All Programs


Sonic Dust Live Activation
Mar
10

Sonic Dust Live Activation

  • Elysian Park Los Angeles, CA, 90012 United States (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Sonic Dust explores the material, metaphor, and mobile conditions of dust, smog, and smoke and the generative engagements between beings and space. Inherently liminal as something both precarious and dynamic, dust is a formless challenger of form that subverts economies of order from architecture’s materiality, to the binary of cleanliness/dirtiness, to a possible method for “de-in-visibilizing” matter we otherwise ignore.

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Day/Dream Closing
Sep
24

Day/Dream Closing

  • 1313 Sunset Boulevard Los Angeles, CA, 90026 United States (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Day/Dream, a collaborative spatial project on Sunset Boulevard by artist Sara Suárez and architect Regina Teng, closes on September 24.

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Day/Dream: Melting Soundscapes by Martancho
Sep
13

Day/Dream: Melting Soundscapes by Martancho

M_A is excited to present Melting Soundscapes, a performance by sound artist Martancho (Martín Velez), inside the Day/Dream installation. Melting Soundscapes is a live, generative sound piece exploring ice as a sonic material, creating intricate textures as it melts, cracks and transforms.

Doors will open to visitors at 7:30 PM. The performance will begin at 8:00 PM.

Melting Soundscapes is free to attend. We will be accepting material drop-offs for HEAT AID during the program, so please bring items to donate! A list of recommended items is here. 


Born in Bogota, Martín Velez (AKA Martancho) lives in the Los Angeles area. Martín’s work combines music, sound, science, and technology into single interactive experiences that aim to cultivate social consciousness and self-awareness within audiences at a personal and environmental level. His installation works have been presented in Los Angeles and Bogota. Martín holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and Sound Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and a Master in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. 

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Present Continuous
Sep
10

Present Continuous

Thank you for joining us for an evening gathering in the shadow of Black — Still on its closing day, September 10th as we raised a toast to our 2023 summer projects and recognized the generosity of our community across LA that is critical to sustaining a vibrant landscape of cultural production in architecture.

Present Continuous, a celebration of our past, present, and ongoing commitment to experiments in public space, featured a taco bar, drinks by Amass, Health-Ade, Topo Chico, and Sanzo, donuts from Trejo’s Donuts, music by Boneless Pizza, ceramics by Vincent Yung, florals from Muddy Heaven, and goodies sponsored by Capsule Parfumerie, Fly by Jing, Plunge, and Vacation.

Photography by Christopher Lee

 

Many thanks to our Host Committee: Benjamin Ball, Honora Shea, Jia Yi Gu, Mira Henry, and Mimi Zeiger; and our M&A Board of Directors: Abigail Smith, Kimberli Meyer, Mishal Hashmi, Warren Techentin, and V. Mitch McEwen.


This event was ticketed to cover costs and provide support to M_A as we develop our upcoming exhibitions and public programs.


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Black — Still: Celebration
Sep
9

Black — Still: Celebration

Join us for a celebratory penultimate afternoon at Black — Still among stalls and stands featuring Black-owned art, craft, and cultural businesses.

Vendors include Bless the Theory, Brookai, Creations by Hellena, Epiphany Soaps & Blends, Jade Vine Jewelry, Junie Bees Butta, Lucas Pincer-Flynn, Otts & Kulcha, Paige René Body Essentials, SampleHAUS, and Soul Food Company.

Food is provided by Crenshaw Coffee Co., D. Lo’s Kitchen, and Vurger Guyz with DJ sets by feeemz + Professor X.

RSVPs are encouraged; this event is free and open to the public.

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Black — Still: Restoration
Aug
27

Black — Still: Restoration

12pm-1:30pm: Workshop with the Center for Restorative Justice Works
2pm-3:30pm: Meditation with Jylani Ma’at

At 12pm, the afternoon kicks off with a workshop presented by the Center For Restorative Justice Works introducing how people at an individual level can become involved in compassionate activism. The workshop will include an introduction to restorative justice, non-violent and healthy communication and conflict resolution, and the importance of community and relationships in the role of healing.

All ages are encouraged to attend this workshop.

Following the workshop, at 2pm, Jylani Ma’at will lead groups in meditation. In Ma’at’s words, Black still*ness is an opportunity to sit in and with many B/blacknesses via an exploration of the senses. Ma’at will guide visitors in exercises of simple embodiment and presence toward a sense of peace and well-being.

There will be multiple meditation sessions, each limited to 10 participants.

These workshops are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

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Black — Still presents...Deluge
Aug
26

Black — Still presents...Deluge

Join us at Black — Still for an evening of ambient and experimental sound from boundary-pushing artists and performers algorythm.code, 6999, and Kelman Duran featuring Harmony Holiday.

Black — Still will be activated with a set of site-specific soundscapes, creating a heightened engagement between visitors and the installation. The interior of the installation will be reserved as a space for guests to immerse themselves in deep listening, with the surrounding courtyard acting as a space for connection and conversation. Together, the space becomes an environment for introspection and communal engagement around the radical possibilities of Black space and sound. 

Doors will open at 4:30pm, and performances will begin at 5:30pm.

RSVPs are encouraged.

 

Deluge is a music performance series that seeks to explore the depths and outer reaches of ambient, experimental, and avant-garde sound. The series aims to create environments for deep listening and discourse around innovative work with a focus on BIPOC artists, building upon the rich landscape of ambient and experimental music performance in Los Angeles with a socially and critically engaged approach.

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Black — Still: Narratives
Jul
16

Black — Still: Narratives

12pm-1:30: Storytelling with A New Way of Life
2pm-3:30: Affirmations with BEAM

At noon, A New Way of Life shares their “Testif-i | Storytelling for Change” platform, which empowers formerly incarcerated women and their children to share their truth, trauma, and triumph. This day’s Testif-i session will be offered by moderator Pamela Marshall and by Evie, a member of the 2022 Testif-i cohort. Attendees will first listen to Evie's 2022 Testif-i testimony and then join them in an intimate conversation and learn more about their experiences with mass incarceration and reentry.

As this will be an intimate event, participation is limited to 20. While children are not discouraged, this workshop is best suited for adults. Content may be difficult and emotional, but also empowering and uplifting.

The afternoon continues with the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective’s (BEAM) “Dear Black People” affirmation project, designed to disrupt public space by providing messages of radical love for Black people. Each affirmation speaks to some of the unique challenges that different Black communities face, and provides reframing dialogue that serves to combat narratives of self-hate rooted in patriarchy, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia. BEAM is, additionally, a resource that may provide guidance on mental health services, events, tools, etc. to support folks on their healing journeys. 

Participation in BEAM’s workshop will be limited to 20.

These events are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

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Black — Still: Movement
Jun
25

Black — Still: Movement

Schedule

12pm-1:30
Yoga with Sonya Om

2pm-3:30
Movement with Ajani Brannum

 

The afternoon will begin at 12pm with a yoga session for all ages led by Sonya Om. The session will feature classical yoga practice for all levels and include postures, breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation. Anyone can join, and modifications will be offered. 

The afternoon concludes 2-3:30pm with a workshop with movement artist Ajani Brannum. What can our bodies teach us about liberation? Better yet, what do they remember about it? In this workshop, we'll talk about, reflect on, and move with "the fullness of [our] depth of feeling" (to quote Audre Lorde). This session will be an invitation to practice right relation with ourselves, other beings, and the land that holds us. 

Brannum’s movement workshop is most appropriate for folks ages 18 and up. Participants are encouraged to bring something to write with and on. This workshop will be limited to 15 participants.

These events are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

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Black — Still: Opening
May
28

Black — Still: Opening

Join us for the opening of Black – Still.

The afternoon begins as designers Megan Echols and Dana McKinney White of enFOLD Collective present an opening-day talk and walkthrough of the M&A summer installation in the M_A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard. 

The walkthrough is followed by an immersive sound bath experience offered by Dr. Kischa Campbell. By utilizing a number of instruments, including crystal chakra sound bowls, chimes, and drums, we will combine our energies to create an environment of healing.

The sound baths are recommended for adults and kids over the age of 10 (and younger, if they can be still for an extended period of time). Sound bath participants are encouraged to bring a yoga mat/seating cushion, comfortable clothing, and other comforts such as an eye mask.

This event is part of a series centering health and wellness, taking place throughout Summer 2023 in our installation, Black — Still, designed by artists enFOLD Collective. Read more about Black – Still here.

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Gathering Tides: Live Dream Journal Reading
Apr
23

Gathering Tides: Live Dream Journal Reading

Join M_A for the culmination of the Gathering Tides Dreaming Workshop Series. Through this series of workshop sessions guided by artist Sara Suárez, participants have generated a collective dream journal interweaving our nighttime wanderings, visions, and sensations. This shared archive will shape a collaborative installation by Suárez and architect Regina Teng in the M_A Storefront project space.

In this live group reading of our collective dream journal, we will explore, reflect on, and give voice to this “reservoir” of dreams and create voice recordings that will be included in the sound composition and installation designed by Suárez and Teng. 

The group reading will start at 3:30 pm. Stop by anytime between 3-6 to contribute and discover dreams, create voice recordings, and meet new friends.

The event is free to attend and all are welcome. We would appreciate it if you could RSVP here.

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Gathering Tides IV
Apr
9

Gathering Tides IV

Join M_A for a fourth workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

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Gathering Tides III
Mar
12

Gathering Tides III

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M_A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

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Gathering Tides II
Feb
12

Gathering Tides II

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

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Disc Journal Issue 2.0 "Intimacy" Launch
Jan
29

Disc Journal Issue 2.0 "Intimacy" Launch

Join us for the Los Angeles launch of Disc Journal’s second issue, which takes up the theme of intimacy.

Commissioned by Disc Journal, the design collective Office Party was invited to develop two events, one hosted in New York City and the other in Los Angeles, that explore opposing models of intimacy unique to two common party environments: the dance and the dinner party. The respectively loud and quiet spaces of each gathering calibrate the terms of interpersonal engagement—how close do you need to be to speak with someone, what kind of body language is appropriate, what can other people see you do, and what can slide unnoticed, masked by the distractions of the party. 

The quiet launch event, hosted at the Materials & Applications Storefront in Los Angeles, converts the noise of the gathering’s Sunset Boulevard venue into the polite silence of a dinner party through the installation of a horizontal, 4-by-8 ft acoustically-engineered table. Sound-absorbing panels on the surface of the dinner table and the surrounding walls deaden ambient noise, bringing the conversation of guests, the sounds of eating, and the percussion of utensils to the fore. The remaining noises are recorded by conspicuously-placed microphones that sit as centerpieces on the table, making diners aware of how their voices and actions might be transmitted across the space of the party.

The remnants of the launch party will be left in place for display in the M_A Storefront, leaving traces of the evening’s activities. Recorded sounds of the event will be made available for remote listening, reactivating the guests’ conversations and discussions of the publication.

Disc explores the entanglements between architecture, media, and technology. Each issue has a different theme, form, and design. Disc is editorially independent and para-institutional.

Office Party is an international research and design collective specializing in the production of temporary events, installations, and exhibitions. With an attention to sustainable material systems and community resource-pooling, the office critically examines the role of parties and similar ephemeral spaces as the origin of complex social and material networks with urban, political, and environmental effects. Office Party further investigates the ways that parties provide insight into the development of architecture as a temporary and responsive mode of space-making through written and editorial work.

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Quiet Party
Jan
29
to May 1

Quiet Party

Office Party’s design for Disc Journal’s second issue launch converts the noise of a gathering in M_A’s Sunset Boulevard venue into the polite silence of a dinner party through the installation of a horizontal, 4-by-8 ft acoustically-engineered table. Sound-absorbing panels on the surface of the dinner table and the surrounding walls deaden ambient noise, bringing the conversation of guests, the sounds of eating, and the percussion of utensils to the fore. The remaining noises are recorded by conspicuously-placed microphones that sit as centerpieces on the table, making diners aware of how their voices and actions might be transmitted across the space of the party.

Traces of the evening’s activities are left in the M_A Storefront project space as a display. The project may be visited by appointment.

Office Party is an international research and design collective specializing in the production of temporary events, installations, and exhibitions. With an attention to sustainable material systems and community resource-pooling, the office critically examines the role of parties and similar ephemeral spaces as the origin of complex social and material networks with urban, political, and environmental effects. Office Party further investigates the ways that parties provide insight into the development of architecture as a temporary and responsive mode of space-making through written and editorial work.

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Gathering Tides I
Dec
14

Gathering Tides I

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is the first in a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023.

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors.

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides I is the first in a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

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KGAP 96.7 FM-LP
Sep
12

KGAP 96.7 FM-LP

Materials & Applications is happy to announce the public launch of M&A Radio, Los Angeles’ only terrestrial architecture radio program, on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM. We are now broadcasting on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM and streaming online, here.

M&A Architecture Radio publishes audio issues of contributions --podcast episodes, field recordings, interviews, experiments, etc-- about the built environment. We publish two issues on air each year, with each broadcasting via 96.7 KGAP from our terrestrial tower in Burbank for six months out of the year. Over the air, these works are played on a random loop, so listeners encounter found and coincidental audio. Listeners may also tune in from this website to find a curated archive of projects that we are broadcasting via our radio tower, as well as works that are exclusive to our website due to profane content.

About K-GAP 96.7

KGAP (96.7 FM) is an architecture radio station run by Materials & Applications and broadcasting from the hills of Burbank, California. KGAP partners with Los Angeles-based radio network Lookout FM to share critical and curated programming centering on architecture, art, and critical practices.  

About Lookout FM 

LOOKOUT FM is a new independent FM radio network in Los Angeles. Broadcasting in Burbank on 96.7FM KGAP and Hollywood on 99.1FM KZUT, LOOKOUT FM is an observatory: curated audio programming with a wide outlook: varied perspectives on the world expressed through music, documentaries, lectures, poetry, and discussion.  Partnered with voices from the indigenous community, the music community, the arts community, and the academic community, LOOKOUT FM offers long-term perspectives on that which lasts: nature, and the arts.

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Threads: A Conversation about Textiles in Art and Architecture
Aug
21

Threads: A Conversation about Textiles in Art and Architecture

On the occasion of Veil Craft, Materials & Applications with Craft Contemporary presents a conversation between practitioners across art and architecture on the topic of textiles and fibers. Veil Craft draws upon the materiality of a city under constant construction, transforming the debris netting that adorns building sites into a meditative pocket park that gestures toward cultures of maintenance, histories of gendered labor, and the presentation of the body. Threads convenes a community formed through practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material to explore connections between and beyond.

PARTICIPANTS

Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her BA from Yale University in English literature and a MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the 01SJ Biennial, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the Sundance Channel. Her honors include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination, and her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.

Casey Baden is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, text, natural dye, sun-lit photographic exposures, painting, weaving, clay, and installation. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she completed her BFA at New York University, 2014, and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Combing craft (the handmade, embodied knowledge, enduring labor) with figuration, intimate personal experience, and the domestic, Baden attempts to foster the critical space of emotion and create opportunities for immersion and embodiment. Presently she is the co-founder of an artist-run space and arts fabrication project called Full Service Creative and the co-founder of an up-and-coming fiber resource center, Textile Resource LA.

Current Interests is a Los Angeles-based architectural design studio founded by Matthew Au and Mira Henry. As a creative collaboration, Current Interests’ built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking. Matthew and Mira are design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture and have visiting faculty appointments at Princeton University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live as she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Computational textiles are textiles that respond to cues in the environment or use the changeable properties of the material itself to communicate information, thereby transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. Davis is interested in developing computational methods and designs in relation to specific bodies in specific places, engaging specific social, cultural, and political constructions.

Figure is a San Francisco-based architecture collective led by James Leng and Jennifer Ly, RA. Their work explores relationships between art, architecture, and community. Their current interests include unexpected materials, dollhouses, and rocks. James and Jennifer received their architectural education from Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of California, Berkeley. They have received numerous fellowships and awards, and have been published in The Architectural Review, Log, and CLOG, among others. They are also lecturers at UC Berkeley.

Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. She completed her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Opazo has exhibited works internationally including at the Museum of Visual Art, Santiago, Chile, CAM Gallery, ACRE, the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and CalArts. She has been awarded various residencies including at the Banff Centre, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, The REEF, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MASS MoCA. She recently had her work published in Artforum and Lumzine.

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Veil Craft by Figure
Jun
19
to Sep 12

Veil Craft by Figure

About Veil Craft

Even as the pandemic brought Los Angeles public life to a halt, construction continued, unabated and deemed an essential activity. Shimmering veils of green, white, orange, and black construction textiles are found across the city, their presence signaling many things: perhaps a future shelter for those without or, more often than not, a simple indication for the public to keep out. Referred to often as construction tarps or debris netting, these robust, porous, and colorful textiles have inadvertently become a near-permanent facade aesthetic through the ubiquity of construction in the city of Los Angeles. 

Veil Craft is an architectural installation made from these textiles, transforming the courtyard of Craft Contemporary into an unexpected pocket park. The street wall, faced in commonplace green debris netting, masquerades as another construction site on Wilshire Boulevard. Yet the base of this wall opens up into a deep awning, producing a generous, shaded porch that invites the public into the courtyard interior. Beyond this threshold is a courtyard within a courtyard, draped with long pleated panels of white debris netting hung thirty feet up. In this shaded inner space, the pleated fabric creates varying effects of transparency and texture while playfully parting to make way for serendipitous intersections with existing courtyard elements. The various spaces perform a continuously shifting and unfolding act of veiling and revealing as one navigates through the courtyard, and the careful stitching and assembly of the textile panels juxtaposes references to domesticity, body and garment, and ornamentation alongside typical construction practices. Both playing into and upending these material associations, the installation brings forward the everyday, invisible materiality of Los Angeles’ changing landscape in order to interrogate it. 

The M_A x Craft Contemporary partnership in the museum courtyard itself transforms into a public venue for a series of summer events that bring artists and storytellers together into dialogue, with renewed focus onto questions of urban change, labor practices, and community engagement. Ultimately, Veil Craft aims to activate an interest in the overlooked materiality of our built environment, bringing together expert and non-expert publics in conversation about Los Angeles’s material culture. 

M_A and Craft Contemporary gratefully acknowledge the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Veil Craft is additionally supported by the Pasadena Art Alliance.

Veil Craft is the inaugural exhibition of M_A x Craft Contemporary, a five-year partnership between the two institutions exploring craft through art and architecture. Veil Craft is a site-specific installation by San Francisco-based architectural studio Figure, which takes its inspiration from the everyday construction materials in Los Angeles to transform the museum’s courtyard into a temporary pocket park.


Exhibition Images

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Material Realities: At Work
May
23

Material Realities: At Work

A unionization workshop with The Architecture Lobby and the MOCA Union

The last year has been a strange one for workers. Will there be layoffs? What is really expected of us? Are we being treated equitably? Can we have a say? Crisis can reveal and make more urgent the questions we’ve had all along.

Even before the global pandemic, workers in building and creative industries struggled to pay off student debt, support their families, and maintain their own well-being. A professional culture that celebrates genius and undervalues labor complicates matters. What can be achieved when we recognize that we are all part of the same, precarious labor force?

M&A celebrates May Day this month by learning about unions: what they are, how to establish your own, and who they empower. Join us for a workshop with Architecture Lobby organizers Keefer Dunn and Shota Vashakmadze, plus a presentation from Olivia Leiter of the MOCA Union. Together we’ll work through the pragmatics and aspirations of labor organizing for architects, students, and scholars alike.

SPEAKERS

Keefer Dunn is a licensed architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a sole practitioner, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the host of a radio show about architecture and politics called Buildings on Air. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and has previously served as the group’s National Organizer.

Olivia Leiter is an artist living in Los Angeles. She has had recent screenings and exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, and Human Resources, Los Angeles. She is on the organizing committee of the MOCA Union.

Shota Vashakmadze is a PhD student at UCLA and an organizer with UAW 2865, a union representing 19,000 student workers in the University of California system. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and helps coordinate its unionization working group.

At Work is the first event of Material Realities, a series of workshops and conversations about the positions we hold within a multitude of material circumstances. While we may be "architects" and "designers," we are also workers, tenants, kin, and allies. Material Realities explores our intersectional subjectivities to understand how we may collectively better our conditions.

Material Realities: At Work was organized by Aubrey Bauer, Kate Yeh Chiu, Mateus Comparato, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, and Dana McKinney.

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Why Not Us? w/ SCI-Arc Student Union
Nov
20

Why Not Us? w/ SCI-Arc Student Union

In collaboration with the SCI-Arc Student Union, Why Not Us? will explore non-traditional and critical modes of architectural practice and organizing, and speculate on how architecture can learn from mutual aid. The workshop is oriented towards identifying harmful systems present in traditional practices and internships, and will serve as a platform to brainstorm how students can instead build their own mutual aid networks and social infrastructures to flatten leadership in architectural production.

Are you a student organizer interested in participating? Email info@materialsandapplications.org for more info.

About STUN

The SCI-Arc Student Union (STUN) is a student-led organization at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. They administer student activities and help to support the student community at SCI-Arc by funding and organizing student events, built work, exhibitions, and publications. STUN organizes a monthly gathering open to the entire school that allows the SCI-Arc community to discuss and meet informally each week called Fridays@5, of which this program will be a part of.

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

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Why Not Aid? A Reading Event with Dean Spade on Mutual Aid
Nov
14

Why Not Aid? A Reading Event with Dean Spade on Mutual Aid

The architectural profession has long understood itself as a service providing for society’s most basic needs—shelter, community. In practice, the architects’ work is often structured by hierarchy and profit, filtered through contracts and laws. As architects, we have failed to erect the most basic systems of care for our own collective needs, and instead have invested in a service profession premised on harmful systems, including excessive student debt, transactional service models, exploitative labor conditions, and an extractive economy dedicated to clients holding the highest capital. When collective needs aren't being met, what can we do to address them now? 

In conversation with educator and activist Dean Spade, we will consider how mutual aid can challenge the organizational logic of professional practice. These networks focus on immediate forms of care rather than categorical solutions. What might architecture gain by moving away from transaction and toward care? Join us in reading and discussing a short chapter of Spade’s forthcoming book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), with the author and with each other. Register now to receive future updates, materials, and resource guides.


BIO

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He works as an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. Dean’s new book is forthcoming from Verso Press in October, 2020.

Registration for this Event is Closed. Check out the recording of the session below!

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

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Why Not Things?
Oct
30
to Oct 30

Why Not Things?

 

M_A Storefront hosts Why Not Things?, a new installation by Jesse Hammer that presents a visual inventory of the testimonials, material objects, and numbers that have emerged around the mutual aid initiative Heat Aid. A collection of things and graphics lend themselves to a stylized portrayal of energy, water, and talismans of refuge. The project simultaneously offers itself as a storage space for donated water units, and presents a visual accounting of the unfolding crisis of shade and water inequity. Somewhere between an Enzo Mari puzzle, a fashion storefront display, and an IRL infographic, the installation amplifies the literal container of the Storefront to extend itself to something that is thick with an attitude about the issues at play. Re-imaging the crisis through the ethos of mutual aid, Hammer’s project evokes how the sharing of things, alongside language and information, become tokens of love for a community in need.

Exhibition Images

About Jesse Hammer

Jesse Hammer is an Architect and Designer whose work explores colorful graphic forms, humor, and conceptual commentary with a nod to historic and cultural references. Having worked in both the abstract and practical realms of architecture, their unique experience is grounded in intellect and playfulness. They run a studio practice based in Los Angeles and hold a Masters of Architecture from UCLA.

Heat Aid was organized with M_A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

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Why Not Shade? Six Los Angeles Crime Stories
Oct
24

Why Not Shade? Six Los Angeles Crime Stories

Shade is a crucial yet criminalized resource in Los Angeles. City sidewalks, parks, bus stops, freeway underpasses, and the LA River are all sites in which the presence of shade is problematized and often explicitly made illegal. Motivations for criminalizing shade range from bureaucratic mismanagement to surveillance to issues of profit and beyond. More often than not, however, the lack of shade is a situational consequence with serious repercussions. Facing rising temperatures and impending heat waves, LA residents don't have many options for escaping the deadly heat. The lack of shade affects so many of us — walkers, bikers, and runners; children playing in parks; city transit takers; residents who are housed and those experiencing homelessness — and yet by no means does the illegalization of shade affect us all equally. Join us for six stories about shade and its criminalization in Los Angeles. Moderated by Sam Bloch, this session will address the complications of heat and shade through the topics of homelessness, the LA River, street vending, tree canopies, and public transportation. Speakers include Genevieve Liang from SELAH, Mark Vallianantos from LA Metro, Jessica Henson from LA River Project, and Lyric Kelkar from Inclusive Action, among others.


SPEAKERS

Sam Bloch is a journalist in New York. A staff writer at The Counter, a nonprofit newsroom, he has also written for The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Art in America, CityLab, Artnet News and others. He is currently at work on his first book, a work of narrative nonfiction for Random House that expands upon his Places Journal article "Shade." The book will be a surprising, urgent exploration of this underappreciated natural resource, which reveals deep inequalities in society and just might hold the key to mitigating climate change and make living with it bearable in the meantime. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, he used to live in one of Los Angeles’s shadiest neighborhoods.

Genevieve Liang is a clean technology strategist whose primary work focuses on decarbonizing the primary industrial sectors contributing to climate change. Three and half years ago, she began a deep dive into the homeless services ecosystem in Los Angeles via volunteer roles as executive director of Cardborigami, an emergency shelter product nonprofit; serving on the board of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition; and as a co-chair of her neighborhood council's housing and homelessness committee. Along the same vein as the community-scale, distributed energy resource projects that she has led commercial teams in realizing, she believes that geographically distributed and locally originated resources need to be intentionally integrated into the framework of local social services delivery.

Jessica Henson is a landscape architect at OLIN where she is currently the project manager for the 2020 Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. At OLIN she has developed numerous planning and design projects that seek to create socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure including the LA River Index and the Rio Hondo Confluence Area Project. Jessica’s other significant projects include the SELA Cultural Center, Chicago’s Vista and Willis Towers, a new residential precinct at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the new U.S. Embassies in London and Brasilia. Jessica teaches at the University of Southern California and is the co-editor of the recent book Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.

John Yi is the Executive Director of Los Angeles Walks. Prior to joining LA Walks in 2019, John was the Advocacy Director for the American Lung Association in California, where he worked on strong tobacco control and air quality policies. At the Lung Association, John also served as a lead organizer by training tobacco control coalitions throughout the state. He helped bring smoke-free ordinances to over a dozen different cities, fighting back against secondhand smoke and Big Tobacco's efforts to target low-income and communities of color. John also served as the interim National Director for Parent Revolution, an education and social justice non-profit. In this role he led parent organizing campaigns in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Ohio. He received his master's degree at Georgetown University and his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan. He is a brother of Pi Alpha Phi, speaks Korean and Russian, and loves to cook.

Kara Holekamp is a landscape designer and project manager at Terremoto. She earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from The University of Texas at Austin and has a background in Geography. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has had the opportunity to work on a variety of project types, including high-end residential, commercial, and office spaces. As part of the Terremoto team, she has taken on several adventurous projects and is inspired daily by her radically talented team. Terremoto is a ‘formally and conceptually ambitious’ landscape architecture studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

Lyric Kelkar is a Senior Associate of Policy and Research at Inclusive Action for the City, where she leads policy advocacy for better access to government systems and protections for underserved communities across LA. Her current projects include moving work forward for the LA Street Vendor Campaign, Healthy LA Coalition, and SPARCC LA table. Pulling from her Masters in Design and Urban Ecologies, she applies a design-thinking approach to research social challenges in the built environment and drives equitable policy and community development solutions to counteract exclusion within the field of urban planning.

Mark Vallianatos is Executive Officer in the Office of Extraordinary Innovation at LA Metro, where he works to implement the agency's strategic plan and staffs its COVID-19 recovery task force. Mark previously taught urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, co-founded Abundant Housing LA, and serves on the City of LA's zoning advisory committee. He is interested in the policy history of LA 'building blocks' like food trucks, single-family houses and low-rise apartments. Mark is the co-author of The Next Los Angeles: the Struggle for a Livable City. He received his BA and JD from the University of Virginia.


Registration for this Event is Closed. Check out the recording of the session below!

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

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STREAMING LIVE FROM LA: 6° A VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM
Sep
19

STREAMING LIVE FROM LA: 6° A VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM

6° is a single-day virtual symposium bringing together six L.A. non-profit art organizations. Through dynamic, individually presented programs from the viewpoint of each institution, we aim to begin a collective and open conversation addressing how to dismantle and identify systemic racial inequalities in the art world. Where can we start?

Find more details at 6degrees.la and tune in Saturday, September 19, 2020 from 10 AM - 5 PM PST!

6° Program:
10 AM – Materials & Applications Organizing as Architectural Labor
11 AM – Art + Practice Making L.A. Arts Education More Equitable
12 PM – NAVEL This Must Be The Place: Practicing Divestment, Investment, and Sharing Power
2 PM – The Underground Museum Building Community Within Our Community
3 PM – Craft Contemporary To the Past, Towards the Future 
4 PM – ICA LA Support for Coalitions / Coalitions for Support

All times PST and subject to change due to live events. Visit 6degrees.la for all the details!

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