Big City Forum: Creative Action #3

 
Cesar Garcia – Director and Chief Curator, The Mistake Room
Glenn Kaino – contemporary artist
Kris Kuramitsu – Deputy Director and Senior Curator, The Mistake Room

Tuesday, April 22, 2014
7 – 8:30 pm
The Auditorium, Otis Main Campus

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 third panel scheduled for Tuesday, April 22nd highlights the story behind The Mistake Room, LA’s new independent non-profit cultural institution devoted to an international program of contemporary art and thought. Founder, lead curator, and artist will discuss their collaborative process and the motivations behind developing this experimental site for creative engagement

Cesar Garcia is the Founding Director and Chief Curator of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA. A curator, writer and educator, Garcia formerly served as the Associate Director and Senior Curator of LA> Made in L.A. 2012--the first Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum and LA>

Glenn Kaino (b. 1972, Los Angeles) received his BFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1993 and his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1996. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Glenn Kaino:19.83,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Kris Kuramitsu is the Deputy Director and Senior Curator of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles and the Associate Director for Artis in Los Angeles. She has served as the Director of Special Projects at LA>Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival at venues across Los Angeles County and Made in LA at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park. 

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.

Glenn Kaino (b. 1972) lives and works in Los Angeles. His upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Glenn Kaino, Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin (2014); Tank, Prospect3, New Orleans, (2014); Tank, Grand Arts, Kansas City, (2015); Bring Me The Hands of Piri Reis, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2012); In Every Grain, U.S. Pavilion, 13th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt (2012-); The Space Between, A.Bandit, The Kitchen, New York (2011); Glenn Kaino: Safe | Vanish, LA>

Glenn Kaino (b. 1972) lives and works in Los Angeles. His upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Glenn Kaino, Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin (2014); Tank, Prospect3, New Orleans, (2014); Tank, Grand Arts, Kansas City, (2015); Bring Me The Hands of Piri Reis, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2012); In Every Grain, U.S. Pavilion, 13th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt (2012-); The Space Between, A.Bandit, The Kitchen, New York (2011); Glenn Kaino: Safe | Vanish, LA>

Kris Kuramitsu is the Deputy Director and Senior Curator of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles and the Associate Director for Artis in Los Angeles. She has served as the Director of Special Projects at LA>Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival

at venues across Los Angeles County and Made in LA at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park; Programs Director for Creative Link for the Arts, New York; the Curator for the Collections of Eileen and Peter Norton, and for the Collection of Eileen Harris Norton; and as the Arts Programs Director for the Peter Norton Family Foundation. In addition, she has consulted for non-profit arts organizations and foundations such as United States Artists and the California Community Foundation. As an independent curator, she organized the exhibitions Home Away at the Armory Center for the Arts; John Outterbridge: Rag Factory at LA>Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Post-War Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; the ARCO Madrid Art Fair; Invisible Cities at Instituto Cervantes, Madrid; and Et in Arcadio Ego at Estacion Tijuana, among others. Currently, Kuramitsu is organizing an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Mike Kanemitsu that will open at The Mistake Room in September 2014. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Pomona College and an M.A. in Art History from UCLA. 

Big City Forum: Creative Action #2

Big City Forum: Creative Action #2  
Tuesday, April 15, 2014  
7 – 8:30 pm
The Auditorium, Otis Art Institute Main Campus

Featuring: 
Yuval Sharon – Artistic Director, The Industry
Danielle Agami – Artistic Director, Ate9 Dance Company
Victoria Looseleaf – arts journalist at LA Times, contributing reporter at KUSC

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 second panel scheduled for Tuesday, April 15th addresses the collaborative process between an opera director and a dance choreographer/director in relation to their recent trans-disciplinary staging of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” at LA’s Union Station and the performance installation Terry Riley: In C at the Hammer Museum.

Danielle Agami
Originally born in Israel in 1984, Agami studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance High School and was a member of the Batsheva Dance Company from 2002-2010. Between 2007-2009, Agami served as the artistic director of Batsheva Dancers Create and functioned as the company's rehearsal director from 2008-2010, during which she received the Yair Shapira Prize for Excellence in Dance in 2009.  In 2011 Agami relocated to New York City, where she functioned as Senior Manager of Gaga U.S.A. Since arriving in the U.S., Agami met and taught thousands of dancers. During 2011 she created original work at Rutgers University (NJ), Boston Conservatory (MA), Springboard Montreal, Cornish College for the Arts (WA) and more. In 2012 After relocating to Seattle, Agami founded Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY, as her first longitudinal project and created both Sally meets Stu and Sheila for Ate9. In 2013, she presented TacTics for Ate9, Shula in Israel,  for the Batsheva Ensemble, This Time Tomorrow for NorthWest Dance Project in Portland OR, Loose Gravel  for Barak Ballet in L.A, and a unique collaboration with L.A Dance Project for Invisible Cities by The Industry Opera.

Victoria Looseleaf
Victoria Looseleaf is an award winning arts journalist and regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, Performances Magazine and KUSC-FM radio. She also contributes to the New York Times and writes the program notes and broadcast scripts for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. In addition, she teaches Dance History at USC and does pre-concert talks at venues including the Los Angeles Music Center. She was the producer/host of the cable TV show on the arts, "The Looseleaf Report," which ran for 22 years in Los Angeles and New York, and now maintains a blog of the same name. One of her passions is covering international music and dance festivals, where her travels have taken her to places that include Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Aix-en-Provence and Zakopane, Poland. Looseleaf has a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in the Performance and Literature of the Harp from Mills College. She has also released two albums, Harpnosis and Beyond Harpnosis, both registered trademarks. 

Yuval Sharon
Director and Producer Yuval Sharon, named a "Face to Watch in 2012" by the Los Angeles Times, has been creating an unconventional body of work that explores the boundaries of music, visual art, and concert theater. His productions have been described as "dizzyingly spectacular" (New York Magazine), "magical" (The Village Voice), "ingenious" (San Francisco Chronicle) and “staggering” (Opera News). Yuval directed a landmark production of John Cage’s Song Books at the San Francisco Symphony and Carnegie Hall with Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. He also founded and serves as Artistic Director of The Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles, where his inaugural production of Anne LeBaron's hyperopera Crescent City was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "groundbreaking" and "reshaping LA opera." Yuval was Project Director for four years of New York City Opera’s VOX, an annual workshop of new American opera, which became the most important crucible for new opera in the country under his direction. He has also worked with international houses like the San Francisco Opera, the Mariinsky Theater, the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria, and the Komische Oper Berlin, as well as experimental venues like Le Poisson Rouge, Berkeley Opera, and the Deitch Projects.

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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.