The gorgeous 2019-2020 Annual from 18th Street Arts Center is available for purchase and download here. Edited by yours truly, with incredible design by Place & Page, this full-color book catalogues all of the exhibitions, artist projects, and artists in residence at 18th Street Arts Center – both pre- and post-pandemic. Commissioned essays from Anuradha Vikram, Michael Ano, Lise Gruner Bertelsen, Frida Cano, Gregg Chadwick, Mackenzie Hoffman, Michael J. Masucci, Tijana Miskovic, Susan L. Power, Tibby Rothman, Liv Wafler, and Yunglin Wang grapple with the impact of COVID-19 on artists and the world from a variety of global perspectives.
Featuring projects by Postcommodity & Guillermo Galindo, Jimena Sarno, Shirazette Tinnin, The Winter Office, Brooks + Scarpa, Esther Lin, Patty Chang, Su Hui-Yu, Renee Petropoulos, Damir Avdagic, Arturo Hernandez, Sara Daleiden, and many more. Read the introduction I wrote below. I’m so proud of everything we’ve accomplished at 18th Street!
Introduction: Facets of the Commons
By Sue Bell Yank
Even before the total paradigm shift of a global pandemic, an unprecedented adjustment to isolation and transitioning to a totally digital social existence, followed by waves of Black Lives Matter protests around the nation that thrust us out in the streets again, 2020 felt a boiler about to explode. In many ways, 18th Street Arts Center’s 2020-2021 centralizing artistic theme of Commons Lab: Place and Public Life, which asked artists to interrogate in myriad ways how we both value and access our common natural and cultural resources, played out with terrifying urgency on a national and global scale. Faced with a total breakdown of the informal norms and values we as a society once considered intrinsic (as illusory as that concept may have been), we were left rudderless, grasping for meaning, unsure of what we ever held in common in the first place.
In Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, the commons is not only defined as cultural or natural resources meant to be accessible and held in common for all members of a society (such as air, water, and a habitable earth), but also refers to the process through which those resources are governed. Commons is “a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market, but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.” The commons has also typically been a place, the common pastures on which sheep would graze, the public spaces that have become increasingly sparse, the streets where people gather to protest and advocate, where democracy plays out in its most elemental form.
18th Street is an organization that has long been defined by place, in particular, a collection of brightly colored light industrial buildings on the cul-de-sac at the end of 18th Street in Santa Monica, on land that was once part of the Tongva nation. When we expanded to a second site at the Santa Monica airport, taking over the program management of a former airplane hangar with its own artistic community, history, and context, we were compelled to imagine 18th Street as much more than a place. Perhaps 18th Street was actually a commons of a kind, a mechanism through which communities of artists can build power together and influence social change. The artists in this year’s cohort took the notion of the commons to places we never could have imagined—from how we experience disparities in power and identity through sound, what mobility and dignity look like cities, how we recognize the commonality of our fears and memories, and how we create common ground between disparate communities that may not even speak the same language. The development of the artistic program for 2019-2020 could not have happened without the perceptive curatorial instinct and conceptual work of Artistic Director Anuradha Vikram, who left the organization in November of 2019. Her prescient framing was enhanced and elaborated upon by the work of Associate Curator Frida Cano, and bolstered by the outsized efforts of our small but mighty staff.
The programming year began in July 2019 by acknowledging the land itself through a blessing by Tongva elders of the hangar studio space at the Santa Monica Airport, followed by Sy/stem, a performance piece created by composer Guillermo Galindo and the art collective Postcommodity (artists Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist). Dozens of community members and artists moved through the space as four different clans in a two-hour performance, interacting with each other and the audience with looping sound machines in a visceral social choreography. Artist Gregg Chadwick, one of the clan facilitators that night who has worked out of the hangar for over a decade, characterized the process as the “revolutionary listening” of “quiet multitudes,” wherein the empathy born of truly present bodily engagement can elicit new social understandings. In Score for the Near Future, Los Angeles-based artist Jimena Sarno likewise explored harmony and dissonance, collaborating with vocal artist and improviser Molly Pease to transform 18th Street’s Main Gallery into a three-dimensional musical score where every presence, absence, and spatial relation is readable as both notation and abstraction. Exploring the relationship of rhythm to memory, power, and identity was burgeoning in the work of New York-based percussionist and composer Shirazette Tinnin through her powerful new work The Healing Project, when her Make Jazz Fellowship and residency was unfortunately cut short due to COVID-19. An accomplished educator, Tinnin made a huge impact during her time at 18th Street and later as part of our virtual Arts Learning Lab, exploring the African roots of the clavé and deeply personal stories of navigating her career as a Black woman.
The Copenhagen-based group The Winter Office, comprised of artists, curators, architects, and social scientists, studied both the literal and figurative urban connections between 18th Street’s two campuses in Santa Monica. This investigation into mobility and transitional space elicited new insights into Santa Monica’s urban infrastructure, and spun out a range of media (including podcasts, publications, and designs) that coalesced in #SYNCHRONICITY, the inaugural exhibition at the Airport Gallery. Los Angeles-based architects Brooks + Scarpa proposed multivalent meditations on density in DENSE-CITY: Housing for Quality of Life and Social Capital to address the underlying issues exacerbating the city’s urgent housing crisis. Using architecture and urban design as tools to explore how we live together, they proposed radical new societal structures shaped by the spaces we call home. Taiwan-based artist in residence Esther Lin investigated liminal spaces in Revolving Corridor (n.), evoking imaginary alternative spaces through text, light, objects, and films in which people can connect while preserving a sense of personal psychological space. For these artists, the commons is a place of simultaneous physical connection, psychological isolation, and social transition.
The notion of the commons also elicited interrogations of our commonality, and artists grappled with what binds us as communities and societies on many scales. In Milk Debt, Patty Chang collected fears from localities experiencing upheaval both urgent and simmering, laying bare raw emotions and bodily empathy as they were read by lactating performers pumping their breast milk. Taiwan-based artist Su Hui-Yu probed the fissures between popular memory and history in his solo exhibition Reshooting. About martial law, cold war, censorship and those who were forbidden, revealing how memory can motivate political struggles as it breaks with imposed societal structures. LA-based artist Renée Petropoulos, in her collaborations with master Oaxacan weaver Arturo Hernández, explored cultural knowledge and traditional craft as a way to recall our ancestors, Through community-based art-making workshops and the exhibition We Will Congregate: Platforms and Wool, that revolved around the weaved form of the rebozo blanket, the artists interrogated collective cultural memory and its embedded societal values. Norway and Denmark-based artist Damir Avdagic likewise captured the memories that reverberated reflexively across generations in Repriza/Uzvracanje (Reprise/Response), a film in which four people in their mid-60s from ex-Yugoslavia, perform a transcribed conversation from the piece Reenactment/Process (2016), in which four people in their mid-20s discuss the inter-generational frictions they experience between themselves and their parents relating to the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia.
Exploring history and collective cultural memory also underscored our community engagement work, and shored up our deep commitment to our local Pico neighborhood. As our Culture Mapping 90404 oral history project reached maturity with over 100 assets collected, we solidified a network of strong community partnerships with the Santa Monica Library, the affordable housing non-profit developer Community Corp of Santa Monica, Virginia Avenue Park, Santa Monica High School, and the Quinn Research Center. We began to create collaborative programming together, pulling together a Story Table of the Black history of Santa Monica, creating educational art workshops for low-income families with professional artists, and celebrating the life of Black recreation leader Thelma Terry. We collaborated with Santa Monica High School AP art teacher Amy Bouse to develop a six-week local cultural history curriculum, and 60 students responded artistically to their own investigations into the history of Santa Monica and their own families. These jewel-like works were presented in the exhibition Out of the Past: Gen Z Responses to 20th Century Santa Monica.
Through the global pandemic, economic uncertainty, and sweeping actions against structural racism that crashed like waves across our communities in March 2020, 18th Street was engaged in the very real task of binding two disparate artist communities together to build power and collective strength. Artist Sara Daleiden has facilitated an ongoing series of artist network-building conversations to catalyze advocacy around neighborhood development in Santa Monica, especially during a time of recovery. A series of group shows of artists from both campuses as well as internationally have explored different facets of how society tranfigures and changes, burrowing into the core of what binds humanity together. Las Hijas de Los Dias featured the voices of seven female-identifying artists revealing their capacity to “deconstruct old stereotypes, resist…patriarchal pressure, and renovate themselves formally,” as curator Begoña Torres asserts. Transformations dealt with themes as universal as death and transmutations, regarding change as the only constant, and its narrative has proved prescient. Finally, Drawing Connections returned to the most ancient human form of mark-making. As art historian Susan Powers describes, “Ubiquitous and perennial, drawing crosses the boundaries delimiting disciplines and geographies. Drawing connects us over the ages to our earliest human ancestors and our childhood selves.”
This return to the elemental, to the very core of what defines us as artists, organizations, and humans, became necessary for survival in the time of COVID and social unrest. In times of crisis, we must ask ourselves what we do and why, as all other reliable routines and structures as we knew them suddenly fall away. Ultimately, we believe that artistic thinking, communication, action, and knowledge can change the world. By probing the gaps, fissures, contradictions, and overlooked commonalities in our society, artists provoke ways to imagine new futures. And with that hope comes resilience, empathy, and collective strength.