In Conversation: Hamza Walker with Cheryl Harris

07.27 // 12:00pm

Cheryl Harris & Hamza walker

View the Talk here

Cheryl I. Harris is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law where she teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory and Race Conscious Remedies.

A graduate of Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law, Professor Harris began her teaching career in 1990 at Chicago- Kent College of Law after working for one of Chicago’s leading criminal defense firms and later serving as a senior legal advisor in the City Attorney’s office as part of the reform administration of Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago.  The interconnections between racial theory, civil rights practice, politics, and human rights have been important to her work.  She was a key organizer of several major conferences that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution.  This work played a significant role in the production of her acclaimed and influential 1993 article, “Whiteness as Property” (Harvard Law Review). This essay is one of several key and core writings of Critical Race Theory, a movement of legal scholars challenging how race is constructed in American law.  Conjecturing that racial identity and property have been historically and conceptually intertwined since the founding of the country, Harris’ essay is distinguished by its sweep and the boldness of its position.

Since joining the UCLA Law faculty in 1998, Professor Harris has continued to produce groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Critical Race Theory, particularly engaging the issue of how racial frames shape our understanding and interpretation of significant events like Hurricane Katrina—(“Whitewashing Race”, in California Law Review), admissions policies (“The New Racial Preferences” in California Law Review)(with Carbado) and anti-discrimination law (“Reading Ricci: Whitening Discrimination, Race-ing Test Fairness” in UCLA Law Review) (with West-Faulcon).

She has also lectured widely on issues of race and equality at leading institutions here and abroad, including in Europe, South Africa, and Australia, and has been a frequent contributor to various media outlets on current events and cases involving race and equality.

Professor Harris has served as a consultant to the MacArthur Foundation and has been on the board of leading academic societies, including the American Studies Association.  She has served as faculty director for the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA Law School and has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking teacher in the area of civil rights education, receiving the ACLU Foundation of Southern California's Distinguished Professor Award for Civil Rights Education. 

 Harris is also the mother of American rapper, songwriter and record producer, Earl Sweatshirt.

Generous support provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the City of West Hollywood.

In Conversation: Hamza Walker with Postcommodity & Justin Richland 

03.08.20 / 2:00pm

Please join us this Sunday at 2:00 pm for an informal discussion between Postcommodity (Cristobal Martinez and Kade Twist), director of LAXART,  Hamza Walker, and Justin Richland, associate professor of anthropology and Native American studies at the University of California Irvine.

Conceived as a permanent gesture, Postcommodity's site specific installation Some Reach While Others Clap, features two I-beams that have been given lowrider paint jobs.  The work will be in the care of LAXART.  This discussion will address the issue of cultural stewardship and its speculative relationship to contemporary artistic practices.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary collaborative self- described as a shared Indigenous lens through which to examine and respond to the ongoing narrative of colonialism.

Justin Richland is an associate professor of anthropology and Native American studies at the University of California Irvine. Also trained as a lawyer, his areas of expertise include contemporary Native American law, politics, art and ethnographic museology.  In 2014, he was appointed Adjunct Curator of North American Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and in 2015 he was appointed to his second term of service by the Hopi Tribal Government as Associate Justice of the Hopi Appellate Court. In addition to his scholarship and advocacy, he also co-curated an exhibition of the art of Rhonda Holy Bear and Chris Pappan, two contemporary Native American artists, which opened at the Field Museum of Chicago in November 2016. He was named a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow in April 2016.

All of our events are free and open to the public. No ticket is required. Seating is first come, first serve.

Funding provided by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

John Cage and Yves Klein: Aria and Recitative (Monday Evening Concerts)

02.09.20 / 8:00pm

PROGRAM:

​Yves Klein - SYMPHONIE MONOTON - SILENCE (1947-1961) 
John Cage - SPEECH (1955)

Jonathan Hepfer and Hamza Walker, co-curators

"There are at base only 2 things: recitative and aria. Or said differently: telling a story (narrative) and stopping time.
Or put yet another way: the consecutive, the one-after-the-other, and the simultaneous, the all-at-once." - Peter Ablinger 

"Even in its presence, this symphony does not exist." -  Yves Klein

"Well, you know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment - very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which probably as you say, were intrusions, they drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios, even a single one, not just twelve at a time...I think, well, they're just playing my piece!" - John Cage

7 in 3: Charles Curtis in Concert

02.16.20 / 4:00pm

In celebration of his new career-spanning album, Performances & Recordings 1998-2018, released by Saltern, renowned cellist Charles Curtis presents a marathon day of performances surveying more than two decades of work. Curtis has established a reputation as one of new music’s foremost cellists, having collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles and Los Angeles’ very own Tashi Wada. The rigor and astute sensitivity Curtis brings to the work of these composers actually betrays his immersion in late Medieval and Renaissance music, examples of which will be performed. In a sequence of three extended programs stretching from late afternoon until night entitled 7 in 3, Curtis will perform two of his own compositions, as well as Éliane Radigue’s hour-long Naldjorlak (2005), Chansons and Ricercars of Guillaume de Machaut and Sylvestro di Ganassi, Alvin Lucier’s epic Slices for Cello and Pre-Recorded Music (2007), Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008), and a rare performance of Richard Maxfield’s Perspectives for La Monte Young (1961-62). This event is not to be missed.

Program
I.
4:00 PM
Éliane Radigue – Naldjorlak (2005)

II.
7:00 PM
Guillaume de Machaut & Sylvestro di Ganassi – Chansons (14th century) & Ricercars (1542)
Charles Curtis – Unfinished Song (1998)
Alvin Lucier – Slices for Cello and Pre-Recorded Orchestra (2007)

III.
8:30 PM
Charles Curtis – Ultra White Violet Light (1996)
Alison Knowles – Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008)
Richard Maxfield – Perspectives for La Monte Young (1961-62)

Art & Dialogue: Los Angeles featuring Courtney J. Martin and Rita Gonzalez

12.03.20 / 4:00pm PST

On December 3, please join Artadia and LAXART for a free online public program featuring Courtney J. Martin, Director, Yale Center for British Art in conversation with Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, at Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art.

Thursday, December 3, at 7pm EST/ 6pm CST / 4pm PST

RSVP details forthcoming. The event will be live closed captioned, if any accessibility accommodations are needed please email info@artadia.org.

In 2019, Courtney J. Martin became the sixth director of the Yale Center for British Art. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation; an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; an assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute research fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

In 2012, Martin curated the exhibition Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. In 2014, she co-curated the group show Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008 to 2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and was co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award). In 2015, she curated an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation focusing on the American painter Robert Ryman. At Dia, she also oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. She was editor of the book Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016), surveying an important collection of modern and contemporary work by artists of African descent.

Rita Gonzalez is the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gonzalez has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnès Varda in Californialand; and A Universal History of Infamy, among other exhibitions. Gonzalez’s collaboration with filmmaker Jesse Lerner, Mexperimental Cinema, was the first survey of Mexican experimental film and video. It traveled to museums and festivals internationally and resulted in the first bilingual publication on the subject.

From 1997–1999, she was the Lila Wallace Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. While there, she worked on numerous exhibitions, as well as serving as curator for William Kentridge: Weighing and Wanting. She also co-curated the 2006 California Biennial and Adrià Julià: La Villa Basque at the Orange County Museum of Art. Essays appear in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Duke University Press), Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from 90s to Now (JRP|Ringier Zurich), and California Video: Artists and Histories (Getty Publications). Gonzalez was on the curatorial team for Prospect 3 New Orleans and a curatorial advisor on the first Current L.A. Biennial in 2016.

Artadia’s Art & Dialogue invites curators from across the United States, who are experts in their field, to deeply engage with each Award city through a series of virtual studio visits with local Awardees and public programs, co-hosted with local partner organizations.

Founded in 1999, Artadia is a nonprofit grantmaker and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons. Artadia elevates the careers of these artists through a proven combination of recognition, grantmaking, community support, and advocacy. We believe that by working collaboratively to improve the conditions necessary for artists from all backgrounds to thrive and succeed, Artadia can strengthen their communities and foster economic justice in the arts. 

Funding provided by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.