Big City Forum: Creative Action

Big City Forum: Creative Action
Thursday, Feb. 20, 2014
7 – 8:30 pm
The Auditorium, Otis Main Campus

from A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes at The Hammer Museum

Allison Agsten – Curator, Public Engagement, The Hammer Museum
Saskia Wilson-Brown – Founder/Director, The Institute for Art and Olfaction
Yasmine Mohseni – arts correspondent, writer, curator

In conjunction with Otis’ Creative Action program, Big City Forum presents a series of four discussions featuring individuals who reinvent social space and redefine how we engage with each other. The first panel scheduled for Thursday, February 20th addresses the collaborative process between a trans-disciplinary curator, an olfaction artist, and a contemporary arts writer.

Allison Agsten is Curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum. In her role, she collaborates with artists and staff to develop a new paradigm for the museum experience. Recent projects include the installation of a lending library and used bookstore into the Hammer's lobby gallery as well an examination of security guard labor that culminated in new, artist-conceived uniforms. Formerly, Agsten was Director of Communications at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she spearheaded a number of projects related to accessibility including a first-of-its kind program to make rare LACMA publications available for free online and a curated online photo contest that garnered more than a thousand entries from across the globe. A leader in social media, Agsten also initiated the institution's groundbreaking bilingual Twitter feed. Prior to joining to LACMA, Agsten was a producer in CNN's Los Angeles bureau where she regularly covered the arts.

Saskia Wilson-Brown - French by upbringing, Cuban and English by blood and American by birth, Saskia received her BA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley and her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. A producer and curator for visual art and film, she co-directed the seminal and sadly defunct Silver Lake Film Festival, ran international outreach and development for the seminal and sadly defunct Current TV, and launched the seminal and sadly defunct Cinema Speakeasy. In 2012 she started The Institute for Art and Olfaction, a non-profit arts organization devoted to experimentation and education in perfumery. So far, it is neither seminal nor sadly defunct. Fingers crossed!

Yasmine Mohseni is a writer, editor and independent arts curator. Her articles have been featured in international publications such as Artinfo, The Art Newspaper, Beautiful/Decay, BlackBook, the Dubai-based arts publication Canvas, The Huffington Post, Modern Painters, Newsweek, and Whitewall. As Artinfo’s Los Angeles Correspondent, she provided extensive coverage of the city’s dynamic and diverse artistic community.  These include interviews with the Hammer Museum’s Ann Philbin, art dealers Maggie Kayne and Bill Griffin, and artists Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie.  She has curated numerous art exhibitions, art events and educational programs in LA, including collaborations with Christie’s, Vanity Fair, and artist Shepard Fairey. Through her exhibitions and articles, Yasmine seeks to provide her audience with a thoughtful and accessible approach to contemporary art.

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BCF asks artists, writers, architects, designers, musicians, and curators to reflect on how they currently live, what they've learned through experience, and what they'd like to pass along to others. Through dialog we seek to identify the connections that run through our creative processes and daily lives. We intend to tell the story of Los Angeles through the words and work of its most inventive participants.