Big City Forum #8

Big City Forum #8


Featuring:

Alexandra Grant

Michael Pinto


Thursday, October 15, 2009

7 – 9 pm

6:30 pm reception


Neutra VDL Research House

2300 Silverlake Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90039

http://www.neutra-vdl.org/site/

An event featuring Alexandra Grant and Michael Pinto in a conversation focused on issues around practices related to community renovation and activism, and sustainable urbanism.

Alexandra Grant is a text-based artist who uses language and networks of words as the basis for her work in painting, drawing and sculpture. Her work has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore), and galleries in the US and abroad. Grant’s work maps language in different media: from intricate wire filigree sculptures to large scale drawing/paintings on paper. She investigates translation not only from language to language, but also from text to image, spoken language to written word, and representations in two dimensions to three dimensional objects
Grant is currently at work on a public art collaboration with Watts House Project in Los Angeles, an artist-driven redevelopment of the homes across the street from Watts Towers. She is also preparing a second solo show with Honor Fraser Gallery in 2010.

Michael Pinto is an architect, educator, and community activist. Michael teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) where he is also coordinating of SCI-Arc’s Community Design Program, which engages students in researching and constructing design-build projects for nonprofit and civic agencies. Additionally, Michael is Design Principal at Osborn Architects, where he steers design toward an expressive functionalism: work highly influenced by the realities of program, structure, and building technology while aspiring to beauty, simplicity, and harmony with nature.

Michael is the founder of Project Food / LA, a group of educators, chefs, artists, architects, planners, nutritionists, growers, and caring individuals concerned with improving access to healthy food choices in underserved communities. The organization grew out of Michael’s research on the relationship between urban infrastructure and food systems. In service of larger projects focusing on infrastructure, planning and sustainable urbanism, Michael founded Intercision, a global collective of like –minded practices. The collective includes architects, engineers, ecologists, and planners interested in radically rethinking contemporary urban models. Michael holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Penn State University, and a Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc.

A contribution of $10 will be asked towards the renovation campaign for the Neutra VDL House.


Big City Forum is an interdisciplinary project and collective network of leaders, formed to sustain efforts in the creative community that promote the civic and cultural vitality of metropolitan and urban communities. Through various formats such as gatherings, symposiums, exhibitions, and special events, Big City Forum fosters dialogue and engagement around capacity-building approaches that engender cultural growth and community transformation, Ultimately, Big City Forum functions as an “idea lab” to develop new solutions to key problems that impact contemporary urban centers.

Big City Forum events are BY INVITATION ONLY


Please rsvp to this event at:


bravoarts@gmail.com

Big City Forum #7

Big City Forum #7

A conversation about our relationship to city and place...

Featuring:
Tom Marble
Zoe Crosher
Will Wright

Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009
7 – 9 pm
6:30 private reception

Fifth Floor Gallery
502 Chung King Cour
Chinatown
LA , CA 90012

Tom Marble

Tom Marble is an architect and urbanist living and working in Los Angeles. After obtaining degrees from UC Berkeley and Yale, Tom worked on a variety of projects at a number of scales for firms as diverse as SOM and Rios Associates, Morphosis and The Irvine Company. In 2001, he opened his own practice, Marble Architecture which, initially focused on residential work, has expanded to include conceptual urbanism, public art, and writing. With his book, “After the city, this,” recently published by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, Tom embarked on a new line of inquiry, employing urban forensics to investigate the death of the public realm and to determine how individuals and cities use the massive media of architecture and infrastructure to communicate their values in a preverbal, often ambiguous language.

Zoe Crosher

Playing with fictional documentary, the fantasy of expectation and the false promise of travel, an obsession with transience, and the reconsidered archive, Zoe Crosher's work has been shown internationally in Vancouver, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and New York City. She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in the Photography and Integrated Media Programs. As Julian Myers writes, “Crosher’s method works through the difficulty of taking pictures of Los Angeles, and what she understands as its resistance to being pictured." This obsession with capturing the imaginary of LA began with photographing planes coming in to land from each motel along the forgotten strip of Century Boulevard by LAX, captured in the series, Out The Window (LAX) (2001-05). Her interest in, “a place that moves in shifts and perpetual motion, with no real center, no point of concentration,” now informs the series LA-Like (2004-), a body of work inspired by the sun-drenched noir of Raymond Chandler and F.Scott Fitzgerald, anoydyne boosterism of Helen Hunt Jackson and the other early salesmen of the Los Angeles proto-myth.


Will Wright
Director, Government & Public Affairs 
AIA Los Angeles 

At AIA Los Angeles, Will Wright plans, coordinates, and implements the advocacy, legislative, and outreach initiatives and programs of The American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles Chapter. He serves as a liaison between local civic & municipal leaders and the AIA/LA's Political Outreach Committee, which is a board committee integrated with the Urban Design Committee, the Committee on the Environment (AIA/LA COTE), the Building Performance & Regulations Committee and the Professional Practice Committee with the mission of reviewing and influencing local government policies and regulations pertaining to issues that impact the built and natural environments. In 2007, Will Wright served on four separate steering committees to organize a broad range of events: the Public Space LA! urban open space summit, Park(ing) Day LA, Canstruction LA and AIA/LA Legislative Day. 

Will Wright received a BFA from Southern Methodist University before moving to The City of Los Angeles in 1995. He later went on to receive an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In his spare time, Will enjoys reading the likes of Chandler, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy & Dennis Johnson, hiking the San Gabriel Mountains with his dog Lexington, collecting seeds from native California plants and xeriscape gardening in his backyard in Silver Lake, California.