Matthias Merkel Hess at Las Cienegas Projects until 10/2

Devil's Tower has officially become an LA Monument, at least for a little while, until the clay dries in the exhibition of Matthias Merkel Hess' new work, which comes down on October 2nd at Las Cienegas Projects. The notion of recreating an iconic natural wonder (the original is located in Wyoming) in an urban setting, even in a gallery, is a novel one. Hess, who is the creator of the EcoArtBlog and editor/publisher of Mammut magazine, which he launched in 2008, is also a recent MFA graduate from UCLA (and undergraduate in Journalism and Environmental Sciences). For his first solo show in a LA gallery, he has chosen to combine his interest in art and ecology with his love of clay, in a brillant "outpost" installation where visitors can purchase handmade postcards, paperweights and miniature color glazed clay replicas of Devil's Tower, all under $20 each. Wall posters are original works of art and go for a lot more, but still under $1,000. If you cannot afford to go to Wyoming to see the real Devil's Tower, it is highly suggested you head on over to La Cienega near the 10 Fwy and catch a glimpse of Hess' handmade wonder ASAP.

MAKE:CRAFT at the Ben Maltz Gallery opens Oct. 2nd

Ben Maltz Gallery
Otis College of Art and Design
October 2 - December 4, 2010

Kim Abeles, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Frau Fiber, Garnet Hertz, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Seth Kinmont, Liza Lou, David Prince, Mark Newport, Alyce Santoro, Shada/Jahn (Steve Shada and Marisa Jahn), Eddo Stern.

Inspired by the cultural currents represented in the popular magazines MAKE and CRAFT published out of Northern California, MAKE:CRAFT includes contemporary artists who combine handmaking and building techniques to create, engineer and hack unique, mostly functional devices, objects, machines and accessories; making either a sociopolitical statement, creating new markets for individual styled products, or creating inventive ways to experience the tactile world, non-virtual, the “real.”

The exhibition is guest curated by Patricia Watts, founder and west coast curator of ecoartspace, who feels that recent trends in the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement of making and crafting have empowered contemporary artists and designers to create more socially relevant work that supports sustainable communities.

Go to the Maker blog HERE

Go to MAKE:CRAFT Facebook page HERE

A High Desert Test Sites Lecture & Workshop Series

Saturday May 1st-Sunday May 2nd 2010

2-Day Workshop in Joshua Tree, 12 students, $120 fee

The New Everyday Live is an endeavor designed to both stimulate conversation and catalyze action by considering overlap between contemporary art and craft, sustainable living, survival skills, ecology and earth science, and cultural variation. Each participant in The New Everyday Life will leave with a new set of skills and inspirations, after intimately experiencing the Mojave desert’s unique context for life and living.

Only a few spots left as of 4/21. Email info.hdts@gmail.com

For more information go to: http://www.highdeserttestsites.com

World Water Day LA at Natural HIstory Museum

This Sunday at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles you will find a day long program of water and sustainability education. It is a non plastic event (however they are providing paper cups - which someone will need to talk with them about). I'm sure it will be a good turnout. It is always fun to go to events like these and educate the educators on how it could be even more GREEN.

Don't miss the Water Justice Forum at 1:30pm where speakers will discuss water challenges for Los Angeles from the Southern California Watershed Alliance, Arroyos and Foothills Conservancy, Los Angeles & San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, and Urban Semillas.

LA Urban Rangers final tours of Malibu Beaches 2/27

The LA Urban Rangers are wrapping up a three year Malibu Project to celebrate public beaches one last time. They are offering three mini-safari's at 11am, 1pm and 3pm on Saturday, February 27th. No sign up and all are welcome to come along!

These tours are meant to share how to access these beaches peacefully, legally, safely and respectfully.

Gadget OK! Symposium and Exhibition at UCLA Broad Art Center

Gadget or device art is a great tool for ecovisualization. This is an interesting symposium happening Feb. 18 & 19th at UC Los Angeles. Gadget OK! (also an exhibition) will explore new ways of bridging art, design, technology, science and entertainment using both latest innovations and everyday technology.

RSVP via Facebook HERE

Or, for more information go HERE

Mel Chin to speak at Farm Lab 2/11 7pm

For those of us who have followed the art and ecology movement over the last two decades, Mel Chin is considered an influential pioneer combining art with brownfield remediation. His famous or infamous Revival Field (1989-ongoing) funded with NEA money that was rescinded then later reinstated, demonstrated the natural processes of removing heavy metals from soil using hyper accumulator plants. He did this project in collaboration with an agronomist at a landfill site in Minnesota.

Mel will be in Los Angeles next week to give a talk on his Fundred Dollar Bill Project in New Orleans. If you have never heard him speak, you should go, with the promise that you will be entertained and educated. Being an artist should be so much fun!

For more information go the FarmLab website HERE

Saturday, Jan. 30th, 2010 @ Honor Fraser Gallery

Big City Forum invites you to a round table conversation about our relationship to nature, issues of perception, land use and the built environment.

Saturday, Jan. 30th, 2010
4 - 6 pm
Honor Fraser Gallery
Culver City, CA

Featuring:
REBECA MENDEZ
KIM STRINGFELLOW

REBECA MENDEZ is a professor at UCLA, Design | Media Arts who works in photography and video art installations to explore issues of perception, specifically our relationship to technologically mediated nature. Méndez’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Design Museum, NY, and Denver Art Museum, among many others.

KIM STRINGFELLOW is an artist and educator residing in Los Angeles, California. She teaches multimedia and photography courses at San Diego State University as an associate professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Fallen Fruit Presents EAT LACMA

February–November 2010

EAT LACMA is a year-long investigation into food, art, culture and politics. Fusing the richness of LACMA's permanent collection with the ephemerality of food and the natural growth cycle, EAT LACMA's projects consider food as a common ground that explores the social role of art and ritual in community and human relationships. EAT LACMA unfolds seasonally, with artist's gardens planted and harvested on the museum campus, hands-on public events, and a concurrent exhibition, Fallen Fruit Presents The Fruit of LACMA (June 27-November 7, 2010). It culminates in a day-long event (November 7, 2010) in which over fifty artists and collectives will activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum's campus and galleries. EAT LACMA is curated by Fallen Fruit—David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young—and LACMA curator Michele Urton.

Community Design at SciArc - Hybrid Fields lecture

Tuesday, November 24th at 5:30pm

Patricia Watts of ecoartspace will present a lecture on the exhibition Hybrid Fields which she curated for the Sonoma County Museum in 2006 including 18 artists who address fow food is grown, distributed and consumed in their art practice. The lecture is in conjunction with the "Watts Cooking: Imagining an Accessible Food Infrastructure" course in the Community Design Program at SciArc taught by Michael Pinto, Program Coordinator.

Southern California Institute of Architecture
Kappe Library
960 E. Third Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Parking at 320 E Merrick Street

This program creates opportunities to engage with various local communities by spearheading a number of tactical, action-based projects enabling students to collaborate directly with community agencies and undertake design/build projects. Each project deals with some form of practical and urgent problem solving circumstance and might involve the creation of built structures or functional implements, or the imparting of vital skills to community members or at-risk groups.

Watts Cooking investigates urban food infrastructures and is generating proposals for a 2.5 acre urban farm in Watts. This project is funded in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Waste Reduction & Recycling Workshop

Did you know that nearly 70% of materials thrown in the trash are commonly recyclable? Help educate your students by educating yourself. Go to the Waste Reduction and Recycling Workshop!

Are you interested in learning why recycling is so critical? Interested in how to recycle on your campus? Interested in the best practices to take your recycling program to the next level? The Waste Reduction and Recycling Workshop introduces participants to Los Angeles County's waste cycle and helps teachers and students set up or improve their campus recycling programs.

The Waste Reduction & Recycling Workshop will take place:

Saturday, November 7th
9:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Registration begins at 8:30am
Culver City High School
4401 Elenda Street
Culver City, CA 90230

Click here to register! Registration Deadline: November 6th, 2009
Contact Steve Howe at: showe@treepeople.org or (310) 402-7400

For the fourth and final installment of Almost Utopia, the gallery at 18th Street Arts Center will be dedicated to an unprecedented investigation of 100 Car-Less Angelinos and it will tell their stories of living in Los Angeles.

Public Discussions are as follows:

November 6, 9:30PM
Ride-ARC Ride on Santa Monica Car and Pedestrian Culture: Alex Amerri

November 11, 7:OOPM
“Walking in LA” Panel/Discussion with:
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor, UCLA Department of Urban Planning; author of Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation Over Public Space
Herbert Medina, Professor, Loyola Department of Mathematics
Nigel Raab, Assistant Professor, Loyola Department of History
DJ Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Real City:Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out and Where We are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, Public Information Officer for the City of Lakewood
Damon Willick, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Loyola Marymount University

November 14, 2pm
“Transportation and the Future of Los Angeles”
Jessica Meaney, Transportation Planner, So. CAL Assoc. of Governments
Browne Molyneux, Journalist and Blogger, Shame Train LA
Claude Willey, Artist, Urbanist and Educator, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, California State University, Northridge

Others to be confirmed

Emerging Green Builders - Los Angeles
EGB-LA Committee
Upcoming Opportunities for Member Participation

SCRAP CASTLES | SUSTAINABLE BEACH ART EVENT
Saturday, September 26, 2009 | 9am
Lifeguard Tower 4 | In front of 415 Pacific Coast Hwy, Santa Monica, CA
Near Annenberg Community Beach House | Parking south of 415 PCH

Event Description | Designers and builders are encouraged to come out and enjoy the morning on the beach with fellow Emerging Green Builders (EGB). We will design and create large and small scale scrap castles comprised of sand and your scrap materials. This is a great time to meet the group, learn about upcoming events, and of how you can become involved. Please review the Beach Rules included below.

What You Bring | Used scrap materials such as: window frames (no glass), doors, small furniture, lumber, ply, (no nails) and any decorative item that you can haul out to the beach. Sand castle tools such as: buckets, shovels and maybe a ladder. Bring a friend, co-worker, or partner.

Beach Rules | Normal beach restrictions will apply: No smoking, no fires or fireworks, no tents or temporary enclosures, lifeguards' directions must be obeyed, etc. For more on Beach Rules, see http://www01.smgov.net/osm/beachrules.htm. Be sensible when choosing scrap to bring to the beach. If you are unsure about what you may bring or are looking for more information about this event, you may contact Paul at pjramirez@gmx.com

*Note | Tours of the Annenberg Community Beach House are at 11am, 1pm and 3pm for more information contact Paul at pjramirez@gmx.com

About EGB-LA
EGB-LA, a committee of the USGBC-LA Chapter provides emerging green builders, primarily young professionals and students, a network from which to gain knowledge and become involved in the green building community, established by the USGBC-LA.

Leave the Land Alone by Bruce Nauman

Realized September 12th, 2009 in Pasadena
See previous post regarding this work on the ecoartspace blog here.

Armory 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Installations Inside/Out
September 20 – December 31, 2009
Opening reception, Saturday, September 19, 2009, 6–9 p.m.
Jay Belloli and Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne, curators

This exhibition will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Armory Center for the Arts by commissioning twenty contemporary artists, who have created art installations in the past, to make new site-specific art installations both inside and outside the Armory. Artists in the exhibition will include Kim Abeles, Edgar Arceneaux, Deborah Aschheim, Daniel Buren, Carl Cheng, Seth Kaufman, Bruce Nauman, Barry McGee, Michael C. McMillen, Carlos Mollura, Matthew Moore, Jane Mulfinger, Sarah Perry, Rudy Perez, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Barbara T. Smith, John Trevino, Pae White, and Mario Ybarra Jr.

The Armory has a long-standing goal of supporting contemporary Southern California artists, as well as the Gallery’s determination to bring art to the public in exterior, non-art locations.

At the Armory, Caldwell, Mezzanine, Art All iance Galleries and outside the Armory.

i wanna jam with you

Public Fruit Jam 2009!

Fourth Annual Jam with the Fallen Fruit Collective

Sunday, August 2
10am to 1pm

at Machine Project

This year Fallen Fruit has also sent out a National Call for a Summer of Public Fruit Jams, encouraging people everywhere to get together and organize their own collective jam sessions. Their hope is to inspire a national movement of public jamming.

AFLA's 2009 Design Green Call for Entries and Scholarship

From the Architectural Foundation of Los Angeles: As Renzo Piano suggests, sustainability is the 21st century order for architecture and the built environment-and when exceptional design is seamlessly integrated with new high performance standards for conservation and sustainable building practices are implemented, innovative and sophisticated solutions are the result. This evolution of form is coming of age and changing the landscape one space, one home, and one building at a time. The Architectural Foundation of Los Angeles (AFLA) mission recognizes this metamorphosis of design integrated with the language of sustainability and a spirit of environmental justice. AFLA recognizes both LEED and the Living Building Challenge (LBC) as measures of best practice sustainable design and sees a need to recognize design elegance in that context. The Design/Green Awards were created by the AFLA to honor exceptional design of LEED and LBC projects in Southern California. As with the judging of last year's entries, this year's jury will include internationally recognized architects, engineers, and designers.

To download an application form go to http://www.afla.us/cfe.html

Are You Happy to See Me?
UNITED FRUIT at LACE

June 16 - Sept 27, 2009

FALLEN FRUIT who will be in residence at the Hedlands in the Bay Area for the month of July opens a new show this month in Los Angeles that explores the most popular fruit in the world, the banana. United Fruit, drawn from Fallen Fruit’s recent trip to Colombia, examines the social, political and pop history of the banana.

OPENING RECEPTION: Tuesday 16 June 2009, 8pm - 10pm, featuring Are You Happy to See Me?, a participatory performance involving hundreds of bananas available for eating. Attendees will be encouraged to photograph themselves playing with this often comical or suggestive fruit.

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
6522 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90028
Gallery Hours: Weds-Sun 12-6, Fri 12-9
www.welcometolace.org

NewTown has presented several of these "trail art" exhibitions in Pasadena over the last ten years. Here is the latest. Don't miss it! Only open for two days and includes a great line up of site-specific art and nature experts and some new names. If you go and take pictures, please send me some or send a link to post on the ecologic blog.

NewTown Presents:

On the trail of A Half Mile of Al Fresco Installations, sculptures and performances

Karen Bonfigli & Andreas Hessing
Neil Fenn
Thadeus Frazier-Reed and Cassia Streb
Libby Gerber
John P. Hastings
Stanton Hunter
Huckleberry Lain
Richard Newton
John O’Brien & Cielo Pessione
Toti O’Brien
Miguel Olivares
Joseph Ravens
Karen Reitzel

June 6, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM
June 7, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Hahamongna Watershed Park (see below for directions)
Free
A stroll through art and nature

Directions to Show: The Park is in the northwest corner of Pasadena, just south of JPL. Exit the 210 Fwy. at the Berkshire/Oak Grove offramp (N. of 210/134 Intersection). If you were going west on 210, turn right. If going east on 210, turn left. Turn left at Oak Grove (light at end of Berkshire). Go 0.3 miles to stop light at Foothill Blvd.. Turn right into park. Turn left to go down the hill to main parking area. Maps will be available at parking lot island.

**Contact Information**
Richard Amromin, Artistic Director
info@newtownarts.org
www.newtownarts.org
(626)398-9278 or (626)240-7787 (show dates only)

Otis Connects with the San Joaquin Valley

This is an awesome community arts project that connects graduate students in the Social Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design with the rural agricultural area of Laton, California. Initiated by Suzanne Lacy who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. For more information go to https://wikis.otis.edu/sjv/index.php/Welcome!_Bienvenidos!_Bem-vindo!

The very first Social Practice program "graduate exhibition" open till June 6th at the Santa Monica College Pete & Susan Barrett Art Gallery (includes work by Candida Ayala, Andy Manoushagain, Ofunne Obiamiwe, Jules Rochielle Sievert and Tory Tepp). Installation shot below: