The Los Angeles Review of Books was founded on an alternative model of publishing, born out of a place where mainstream publishing was failing. How do alternative modes of publishing relate to artist books and artist-led publications? The panel will discuss the role the internet plays in arts publishing, the virtues and dregs of independence, and the challenges of distribution. Los Angeles has always blurred boundaries, expanded and crept outward. How has LA and the opportunities it offers also changed the landscape of art and publication? What are the new projects and difficulties faced by artists who seek to publish and publishers who seek to feature art in their pages?

Participants: Travis Diehl (Online Editor, X-Tra), Clare Kelly (Artist & co-founder Hesse Press), Kandis Williams (Artist & publisher Cassandra Press)

Moderator: Kate Wolf (Editor at Large, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants.

Sondra Perry explores the intersection of black identity, digital culture and power structures through video, media, installation and performance. Perry makes work about blackness, black femininity and African American heritage, often taking her personal history as a point of departure. Her use of digital tools and material, ranging from blue screen technology and 3D avatars to found footage from the internet, reflects on these modes of representation and the abstraction of black identity in art and media.

In the spirit of the game show Name That Tune that delighted millions of home viewers in the 1950s, Frieze Talks will challenge the ears and knowledge of select L.A. based artists whose work has an undeniable relationship to noise, sound, and/or popular music.

Curator Hamza Walker will test artist Arthur Jafa with a series of sonic fragments meant to thrill, confound, provoke, and entertain.

As part of the new Berggruen Institute Transformation of the Human (ToTH) program, artist Agnieszka Kurant discusses her work in relation to the evolution of labor, knowledge, creativity, nature and surveillance capitalism with the philosopher and anthropologist Tobias Rees of the Berggruen Institute and pioneering synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University.

Participants: Agnieszka Kurant (Artist & Artist Fellow, Berggruen Institute), Drew Endy (Pioneering Synthetic Biologist, Stanford & President, BioBricks Foundation)

Moderator: Tobias Rees (Director, Berggruen Institute Transformation of the Human & Reid Hoffman Professor of the Humanities, New School for Social Research).

Rafa Esparza’s (b. 1981, Los Angeles) multifaceted, often collaborative practice involves durational performance and sculpture, and considers the impact of migration, colonization, and collective histories on the formation of identity and communities.

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including gender, sexuality, radical sex, queer activism, postpunk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

Taking as a starting point the research published by In Other Words and artnet News, which examined the representation of African American artists in US museums and the international market, Charlotte Burns will moderate a conversation with major Californian institutional leaders about the ways in which they are working to broaden the canon, and think specifically about local communities.

Participants: Michael Govan (CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Naima J. Keith (Deputy Director, California African American Museum), Andrew Perchuk, (Deputy Director, Getty Research Institute), Megan Steinman (Director, The Underground Museum)

Moderator: Charlotte Burns (Executive Editor, In Other Words)

Join us for a conversation about regionality, locality, and the myriad of ways in which artists find themselves living and working in Los Angeles. This panel is comprised of artists who have spent time in Los Angeles looking out and outside of Los Angeles looking in. We come together to take a deeper look at the benefits and drawbacks of our chosen home.

Speakers: Kelly Akashi (artist), Kori Newkirk (artist), Eamon Ore-Giron (artist), and Mary Weatherford (artist).

Moderators: Naima Keith and Diana Nawi (Artistic Co-Directors of Prospect.5, to take place in New Orleans in fall 2020)

Public art has expanded to not only include publicly commissioned sculpture, but also creating communities. Artists are partnering with civic agencies to produce social impact, which include long-term projects and the lack of a permanent installation. Civic agencies navigate changing opinions of public art, while artists respond to both a public and their own sensibilities during commissioned projects.

Participants: Kristin Sakoda (Los Angeles County Arts Commission), Andrea Bowers (Artist), Suzanne Lacy (Artist and Professor, USC Roski School of Art and Design)

Moderator: Brooke Kamin Rapaport (Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York and Commissioner, U.S. Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale).

The visionary founder of LUMA Foundation Maja Hoffmann will join celebrated architect Frank Gehry and Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulrich Obrist to discuss how art can bridge the worlds of ritual, environment, and community. Hoffmann created an intensely local outpost for her foundation in Arles, France with a radical design by Gehry that will impact the region’s cultural tourism for years to come

Kristy Edmunds,  Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, has worked closely with Susan Nimoy to purchase the historic  Crest Movie Theater, which will be transformed into a new venue dedicated to providing performance and gathering space for boldly emerging artists in an intimate-scaled setting on the Westside of Los Angeles. The theatre will be named after the late Leonard Nimoy, whose influence has also led to a street on Paramount Studios to bear his name.

Also joining the conversation are Sarah Arison, Chair, National YoungArts Foundation, and Olivia Marciano, Artistic Director of the Marciano Art Foundation, who are dedicated to supporting young artists at critical junctures in their careers – the very artists who will create and present new work at The UCLA Nimoy Theater. The conversation will explore the complexities of supporting work of contemporary performance and the vital role that spaces such as the Nimoy play as community hubs.  

Participants: Kristy Edmunds (Executive and Artistic Director, Center for the Art of Performance), Susan Nimoy (Patron), Sarah Arison (Chair, National YoungArts Foundation), Olivia Marciano (Artistic Director, Marciano Art Foundation) Moderator: Patton Hindle (Senior Director of Arts at Kickstarter)