FRIDAY, MAY 20 2016 @ 6PM
RUN ENDS @ ECHO PARK AVE & PARK AVE 8PM
POTLUCK & FILM SCREENING FOR EVERYONE TO JOIN THE RUNNERS EMAIL: DANCINGBIKES@GMAIL.COM This is run is open for Queer Trans* People of Color to address issues around (dis)placement we may face in our neighborhood, communities, spirit cultivating spaces, families, etc. We will run around 5 miles in displaced communities of Chinatown, Echo Park & Chavez Ravine. The first 10 runners to sign up will have a chance to make their own Wanna-Be Huaraches and Buya (noise) Makers. The Run is for Free(dom). We are also looking for QT*POC Cyclists support. Pre-Trainings & Huarache/Buya Making Dates : Friday, April 22nd @ 6pm & Friday, May 6th @ 6pm
Kite in collaboration with James Hurwitz and Devin Ronneberg present:
“Sources or ( x ) x + [ ( x ) x { x } x x ] { x } +” is a performance that takes a body through an environmental simulation of the Oglala Lakota cosmologyscape, shouldering the burden of 4 female Oglala characters who have shaped space/time. The piece includes 12 sculptures, animation, sound, video, carbon fiber, clothing, and movement, developed from an obsessive hyper-structure derived from “bad” source books that attempt to qualify Oglala religion into simplified charts. This piece explores the relationship between the body and the entanglement between lies, fiction, oral history, mythology, ethnography, and Oglala religion.
“Some Numbers” is a lecture/performance that asks the question “WHY?” “Why are there so few Indigenous working artists? Why are there so few Indigenous art school graduates?”
This event is part of the Decolonize LA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Join the LA No More Jails Coalition on Mother’s Day!
We will be at the Lynwood Women’s Jail (Century Regional Detention Facility), hosting a rally and interactive event to build opposition to the proposed women’s jail in Lancaster and LA County’s $2.3 Billion Dollar Jail Plan. This year is a pivotal year for the jail fight, as construction on the new women’s jail is slated to begin early next year. The LA No More Jails Coalition has been fighting LA County’s jail plan through its various forms since 2011, and we are looking to build support and amplify the voices of those most directly impacted by the construction of a new jail. For our annual Mother’s Day event, we will have interactive stations for families and supporters to write messages to their loved ones locked inside, with a giant Mother’s Day Card to sign, an instax photo booth for portraits of visitors to take home and post in the Mother’s Day card, and an arts and crafts station where children can make their own cards. The LA No More Jails Coalition intends to create a space of warmth, love, and resistance at what is normally an intensely violent and sad space for families. We want to build community to be able to support people with imprisoned loved ones while also building opposition to the jail plan by holding space to talk about community alternatives to the policing and prisons that ravage our communities and take away our loved ones.
This event is part of the DecolonizeLA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Between May 3 and May 11th, HRLA will host an exhibition of work from artists who applied to the DecolonizeLA call for proposals. The work will be shown in the lobby, and second floor space. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Open daily 12pm – 6pm till May 11th
In addition to events listed here on HRLA’s websites and happening at HRLA, DecolonizeLA’s calendar includes off-site events: the annual Retomemos La Noche on April 22, and the Critical Resistance’s Mother’s Day (May 8) intervention against Lynwood women’s jail, and a QT*POC Run on May 20.
*There will also be a series of performances, discussions and events (between April 22 and May 20), please check this site and the DecolonizeLA facebook page for more info.
Isabel Avila
Cyrstal Liu – The Crop Project
Avelardo Ibarra
Liberated Arts Collective
Raze the White Box: A think tank of change
About Artists:
Isabel Avila
As society increasingly moves towards the commodification of all aspects of life, I find it personally enriching to look at contrasting values such as “the sacred” through the art process. In my recent installation, Shifts in Perspective, I present images that address cultural preservation and confront the sacred through beliefs and practices of traditional Native ways of gathering medicine (sacred plants). The viewer is informed and confronted with the idea that a supernatural happening may have interrupted the photographic process and resulted in the light leaks on the film.
Crystal Liu – The Crop Project
The Crop Project’s exhibition includes an installation of the cornfield’s digging process and found objects from underground. Join members of The Crop Project on May 11, 7:30-9:30 p.m for some corn snacks and drinks!
The Crop Project is a public art piece that invites people to grow corn in USC Roski School of Art and Design from April- July 2016. The project includes a 15-square-foot corn field, educational corn growing workshop, corn cooking lessons and a group harvest event in June when corn fully matures. Through a group effort of cultivating a staple food, corn, and sharing the unprocessed product in a city that consumes but rarely grows corn, we can be closer to nature, and closer to each other.
Liberated Arts Collective
The Liberated Arts Collective is a collaboration between recently
liberated term-to-life prisoners a teaching artist, invested in art as
a tool for personal liberation, cultural expression and social change.
Formerly incarcerated members come to the collective with a range of
art experience and interests; some of us began our art practice years
before being incarcerated, some began making art in prison, while
others haven’t made art previously. While on the inside, we used art
as a tool to make money, remain sane in solitary or steer away from
prison politics. Now on the outside, we use art to recognize our
power & potential, engage in leadership, build notoriety and lift each
other up. Through art we gain a platform for our collective voices,
speak to younger generations, address the “crisis on the streets” and
educate the public about our experiences in California State Prisons
and the probation system.
Raze the White Box: A think tank of change
I wear this fools hat connected to the others. Others following as such family can only do. Blessed are the fools that know no ill. Bless the suffering that they don’t know the root of…
The Act of decolonization is a complex action. This is problematic since we are all now part colonized and colonizers despite our heritage. The act of colonizing has stayed alive in the co-opted ideas of free spirit and sewing your wild oats. This philosophy is now inherent in the culture of the west, the culture of north America and of course the culture of the golden coast. What is this culture? It is a culture of searching for new land to conquer and experience ignoring its consequences. Swung at the opposite end of a club, the reaction to a colonized state is a mirrored response. Knee jerk flawed and beautiful such is human thought.
‘We don’t have mothers’ a 1-day art installation at Human Resources LA.
I will be cutting hair for the kids as well as Patty Wack Vintage giving them clothing. Music workshops and yoga class all at once. I really hope you can be apart of this homage to homeless queer youth and possibly be a person that they can also look up to!
ProjectQ is a non-profit organization founded by Madin Lopez to help LGBTQIA and homeless youth combat bullying, develop self esteem and find an identity for themselves through hair styling. For the past three years, they have been working with different organizations to help realize this goal.
Join us to co-create change collectively as well as release restrictive & oppressive structures that limit expansion. Together let’s un-cast the nightmares of colonization!
This workshop/performance will consist of movement that co-creates ritual space, use of herbs to support collective spell casting/ un-casting and to invoke and activate individual and collective dreams. Together we will interrogate how we can use our dream world as a space to activate our intentions.
We come to this work acknowledging the history, psychological, economic, physiological impact of colonization on people Indigenous to the Americas as well as people of African heritage and the impact on our sacred practices of spell casting and un-casting. This work addresses “decolonizing” as a recognition and grounding in community to connect to the ever – evolving work (of our ancestors). Some of this work includes practices that have been passed on such as working with intention to manifest our desires. We are engaging in this work in order to assess/ release the oppressive structures that impact our growth and expansion from the micro to the macro level in the everyday.
We will bring our experience in herbalism/ plant medicine, dream interpretation, and healing movement work into the space to support the work of spell/un-casting. Be ready to move, walk through the city, dream & dance. Bring a lunch, water, and your intentions to decolonize L.A
This event is part of the Decolonize LA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Song of Eurydice re-envisions the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a call to marginalized artists, emphasizing a discourse between Eurydice (mecca vazie andrews) and the deity of the underworld, Persephone (Carolyn Pennypacker-Riggs). Picking up where the ancient tale left off, as Eurydice descends into the underworld and grapples with re-arranging established ways of thought and processing information. On Monday May 2nd and Monday May 9th between 4:30-7:30 we invite you to drop-in to our informal rehearsal as we begin the process of staging Song Of Eurydice. This event is part of DecolonizeLA, a project made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Have you had a moment in art school when you realized you can’t even talk about the work because you have to explain/defend/validate your own body/experience/everything?
MTT member Shefali Mistry, as part of her graduate Public Practice thesis project, has conducted a series of interviews on the experiences of artists of color in graduate school. From these discussions, Michelada Think Tank (MTT) continues the “PoC Survival Guide” project with a public conversation about higher education and art school. Is formal education even necessary? What if you choose a formal education? For people of color who decide to go to art school, how do you survive? How do you thrive as an artist when the curriculum and the community don’t reflect your lived experience and your practice?
Join us for a think tank style generative discussion on not only what issues we face, but WHAT CAN BE DONE. How do we advocate for our own education within these institutions? Where do we try to implement change in curriculum and hiring practices? How do we create large scale structural change to move the condition of PoC artists beyond surviving and into thriving? We know this labor shouldn’t only be our burden, but can we do it to ensure a better education for the generations behind us?
This event is part of the Decolonize LA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
More about the Survival Guide project:
Are we so busy surviving that we forget to be radical?
In summer 2015, Michelada Think Tank initiated the “PoC Survival Guide” project, posing the question, “If there was a PoC Survival Guide for Artists of Color, What Topics Would You Want it to Cover?” The project was a tongue-in-cheek, but critical exploration of survival under a framework of institutional racism in the arts. Through a summer residency at LACE (as part of Chats About Change) and a series of think tanks, MTT brought people together to talk about survival strategies for artists of color working in a predominantly white art world.
Michelada Think Tank is a group of socially conscious artists who are interested in hosting conversations, creating safe places and opening up opportunities to connect and build relationships between people of color (PoC). Through think tank sessions, MTT creates networks of socially-engaged /community artists interested in creative ways of making social change happen.
A participatory performance where rocks, pollinators, plants and animals weave participants through critical conversation on displacement in our city and share healing practices of toning, movement and visualization for the future.
We seek to articulate together a critical and poetic view of the current dis*locate landscape; spheres of influence giving voice to some and not to others. What role does everybody play? How is the land and its flora and fauna affected? Can a dialogue exist between all parties? What kind of future are we building? This participatory installation and performance will share tools for healing; we seek balance.
Open to everyone. Displacement organizers (tennant right, NELA, ext) business owners, home owners, transplants, gentrifiers, policy makers, locals, and LA natives are especially encouraged to attend.
Arrive by 7:30 to begin the evening in an honoring of the land and its people.
This event is part of the Decolonize LA series, and was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.
