Category: Past

LAND is pleased to be a partner organization of The California Monuments Consortium alongside The Free Republic of California, Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, and ESMoA. The California Monuments Consortium is a theoretical agency aimed to create communal, artistic and sustainable dialogues about statehood and monuments. ⁠
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The Consortium’s first endeavor is the Ojai Consortium Lab at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation which will act as a think tank, research archive, community sounding board and organizing platform. A range of events and panels will highlight the mission and its underpinnings, while offering stakeholders the chance to interact with the space, conduct research, take polls, draft surveys and create artistic expressions.⁠
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Over a three month period, the Consortium’s statement will grow with input from a range of artists and community members. The hope is that the findings of these three months of interaction will become a springboard to physical manifestations of the ideas found therein. ⁠
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Physical components of the installation will include large scale vinyl installation in the windows, a library featuring an ever-growing selection of relevant books and maps of California, a communal workspace, as well as a community survey portal, an interactive area where visitors can reflect and envision.⁠

The Lab opens Saturday, September 10, 2022 with a Community Town Hall and Public Reception, 5:00 – 7:00 pm at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation 248 S Montgomery, Unit A, Ojai 93023. The lab runs through November 6th.

About the partners:

The Free Republic of California is an ongoing conceptual piece by artist Cole Sternberg, which plays with notions of statehood and freedom by offering a vision for a more enlightened nation through the guise of Californian secession. Sternberg coordinates a variety of strategies for a state’s rebirth: alternative history and identity established in a new flag, photographic documentation, and ephemera; a constitution, budget, peace agreements, and international conventions in support of the environment and human rights; and, a proposed future conjured through sculpture, performance and engagement.

ESMoA is an art laboratory located in El Segundo, California and it is run by artlab21 Foundation. Our mission is to Spread the Spark of Creativity through the display and education of visual arts. ESMoA functions as a catalyst for creative thinking offering unique Experiences. The Experiences – our word for exhibition/exhibit – present a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, works on paper, performances, and photography. ESMoA was founded in 2013 by Eva Sweeney, Brian Sweeney and Bernhard Zünkeler.

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is committed to supporting and advocating the arts and sciences. Current initiatives include awards for visual artists, as well as The Ojai Institute, an artist-residency program in Ojai, that extends the dialogue between artists and the public through exhibitions and programs. Currently based in Ojai, California, the organization, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 2015 by artists, family, and friends to celebrate the legacy of esteemed art patron and private art dealer Carolyn Glasoe Bailey

LAND’s 2022 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Wilhelm Family Foundation, and LAND’s Nomadic Council. Special thanks to Artist Sponsors Karen Hillenburg, Brenda Potter, Abby Pucker, Jay and Deanie Stein Foundation Trust, and the Poncher Family Foundation.

LAND is a member-supported organization. Support LAND’s free, public programming by becoming a member today.

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) in partnership with Aaron Fowler, co-presents The Oasis, an experience  of Fowler’s N2EXISTENCE. N2EXISTENCE is a solution-based movement that enables people to use their passions to manifest new realities of freedom, founded by artist Aaron Fowler in 2020. N2EXISTENCE: The Oasis is an interactive creative space in which artists, makers, technologists, activists, and community organizers can come together to share their work, learn, access expensive technologies, engage in deep discussion, and explore their own creative visions.  N2EXISTENCE was the result of Fowler expanding his studio practice to building a shared vision, one that builds spaces providing community members the ability to experience the feeling of freedom that accompanies standing in, and living one’s dreams. As his studio practice expanded to not only include physical objects but reflected visions, he realized this could be a model anywhere for people to manifest their creative visions and impact their communities.

The Oasis is the result of a residency facilitated by LAND in the Residency space in Summer 2021, where Fowler met Inglewood-based peer specialist Divinity Warmsley and continued his work with activist and filmmaker Sultan Sharrief. Over the past year, they have collectively envisioned what is missing in the creative communities in South LA. Despite an influx of new residents and a multitude of creative apps for connecting, there are no accessible spaces open in the evening, where community members can imagine, engage, and manifest their creative visions leading to real impact. The Oasis is in essence a prototype that can be scaled in future iterations, including Fowler’s dream of an N2EXISTENCE town-hub constructed out of shipping containers. 

Over the course of the two months, Sharrief and Warmsley have an ambitious schedule of public programs, activating the space and providing exponential opportunities for collaboration. A sample of public programs includes CommuniTEA Conversation Series led by Warmsley, addressing issues such as parenting, local politics, technology and financial support. Sharrief will lead sessions with The Quasar Lab, his ongoing research lab that utilizes disruptive community organizing as a strategy for futurist design. At the end of the period, the community will be invited to propose their own events and programming, with a culminating public celebration. 

The Oasis is a creative solution, an ongoing experiment of structure and scale, manifestation in process. artist working in dialogue with his community, together creating an autonomous entity with large-scale social results.

This iteration of N2EXISTENCE is presented by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). The project was made possible with support from Angeles Art Fund

Special thanks to Residency Art Gallery.

Aaron Fowler

Aaron Fowler (b. 1988, St. Louis, Missouri) currently works in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Los Angeles, California, and St. Louis, Missouri. Fowler received his BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 2011, and MFA from Yale University, in 2014. His work has been exhibited at New Museum, New York (2018); Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia (2017); Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio (2016); Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); Flanders Gallery, Raleigh, North Carolina (2015); Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2013); and Sophia Wanamaker Gallery, San José, Costa Rica (2012). He is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015) and was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). @n2existence

Divinity Warmsley

Divinity Warmsley is CEO of The Peer Specialist LLC, a community based service that provides mental health and behavioral health supportive services to underserved communities in the Greater Los Angeles area. She has over 15 years experience in community engagement events, community outreach, group talk therapy, One on One talk therapy, facilitating active listening sessions, 90 days of evidence based peer support, life skills supportive services, service bridging and resource navigation. @thepeerspecialist.llc

Sultan Sharrief

Sultan Sharrief is a trans-media activist, filmmaker, and XR designer. He holds a BA in Film from University of Michigan, an MS in Comparative Media from MIT, and is a PhD candidate in Media Arts & Practice at USC. His directorial debut feature film, Bilal’s Stand, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and he has since produced four additional feature films and a TV program. In 2018 he founded the Quasar Lab at MIT, an institutional-hacking research lab that uses disruptive community organizing as a strategy for futurist design. @sultanreflects

LAND’s 2022 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Wilhelm Family Foundation and LAND’s Nomadic Council. Special thanks to Artist Sponsors Karen Hillenburg, Brenda Potter, Abby Pucker, Jay and Deanie Stein Foundation Trust, and the Poncher Family Foundation. 

LAND is a member-supported organization. Support LAND’s free, public programming by becoming a member today at nomadicdivision.org.

Photos by Gary Askew.

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Capacity is limited. All attendees are encouraged to wear white.

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) presents The Horse, a 45 minute immersive performance directed, choreographed and performed by Chris Emile. Developed during a three month creative residency, The Horse is the result of a collaborative process between Emile, sound architect Cody Perkins, vocalist Alevonallure, lighting designer Jason Fox, and a small circle of West African drummers with guidance from Vodun practitioners.

The Horse evokes the supernatural experience of spiritual possession. In Vodun tradition, a “horse” is a person possessed, being “ridden” by a possessing deity. In combining somatic practice, theology and research into the origins of ballet, Emile reassesses what traditional balletic training deems the role of the performer/dancer. The resulting work embodies ancestral knowledge, reverence for African religions, the human-divine connection, and, in reintroducing catharsis into performance, reclaims the relationship between body and spirit.

The Horse is a contemporary ritual. All are invited to witness and experience a shared catharsis.

The Horse by Chris Emile is commissioned by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division).

Evan Greer – Drummer

Kevin Moore – Drummer

Nery Madrid – Drummer

Alexis Vaughn – Vocalist

Cody Perkins – Sound Architecture

Jason Fox – Lighting

Liz Montecastro – Costume

Hatt Merlino – Audio Engineer

Daniela Aramayo – Producer

Special thanks to Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center and James R. Eads

This performance will take place outside. Floor seating and chairs will be available on a first come first serve basis. You are welcome to bring your own blankets and pillows for seating on the floor. If you need specific accessibility accommodations, please email info@nomadicdivision.org.

About Chris Emile

Based in Los Angeles, Chris Emile is an active director, choreographer, educator, and performer. He received his formidable dance education from Lula Washington, Karen McDonald, the Ailey School, and holds a BFA in Dance from the Alonzo King LINES Ballet/Dominican University BFA program as a member of the inaugural class. As a dancer, Chris has performed with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Morphoses, Luna Negra Dance Theater, and BODYTRAFFIC performing the works of master choreographers such as Nacho Duato, Idan Sharabi, Stijn Celis, Barak Marshall, and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano.

Chris’s directorial and choreographic work oscillates between the experiential, film, stage, and commercial worlds. He is a 2022 Artadia Award Finalist. His film work has been presented by the Getty Museum, Compound LB, NOWNESS, 4:3 Boiler Room, Art + Practice, and CULTURED Magazine. His choreographic work has been commissioned by  Solange Knowles, the Kennedy Center, Sao Paolo Opera, Anderson Paak, Moses Sumney, San Francisco Symphony, Opera Omaha, the University of Southern California, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, and LA Opera for the Pulitzer Prize winning opera p r i s m where he also assistant directed. Chris’s first solo exhibition was presented by the MAK Center for Art & Architecture in 2020.  AMEND explored Black male identity through movement, cinema, sculpture and sound. Emile employed archival & contemporary found footage with artifactual set design to re-render the modern architectural marvel that is the Schindler House into a sacred, private place: a home amenable for Black dealing and healing. An intergenerational cast of three dancers acting as one man, move the audience through the house and through time working their way through the question: who, if not me, decides what a Black man is?

He is the co-founder/curator for the movement based project No)one. Art House where he has programmed site specific performances, films, educational workshops, and movement based installations with institutions such as Hauser & Wirth, the Getty Museum, SAINT HERON, Refinery 29, St. Germain,  the 14th Factory, and the California African American Museum among others.

As an educator, he has been a guest lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, AMDA, Loyola Marymount University, Pomona College, Boston Conservatory, and UC Irvine. He also coordinates a week long workshop every summer entitled CIPHER that engages movement based artists in an intense daily practice of meditation, movement research, and composition study.

The Horse by Chris Emile is commissioned by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and is being presented as a part of Gatherings, LAND’s ongoing series of public installations, performances, collaborations and offerings reimagining civic spaces and ways of gathering with artists who weld ritual, myth, ancestral knowledge, and communal practices to navigate and reimagine the world. Gatherings is presented with support from the Pasadena Art Alliance.

LAND’s 2022 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Wilhelm Family Foundation, and LAND’s Nomadic Council. Special thanks to Artist Sponsors Karen Hillenburg, Brenda Potter, Abby Pucker, Jay and Deanie Stein Foundation Trust, and the Poncher Family Foundation.

LAND is a member-supported organization. Support LAND’s free, public programming by becoming a member today.

February 16 – February 20, 2022

9900 Wilshire Boulevard

Beverly Hills, CA 90210

In partnership with Frieze Sculpture, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division)  commissioned a new sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Isabel Yellin entitled Pillar of the Intangible. A continuation of Yellin’s visual language, the sculpture plays with hardness and softness, the duality of our internal experience and external presentation. The work is a connective structure that invites as much as it confounds. The organic, soft forms rendered permanent encompass the contradictory and confounding expanse of time that we move through, the daily obstacles we face, and the fluidity demanded of our rigid, breakable bodies.

This is a unique opportunity for LAND to support a young artist in pushing their work to a new scale alongside an exciting group of established artists. This would be Yellin’s first public commission, and at 9 feet tall, the largest iteration of her work to date.

Isabel Yellin (b. 1987, New York, NY) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2014. Her combinative works aim to articulate the subconscious. Her work is simultaneously sensory and sensitive, corporeally linked to both the guttural and the alien. Recent exhibitions include Show Me As I Want To Be Seen at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2019), Cuddle Puddle (solo), at Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2018), and Velvet Concrete (solo) at M. Le Blanc Gallery, Chicago, IL (2018). She is also the curator of a two-part LA based female sculpture show, Your Presence is Encouraged, which opened last month in Nevine’s Yard, and PSYCHOSOMATIC at Various Small Fires, LA.

LAND’s 2022 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation. 

Additional support is provided by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Abby Pucker, the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, Jay and Deanie Stein Foundation Trust, the Poncher Family Foundation, Brenda Potter, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.

Photo by Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of Casey Kelbaugh/Frieze.

For resources and information, please visit twotw.org

LAND is pleased to present Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Baz Dreisinger’s The Writing on the Wall, a multi-site wheatpaste campaign in partnership with Kayne Griffin Los Angeles. 

The Writing on the Wall is a shape-shifting collaboration between professor and activist Dr. Baz Dreisinger, artist Hank Willis Thomas, and a growing list of design and production partners including Openbox, MASS Design and Chemistry Creative. 

As an artwork made from essays, poems, letters, stories, diagrams and notes written by people in prison around the world, it is a potent visual intervention. In its fullest form it debuted on the High Line in NYC, the most trafficked public park in the World. LAND is pleased to partner with Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Baz Dreisinger to bring The Writing on the Wall to Los Angeles spread across its various neighborhoods. 

The Writing on the Wall is housed within the fabric of the radically imaginative justice work of the Incarceration Nations Network (INN): a global network and think tank that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform efforts around the world. With 115 partners spanning every continent and more than 50 countries, INN uses The Writing on the Wall as an anchorage point and artistic soapbox for justice partners, believing in the power of the visual to emphasize creative approaches to justice.

In response to the global pandemic dire impact on the carceral population, The Writing On the Wall transformed its 1,200 square foot installation into a digital version that took over cityscapes. By partnering with local projection collectives, the artwork was featured guerilla-style on “justice” buildings (i.e. jails & courts) and iconic sites in New York City, Washington DC, Columbus OH, Mexico City, Chicago, IL and Boise, ID. This transformation also includes the writings wheat pasted in neighborhoods across the US–featuring QR codes taking people to Incarceration Nations Network’s information website filled with resources.

LAND’s 2022 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation. 

Additional support is provided by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Abby Pucker, the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, Jay and Deanie Stein Foundation Trust, the Poncher Family Foundation, Brenda Potter, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.

You can find Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Baz Dreisinger’s The Writing on the Wall’s posters in the following neighborhoods: Chinatown, Downtown Los Angeles, Leimert Park, Little Tokyo, Echo Park, Mid-City, and Hollywood.

Photos by Bradley Hale

THEIR BODY BECAME (an offering) 5/20

THEIR BODY BECAME (an offering) 5/27

Opening event 
Friday, May 7 (Los Angeles State Historic Park) 

6:30pm PT — Welcome
7:00pm PT — Ceremony

In the Catholic “ex novoto” tradition, where symbols of body parts can be used as offerings that evoke gratitude or desire for healing, Laur Lewis Neal will lead participants in a ritual, accessible and open to all, that centers queer and trans bodies. Participants will be guided through a practice of letting go; offering up parts of themselves that no longer serve them so that healing can enter the new space left behind. This ritual acknowledges the transformative act of relinquishing ownership, infusing generosity and gratitude into the objects, concepts or traumas we choose to release. RSVP here.

The Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA) and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) present a collaboration for WE RISE 2021.

For WE RISE 2021 the artist veronique d’entremont will present a public artwork that reimagines their own family legacy of spiritual mysticism, bipolar disorder and suicide through the veneration of human ancestors and non-human kin. The artist’s installation Their Body Became (An Antenna, Transmitting the Message of God) at the Los Angeles State Historic Park takes inspiration from their ongoing interspecies collaboration with feral swarms of honeybees. Borrowing from a multitude of sources including Christian Mysticism, Sicilian folk magic, earth-based spirituality, entomology and developmental psychology, the artist re-frames the story of their mother’s untimely death as one of martyrdom and sainthood—albeit unrecognized by the Catholic Church. Through their devotional sculpture and poetry, d’entremont crafts a personal mythology that seeks to reclaim agency and find liberation amidst patterns of intergenerational trauma.

Located at the top of a small hill is a 20’ diameter circular tapestry, painted with gold lettering that tells a poetic allegory of honeybee reproduction, through excerpts from the artist’s text Hail Holy Queen: A Novena To The Bees.  “…but we remind you, O Queen, your mother abandoned you that you might flourish.” In the center of the tapestry sits an empty adobe shrine, sculpted out of a mixture of unfired clay, cemetery dirt and the ashes of the artist’s mother. The shrine simultaneously refers to a backyard grotto that might house a religious icon, but also to the mountain caves in which feral honeybee colonies commonly make their homes. Over the course of the installation, the unfired ceramic shrine will evolve, reminding the viewer of both the impermanence of human-made institutions and the lifecycle of the natural works.

At the base of the hill are arranged a series of sculptural receptacles bearing purposeful statements written by the artist as a form of invocation. Viewers are invited to write their own responses or prayers and insert them into openings incorporated into the sculptures.  In future artworks, the artist will engage these written contributions, and the ceramic receptacles will be put to use as sculptural hives for feral colonies of honeybees.

 Through a QR code provided at the site, viewers are invited to watch documentation of “Their Body Became (An Offering)” a ritual centering queer and trans bodies and inspired by Catholic “ex novoto” tradition, where symbols of body parts can be used as offerings that evoke gratitude or desire for healing. The syncretic nature of d’entremont’s work—merging spiritual traditions to yield new meaning—creates room for the frictions and contradictions implicit in the gesture of a queer artist reclaiming the Catholic rituals of their upbringing.  “Their Body Became (An Antenna, Transmitting the Message of God)” marks an expansion of d’entremont’s spiritual cosmology, as the artist moves beyond the matrilineal legacy of their biological family into an exploration of queer mysticism.

Los Angeles State Historic Park is located on a site with a syncretic history of its own.  It was once an indigenous pueblo and trading site for the Tataviam, Chumash, and Tongva people, a Spanish settlement, and over the last two centuries the surrounding neighborhood has been a cultural center for Chinese, Mexican and Italian communities. On the street behind d’entremont’s installation sits St. Peter’s Italian Church, one of few remaining relics of Los Angeles’s Little Italy, where a now-aging Italian spiritual community hold processions and feasts honoring certain saints.

WE RISE encourages wellbeing and healing through art, connection, community engagement and creative expression.Taking place during May: Mental Health Awareness Month, WE RISE 2021 includes Art Rise, a series of 21 art experiences; Community Pop-Ups, hyperlocal activities across Los Angeles County neighborhoods; and a robust Digital Experience, offering original programs that can be enjoyed from anywhere. All installations and activities are meant to be viewed from a distance individually or in small groups, in order to remain COVID-safe while still fostering community connection and collective healing.

An initiative of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, WE RISE is needed now more than ever as the region emerges from the isolation of the global pandemic and continues to grapple with related stressors and racial injustice. This is our opportunity to rise together.

WE RISE events are calls to action, asking you to join a movement to break through barriers and defy old assumptions about mental health and the many related social conditions that compound problems and hurt our communities. WE RISE is the signature experience of the broader WHY WE RISE public education campaign, which is part of a national movement to transform the mental health system and help break through barriers by defying old assumptions about mental health, combatting stigma and recognizing the role that related social conditions play in the wellbeing of individuals and communities. For more information, please visit werise.la

LAUR LEWIS NEAL is a nonbinary writer, historian, and artist based in Los Angeles. Their essays, research, and interviews interrogate how physical space is gendered and raced in community building and politics. They have been published in Dissent, Guernica, and After Ellen, and their prose was a finalist for the Summer Literary Prize. As a writer-in-residence at the Grin City Collective, Neal explored poetry as ritual, removing it from a strictly religious context and reappropriating it as a personal form of healing inclusive of queer experience. In the interactive poetic installation All My Saints at the Rurally Good Festival, they conducted rituals canonizing people in our past as a form of healing. Their current focus is on symbols and rituals that expand physical space outside the binary

veronique d’entremont is a transdisciplinary artist who looks to early Christian mysticism and earth-based practices for ways to claim queer ancestry with human & non-human kin. Their practice spans devotional sculpture, audio installation, video, performance, and an inter-species collaboration with a feral colony of honeybees. Through myth-making, veronique seeks paths to healing our relationships to the environment, each other and ourselves. Their current public artwork, inspired their own mother’s martyrdom and sainthood, explores avenues of mysticism and ritual that center trans and other queer bodies.

LAND’s 2021 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation and the Jerry and Terry Kohl Foundation. Additional support is provided by the the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the California Community Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust Foundation, Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Chauncey and Marion D. McCormick Family Foundation, the Poncher Family Foundation, Brenda Potter, and LAND’s Nomadic Council.