As an organization, LAND strives to create space for artists to thrive and dream bigger. We can plan, but often how this happens reveals itself in the process.
2022 was very much a year of process, and we are all still in a state of shock. At LAND, we felt a responsibility to bring our community together through welcoming, communal projects that deepened a shared sense of community. We leaned into artists who do this authentically and who are deeply embedded in their communities.
It was an ambitious year, with LAND realizing 45 dynamic, unconventional projects with 67 artists across 36 sites. There were performances in parking lots, a citywide wheatpasting campaign, concerts in driveways. We created a feminist fantasy world in a former nail salon and engaged with the rich feminist lineage from WOMANHOUSE. We built an oasis for community programs in a storefront in Inglewood; we held a contemporary ritual (LAND’s first ever dance commission) which was shared with over 500 people across 4 nights. We occupied an iconic movie house and filled the rooms with corn and glowing liquids. We launched a new programming series, planted seeds for bigger things to come, and we grew roots in our new storefront in Jefferson Park, a space to share our resources with artists and other organizations.
The arc of activities and projects connected with over 150,000 people, adding to LAND’s always growing network of relationships and possibilities. We are so grateful to everyone who showed up. You don’t always know what you’ll get at a LAND project, but that sense of discovery and trust compels us to deepen our commitment to evermore ambitious projects.
Alongside our programming, we were active in a number of strategic and sustainability initiatives, both inside LAND and as part of the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition, a group of 33 arts organizations across LA that has met weekly since March 2020. Our goal is that, as we look ahead, the organization and our sector will be stronger than
ever, with more support for artists and those who work diligently to support them.
This work was acknowledged by significant support from the Perenchio Foundation, MAP Fund, Wilhelm Family Foundation, LA Arts Recovery Fund, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. The commitment and investment of these foundations in this work is transformative for LAND and supports our ability to platform artists who are vanguard and experimental, who work outside of traditional models, and whose art is deeply regenerative. These grants provide the stability that an organization of LAND’s scale needs, but our core support is from individuals. Those who contribute anything from $5 to $25,000—thank you. The support from you, our community, is motivating and affirming beyond words. We love being able to share this work together with you through studio visits, gallery tours, meals, parties, and more. As we anticipate an adventurous, roving arc of art, activism, and innovative programming all over Los Angeles County that we hope activates and uplifts the nearly 275 distinct communities that make up the diverse county, the generous and vibrant community of LAND patrons is essential.
Lastly, thank you to the small but mighty LAND team, whose commitment to artists is humbling. And to our LAND board, who works tirelessly supporting and shaping this work, envisioning a future emboldened by artistic visions.
Executive Director
Laura Hyatt
LAND believes that all people deserve the opportunity to experience innovative contemporary art in their everyday existence, to enhance their quality of life and encourage dialogue amongst diverse communities.
In turn, artists deserve the opportunity to realize projects in the public realm, unsupported through traditional institutions.
LAND brings contemporary art outside of the walls of museums and galleries, into our shared public spaces and historic sites.
LAND is a nonprofit arts organization committed to presenting siteresponsive projects in the public sphere throughout Los Angeles and beyond.
Kelsey Lee Offield, Laura Hyatt, Cole Sternberg, Allison Gorsuch Corrigan Karyn Kohl Tré Borden
Geraldine Chung
President Vice President Secretary and Treasurer
Getty Foundation
City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture LA Arts Recovery Fund
The Perenchio Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts MAP Fund
Angeles Art Fund
Fran and Ray Stark Foundation
Wilhelm Family Foundation
Amazon Smile Foundation
Andy Warhol Foundation
Emerson Collective Pasadena Art Alliance
The James Irvine Foundation
Cause Communications
Bursting in air was a video/audio installation occupying a vacant ground floor space in Downtown Los Angeles. Set against the backdrop of chi-chi-fying Broadway Ave, just south of Olympic, this work is a mournful and metaphoric response not just to an attempted coup in the United States one year ago and the events that led up to it, but to the state of play in 21st century America: the accumulation of hundreds of years of disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and disrepair, spurred by racism and greed, inextricably bound. The soundtrack includes the haunting voice of contralto Gwendolyn Brown.
January 19 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. This multi-site wheatpaste campaign was presented in partnership with Kayne Griffin Los Angeles.
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.
LAND in partnership with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) presented a free hybrid course on Jamaican philosopher, dramatist, and novelist Sylvia Wynter, consisting of four weeks of social study and one day of screening facilitated by manuel arturo abreu.
Wynter’s multidisciplinary projects reimagines cognition, western science, and development. She investigates and proposes alternative ‘genres’ of homo sapiens which Enlightenment rationalism tried to erase. Resisting the “mechanization of the world” to material causes, Wynter instead builds on Fanon’s notion of sociogeny: on this analysis, immaterial, social, and spiritual causes underlie the materialist colonial project, as well as resistance to it. Wynter catalyzes a postdisciplinary Black Study and performative myth-making to rewrite the Caribbean as central to modernity and its eventual sunset.
In February, LAND was pleased to announce a solo presentation of Trulee Hall’s most expansive body of work to date, Ladies’ Lair Lake. The installation’s density, both in concept and production, platformed a rich world for the public to explore and familiarize themselves with Hall’s feminist-oriented, imaginative, and playful world-making art practice. LAND’s presentation invited audiences to immerse themselves in Hall’s universe, an uncompromising experience bringing to life the body of work through video, sculpture, painting, and installation. Viewers were able to wander through Hall’s mythical world and engage with its characters, intimately experiencing their stories. The installation presented a variety of techniques and mediums, including CGI, claymation puppetry, green screen, found nature footage, live action, painted dimensional sets, costumes, makeup, and newly composed music alongside a choir.
In partnership with Frieze Sculpture, LAND 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.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary and expand upon narratives surrounding the historic environmental art installation and performance space, LAND partnered with Anat Ebgi Gallery to present a dynamic performance and events series in support of the exhibition WOMANHOUSE. This exhibition examined the spirit of experimentation and collaboration that defined west coast Feminist Art and traced the period that immediately preceded and succeeded Womanhouse from 1970 to 1976. The programs included a restaging of historic performances, consciousness-raising sessions, and film screenings. These performances and events included participants from the original Womanhouse alongside younger and emerging artists in order to reimagine and complicate ideas relevant to our contemporary moment. Participating artists included Karen LeCocq, Kayla Tange, Holly Harrel, Sebastian Hernandez, Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Gabriela Ruiz, Megan Rippey, and Marka Maberry-Gaulke
LAND in partnership with Aaron Fowler, co-presented The Oasis, an experience of Fowler’s N2EXISTENCE. N2EXISTENCE is a solutionbased movement that enables people to use their passions to manifest new realities of freedom, founded by artist Aaron Fowler in 2020. N2EXISTENCE: The Oasis was an interactive creative space in which artists, makers, technologists, activists, and community organizers could come together to share their work, learn, access expensive technologies, engage in deep discussion, and explore their own creative visions. The Oasis was 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 course of the two months, Sharrief and Warmsley organized an ambitious schedule of public programs, activating the space and providing exponential opportunities for collaboration. At the end of the period, the community was invited to propose their own events and programming, with a culminating public celebration.
The Horse was a 45-minute immersive performance directed, choreographed and performed by Chris Emile. Developed during a three-month creative residency, The Horse was 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 evoked 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 reassessed what traditional balletic training deems the role of the performer/dancer. The resulting work embodied ancestral knowledge, reverence for African religions, the human-divine connection, and, in reintroducing catharsis into performance, reclaimed the relationship between body and spirit.
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.
The Consortium’s first endeavor was the Ojai Consortium Lab at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation which acted as a think tank, research archive, community sounding board and organizing platform. A range of events and panels highlighted 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.
Over a three month period, the Consortium’s statement grew with input from a range of artists and community members. The hope was that the findings of these three months of interaction became a springboard to physical manifestations of the ideas found therein.
October 28
Through a series of site-specific interventions, Hooper Schneider used the American home to reimagine the concept of horror as a parallax state of unreconciled longing and isolated madness and more aptly, the successive flows of unforeseen anomalies and rapturous events that span generations, functions, incarnations; i.e. a film set for a genre-defining classic, a reliquary of late midcentury decor, a Hollywood snuggery for an aging couple. All iterations of the home where it is located further understandings of horror as a simultaneous process of flourishing and decay, life, death, pain, joy, the unclassifiable, the yet to come. The executed interventions presented each room as a different event in a different state of being; a forgotten past, a revision of extant matters, a delirious speculation, that as a totality formed a prism of seductive astonishment.
BLKNWS® is best described as a ‘conceptual news program’, or ‘conceptual journalism’, that is simultaneously a work of art as well as a media entity. It takes the form of a two-channel installation connected to a newscast that blurs the lines between art, reporting, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique.
In Fall 2020, in partnership with the Hammer Museum as part of Made in LA 2020: a version, LAND presented the most ambitious installation to date of Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS®. BLKNWS® broadcasts at sites across Los Angeles, with a focus on South Los Angeles and black-owned businesses.
Participating Sites include: Patria Coffee Roasters, Hank’s Mini Market, Touched By An Angel / SON., Bloom & Plume Coffee, Natraliart Jamaican Restaurant, Total Luxury Spa, and Go Get Em Tiger.
Compass Rose is an expansive collaboration connecting contemporary oral histories with historic cartography to better understand the shape of Los Angeles. The project draws a direct line from past to present, using the Sanborn Fire Insurance indexes to discuss the long-standing impacts of urban planning policies that implement highways as tools for segregation. Project partners include Los Angeles Public Library, Occidental College, CSUN Sanborn Map Library and LAND. The latest expansion of Compass Rose is UnMapping LA, a podcast featuring historians and residents from the Los Angeles area, sharing their memories of their neighborhoods and their experiences of displacement by developments of Los Angeles freeways.
LAND commissioned Los Angeles-based artist Anna Sew Hoy to create the large-scale, bronze public sculpture Psychic Body Grotto at the 32 acre Los Angeles State Historic Park. Drawing on the artist’s previous explorations of materiality, spirituality and the relationships we forge with everyday objects, this is Sew Hoy’s most ambitious sculpture to date.
Psychic Body Grotto is a room-sized bronze sculpture or “figurative gazebo” for meetings and rituals that have yet to be invented. The sculpture evokes the illusion of being organically generated from the earth, creating a locus for contemplation and relaxation amidst the buzzing city-scape of Los Angeles.
Working in conjunction with the efforts of California State Parks to revitalize and create new spaces for cultural and civic dialogue, activity, leisure, and engagement, Psychic Body Grotto functions as an interactive work of public art, landscape design, and gathering spot for local residents and visitors of the park.
Frame Rate is LAND’s screening series, presenting film, video, and moving image works in site-specific contexts. Reflecting the diverse ways contemporary artists engage with visual culture, Frame Rate allows audiences intimate access to artists’ works and creative process. Unlike conventional formats, Frame Rate invites artists to propose and present new work, works-in-progress or ideas that comprise the multifaceted influences informing their creative practice.
May 28
Arts at Blue Roof
Multi-channel video installation and durational performance, curated by Jheanelle Brown.
Screening of a selected short videos by the late artist Kaari Upson, co-presented with MOCA.
Nomadic Nights are salon-style events in roaming locations which reflect the diverse ways in which contemporary artists engage and present visual culture.
As a departure from conventional formats, Nomadic Nights invites artists to present work, performances, and ideas that comprise the constellation of influences informing the overall creative practice.
One day group exhibition featuring Gonzalez's artistic community on the occasion of the closing of his solo show at Matthew Brown Gallery.
Artist lecture and presentation in support of Abareshi's solo exhibition at Hunter Shaw Fine Art.
This year, LAND introduced Soundscapes, our new programming series dedicated to experimental music and audio practices, inviting artists to consider how location and sound in its various modalities are deeply intertwined. This series champions artists prioritizing audio and the sensorial over the ocular to facilitate unique experiences widely available to the public.
L.A. Summer Mixes was a monthly series that spanned the four summer months, inviting artists to create a musical portrait of their neighborhood, document their community, then create a list of recommendations to accompany their mix. Both the documentation and the neighborhood lists were released alongside the mixes to offer a more in-depth perspective into the artist’s relationship with the places around them. To culminate this work, LAND organized a listening party at a local venue of the artist’s choosing, further celebrating the richness and variety of landscapes of the city.
November 11
LAND was pleased to present Soundscapes: Lani Trock as a part of LAND’s ongoing Soundscapes programming, dedicated to experimental music and audio practices. This program was also a part of the artist’s ongoing series, tend to care.
By way of an open source community choir free-form sing and cleanup along the LA River, this donation-based, community gathering intended to honor and deepen our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and with this vital body of water and its surrounding land. Together, participants cleaned and sang, as an offering of collective care to this time and space.
Facilitated by Aaron Shaw, Lani Trock, Meg Shoemaker, David Moses, and Noah Klein. Made possible by floating, LAND, NPS & New Earth Dao.
-RemarksfromLadies'LairLakebyTruleeHall
"LANDisdeartomyheartbecauseit presentscriticalandculturallyauthentic artisticviews,andmakesitfeellikefamily."
