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Mobile Museum of Riverside Chinatown
Part activist architecture, part education station, with a hint of playfulness, the Mobile Museum of Riverside Chinatown is a transportable kiosk that will engage the public about the history of Riverside’s Chinatown and the current political struggle to preserve the historic site. The project aims to share untold stories and document an important piece of Asian American history, and larger US history.
In Riverside, one of the most well preserved archaeology
sites containing invaluable artifacts documenting one of the oldest Chinatowns
in the country is under attack. Private development is attempting to purchase
the site, and the community is organizing.
Partnering with Save Our Chinatown Committee, a 501(c)3 non-profit
organization, we plan to construct a mobile museum that will serve multiple
functions. The Mobile Museum will display photographs of artifacts that are in
storage at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum, hidden from public view.
Additionally, it will be a roving information booth that will provide important
information about the political campaign to save the site to the community and
serve as a mobile volunteer station. It will also be an interactive art
workshop station for the community to create their own vision for a public park
on the site, NOT a medical building.
The Mobile Museum will be deployed in Los Angeles, Riverside and
other locations, to support interactive learning, political awareness, and
cultural exchange. It’s portable nature is a comment on the ability to reclaim
space for our history, not confined to a brick and mortar structure. We CAN
build our own cultural institutions!
Think silkscreened canopy, collapsable modular architecture,
community art, and political message—that is the Mobile Museum of Riverside Chinatown.
This will be a collaboration between DreamLA (Melissa Guerrero)
and FrameShiftDesign (Theresa Hwang), both LA based art and design studios.
About Save our Chinatown Committee: www.saveourchinatown.org
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Actual Size Los Angeles
www.actualsizela.com
Guy de Cointet
ACR CIT, 1973
Offset on newspaper
22 x 17 inches
001-75-GC
Actual Size Los Angeles is collaboratively run by Lee Foley, Justin John Greene, Samia Mirza and Corrie Siegel. The current Actual Size location at 741 New High Street in Chinatown, Los Angeles opened in April 2010. Actual Size has hosted over 20 exhibitions/ curatorial interventions and worked with over 90 artists. Actual Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to encourage situations that activate the exhibition and engage the public. Projects curated by Actual Size have been profiled in the L.A Times, Mousse Magazine, and Flash Art International.
PRINT IMPRINT
Take a
book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is the openness of this
book that I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, is not
walled up as in a fortress. It asks for nothing better than to exist outside
itself, or to let you exist in it.
- Georges Poulet, Interiority and Criticism,1970
Print
Imprint is a
satellite exhibition in partnership with Once Emerging Now Emerging, Cirrus Gallery’s year-long
exhibition project in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time. Print Imprint seeks to develop an intimate
relationship and conversation between artworks from the 1970’s and 80’s,
and current artworks works produced by emerging and mid-career Los Angeles
artists. Participating Artists include Ali Bailey, Scott Benzel, Gui de Cointet
and Larry Bell, Cayetano Ferrer, Katie Herzog, Laura Owens, Ed Ruscha, and
Barbara T. Smith. The artists’ responses to the concept and form of the book
will take many physical forms, including prints, paintings, slide projections,
musical composition, and custom vitrines and pedestals. Actual Size will produce a limited edition book in conjunction with the exhibition.
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Outpost for Contemporary Art
Outpost for Contemporary art has a six-year history of promoting
community-based projects with international influence. Through Outpost's
residency program, artists from Mexico, Canada, Eastern Europe and South
America have operated for extended residency periods from Outpost's Highland
Park headquarters and embarked on projects that have engaged the community in a
part of the city historically underserved by the region's major cultural
institutions. Outpost also serves as an important satellite for members of Los
Angeles' vibrant artist community whose practices manifest largely outside the
realms of galleries and institutions.
Outpost for Contemporary Art seeks to engage and enrich diverse
Los Angeles communities through cross-cultural exchanges and interdisciplinary
projects that blur the boundaries between art, social practice, and public
life. Programs support the work of innovative, socially-engaged artists who
utilize public spaces, temporary venues, and collaborative methods of
production to foster intimate contact and genuine connection with their
audiences.
Outpost has been connecting people to art and artists through a
wide variety of events, exchange programs and residencies since 2004. Alive to
the specificity of its location in heterogeneous Northeast Los Angeles,
Outpost’s programming actively creates community and intellectual exchange on
local and global levels.
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Knowledges
Knowledges is an emerging, artist run curatorial organization that seeks to broaden the context of contemporary art production and reception. Our mission is to create dialogue between contemporary art and geographic sites of historic, scientific or cultural influence by organizing site-specific
explorations and events.
Our first major project is an event that will take place at the
Mount Wilson Observatory. Located in the San Gabriel Mountains, just outside
Pasadena, Mount Wilson is an astronomical observatory and site of historic
scientific discovery, contemporary research, and sweeping views above Los
Angeles. Art and science communities thrive in Los Angeles, but seldom have
occasion to converge. We are initiating a dialog by inviting contemporary Los
Angeles artists to create and exhibit works in response to the location,
history and influence of Mount Wilson. This weekend-long, experimental event,
scheduled for June 2012, will incorporate exhibitions, performances, film/video
screenings, and other forms of temporary installations on the observatory
grounds, as well as night viewing through the telescope. The observatory has
granted us unprecedented access to the facilities and grounds, including the
historic auditorium, astronomical museum and the observation decks inside the
60-inch and 100-inch telescope domes.
We have an overwhelmingly positive response so far, with the
following artists and organizations confirmed: Lita Albuquerque, Jennifer
Boysen, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Claude Collins-Stracensky, Cloud
Eye Control (Anna “Oxygen” Huff, Miwa Matreyek, Chi-wang Yang), Zoe Crosher,
Russell Crotty, Katie Grinnan, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern, Norman Klein, Emily
Lacy, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Laura Riboli, Kim Schoen, Sneaky Snake
(Ian James & George Jensen), April Totten & Donnie Stroud, Kara Tanaka,
Mungo Thomson, Cody Trepte, Viralnet.net (Tom Leeser) and more to be
announced...
Funding from an Artist Bailout grant will help cover our project’s
organizational costs, including the development of a comprehensive research
website, the creation of a companion publication, printed event maps or
promotional materials, and a possible park permit fee. Additionally, we need to
raise funds to rent the 60” telescope.
Christina Ondrus, Founder/Director, Co-Curator
Elleni Sclavenitis, Associate Director, Co-Curator
Information about the Mount Wilson Observatory:
www.signifysanctifybelieve.org
Signify, Sanctify, Believe—facilitated by Claire Cronin, Adam Overton, and Tanya Rubbak, and featuring the sacred gifts of dozens of contemporary artists, performers, and visionaries—is invested in the temporary, playful exploration of [semi-]fictional religious technologies.
Over 2 weeks last Spring 2011, we opened our storefront revival center doors – within the Free Church of Public Fiction – to the Highland Park public. We provided a venue for over 70 semi-secular artists to present over a dozen inspirational services, sermons, and workshops, and oversaw the publication of nearly 20 pamphlets, consisting of creative articles of faith and other religious ephemera. (Our full schedule, and the complete Library
of Sacred Technologies, can be found online at http://signifysanctifybelieve.org.)
This year we hope to travel our two very special branches – The
Saints and Servants of the Order of [Con]Temporary Religious Observance, and The Library
of Sacred Technologies – up, down, and around the West Coast and Southwest,
spreading the good word and creative gospel currently infusing the sanctified
work of our Los Angeles experimental art and performance community. In
addition, we hope to meet and collaborate with artists in these locales as
well, as we continue to produce creative, gentle, temporary religious services,
sermons, healing dens, and so forth.
Money earned through the Artist Bailout will potentially help us
visit Portland, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Salt Lake City. It
will also help us print and distribute more copies of our Library of Sacred
Technologies.
a video
advertising the first iteration of Signify, Sanctify, Believe:
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Mobile Pinhole Project
www.mobilepinholeproject.tumblr.com
This past summer, I founded the Mobile Pinhole Project, a new community arts organization in Los Angeles. The Mobile Pinhole Project brings hands-on photography workshops to youth in neighborhoods across Los Angeles using the VanCam, a giant pinhole camera on wheels. The Mobile Pinhole Project is having a huge impact for kids across Los Angeles, guiding them to re-examine their neighborhood community through a visual lens. The “oohs” and “ahhs” from the kids when they go INSIDE the camera makes all the hard work worth it. Unfortunately, we can’t continue our programming unless we raise funds to support our materials and maintenance costs. The Artist Bailout micro-grant would support the paper, developing, snacks and gas for 5 workshops, allowing us to continue to inspire the creative leaders of tomorrow by making arts education available to youth who otherwise don’t have access to creative outlets.
WHAT WE DO
In half-day mobile workshops guided by professional local artists, young people experience photography as a powerful tool for exploring their communities. Our workshops makes visual arts geographically and technologically accessible by allowing youth in neighborhoods across Los Angeles inside the mechanism of photography, empowering a collective visual exploration of identity, culture, and place.
WHY WE DO IT
Funding for arts and education has been cut deeply across the United States, and California is no exception. Twenty-nine percent of California's public schools offer no study in any arts discipline. Los Angeles has lost 25% of its full-time elementary art teachers in the past three years. Yet, we know that artistic expression is fundamental to youth development – as a tool for self-expression, communication, and critical thinking. Personally, founding the Mobile Pinhole Project has been a personal milestone for me, furthering my goal to improve accessibility to arts education for all youth.
