Literature Lovers and Book Babies: It’s Poetry Month in West Hollywood

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April is National Poetry Month, and the city of West Hollywood is celebrating poetry and presenting a number of other literary programs this spring. WeHo is dazzling residents and visitors with “Poetry in Lights” electronic billboards and lamppost poetry banners that are literally bringing poetry to the streets. It’s literature as visual art, and as kinetic as it is moving. But don’t stop there – workshops, readings, and the chance to build your own Little Free Library are all a part of the city’s plan to woo readers and writers.

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The city’s celebration of National Poetry Month is the biggest news, city poet Steven Reigns has put together a wide-ranging calendar of events and workshops, and is leading a free poetry writing workshop himself on April 21st at 7:30 p.m. in the West Hollywood Library Community room. Both novices and the more experienced can join – the only requirement Reigns makes is a willingness to try plus a pen and some paper.

Along with his tenure as City Poet of West Hollywood, Reigns is a nine-time recipient of The Los Angeles City’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Artist in Residency Grant, and has led the My Life is Poetry workshop, an autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBTQ seniors, and edited an anthology of their work. He also has led the 2016 Lambda Literary Book Club series, a monthly discussion of LGBTQ literature that is on-going.

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“This year, my final year as City Poet, my focus has been to introduce poetry to more people,” Reigns says. “Poetry is powerful and I want to share it with as many people as possible.” Reigns is particularly driven to express the relevance of poetry for those who’ve discounted the medium. The Poetry in Lights initiative was his own, with the support of Alex Bazley at West Hollywood Gateway, and graphic designer Eric Hanson, who created the visuals showcasing the poets.

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This digital public art project is being displayed intermittently on two electronic billboards, one at West Hollywood Gateway in the 7100 block of Santa Monica Boulevard, and the other at 1OAK located at 9039 W. Sunset. These billboards flip through portraits of 22 contemporary poets and feature excerpts from their works. Visually compelling, the project is also of course a good read.

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The lamppost banners that are flying in conjunction with this project and National Poetry Month dot the landscape along Santa Monica Boulevard from Sweetzer Avenue to Westbourne Drive. These banners also feature a poet’s image along with a line from the poet’s work.

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As an added bonus, free bookmarks depicting four of these lamppost poets are being distributed throughout the city, at the West Hollywood Library, City Hall, and other locations.

Grab a bookmark while you can, and along with Reigns’ workshop on the 21st, check out events that include a poetry reading by three Red Hen Press poets at Book Soup on Monday the 25th. Don’t miss these events, remember, as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said, “Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” Living in LA, that’s a pretty potent metaphor.

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Proving that WeHo will continue to be a literate community even after National Poetry Month rhymes on, is the Little Free Library Program. West Hollywood residents can apply on the city’s website for one of eight $600 grants to build their own “take a book, leave a book” shelter. While most participants start off using their own books, the group Friends of the West Hollywood Library has agreed to donate a starter set of books to each person who receives a grant from the city to build one. The initial pilot program still has enough funding for five more Little Free Libraries, so bibliophiles in West Hollywood are encouraged to apply.

And lastly, writers who reside in West Hollywood should look up the three PEN Center USA Scholarships, which include an eight-week master class in fiction and non-fiction, a session with an editor, and a reading. But would-be applicants better hurry – the deadline to apply is Monday 4/18. To apply, visit https://emerging-voices.submittable.com/submit.

For complete information on Poetry Month in West Hollywood, including bios of featured writers, visit http://weho.org/residents/poetry-month-2016

And for WeHo residents interested in building a Little Free Library visit www.weho.org/residents/arts-and-culture/little-free-library

Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel: Expanding the Art Scene in DTLA

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DTLA’s burgeoning art scene now has a strong international presence with the opening of Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel in what was once the Globe Mills flour factory.

A vast, 10,000-square-foot complex with a beautiful, open outdoor plaza, the gallery includes bookstore ARTBOOK, and will, come summer, feature it’s own restaurant, Manuela.

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Above, Jackie Winsor’s  “30 to 1 Bound Trees,” originally created in Nova Scotia for a contest in the early 1970s and re-created here.

It may be the open public space that is the most appealing aspect of the vast and – pun intended – artfully restored building. The courtyard’s sunshine is entirely Los Angeles in nature, and this space, which links the galleries, plus the soon-to-be-developed public gardens brings back an evocative childhood memory of the skylit courtyard in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., alive with plants and fountains.

Such a space was a pleasure for a child, and for adults to breathe a little while their eyes, hearts, and minds took in all the art on view.

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A Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, a dedication to this open and breathable space also has carved out a passageway between 2nd and 3rd streets. The artwork hanging above the public passage is “Forgiving Strands,” by Shinique Smith.

Hauser Wirth & Schimmel was founded in 1992 by Manuela Wirth and her mother Ursula Hauser. The gallery now has locations in Zurich, London, New York, and Somerset, England. The Somerset property is a holistic creation on rural land; the gallery’s Los Angeles incarnation aims for a similar completeness. Iwan Wirth describes the DTLA space as providing “a way to seek to connect art through community, conservation, and discoveries.” Paul Schimmel adds “We want to expand the notion of what a gallery can be and it’s relationship to the artist. It’s our certainty that people will come from all over the world.”

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Ruth Asawa’s delicate suspended sculptures above seem like cocoons for living beings.

The co-curator of the opening exhibition, Jenni Sorkin, notes that the gallery itself is broken into four different spaces, whose openness within each room and their separation from each other works spectacularly well as museum-like space for the opening exhibition, “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016.” A survey of sculpture by women from  post-World War II to the present, the art on display includes that of seminal French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, German-born Eva Hesse, Brazilian Lygia Pape, Tokyo-based Yayoi Kusama, New York-based Louise Nevelson, Ruth Asawa, and Lee Bontecou, among others.

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Above, Claire Falkenstein, who began her career as a sculptor crafting jewelry.

The towering ceilings of the south gallery features the progenitors of abstract sculptures, dating from a pre-WWII era when sculpture itself was dominated by men making large scale works.  Sorkin explains that there was a gendered division in the public school system in which boys were sent to skilled labor shop classes and girls to home ec. “Women were not given the skill set to build and make,” Sorkin reports, which makes the pieces in this first gallery all the more impressive.

 

 

 

 

Women needed, Sorkin notes, not a room of one’s own as Virginia Wolf expressed, but a studio of their own.

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Moving into the north gallery, seminal pieces such as “Wheel With Rope,” by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz were created in the 70s, as were New York-based Ursula von Rydingsvard’s “Untitled (Nine Cones),” above. These cedar pieces were hand-tooled in her studio. Like many other pieces in the exhibition, including a pair of sculptures by Lynda Benglis made from aluminum, below, there is a living quality to the pieces, as if they housed creatures now born.

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Below, work by Liz Larner.

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The east gallery houses the most contemporary works, and also the largest installations. Not a coincidence: now, as we approach more current work, women sculptors finally have the space to think big.  They also have the permission to create in vibrant color. Here are the works of Abigail Deville, and Rachel Khedoori who used craft techniques in her creations;  large scale pom-poms that could be massive cat toys are the work of Phyllida Barlow. Knee high pantyhose, chopsticks, discarded couches – found art elements, recycled materials are key here.

 

 

 

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The exuberant and all too rare female-driven opening exhibition is a don’t miss; and then you’ll want to see and experience the gallery space itself.

Press was lucky enough to score a delightful brunch – we look forward to seeing what summer’s addition of a dining space will provide.

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Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel is located at 901 E 3rd St. in DTLA.

 

http://www.hauserwirthschimmel.com/

 

Photographic Artist Sal Taylor Kydd at Gallery 169

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On exhibit through May 14th at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica, the photography of Sal Taylor Kydd offers a stunning juxtaposition of innocence and change. Kydd’s exhibition, Origins, is all about the story of our past, rooted in the present moment. It is about growth, transformation, the basis for our memories and the magical alchemy that makes us, “us.”

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The artist’s photographic process is one first developed in the 1800s by British photographer Henry Fox Talbot. While Kydd shoots with a digital camera, she makes a physical negative printed in a contact frame to create a salted paper print. Kydd says “There is a tangible connection with nature and the natural elements brought into the print, which mirrors the content of the work.” The artist notes that it takes a considerable amount of time to make a print, coating the paper, exposing it to the sun, and waiting for the development process. “The artistry of ‘making’ a photograph becomes itself an act of becoming and invention,” Kydd explains.

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The effect is almost translucent, her black and white images glowing from within, kissed by sunlight, moonlight, and shadows. The approach fits her subject: connecting with nostalgia for the past, and the moment when change occurs. The luminous quality of her photographic process enhances the subject matter which is also aglow: the essence of childhood and its relation to our sense of place and time.

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Kydd takes us up close and personal as we view the wonderous moment when childhood moves into the teen years – a girl, eyes closed, emerges from a pool of pristine water, or a small creature leaves it’s indelible mark – a delicate, tiny frog or braided snake held in a small, pale hand. Each moment is transcendent, caught in a careful prism. A droplet of water, a still lake, ferns floating beneath the surface of a small pond, a hand in a glass of water – mutable substances, as transitory as time, age, stillness. Often water is captured by the artist, and she makes her pools both mysterious and clear. Like Aphrodite rising from sea foam, her young women are water-born and bourne.

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From a child in a joyful back-bend, to the fragile image of a jelly fish out of water, to strands of hair swaying mobile and fish-like in that water, these are small moments writ large. What do these fragments of memory, an image imprinted on a child’s mind, in a mother’s heart, mean? Both cumulatively and individually, these pieces suggest that each moment supports the words of Aristotle, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The connection between each small part of a day, a child’s summer adventures, individual memories, creates the web that is life itself.

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And life is ultimately Kydd’s subject in each of her photographic collections, but particularly here. Origins also reflects on our own awareness of time and change. The title itself suggests that the exhibition is designed to show our own transformations internally as well as that of the external world around us, and our relationship to the natural world. Using as a frequent subject her own children, she views these relationships and transformations through their eyes.

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Originally from the UK, Kydd traveled the world before selecting the Los Angeles area as her home. She splits her time between LA and Maine, where the artist is pursuing an MFA in photography. However, the sense of place she crafts is less about the state in which it takes place than the subject’s state of mind.

Kydd says “In the 1970s children led relatively unfettered lives and were free to explore the world with a large degree of independence. In my work photographing my children and family, I find myself revisiting that time through their experience. Each year we spend our summers on a small island off the coast of Maine…a place for us to connect with nature and with each other.”

This island setting, and all of Kydd’s work, are strongly poetic. And it’s not merely coincidence that her images have the feel of visual poetry – haiku of the highest order – she’s also written and published a book of poetry and photographs, Just When I Thought I Had You.

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To feel the cadence of Kydd’s work, visit Gallery 169, located at 169 W. Channel Rd, Santa Monica, CA 90402

  • Genie Davis; Photos: courtesy artist Sal Taylor Kydd, Kristine Schomaker

 

Carolyn Campbell: (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project

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Carolyn Campbell at LACE with her Thaddeus Ropac poster
Carolyn Campbell at LACE with her Thaddeus Ropac poster

Female artists are getting buried. Beneath the onslaught of male-dominated gallery openings and exhibitions, the work of photographic artist and activist Carolyn Campbell sounds a rallying cry to creatives everywhere: address the gender inequality rampant in the arts community.

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Closing April 17 at LACE, (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project includes 450 international artists who tackle this subject, Campbell among them. All posters are 24” x 36,” and are designed to address the question as to why female-identified artists are still valued so much less than male-identified artists. Gallery Tally is a crowd-sourced, social engagement project created by Micol Hebron to examine and question the ongoing gender imbalance in the art world.

Campbell has four works in this exhibition, which have been a part of the show’s traveling itinerary from Chicago to Santiago, Chile.

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“I was invited to create works illustrating the ratio of male to female artists in four galleries: two in New York and two in Paris,” Campbell relates. In her contributions to the exhibition, she meshed subjects she is passionate about – social justice, culture, art, and architecture.

“I was excited to be part of a show that speaks to gender parity. It afforded me the opportunity to examine how, when I was promoting women artists, was I able to successfully increase their visibility in the marketplace, face any challenges, and how it affected my own creative expression,” she states.

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For Gallery Tally, Campbell’s works are posters depicting Marlborough Chelsea, a satellite of the Marlborough Gallery, one of the world’s leading artist reps, and Kerry Schuss Art, both located in New York. For her Paris representations, she chose Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, and Galerie Hussenot.

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The images she uses to craft these pieces are photos of 19th century sculptures which Campbell made in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The carefully curated images have expressions that exhibit frustration, sorrow, and exasperation in regard to the poor tally of female to male artists exhibited at these galleries.

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Along with expressing this important social subject, her art for the exhibition reflects a 20-year span of Campbell’s work chronicling the funerary images of Père Lachaise in written word and photographs. Her elegiac photos make the tomb sculptures, which often mark the final resting spots of some of the world’s most famous artists, seem alive, as if the stone figures were merely staying still waiting to be photographed. With mossy green lichen and leaves, golden streaks of sunlight, and red tinged trees contrasting with the silvery grey statues, the photos feel almost archetypal.

“The female figure in funerary iconography is traditionally linked to the Seven Virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude and Justice,” Campbell says. “The images that I chose for the exhibition are powerful examples of how women embody some of the deepest qualities of the human condition.”

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From community portraits to architectural forms to her cemetery study, Campbell exhibits an immediacy and grace that brings her subjects to life. There is irony in the fact that her work in Père Lachaise creates the fluidity of captured motion in her depictions of these graceful sculptures. From drought-riven landscapes in her recent series CA Route 5 to fluid images of jellyfish in her work Ocean Sentinels, she is all about suffusing the still with movement and capturing movement in frozen grace.

Born in Washington, D.C., now a resident of West Hollywood, Campbell began taking photographic portraits and urban still-life pieces when her mother gifted her with a Rolleicord camera while still in art school. Her work with other artists at UCLA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington led her to explore the relationship between the arts and political culture in her photography.

Whether tackling political subjects through her posters in the (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project, or narrating the subject of California’s historic drought, Campbell brings a keen eye and a sharp wit to her work.

To experience the powerful posters at Gallery Tally and get a taste of Campbell’s oeuvre, visit LACE at 6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028 before its closing this weekend.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Laura Grover