Big City Forum presents Attunement

ATTUNEMENT

Opens November 1, 2014
Panel Discussion 4–6PM
Reception 6–8PM

Attunement pays tribute to artists who function on multiple frequencies. They flow through worlds, above boundaries, under surfaces, around obstacles, and inhabit the spaces in-between. We define their work as exceptionally rich, layered, complex, and in some ways “off the charts.” They communicate on multiple channels. In order to appreciate the messages fully, we must “tune in” to the ranges of expression that continue infinitesimally through space and time. We bring together an expansive show of paintings, photos, prints, text pieces, and video that are prone to resonate beyond ranges of audio and visual perception.


Co-Produced by Leonardo Bravo, River Jukes-Hudson, and David Shorter.

Leonardo Bravo is an artist, curator, educator, and the founder of Big City Forum, an interdisciplinary project highlighting creative practices across architecture, design, and contemporary art. BCF produces events in partnership with institutions such as the Skirball Cultural Center, Armory Center for the Arts, Otis Art Institute, Santa Monica Museum of Art, and LAX ART. Bravo is also Director of School Programs of the Music Center of Los Angeles, where he oversees the implementation of strategic arts education partnerships with districts and schools across Los Angeles County.

River Jukes-Hudson is an independent graphic designer who collaborates regularly with artists, curators, architects, writers, and other designers. She currently teaches Typography at Art Center College of Design. River co-directs Big City Forum with partner Leonardo Bravo.

David Shorter is a professor, filmmaker, curator, and consultant living and dying in LA. His areas of interest loosely overlap around ways of knowing through indigenous wisdom systems, the esoterica, and occult sciences. Dr. Shorter is currently Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles.

Big City Forum: Creative Action #4

Eve Fowler, Billboard from it is so, is it so, 2014. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project: A LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) Exhibition

Big City Forum in conjunction with Otis' Creative Action program presents:

Location, Location, Location: The Decentralization of Art Activity

featuring:

Shamim M. Momin

Aurora Tang

Asuka Hisa

Tuesday, Sept. 23rd
7:30 pm
Otis Auditorium

Los Angeles is a city often described as having no center. Its art community has turned that "disadvantage" into an advantage and given itself a license for adventure. Organizations, galleries, and artists find decentralization to be an exciting option and they establish their addresses in unexpected neighborhoods and zones in the city and even beyond, in other cities and states. What are the challenges and advantages of this programmatic and conceptual strategy? What are the risks, to organization and audience alike? Is this necessary, and if so, is it sustainable?

Join Shamim M. Momin, Director/Curator/Founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and Aurora Tang, Managing Director, High Desert Test Sites; Program Manager, The Center for Land Use Interpretation in an open conversation moderated by Asuka Hisa, Director of Education and Public Programs, Santa Monica Museum of Art. This program is part of Big City Forum's series produced in conjunction with the Otis Art Institute's Creative Action program.

City of Hope, City of Resistance, Part 2

 

We don’t generalize about a 470 square mile city with 130 zip codes. Los Angeles is a world in and of itself. A situation this diverse is comprised of contradiction so we don’t seek to simplify. We extend an invitation.

Greet your neighbor. Share a meal. Start a conversation. Do what you can. For the past five years, Big City Forum has been committed to actions such as these–initiating collective conversations, open to anyone who appreciates getting in a room together.

Human interaction is on the brink of extinction! Big City Forum advocates direct engagement, appearing in person, speaking truth, taking risks–no matter how large or small. Past, present, future. It’s the doing that matters.

“A tree–the slow explosion of a seed.”
—Bruno Munari

Genuine gestures are apparent, they resonate, word gets out, they gain momentum, movements take hold. But the initial motion has to happen. Our devotion is to the seed, the spark and to the risk.

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. 

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.

Big City Forum: Global City at the Skirball Center

National Art Museum of China, competition rendering. Image courtesy of Safdie Architects.

Big City Forum - Global City
 
Adrianna Cuellar &Marcel Sanchez-Prieto 
Analia Saban
Peter Zellner

Saturday, Feb. 8th

2 - 4 pm

In conjunction with the exhibition Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, Big City Forum presents an interdisciplinary event that examines the ways in which we view, interact with. and respond to public space. 

After a weekend of research on the Skirball campus, a team of local artists, designers, and architects will present their reflections and responses to Moshe Safdie’s work and how it relates to current issues within urban, social, and political contexts. Participants include contemporary artist Analia Saban, Cro Studio’s Marcel Sanchez-Prieto and Adriana Cuellar, and AECOM Principal and Studio Design Lead Peter Zellner.

“Global City” is produced by Big City Forum.  The presentation will be facilitated by artist, curator, and founder of Big City Forum, Leonardo Bravo.
For reservations: http://www.skirball.org/programs/expert-insight/global-city

Adriana Cuéllar received her Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Master on Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she received the Annual Award for Excellence in Housing Design. She is a recipient of the 2006-2007 Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Design by the American Academy in Rome where she expanded her interest and research on experimental cartographies that capture the erosion of everyday urban landscape. Currently she is an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Diego and at The New School of Architecture and Design where she teaches at graduate level and co-directs the Rome study abroad program. For several years Adriana worked for estudio Teddy Cruz on the design of housing projects and on the investigation of the cultural/spatial relations at the border region of Tijuana-San Diego. She has also worked for Rafael Viñoly Architects in New York on large-scale cultural and residential projects.
 
Marcel Sanchez received his Bachelor of Architecture from Iberoamerican University in México and a Master in Architecture from University of California, Los Angeles, where he was awarded the Director’s scholarship award. Currently he is a full time assistant professor at Woodbury University San Diego where his research has been the development of design methodologies that expand on geometry as tool for urban sensing and architectural innovation. He has been critic, invited lecturer and taught at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia University, RMIT, South Eastern University in China, Iberoamerican University and The New School of Architecture and Design, where he co-directed the Rome study abroad program. For several years he participated in a wide-range of urban studies along the México-US border with San Diego State University, University of California San Diego, Colef-College of the Northern Border, the Municipal Planning Institute of Tijuana and the San Diego Association of Governments; with the intention to comprehend and explore the morphological and social implications of this region. He has worked for Kieran Timberlake and Frank Gehry in technology driven projects, researching on methodologies of digital design, fabrication and material assembly. 

Analia Saban, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is an artist currently working in Los Angeles and living in New York City. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, her works often include plays on art historical references and traditions. Paintings can become sculptural forms and sculptures are presented on stretched canvas, all while using the process of trial and error with new techniques and technology. Saban has participated in the Hammer Museum's "Made in LA" exhibition in 2012, and most notably the recipient of the Norton Museum’s annual "Rudin Prize,” a juried exhibition for emerging photographers. Saban has had solo exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Thomas Solomon Gallery in LA, Praz-Delavallade in Paris and Sprueth Magers in Berlin, amongst others.  The artist is in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, NY; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA.  

Peter Zellner is Principal, Studio Design Lead, Los Angeles at AECOM and professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).  He was also the founding principal of ZELLNERPLUS, an award winning architectural design, planning and research firm located in Venice, California. ZELLNERPLUS has designed public and private art galleries, residences, institutional facilities and corporate spaces in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. He has been recognized as an emerging architectural voice in national publications such as The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Art+Auction magazine included Zellner in its annual "Power 100" selection of influential people in the art world. Zellner was also named by the Los Angeles Times one of "10 Faces to Watch in 2012 in Dance, Theater, Architecture and Art," while Harper's Bazaar included him in its Editor's Selection "Best of What's New - Designers to Watch." 

Zellner holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard (1999). At the Harvard Graduate School of Design he was a participant in the Harvard Project on the City led by Rem Koolhaas. He received a Bachelor of Architecture with First Class Honors from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1993) in Australia, where he also taught between 1994 and 1997.  Zellner is the author of numerous essays and books including Hybrid Space (Thames & Hudson, 2000) and Pacific Edge (Thames & Hudson, 1998). He has curated exhibitions such as Sign as Surface (Artists Space, 2003) and Whatever Happened to Los Angeles (SCI-Arc, 2005). 

Zellner has held Visiting Professorships in Architecture at UC Berkeley, FIU, the University of Southern California, the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris and the Institut fur Stadtebau und Raumplanung (Institute for Urban Design & Urban Planning) at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2012, Zellner completed his first free standing project, the Matthew Marks Los Angeles Gallery. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne described the project as "...one of the most conspicuous architectural debuts to appear in Southern California in a number of years." The project recently won an AIA|LA Design Award (Merit).

About Big City Forum

Big City Forum (BCF), founded in 2008 by Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and activist Leonardo Bravo and co-directed with artist/graphic designer River Jukes-Hudson since 2013, is an independent, interdisciplinary project that explores the intersection between design-based creative disciplines within the context of public space, the built environment, and social change.