Join us for a roundtable talk on founding and operating contemporary art venues as part of Critical Transformations: A Forum on New Futures.

Thursday, October 29 at 4:00 PM PST
Free & Open to All – RSVP Here

ZOOM URL
Meeting ID: 660 4878 0336
Passcode: 929121

This event assembles a group of directors of West Coast independent art spaces to reflect on their experience founding and/or managing small, experimental, community-building and utopian venues for contemporary art. What alternative models do these venues provide? How is their approach indicative of the future of arts organizing?

Panelists:

Fritz Haeg, Salmon Creek Farm
Morgan Elder and Allison Littrell, Co-Directors, Murmurs
noé olivas, Co-Founder, Crenshaw Dairy Mart
Moderated by Ceci Moss

Please note all Critical Transformations events will be recorded and published at a later date on this website.

About the Panelists:

Fritz Haeg‘s work has included animal architecture, crocheted rugs, domestic gatherings, edible gardens, educational environments, preserved foods, public dances, sculptural knitwear, temporary encampments, urban parades, wild landscapes, and occasionally buildings for people. Since 2014 he has been settled in rural life and work, reviving the 1970’s commune Salmon Creek Farm on California’s Mendocino coast as a long-term art project shaped by many hands, a sort of queer commune-farm-homestead-sanctuary-school hybrid.

Morgan Elder is a first-generation American curator, artist, and designer. Elder received her BFA with an emphasis in Art History, Theory and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating, Elder co-founded Born Nude, an experimental gallery based out of a residential living space in Chicago, IL that prioritized under-recognized and emerging artists. Elder is interested in exploring alternative exhibition models, redefining the standardization of an art space, and merging the boundaries of art, life, and community as part of her curatorial practice. She is the co-founder of Murmurs.

Allison Littrell is a curator, writer, editor, and educator. She graduated from Bard College with a BA in Literature and Art History in 2014 and received her MA in curatorial studies from USC Roski in 2018. Littrell worked in documentary film as a producer and editor before transitioning to art and continues to occasionally work as a producer and art director on independent films. In 2014 she co-founded the arts magazine ALL-IN and, in 2018, co-founded Third Magazine, a printed publication and programming initiative dedicated to creating space for POC artists to engage in critical decolonizing practices. She curated exhibitions and live arts programming independently before co-founding Murmurs in 2019.

noé olivas is a Southern California-based artist. Through printmaking, sculpture, and performance, he investigates the poetics of labour. He considers the relationship between labour as it fits into the conceptions of femininity and masculinity in order to play with and reshape cultural references, narratives, myths, traditions, and objects, ultimately employing a new meaning.

olivas is an artist-gallerist-organizer and co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart and inaugural professor for the Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA at Prescott College, where he is teaching a course on art and healing. olivas received his BA in Visual Arts from the University of San Diego and his MFA in Art from the University of Southern California. He lives and works in South Central, Los Angeles, CA.

Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator based in Los Angeles, USA. She is the founder of Gas, a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. Her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her first book, Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu, is released through the Bloomsbury series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, CURA, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum. She is currently a Lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts and she has held teaching positions at the University of Southern California, Scripps College, the San Francisco Art Institute and New York University.

About Critical Transformations: A Forum on New Futures

We are living through unprecedented times that present the challenges of the pandemic, an economic recession, and rising fascism, alongside the opportunities of social justice, creative problem-solving, and bold thinking.

Curated by Ceci Moss and hosted by the Shumka Centre at Emily Carr University, Critical Transformations is a monthly series of online roundtable conversations that invites visionary artists, curators, activists, designers, architects, and arts organizers around the globe to discuss their work in creating groundbreaking new models for the arts sector.