary choice of many women to not have children. In the end, I like to think that our COLA partnership with the Hammer Museum was one seed in inspiring this

crew was a nearly nine-foot-high “rocket” made from cow bones, entitled Beast of Burden, by artist Sarah Perry. The rocket was very heavy, awkward, and delicate; it was carefully relocated from the artist’s studio in the desert east of LA County.

In 2002, Karin Higa and I co-wrote the catalog introduction for the COLA show hosted by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Like the Skirball, this cultural museum was not exclusively a venue for contemporary art, although Ms. Higa formed a solid bridge between heritage and living expression. In this instance, LAMAG staff collaborated with Karin Higa, Director of the Curatorial and Exhibitions Department; Kristine Kim, Associate Curator; and Clement Hanami, Director of Support Services. For the show, street-poster artist Robbie Conal produced a “history painting,” Daniel Wheeler created a linoleum mound titled My Pompeii, and Linda Stark showed beautifully ominous Black Widow paintings. About the exhibition, Higa and I wrote:

Although it is not thematic, there are convergences that occur throughout the

institution to formulate its now famous LA Biennial, popularly called Made in LA.

In 2001, DCA mounted the COLA show at the Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish cultural center that was not then entirely accustomed to the wild whims of living artists. Indeed, this iteration of COLA included some especially challenging sculptural works, and I recall our hosts permitting extensive latitudes. Laura Aguilar showed a stunning series of black-and-white photographs of herself nude as an element of the desert landscape. Sandow Birk showed a series of works entitled The Rake’s Progress: The Life and Times of Rafael Perez, painted in the historical manner of William Hogarth’s narrative works and related the recent real-world confessions of a corrupt LAPD officer in the Rampart Division. Jennifer Steinkamp produced a digital light projection titled Tra La Boom, which was fitted precisely into the gemetry of the gallery’s architecture, and Liz Young produced an ambitious installation called Miss Fits and Will Knot, which consisted of a cabinlike room with a full-sized horse and a hand-sewn dress on a mannequin form. Perhaps most exciting for our

THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS\1997 TO 2004

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one-sided cell phone conversations that surround us even more so today. In conceptual opposition, Habib Kheradyar showed mysterious multimedia portraits (slide projections onto silk that produced moiré patterns) of four iconic female Los Angeles art dealers in a series entitled L.A. Art Court.

In 2004, I retired from the City of Los Angeles, and Mark Steven Greenfield and Scott Canty took over management of the COLA program. My overarching memory of the COLA program remains its amazing power to encourage innovation. I enjoyed the anticipation of seeing how new work was developed by master artists as they solved deep and self-reflective puzzles. The studio visits hold some of my fondest memories because they provided an opportunity to hear artists talk about their intentions and ambitions. I gained great curatorial insight into each artist’s practice and developed myriads of respectful relationships.

A new aspect to 2004 was the additional of a COLA literary artist fellowship category. Inaugural fellow Wanda Coleman produced new poems and presented them in her signature style within the same showcase as the performing fellows: musician Pirayeh Pourafar, dancer Deborah Greenfield, and performance artist Jude Narita. Among the strong and superb mix of artists in the 2004 design-visual exhibition, I distinctly recall Cindy Bernard’s documentary photographs of band shells as conceptual spaces where artists share the ideal of “the commons.” I also recall Jack Butler’s pinhole camera photographs, which embrace car culture as an exultation of common-place but treasured objects. Ann Chamberlin’s lovely, intimate narrative paintings juxtapose her familial experiences in war-torn Medellin, Columbia. John Sonsini’s gestural portraits both caress and protect the anonymity of Latino, working-class, immigrants. And Dan McCleary’s subjects are the many individuals we encounter every day as fast-food workers, receptionists, or clerks. In a further exploration of anonymity, Jody Zellen’s multimedia installation bathed the audience with the kinds of oddly intimate,

directing many superb projects during the same years in which COLA evolved.

In 2003, COLA returned to Barnsdall Park with linked presentations of visual artists at LAMAG and performing artists at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater. In addition, a COLA design fellowship category was inaugurated with five designers included in the exhibition through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Interestingly, there were no painters or sculptors in this cycle of grantees, while a great number of the selected artists were engaged with ideas tied to science. There were several of large installations, including one by Lothar Schmitz titled Biotopia, and an even larger and interactive environment by Deborah Aschheim, titled Neural Architecture, which utilized vinyl structures, lights, and motion sensors to suggest a living archi-body. Pae White created an arrange-ment of stunning, mirrorlike, mercury coated glass and ceramic blocks. Other artists showed video and photographic works, including Susan Silton, whose correspondence with storm chasers was captured in her video tornado in a jar; plus a series of still images, titled The Speed of Debris.

exhibition …. Most curious are multiple representations of the physical land-scape—some literal and some less obvious—that can be seen in each of the galleries. A second grouping is those works that reflect on the personal, public, and political undulations of the human and/or social landscape. It is interesting that while the inclusion of design might seem to further diversify the exhibition, the work of the designers in one way or another shares a conceptual and formal language with that of the other artists in the exhibition. As Curators we were intrigued with the connections that could be made between divergent practices, and we feel that this is evidence of these individual artists’ shared experiences of time and place.

Ms. Higa passed away from complications of cancer in 2013, and I like to think that her co-management of the 2002 COLA program was a professional benchmark for us both. She was an incredibly smart and well-respected leader

THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS\1997 TO 2004

20./ Sarah Perry, Beast of Burden (Bone Rocket), 1999–2000

24./ John Sonsini, Luis, 201419./ Carole Caroompas, COLA installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 25–June 4, 2000

23./ Alexis Smith, Lust/Rust/Dust (after Robert Indiana), 2002

18./ Lynn Aldrich, Storm Surge Salvage, 2014

22./ Deborah Greenfield, from Respirame (Breath Me), 2002, pictured: Deborah Greenfield and Abigail Caro

17./ Dulce Capadocia, performance view, COLA 2001, Mother Night

21./ Loretta Livingston, Leaving (Evidence), 2003

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Epiphanies and Reflections\ Mark Steven Greenfield

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It became increasingly apparent to me that I needed to adjust my approach to the myriad of challenges each exhibition presented. I retreated to spiritual mindsets and practices. Surrender, tolerance, acceptance, and flexibility became my guiding principles. I started looking forward to studio visits, and occasionally found myself fighting off “studio envy.” I even suffered a case of “travel envy” when Bia Gayotto’s project research took her to the Azores, a group of islands I had visited briefly as a child and have never forgotten.

Though I had previously exhibited with Alison Saar, Lita Albuquerque, Castillo, and Cheri Gaulke, most of the COLA fellows were only familiar to me by name or reputation. I will admit to having been a little starstruck at first. I worked with a number of public artists in the early 1970s thru Brockman Gallery and Mural Resources, the forerunner to the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), and was well aware of the power of murals to transform communities. I was happy to see the work of such notable muralists as Wayne Healy, Paul Botello, Eloy Torrez, and Ernesto de la Loza receive well- deserved recognition. The participation of these artists in COLA exhibitions gave me my greatest personal satisfaction.

I remain continually amazed at the efficiencies and resources artists develop to create their work. Sometime the lines blurred between their living

AFTER SPENDING NEARLY TEN YEARS at the Department of Cultural Affairs’ (DCA) Watts Towers Arts Center, I became director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) in 2004. When I arrived at the gallery, the wheels of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship Program for 2005 were already in motion, and I was immediately caught up in its momentum with studio visits, meetings, and assignments. I had been a panelist for COLA in 2002 and maintained mixed feelings from the lamentations of some artists who had applied countless times.

I curated exhibitions for over twenty years, but nothing could have prepared me for organizing a COLA exhibition. In the past, I was used to organizing work around a theme and putting together like-minded artists in explorations of a concept or issue, but COLA was completely different. Artists were encouraged to experiment and push boundaries, and with space, time, and resources, they had a mandate. At the same time, I had a responsibility to consider issues of public safety and security while maintaining the integrity of the work. I could offer advice and resources, but withheld opinion and critique. Artists would sometime change direction in the middle of their fellowship, causing a collective sigh amongst the staff and a scramble to adjust. With few exceptions, we did our best to accommodate the artists, but some disagreements were unavoidable.

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EPIPHANIES AND REFLECTIONS\2005 TO 2009

from the roof of the LAMAG. Her topographical installation decayed daily, as small collections of dirt particles and chunks occasionally fell to the floor.

Among the many works realized in the gallery under my tenure, Carrie Ungerman’s would rank among my favorites. Combining the ephemeral and the ethereal, her room-sized installation employed recycled materials and a host of reflective elements that evoked a meditative atmosphere. I would find myself drawn to her space on many occasions, just to sort out the complexities of the day. Fran Siegel’s transparent wall-art had a similar effect. Equally compelling was the masterful installation of Joyce Dallal, entitled Descent, which employed hundreds of paper airplanes, each imprinted with text taken from the United Nation’s Geneva Conventions.

an hour later, she triggered the alarm causing the police to respond to one of their more unusual incidents.

I had seen the performance work of Hirokazu Kosaka on a number of occasions and felt an affinity for his artistic priorities. Having a meditation practice in common, I was reminded of the importance of putting positive vibrations in the world, as a counter weight to negative environmental energies. His installation employed nearly a ton of charcoal blocks on a massive platform, with clay pots suspended from the bottom designed to amplify the sound of performers (himself and a Butoh dancer) moving upon the blocks. I remember it as being among the most peaceful installations I experienced.

Caryl Davis applied mud to the gallery walls in the configuration of the Los Angeles skyline as seen

fan that inflated his sculpture made conversa-tion in our offices nearly impossible. We tried to buffer the sound using pillows and blankets, but all our efforts were futile. For more than a month, staff walked around in a shell-shocked daze and frequently stepped outside to regain concentration.

Among the most intriguing COLA projects for me was the work of Sam Easterson. He had become adept at mounting micro-cameras on animals and was establishing the world’s largest library of video footage captured from the point of view birds, mammals, and reptiles.

Claudia Bucher had an ambitious installation involving multiple elements in which she performed in scuba gear, remaining motionless in a trance for hours. She was so good at it that one time the staff forgot she was there, left work, and locked the gallery for the night. When she awoke, nearly

and working space. Everyone’s garage served, at the very least, as storage space. Among the most memorable studios I visited were Steve Roden’s Pasadena home, which is an architectural outlier; Cindy Kolodziejski’s studio, where conversations were harmonized by her two pet peacocks; and Janie Geiser’s studio, with puppets that enchanted some boyhood memories. I also remember creative distinctions between the studios and the prac-tices of Margaret Garcia, Kaucyila Brooke, Natalie Bookchin, Andrew Freeman, Stas Orlovski, Judie Bamber, Alex Slade, and Suzanne Lacy.

Each COLA exhibition came with its unique set of problems, and I began to relish the prospect of tackling every one of them. I was overjoyed when a longtime friend, Clement Hanami, was selected for a fellowship. In the end, his installation consisted of a twenty-five-foot inflated jumper in the shape of an elephant, but the noise from the

COLA 20

6./ J. Michael Walker, St. Susan Place, 2007

7./ Linda Arreola, Caravan, 2010 8./ Claudia Bucher, installation view. Dream wars in the LA memosphere: From kelp forests to salt flats, the secret life of mematars revealed: Claudzilla and Carman in love, 2006

9./ Dorit Cypis, Stranded Subject (weekends) series, 2006

1./ Wayne Healy, Carwash Chisme, 2003

2./ Carrie Ungerman, rosco blue, 2007

3./ Cindy Kolodziejski, portrait by Robert Pacheco

4./ Kaucyila Brooke, installation view, The Boy Mechanic, 1996 ongoing, Los Angeles Edition, 2005

5./ Coleen Sterritt, Ways of Seeing, 2007

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COLA provided as rich a learning experience for me as anything I had encountered in academia. The wealth of ideas I was exposed to, the varied approaches to analytical thinking, the negotiation between concept and process, and the exposure to the possibilities and complexities of working in different mediums all served to affirm my resolve and commitment to contemporary art. The value I place on the experience I gained is immeasurable and has profoundly influenced both my approach to curation and my own artistic practice. It was indeed an honor and privilege to be able to work with those who had been validated as a spectrum of LA’s best. When I retired from civil service in 2009, Scott Canty provided continuity for the years that followed.

photographer showed up at his studio and was intimidated by the imposing figure of her plus-sized black male model. Willie described the photographer as “freaked out.”

Looking back over the years, I notice that each COLA exhibition had a unique character or ambience. Some shows were tech heavy while others were decidedly nostalgic with references to personal histories. Works blurred the lines between art and science or were aimed at establishing dialogue between the organic and the architectural. In most instances, the art that viewers first encountered at the center of the two-wings of LAMAG set a tone for subsequent interactions and balanced the two sides of the exposition. I always found the mystery of how this centerpiece would become evident to be one of the most intriguing aspects of my curatorial supervision.

would take exception to professional editing. Editors would go back and forth on acceptable word counts and artists would complain. In other instances, artists felt the catalog design clashed with their works. However, one of the marks of good graphic design is its ability to be timeless. In this regard, I feel the COLA catalogs hold up remarkably well.

Another surprising aspect of COLA catalog produc-tion involved artists’ portraits. Though artists are used to having their work photographed, many become uncharacteristically shy when it comes to images of themselves. I recall that Janice Tanaka was the most camera-shy, and it took extra amounts of coaxing and compromise to secure her enigmatic image. Willie Robert Middlebrook notoriously avoided being in front of the lens, very ironic for such an accomplished photographer. On the agreed upon time and date, the catalog

One of the more difficult decisions I made regarding an installation concerned the work of Rebecca Ripple. Though she created a stunning sculptural piece that required a lot of breathing space, many elements protruded at levels that might have caused injury to patrons. It became necessary to put up a barrier that, unfortunately, looked like an element of the piece. It was symptomatic of the regrettable trade-offs I made in maintaining the integrity of artists’ intentions with my other eye on potential liabilities.

Among the opportunities that accompany the COLA exhibitions are the production of the catalogs. In most instances, the fellows selected writers who were familiar with their work or, if a writer was not identified by a given date, I would assign someone from LAMAG staff or prevail on a community critic or collegial curator. No matter the writer, most essay deadlines were unheeded, and many writers

EPIPHANIES AND REFLECTIONS\2005 TO 2009

14./ Rebecca Ripple, installation view, Prospect, 2010

10./ Rika Ohara, stills from The Heart of No Place, 2009

15./ Michael Pierzynski, Untitled, 2007

11./ Maureen Selwood, I Am Measuring You, A Shoe Falls, Empire of Dreams, 2009

16./ Shirley Tse, foreground: Quantum Shirley Series: Superposition, 2009; background: Quantum Shirley Series: Double Comfort of Soft Filled Space, 2009

12./ Bia Gayotto, map from: “Portugal, Cartographic Movement,” Lisbon 1960. Part of research for The Sea is Not Blue / o mar não é azul, 2009

13./ Louise Sandhaus, installation view of research material for Earth-quakes, Mudslides, Fires, and Riots: California and Graphic Design, book proposal, 2008

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As the chief curator at LAMAG between 2011 and 2015, I relished taking three or more studio appointments with each fellow. These visits allowed me to see the artists working in stages on their projects. Our interpersonal discussions helped me become an informed advocate for their work, assess their likely installation needs, and forecast potential problems. In the end, each fellow and I collaboratively decided on the number of brand-new works to be premiered. My colleagues and I designed the gallery space to best accommodate all players. As we came to expect, COLA pieces ranged from small to massive, singular to serial, representational to abstract, explicit to conceptual, static to kinetic, and quiet to loud. Each collection of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and equipment-powered works needed to fit within a 10,000-square-foot gallery space. As curator, I hoped to provide harmony between each set as well as some progressive understanding to the touring public.

The final years of the recession presented many challenges—these were complicated times. We suffered staff layoffs, facility open-hour

I BEGAN A CURATORIAL CAREER with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in 1986, ultimately developing exhibitions for the Bridge Gallery between City Hall and City Hall East, LAX and Ontario airport terminals, and finally at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG). During my thirty years of civil service I was party to the entire history of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship program. In fact, I was assigned to create a mini-retrospective for the tenth anniversary of COLA in 2007. Working with a willing selection of prior fellows, we commissioned them to create two small works in their unique style. The result-ing exhibition premiered at LAMAG, traveled to several regional sites, and ended with a six-month installation at LAX airport.

Over the years, I have watched the quality and prestige of the COLA program grow and have been impressed by the lofty visions of each class of artists, performers, and writers. They have changed the mindset of our government by or-chestrating a place for the highest level of artistic accomplishment within civic dialogue.

Memories\ Scott Canty

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Space movement. Heather Flood produced the freestanding, colorful Wonder Wall constructed of woven aluminum. This was in fact a prototype for a wall system with multiple possible applications in art and architecture. Carole Kim developed a complex and engaging work in her signature style of combining performances, moving images, creative props, and experimental music. I remem-ber feeling intense wonder while watching her fellowship piece, SCAN.

In the 2014 exhibition, Corey Stein, Hector Silva, and Jennifer Celio had the most amazing contribu-tions. All three made works at larger scales than ever before. Corey Stein, who once dreamed of being a taxidermist, developed humorous beaded objects, quirky watercolors, and mixed-media stuffed animals. Part of her installation Malling Bears was a full-size California grizzly bear standing upright with a diorama in its stomach.

to tap into their innovative or adventurous wisdom and develop works that might otherwise go unrealized. Although the LAAFL was a pilot that did not need to be repeated, launching it and combining it with COLA was a brilliant way to underwrite the continuity of one program and test its ability to morph into another.

I have many fond memories of installations and exhibitions throughout the years. For the COLA 2011 exhibition Danial Nord produced a mixed- media installation entitled State of the Art, which included recycled televisions and electronics in the form of a fallen Mickey Mouse. This statement on the darkness and trashiness of pop culture and television was superb. Working with formal and conceptual theories, Heather Carson created dazzling pieces that seemed brighter than the sun. Her light sculptures referenced both East Coast Minimalism and the West Coast Light and

the fellows participated in two exhibitions, one outdoors at Plaza de la Raza and its surrounding Lincoln Park, and the second indoors at LAMAG. The first segment was called the Los Angeles Artists Fellowship Laboratory (LAAFL) for which each fellow created a site-specific installation. Among the artists in this exhibition, two stand out in my mind—Lynne Berman and Diane Gamboa. Berman designed and installed The Complaint Center, a series of wooden frames in various sizes and shapes to which she applied paper sheets that included phrases and texts related to the local community and invited audience participation. Gamboa created large vinyl flags and banners illustrating her signature-style of portraiture, mounted outside of a boathouse pergola.

The Fellowship’s purpose is to give the artists flexibility to step out of their comfort zone and create a body of work that provides an opportunity

reductions, early retirements followed by hiring freezes, and yet through it all, the COLA program survived. In 2010, we were asked to provide voluntary budget cuts of 10% after signing grant contracts for full amounts. This was exceedingly uncomfortable for the COLA fellows and staff. Both parties proceeded to reach intended goals with full funding because some other grant contracts withdrew their efforts due to the scarcity of matching money. Another aspect of COLA’s survival mode involved temporarily replacing printed editions of widely disseminated public catalogs with online-catalogs available as print-on-demand.

During the worst of our budget woes, the COLA team turned to its forward-thinking Public Art Division Director Felicia Filer and Arts Manager Pat Gomez to identify and apply funding from a hospital facility development percent-for-public-art project to fund the contracts for COLA fellows. So in 2011,

5./ Rebeca Mendez, Never Happened Again, Glaciers 2, 2012

6./ Carolyn Castaño, Mario, Yo Quiero Sportie LA!, 2007

7./ Mark Steven Greenfield Blamo, 2012

8./ Hector Silva, Homeboy With Sunflowers, 2014

9./ Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled II (Antico [Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi] Bust of a Young Man, and Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.), 2011

4./ Heather Carson, light/CONCENTRIC, 2007

3./ Sherin Guirguis, Untitled (hexagon), 2015

2./ Soo Kim, (A long pause), 20101./ Lisa Anne Auerbach, American Megazine #1, 2013

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paper. I recall that this geometric mountain pulsated with color and reflected light.

I am exceedingly proud to have participated in the first twenty years of the COLA program. It was always a trial and a triumph to install and interpret the works of these master artists for the general public. Each and every fellow demonstrated her or his value to the creative vibrancy of Los Angeles. As I approached my retirement, Isabelle Lutterodt joined LAMAG to steer the future of this wonderful program.

returned from an artist’s residency in China. For her COLA fellowship she paid homage to the Chinese ceramic artist, Ai Weiwei, whose many persecutions and imprisonments have only served to make him a greater hero. Fukazawa’s installation was a giant bicycle, against a theatrical backdrop with small porcelain flowers falling as rain over the scene. Marsian De Lellis, created hundreds of handmade dolls and puppets and performed from within his presentation as his alter-ego, Andrea Lowe. His strange and haunting installation (In) Animate Objects blended horror and suspended disbelief as intense as any great movie. I had worked with artist Christine Nguyen in a previous project at LAX, and for her COLA fellowship she created enchanting cyanotype images and a large, triangular installation called Portals of Light from the Mountain and Night Sky, made up of salt crystals, glass, collected vegetation, spray paint, and photo process

Tears employed knitted blankets while Perspective Distortions seemed to be a large metal spider from rebar and handblown glass. Greene crafted a bench, two chairs, and a curio cabinet from singular pieces of wood. His fascination with wood goes back to early childhood when he practiced on fallen pieces of trees, a philosophy he still uses to source and reuse fallen and unwanted trees.

Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu (B + U) are among the handful of practicing architects who have been named COLA fellows. In 2015, they created a twenty-five-foot techno-organic cave called Aperture composed of thermal formed plastic that was bolted together once inside the gallery. Through its many portals people interact-ed from outside to inside and vice versa.

The 2016 COLA exhibition provided more amazing work. Keiko Fukazawa had recently

Hector Silva skillfully used graphite on paper in creating his LA homeboy-aesthetic with several monumental drawings of gay Latino male nudes and couples. Silva began his artistic journey to explore themes of cultural identity. His mastery of light and shadow made him a legend in both the Mexican and gay worlds, and the points at which they intersect and overlap. Jennifer Celio created graphite drawings that portrayed urban-nature, which were sprinkled with sign and symbols. The overall craft and the cleverness of her ideas engendered many smiles.

In 2015, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of new works by Miyoshi Barosh and Harold Greene. Both create objects at the intersection of craft and sculpture from recycled materials, yet with profoundly dif-ferent intentions. Barosh investigates the social political underpinnings of American culture recon-sidered with a digital mind. Her piece Rainbow of

MEMORIES\2010 TO 2015

13./ Lynne Berman, Dov Plays One, 2011

14./ Heather Flood, Chub Boardroom Table, 2008

15./ Harold Greene, Settee, 2015

16./ Nery Gabriel Lemus, De Guatemala, a Guate-peor, 2013

17./ Raphael Xavier, Rehearsal still from The Un official Guide to Audience Watching Performance, 2012

12./ Jeff Colson, installation view, Receiving/Leaving, 2015

11./ Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Olmec Head in Mayan City, 2006–7

10./ John Outterbridge with Castillo, Out Cast II, 2008

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COLA 20 Anniversary Exhibition\ Jamie Costa

DCA Assistant Curator

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From the ancient Greek symposia to Gertrude Stein’s legendary Paris salons, thematic artist dialogues have acted as platforms to discuss common thoughts and forecast relevant futures. Framed by this historiography, LAMAG coordinated ten, and hosted nine salon conversations to collect and connect the insights of multiple generations of COLA artists. This central concept of a space for dialogue became the genesis for the four overar-ching elements and living-room-style design of the installation.

Our hope was that these vanguard exchanges would provoke discursive explorations of the LA context from 1997 to today, seeking both common and divergent thoughts. We looked to a selection of former COLA recipients as conversation moderators to initiate group dialogues that might include wide swaths of cultural, historical, and sociopolitical issues. We were not surprised to discover great participation, new and overlapping perspectives, wildly unexpected vantage points, exceptional intellectual rigor, and profoundly personal expres-sions. Topics and leading questions for the COLA 20 salons were decidedly open ended and intended to interweave ideas about the benefits and challenges of living and working in Los Angeles. As you will read in the following section of this publication, these exchanges included discussions of visible/invisible presence of queer space, the history of Hollywood and the cinematic, the performative role of public space, and the transformative power of technology upon all humanities. The resultant breadth and depth of these conversations reminds us of the centrality of the artist, the arts, and conversations, especially in facing the winds of time.

In addition to the salon moderators and salon participants, I wish to acknowledge photo-video documentarians Giulia Caruso and Ki Jin Kim. I would also like to thank LAMAG’s Director, Isabelle Lutterodt, for her encouraging mentorship, as well as former DCA Curator, Erin Christovale, for developing the original plans and loans for the COLA 20 exhibition.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFINE A TYPICAL City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellow except by referencing the quality and seriousness of his or her engagement in Los Angeles’s dynamic art scene. Not even the Department of Cultural Affairs’ (DCA) Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), however, is monumental enough to host a retrospective of past or current works (even intimate ones) by 271 artists and/or collaboratives. Therefore, my colleagues and I planned a different kind of historical exposition to commemorate two decades of COLA.

We engaged exhibition designers Sencee Tagami and Aldo Puicon to help us fabricate a living space where a group of objects, COLA Fellows, and the public could coalesce into a platform for ongoing and newly acknowledged stories. In laying out the exhibition, we kept in mind both the thousands of visitors who have experienced COLA, and those who would be encountering COLA, LAMAG, and/or Los Angeles for the first time. The exhibition contained four central elements: tributes to eleven deceased COLA Fellows, a time line, a reading room, and gathering spaces.

To honor the artistic legacies of the COLA master artists who are no longer with us, we utilized the intimate, auxiliary gallery spaces. These tributes framed the historical time line of COLA, which moved around the entire central space to chronicle COLA’s first twenty years with various ephemera, including COLA’s beautiful past catalogs, promo-tional posters from the City of Los Angeles’s civic art collection, digital images, reviews, and quotes provided by fellows in response to COLA 20 and Los Angeles. To provide visitors more context, a reading room included monographic materials on fellows’ artistic practices and histories. And the conversation spaces served a dual call/response function—as a place for fellow-to-fellow salon conversations documented in this publication, and a space to host fellow-to-public discussions that would expand topical ideas proposed by fellows into greater public dialogues for LA artists and residents.

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unique ecosystems were boiling with creative practice. Unlike New York, however, there was no overarching infrastructure or financial resources, so the LA scene, by default, was more DIY and decentered, and artists were forced to be more entrepreneurial and experimental.

This scene met its apex in the early 2000s, and four important incubators with brave and genre-pushing arts administrators were at the center of this creative explosion: Highways Performing Arts Space/18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The House. These spaces sought to uncover and unleash innovative stories presented in fresh styles and usher in new art movements in LA. In 2000, the first roster of COLA performing artists was selected, and their high quality output and collective variety reflected and inspired the classes to follow.

From 2000 to 2003, COLA fellows performed at the Los Angeles Theatre Centre (LATC), and from 2004 to 2007, performances took place at the Department of Cultural Affairs’ (DCA) Barnsdall

LOS ANGELES HAS EXPERIENCED an explosive performing arts renaissance since the first City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship award was established, one that has expanded our concepts in design, content, scale, and aesthetics, putting LA on the map, nationally and internation-ally. It is within this specific trajectory that I look back at the important history of the COLA dance, music, and theater fellows from 2000 through 2007.

By 2000 something very special was evident in Los Angeles. America had recently passed through its federal culture wars, and contemporary performance practices were sharper on impact and purposeful intent. LA’s above-ground scene and underground scene were always hybrids of sorts: culturally conscious, geographically sprawling, socially connected with radical nightlife through emergent identity politics, all vibrantly launched from keen academic and alternative viewpoints. It was high and low and everything mixed in-between. Just like the East Village in New York was considered a center of the contemporary performance practice in the early 2000s, so too, were the multitude of neighborhoods in LA, where

Dynamic Inclusion\ Ben Johnson

DCA Performing Arts Division Director

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COLA 20 DYNAMIC INCLUSION

Many of the fellows founded and figure-headed informal ensembles and formal companies in the same era: Jacques Heim (Diavolo Dance), whose practice explores athletic dance upon large-scale moving sculptures; Sophiline Cheam Shapiro (Khmer Arts Ensemble), who escaped the Khmer Rouge and saved classical Cambodian dance for future generations; Licea Perea (Blaktina, Latina Dance Project, and Shut up and Dance Festival), whose curatorial methods have carved pathways for black and Latino artists; Lynn Dally (Jazz Tap Ensemble), who created America’s first touring jazz tap ensemble; and Loretta Livingston (Loretta Livingston Dance Company), who propelled LA’s dance-theater scene on the West Coast.

LA is now considered the epicenter of new music and contemporary composition in part because of pioneers like composer Amy Knoles (2000), who co-founded the California EAR Unit;

The World Arts and Cultures and Dance programs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which fosters a global dialogue and hybrid-ities with special attention to Latin American and Asian diasporas, has forced a new discourse about dance in America. This is evident in the practices of several COLA dance fellows. Dulce Capadocia (2001) combines traditional Filipino forms with modern dance and new narratives; Hae Kyung Lee (2002) fuses traditional Korean dance with contemporary ideas about performances; Deborah Greenfield (2004) merges passionate flamenco and modern dance and music; and Sri Susilowati (2006) designs new work that employs Indonesian performance styles with new movement. All four embrace themes of social practice, community, gender, and ethnicity through contemporary, multimedia dance.

choreography dynamically bridges dance and architecture; William Roper (2006), who connects folkloric storytelling with experimental musical compositions for the tuba; Hector Aristizábal (2007), who weaves the cathartic stories by political refugees into compelling movement theater; Dan Kwong (2006), who counteracts the shy silence of large swaths of the Asian diaspora by teaching the power of the first-person narrative; Paul Zaloom (2005), who mixes smart political satire with contemporary puppetry; Jude Narita (2004), who combines comedy and feminism to smash racially charged stereotypes; Denise Uyehara (2006), who reconciles collective tomes with research specificities; performance novelist Heather Woodbury (2007), who enacts serial street theater on a grand scale; and Michael Kearns (2005), who crosses radical queer narratives with themes of socioeconomic empowerment.

Gallery Theatre. Many thanks to former and current DCA employees Ernest Dillihay, Anisa Hamden, Debbie Livingston, and Tom Albany for producing these showcases.

Over these years many exciting COLA fellows have ushered in important conceptual styles and companion nonprofit organizations, further giving voice to the LA arts scene. For instance, 2000 Fellow Rachel Rosenthal was an underground hero and radical feminist icon. Experimental composer Arthur Jarvinen (2003), avant-garde pianist and jazz improviser Larry Karush (2003), and experimental opera director and composer Anne LeBaron (2005) might all be called contemporary “physical poets” and performance pioneers. LA’s new breed of multidisciplinary performance artists follow in the footsteps of interdisciplinary masters such as Dan Froot (2001), who intelligently combines music, dance, and theater; Heidi Duckler (2003), whose

5./ William Roper, two video stills, Land Ob Cotton A Tragic Slapstick, 2006

6./ Pirayeh Pourafar, portrait

7./ Phranc , Goofyfoot album cover, photograph by Ken Seino, designed by Carol Chen, 1995

8./ Adelina Anthony, performance view Prey for Me, 2008

9./ Raphael Xavier, three performance views, The Un official Guide to Audience Watching, 2012

4./ Ian Ruskin, Still from the film From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks, 2007

3./ Hector Aristizábal, In the Forest de/Lirios, 2004

2./ Lionel Popkin, performance view, There Is An Elephant In This Dance, 2010

1./ Paul Zaloom, performance props

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to support and layer emerging and established artists into a network of international awareness and potential touring by connecting LA performing artists with resources such as for-profit promot-ers, national service organizations, public and private funding agencies, foreign consulates, important festivals, and cultural centers across the globe. The world recognizes Los Angeles as a cross-cultural epicenter of dynamic talent, creative practice, and social activism through our COLA fellows and the deep and wide fields of other genius artists who also call LA home.

I am thrilled and proud to be DCA’s current Performing Arts Division Director, infusing some of the vision and value of the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship Program into, and between, DCA’s four City-owned and managed theaters: the Warner Grand Theatre (San Pedro), the Vision Theatre (Leimert Park), the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre (East Hollywood), and the Madrid Theatre (Canoga Park) in three of the furthest corners of Los Angeles, and DCA’s community-operated theaters: the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center (West Adams, managed by Ebony Repertory Theatre) and the Los Angeles Theatre Center / The NEW LATC (downtown Los Angeles, managed by the Latino Theater Company).

Through public and private support for performing arts programs, DCA’s Performing Arts Division also facilitates open calls and contracts independent peer panelists for proposal reviews. My goal is

Pirayeh Pourafar (2004), who co-founded Lian Ensemble to connect classical Persian music with other musical forms such as jazz; new music composer Ron George (2005), who designed unique object-instruments to compose experimental scores; and Phil Ranelin (2007), who is LA’s leading experimental jazz trombonist. Many of the fellows represent several of the categories above by mixing global forms, conceptual experimentation, interdisciplinary reach, and group processing: Oguri (2000), a dancer in the butoh tradition is the founder of Body Laboratory and Arcane Collective; avant-garde dancer and choreographer Michael Mizerany (2000) mixes queer narratives with vernacular and spectacular body gestures; Melinda Ring (2000) merges hyper dance with electronic music and multimedia sensations; and Victoria Marks (2002) is an influential teacher, choreographer, and performer.

DYNAMIC INCLUSION

13./ Ian Ruskin, Still from the film From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks, 2007

17./ Phil Ranelin, portrait12./ Rika Ohara, still from The Heart of No Place, 20095

16./ Anne LeBaron, performance documentation

11./ Hirokazu Kosaka, Charcoal pit, five views, collaborative performance with dancer/choreographer Oguri, 2006

15./ Dan Kwong, COLA performance still, 2006

10./ Tim Miller, Glory Box 14./ Rachel Rosenthal, L.O.W. in Gaia, 1986

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onward, a chronicler of single motherhood and of living below the poverty line, her concerns are relatable to the vast majority of the city’s inhabi-tants. But she could also be an outspoken critic, unafraid to offend. The poet is quoted in her COLA catalog essay describing herself as an outcast. “I’m the low bitch on the totem pole,” she says, “there is no place in this society for autodidacts like me … I write for the audience that is me. I believe that I exist in other forms out there, and that the me over there needs the me that am here, to speak to them.”

Coleman was the LA version of a civic laureate, a contradictory figure who speaks for us, but from an independent distance, a stance representative of the city’s ambivalent relationship to its self-image. This is a city hesitant to unabashedly express civic pride, a city, after all, that embraces Randy Newman’s ironic anti-anthem, “I Love LA,” that paean to the most boring of Los Angeles streets. The COLA Fellows that follow further bring to light the numerous facets of the city with no center and no canonical past. In place of a single predomi-nant Los Angeles literary community, there are many literary communities, each active around its own center of gravity, including reading venues, publishing houses, university writing programs, or social justice efforts like the Chicano/Chicana and LGBTQ movements. The COLA literary alums come out of, and form a cross-section of, many of these literary centers of gravity.

Luis J. Rodriguez’s Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, which grew from a modest neighborhood book-store to a reading venue, publisher, and writing

WRITING LOS ANGELES or writing in Los Angeles? There are at least two ways of relating to this city as a writer: one can be an observer, as in the first case, and look for the essence of this sprawling metropolis, a challenging task for a city that seems to evade summation; or one can be a product of the city, formed by its contrasts, its inspiring diversity, its traffic, and write about any subject, particularly, any subject other than Los Angeles, and yes still be writing Los Angeles.

The writers who received City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships since the program was expanded in 2004 to include literary artists have been much more the second category than the first. Since the first grant, awarded to Wanda Coleman, sixteen writers have received the honor, including: Katharine Haake, Eloise Klein Healy, Terry Wolverton, Diane Lefer, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sesshu Foster, Tara Ison, Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Bruce Bauman, Fernando D. Castro, Joseph Mattson, Jen Hofer, Gabriel Spera, Sarah Maclay, Claudia Rodriguez, and Lynne Thompson. These COLA literary fellows have given voice to a changing Los Angeles, as the city and its art communities have grown, and as previously marginalized groups have gained recognition, making Los Angeles a leading center for writers and writing.

It is fitting that the first grant was given to Wanda Coleman, a writer who was long considered the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles. Raised in Watts where the local Ascot branch library was her refuge, in some sense she wrote as an every-woman. As a pioneering black female, a veteran of racial protest from the 1960s Black Panthers

COLA Writers\ Gabriel Cifarelli

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DCA Arts Manager

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5./ Claudia Rodriguez, Always repping my city COMPTON

6./ Bruce Bauman, portrait 7./ Claudia Rodriguez, COLA Reading, 2016

8./ Lynne Thompson, Tabula Poetica, Chapman University

9./ Joseph Mattson, Lit Crawl 2 @ the Echo, poster, 2010

COLA WRITERS

sounds rather weighty, Lefer manages to bring wit and nuance to these topics, calling the writing style of one of her books, “cheerful nihilism.”

Other literary communities form around various independent publishing houses and independent journals, Slake Magazine and its support of COLA fellow Joseph Mattson being one example. Eloise Klein Healy’s publishing house, Arktoi Books, part of Red Hen Press, which also publishes the Los Angeles Review and sponsors readings and mentorship programs, is another writing hub. And Diane Lefer, has had many stories and a novella published in the Santa Monica Review, a literary journal published out of Santa Monica College, which is a thriving example from the Westside.

Each of these literary scenes can flourish inde-pendent of one another, each has its own set of values and measures of success, but the wonderful nature of a city as madly bustling as Los Angeles is the spillover that is always happening between creative activity. The intersection that Gloria Enedina Alvarez mentioned is a place of exchange. This defining concept of Los Angeles is the one mentioned most frequently by COLA literary artists. As Lynne Thompson aptly describes it, “Creative arts in Los Angeles benefit from its residents who speak Tagalog and Greek, drink sake, kill for kebobs, sing with Jewish cantors, exercise to African drums. Can you imagine the Music Center without the sculpture of French-Lithuanian Jacques Lipchitz or LA without Olvera Street’s piñata?”

Sheila Roth wrote in his COLA catalog essay. Sesshu Foster, East LA bred, son of an absent father and Japanese American mother, long-time LAUSD English teacher, also writes from this place. His novel Atomic Aztec turns postcolonialism on its head by imagining a Los Angeles in a world where the Aztecs had defeated the Spanish coloniz-ers—a world both “aqui y alla,” to use Alvarez’ term. Claudia Rodriguez combines reflections on the immigration experience with interrogations of queer identity and observations of life in her native Compton. Writing in in her poem, “To my Butch Scholar,” she states, “the personal is political, but the political is not always written on the skin,” proposing instead a category synthesis: “all I want is to step into my post-heroic masculinity / stop suppressing mine to uphold others’”

The concerns of the LGBTQ movement have been an abiding motivation to Rodriguez and to many COLA literary artists. As Terry Wolverton expresses it, “When I began making art, feminists and lesbians were outlaws, part of a movement to reshape culture and its values, from collaborative production to engaging, involving and listening to diverse communities. We’re still queering the art world, all these years later.”

Diane Lefer’s writing distills a quality present in each of the COLA writers: a devotion to activism and political justice. In her non-writing life she is an immigrant rights activist among many other commitments; in her stories and novels she has tackled subjects such as Abu Ghraib prison, animal rights, pornography, and religious cults. If this

Los Angeles is this crossing of borders between creative fields, where, as the curators go on to say, “Writers seem to find their corresponding forms in art, and vice versa. Ours is a city of writers who matter a great deal to artists; of artists who are also writers; of writers who are also musicians, dancers, performers, or visual artists; and so many other incarnations besides.”

There is the figurative crossing of borders mentioned above that defines Los Angeles, and there is also the literal crossing of borders. Gloria Enedina Alvarez, a seminal Chicana writer, writes from this place. Alvarez finds inspiration in her adopted hometown. “Having lived in Los Angeles from the age of three constantly traversing the city, I find inspiration in its many cruces, crossings, and portals,” she is quoted as saying in her COLA catalog essay. “My work,” she says, “maps the migrations and transmigrations of memory and place, drawing on my own and my family’s experi-ence of repatriation and interior exile.” A condition she describes as, “the fragmentation of the self, that is, ‘neither/nor, ni aqui, ni alla,’” that evolves to a fluid ‘aqui y alla,’ both, ‘here and there.’” While this fluid state produces a new literary conscious-ness, the notion of “interior exile” is a reminder once again that, while Los Angeles is an inspiring and vibrant place, it is also not a place where things come easy.

Fernando D. Castro also writes from this place of intersectionality. A Colombian native, his COLA grant supported a “collection of poems themed around his concept of the ‘native tourist,’” as

workshop, is one example of a vibrant socially engaged nonprofit. The World Stage in Leimert Park should also be mentioned, it being one of the centers for spoken word in the Los Angeles African American community. Through his redemption memoir, Always Running, published in 1993, and the more than a dozen books and decades of tire-less activism that followed, Rodriguez has become a role model for a generation of young people struggling to emerge from gang life. He is quoted in his COLA catalog essay saying, “We live in a world where society likes to tell us no. I tell kids they shouldn’t give up. It sounds simple, but it’s not.”

COLA fellows Katharine Haake, Jen Hofer, Bruce Bauman, Tara Ison, Eloise Klein Healy, who founded the Antioch University MFA program, and Sarah Maclay are a few examples of writers affiliated with university-based creative writing programs. With its world-class higher education, it follows that Los Angeles would have as many highly regarded creative writing programs as it does. For many of these writing programs, partic-ularly ones housed in art schools, there has been a productive cross-pollination between writers and artists. The relationship was recently explored in the Department of Cultural Affairs’ Ours is a City of Writers exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), curated by Suzanne Hudson, Simon Leung, and James Nisbet. As they explain, the exhibition considered, “shared modes of critical engagement, discussion, and inquiry,” between artists and writers, and the “innovative writing practices” that result from this relation-ship. A characteristic of many art communities in

4./ Joseph Mattson, reading from an early excerpt of Empty the Sun, 2007

3./ Sarah Maclay, reading at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, UCLA. Photo: Helen Hierta

2./ Jen Hofer, portrait1./ Luis J. Rodriguez, Billboard, Chicago, sponsored by Chicago Poetry Center and Lightology

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COLA 20 INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ALEXANDER

to be California Plaza, and the city put in a request for two different cultural amenities. One was The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the other was a free performing arts program.

This was done during the Bradley administration, and Mayor Bradley had seen both as a councilman and as mayor, the benefits of the performing arts in building community.

Because originally the two office towers, One and Two California Plaza, and the hotel, now the Omni Hotel, were renting the land under them from the City of Los Angeles’s community redevelopment agency, an obligation was put on them to put seed money in every year to support a free performing arts program. We created a nonprofit so that we could do the fundrais-ing, It was then that I found out that the owners of California Plaza were required to hire an artistic direc-tor, and I was ultimately the first one they hired.

First two summers, ’87 and ’88, they exclusively did lunch hour concerts, and when I was hired [in 1989] we continued doing lunch hour shows and evening concerts.

The evening performances have truly become the hallmark of what Grand Performances is all about, because of … public transportation and with downtown being a magnet to draw people in, our audiences look like LA. And I was told by the mayor’s Head of Adaptive Reuse, Hamid Behdad, and by Tom Gilmore, one of the foremost developers in downtown, that they felt that Grand Performances played a critical role in the demystification of downtown. There was nothing happening when we started evening programs in the early 1990s, and now there’s all kinds of energy on the streets.

Many people say, “I’m going to keep coming back no matter what they’re presenting,” and that’s why the audiences are diverse, and why people have come to trust that they’re going to have an interesting experience at our space. And so audiences have come to trust the COLA name, they’ve also come to trust the Grand Performances’ name, and so the result is that there’s a great audience, an interested audience for the COLA artists.

Christopher Riedesel: You’ve talked about the diverse audiences and the diverse programing that you do. Can tell me more about the Grand Performances’ stated mission?

Michael Alexander: It is to celebrate the many communities and bring people together … we are here to help create a sense of community. Because it’s free, we are drawing people from every socioeconomic group. And that’s very

Christopher Riedesel: When the COLA Master Artist Fellowship program was inaugurated in 1997, it was open only to visual and design artists. In 2000, the program was expanded to include solo performing artists, and the new works of these fellows were presented at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC). Between 2004 and 2007 group showcases of literary and performing fellows were relocated to the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre (BGT). Subsequently, it became clear from artist-evaluations that while the both LATC and BGT were technically adequate, these venues had no consistent audiences. While the artists’ world premieres were cross-marketed successfully between each other, marketing to general audiences was less successful. The fellows wanted DCA to help them reach audiences one or two layers wider than those persons already familiar with them. To this end, Joe Smoke asked you in 2008, if Grand Performances would host the City of Los Angeles fellowship performing arts showcases. So tell me, how long has Grand Performances been around, how was it formed, and if you can, tell me a little bit about your involvement with that.

Michael Alexander: My history with Grand Performances goes back to 1989. This is a project that is a beneficiary of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s desire to turn Bunker Hill into a new financial center for downtown Los Angeles. The Victorian mansions that were there from the 1910s had fallen into disrepair after World War II, and by the ‘60s it was becoming quite a dilapidated part of the downtown area. The city decided to buy those homes and to use that area for redevelopment. The largest parcel was going

important because those who are earning over 100 [thousand] can go anywhere, those earning under twenty-five [thousand] can’t, but they’re all coming in equal numbers to our programs, which says that the experience is worthwhile. We have been looking at the many different communities and, as most Angelenos now know we have well over 100 languages spoken in our schools, which means that there’s hundreds of different communities throughout Los Angeles.

We do our very best to find artists from the many different communities, or are reflective of those communities. Some of our artists do come from overseas, and we do look to bring in international artists and introduce them to people from outside the community, but also to honor the people from within a community by bringing some of the treasures that they would not otherwise get to see, and certainly not get to share with other people from Los Angeles. And it has been a conscious effort on our part to curate with a certain kind of inclusiveness as a goal.

We work hard at reaching audiences through many, many different types of systems, in effect curating our audience. Another one of our surveys showed us that 60% of our audience heard about us first through word of mouth, so one of our first grants was to get a grant to help us find people with big mouths—to find those people in communities that influence other people, the tastemakers, the motivators that say, yeah, there’s a great movie, let’s all go tomorrow night and see whatever it is.

Christopher Riedesel: Along with this double curation—curation of the artists, curation of the audience—we have COLA, which sometimes might feel fairly random based on the artists that are selected. How do you tie all of that together?

Michael Alexander: Well, we have to look at diversity or equity issues not just on an annual basis but over a historic period of time. There are just too many different cultures in Los Angeles for us to cram them all into one summer. Some art … some cultures may be repeatedly seen on our stage, partly because of just the opportunities that exist, or the sheer numbers of people from certain communities that are here in Los Angeles and others may be less frequent. So, we’re looking at the COLA artists that they’re part of the annual series.

We don’t necessarily say, well, there’s an Iranian on the COLA series this year, we don’t have to do any other Iranians. Sometimes when we’ve had COLA artists for a specific community, there are artists from that community that have appeared other times in the series, and sometimes not. But I think it’s partly because we’re using COLA to send a different kind of message, which is one about the important role that public art agencies play in the nurturing and encouraging of growth among local artists.

And we want to be your partners in helping the general public realize what an important statement has been made by the City of Los Angeles in saying, “we are going to support individual artists; it’s not happening on the national level.”

Interview with Michael Alexander\ Christopher Reidesel

DCA Grants Associate

(L to R) Christopher Riedesel, Michael Alexander

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Christopher Riedesel: I remember one year we had Paul Outlaw and Raphael Xavier, and then, right in the middle, author Joseph Mattson.

Michael Alexander: Right. And sometimes it’s just a pacing thing, too, figuring out which could work. I think Paul Outlaw was last on that bill because he was using the water. And this is what is also interesting, for these artists, some of them have had a chance to come, and they may have a very proscenium arch vision in their head before, when they get the grant and when they think about what they’re going to be doing. And then all of a sudden they come to a venue that has been used by many, many different artists as a great space to do what we might refer to as site-specific work, where they’re taking advantage of water, of the architecture, the different spaces.

Christopher Riedesel: So, we’ve touched upon something here in that these performances don’t take place without a lot of support, and so throughout the years, who have you found on your team, or who would you like to point out at this time for making sure everything runs smoothly and meets the artists’ visions?

Michael Alexander: Well, Leigh Ann Hahn is our programing director, and she first and foremost is the one that is interacting with the artists both individually and collectively so that we’re able to figure out what do we need to do in terms of pacing the program, who do we put on first, who do we put on last? And we will often call these people together after she has had opportunities to deal with them individually. Then we’ll bring the group together in part so that they can also meet with our technical people.

Initially, our production manager was Fred Stites, who now has emeritus status, and he passed the baton onto Mark Baker, who was our technical director at the time that our relationship with COLA started and is now our production director. The two of them would talk about lighting needs, sound needs, what are the different elements that we’re going to have to prepare for because, as I say, we want to make sure that each artist feels that their vision was supported as best as possible by the technical

equipment and crew that Grand Performances can provide. So, those are the key folks.

We’ve had a number of different marketing people in the years since we started working with COLA, but all of them have wanted to make sure that we were presenting information in our season brochure, and I think one of the things that helped out COLA quite a bit is that we have made the COLA presentation a part of our regular season. It takes, I think, a lot of work to find a variety of interesting artistic experiences and Grand Performances is spectacular because it’s all in one spot.

Christopher Riedesel: I feel like we could carry this conversation on for much longer, but on behalf of the City of LA, Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as the many residents and tourists you have provided with enjoyable experiences, I thank you very much for your extraordinary stewardship. The organization you have founded is truly inclusive and exciting, and its ongoing embrace of the COLA Fellowship Performance Showcase and the Literary Showcase at this point, is sincerely appreciated. So, I hope your upcoming retirement is filled with equally rewarding experiences.

Michael Alexander: I’m looking forward to not completely retiring but reducing my workload and finding some other special projects that I can work on. I have to say I was the beneficiary of a gift when I got hired, and I’ve just felt so lucky to be able to do what I’ve been doing. Thank you for the opportunity and thanks to the department for allowing us to be the partners on the COLA Presentations.

Christopher Riedesel: I think it’s a mutual benefit for all of us, so thank you.

masked so that the projection was only on the rock and not bleeding at all onto the rest of the granite around her. A very, very clever piece … started a love affair with her art for me.

Houman Pourmehdi brought us a really beautiful program of Iranian/Persian music, and it came at a time when there was some particular crises in his home country. He was going to come with just solo work but felt that he could present his message much more powerfully by bringing an ensemble. And so I think it added to the meaningfulness for us to know that this was an example of how art is playing a healing role, it’s playing a community building role. I think for people both in and outside of his community we were catching the power of this opportunity for him.

Christopher Riedesel: We’ve had some unusual artists at COLA performances. I’m thinking of maRia Bodmann, who does Balinese shadow puppetry. How was that done on the Marina stage?

Michael Alexander: It worked out quite well because she’s using that rear projection where she has to have the lighting coming in from behind her and, fortunately, we have the technical equipment and personnel both that can work with artists. Those of us who are presenters, who are bringing in or inviting in artists that are not part of our internal company, have an obligation to work with artists to help their artistic vision be realized as best as possible.

maRia, like Sheetal had very demanding lighting needs and needed that kind of technical support so that their art was being perceived by the audience. In fact, we had to program them so that we made sure that we were starting their shows late enough that it was dark because most of our COLA performances have been in very late June, which puts it particularly close to the solstice and therefore it’s the latest sunsets of the year.

So, we always have to figure out who do we start when it’s still daylight. Who can handle that? Sometimes it’s been a bit tough because no one wanted to start in the light, and we had to figure out, oh gosh, let’s see if we can delay the show by fifteen minutes, and then the sun will be on its way down and it’ll work for all of them.

Christopher Riedesel: Right, especially if you have literary artists and performing artists such as COLA had who were performing at the same time.

Michael Alexander: Right, some of the literary artists got the earlier spot on the program for no other reason than nature’s natural lighting program.

We don’t expect every COLA artist or every Grand Performances’ artist to be adored by every member of the audience. But we want those artists to be on the stage to get a chance to do their work, to test their work, to test it in front of a live audience, and for those audiences also to stretch and decide, is this something new and interesting for me? Do I want to make a more dedicated effort to discover that art after seeing it here tonight?

Christopher Riedesel: You were at Cultural Affairs, then you were at Grand Performances. Throughout the twenty years of COLA and your experience, what are the changes that you’ve seen through the field as an arts presenter? It’s a broad question there, but …

Michael Alexander: It is a broad question. The environment for artists is … it’s sort of like how difficult it is to predict the weather because there’s so many factors that are at play—a variety of storms here and, and winds there—and the artists are working in a very, very odd ecosystem because there’s public funding and there have been great years for the city, great … good years for the county, but there’s been a drought for quite a period of time from the state. It’s starting to pick up again, over the last four or five years. The federal government has certain types of programs, but right now it’s under threat of closing down the NEA.

The 2008 economy drop was devastating because foundations that support the arts are usually running about two years behind the economy. Business improves after a certain period of time, and then the foundations are at least a year later. The environment for the artists has been constantly shifting, and so I haven’t seen a continuum of growth. I think that it’s been up and down in terms of any money … and due to any one of a number of different factors in terms of the kind of art that is getting produced on a broad basis in Los Angeles, but even specifically within the COLA program. And we’ve had some performances there that have been absolutely incredible. I think that it has been a great investment for the city to help some artists really learn about their own capacity among many other things.

Christopher Riedesel: Of these COLA performances, do you have any favorite memories of particular performances?

Michael Alexander: I have quite a number of them. Sheetal Gandhi is a dancer/ performance art maker who brought a video project that was absolutely stunning. She created some rocks that she was using as props on the stage that she stood on, and she had projections on them that were perfectly

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ALEXANDER

Christopher Riedesel Michael Alexander

ii.documentation

&interaction

COLA Printed Matter\Will Caperton y Montoya

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only, place on the planet discovered so far with ancient images lined up—signs—indicating people were starting to play around and experiment with organizing their thoughts; illustrating how they related to one another and the world around them, as well as to God and the heavens above. This is when knowledge reached across generations, beyond the cave dwellers, providing us with an understanding of where and how thought and graphic communication first came together.

As I understood more about the potency of art and culture, I wanted to integrate story and design in a more meaningful way into my work, so in 2002 I joined the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) as its first and only Director of Marketing and Development. After fifteen years, I still find the work engaging and challenging. During my tenure I have been blessed to collaborate with amazing, creative artists and progressive thought leaders, as well as with local, state, national, and international organizations to promote cultural awareness, increase arts education, and work towards providing equal access to the arts and creativity for all across LA’s diverse communities.

DCA’s Marketing and Development Division raises funds from foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individual donors to support arts and cultural programming and facilities. Since I

COLA program, and the fellows. Documentation of the first two COLA exhibitions was combined into an inaugural publication for 1997/98 when DCA established a partnership with Otis College of Art and Design.

The Otis Design Group (ODG), a student-run graphic design studio that functioned like a cooperative to perform community-based assignments, offered to pitch competing concepts and allow DCA to select students to design each publication under the supervision of professor Ave Pildas. From 1997 through 2003, these emerging young designers developed their first professional art catalogs with DCA as their client. In 2003, as I was developing my first COLA catalog, and ODG was working on its last, Ave decided to retire and his colleagues decided ODG should step away from community-based client learning.

As a result, the concept, art direction, and editing of the next fourteen publications in print and/or digital form produced from 2004 to 2017 became my primary COLA responsibility. Though my colleagues and I lamented that we could no longer continue the professional development of the design students from ODG, we were excited to utilize the extraordinary pool of COLA design fellows to help us create an amazing archive of LA contemporary art. So I continued my exciting journey and began working

ART GIVES VOICE TO IMAGINATION and awareness and serves as a powerful tool for self-knowledge and collective consciousness. Art allows us to dream, imagine, contemplate, and transcend. Art connects us. We are the only species on Earth that communicates by story and design, sending messages across generations. Artists especially have a passion and a driving impulse to create something unique, a desire that expresses itself in nearly every aspect of human culture across different civilizations, different forms of art, and different forms of living.

Early humans communicated with pictures and markings. As these markings spread and were understood and accepted, broad transmission of ideas and language could occur, and art became a powerful communication tool. Cave painting was perhaps the beginning of storytelling and graphic design, when the first artists used symbols to communicate ideas and emotions. In Spain over 40,000 years ago, in the Cuevas de Monte Castillo, hands wet with deep red ochre and dark grey charcoal created hand prints and images of themselves and animals on walls, a moment that forever changed our ability to graphically communicate.

In La Cueva de La Pasiega, you can step into another time to learn about the mystical world people lived in thousands of years ago. This is the oldest, and

joined the team, we have raised over $37 million to date. We market the City’s arts and cultural events by: creating thousands of publications, catalogs, direct mail pieces, and promotional materials; maintaining DCA’s culturela.org website; managing DCA’s social media channels; and producing calendars and cultural guides for the City’s Latino, African American, American Indian, Asian and Pacific Islander American, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Heritage Month Celebrations. We also produce and promote several citywide festivals and events, and publish an annual Festival Guide featuring hundreds of festivals throughout Los Angeles and its neighboring cities.

One of my favorite annual duties is to work on the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships to showcase the quality and diversity of each class of artists and educate national and international audiences about the specificity, depth, and richness of art and culture in LA. Highlighting the incredibly unique works created by these fellows, and working with world-class graphic designers on fifteen COLA publications, has proved to be both professionally engaging and personally fulfilling.

After the artist selection and exhibition aspects of COLA were initially established, DCA agreed that a COLA catalog and collateral material should be developed each year to continually brand DCA, the

COLA 2004, exhibition catalog (excerpt), designed by Susan Silton, SOS, Los Angeles

COLA 2005, exhibition poster, designed by Michael Worthington, Counterspace

COLA 2008, invitation, designed by Susan Silton, SOS, Los Angeles

DCA Director of Marketing and Development

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The COLA designers each learned to work with a set of different visual artists/writers/performers developing works not at all related to each other, and to present them in a manner that would always communicate the necessity of recognizing and honoring individual expression. Over the years they made us think with words from Luis J. Rodriguez, Wanda Coleman, Alma Lopez, and Claudia Rodriguez. They knew how to stimulate us with powerful images from John Sonsini, Hector Silva, Laura Aguilar, and Tim Miller. They moved us with works by Lionel Popkin, Alejandra Flores, David Rousseve, and Phranc. They made us reflect on our world with Tony Gleaton, Carlos Estrada-Vega, Willie Robert Middlebrook, and Ken Gonzales-Day. They captivated us with Eloy Torrez, Castillo, Mark Dean Veca, and Pae White. And they knew how to make us feel with Stas Orlovski, Marcelyn Gow, Carrie Ungerman, and Nery Gabriel Lemus.

Another challenge the designers met was to organize and combine images with words into a comprehensive whole for readers to absorb and enjoy. The first catalog featured LA writers Noriko Gamblin (Feeding the Soul of the City) and Susan Morgan (A Key to the City) providing two perspectives on how the first fellows reflected the thriving art scene at that time in LA. The next catalog featured Susan Morgan’s essay, The Spirit of Place: Art in Los Angeles; and the 2001 catalog featured correspondence between

Note of Gratitude:

For most of my past fifteen years at DCA, I was lucky to have Martica Caraballo Stork at my side for endless hours of tracking down art works, editing essays, and proofing design layouts. I also fondly remember the time we worked with Sarah Welch Cifarelli before she left DCA to run the art exhibition program at Los Angeles World Airports. I owe them more than they will ever know, and will always be indebted to them for their diligence in both making every publication almost perfect and my work more enjoyable. I can only hope to repay them one day for their dedication and assistance, and thank them for their exceptional intelligence, laughter, and enduring friendship!

with the following highly intelligent, exceptionally talented, and wonderfully creative communications experts:

• Susan Silton designed DCA’s COLA catalogs in 2004, 2008, and 2012;

• Michael Worthington in 2005, 2007, 2013, and 2017 (with this publication);

• Garland Kirkpatrick in 2006 and 2014;

• Louise Sandhaus in 2009 and 2015;

• Jeffery Keedy in 2010; and,

• Jody Zellen in 2011 and 2016.

Using their preliminary work on each COLA catalog, our curators were inspired to present the COLA exhibitions, performances, and literary readings based on these designers’ initial design direction for each publication. Moreover, this group of gifted people enjoy dual careers as both superb artists and outstanding graphic designers. They do not just design innovative concepts and layouts; they use story as well as design to always accomplish my main goal for the COLA publications: to provide a space on the page from which the artists’ master works can soar.

Irene Borger and Louise Steinman entitled Wondering L.A. In later catalogs, DCA matched staff with the artists to create essays about the attributes of each within LA’s arts landscape. Eventually, the fellows were asked to select their own writers and commission their essays, allowing for a greater selection of writers to be involved, and for DCA to publish the texts of more writers with deep familiarity with their subjects.

Much like the cave painters used their signs and symbols to convey knowledge, the COLA designers used their own design elements with the artists’ images and words to provide an understanding of something we think of as modern, but is actually quite ancient … meaning.

This is how they connect us to the art, carrying on the traditions of the cave painters to communicate how we are all the same by showing us the beauty in expressing how we are all different.


COLA 2010, exhibition catalog (excerpt), designed by Jeffery Keedy

COLA 2014, exhibition catalog (cover), designed by Garland Kirkpatrick, gmatter.la

COLA 2015, exhibition catalog (cover), designed by Louise Sandhaus, LSD / Louise Sandhaus Design

COLA 2016, exhibition catalog (excerpt), designed by Jody Zellen


COLA PRINTED MATTER

1997 1998C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Otis Design GroupLau Chi LamSasha Perez

1999 20012000 2002C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Otis Design GroupHeather CaugheyHenry EscotoVaughn Lui

C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Otis Design GroupBryan Craig, Allison Eubanks,Anouk de Jonge, Kevin Yuda


Otis Design GroupJessica Berardi, Amanda Cheong,Sayuri Dejima, Tritia Khournso,Christina Kim, Tatjana Lenders


Otis Design GroupJessie Pete AlvarezHesed ChoiChrista DeFilippo

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TIME LINE OF COLA PRINTED MATTERCOLA 20

Printed Matter

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Time Line of COLA

20052004 2006C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Michael WorthingtonCounterspace, Los Angeles


Susan SiltonSOS, Los Angeles


Garland Kirkpatrickhelveticajones.com

2003C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Otis Design GroupAmber HowardRajeswaran ShanmugasundaramSharleen Yoshimi

2007 20092008 2010C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Michael WorthingtonCounterspace, Los Angeles


Louise SandhausLSD / Louise Sandhaus Design




Jeffery Keedy

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20132012 2014C A T A L O G D E S I G N



Garland Kirkpatrickgmatter.la


Michael Worthington & Ania Diakoff

Counterspace, Los Angeles

2011C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Jody Zellen

2015 2016C A T A L O G D E S I G N

Jody ZellenC A T A L O G D E S I G N

Louise SandhausLSD (Louise Sandhaus Design)Kat Catmur & Columba Cruz Elton

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The COLA exhibitions were more challenging than others. Initially, the education program staff received information about the art solely through artist applications and only got to actually see the work when it was being installed at the venue. This necessarily made writing our pre-visit lessons more general in scope since we couldn’t write accurately about work we did not yet know. Joining the curatorial team on COLA studio visits ameliorated this situation. We visited artists throughout the city in all manner of studios from dedicated rooms in homes to industrial lofts in once-working manufacturing centers, getting to know the personalities of the artists, their environments, and their practices.

Some experiences took us by surprise. Though we planned our children’s gallery lessons for COLA and our other exhibitions as carefully as possible, children find a way to change the best-laid plans. In one exhibition there was a life-sized balloon, shaped as a heavy-set nude man, with full anatomical detail. It was positioned in a far corner of the gallery as a courtesy to the teachers. As a matter of course we ended each gallery tour with an art project, letting the kids pick their favorite work of art to draw. To our surprise and amusement, nearly every child for the entire run of the show drew a picture of the nude balloon man.

but also had an opportunity to speak with the artists. This exchange gave fellows a chance to interact with the public and hear what they thought about the work. An added bonus, and one that I thought was incredibly important, was that artists got to hear other fellows discuss their work and ask questions of each other.

The COLA series generated many wonderful and enduring memories that I will always treasure.

Sara L. Cannon

AS DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM EDUCATION and Tours Program for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) from 1993 to 2013, my mission was to connect children and adult visitors to art objects and experiences. One of the most important elements of my job was the School Tours Program, which served approximately 4,600 elementary and middle school students from the Los Angeles Unified School District every year. Before their visits, we furnished schoolteachers with packets that included discussion topics about the themes of the exhibitions, educational games about specific artworks, and post-visit art projects to build upon the gallery experience. These packets remain some of the best educational tools designed for public arts education.

During my management of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship education program, which included seventeen COLA exhibitions, I had the enthusiastic and excellent assistance of Laurel Granger and later Marta Feinstein as Education Coordinators. For over ten years Marta Feinstein was in charge of developing the pre-visit educational packets, the gallery lessons, and our family art workshops. We even had a series of summer art camps that used all of Marta’s ingenuity and endurance. The program also had the invaluable assistance of college workers through the Getty Multicultural Internship Program.

Over my years with the COLA exhibitions, I had the privilege of seeing some extraordinary works created by Fran Siegel, Cindy Kolodziejski, Lies Krall, Dorit Cypis, Clement Hanami, Fumiko Amano, Tony de los Reyes, Soo Kim, Habib Kheradyar, and Takako Yamaguchi. One very memorable work was Danial Nord’s State of the Art piece, a hybrid light-installation, video and sound show, and sculptural structure in the form of a fifteen-foot Mickey Mouse lying on its side. It occupied a large, pitch-black room with lights emanating at different angles onto the ceiling and walls with Mickey Mouse Club theme on repeat. The structure was comprised of television sets, steel armature, video projectors, a sound system, and a variety of other media woven together by wiring. A major art experience for kids and adults, it was also a major art challenge for staff who had to turn the artwork on and off. We usually worked in the totally darkened room in teams of two, holding flashlights and instruction sheets written in exacting detail by the artist while we searched out and turned on the many deeply embedded projectors, sound recorders, and light systems in the cavities of the mouse’s fallen body. In the end, both viewers and staff got to experience the precision and poetry of a master artwork.

One of the most popular adult programs was Conversations with the Artists. Not only did the public get to hear artists speak about their work,

Alison Saar Treetop, 2005

Takako Yamaguchi Available Light, 2007

Won Ju Lim Detail from Casting 1, 2016

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COLA EDUCATION PROGRAMSCOLA 20

COLA Education Programs

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&conversations

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COLA 20

S A L O N C O N V E R S A T I O N

TUE SDAY, APRIL 2 5, 2017M O D E R A T E D B Y

Karen AtkinsonHeidi Duckler

W I T H

Lynne BermanAnna Boyiazis

Nancy BuchananPaolo Davanzo

Ernesto de la LozaElizabeth Leister

Phil Ranelin

Performances of art outside of the gallery, museum, or theater (i.e. the street scene and urban

interventions) are important expressions in Los Angeles. What

historical and cultural experiences have propelled our “street scene?”1

R I G H T , T O P

Paolo Davanzo

R I G H T , B E L O W

(l to r) Paolo Davanzo, Nancy Buchanan, Elizabeth Leister, Lynne Berman, Karen Atkinson, Heidi Duckler, Anna Boyiazis,

Ernesto de la Loza, Phil Ranelin

Because the COLA program runs in annual cycles, fellows connect only with their classmates. As one aspect of this twentieth

anniversary, the Department of Cultural Affairs sponsored ten salon conversations to record at least twenty hours of intergenerational

dialogue. And although social, collegial, and/or pedagogical relationships have drawn most fellows to meet at LAMAG before

or after their enrollment in COLA, a surprising number of salon participants were meeting each other for the first time, or the

first time within a staged dialogue. In relation, it was particularly meaningful for this element of COLA 20 to cross-connect respected

members of our large region’s literary, performing, and visual-design communities.

The themes of these exchanges were curated yet flexible. The transcriptions showcase aspects of the rich context of LA as well as

some continuity within historical and intellectual pathways. Years of peer panel debates informed each salon’s topical question, and

these leading questions were given centrifical rather than limiting treatments by teams of moderators. Two topics were repeated with

different players, showing distinctively additive outcomes with sparse duplication. This experiment indicates how much more

exists to be cast and/or recast.

The salon conversations were embedded in the anniversary exhibition and digitally recorded for as an archival resource. Full

episodes of these videotaped sessions may be requested via email to the LAMAG staff. The excerpted and condensed texts printed

here are selections rather than summaries. The use of three dots suggests the elimination of small or large sections of speech,

and words in parentheses are added to foster linkages.

Introduction to Salon Conversations

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E R N E S T O D E L A L O Z A : I’ve been painting on many corridors of LA streets for almost fifty years—twenty-five years on Sunset Boulevard, another fifteen on Caesar Chavez Blvd … the environment has great impact on the way I see the world …

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : So one of the questions that’s come up is the historical precedence of the kind of work that we make …

N A N C Y B U C H A N A N : I was thinking about events that I found really profound in the past. One was a public performance organized by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz called In Mourning and In Rage … in response to the Hillside Strangler murders that had happened in Los Angeles … (it was) a funeral procession that led to City Hall and they had a press conference and all the press indeed came out. And in response, one of the amazing things that happened was that the telephone company, which had refused to list rape hotline crisis numbers in the phone book, immediately said they were gonna do that. I was also thinking of Laundromats, and another feminist group called Mother Art. They came out of the Woman’s Building and got a tiny California Arts Council grant to develop a series of pieces that they called Laundry Works. And these were public performances in laundromats unannounced. They showed up with flyers in English and in Spanish. They had pillowcases with words on them that they invited the public to put in order and make a poem. Their performances were as long as a wash cycle … and the money (that Ronald Reagan complained about) was so well spent.

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : I curated some projects in San Diego and … all of them have really amazing stories of how audiences responded. For instance, the California Arts Council decided to visit us when we did a performance in

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : Thank you everybody. This panel conversation is about art outside of the traditional spaces …. Maybe you could introduce your work or say what your relationship is to the topic. Why don’t you get started?

PAO L O DAVA N Z O : Certainly … (I am co-director of ) the Echo Park Film Center … we’ve been around sixteen years … to integrate filmmaking into the community. We have an itinerant school bus. We do a lot of outdoor events …

E L I Z A B E T H L E I S T E R : I’m a visual artist … and over the last several years, I’ve been collaborating with dancers. The work has a lot to do with memory and landscape and feminist issues are very important to my process …

LY N N E B E R M A N : I have been going out into public spaces like library courtyards … and the LA County Fairgrounds … trying to create a communication around aesthetics and the ideas of art with people who don’t have the framework that a gallery audience would have.

H E I D I D U C K L E R : Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre is a site-specific dance company … work is created on-site. None is created in a studio and transposed. So it’s always a response to the environment, the community, and the location. All the content is directly inspired and connected to the place …

A N N A B OY I A Z I S : My career started as a graphic designer, and I designed a lot of art and architecture publications for art and architecture institutions. But … even before graduate school I wanted to be a photojournalist and a documentary photographer. So in 2006, I started making that transition … my (COLA fellowship) evolved into a ten-year body of work … and now my first monograph. My work happens on the other side of the world, usually in sub-Saharan Africa and East Africa.

difficult to subvert a space and want to improvise. That goes against the grain (of ) institutions.

E R N E S T O D E L A L O Z A : (With mural production) … you have imminent domain issues and intellectual property rights …

F E M A L E : No more lawyers. [LAUGHS]

A L L A T O N C E : [LAUGHTER]

A N N A B OY I A Z I S : I negotiate access of a whole different type, where I’m involved in a community for more than a month … proving to (my subject-participants) why I’m committed to their story … and that they can trust me. Most recently, I was in Tanzania teaching English lessons to show that I was devoted.

LY N N E B E R M A N : I wanted to bring up a key question, what is public space … and how much of public space is extremely controlled? People are no longer going out into unexpected environments … which I think about as I plan new performative works out in the world. Using public space is extremely important and extremely political now.

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : Agreed. I’m struck by how artists work these days … (especially) if you go into a space without permission … when I was working on a project to project artist’s images in theaters, it was a thirteen-year project. I proposed it to every artist-run space in Los Angeles and they all said, “That’s too big. You’re never gonna pull it off” … (Eventually I was) able to get a small amount of money as seed funding to make it work. I have a quote (here) on the gallery wall: “My favorite art supply, is tenacity.” Maybe you guys can talk about your favorite art supplies in making this kind of work? So you have an album called Perseverance. Why did you name it that?

Ocean Beach. And there was a guy who was doing a per-formance. He made himself up to look like a homeless person and walked onto the set. More or less and people started trying to get him to go away … people were giving him cigarettes, giving him money …. And then, he went over and he started performing. All of a sudden, the whole audience realized this was not a homeless person. This was an artist who was doing a performance. It was quite spectacular …

P H I L R A N E L I N : You know, creating your own audience, that’s what we do as artists. Wherever there’s people … that (is) the continuum. Art is everyday life. Artists, we have to figure out ways to present.

PAO L O DAVA N Z O : How do you democratize that process, right? … (like) the noble tradition of itinerant cinema in India and Mexico. Caravans go town to town and show films … (with the Echo Park Film Center) we’ve continued that process of bringing film to communities. Often potluck meals are involved. Sharing ideas. Sharing space …

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : So one of the things I did want to talk about is the way we all work. Heidi and I were talking yesterday and reminiscing about getting into so much trouble [LAUGHS]. We’re getting our funding and resources from places that aren’t conventional …. And so … I’m imagining (with) a lot of you that, the idea of negotiation is part of the work …

H E I D I D U C K L E R : Yeah … life has changed …. We used to be able to do what we wanted. Now, there’s always insurance and lawyers and people following us around. A lot of this work is unplanned … because it’s responsive … you need to have that ability to be extemporaneous! Sometimes I’m asked, “What are you planning on doing here?” [LAUGHS] I need some freedom … makes it

L E F T

(l to r) Anna Boyiazis, Ernesto de la Loza, Phil Ranelin

R I G H T

(l to r) Lynne Berman, Karen Atkinson, Heidi Duckler

“ I define my life through street art … and I strive for a classless world … to be identified with a city (without) zip codes and class divisions …”

—Ernesto de la Loza

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COLA 20

E L I Z A B E T H L E I S T E R : Yeah. Completely.

LY N N E B E R M A N : It’s really exciting to be around a group of master artists who work in various ways to offer free experiences to the people … because so much in our culture is about buying and selling.

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : I think the COLA Program is an amazing historical precedent.

H E I D I D U C K L E R : … (this program has provided so much) civic pride and pride in your colleagues. It’s uplifting and grounding at the same time …

P H I L R A N E L I N : … Too bad it only happens once (in your career) … but I am so grateful and thankful …

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : … I want to thank you all for your history in creating this genre … and perpetuating such an interesting dialogue.

P H I L R A N E L I N : The story of my life is perseverance … I have also been honored to have been involved with some great musicians in my lifetime. I ended up with Motown Records, and Motown Records allowed me to form Tribe Records, which was an independent label in Detroit. That led to this.

E R N E S T O D E L A L O Z A : … I define my life through street art … and I strive for a classless world … to be identified with a city (without) zip codes and class divisions …

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : That’s great.

LY N N E B E R M A N : As I alluded to before, the COLA grant pushed me back into performance art and helped me to start rethinking about public space and interaction … and it (continues to) influence work that I’m involved with now.

PAO L O DAVA N Z O : Traditional galleries freak me out. I don’t feel welcome there. I’m not cool enough. I’m not beautiful enough … yet THIS is the people’s gallery. My mother always said, “Nurture the system, replenish the system.” She was an activist, who died when I was very young. So I’ve committed my life to helping others. Still, your city says here’s $10,000. [LAUGHS] Make your own work. It’s wonderful. This gallery has a tremendous history. We need to keep bringing art to the people. We need to keep making people feel comfortable with art … and not feeling that you have to be cool.

N A N C Y B U C H A N A N : This place has always been really key for the City of Los Angeles. At a time when diversity wasn’t as celebrated, you could always find diversity in this space. And you could discover a rainbow of artists … and have your work validated by your peers. It is one of the most meaningful things in an artist life.


TUE SDAY, APRIL 2 5, 2017

M O D E R A T E D B Y

Hirokazu KosakaLynne Thompson

W I T H

Linda ArreolaJennifer CelioJoyce Dallal

Bia GayottoClement Hanami

Malathi IyengarMichael PierzynskiMaryrose Mendoza

Corey SteinDenise Uyehara

Los Angeles has been a preeminent space of artistic integration of Western and non-Western peoples

and ideas. What aspects of LA history and culture have propelled

this integration?2

R I G H T , T O P

(l to r) Jennifer Celio, Joyce Dallal


(l to r) Malathi Iyengar, Michael Pierzynski, Denise Uyehara, Clement Hanami, Hirokazu Kosaka, Lynne Thompson, Linda Arreola, Corey Stein, Jennifer Celio, Joyce Dallal,

Maryrose Mendoza, Bia Gayotto

“ You know, creating your own audience, that’s what we do as artists. Wherever there’s people … that (is) the continuum. Art is everyday life. Artists, we have to figure out ways to present.”

—Phil Ranelin

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brought that aspect of culture into my practice …. We are all from different places … and that’s a true portrait of our city. I consider myself an LA-based artist. I’ve become part of the diversity of the city.

M A RY R O S E M E N D O Z A : My parents immigrated in 1969, and we came shortly after in 1970. I’ve had to (actually) find ways to connect to my home country. Filipinos are a majority Asian population in California … and finally getting a little bit of recognition.

J OYC E DA L L A L : I’m an immigrant from the Midwest. [LAUGHTER] But my parents emigrated from Baghdad. I was born in Indianapolis. We were a minority in Indianapolis because, in addition to being Iraqi, we’re Jewish So we were a minority in every community … (in some ways) I rebelled against my parent culture and I thought of it as a drag and a detriment …. Some years later, I got a student grant to go to the Vista Awards ceremony. I think it was sponsored by the Woman’s Building. They honored women in Los Angeles … and this amazing Japanese American koto player told a story … she asked her teacher to teach her how to play “Duke of Earl” on the koto.And her story just resonated with me so much. I was in grad school by then, and I didn’t ever consider my own background as something that I could draw upon or combine. I think simply being in Los Angeles makes you able to see in somebody, things that could apply to yourself.

J E N N I F E R C E L I O : … My work has always been about the suburbs and urban experience. Where nature and civilization collide.

L I N DA A R R E O L A : I’m born and raised in LA, and I live in a community called El Sereno … yet it’s the light, the ocean, and this feeling of anything can happen in this place which really predominated my sensations as a child. I’m Mexican American. I was raised by a single parent, and my father would drive myself and my brother out on weekends to the beach and there was a feeling of, sort of a birthing or maybe this is a place to nest for all types of people and places and ideas and all things to come

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : Los Angeles has been a pre-eminent space of artistic integration of Western and non-Western peoples and ideas. The question (of this salon) is: what aspects of LA culture and history propel this integration … Hirokazu and I met briefly before this and talked about the ways different cultures in LA affected us as artists …. A lot of my work is affected by the fact that I grew up in a Japanese American neighborhood. I wondered if anybody else had similar types of experiences as an artist?

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : I’m Okinawan and Japanese American … and I didn’t realize I was Okinawan-American until I came to Los Angeles. I am also interested to discuss … what is our connection to and our relationship to the rest of the world? Are we at the center of the world, or are we part of a large pluralistic conversation? That’s now led me to work with indigenous groups in the Southwest. I now live in Tucson … I think as artists what we’re supposed to do is to create work that unpacks very complicated situations, and asks difficult questions.

M A L A T H I I Y E N G A R : … Marriage brought me here, and I practice an Indian classical dance style called Bharatanatyam … when I was doing my MFA I was constantly asked to deconstruct my art form … you know, it’s okay sometimes if you do not understand everything. What was important to me in California (was to) find different ways to stage things in multiple ways, so each one of you will take away something different from my work. So in other words trying to choreograph from an audience point of view.

H I R O K A Z U KO S A K A : … I’m an immigrant here, and I remember coming to the states in the ’60s and, and I saw incredible amount of diversity here. I come from a traditional family as well. The question that impacted me was, “are you Japanese or Chinese?”

B I A G AYO T T O : I emigrated from Brazil in 1993 to pursue my master of fine arts here at UCLA … and like you I feel that before coming here I wasn’t aware of my roots. It wasn’t a concern in my artistic work. Coming to LA

together and it seemed to be a really unique …. My home neighborhood was Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican American. And one other thing, I rarely learned anything about Mexico until I took a trip with my brother. We saw the pyramids for the first time. And I was blown away. It was a great influence on my art practice of developing space and simple geometries. How very unique to LA that the history of “faraway places” is actually very close.

C L E M E N T H A N A M I : I grew up in Los Angeles … my unique experience is that I went to a Japanese American Catholic school in Little Tokyo. I was surrounded by Japanese Americans at school. But when I would go home, I lived in East LA. So my neighborhood was predominately Latino. All kids on my block would call me Chino, which returns to your (Hirokazu’s mention of the) Chinese/Japanese thing. And I’d reply I’m not Chino, I’m Japanese! (There was) always this constant evolution of my identity … so a lot of my work deals with hybridity and how our identi-ties are shaped by the diverse cultures in Los Angeles.

M I C H A E L P I E R Z Y N S K I : I’m a Midwestern transplant as well … I also lived in New York for eight years, also a city of immigrants, but which seems very European. I’ve lived in the same apartment in LA’s Koreatown since 1989. The Asian communities here are huge compared to New York … in addition to Mexican and Central American influences. LA just feels more non-Western from the start because of its immigrant communities …. There is also an openness here within the art world … maybe because it’s more spread out and you spend more time at home and … (thus) people tend to make more personal, idiosyncratic, and less commercial work. We also have more space to work, more light. It makes for a better working atmosphere for me …. My wife is Japanese American, from St Louis. I have a half Asian child, and he’s very comfortable here.

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : … I was just wondering, for any of you that want to respond, how this melting pot of Western and non-Western cultures in Los Angeles has affected your work, if it has?

M A L A T H I I Y E N G A R : If I didn’t live in India, I would only live here because California is a country by itself (although it’s a state) …. And I’m thankful for that for my citizenship.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : I had the experience of working here with the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, a culturally diverse experimental group. We were African American, white, working class and poor backgrounds, Asian American, and Jewish American. We did a lot of heated work, very experimental, with a lot of laughter and exchange of ideas … talking about points of intersection …. What can you learn from putting yourselves in a room together? We can kind of have a relationship and find that middle ground and that was something that was unique to Los Angeles, and I think it continues to this day.

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : I am a native Angeleno, but my parents emigrated from the Caribbean in the 1920s. Coming of age in the ’60s, I struggled with trying to con-vince my family that we were black and my mother kept saying, we are not black. We are Caribbean! …. My mother never really wanted to go back. My dad always wanted to go back. That was a point of contention. Now my poetry circles around my parent’s immigration … and I use bits and pieces of many different cultures in my writing because it’s so rich … and I suspect, listening to all of you, even when you think it’s not in your work, it’s in your work.

H I R O K A Z U KO S A K A : I think Los Angeles is incredi-ble. The scale is like a country…and (whereas) English is written horizontally, I think we speak it vertically. In Japanese we write vertically, but speak horizontally.

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L E F T

(l to r) Malathi Iyengar, Michael Pierzynski, Denise Uyehara, Clement Hanami, Hirokazu Kosaka

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J E N N I F E R C E L I O : … Not always … when I re-present elements of the urban environment, of things that I see around me … I’m depicting things that are created by very diverse peoples … and so it makes its way into my work … the products of people: buildings, structures, fabrics, all kinds of products … and everything I experience

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : … Cross-pollination. I don’t whether it’s Western or non-Western … now I’m trying to open my mind to that definition a little more … perhaps we all are drawing from the otherness?

M A L A T H I I Y E N G A R : On June 24th we have a perfor-mance right here at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. The first half of the performance is traditional classical Indian dance, and in the second half we are collaborating with an Appalachian FlatFoot dance group …

M I C H A E L P I E R Z Y N S K I : (when) I got a COLA grant in 2010, I exhibited in this space, right here. I usually work small, and I asked for one of the small rooms, and the curators provide one for me. So I was forced to improvise to a bigger installation. It also spoiled me to make something without commercial aspirations … makes me wish I could work like that all the time.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : ( For my COLA project) I performed right over there in a performance installation. The grant had a huge impact on my ability to grow as an artist because I had to think outside of my own box. I was getting relegated to touring solo and doing kind of a monologue forum and I created work that actually had no words … the money was very significant to me because I didn’t have to think commercially about the next gig. I made a commitment to myself after I finish my COLA grant project that I would not go back to a gig mentality. I had to think differently from that point on.

ever seen. A lot of Asians, but also a lot of Latinos … (who will be) making the art community here so lively. There’s a lot more people participating now.

H I R O K A Z U KO S A K A : Yes, and through other universi-ties as well: UCLA, USC, the Cal State branches, etc.

L I N DA A R R E O L A : I wanted to ask (in retrospect of all this dialogue), how do we define Western and non-Western? And how do we learn that distinction? Are we indoctrinated through schooling? …

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : I went to Scripps College, part of the Claremont College system … for me personally Western is Europe and then everyplace else is non-Western …. That’s how I make that distinction.

M A L A T H I I Y E N G A R : It used to be world, global, ethnic, or Oriental … because people are always trying to put you in a box.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : The term non-Western still puts Western in the center, and everything is in response to it …. We’re not creating work in response to Western. We create multiple voices that co-exist … and that’s what I think is really interesting about Los Angeles. There is enough access to resources to tell your story or show your point of view.

C L E M E N T H A N A M I : For me it’s always this argument between classical and ethnic. I work at the museum trying to dispel the whole notion of “the other” … (a place) where you’re not asking if it’s ethnic or classical. There’s no differentiation.

J OYC E DA L L A L : Yet if we are making work from our own background, does it become a label that we get stuck with? Does it keep us outside the norm?

L I N DA A R R E O L A : I’d like to say something about activism … LA wasn’t always a great place of diversity. There were times when we were all living in separate communities. I remember that as a child. There’s still some of that around. But I think there’s now a mindfulness of breaking down barriers. If we looked at each other’s art, you could see that pushing and trying to find something new, create something different.

C O R E Y S T E I N : We have all these wonderful ethnic backgrounds … in music, food, and art. I’ve gotten into my Native American background … working with the Autry Museum. And as I was saying earlier, we didn’t go to church ‘cause my mother was raised Catholic and my dad was raised orthodox Jewish. So we were raised going to art school on Sunday … LA rules!

M I C H A E L P I E R Z Y N S K I : … I was already interested in non-Western and ancient art objects before I moved here. Ceramics last for thousands of years! I like to think I am part of a 15,000-year tradition that is also contemporary … and I feel more comfort and acceptance for it (practicing) here in LA.

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : I really appreciate what we have here … when I travel to other areas, they just don’t have the same mix.

H I R O K A Z U KO S A K A : I read some of your resumes, and I saw that many of you were educated here. I, too, I went to a school called Chouinard Art Institute in MacArthur Park, and there was the Otis Parsons and Otis School there and ArtCenter was on 7th Street … before it moved to Pasadena … (also) Pacific Standard Time is a very import-ant thing happening here in Los Angeles

M I C H A E L P I E R Z Y N S K I : I would echo that. I work at Otis, and the student body there is the most diverse I’ve

They’re not yes and no, or black and white (but) an in between space … and I think I grew up in that situation …. Everything is conjoined in oneness … and the void is also important. I think many of us here are lingering on the subject of scale. I mean we don’t get rain, we get sunshine all the time … and in some sense Los Angeles is like a rat in a shoe box, whereas Japan is an elephant in a match box.

C L E M E N T H A N A M I : I always like listening to Hirokazu because he’s a mentor to a lot of us. I work at the Japanese American National Museum, and in many ways we’re a small, ethnic-specific museum with big aspirations. What I have been able to bring to the museum is a hybrid-ity of projects …. For example, after the (1992) riots we started to work with Self-Help Graphics, Watts Towers Art Center, Plaza De La Raza, and as many institutions as we could …. And for us it’s about truth and history … but it’s diversity that makes the truth even stronger and harder to break down. And I think that’s something that we have in Los Angeles. The strength of America is diversity.

B I A G AYO T T O : You both mentioned hybridity or hybridism and the spaces between. I always felt like I am a hybrid of two cultures. I’m not there. I’m not here. I am somewhere in between. That premise led me to pursue a series of video work with the COLA grant. I went to the Azores to explore my own roots …. People like me navigate or circulate between two or more places and cultures … addressing that sense of culture, sense of place, and cultural identity. I use an ethnographic approach.

J OYC E DA L L A L : I just want to say that the project that Clement talked about was called Finding Family Stories … and (this project) with several ethnic museums or community art spaces was really interesting …

“ The term non-Western still puts Western in the center, and everything is in response to it …. We’re not creating work in response to Western. We create multiple voices that co-exist … and that’s what I think is really interesting about Los Angeles. There is enough access to resources to tell your story or show your point of view.”

—Denise Uyehara

L E F T

Denise Uyehara

R I G H T

(l to r) Jennifer Celio, Joyce Dallal, Maryrose Mendoza, Bia Gayotto

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COLA 20

J E N N I F E R C E L I O : I was a recipient in 2014, and like others have said, it was very freeing to have that funding to create something without any pressure for commercial applications … the funding allowed me to create a large pencil drawing (one of my largest I’d ever done), and rep-resented, the very end of a body of work. Now my work is completely different. I do mixed media paintings. It was that step I needed to go to the next phase.

J OYC E DA L L A L : I got the COLA in 2008 … a time when I was upset about the United States using torture. So I did a piece using the text of the Geneva Conventions. When the curators came to my studio, I had made this little paper airplane. I also thought I was gonna get one of these little rooms. But they said no, we’re putting you right here, in the front. [LAUGHS] So I did a test by hanging my little paper plane … and I thought now I have three months to make about 940 airplanes. [LAUGHS] During the opening party, somebody said to me, “you should show this at the United Nations,” and so I actually called the United Nations and talked to someone in Geneva … and ended up taking the installation to New York in the UN lobby … where an African artist who visiting from Norway on a residency orchestrated a way to take the piece to Norway in suitcases. [LAUGHS] I’ve been on this kick with paper airplanes now for like ten years.

M A RY R O S E M E N D O Z A : When I received my COLA grant, I was very honored to be recognized by the same program that recognized some of my teachers and … great artists like Michael Brewster, Phyllis Green, Jack Butler, and Susan Rankaitis. It felt like, wow!

B I A G AYO T T O : I received the COLA grant in 2009 … and started doing multiple screen video installations using mul-tiple ways to tell a story through different points of view and perspectives. That’s something that I’m still doing.

C L E M E N T H A N A M I : I was a COLA artist in 2007 …. At the time I was doing these mash-ups … rickshaws designed with low-rider style based on the whole expe-rience of being called Chino in my neighborhood. We’d ride people in them … they had music playing really loud. [LAUGHS] Getting the COLA grant really validated what I was doing and gave me more confidence. I made three rickshaws. One was exhibited at the Smithsonian (recently).

H I R O K A Z U KO S A K A : I received a COLA in 2006 … my project was a collaboration between myself, Oguri, and Yuval Ron. It was called Charcoal Pit …

LY N N E T H O M P S O N : I was a recipient in 2016, and it was interesting to me the way others started to view me … I remain interested in the way that cities make decisions about what they keep and what they don’t keep in terms of neighborhoods, buildings, murals, or other kinds of landmarks. The COLA grant made me nostalgic for land-marks that aren’t here anymore. So I thought I could write them back into existence … and I also became interested in things that had been covered up, such as the downtown courthouse on 1st and Hill, once the spot of a lynching. So I’m interested in excavating the history of this city.

L I N DA A R R E O L A : I have to say that this gallery has been a place I’ve admired since I was very young. I didn’t go to commercial galleries. I would come to the LA Municipal over the years. So it was a BIG thing to become a fellow. It validated me. I have no representation in any commer-cial galleries, so I make very little money on my art. The money that I received floated me to the next level so I’m very grateful … I hope the grants continue ’cause it just doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s so important.

C O R E Y S T E I N : I had a blast!

L E F T

(l to r) Lynne Thompson, Linda Arreola, Corey Stein


WEDNE SDAY, APRIL 26, 2017


Ei leen CowinJen Hofer

Jesse Lerner W I T H

maRia BodmannSam Erenberg

How have the rich cinematic storytelling and documentary traditions of LA’s film and

television industry influenced the literary, performing, and

visual arts?

SE S SION 1

3

R I G H T , T O P

(l to r) Jesse Lerner, Jen Hofer


(l to r) Sam Erenberg, Eileen Cowin, Jesse Lerner, Jen Hofer, maRia Bodmann

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COLA SALON CONVERSATIONS

entertainment, where you had a screen and a lamp and characters that play between the screen and the lamp for a story. It’s a really difficult art … it feels like cinematogra-phy, so, here I am …

J E N H O F E R : I was involved in a puppet theater collective for many years here called Sunset Chronicles. But, I’m actually resonating a lot, Sam, with your description of your work because some of the work that I do in my poetic practice has to do with filtering through the ways that language becomes militarized and military thinking and a sort of permanent state of war is normalized through language.

S A M E R E N B E R G : Years later I discovered Guy Debord and his treatise on … I forget the title. It’s a complicated title. I copied the entire written piece, letter by letter by stamping each letter on … into eighteen panels of wood … this history about race. I grew up in Los Angles, Baldwin Hills, really, which had a strong effect on my work. The piece I made for COLA was about military intervention, water, thirst, and drought.

J E N H O F E R : Jumping forward, some poets and artists started doing this practice where they would take a clip from a film, mute the sound, and re-narrate the film … it’s a practice where you are using the image to generate the work that you’re making as a writer and then performing back with the image playing alongside. So, that’s what I did with the grant that I had for COLA. It was the first time I made a multi-voiced piece, which was amazing … but it’s also using film in a completely different way, less as enter-tainment and more as something to sort of take apart and then remake into poetry and defamiliarize on purpose. So, we had one other thought, if each of us wants to go around and say a question that we brought to this conver-sation. What brought you here?

S A M E R E N B E R G : Like Jesse, I began in experimental film, and the art world wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my experimental films in the late 60s and 70s. The art world did change, of course, with the onset of video art. And so, I guess the question is, why has (experimental film) not integrated more with the art world?

J E S S E L E R N E R : What you’re doing doesn’t fit very well into something that can be commodified.

E I L E E N C O W I N : … The art world now is about making money, and the film industry is about making money … I sent a quote this morning about Damien Hirst talking about how kitsch his work is. You know, “it’s not just kitsch, it’s very Hollywood.”

J E S S E L E R N E R : Well, I guess, I would suggest that maybe there’s more than one art world, right? And the same thing might be true for the world of moving images. There are parts that are about box office success. And then there are other kinds of moving images that are about something else.

E I L E E N C O W I N : I was just gonna mention what you said about something being authentic because it had a grass-roots approach …

J E N H O F E R : Well, that sort of leads me back … I was thinking about your mention of ritual and ritual entertainment. And then what I wrote down when you were talking about that was to wonder if all art is ritual. I think in some way, movie-going is ritual, that sitting quietly in the dark with many other people, most of whom you probably don’t know, and sharing a narrative visual experience. And poetry feels like a ritual to me as well. I work a lot as an activist and think a lot about the ways that people use their agency to make meaning. So, I think, our conception of art worlds has a lot to do with what we’re

COLA 20

Hollywood is more of a mindset instead of a place. So, we could take it from there.

J E N H O F E R : As an experimental poet, my mode is always to understand the grammar and then break the grammar. So I just read right past that word industry and decided to think about film and the ways that it affects the artworks that I care about. Thought that we might go around again and give an example of one project or piece of art, either by yourself or by someone else, that interacts with the film industry. What do we mean when we say art that interacts with or interfaces with or intertwines with the film indus-try? Are people familiar with the Thom Andersen film Los Angeles Plays Itself ? For me, that piece is a really good example of a piece that is not itself a commercial film by any stretch, but in many, many different ways and very complexly interacts with commercial filmmaking, with the idea of Hollywood, both as place, as concept, as char-acter, as sort of an air that permeates a particular way of making art. I see that film as poetry. I see it as essay. I see it as polemic.

J E S S E L E R N E R : A film like Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge is not a commercial film by a stretch of imagination, right? A forty-minute take of a light table. And on the light table, he puts different pieces of film and he talks about those pieces of film … the result is a very playful, struc-tural, experimental film of little fragments of other films.

S A M E R E N B E R G : I grew up in a Hollywood family. My uncle was a film and TV director, and my mother worked for ABC News as a researcher. So, there were people in and out of the house from the time I was young. I was invited to some sets as a kid, and so I have fond memories of those experiences. And since my mother was a social activist as well and worked in South Central LA with gangs, that had a profound influence on me. But it wasn’t until years later that I began to make work that had a direct relation to Hollywood … a piece based on the 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, for a program organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art … and I made an installation in the old State Street Theater, which was turned into an arcade … and at that time, the arcade had numerous war videogames for kids … so my project was partly tongue in cheek, but partly serious critique of war and foreign policy.

M A R I A B O D M A N N : I was drawn to this discussion because my art form, Balinese wayang kulit shadow play, is ritual entertainment. It is also the world’s first screen

J E N H O F E R : So, we had this idea that we would introduce ourselves by our preferred gender pronoun, our neighbor-hood, and if there’s a particular project that we’re working on in a pressing or passionate way. Do you want to start?

J E S S E L E R N E R : You can refer to me as he or him or his. I live in Chavez Ravine, but my studio is in Echo Park. And the project that I’m working on with Los Angeles Film Forum is a survey exhibition of eighteen programs, and a 406-page catalog about the history of experimental film in Latin America for Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA with the support of the Getty Museum, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

E I L E E N C O W I N : I live in Santa Monica, but my studio’s in West LA. And I guess you could refer to me as she, her, or whatever. I’m working on art for the platform levels of the Martin Luther King Jr. metro station …

S A M E R E N B E R G : He or el in French, I suppose. I live and work in Santa Monica as well. I’m working on a series of painting titled The Battle of Los Angeles, based on a Los Angeles Times photograph that was taken in 1942 about anti-aircraft batteries that went off one night.

M A R I A B O D M A N N : You can call me she or her. I live in Grenada Hills, which is part of Counsel District 12. I just recently finished a project of shadow theater, a political satire, which was very cathartic for the performers and audience.

J E N H O F E R : I live in Cypress Park, which is in northeast Los Angeles. I prefer to use she or they. I am working on a show through the MAK Center for Art and Architecture for Pacific Standard Time: LA / LA that focuses on the role of Disney in Latin America … and also thinking a lot about Hollywood for export and how that has had political ram-ifications across the Americas and across the world. Also thinking about both political satire and issues like imperi-alism, what kinds of products, ideological and otherwise, we might export, which also leads me to think about militarism.

E I L E E N C O W I N : The topic of this salon is the ways in which the rich cinematic storytelling and documentary traditions of the LA film and television industries influ-ence the literary, performing, and visual arts? … I don’t really think that much about the industry, and I think that

L E F T

Sam Erenberg

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E I L E E N C O W I N : I was researching this idea of how people thought about LA, just the idea of Los Angeles because it’s just such a … it’s very unique. Geographically, it’s unique. The poet Harryette Mullen was giving a talk a couple of weeks ago she said, “I still don’t understand Los Angeles. It’s wonderfully complicated and tragically complicated.” Then I found that other people have said almost a similar thing. Bertolt Brecht said about LA: the very same streets can feel like purgatory or the promise land, all depending on the status of your dreams. So, it’s really wonderful to see how people would say, it’s either this or that. It can be both at once. Werner Herzog once said he was going to move to San Francisco, but felt that it wasn’t the most exciting place in the United States. He said, we wanted to move to the city with the most sub-stance, and it was immediately clear that Los Angeles.

J E N H O F E R : I think we have to end soon, so maybe I’ll end with this poem … this is from City Terrace Field Manual by Sesshu Foster. I was trying to look on the wall to see if he had gotten a COLA grant, and he did! Well deserved. It’s published by a press called Kaya, which used to be located in New York. They’re about twenty-some years old now. They focus on Asian diasporic work. So, I wanted to read a poem that is very Los Angeles, as counterpoint to more Hollywood-esque ideas.

How to get there. Downhill from the jail where deputies run in training formation. Stragglers staggering up past the school where we played football on the lawn, down the avenue behind plaza market. The wall that cracked open. Willie Herron painted faces of the afflicted breaking through the walls of oppression after Johnny, his brother, in my class, was beaten by gangbangers to the intersection where, years later, I crash Pricilla’s car into a truck that ran the red light. The little Honda jumping into the air like a poodle, spraying out an arc of glass, rubber stripping and chrome fittings there. Years before the library was turned

into a laundromat, years earlier, past the gas station burnt down, bulldozed, apartments and dusty, narrow shops. In the old days when people went to the farmer’s market, replaced by St. Lucy’s. Then, across the freeway overpass, where the motorcycle cop hides out in the morning, a right past the onramp, down into the factory district where I walked the railroad tracks with my bloody hand wrapped up in my tee-shirt. Twelve years old, and I wanted revenge for everything they were doing to us, smashing out all the windows I could in the envelope factory, smashing out every window I could until my fist was lacerated to the bone and I wrapped it up and walked. Twelve years old, bleeding through my shirt, through the heatwaves on the railroad tracks in the flat, hot, smoggy sun of all those years.

Thank you Sesshu.

E I L E E N C O W I N : In closing we might each talk about the COLA grant program in relation to our careers and/or this topic? When I got a COLA grant, I decided I would make my first single channel video, which I don’t know if I would have ever made if I hadn’t gotten that grant with that show, and I still feel really good about that.

J E S S E L E R N E R : With my COLA grant, I made an experimental film … it subsequently showed at lots of film festivals including Rotterdam.

M A R I A B O D M A N N : The COLA grant changed what I do quite a bit. I’m a three-time cancer survivor. At that time, I was a one-time cancer survivor, and I decided to write my cancer story as a shadow play. I don’t think I would have done that without the COLA grant.

S A M E R E N B E R G : I’m still working on the project that I exhibited in COLA, zero nine, mementos, historical events. A kind of overview of American foreign policy. I’m up to about 400 small, black-and-white paintings now.

gonna frame the reception, right? I guess my point is that, even if you’re not thinking about living in the (San Fernando) Valley, it is framing your next piece. And people from outside Los Angeles will say, “oh, this isn’t a Balinese version of shadow theater, but rather an Angeleno’s take.”

M A R I A B O D M A N N : That’s totally true. Los Angeles is so supportive. It’s also the gateway Asia … so, yeah, I guess, geography is important.

S A M E R E N B E R G : The beginning of TV news looking above that was 1965. That perspective originated in Los Angeles. The pervasiveness of covering news from an aerial perspective is certainly how I/we envision Los Angeles. That concept really affects my work.

J E N H O F E R : I guess, I wanted to go back to an idea that Maria was talking about, that we could do anything, anywhere. I’m much more aligned with where we stand or where we make our work from does matter. And yes, there’s great dispersal with the internet … particularly if you think about any kind of work that is involved or engaged with grassroots … and the people who are doing things are in different places. For me, it’s important to think about the non-universality and specificity of being a particular body, occupying a particular subject position, in a particular place. And so, that would also mean, to return to our topic perhaps, that the ways that we interface with the artifacts of the culture that are all around us, which in Los Angeles, do have something to do with Hollywood production and with lots of other things as well, probably are different based on how we receive those artifacts and who we are … I brought some poems that had to do with our topic today, but maybe someone else wants to talk while I look for the one I’m thinking of. They’re not by me, but by other Los Angeles writers.

valuing. While you were talking, Jesse I was thinking about the kinds of resources that we have, this industry here. And then, how can we be oppositional? How can we dissent in a beautiful and artful way?

S A M E R E N B E R G : I was radicalized when I saw The Battle of Algiers, but in 1966. I was twenty-two. That was fifty years ago.

J E N H O F E R : So, you haven’t been thinking about activ-ism for very long? [LAUGHS] Maybe our next question should be: What radicalized you?

M A R I A B O D M A N N : I just wanted to talk a bit more about the ritual. You know, in Bali they didn’t even have a word for art until the twentieth century because it was all tied in with ritual and with their religion, which is very strong. And it’s a cool religion. It’s a combination of Hindu, Buddhist, and their original Animism. So, it’s all about love and giving thanks and balancing good and evil. And I feel that maybe, as a society, we would grow or at least grow tolerance if there was a little more ritual in our lives. And I don’t think ritual can be commercialized.

E I L E E N C O W I N : Do you think that Los Angeles, in the age of the internet, can still be a place of influence? When people would say to me it looks like your artwork is really influenced by Hollywood … I replied, “I don’t think so.” But I just wonder now if LA or New York or Ohio can influ-ence us greatly or politically.

M A R I A B O D M A N N : You know, the technology has just gone so far that the geographical location almost doesn’t matter.

J E S S E L E R N E R : But, doesn’t location frame your thought process while you’re making your work? It’s

F A R L E F T

maRia Bodmann

L E F T

Eileen Cowin

“ … it’s all about love and giving thanks and balancing good and evil. And I feel that maybe, as a society, we would grow or at least grow tolerance if there was a little more ritual in our lives.”

—maRia Bodmann

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J A N I E G E I S E R : (So the question is about) the cinematic and its relationship to Los Angeles … and our relationship as artists to that tradition …

K E N R O H T : Have you thought in terms of a cinematic context for your work?

J A N I E G E I S E R : I make films; I use films in my perfor-mance. And film was one of my major artistic influences growing up, film and television. So, it informs everything that I do in terms of my artistic practice. One film that I remember seeing as a kid on TV was The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was fantastic … like The Wizard of Oz … my work is actually drawn very much from cinematic form, like thinking some more or thinking about other kind of experimental films. But I never had particularly thought about it in terms of LA.

K E N T YO U N G : For me, the draw of the industry was sort of subconscious …. And coming to Los Angeles, making that decision to come here, was probably in large part because of the (film) industry … the desire to be a part of that dynamic mythology … my maternal grandparents lived in Canoga Park, and my grandfather owned a biker bar …. When I moved here for school (I was) thinking that I wouldn’t be for very long.

S A R A H M AC L AY: I got to Los Angeles because of the film industry. I’m from Montana, and I had fallen in love with European film … foreign films and American independent film. For a few years, I was working behind the scenes at the Sea Islander National Film Festival … meeting a lot of filmmakers, and I had been writing … singing … acting … so I thought, I don’t want to be eighty and not have tried acting … I had fallen in love with (Ingmar) Bergman, espe-cially Persona and The Silence … the ones that I find most haunting … David Lynch … especially Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive … and (Wim) Wenders’s Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire … what is cinematic has to do with camera moves, especially the dissolve. A lot of my work is very involved with the dreamlike and the surreal. And so … there’s an automatic connection.

K E N R O H T : And poetry?

S A R A H M AC L AY: I found my way back to poetry. I had been published as a poet before …

K E N R O H T : I’m from Los Angeles. From an early age I got … to go on the studio lots to see films and television being made … so it (media fantasy) was demystified early for me. And my first job … in ninth grade … was an assis-tant running stagecraft …. Song and dance, that’s my background …

K E N T YO U N G : I remember going to Disneyland when I was a little boy, and it rained the whole time. I had a great time.

K E N R O H T : I used to go to Disneyland every year with school …. Animation … that’s super exciting to me … so, I’ve done really whimsical, surrealistic musical theater … alternative worlds, fun.

J A N I E G E I S E R : I didn’t come here for the mythology, or to work in the business. I came here to teach at CalArts.

K E N T YO U N G : The school that Disney built.

J A N I E G E I S E R : That’s true. Yeah. But it’s the artifice of film that I fell in love with. And that is a big part of my artistic practice … creating some kind of illusion that we all decide to believe, but we know is fake. And that tension and that beauty of artifice …

S A R A H M AC L AY: I’m having a memory that may or may not be relevant … The Big Lebowski is modeled after a guy that I was going out with when I was first here. Yeah, liter-ally. [LAUGHTER]

K E N R O H T : Oh, my God.

J A N I E G E I S E R : I think that brings up a point about Los Angeles …. All those (screenplay) stories, they all intersect with real life …. You will be walking around, and you will see a house, and you recognize it from a film … I work with puppetry, and objects, and found materials … things that might have a cultural memory …. The main characters (in my artworks) are puppets … they’re not alive … constantly reminding you of that line between life and death that (we are) walking all the time.


THUR SDAY, APRIL 27, 2017

SE S SION 2

3M O D E R A T E D B Y

Janie GeiserKen Roht

Kent Young W I T H

Sarah Maclay

How have the rich cinematic storytelling and documentary traditions of LA’s film and

television industry influenced the literary, performing, and

visual arts?

L E F T , T O P

(l to r) Sarah Maclay, Ken Roht, Janie Geiser, Kent Young

L E F T , B E L O W

(l to r) Janie Geiser, Kent Young

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S A R A H M AC L AY: … a bunch of us found our way doing a master class with David St. John … he’s been very instrumental in a lot of poet’s lives in LA … and then Ralph Angel, and Cecelia Wallach …. It’s hard to find a community, a sense of community in LA that stays. (Even) the film business is a sort of temporary (project-based) community … that is really intense …. The (LA) poetry community is pretty porous, and it has a way of continuing.

K E N T YO U N G : … I see my daughter watching, whatever she watches, on a little bitty iPhone, and it’s traditional narrative. When I grew up watching TV, we had three channels. And narrative structure was already deter-mined … (through) a rich and long history … that structure was arrived at, I think, primarily through Hollywood.

J A N I E G E I S E R : Teaching at CalArts … I’ve noticed a huge shift in the percentage of graduate students who stay in Los Angeles instead of going to New York … visual artists, performance artists, filmmakers, that are … staying here and forming what you’re describing in terms of the poet’s community.

S A R A H M AC L AY: This is a little bit away from the con-versation, but I was just thinking … imagery is one of the really strong connections I feel to film …. As a poet you’re not talking in abstract words, you’re talking in images. You are trying to leave traces … phenomenologi-cal traces on the minds of whoever … sometimes it’s just about image and flow. I had mentioned David St. John, and there’s a particular poem of his called Meridian, which is a story about an encounter with a woman. And it turns out that she has a really devastating problem with drugs. And, there’s this amazing dolly-tracking shot at the beginning of Goodfellas …. It’s very long and unin-terrupted … where they come through the bowels of the

know if you guys know a cartoon called Adventure Time? It’s so brilliant, and it’s so weird.

K E N T YO U N G : Yes, the story is linear and the imagery is a non sequitur?

K E N R O H T : Non sequitur is a great word.

K E N T YO U N G : Well, I used to say people move here for any number of reasons, but they stay because of the weather. And that’s partly true … yet Hollywood was the (primary) lure. It was sort of the bait and switch [LAUGHTER] …. The idea of Hollywood is strong. It’s the magnet that brings creative people here. And, they stay. Most people I know (in LA) are from somewhere else, and they come here to seek out creativity.

J A N I E G E I S E R : When I was coming here from New York, all of my friends in the Lower East Side kept saying, “Well, you have to meet David Wilson, who runs the Museum of Jurassic Technology.” So, I made it a point to go and meet him within the first month that I came here. I went to an event (a lecture on bird calls by a very eccentric man) … and sat next to David. And after it was over, I said to my husband, “Okay. Now, I can live in Los Angeles.” … David started as a model-maker, working in the movies … and in his spare time started this other kind of fictional historical presence.

K E N R O H T : … I started in commercial entertainment and was having a great time. I was doing industrial shows for hotels or dinner theater on Catalina Island … with all these yippy-skippy songs. And loving it. And if I’d kept doing that, I’d be a millionaire. But, I met Reza … and followed him to Bob Flannigan shows … I feel like I was some sort of spiritualist flogging myself, you know … to exorcise the upper-middle-class guy of all my conventional presets.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … when I kind of got back into writing, I was going to workshops at the Midnight Special book-store … and Beyond Baroque. And a lot of the people that were going were also … working in film or at one time was an editor, an actor … somebody who was doing set design …

J A N I E G E I S E R : … how do you feel like your interest in film has seeped into your writing?

S A R A H M AC L AY: … I don’t consider myself primarily a narrative poet, but I think that to the extent that … working in the industry … (I am) looking at a story in that way … when I think about those great moments in Persona at night, where you’re not really sure if it’s a dream or … if it’s meant to be real. Yeah, there, there is a lot of stuff like that in that film … I’m really interested in anything that’s liminal … anything that has that kind of sense of blur … boundary-lessness and threshold.

J A N I E G E I S E R : That idea of the liminal space is very important to my work, too. And I don’t know how much of that comes from film … I was also thinking when you were talking about dissolves … and I think film-forms have affected every bit of art in the twenty-first century … just the idea of jump-cutting or dissolves.

S A R A H M AC L AY: Or the extreme close-up … I’m not just thinking of mine, but some other poets can focus for a second on something that seems peripheral, like in a glimpse … that’s so potent.

K E N R O H T : There’s a lot of video … that goes into (live) theater now …. Again, I started in musical reviews, which is (like) collage. Then I worked with this guy named Reza Abdoh …. (His artworks were) all about collage … so I find the concept of collage, is very important to me … I don’t

K E N R O H T : Like (Robert) Rauschenberg’s sculptures … about common events.

S A R A H M AC L AY: Right … related … through the history of collage, which also is a big part of film. Collage and montage …

K E N T YO U N G : … my work is … conceptually based … depending on the project … I did a lot of performance work for several years. I have an identical twin brother, and we engaged that subject pretty vigorously for a while …. My work spans the field of media, performance, video, and collage … the video work … it’s narrative. (My artworks) tend to document events or actions … Fluxus, in some regard, would be a close analogy. (Samuel) Beckett is one of my heroes …. Oftentimes the performances took the form of an experiment … (and) would draw from the scientific … or the scientific method … as a strategy … for structure.

K E N R O H T : Did you feel like you were in any way getting permission from any particular filmmakers?

K E N T YO U N G : No. The influences … were more literary … although, yeah, Paris, Texas … movies like that, sort of define Hollywood … by admission …

J A N I E G E I S E R : … makes me think about the experimental film community that’s always existed here … a lot of exper-imental filmmakers had jobs in Hollywood. They might be editors or color-correctors or camera people …. So, there is a kind of cross-over that happened here and still happens …. An artist like Pat O’Neill was integrated in the film commu-nity and developed a lot of his skills through his access to that equipment …. So, there has always been artists … not necessarily informed by Hollywood, but aware of it … and earning money from it.

L E F T

(l to r) Janie Geiser, Kent Young

R I G H T

(l to r) Sarah Maclay, Ken Roht

“ … it’s the artifice of film that I fell in love with. And that is a big part of my artistic practice … creating some kind of illusion that we all decide to believe, but we know is fake.”

—Janie Geiser

111

COLA 20

S A R A H M AC L AY: … It took me an hour and a half to drive across LA to (this gallery) from Venice … and on the way I happened to hear Mayor Eric Garcetti (on KCRW radio) talking about LA as an imperfect paradise …. Maybe part of what we are doing (here is) embracing that imperfection?

restaurant and then come out into the main site (during which) you learn all of this detail of a character …. That’s going on in this poem (by David St. John). The way it’s constructed, it’s a really (sustained yet) intricate shot … set up so that you can barely breathe … until you realize you have been (fully) informed.

K E N T YO U N G : As an artist, my job is to tell a good story. And so, I’m thinking about where in my work can I identify this idea of story. When I was doing these performance pieces with my twin brother, the format was a science experiment. There was one where we tried to solve a crossword puzzle telepathically. One of us had the clues and the other had the puzzle. It went on for over an hour … the story came from the audience …. Another (format for our) performance was a three-act play. The first act was like a song and a dance. The second act was the exper-iment. And the third act was a return to the song and dance. And (as) we were twins … in the middle of it all, we switched characters. A simple effect, we changed hats and switched positions … and just kept right on going.

J A N I E G E I S E R : … I think that motivates a lot … allowing for ambiguity, for people who have their own experience …

K E N T YO U N G : I think I’ve always strived in my ideas for clarity, clarity that allows for the ambiguity.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … clear images, but with the possibility for something to be interpreted in more than one way.

K E N R O H T : … to create surrealist work with these elements … it’s delightful.

J A N I E G E I S E R : … Are any of us (really) working in reaction to the film industry or … in confluence with it? It is a big part of our landscape …


WEDNE SDAY, APRIL 26, 2017M O D E R A T E D B Y

Cheri GaulkeTerry Wolverton

W I T H

Kaucyila BrookeMarsian de Lell is

Phyll is GreenJessica Rath

Coleen SterrittDenise Uyehara

What are the shared and divergent strategies employed by artists who

embed feminist and/or LGBT ideas in their works?

How have artists working at this intersection shaped a national

dialogue?4

L E F T

Ken Roht

R I G H T , T O P

(l to r) Marsian de Lellis, Coleen Sterritt, Kaucyila Brooke


(l to r) Denise Uyehara, Phyllis Green, Jessica Rath, Cheri Gaulke, Terry Wolverton, Marsian de Lellis,

Coleen Sterritt, Kaucyila Brooke

SE S SION 1

114113


was the first woman who was the shop assistant, which was a major big deal. That was in the mid-’70s. I never had a female instructor until I got to Otis, and Betye Saar was my mentor … that, in itself, was an amazing expe-rience … The Woman’s Building was, you know, out in the boondocks … and I think about the freedom of being downtown. It was at the time that LACE started, and there was this amazing amount of experimental work going on … through artist-run spaces.

J E S S I C A R A T H : … I had grown up with a disdain for capitalism and for any kind of commercialization of art as anything other than a collective experience … Millie Wilson was my mentor, and (she professed) an idea that I didn’t necessarily have to identify as LGBT, and the work didn’t have to be particularly feminist in its content or issues. So I felt like I could become an artist with feminist intent without a fixed identity …. And this city continues to amaze me, how many different kinds of people that I meet, all the time. And how welcoming it is in terms of how I evolve.

M A R S I A N D E L E L L I S : … my work is definitely queer. I have a lot of strong female protagonists, who are often complicated. My last piece was about object-sexuality … I definitely work in an area that involves craft that has a feminist tradition … and like others my education was heavy on critical theory and feminism and dominated by women (more than men), and LGBTQ people. And I remember … as I kid, I was inspired by Rachel Rosenthal. I read an article in OMNI magazine about her work and how she was an interdisciplinary performance artist and could traverse different mediums. That really got me going on a path toward performance art …. The puppet community here in LA is more dominated by women than any other puppet community where I’ve lived—Chicago, New York, Providence.

been meaningful to me about Los Angeles …. As I traverse the city, its great expansiveness and openness … allows for a lot of freedom … (with fewer) historical burdens …

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : After I graduated from UC Irvine, I stumbled upon Highways Performance Space, and ended up living there (at the 18th Street Arts Center) …. And I remember one of the first pieces that I saw was Ron Athey’s body piercing piece and … it just blew my mind. 18th Street … was a huge synergy of queer performance, people of color, working class poor …. It was founded by Tim Miller and Linda Burnham … I was creating solo work and coming out as queer and bi … I was also in an ensem-ble called the Sacred Naked Nature Girls … and we created work that was very much about … spaces of imagination.

C H E R I G AU L K E : In the summer of 1974, I was introduced to performance art … and I heard that in Los Angeles at the Woman’s Building, at the Feminist Studio Workshop, that … Suzanne Lacy was teaching performance art, but they were having feminist performance art conferences. I just was so excited. So that’s why I moved to LA. And I was attracted to that medium because it was a medium that had not really been defined by men. It was wide open … and the whole city was this very rich environment for performance …. We were working with other women. We were inventing this new art form. We were interacting with communities. We were incorporating social and political critique into our work and thinking about how art could have a function in society and make change in society through questions of form …. And the content, too, was about violence against women … incest … sexual abuse … lesbianism, and so many topics that were really initially kind of taboo …

C O L E E N S T E R R I T T : … I am a feminist (but) my work does not address feminist perspectives specifically …. At the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana … I

I’ve been here for maybe ten years. I’ve lived in Boston, Providence, New York, and Chicago.

C O L E E N S T E R R I T T : I moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Originally from Chicago … so I’ve been here for forty years, and I consider myself definitely a Los Angeles artist. I’m a sculptor. I also make drawings. I received my COLA fellowship in 2007.

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : I moved here in 1992 to take a position at CalArts in Valencia. And first I lived in Mount Washington, and then Silver Lake … and then I was able to move to Tujunga. So now I’m a mountain woman …. Being an Oregonian, I’m thrilled to be near the mountains. I work with photography and video and text and image. And I also write, with a little drawing here and there.

C H E R I G AU L K E : So … what is it about your work that reflects feminist and/or queer identities in its forms or content?

P H Y L L I S G R E E N : … my education at UCLA centered on ceramics … one of the media that’s considered women’s work … that’s had second-class status in the modernist pantheon. So I was challenged by that …. My work got bigger and bigger, until the mid-‘90s, when I made smaller objects, for which I was awarded the COLA grant …. (Since then) I have been making small, playful work loaded with decoration and ornament, which I consider to be antithet-ical to a modernist strategy …

C O L E E N S T E R R I T T : I started making sculpture in 1976 … (I) went to graduate school at Otis … (when) the sculpture world was a heavily male-dominated world. To be taken seriously in that world was very difficult …. Anyway, I chose to be here because of that, because I felt that it was important to find a way to talk about … what has

T E R RY W O LV E R T O N : … We’re celebrating twenty years of the COLA Fellowships, and I’m excited to sit with each of you to talk about feminism and LGBTQ intersectional-ity …. We wanted to just begin by asking each of you to give us your art medium and how long you’ve lived in LA or your history with LA.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : … I’m a performance artist and a writer. I work in solo and ensemble forms. I came to LA in the late ‘80s, and I now live in Tucson, Arizona.

P H Y L L I S G R E E N : I came here in 1979, and my profes-sional career started in 1981 when I graduated from UCLA … I’m a sculptor … an object maker. But along the way I have also done animation, video, and performance.

J E S S I C A R A T H : I came out here for grad school in 1994 and have stayed in Silver Lake for twenty-five years, I guess. I’m a sculptor predominantly … (but also) work in a lot of with film, drawing, printmaking, performance, and sound.

C H E R I G AU L K E : I moved to LA in 1975 to be involved with the Woman’s Building and the feminist art move-ment. A proud resident of Silver Lake. My medium was performance art for many years … but also installation, public art, video, and writing.

T E R RY W O LV E R T O N : I moved to Los Angeles in 1976 from Detroit … the Woman’s Building and feminism and queer identity had everything to do with my getting to Los Angeles. I needed a place where I could bring those iden-tities together with my artwork …. And I am primarily a writer … (but also have) a long history in performance …

M A R S I A N D E L E L L I S : I’m a visual artist, performance artist, and writer who often uses puppets and dolls …

“ Millie Wilson was my mentor, and (she professed) an idea that I didn’t necessarily have to identify as LGBT, and the work didn’t have to be particularly feminist in its content or issues. So I felt like I could become an artist with feminist intent without a fixed identity …”

—Jessica Rath

L E F T

Terry Wolverton

R I G H T

(l to r) Phyllis Green, Jessica Rath, Cheri Gaulke

116115


go to India. I never would have been able to make that trip without the funding.

C H E R I G AU L K E : … I did three artist books … (which) was very affirming for me as a writer … and that’s something that I’m doing a lot more now. I’m in a group called QueerWise, LGBTQ people over fifty writing and performing …

J E S S I C A R A T H : ( The COLA fellowship) … allowed me to experiment between different mediums, including film, texts, and music … and to collaborate with a composer, which now I do regularly.

P H Y L L I S G R E E N : … I had sort of focused my attention for a number of years on public art. And then I got the COLA grant, and it reaffirmed and redirected me toward my studio practice.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : … (the COLA fellowship) helped me move away from the idea of the creator-spectator … and reposition my own identity, making it a more plu-ralistic conversation that is the art. I finished the project called Shooting Columbus with indigenous and non-indig-enous artists … and next I’ll be working with James Luna … COLA was that moment of change for me.

J E S S I C A R A T H : … I teach writing. I teach research and I teach professional practices. But I also teach sculpture (at ArtCenter College of Design) … and I think 60% of the students are foreign nationals, so I get to understand the world in a way that is really quite phenomenal now, with people from all over the world, and diverse LGBT and feminists’ perspectives … that are new and challenging me.

M A R S I A N D E L E L L I S : I just wanted to add that in the current political climate, there’s been a lot of fabulous street art that’s very carnivalesque …. And I was so proud of our Women’s March. It attracted 750,000, which is the most of all the women’s marches. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, people think we’re all getting our asses bleached … stuck in our cars … or getting lip implants and stuff.

T E R RY W O LV E R T O N : … within feminism, we thought about community in a different way. We thought about the idea that every individual has creativity within … stories to tell … expressions to make. In encouraging that (idea), I’m really interested in the changing relationship between artists and audience …. (In the past) the artist was the expert and the audience was the recipient of that expertise, and that’s dissolving toward a dialogue among creative equals … and I think Los Angeles street art is kind of an example of that. Yes, plenty of people have creden-tials. But you don’t have to have credentials to be creative.

C H E R I G AU L K E : So let’s do a quick final round, and if you could reflect upon some way your COLA grant had an impact on your life.

T E R RY W O LV E R T O N : I got my COLA grant in 2006 to work on a book of essays about how our social problems are really spiritual problems. I used some of the money to

of queering the way we look at the world has become very important …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … So I’ve been happy in this matrix of people that I’ve met through my teaching career—colleagues who have become friends, as well as students and former students who have become friends—and (I feel a drive to) to keep up … and not fall behind …. And I enjoy being open to the new ideas that come from students and from my colleagues …

C H E R I G AU L K E : … to add to this question about public dialogue, I think one of the things we innovated at the Woman’s Building is this idea of including other voices in our work and seeing your art as a vehicle for gathering the voices of others …. When I did my COLA project it included … an artist book called Marriage Matters … a series portraits of gay and lesbian couples and families reflecting on marriage. And of course this was a time when none of us thought we would ever have the right to marry …. And so this practice continues …. In the ’80s we organized a parking garage in downtown LA as giant antinuclear festival …. I have worked with teens in East LA to do the LA River Project and … Filipino World War II Veterans Memorial

M A R S I A N D E L E L L I S : I’m definitely interested in queer as a verb. And even being queer about your own queerness … I’m inspired by this John Waters quote, he said something about his work being “for minorities who feel rejected by their own minorities” …. The piece I did for COLA included 1,200 Raggedy Ann dolls … the very process became a community thing, where all of my friends came over and helped sew … and then distress, burn, or run over our dolls. I guess there’s some feminist tradition in that too?

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … I started making art because … (even at) the feminist bookstore in my town, Mother Kali’s Books in Eugene, Oregon … there were no images of lesbians that I liked … so I started taking photography classes so that I could represent different ideas about what it meant to be a dyke, or what it meant to be a feminist …. Portraiture was the beginning …. And maybe the whole reason for me to make art at all anyway is because I don’t see what I want to see, so I make it so I can look at it ….The project that I did for COLA in 2005 is an ongoing project about the history of lesbian bars … a sort of documentary of vernacular architecture … that spans four cities so far. COLA gave me funding for research … materials … time … and hiring assistants.

T E R RY W O LV E R T O N : … As many of you have said, there is an issue of content, making work with feminist and lesbian content, and … there are collaborative processes that have risen out of feminism. I’m also pretty inter-ested in the idea of “queer” as a verb. How do you go in and disrupt a situation? How do you de-normalize thinking around an issue? I’m going to pitch another question … which is: How do you feel your work has contributed to a public dialogue, and what is the influence you hope that you have had, or that you hope to have?

P H Y L L I S G R E E N : I’ve been teaching at colleges and universities since 1989 … so I have had the opportunity to mentor a lot of women, and it really expands my own perspective.

D E N I S E U Y E H A R A : … about queering the dialogue, I (just) curated a weekend at Highways Performance Space called Not About Me. It was queer artists and artists of color creating work not about themselves, and … it turned out to be this interesting dialogue about how our iden-tity does not stop with our own personal story … the idea

“ And maybe the whole reason for me to make art at all anyway is because I don’t see what I want to see, so I make it so I can look at it …”

—Kaucyila Brooke

L E F T

Kaucyila Brooke

R I G H T

(l to r) Jessica Rath, Cheri Gaulke

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K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … thinking about how things were different in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s … how have the categories of LGBTQI changed over that time and expanded? And how have feminisms developed over the last fifty years, and how have these different positions affected the visual arts?

S U S A N S I LT O N : … I graduated college in 1978 … and one of the defining characteristics of Los Angeles is the way in which that was so spread out … one could find spaces if you wanted to …. But I think I was rather petrified to be queer at that moment …. It took me a long time to find … to design my sexuality. So I can’t really speak to the ’70s very well. I don’t know what that was like here.

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : I can speak to the ’70s in terms of my experience of being a lesbian …. There seemed to be a back-to-the-land movement …. It was also the era of androgyny … very codified behaviors … a sort of backlash against the gender polarization from the ’50s and the ’60s … anything that was kind of separated in that way between masculinity and femininity, we found really threaten-ing because I think basically we really found masculinity threatening, full stop … I didn’t know any gay men at all in the ’70s. I only knew women …. Weirdly enough, now we’re in these kind of pronoun debates, but the only pronoun I ever used was a feminine pronoun …. The artwork really (seemed centered on) vaginal art and the circle … and anything that was phallic was again associated with mas-culinity … patriarchal culture had been so oppressive. But that (paradigm) was also very repressive because to be a part of the group you had to kind of conform … I had to cut my hair and wear a dike vest in order to find somebody to sleep with …

S I M O N L E U N G : … the ’80s was my decade. I want to address (it) in relationship to art as well as feminism and gender politics …. The Reagan years impacted our way of thinking about representation and theory … I’m of the generation that grew up with feminist theory and espe-cially psychoanalytic feminist theory ….It was also the time of AIDS …. In New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, you saw firsthand the devastation that AIDS had in the arts community …. My daily life was basically going to ACT UP meetings on Mondays, going to seminars on

Tuesdays, and Thursdays at the Whitney Program …. The end of the ’80s and the early ’90s was also the beginning of what we now think of as queer theory … I remember going to Yale or Rutgers when Judith Butler or Douglas Crimp were giving lectures about rethinking gender … both fem-inism and LGBTQ issues and queer issues were just part and parcel of my formation as an artist …. Now having said that, I do notice something as a teacher that’s changed profoundly in the last ten years … because of (social) debates and especially trans activism in the media. Every student has a much more sophisticated way of dealing with these issues than they did twenty or thirty years ago … which doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re living in an age without a lot of backlash as well. But, there’s vocabulary and there is discourse that’s available to young people that wasn’t before.

S U S A N S I LT O N : … the discourse has become more sophisticated because we’re exposed to so much more …. Prior to post-structuralism, it seems as if the discourse was just not as sophisticated overall in terms of an art practice, right?

S I M O N L E U N G : Yeah … other criteria developed … the politics of difference developed in the late ’80s. And was brought to a boiling point (just) before Jesse Helms’s right wing attack on art culture … Reagan famously did not even utter the word AIDS until 1986 …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … and there was a retrenchment to a conversation about beauty …. Back to this idea of, I was born an artist.

S U S A N S I LT O N : … The commodification of the field also began to happen, in the late ’80s right? … and nonprofit organizations began to wane …

S I M O N L E U N G : Maybe this is a good way to segue into the discussion of institutions …. In the ’80s some alter-native spaces such as LACE were quite open to … show (diverse practices) that dealt with desire … (and) lived political realities, not filtered through a thinking of form.

S U S A N S I LT O N : … I remember the desire to incorpo-rate multiple genres into one space … and I remember the


WEDNE SDAY, APRIL 26, 2017


Kaucyila BrookeSimon Leung

W I T H

Susan Silton

What are the shared and divergent strategies employed by artists who

embed feminist and/or LGBT ideas in their works?

How have artists working at this intersection shaped a national

dialogue?SE S SION 2

4

L E F T , T O P A N D B E L O W

(l to r) Simon Leung, Susan Silton, Kaucyila Brooke

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S I M O N L E U N G : I completely agree … to smash monog-amy is a part of the rethinking of the nuclear family, the bourgeois ideal of an economic system … and parcel of a critique of capitalism individualizing or privatizing these ways of thinking about identity … (can become) a new way of controlling …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … makes me think about this bar in Cologne, which was the only place where (gay) people could connect, or as they say now “hook up” …. And the basement in that bar—it was a mixed gay and lesbian bar—was just a bunch of mattresses. And who knows what was going on there, but it was a place where people could be together. I mean, that’s SUCH a different idea than having your own marriage certificate and taking your kids to the school …

S U S A N S I LT O N : … the only reason that gay marriage has become sanctioned so quickly is because of its capitalist intrigue …

S I M O N L E U N G : I think it’s also an alibi for civil society, especially in more repressive countries …. The idea of civil society is a corollary to democracy … a demonstration that various nation states use for picturing civil society without necessarily providing true democracy … a way to control its image …. For example, in the case of China … the way in which the art world was allowed to develop in a place like China is a way of picturing that the ideals of democracy, namely modernization … (and to Susan’s point) there are certain aspects of it that is definitely about money, but I think there are other aspects of it which is really about control …. (Another example would be that) it is very acceptable to the powers in Hong Kong and in Beijing to clamp down on cultural producers —I’m think-ing mostly about the booksellers and publishers in Hong Kong who suddenly went missing, despite the protests

I think of it as two (or more) dynamics simultaneously …. (For example, everyone is) many different things simul-taneously … so, it’s very important to think through as an ethos and not necessarily as a group.

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … with the struggle to have that difference recognized … we haven’t always had the tools …

S I M O N L E U N G : … for example, I think new democracy theorists are pretty much traditional men, and maybe (it is) a feminist issue and an LGBTQ type issue that we inter-rogate our own subjectivities? …. Queer identity … maybe a lot different in 1990 than it is in 2017 …. We keep trans-forming. That is one lesson in thinking about difference … the otherness that is within ourselves.

S I M O N L E U N G : [TO SUSAN, AFTER A DISCUSSION OF GAY MARRIAGE] Are you talking about mainstream-ing? Can you give some examples of what you mean by what we’re losing?

S U S A N S I LT O N : … where I’m feeling a push/pull is around the politics of economics, as opposed to an identity … to go beyond the body as a sexual body, to the economic body.

S I M O N L E U N G : [TO KAUCYILA] Do you think we’ve lost something … in the sort of widespread acceptance of queer people in the mainstream? What have we lost?

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : Yeah … mainstreaming is normal-izing … that erases difference …. (Issues) just becomes a personal difference rather than a political difference … and deviance gets washed out of it … not pinkwashing, but … the perverts get washed out, you know? …. There’s a radical position if you’re on the margin. So if you’ve been brought to the center, then you are part of the mainstream market economy. It’s neo-liberalism.

to the task … whether or not it was “essentialist” … each camp or group began to learn from the other … Gayatri Spivak’s term “strategic essentialism” became a discur-sive modus operandi; (for example) the discussion around Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party really shifted in the 1990s … there was a real attempt to recuperate that work to claim that it was not essentialist …

S U S A N S I LT O N : … when the Dinner Party was mounted at the Hammer, I designed that book, and Amelia Jones curated the show … the project itself became critiqued … And a decade later, Connie Butler curated WACK! …

S I M O N L E U N G : WACK! was a very different show though … because it was international …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … and (included) an additional ten years or longer (of history) … I think it’s important to talk about Spivak and postcolonial theory and women of color, because … ’70s feminism tried to, but didn’t successfully figure out how to diversify itself. So there were parallel feminisms being developed at the same time …

S I M O N L E U N G : That segues so neatly and brilliantly into our topic of intersectionality … about queer people of color … thinking about race, class, immigration, dis-placement, assimilation, white supremacy, pinkwashing, postcolonialism, borders …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : Well, I think inclusion is what’s important about intersectionality … inclusion has been something that everybody has been trying to deal with, all the way along … opening up … to include more and more people …

S I M O N L E U N G : Well, I think intersectionality is slightly different. I don’t think about it as including more people.

Municipal Art Gallery was really important to my devel-opment because (of ) the various artists … Betty Brown was among them. She curated a show in I think it was ’93, called Utopian Dialogues, in which various artists were invited to have dialogues with other people/communities … that was a super interesting endeavor …

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … in Canada, they call (non-profit spaces) parallel galleries … (places like) Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, which was for me a really important exhibition and publication place that I was aware of before I even moved here in the ’90s …. Also, there was a different relationship to the text … because we had bookstores … (even) women’s bookstores … and gay and lesbian bookstores were huge places for me, for read-ings, and to educate myself … (later, as a professor) when I first heard about queer theory as a legitimate academic discourse, I was like, “oh my God. I never thought this would happen.” And I didn’t feel that way about gay mar-riage when it happened … I was like, “why would anybody want to do this?”

S I M O N L E U N G : … the term queer theory came after Queer Nation … there are extremely explicit links … that transformed (coalition), into a declaration of identity … and so there’s a deep implication between theory and practice … you know, like GLQ … that magazine? I think it still exists, right?

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : Yeah, that magazine was really important … (yet) all these publications weren’t dealing with post-structuralist issues … (or) media critique … (or) psychoanalytic theory …

S I M O N L E U N G : … I actually want to back up a little bit … we would be remiss not to talk about the idea of essen-tialism …. Almost every form of political identity was put

“ The idea of civil society is a corollary to democracy … a demonstration that various nation states use for picturing civil society without necessarily providing true democracy … a way to control its image …”

—Simon Leung

F A R L E F T

Simon Leung

L E F T

(l to r) Susan Silton, Kaucyila Brooke

121

COLA 20

of the people, right? …. A sense of impunity for the main-tenance of power … dissent is often the first thing that is appropriated by capitalism …

S U S A N S I LT O N : I think about George Bailey standing in front of the bridge in It’s a Wonderful Life, and thinking about committing suicide, jumping over the bridge, and then he sees the angel, Clarence, dropping in the water. And of course, he jumps in to save Clarence. So it eclipses his desire to commit suicide. And in a way, I think it’s what you’re saying, the nation state co-opting dissent … to cut it off.

K AU C Y I L A B R O O K E : … I’m just wondering if we want to come back to Los Angeles and COLA as a site of resis-tance? …. If you look at what you see in this exhibition … and go through the timeline, you can see that there isn’t one COLA, right? But it is a program wherein artists who are resisting this kind of commodification and mainstream-ing do have the possibility to produce their objects … I think that’s really important …. There is a real desire to recognize difference. And that’s partly what’s making people talk about (us) as a sanctuary city.

L E F T

Susan Silton


SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2017


Gloria Enedina AlvarezHarry Gamboa Jr.

Claudia RodriguezW I T H

Judithe Hernández

What are the past and potential impacts of Latina/o-based cultural traditions, politics,

and multiplicities emanating from Los Angeles?5

R I G H T , T O P

(l to r) Claudia Rodriguez, Judithe Hernández, Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Harry Gamboa Jr.


(l to r) Claudia Rodriguez, Gloria Enedina Alvarez

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being U.S. citizens for three generations, coming, helping to build the railroad. Then in the mid-thirties being sent back to Mexico. Yeah. I’ve been working with my own family’s history. So, yeah, I was thinking about this in between. Being neither here nor there. Being both here and there.

C L AU D I A R O D R I G U E Z : … we’re constantly having to build and rebuild. Do we have the burden of constantly using our work as a means of resistance?

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : As a way of life and as a way of my practice—it kind of pre-dated my practice actually—was to always have a good time. To have a good time in the face of adversity. Which, in a way, is very Mexican. To be cele-brating … becoming very optimistic, rather than falling into despair … that is a rather revolutionary act.

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : A couple years ago I showed at the Princeton University Art Museum, and they used one of my works on their little postcard. And they listed me as an American artist. So I was thinking I might use that as a passport. [LAUGHS]

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : … It’s like the new kid at school. You sort of want to fit in, but you also need to give up some of the things that made you different …. Everything about our culture is something that we should be willing to share. And we need to be open to the majority culture as well. What should be reciprocal hasn’t yet been reciprocated.

G L O R I A E N E D I N A A LVA R E Z : I did an interview a couple of days ago for the Woman’s Building Archive … to talk about the feminist art movement and the Chicana art movement. They were both happening at the same time. Originally I had some issues with class and race being

C L AU D I A R O D R I G U E Z : What are the past and potential impacts of Latin-based cultural traditions, politics, and multiplicities stemming from Los Angeles? What does that question mean to (each of ) you?

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : … this has always been a very Latino city. Interesting to think about how this recogni-tion will move eastward with Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles/ Latin America.

G L O R I A E N E D I N A A LVA R E Z : … How do we define the term Latin or Latinx?

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : The Latino population is usually precluded from participating on panels, in exhibitions, through academia, and in the economy …. If you watch English-language TV you will get a particular version. And if you watch Spanish-language television it’s very complex, very intellectually inspired, a more true repre-sentation of what’s going on.

C L AU D I A R O D R I G U E Z : … When we used an umbrella term like Latino, it’s a shortcut that unfortunately doesn’t do us service because we’re so diverse.

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : It’s been the artists primarily who are dealing with local history, sometimes documentary, sometimes interpreted … based on place, to try to tell the entire story.

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : … My career began at a time where all of the work that we did had a very strong political agenda …

G L O R I A E N E D I N A A LVA R E Z : And as you were talking, Harry, I was thinking about two things: the concept of the “in-between zone,” and my own family’s experience of

addressed (within feminism) … (but) later I went back and did a residency there to address women’s involvement in our (Latino/a) communities.

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : … we are also part of the first television generation exposed to international events, pre-dating the Internet … and also the age of rock and roll. So, if you’re gonna fight, think big and do it with style! (Are) there are multiple connections between those moments and current moments? Or some sort of trajec-tory? Chicano artists have responded very exquisitely, astutely, and creatively on an international level. But if you have a president and other people announcing that you are someone to be hunted down, one has to respond to that.

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : … Artists across generations face the same choice that we did … you and I opted to be political artists for most of our careers.

C L AU D I A R O D R I G U E Z : I see the works of undocu-mented artists, visual and literary artists that are putting themselves out there and saying, “We’re not hiding. You know who we are.” Just like the queer Latinas and Latinos that are out there, creating their work, saying, “We’re not hiding either. This is our experience.” …. Going back to the question about does Latino cultural experience influence politics? Yes, by pushing back

G L O R I A E N E D I N A A LVA R E Z : I guess I don’t see it as this burden, although I feel responsible (to express my culture). It’s part of who I am. It’s part of where I come from. You know. It’s part of the past and the present and whatever comes after that. I feel it as an honor to be in touch with my ancestors …. The artist’s way is to be in touch with her own heart … and balance interior life and exterior life.

C L AU D I A R O D R I G U E Z : The COLA award also helped me to create performance-poetry. Growing up like a thousand feet away from the railroad tracks in the city of Compton … the trains were carrying all the goods from the docks to be distributed across the nation.

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : The COLA came at an inter-esting time in my career. I had just moved back to LA the year before, after twenty-five years in Chicago. And my practice needed a jump-start …. The fellowship allowed me time and resources to begin a body of work that I have followed ever since. I appreciated that enormously! Mainstream feminism in the 1970s wasn’t something that appealed to me. Probably a lot of other Latinas felt the same, which is why we didn’t participate. But over the course of my career I’ve certainly turned focus on lives of women, our place in society. I have a daughter so I’m very invested in that idea of what will happen to her.

H A R RY G A M B OA J R . : … I remember that I probably spent half of the grant on reading materials. I found myself invested in doing some very concentrated study. Doing that also allowed me just to kind of hang around the city and consider what my role was in this place, now that I had been recognized by my city. You know, it helped me con-tinue on a trajectory … to make sure that everyone around me also became more eloquent, more educated, to gen-erate cultural wealth … so that we find ourselves jointly interested in each other and call this city our own.

J U D I T H E H E R N Á N D E Z : Viva l’arte. [LAUGHTER]

L E F T T O R I G H T

Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Harry Gamboa Jr. Claudia Rodriguez Judithe Hernández

“ I see the works of undocumented artists, visual and literary artists that are putting themselves out there and saying, ‘We’re not hiding. You know who we are.’ Just like the queer Latinas and Latinos that are out there, creating their work, saying, ‘We’re not hiding either. This is our experience.’”

—Claudia Rodriguez

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J O E S M O K E : One purpose of this evening is to talk about how artists live with other artists. It’s a topic that’s partic-ularly interesting to DCA since there are several instances where husbands and wives have both gotten COLA Fellowship grants, sometimes in the same year. And we also know a lot of artists who lived as couples with other artists. So we thought it would be interesting to have a conversation about the benefits and challenges of being in a relationship with another creative individual.

F R A N S I E G E L : Danial Nord is my partner, across the table. We have a technique called “residency rules.” If we see each other in the morning and its residency rule, it means that we don’t speak and we go into our studios and close the door and there’s no conversation until lunch-time. It sounds very strict, but it actually works really well for us …. We used to have studios that were further apart, at opposite ends of a floor. Now they’re side by side, so we had to do something different in order for that to work.

DA N I A L N O R D : There’s a lot of interesting advantages to being an artist couple but one that we were talking about is this idea of the more challenging moments. As a couple, we have this safe place to talk about the things that you might not be able to say in public or just discussing the challenges of being a fifty-something-year-old artist. I really treasure that … certain things that don’t have to be said or explained.

AV E P I L DA S : My relationship with Phyllis Green is much messier than what we’ve just heard. We don’t have any rules, and it generally works with simple responses like, “Not now.” [LAUGHTER]

N A N C Y B U C H A N A N : I’m married to Doug Wickert. We’re opposite in the way that we work, and I think that works out well for us. He gets up at 5:30am, he sits down,

and he makes art. I am rather chaotic. I wander and do things at weird times. I admire his discipline.

D O U G W I C K E R T : What you (Fran and Danial) call res-idency rules, corporate planners call the “golden hour.” You get the first hour with no interference, so you can also take those seeds from yesterday and start developing them.

O G U R I : I’m a dancer/choreographer, and my partner and I dance together. She’s also a dancer choreographer. We raised two boys now. They are twenty-four and nineteen …. My wife has a full-time job, so I’m doing the freelancer, and the domestic … cooking, taking care of stuff …. Each morning is my golden time for creation.

R OX A N N E S T E I N B E R G : So Oguri and I dance in a similar way. That’s a real treat for me because sometimes when I’m struggling, I can rely on him to help me. I do work full time, so thank goodness he’s an excellent cook …. We are able to maintain our own visions and yet work together intimately.

F R A N S I E G E L : This is like the newlywed game. [LAUGHTER]

J O E DAV I D S O N : My wife has a masters in art history. She’s very well acquainted with art, and she loves looking at it. She is a really wonderful resource to bounce ideas off of, and it’s really interesting that you just brought up the fact that you’re a dancer, and so you usually work along-side other people …. We have two kids that are thirteen and eleven so there’s a lot of energy going on …. While there are some things that I miss about having a studio around other artists, making my arts requires some soli-tary existence.

H O S T E D B Y

Miyoshi BaroshJeff Colson

W I T H

Nancy BuchananMiles Coolidge

Joe DavidsonDavid DiMichele

Hae Kyung LeeBrian Moss

Danial NordAve Pildas

Lara Jo Regan Fran SiegelOguri

Roxanne SteinbergDoug Wickert


SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

What are the many challenges and benefits of a two-artist

household?6

L E F T

Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg

L E F T , T O P

(l to r) Joe Davidson, Danial Nord, Joe Smoke, Ave Pildas, Nancy Buchanan, Doug Wickert , Lara Jo Regan, Roxanne Steinberg, Oguri, Hae Kyung Lee, Fran Siegel

L E F T , B E L O W

(l to r) Danial Nord, Miyoshi Barosh, Joe Davidson, Ave Pildas

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J E F F C O L S O N : … and keep spirits up to be motivated.

D O U G W I C K E R T : A chance to work with someone else, in the darkness. Makes it seem a little less foreboding. I wonder, should we eat dessert and then see what happens after a sugar rush? [LAUGHTER]

R OX A N N E S T E I N B E R G : It’s really special to hear from everybody and to be together.

F R A N S I E G E L : And (in) this political climate, I’m also thinking about the COLA program, the City of Los Angeles, and how it has really stood up. How California has stood up politically. I think of that as a larger family.

M I L E S C O O L I D G E : Well, there’s no formula here. Clearly every pair of artists has a different way of manag-ing. Amy and I never talk about artwork with each other … but we never left school because we’re both art educa-tors as well as artists …. We talk about bad days with our students.

R OX A N N E S T E I N B E R G : About writing: Oguri is a very poetic thinker, and we struggle all the time with language. He speaks to me in Japanese, and I only understand about half of it. So when it comes to writing a grant proposal or statement, it takes that time translating from Japanese and putting it into agreeable English.

AV E P I L DA S : Since Phyllis and I stopped teaching, our conversations have changed. It has really freed us up to have a different dialogues. So while it was important to us to teach and have dialogues about our students it also became very important to not to have that anymore.

DA N I A L N O R D : I just wanna say that this makes me wanna cry because being an artist, it’s kind of lonely. There’s this lonely process, yet when you’re an artist-couple, it’s like two lonely people on a life raft. So you’re together, and you’re trying to take care of each other … tonight there are all these people floating around on their life rafts, and we’re bumping into each other. It’s just kind of beautiful. And I really love hearing all these different stories. And I’m thinking about things we can tune or re-tune based on other people’s experiences.

M I YO S H I B A R O S H : I had a less positive way to describe two people on a life raft … two weak bushes in a storm. We both have a lot of anxiety about our future. We both wake up in the middle of the night and have gas and meet for some Tums. [LAUGHTER] It feels like “stable instability.” We’re trying to control that anxiety …

F R A N S I E G E L : I wanted to add some thoughts. We also have similar priorities with money. We spend extra money on travel, we help each other with ethical issues because navigating this art world right now [SIGH] … and we edit each other’s statements. I consider myself a really poor writer, but a good editor.

DAV I D D I M I C H E L E : (One of the) things that I really like about it is being with someone who shares my pas-sions …. We go to see shows together and talk about them. Lara is also very helpful helping me in the studio because she always has a very strong opinion, negative or positive. And I can’t imagine being with another person who didn’t share my socio-political views as well.

L A R A J O R E G A N : It’s great to share a primary passion with another artist. Also we have a thirteen-year-old daughter so we’re (also) thinking about practical things. In the journal Artillery I have photo column called “Sights Unseen.” So we’re both journalists and artists. We share hybrid interests … child and a house. We take turns taking care of the day-to-day practical things so the other person can go into their obsessively focused mode. It’s so won-derful being with someone who shares your deepest bliss.

M I YO S H I B A R O S H : We don’t use residency rules. We’re always interrupting each other, so that’s our social rules [LAUGHTER] … and we don’t have to fight when we travel, we both want to go to all the museums.

B R I A N M O S S : My partner is an art writer as well as an artist, Jody Zellen. We read each other’s artist’s state-ments … the question becomes how do you go back and forth with each other in terms of support and criticism … to get what you need … once you leave school with its readymade group of people to bounce off.

F A R L E F T

(l to r) Fran Siegel, Miles Coolidge, Lara Jo Regan

L E F T

(l to r) Ave Pildas, Nancy Buchanan, Doug Wickert

“ … when you’re an artist-couple, it’s like two lonely people on a life raft. So you’re together, and you’re trying to take care of each other … tonight there are all these people floating around on their life rafts, and we’re bumping into each other. It’s just kind of beautiful.”

—Danial Nord

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T O N Y D E L O S R E Y E S : … So we’re going to go around and everyone’s going to testify … but first, Amy is going to give us a great quote.

A M Y K N O L E S : This is a Frank Lloyd Wright quote: “Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” [SMILES]

M A R G A R E T H O N DA : I worked in sculpture and film. For both of those things, I’ve utilized a lot of the resources that are specific to Los Angeles … from the aerospace and defense industries … and most recently working digitally … with virtual reality.

JO E DAV I D S O N : I am also a sculptor with technology … I do a lot of work with plastics and foams … which I associ-ate as prop-materials from the film industry

S C O T T U R I U : Our works (as B+U architects) are hab-itable sculptural pieces. My partnership with Herwig Baumgartner wouldn’t exist elsewhere. He’s Austrian. I am Japanese, fourth generation … (there is) an amazing mix of cultural experiences in Los Angeles itself, and the technology of amazing manufacturers and materials.

S T A S O R L OV S K I : My work is drawing, painting, and printmaking … more recently I’ve been doing projects that involve moving images. Los Angeles is an incredible place to be making art. My personal work is really inspired by early film history, pre-twentieth century moving images and projections …

S U E A N N R O B I N S O N : Like Karen (Atkinson), I use old technology. I make books. I moved to Southern California from Washington, DC … (to find) a real sense of openness, of possibility, and accessibility.

B A R B A R A S T R A S E N : My art comes out of painting, but it morphs into installation … and digital collage … and lenticular projects or images. Having grown up in the New York area, I always wanted to come to California because it seemed like the last frontier … and I’ve never been disabused of that notion …. Recently I have been using materials (such as) … Silastic, Tyvek, and Yupo and other plastics …

J A N E C A S T I L L O : I’m a native Angeleno. And I agree with everyone here, that LA is just fertile ground for resources and … development of artwork. I’m an installation artist and … I trace my mixed ethnicities to the sugar trade …. (In my artworks) I incorporate technology and imagery … as far as my imagination can think. And it’s grants like the COLA fellowship that allow you the freedom to take risks and try new things …

T R A N T. K I M -T R A N G : I’m a media artist, and I’ve worked in a variety of forms—moving images, short experimental videos, virtual spaces … and now I’m working on Web (based) games … for mobile devices. But (I) also deploy older and simpler forms, like the visual novel. I just want to underscore and echo the sentiment about the schools in this region … for the encouragement to experiment and innovate …. And now that I’m a profes-sor myself, I definitely make sure that my students push the envelope in whatever ways they feel comfortable … I also credit the students, too, for constantly introducing me to new technology.

T O N Y D E L O S R E Y E S : So … how does LA excite us to take intellectual and conceptual risks in advancing the boundaries of traditional hard media? When you’re dealing with technology, how much of it is the content … versus technology?


MONDAY, MAY 1 , 2017


Tony de los ReyesAmy Knoles

Tran T. Kim-TrangW I T H

Karen AtkinsonJane Casti l lo

Joe DavidsonMargaret Honda

Stas OrlovskiSue Ann Robinson

Barbara StrasenScott Uriu

What are the strongest elements in the cultural context of Los Angeles that encourage artists to employ new

technologies or innovative ideas?What excites LA artists to take

intellectual and conceptual risks in advancing the boundaries of

art making?7

L E F T

(l to r) Joe Davidson, Margaret Honda, Karen Atkinson

L E F T , T O P

(l to r) Jane Castillo, Barbara Strasen

L E F T , B E L O W

(l to r) Jane Castillo, Barbara Strasen, Sue Ann Robinson, Tran T. Kim -Trang, Stas Orlovski, Tony de los Reyes, Amy Knoles, Scott Uriu, Joe Davidson, Margaret Honda, Karen Atkinson

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materials and not have things disappear … which gets back to the question of content.

S C O T T U R I U : Yeah … on the bright side … incredible things can be customized. On the dark side … technology has fostered mass mediocrity, the derivative disguised as authentic …. For instance, our city is growing at an incredible pace, yet, I would argue, with very questionable aesthetics. The future is bright, but also a little dark.

T O N Y D E L O S R E Y E S : … to some extent, what we’re talking about is materials, right? A kind of affection for materials and technology, whether it’s cheap or expensive … to ooze out some beauty … that’s when we all feel really lucky.

T R A N T. K I M -T R A N G : For my COLA project, I worked within Second Life, which is a free software. But the labor power was extraordinarily expensive and … I had a steep learning curve to collaborate with coders to build a virtual world that spoke about my (deceased) mother …. The idea was to create an afterlife for her …

S T A S O R L OV S K I : For my COLA project, I made paintings with Xerox transfers. Basically photocopies with acetone to release the toner. As inexpensive as it gets, but of course … some of the things that might seem low tech and accessible are in fact some of the most precious and complex …

S U E A N N R O B I N S O N : For my COLA grant, I did the least expensive thing so far. I make books … (and although) I teach people how to hand-make paper, I feel that there is enough paper in the world already. So, I used existing printed matter … little brochures from the dental office, or an insurance company, or Knott’s Berry Farm … pamphlets back to the ’50s … (and) I modified them … with paint …

B A R B A R A S T R A S E N : I’d like to go back to the question about using very simple technology to elaborate twenty-first century technology …

A M Y K N O L E S : … and what we might want in the future? …. More high technology or … is analog coming back?

M A R G A R E T H O N DA : … A lot could be classified as hybrid. I think artists really want the choice, to be able to continue working with certain processes and certain

photographs of something that is basically a contour line drawing, which is one of the most elemental forms of human expression found in cave art. So you have this odd juxtaposition between a kind of pre-civilized concept of space and a galactic concept of space. (Yet perhaps) one of the problems with technology in any artwork is that it can make us look faddish or fashionable.

T R A N T. K I M -T R A N G : … if we just disregard the word “technology” for the moment … (and ask yourselves) how do I say what I want to say, then we can find the integration of the two: form and content …

T O N Y D E L O S R E Y E S : What is the cheapest technol-ogy you’ve ever used, and did it surprise or disappoint? Because cheap technology doesn’t get enough kudos …

K A R E N A T K I N S O N : For the COLA grant, I was project-ing this forty-minute movie on a glow-in-the dark-screen that I had painted, and … when you project an image on a glow-in-the dark surface, and you take that image away, there’s a trace of that image left on the screen. So there’s no way to actually see a clear image without a trace of what came before it … I used that (concept) in carefully con-structed way so the images (in my film) would blur into each other …

J O E DAV I D S O N : … for my COLA project … (I worked with) low-tech technology. I (mosaic-ed) these large (depictions) of the San Gabriel Mountains, rendered com-pletely with layers of Scotch tape.

S C O T T U R I U : … the cheapest technology (we use) is ironically, the computer … we make tons of iterations in the computer. We try to make as many mistakes as possi-ble in the computer … and then see what works.

A M Y K N O L E S : One quick point I wanted to make about Los Angeles … artistically for me it has been (about access-ing) collaborators … the never-ending stream of interesting, problematic, fabulous, annoying artists …. (Also) I’ve never really created a piece of music unless I saw something visu-ally … or a movement from a dancer … I am an electronic percussionist … I love the consummation of everything (technological) … in music software and music hardware.

S C O T T U R I U : Herwig and myself have a very complex and very interesting take on technology … as a lot of our work can’t (be fabricated) without high-tech comput-ers, C&C milling, vacu-forming, and all sorts of different technologies …. So there’s a strange sort of play (in making art between) what’s authentic and what’s repeatable …

S T A S O R L OV S K I : I never had any particular interest in technology …. Mark-making is a very traditional way (to create art), but now I am trying to figure out how to make my images move … so, the biggest question that I have in front of me (now) is: just because you could do it, should you do it? As artists, one of the interesting things (we must struggle with) is the constant negotiation between restraint and abandonment …

S U E A N N R O B I N S O N : … It’s really the technology in service of your vision …

B A R B A R A S T R A S E N : For me, the technology is just another tool …

T O N Y D E L O S R E Y E S : My (current) work is about the US-Mexico border … when I had the COLA grant, I was working with Moby Dick as an analogy for the American psyche …. One of the reasons I started the border work is because I was looking at satellite images … (that use this) unbelievably sophisticated technology to take

L E F T

(l to r) Tran T. Kim-Trang , Tony de los Reyes, Amy Knoles

R I G H T

(l to r) Barbara Strasen, Sue Ann Robinson, Stas Orlovski

“ … technology has fostered mass mediocrity, the derivative disguised as authentic …. For instance, our city is growing at an incredible pace, yet, I would argue, with very questionable aesthetics.”

—Scott Uriu

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S U S A N S I LT O N : I’m a visual artist with a dual practice in graphic design, so I’ve been familiar since the 1980s with several types of publishing.

A L E X A N D R A G R A N T : I’m also a visual artist with a painting practice that focuses on exchanges with writers, using literary texts as the source for imagery … I’m in the middle of starting a publishing house that will focus on artists’ books.

S A R A H M AC L AY: I’m a practicing poet … also a teacher. And I just had an acrostic poetry class. Part of our prac-tice was to go to galleries and museums and explore art objects as springboards for varying kinds of poems. And a lot of my work increasingly is acrostic. So there’s one art feeding another. I’ve also been lucky in the last few years to be published by a wonderful publishing collective … What Books Press …

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : I identify … as a teacher-writer. I have been writing fiction and non-fiction for thirty years …. And I’ve also done a lot of (pedagogy) in creative writing theory in my thirty-year career at California State University, Northridge

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : I’m a visual artist. I taught at the university level for twenty-five years …. While teaching, I developed a history of modern criticism course. I’m one of the co-founders of X-TRA, which is the longest running art criticism publication in the history of Los Angeles. I’m not extremely positive about the way criticism gets funded or is not taken seriously in Los Angeles.

B R U C E B AU M A N : I consider myself primarily a novel-ist and fiction writer. I’ve written pop criticism (and) I’ve taught at CalArts in the MFA and BFA Critical Studies and Creative Writing programs for fifteen years. I was also

senior editor of Black Clock magazine for its entire thir-teen-year run, which was edited by the great Los Angeles novelist Steve Erickson … I moved here in 1999 because my wife, visual artist Suzan Woodruff, didn’t like living in New York as much as I did … I think Los Angeles is a great place to write … but I have some other reservations about (how) the literary world works in Los Angeles.

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : Writing and publishing can be really important ways of providing context, but also building communities …

A L E X A N D R A G R A N T : I wanna say thank you for X-TRA. It was the first place I published an artistic project. And it was the first place I wrote a review (even though it was late and had to be published online). Can you talk a little bit about what happens next … a big tran-sition to the Internet … or another transitional phase in terms of publishing to millennials?

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : I don’t have the answer yet … we’re making efforts … 70,000 people (read X-TRA) per year … so it has real presence …. Our next phase is gonna be to figure out how to generate more online content …. The publication comes out four times a year … and you can’t do something every four months and expect people to pay attention.

B R U C E B AU M A N : Black Clock was a print magazine, and our circulation was a few thousand. It was really good for a literary magazine. But we … couldn’t put the magazine online without getting all kinds of crazy permissions … George Orwell wrote an essay in 1948 about language and how it can lead to fascism. Today, the English language is in a bad way. If you listen to our president, it’s in a worse way than you can ever imagine. Some mornings I’m really pessimistic …


MONDAY, MAY 1 , 2017


Bruce BaumanStephen BerensKatharine Haake

W I T H

Alexandra GrantSarah Maclay

Susan Silton

With regards to publishing and community building, how

have books, art magazines, and artist-writers thrived or

struggled in Los Angeles?8

L E F T , T O P

(l to r) Bruce Bauman, Katharine Haake, Stephen Berens

L E F T , B E L O W

(l to r) Susan Silton, Alexandra Grant, Sarah Maclay, Bruce Bauman, Katharine Haake, Stephen Berens

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S T E P H E N B E R E N S : Simple. That I could just walk away, and it would continue.

B R U C E B AU M A N : That’s cheating.

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : … I’d like it to be self-sustaining. That … it would be cared for enough by the community …. We’re at this point where we’re getting close … getting new board members … enlarging our circle of community sup-porters …. On the one hand, it seemed like some funding was gonna be cut. But then (surprisingly), there was money added into NEA budget yesterday … the NEA has supported us for a long time. The Department of Cultural Affairs has supported us since we became a non-profit …. Small private foundations where maybe one or two people make up their minds [SIGH] we don’t do so well (with) …. And right now we have an excellent executive director, Shana Lutker. She’s doing a fantastic job … and bring-ing in new people … people with money are interested in what’s going on in Hollywood. So they support artists who make things that relate to Hollywood … it’s that “celebrity thing.”

S U S A N S I LT O N : [TO ALEXANDRA] … because you posed it to everybody … I want you to say something about it as well.

A L E X A N D R A G R A N T : … I will express my excitement … (about) a new generation of minority directors having the power to tell stories … from a queer trans perspective and from the perspective of female desire …. As a female consumer, I want there to be more. She (Chris Kraus) also uses historic pieces by women experimental filmmakers. So, even though the audience might not realize it, they’ll be exposed to a whole generation of women’s work …. And to question of criticality within Los Angeles … how shall we create, not just a oneiric culture of writing but, a criti-cal culture of writing? …. Critical spaces are what actually

generation of writers that took on themselves the challenge of writing a fiction that could not be filmed. And, and, and that may well have been true of course. Very shortly after that, the next generation of writers was desperately writing stuff that could be made into movies. But I think that’s very bad for writing … [TO SARAH] you said you’re a poet. I’m a sentence writer … yet I never had the illusion that I was going to write something that was gonna be commercial or marketable … I do specialize in writing fiction that no one can read.

B R U C E B AU M A N : … more power to it. So many people who had never read Chris Kraus will now be exposed … that can only be a good thing, and I’m not talking from a commercial aspect …. (Hopefully) they will think about things in the way they never thought before … How do I feel writing books that can’t be possibly be summarized, ever? Terrific. I can live the rest of my life without publish-ing … but I could not live the rest of my life without writing all the time …

S A R A H M AC L AY: … I wanted to focus on the other part of your question … I had this experience with some friends who were working in the industry. We were on the beach one day, and somebody asked me what I did (for a profes-sion), which I’d come to dread as a question, especially when I wasn’t doing anything …. So I said I’m a poet. And it was so freeing because nobody had any idea what to do with me. You know, it was like I had just thrown the shoe into the machine. Because there was no way to turn (poetry) into something that had utility (for them). It was … wonderful … existentially. [SMILES]

B R U C E B AU M A N : I have a question for Stephen …. You’ve lasted twenty years … astounding, in any literary sense … so what is your ultimate goal? What would make you the most satisfied with X-TRA?

between when you’re writing in solitude, how you’re sharing, and where you’re given feedback …. Student pub-lishing is also inspiring to me. There’s a lot of really good work that I’m seeing being published at the student level …

B R U C E B AU M A N : … Black Clock published a lot of famous people, but we also published 250 people over the thirteen years who had never been published before. A lot of students. That’s extraordinarily exciting. Our (events gathered) over a hundred people, and there were big parties …. There’s quality in having a lot of readers, and there’s a quality in having just a few really great readers …

A L E X A N D R A G R A N T : What do you guys think about the fact that a Chris Kraus book is being made into a TV show? …. What about that relationship … (between) the publishing industry and the television industry? How has being near Hollywood affected your practices?

S U S A N S I LT O N : … The fact that I Love Dick will be developed as a mainstream HBO series … in my lifetime … I never imagined that … or (that the industry) would really care that much …. It’s fantastic that there are people in (leadership) positions so certain things can be made bigger …. Simultaneously, there’s some controversy about The Handmaid’s Tale … being brought to us by men. The contradiction is inherent. Even though there are many female writers and directors associated with the project … purportedly the women are still answering to men in a tale that is entirely about the oppression of women by patriarchal culture [SIGH] …. And on the other topic, it is undeniable for me that Hollywood is constantly informing my work … both positive and negative. How could it not? We can’t get away from the culture that exists here …

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : … I think it was 1975, Saul Bellow came to my class at Stanford and said that his was the first

S U S A N S I LT O N : I’ve seen magazine projects come and go. It has been astonishing that X-TRA continues to find new ground …. It is a gem in the community, both because you survive and because of the approaches that you take …. But zines have (also) always been a huge part of the city … artist books have always been a part of the city … (yet) from an environmental standpoint, it’s a positive thing that paper isn’t used to the same extent as in the past …. Success is really to stay vital and alive …. Circulation has always made a difference, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t publish.

B R U C E B AU M A N : … In novel writing … if you didn’t sell a certain amount of books, you had a hard time getting a contract after a while … and now its much worse … I love writing as much as I love anything in the world. But there’s a business aspect to it … I know a lot of writers in their fifties and sixties who have published a bunch of books (and) who cannot get published anymore because they did not have sales.

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : I’m very ambivalent, but I’m also really excited … depends on what counts as success …. Writing has a value in people’s lives that doesn’t neces-sarily have to do with publishing or wide readership …. When I started to think about teaching, I started to think about what really mattered to me … framing of paths … the guiding I am committed to, the idea of a sustainable literary practice. So what I’m excited and also ambivalent about is the issue of quality …. One really great thing about (the Internet) is discovering new writers and new people … and them being able to bring their work into the world.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … One of the wonderful things about being a poet is that we don’t have that terrible pressure that novelists have …. My screenwriter friends have amazing things that are in turnaround for ten years, and they can’t get them released! …. There’s an interesting new dance,

L E F T

(l to r) Susan Silton, Alexandra Grant

R I G H T

(l to r) Sarah Maclay, Bruce Bauman

“ How do I feel writing books that can’t be possibly be summarized, ever? Terrific. I can live the rest of my life without publishing … but I could not live the rest of my life without writing all the time …”

—Bruce Bauman

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what people thought about what was happening or what was being made in the city, it will be an archive.

S U S A N S I LT O N : I find hope in publishing. With its mul-tiplicity of interests … with young practitioners … analog processes are flourishing alongside multiple platforms online … they can co-exist simultaneously in positive ways.

A L E X A N D R A G R A N T : … I believe in haptic experiences. I took a book to lunch recently, and I sat at a restaurant reading a book and was transported, you know, for the entire meal. I had great company among other people also searching for a kind of intimacy that allows being trans-ported into another’s imagination. I don’t know if we’ll be able to convince everyone about the importance of these haptic experiences, but I think that there will be the stalwarts who always believe in the sacred and profane importance of the continuation of the written word.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … Yes, now there’s renewed interest in the letterpress … and vinyl … and the book as object …

B R U C E B AU M A N : … Los Angeles is an incredibly vibrant place for all kinds of creativity, and I’m not (only) talking about movies …. (In publishing we have) Red Hen Press, Los Angeles Review, Santa Monica Review … and the Los Angeles Festival Books is the best book festival in the U.S.A. It draws 200,000 people! And the other booksellers have told me that Los Angeles sells more serious books than the tri-state area combined …

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : … I believe in writing as a primary experience and value … and sometimes it’s very lonely … so (in regards to the COLA fellowship) it goes beyond monetary support, you know …. Just the idea that some-body cares and believes in the value of art in this city is enormously important to me.

S U S A N S I LT O N : … criticality demands depth and … (great criticism) is more challenging to find on online in our Internet-based culture because, by definition, that (space) is appealing for sound bites and briefer investi-gations. So, I think in the end, publishing is vital to the continuation of criticality … and I do think criticality is essential to combat the forces that of consumerism that might strike a blow to creativity.

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : And so you know [TOWARD KATHARINE], photography is not that different than lan-guage …. (Students) come into the classroom now having made more photographs than anybody in the nineteenth century made in their lifetime …

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : Aah … so … (same concept) teaching them to see things differently, so that they stop thinking and start making art. So much of the art edu-cation … in the US is predicated upon the principle of teaching people to do what they’re already good at.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … My classes are also about reverse engineering …

B R U C E B AU M A N : I think there are actually some great literary criticism journals like Guernica, Full Stop, Slice … and LARB … and so much lousy shit on the net. Not edited, not curated.

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : … I started up by saying that I was confused by Los Angeles … I feel like there are many, many, many different conversations that are going on, and a lot of them have enormous value. But they’re not going on together. You know, it’s also part of the potential of the city …

S T E P H E N B E R E N S : The records (from X-TRA) will be around fifty years from now. So when people want to know

lead me to write my first book. I wanted to make a farce about the art world and then couldn’t find a publisher for it. So I have decided to begin a press that will be interested in these outliers … weird collaborations … or one-offs … because (there is) a real need for experimental spaces for criticality and play.

S A R A H M AC L AY: … One of the things that I’ve been involved with for a decade is book reviewing for Poetry International … where a lot of books from all over are considered and written about …. That’s been a really terrific thing to be a part of … (and) has also made me more interested in writing longer, longer pieces …

B R U C E B AU M A N : [TOWARD STEPHEN] Speaking of money … it is the elephant in every artistic room. [LAUGHTER] …. Serious criticism is not money-oriented thing … I don’t like to hear about LA being so celebrity-centric. I used to write some art criticism, and I’ve written music criticism. That’s how I started. But I don’t (write criticism) anymore … because as a creative writer, that can really fuck me up. [LAUGHTER]

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : As a teacher … I talk a lot about criticism in theory in my creative writing classes because, unlike artists who have to learn how to work with the medium, writers tend to think that language is a natural thing that they don’t have to think about. So I suggest that thinking is very bad for writing. You have to have the frame-work within which “not thinking” can be productive.

B R U C E B AU M A N : I completely agree …

K A T H A R I N E H A A K E : … getting people to acknowl-edge that they don’t have to write the way they think. That they’re supposed to write differently.

“ … with young practitioners … analog processes are flourishing alongside multiple platforms online … they can co-exist simultaneously in positive ways.”

—Susan Silton

F A R L E F T

(l to r) Sarah Maclay, Bruce Bauman

L E F T

(l to r) Jessica Rath, Cheri Gaulke

iv.in

tribute

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When COLA was designed, I had recently joined the Department as the Public Art Manager for the PWIAP program under the direction of Roella Hsieh Louie. From COLA’s beginning, many of its applicants and recipients worked in public art, including artists such as Alma Lopez, Joyce Dallal, Kim Abeles, and Wayne Healy, who had all previously received public art commissions and enjoyed successful careers. Subsequently, newer COLA recipients such as Todd Gray, Jody Zellen, Deborah Ascheim, and Meg Cranston turned their attention to the opportunities within the public art program and were awarded public art commissions after their COLA honors.

A COLA grant allows an artist to experiment and try out new work, and a public art commission amplifies that experimentation by enabling an artist to work at a larger scale, create much

thousands of Angelenos to see and experience the art in these spaces.

An artist’s legacy is profoundly influenced by the impact that public artwork has on the community. Once the piece becomes part of the fabric of a community, the public then bestows a sense of collective meaning to it, and the experience of it gives value to each encounter. These same ideas of career and collective legacy are at the heart and soul of the COLA program and speak to the ability of artists to create a lasting impact on society.

Felicia FilerDCA Public Art Division Director

SINCE 1996, the Public Art Division at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) has grown parallel to, and often intersected with, the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship program. DCA’s Public Art Division supports artists and cultural projects through four distinct types of arts programs: the City’s public percent for art program, formally known as the Public Works Improvements Arts Program (PWIAP); the private development one-percent for art program, known as the Arts Development Fee program (ADF); the Murals Program; and the City Art Collection. Additionally, the Division administers the art exhibition program at Los Angeles International Airport. Upon its twentieth anniversary, the division inaugurated the CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial, an exhibition of temporary public artworks located around the city.

more ambitious projects, and work with different materials. The symbiotic relationship between these two DCA programs is one of the ways DCA is able to support the growth and success of artists’ careers.

Since 1989, DCA has commissioned over 200 artworks on public property and in public buildings for the following City departments and bureaus: Airports, Animal Services, Engineering, Fire, Library, Police, Port, Public Works, Recreation and Parks, Transportation, and the Zoo. The artworks in these public buildings not only contribute to the visual landscape of the city, but also create a legacy for the artists’ work and for the people and histories often memorialized in many of the projects. Public artworks are commissioned to last a minimum of twenty-five years, allowing tens of

Todd Gray Atlanta by Boat, 2015

Joyce Dallal Descent, 2008

Kim Abeles Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates, 1992

Kelly Barrie Olive Tree 472, 2014

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ART AND LEGACY1997–2017 COLA MASTER ARTIST FELLOWS

Art and Legacy

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A S SU M P T ION S W E M IG H T M A K E A B OU T T H E P O ST WOR LD

Yes, of course there will be animals, although we may not recognize them. With asymmetrical limbs growing out of wrong places—from the orifice of ears, for example, or between the toes—they may have membranes where eyes used to be, or humps where there once were long elegant necks. And while it’s not clear what will remain of their voice boxes, surely they’ll make some kind of sound. But what kind of sounds will these be? Should we fear them, these animals of the postworld? Oh, naturally, some. For like those of today some will feed on others, including those that feed on us, should we share this planet with them, which we will not. What would we have named them, I wonder? Nonetheless, I, for one, have fallen haplessly in love with their dark opacities and chalky luminescences, and it’s hard not to long for a time we could have shared together, galloping on shaggy nine-legged creatures across vast deserts of glowing rock. Impossible to say how we know these rocks will glow, but glow they will, as large and small and all over the planet, they settle into the vacant cavities where our houses once stood. Some things, of course, will not change—geology, for example, and water, which will still go in cycles, although how long will these be? Ice may linger for what we once called millennia, or steam may envelope the planet, eliminating distinctions between rain and not rain. Love? Most emphatically, yes. Rocks, for example, will lodge against each other, faithful forever and glowing as rocks will glow then; so too the steadfast lap of waves, which will continue long after our world does not. Also, in some of the parts of the postworld, most vicious of all will be plants. Gigantic or microscopic, they’ll go after one another with raw colonizing greed we’d find woefully familiar, were we here. Don’t assume the big ones will prevail either. Wonder, instead, about the color of the sky, what the earth will taste like, how the wind will speak when we are gone.

—k a t h a r i n e h a a k e

Excerpt from Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld (Gold Line Press, 2016)Previously published in Chicago Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 2017)

M I C H A E L B R E W S T E R(19 4 6 –2 0 1 6 )

explored the boundaries of the phenomenological experience of art by using sound’s spatial effects to promote sculptural and sensations of space. Both of his series, Sonic Drawings and Acoustic Sculptures,

use sound in space to generate experiences of drawing and sculpture and expand on ideas that define

these categories.

L E F T ( B E L O W )

Michael Brewster, installation view, slowlyDrift, 1997

146

N E W BE G I N N I NG

When you knowDeath is coming,do you welcome herlike a long lost relative?Stand there in disbelief thatit’s been so long. She’s too strong to forget.She carries fire on her back,Black Widow,to warm the souls.Do you invite her to take a load off ?

You offer her a cup of coffee while she waits,her careful sips a reminder of your loved one’s staggered breath. Sitting at the edge of your seat,feeling a stranger in your own home, anxiety grips your throatblood rushes your stomachfire in your pit. You clasp your hands, sweaty,bracing the title wave of fear. You comfort yourself sharing threads of your lives,your bond transforms into memories.You laugh nervously, Death knows all that you share and more. Does she indulge you or move on to the order of business?You can barely see her through your pleading watery eyes,She looks deep into her cupswirls the tepid liquid- Seer discovering a newmessage. “The love is within you”She says before slipping awayyour love mummified in hergrip.

—c l a u d i a r o d r i g u e z

WA N DA C O L E M A N(19 4 6 –2 0 13)

created a body of work that focused on racism and pondered the status of living below the poverty line

in her birthplace, Los Angeles. Her poetry and novels unapologetically articulated the black experience in Los Angeles in terms of its politics, social life and economic

reality—illuminating the ironies and despair in a poor black woman’s daily struggle for dignity and respect, while also tenderly and humorously writing about identity, love,

Los Angeles, and her working-class parents.

148

R AG A Z Z I

I hear them before I see them from across the parking lot, hooting and calling out, two boys on skateboards rolling up Main Street, another boy on a bike, heading west toward Fremont.

I emerge from the sliding glass doors of the market with my sack of vegetables.

I never get a clear glimpse of them, don’t really look at them. Because I feel like I already know them, so I don’t even bother to look.

I am shifting the sack of goods as I walk from one arm to another, avoiding a Smartcar turning at me, reaching for my keys with my free hand, already making my soup in mind after 3 days of f lu. But I have registered them as they rush lanes of traffic across Main Street to the opposite side. I like how the boyish shouts rebuke my indifferent silence.

They cross the twilight median under the big ficus trees for the far sidewalk.

They cross over into twilight shadows, charging through them like figures of speech in some poem.

Like f lying horsemen, like ravens, like this or like that metaphor, boys with the charging energy of boys, like the boys we once were. Out on the horizons of their lives like pronghorns.

Crossing into the twilight shadows I don’t even distinguish let alone really see, the boys like ragazzi in the background, extras in some black and white 1960s Italian movie.

I am listening to their voices, which have crossed over to the other side.

No break in traffic, no emergency screech or sound of accident, twilight assumes the f low into evening. I drive out into twilight myself. I catch a last glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye as I pass, the bicyclist keeping pace with the skaters in front of the boxing club and the Jehovah’s Witness churchfront, heading toward Carroll’s Brake Service. They’re just half-seen figures barely inscribed inside a couple lines here; they’re on their way and passed far beyond.

—s e s s h u f o s t e r

J A M E S D O O L I N(19 3 2–2 0 0 2)

dynamically used color, light, and pictorial structure to create complex illusionism of Western landscapes.

From the geometric, ethereal Arch series, to the visionary desert landscapes and the dramatic urban

landscapes, Doolin interpreted these subjects, particularly Los Angeles, with an acute sense of

familiarity and alienation.

L E F T ( T O P )

James Doolin, Arch series; #14, 1969

150

C I T Y OF DAY

Day and the presence of dayUnlike its positiveWhite and the presence of contentLike its nemesis and incomplete wasteReleased to stitch togetherThe feetIn the light of midnightMuch laterMorningOutside the city of encounters andThe malice of encountersIn the dayThe city without motionWithout a noisy stop of nightThe city of nightWithout waterWith a little asphyxiaThe profane isNow and then hereIf that can be takenLike grief or timeUnlike a possible waitLiving is demonizedLater forgottenIn the city of dayYet slices wholeThe pattern that erasesWhat isAs false and unimportantUnlike being moved to sing and hideInsignificance exposedStops near death

—g l o r i a e n e d i n a a l v a r e z

From MAS ACA: Further Here (2016) Photography by Rafael Cardenas

RO N G E O RG E(19 3 7–2 0 0 6 )

was a highly regarded percussionist, composer, instrument builder and educator. For over two decades,

George constructed instruments including the loops console, American gamelan, the super vibe, and the modular tambellan. Maintaining an informality, his

concerts might occasionally enter lulls before breaking into phases of fascination and childlike play.

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I don’t know how I will die, of course. Stylishly, I hope. But, still: Will I meet death head held high, like a brave, misjudged queen or convict? A weeping martyr, or a murderer offering himself in expiation of a confessed guilt? Will I be an old, purple-wearing woman, well into autumn or a stark winter, ready to go home? Will I be pretty and cherry-lipped in a white lace nightie, or a bald baby bird, my body wasted and riddled with point-less poison? Will it be the malfunctioning blood, or the tumor I cannot f lee from, the bullet I do not see coming, the proverbial, Tara-numbered bus offering a jump-cut exit, the peaceful slip into an angel-assisted sleep? Will I have the dignity of self-determination, or will I mess myself, be left to lie in my helpless body like a helpless infant? Who will be there with me, if anyone? Will anyone be there to hold my hand? Will I have a karmic rein-carnation as higher consciousness or insect, will there be that Heaven or that God after all, a reunion with those who have gone before me, my gold-fish swimming eternally in a bright clear bowl, my little pet mouse happily running forever on that rickety wire wheel?

Will I have lived a life that makes me ready to meet death beautifully and finely?

Or will I fight to the last, try to barricade that door, claim every last second, last breath, last beat of my heart before it is the end of the thing that is me, and the thing that is me disappears forever?

I don’t know. I am writing, as all of us do, in the dark.

—t a r a i s o n

Excerpt from “How To Die With Style: Taking on Tumors, Orchestrating the Happy End, and Writing in the Dark”Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies (Soft Skull Press, 2015)

T O N Y G L E AT O N(19 4 8 –2 0 15)

photographed and recorded imagery of the Afro Latino diaspora throughout Mexico, Central America, and South America. He concentrated on depicting a situation that

appeared as natural as possible yet one that was not coincidental or impromptu. It was these moments of

interaction with his subjects that interested him most.


Tony Gleaton, COLA installation view, 2017

154

T H E D O OR

Everyone diesso why not me?

I do not welcome deathbut neither do I bar the door.

There–through the peephole–something familiar yet unknown.

Release the lock.Leave on the chain.

To my namepolitely answer “Yes?”

—d i a n e l e f e r

A R T H U R J A RV I N E N (19 5 6 –2 0 1 0)

was a well-known composer, performer, and educator in the Los Angeles contemporary art and experimental

sound scene. Jarvinen traversed repertoires and genres, including playing contemporary chamber

music, experimental, surf music, electronics, improvisational and dabbled in experimental theater

and the visual arts.

156

C OE U R D’A LE N E . L O S F E LI Z . T H E H E A RT. T H E T R E E S.

Day droops on its hingesin the rusted shank of summer—

the pond, a twirl of licorice,ref lecting yellow leaves.

And now that cloud, a dark embroidery for the moon, draws its hand across the pale butter face,

clotting your ref lection.

And really, this humidity is enoughto make me want to lose my grip:

I cannot carry carefully enoughwhat I’ve been given

like that moment in my kitchen:

my grandmother’s Depression Glass, shattered on the f loor

at the edge of the century. I could not carry it across.

It had to drop.

—s a r a h m a c l a y

From Music for the Black Room (University of Tampa Press, 2011)

L A R RY K A RU S H (19 4 6 –2 0 13)

used the piano to create what he called “structural springboards.” Karush was adept with contemporary classical music, African-

based percussion and modern jazz preferring a fluency that highlighted many music and

composition fields. The sounds that resulted were often syncopated yet surprisingly quiet,

melodic, and spacious.

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T O BL AC K N E S S

As it happens, I have never tired of blackness—its Marcus Garvey,Raisin in the Sun, Tuskeegee airmen. Its Strivers Row and liver lips;

its Dred Scott, Freedman’s Bureau, Scott Joplin. Some say black isswarthy, gloomy, evil, fiendish, but we all spring from the tribes—

Ashanti, Bobo, Fulani, Wolof—their cowrie shells and krobo beadssewn into our fading fabric. I don’t know much about my native blackness;

my daddy he say Igbo, the only word he can give me, but it’s the only wordI need to get the old folks to remembering that in Igbo ututu is morning,

abali is night, and in any mirror, my ihu—my face—is always black.

—l y n n e t h o m p s o n

From Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007)

W I L L I E RO B E R T M I D D L E B RO O K (19 5 7–2 0 1 2)

sought to alter public perception of black people by documenting family, friends and people he met on the street. The photographs that emerged were

then chemically treated using manual techniques, and eventually, digitally altered. Self-portraiture was extremely important to him. As a heavy set, six foot tall black man, Middlebrook experienced daily stereotyping and racial

profiling based on the color of his skin and physical size.


Willie Robert Middlebrook, Untitled from series Portraits of my People, 1992

160

E XC E R P T F ROM “A P O C RY PH A”

Who are these disgruntled angels, theirwhite robes smirched with streaks of cadmiumor madder, whose withered fists still clutchat broken stubs of brush or charcoal?Unlike the other denizens, who’vefound contentment in celestialrepose, these restless seraphs stalkthe mist-filled colonnades of heaven,curse their unseasonable harvest.

One traces air as if to captureimages still teasing at his brain;another squints as if to frame adistant square of the horizon, itsproperties of shadow and of light.There’s one whose fingers clench and press asif they ache to mold the firmament,sculpt and reconfigure the whole star-strewn plain. And one who strains to arch his

spine once more into an arabesque, or springfrom cloud to cloud in grand jeté. There’sone who mutters constantly, tongue stillworking words like stubborn clay, but poemselude like half-remembered music.…

—t e r r y w o l v e r t o n

Mystery Bruise (Red Hen Press, 1999)

R AC H E L RO S E N T H A L (19 2 6 –2 0 15)

pioneered various approaches to interdisciplinary performance. Her boundary-blurring work

synthesized dance, theater, dramatic monologues, improvisation, and visual art to illuminate her

abiding concerns: feminism, environmentalism, and animal rights. Within her oeuvre, she connected her own personal history to that of nature and the world

within a geopolitical context.

L E F T ( T O P )

Rachel Rosenthal, still from L.O.W. in Gaia, 1986 L E F T ( B E L O W )

Rachel Rosenthal, still from Pangaean Dreams, 1990

162

DU E T

down thru lamppost row, rambling withphantom’s sweat the 1st Street bridge, I heara bird sing the credence of their Lord God as the screeching wheels of a bum’s swollencart wails the indomitable pain of

the world.

—j o s e p h m a t t s o n

From Milestone: Real Stories of East LA (Spring 2015)

M I C H A E L W H I T E (19 3 0 –2 0 1 6 )

incorporated influences and techniques from Western, Middle, and Far Eastern classical music, as well as blues, R&B, and the jazz tradition into

his musical works. White was among the first violinists to explore avant-garde jazz and

rock-fusion. He played violin with artists such as Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Stevie

Wonder, and Pharoah Sanders.

L E F T ( T O P )

Michael White, from the Impulse Records album Go with the Flow, 1974 L E F T ( B E L O W )

Michael White performing with the Michael White Quintet at Eastside Cultural Center, Oakland, 2012

164

E XC E R P T F ROM “I N F I N I T E R E ST ”

He will pass the house where he was born but will not enter.He will walk along the shore where he was conceived.By the grave site of his brother and what was once his, and one day will be again.

He will fall.His lips will close in a wry smile that turns suddenly sublime.

Above him are no stars. The moon not yet down. The sun not yet risen. The pink-blue-black dust swirls and becomes his sky.

No ascent to heaven. No descent to hell. No more questions without answers.No more howls for meaning.

At last, and forever, peace.

—b r u c e b a u m a n

From Broken Sleep (Other Press, 2015)

N O R M A N YO N E M O T O (19 4 6 –2 0 1 4 )

created video art (most often single channel works) that appropriated the visual vernacular of Hollywood movies,

television, and advertising, to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about the media. Applying his film and

screenwriting background, Yonemoto re-contextualized signifiers he found in films and commercials, such as heavily

clichéd dialogue, music, gestures, and scenes that click in the viewer’s memory without being identifiable.

L E F T ( T O P )

Norman Yonemoto, Christmas Greetings from Tule Lake, 2004

Kim AbelesEleanor AcademiaLuis AlfaroGloria Enedina AlvarezMichael AlexanderRichard AmrominAdelina AnthonyLinda ArreolaGlenna AvilaAnne AyresSarah BancroftLane BardenAdilah BarnesNancy BartonSusan Sayre BattonJay BelloliTomas BenitezClaudia Bohn-SpectorPaul J. BotelloKevin BittermanAnne BraySherrill BrittonRobert ByerBill CahalanSusan CahanLuisa Cariaga Teresa CarmodyLance CarlsonJulie CarsonDerrick CartwrightCyrus CassellsElizabeth CheathamChusien ChangBarton ChoyNickie CleavesWanda Coleman (d. 2013)Peter J. Corpus (d. 2010)Julian CoxJoyce DallalLynn DallyTim DangMichael DatcherPaul de CastroMaría Luisa de Herrera Tony de los ReyesErnest DillihayMarlena DonohueJawanza DumisaniMartin DurazoDuane Ebata (d. 2000)Ron Fernandez Felicia Filer

Lauri FirstenbergFrederick FisherHeather FloodAlejandra FloresJames ForwardHoward Fox Shari FrilotNoriko FujinamiBen GarciaMiki GarciaKathy GallegosNoriko GamblinGloria GeraceAmy GerstlerMitch GlickmanPat GomezRita Gonzalez Allison GoodmanTodd GrayMark Steven GreenfieldM. A. Greenstein April GreimanBeverly GrossmanKatharine HaakeLeigh Ann HahnLyle Ashton HarrisEric HayashiEloise Klein HealyAmy Heibel Lisa HenryDavid HernandezLorenzo HernandezDonald HewittKarin Higa (d. 2013)Asuka HisaBonnie Oda HomseyMargaret HondaJohn HugginsJosine Ianco-StarrelsSuzanne IskenTara IsonJade JewettAmelia JonesAlexandra JuhaszSusan KandelLynette KesslerEllen KetchumSoo KimGarland KirkpatrickLaurel KishiCheryl KleinCarole Ann Klonarides

Amy KnolesCindy KolodziejskiVenida Korda Hirokazu KosakaKris KuramitsuNery Gabriel LemusJesse LernerHeidi Lesemann R. Steven LewisTitus LeviAimee LiuGeorge LuggVictoria MartinPeter MaysBilly MitchellMichael MizeranyWilliam MorenoJohnny MoriAram MoshayediRenae Williams NilesLinda NishioMarisela NorteEmiko OnoWendy C. OrtizAnthony PardinesAmy PedersonClaire PeepsLicia PereaPilar PerezGary PhillipsJanice PoberLionel PopkinRose PortilloPirayeh PourafarReina PradoCarolyn RamoTom RhoadsWilliam RoperTere RomoSusan RoseAlma RuizAlison SaarMichael SakamotoChris ScoatesThomas SchirtzLothar SchmitzWillie SimsFrancesco X. SiquierosJohn Spiak John C. SpokesCarol StakenasDorothy Stone (d. 2005)

Louise SteinmanAli SubotnickErika SuderburgLee SweetRoberto TejadaRomalyn TilghmanPamela TomPilar Tompkins-RivasIrene TsatsosTony ValenzuelaPaul VangelistiJustin VeachVickie VértizPetrula VrontikisOliver WangScott WardJennifer WattsElaine Weissman (d. 1998)Carol WellsLi WenNicole WernerCarla WilliamsStanley C. WilsonSteve WongTim B. WrideTakako YamaguchiCheng-Chieh YuMichael ZakianMimi ZeigerLynn Zelevansky

City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissioners, 1997–2017

Celeste M. AlleyneMaria A. BellYork ChangAnnie ChuJill CohenAnthony De Los ReyesMari EdelmanAlycia D. EncisoMoctesuma EsparzaAlfred C. FoungJavier GonzalezAudrey Greenberg (d. 2010)Thien HoPaula HoltKim L. HunterCharmaine JeffersonJayne LevantJosefina LopezDennis R. MartinezSonia MolinaRichard J. MontoyaAdolfo V. NodalEric PaquetteArthur S. PfeffermanLee RamerJosephine RamirezGayle Garner RoskiKathleen H. SalazarElissa ScrafanoDonald H. Smith (d. 2016)Charles M. SternJonathan WeedmanJohn Wirfs Carmen Zapata (d. 2014)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSCOLA 20

Past COLA Panelists 1996–2016COLA 20 Acknowledgements

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) combined the efforts of its Grants Administration Division with its Marketing and Development Division and its Community Arts Division via the Los Angleles Municipal Art Gallery to produce the COLA 20 Individual Artist Fellowships catalog and exhibition.

We would especially like to thank the following DCA employees for their dedicated work in making the COLA 20 exhibition and this publication engaging, educational, and entertaining: Joe Smoke, Christopher Reidesel, and Alma Guzman from the Grants Administration Division; Isabelle Lutterodt, Gabriel Cifarelli, Marta Feinstein, John Weston, Andrea Verano, Jamie Costa, Mary Oliver, and the support staff from the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and Will Caperton y Montoya from DCA’s Marketing and Development Division. We also sincerely thank Michael Worthington for designing the catalog and Stephanie Emerson for copy editing.

We would also like to acknowledge Janet M. Zelaya who has been DCA’s Executive Administrative Assistant serving every General Manager. In addition, we want to thank our two community partners for their assistance with the COLA 20 project, the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation and Grand Performances.

For lending objects to represent the lives and careers of deceased fellows in the COLA 20 exhibition, DCA thanks the following individuals and agencies: Karen Anderson and Lily Scholer for loans pertaining to Michael Brewster; Lynn Angebranndt for loans pertaining to Arthur Jarvinen; Serge Berliawsky for loans pertaining to Michael White; Philip Blackburn and the American Composers Forum for loans related to Ron George; John Campbell and Bruce Yonemoto for loans pertaining to Norman Yonemoto; Charles E. Young Research Library and UCLA Library Special Collections for loans related to Wanda Coleman; Leisei Chen for loans pertaining to Michael White; the City of Los Angeles Art Collection for loans pertaining to Tony Gleaton; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles for loans pertaining to Bruce and Norman Yonemoto; Ceazs Hernandez for loans pertaining to Michael White; Clayton Karush for loans pertaining to Larry Karush; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for loans pertaining to Willie Robert Middlebrook; Kate Noonan and the Rachel Rosenthal Dance Company for loans pertaining to Rachel Rosenthal; Lauren Doolin McMillen for loans pertaining to James Doolin; and Austin Straus for loans pertaining to Wanda Coleman.

Image Captions

p.6: Miyoshi Barosh, Rainbow of Tears, 2016p.8: Lothar Schmitz, Biotopia, 2003 p.9: Jennifer Celio, NIMBY (National Park), 2012p.10: Jessica Rath, Paragon, installation view from Ripe series,

2014 p.11: Malathi Iyengar, Paintings of the Divine, 2009p.14: Mark Dean Veca, Pennybags, 2010 p.15: Victor Estrada, Picardia, 1990– 97, Sculpture with Picardia

(in foreground): Untitled, 1990– 97p.18: Keiko Fukazawa, Homage to A.W., 2016 p.19: Marsian De Lellis, (In)/Animate Objects, 2016p.20: Baumgartner + Uriu (B+U), Apertures, 2015p.21: Corey Stein, Malling Bear, 2014p.27: Maryrose C. Mendoza, Global, 2012p.28: Top: Anna Boyiazis, UGANDA. Rakai. 2013

Bottom: Anna Boyiazis, UGANDA. Rakai, 2008 p.29: Brian C. Moss, installation view Theory of Everything, 2010 p.30: Samantha Fields, Eugene 3, 2013p.31: Jo Ann Callis, Untitled (I.T), 2001p.32: Martin Durazo, 7 Chakras, 2012 p.33: Steve Hurd, Tower of Babel, 2010 p.34: Installation view, Jim Skuldt, BOX SET NODAL SCHEMATIC,

2016p.36: Top: COLA 2013 installation view. Bottom: Blue McRight,

Font, 2016p.38: Top: Jack Butler, COLA 2004, installation view.

Bottom: Takako Yamaguchi, COLA 2004, installation viewp.46: Top: Paul J. Botello, COLA installation view, 2007.

Bottom: Clement Hanami, white elephant, 2007p.52: Top: Nery Gabriel Lemus, installation view Alfombra

Domestica, 2012. Bottom Left: Danial Nord, State of the Art, 2011

p.60 Installation views, COLA 20 exhibtion, 2017p.60: Top: Sheetal Gandhi, performance view.

Bottom: Paul Outlaw, still from The Late, Late Show: Porphyria’s Descent, 2012

p.66: Jen Hofer, from the series, “Front Page News,” 2011p.74: Christine Nguyen. Portals of Light from the Mountain

and the Sky, 2016 p.88: Paolo Davanzo, installation view, Avanti Popolo, 2016p.168 Stas Orlovski, Moon with Book, 2008

Cover: Tony de los Reyes, Sunset, 2009

Photography Credits

All images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise specified below.

Pp. 6, 56 (bottom right): Photographs by Jeff McLane; p. 11: Photograph by Elko Weaver; p. 19: Photograph by Alex Griffin; p. 20: Photograph by Joshua White; p. 31: Photograph by Richard Brown; p. 40 (top left): Photograph by Ave Pildas; p. 44 (top left): Photograph by Roger Fojas; p. 45 (top left): Photograph by Chris Covics; p. 48 (top right): Robert Pacheco; pp. 51 (top right), 52 (bottom): Photographs by Gene Ogami; p. 55 (top center): Photograph by Amy Tierney; p. 53 (middle left): Photograph by Ken Seino; p. 57 (top right): Photograph by Brian Rottinger; p. 62 (top right): Photograph by Steven Gunther; p. 68 (bottom left): Photograph by Helen Hierta; p. 68 (second from left): Photograph by Pablo Giménez Zapiola; p. 68 (right): Photograph by Ned Raggett/Arthur Magazine; p. 69 (top left): Photograph by La Blanka Photo; p. 69 (bottom center): Photograph by Anna Leahy; p. 142 (top): Image courtesy of Lily Scholer; p. 144 (top): Photograph by Bianca Dorso; p. 144 (below): Photograph by Rod Bradley; p. 146 (bottom): Image courtesy of Lauren Richardson Doolin. Photograph by Alan Shaffer Photography; p. 148 (top): Photograph by Ara Oshagan; p. 148 (below): photograph by Astor Morgan; p. 150 (top): © Estate of Tony Gleaton, 1998 All Rights Reserved. Photograph by Bruce W. Talamon; p. 153 (bottom): Courtesy of Lynn Angebranndt; p. 154: Images courtesy of Clayton Karush; p. 156 (top): Photograph by Monica Nouwens; p. 156 (below): Image courtesy of Michael Massenburg; p. 158 (top): Courtesy of Rachel Rosenthal Company, Photograph by Sabra Vickland; p. 158 (below): Courtesy of Rachel Rosenthal Company. Photograph by Jan Dean; p. 160 (top): Courtesy of Leisei Chen. Photograph by Phil Melnick; p. 160 (below): Courtesy of Leisei Chen. Photograph by Kamau Amen-Ra; p. 163: Images courtesy of John Campbell.

COLA 20 Catalog

Project Organizer: Joe SmokeEditor: Will Caperton y MontoyaDesigner: Michael Worthington, Counterspace, Los AngelesCopy Editor: Stephanie EmersonPrinter: Dr. Cantz´sche Druckerei Medien GmbH

© Copyright 2017 by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

Original artwork courtesy of the individual artists unless otherwise noted.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-0-692-90269-1

As a covered entity under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the City of Los Angeles does not discriminate on the basis of disability, and upon request will provide reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access to its programs, services, and activities.

Department of Cultural Affairs City of Los Angeles201 North Figueroa Street, Suite 1400Los Angeles, CA 90012TEL: 213.202.5500WEB: culturela.org

Los Angeles Municipal Art GalleryBarnsdall Park4800 Hollywood BoulevardLos Angeles, CA 90027TEL: 323.644.6269WEB: lamag.org

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COLA 20

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1997–2017 COLA MASTER ARTIST FELLOWS

COLA\20 - Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

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