The Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University presents future visions of the city of Los Angeles from seven design teams:

EDAW / DMJM
ERIC OWEN MOSS ARCHITECTS
GEORGE YU ARCHITECTS
ROGER SHERMAN ARCHITECTS/ cityLAB, DANA CUFF / ROBERT SOMOL
OFFICE OF MOBILE DESIGN/ NICK PISCA / ROLAND RITTER / PAULETTE SINGLEY / EMILY WHITE
GRIFFIN ENRIGHT ARCHITECTS
XEFIROTARCH + IMAGINARY FORCES

The gallery talk is moderated by Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic - Los Angeles Times.

The History Channel, with its sponsors Infiniti and IBM, challenged today's top designers, architects and engineers in The City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge to produce a vision of their city - New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles - 100 years from now. Join us as we revisit the work of the Los Angeles architects.

Join us for a reading and discussion with the authors of Yiddish with George and Laura, Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman. Book signing and reception to follow.

Yiddish with George and Laura tells the story of the farshtunkiner family's birthday bash at WASP headquarters in Kennebunkport, Maine. See what happens when the Bush's are able to express themselves in the mame-loshen. Oy, if only their English was so good!

    ongeshtopt mit gelt (AHNG-gih-shtopt mit GELT, where both g's are hard)

    colloq. phrase. Lit., "Stuffed with money." Rich, wealthy, "rolling in it."

    "Listen, if the United States is so ongeshtopt mit gelt that we can spend ten billion dollars a month to fight the insurgents in Iraq, why can't we just pay them five billion a month to stop shooting each other already? That's called diplomacy."

Click here to see the popular animation of the book, with a link to a press conference where George W. Bush discusses his feelings on the book.

For more information:  yiddishkaytla

LACE is please to announce that for the first time in Los Angeles, the audio-activist organization Ultra-red will host a day-long conference on 1 April 2006, presenting the various activities of its members and working groups. Interrogating a multiple of political and geographic territories, presentations from Ultra-red members will investigate the autonomy of migration in Europe, participatory community-development in East Los Angeles, inquiry-based education strategies in Los Angeles county, organization of the silence around HIV/AIDS in North America, and the dialogue between militant sound investigations, popular education and autonomy politics.

Presentations by Ultra-red members Elizabeth Blaney, Manuela Bojadzijev, Pablo Garcia, Dont Rhine, Robert Sember and Leonardo Vilchis will make manifest the various analyses around political subjectivity, the role of education in political organizing and the problematics of art in the context of organizing. Allies of Ultra-red will then be asked to respond to ideas raised in the initial round of presentations ­ challenging the perspectives of Ultra-red members. The day-long event will conclude with breakout discussions with audience members to further consider ideas and issues raised in the presentations. Confirmed respondents include Simmi Ghandi (Garment Workers Center); Susanne Lang (kein.org); Jackie Leavitt (UCLA, School of Public Policy); Emily Roysdon (LTTR); Walt Senterfit (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project); and David Thorne (The Speculative Archive). Ultra-red member Eddie Peel will perform audio interventions throughout the event.

The workshop is open to the public for artists, community organizers, and anyone interested in strategizing around the intersection between critical art practice and political intervention.

About Ultra-red In 1994, two AIDS activists working with the Hollywood-based needle exchange, Clean Needles Now, launched the sound-art collaboration Ultra-red. Ultra-red assumed as its starting place the specific possibilities for art and activism within the sound recording of social spaces. The dual identities of Ultra-red's founders -- that ...

LACE is pleased to host Los Angeles-based artist Jeffrey Vallance and the graduating class of the California College of the Arts MA Curatorial Practice program as they propose an idea for a federal bill that would create a benefit fund for all living visual artists in the United States.

For more information please visit Americas cultural heritage online.

LACE is pleased to present Vito Acconci and Thom Mayne in conversation on 11 January 2006 at 8pm. Renowned artist and architect, Vito Acconci, is coming to Los Angeles in early January 2006. To offer a truly memorable event, we have invited Thom Mayne to join Acconci. Mayne’s work has been chosen for numerous awards, most recently, he has been awarded the 2005 Pritzker Prize – an award considered by many to be architecture’s Nobel Prize. Linda Taalman, of Taalman Koch Architecture, will moderate the event.

Vito Acconci develops his work as a visual artist, a video maker, a body artist, and a designer of architectural and urban works of art. Acconci Studio, a think-tank of art and architecture where he collaborates with a group of young designers, currently producing works of public art for urban and unique setting. His influential, provocative and often radical art-making practices have earned him international recognition. Acconci Studio is located in Brooklyn, NY.

Thom Mayne is a Los Angeles-based architect known for breaking through traditional bounds of forms and materials. He is principal of Morphosis, meaning "manner of formation." The architectural critic Witold Rybczynski comments, “His buildings have jagged, fractured forms and haphazard compositions that make them look, at first glance, as if they were not quite finished—or were falling apart. This is a subterfuge, of course, since they are solidly built and carefully detailed, but their appearance leaves the distinct impression of chaos.”

This conversation is a PUBLIC INTEREST event. Taking place throughout 2006, this series explores the evolving nature of public practices in an urban context by focusing on contemporary architecture, design and visual art practices that challenge standard notions of public space and manifest social as well as physical presence within the built landscape. Our location in Hollywood is ...

Panel discussion with artists and Jacob Fabricius: 1 July 2005, 7pm

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is pleased to present a project by Copenhagen-based curator Jacob Fabricius organized in two concurrent formats – a traveling art exhibition and a free newspaper publication – together in a reciprocal, social event called Old News. The concept-driven, curatorial practice of Fabricius started in 2004 when he invited one artist a month to collect four articles or images from news sources s/he read during the designated month. Each artist was also asked to invite a fellow artist of their own choosing to do likewise. Some artists culled their articles and images from web news sources; most from print publications; and a few artists re-worked the clippings graphically. The resulting collection of materials were assembled and reprinted in what would be a snapshot of the year through the eyes of the participating artists, the Old News publication.
 
In a second tier of exchange and dialogue, Fabricius developed the Old News exhibition. For the premiere installation at LACE, Fabricius has invited fourteen Los Angeles-based artists to join the exhibition to bring a site-specific layer of discourse to the event. At LACE, we invite you to view and read the original clippings on display, and to interact with a larger reading-lounge-format installation of records, books, and other material relating to Old News’ idiosyncratic collecting principles. Each subsequent presentation of Old News will involve different artists and accumulate more material as the exhibition travels internationally to Sweden and France in 2006.

Artists featured in the installation at LACE include: Mohamed Able, Jessica Almy-Pagan, Mauricio Arango, Julie Ault, Erick Beltran, Andrea Bowers, Kaucyila Brooke, Tania Bruguera, Carolina Caycedo, The Center For Land Use Interpretation, Mari Eastman, Morgan Fisher, Jesper Fabricius, Luke Fowler, Cao Guimarães, Alfredo Jaar, Sharon Hayes, Marc Herbst ...

Panel discussion with Jens Hoffmann and artists from A Walk to Remember:  8 February 2005, 7pm

John Baldessari, Jennifer Bornstein, Meg Cranston, Morgan Fisher, Evan Holloway, Paul McCarthy, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Allen Ruppersberg, and Eric Wesley.

“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
     - Charles Baudelaire

A Walk to Remember is an exhibition that invites a group of Los Angeles based artists to conceive and carry out guided tours through neighborhoods and areas of the city with which they have a particular relationship or affinity and that deal specifically with the rich cultural history of the city.

The exhibition relates to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur as a figure who derives pleasure from the hustle and bustle of the city streets, who moves purposelessly among the urban crowd with the eye of an artist: a spectator of contemporary life and urban scenes. Yet, A Walk To Remember diverts from Benjamin’s idea when it examines a specific European phenomenon of the early 20th century: the postmodern condition of Los Angeles in which walking is clearly a thing of the past. In addition, in giving each walk a purpose and in trying to bring various locations and social and cultural relations of the city to the audience the exhibition reaches beyond what Benjamin described as an “aimless affair.”

Members of the audience taking part in a walk will each be given a disposable camera to document their individual impressions of the artists’ walks from their distinct perspectives. The cameras will be collected at the end of a walk and the developed photographs will be presented ...

CCA’s MA Program in Curatorial Practice Presents:

                        Curating Now
                     [a panel discussion]

What are the most pressing questions for contemporary curators today? Four panelists give their perspectives on the issues and debates that are influencing the future of exhibition making.

Panelists:

Paul Foss
Publisher of artUS and former Publisher, sometime Editor of artext

Irene Hofmann
Curator of Contemporary Art at Orange County Museum of Art

Manray Hsu
Independent Curator based in Taiwan

Maren Richter
Independent Curator based in Austria

This event is organized by the new MA Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in collaboration with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. It coincides with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' presentations of a new project by Christoph Büchel and Florida by Kerry Tribe.

This discussion is part of a lecture series organized by Cara Mullio for LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

This project is part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' special 25th Anniversary Series

"It’s kind of like a modern day log cabin."
Chris Burden on Small Skyscraper

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions presented a solo exhibition by Chris Burden called Small Skyscraper that ran from 1 May through 27 July 2003. An opening reception took place on 1 May 2003, 6 - 8 pm. This exhibition was organized by Irene Tsatsos with Julie Deamer of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in collaboration with architects Linda Taalman and Alan Koch of TK Architecture, founders of OpenOffice. This project was part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' special 25th Anniversary Series.

In 1991, while building a studio on his property, and frustrated by Los Angeles County building codes, artist Chris Burden sketched the first drawings of Small Skyscraper. Eight years later, he was approached by Linda Taalman and Alan Koch of TK Architecture (formerly of OpenOffice) to collaborate on developing actual building plans based on these provocative and contentious drawings. The horizontal presentation of Small Skyscraper at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions from 1 May through 27 July 2003 marked the first of three public components of this project’s collaborative realization.

Small Skyscraper is a quasi legal structure that exploits a loop hole Chris Burden discovered in the Los Angeles County building codes. This loop hole allows small out buildings, like green houses and sheds, to be built without a building permit if they stay within 400 square feet and under 35 feet high. Small Skyscraper uses these legal size restrictions as a point of departure. The total structure, four rooms stacked one on top of the other, measures 400 square feet and rises 35 ...

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions presented Democracy When? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles, guest curated by independent curator Tone O. Nielsen, an exhibition, workshop and discussion series that brought together fifteen artists, activists, community organizations, and theorists from greater Los Angeles to explore six "problematics"--conditions, situations, and cultural challenges or biases that political and social activism is faced with today--through displayed artworks and projects, weekly talks, and actions.

Democracy When?