The Rethinking Structures Book Club focuses on the intersections of social justice and art world justice. We use art as a gateway into social justice, and social justice as a lens to rethink the art world. Each guest is a leader in the L.A. art community and will select a reading to present and discuss with the group.
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Past Events:
April 24, 2021: Erin Christovale
No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues — Sylvia Wynter
Erin Christovale is the associate curator at the Hammer museum and the co-founder of Black Radical Imagination.
Saturday, March 20, 1–2:30pm PST: Cassils & rafa esparza: Selected readings from the In Plain Sight reader
Hosted by: WCCW and CARLA
Free
The Rethinking Structures Book Club focuses on the intersections of social justice and art world justice. We use art as a gateway into social justice, and social justice as a lens to rethink the art world. Each guest is a leader in the L.A. art community and will select a reading to present and discuss with the group.
Our March session, led by performance artists Cassils and rafa esparza, will be centered around the In Plain Sight Reader, which includes selected essays and excerpts from Audre Lorde, Edouard Glissant, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith, Will Rawls and Thomas Lax.
The reader was compiled for a class called “Art, Activism, Modernity” that Cassils co-taught with Jessica Posner at Syracuse University in Fall of 2020. This class exclusively featured artists who collaborated on the In Plain Sight public artwork, which was initiated by Cassils and rafa esparza in July 2020 and is dedicated to the abolition of immigrant detention and the United States culture of incarceration. These readings engage the practices of a diverse group of artists whose practices critically, thoughtfully, and beautifully engage intersectional struggles of our time.
rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces.
esparza is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014), and Art Matters Foundation grant (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio, TX (2018); Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA (2017); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2015); Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2015); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2013). esparza has performed at art institutions including Performance Space New York and the Ellipse, Washington, D.C. (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and Clockshop, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2014). Selected group shows were held at San Diego Art Institute, CA (2019); DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2019); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); GAMMA Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NV (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); LA><ART, CA (2017); PARTICIPANT, INC., New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2015); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013).
Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’s art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands. They are the recipient of a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artfourm, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalogue Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020).
Saturday, February 27, 1–2:30pm PST
Hosted by: WCCW and CARLA
Free
The Rethinking Structures Book Club will focus on the intersections of social justice and art world justice. We will use art as a gateway into social justice, and social justice as a lens to rethink the art world. Each guest is a leader in the L.A. art community and will select a reading to present and discuss with the group.
The second session is led by Nikita Gale, an LA-based artist whose recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions. Gale will be leading a discussion on the Foreword to June Jordan’s Civil Wars, which Gale reads once a season: “It’s a perfect summation of everything she was about: standing up after getting your asskicked; not being annihilated by sexism, racism, and homophobia; remembering to imagine what it is that you want.”
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Gale holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology and the organic. Gale’s recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.
Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.
Sunday, January 30, 1–2:30pm PST
Hosted by: WCCW and CARLA
Free
The Rethinking Structures Book Club will focus on the intersections of social justice and art world justice. We will use art as a gateway into social justice, and social justice as a lens to rethink the art world. Each guest is a leader in the L.A. art community and will select a reading to present and discuss with the group. Together, we will discuss pathways forward that focus on community and care. The first session of this four-part program will feature Ceci Moss, and discuss As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now?
“As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now? compiles responses to a survey distributed to curators, museum directors, artists, and writers in the wake of Trump’s election to office, and it asks big picture questions about the role and value of art institutions during a crisis. One question in the survey is simply “How can art institutions be better?” As we move into a new presidency and new year in 2021, I’m hoping we can revisit this text as a jumping point to imagine new, visionary forms of arts organizations, going far beyond “better” into the entirely revolutionary.” –Ceci Moss
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 University of Southern California, Scripps College, the San Francisco Art Institute and New York University.