18th Street Arts Center (Airport Campus)

Unfolding Possibilities: Something to Ponder for the New Year

December 15, 2021 By Debra Disman

What do we seek, yearn for, want, crave, need, are motivated to strive for, for this New Year coming up?

What is Possible?
And

How do we Achieve it?

What are the Possibilities, and how do we Realize them, in this day and age, in this present moment, under our current circumstances, confronted by challenges seemingly too numerous to count, much less take in?

Unfolding Possibilities, (front cover) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

We have to somehow move forward in a positive way, keep on truckin’, keep on trying, keep at it, continue, keep on keeping on.
We have to try, each in our own way. Hopefully, something will line up.

Unfolding Possibilities, (closed) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

An initiative of the Los Angeles Count Department of Mental Health, Why We Rise LA took place in May 2021, supporting hundreds of Community Arts & Culture Projects which took place across all Los Angeles County neighborhoods, in partnership with more than 100 community groups, artists, grassroots leaders, healers and other LA County Departments. These projects and collaborations included mural making, ancestral healing workshops, a Countywide public literary art project, a Countywide chalk art program and more to celebrate the remarkable resources and communities in LA County and used arts-based strategies for healing and wellbeing.

I was honored to teach a workshop as part of Why We Rise LA 2021 in coordination with 18th Street Art Center’s Arts Learning Lab @ Home: called: Bookmaking with Self-Compassion.
See the workshop HERE!
Nearly 70 online participants learned to create the “Flower Fold” book structure, then added embellishment, images, and words expressing their experience of the pandemic, where they are at now, what they learned, what they wanted to share, their hopes, wishes, dreams, cares , fears, realizations, trauma, expressing the full gamut of human emotions.

The range of words submitted was wide-ranging, thought-provoking and evocative….including opposite emotions and experiences and bits of truth-telling, realizations and wisdom participants seemed eager to pass on to others in other words, humanness in its multiplicity.

I took the words generated by this workshop, and requested from the community at large, and stitched them into an Artists’ Book I made as a community collaboration, entitled, “Unfolding Possibilities“. (“Unfolding Possibilities – Possibilities Unfolding”). Videographer Jeny Amaya created a video of the project which was screened during the 18th Street Art Center event, “Left/Right/Here“

Unfolding Possibilities, Possibilities Unfolding: the making of above.

**Unfolding Possibilities**, (interior) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

**Unfolding Possibilities**, (interior detail) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

When confronted with what seems like overwhelming odds, and not in your/our, favor, try making something, try creating. Here is a workshop to show you how to do it, just one of countless, infinite ways you can make something (out of almost nothing-), create something, experience working with your hands and heart and imagination, craft something, fashion something, and perhaps share this with others. Relax your heart and soul and play. Just see, if you do not emerge, like the butterfly, stronger for the effort. Enjoy. See what happens.

Wishing You the absolute best, healthiest, most creative, most supportive, safest, and imaginative, New Year, now and ever.

Here. We . Go.

“Unfolding Possibilities” for RECOVERY JUSTICE: BEING WELL

August 16, 2021 By Debra Disman

I was honored to teach a workshop as part of Why We Rise LA 2021 in coordination with 18th Street Art Center’s Arts Learning Lab @ Home: called: Bookmaking with Self-Compassion.
See the workshop HERE!
Nearly 70 online participants learned to create the “Flower Fold” book structure, then added embellishment, images, and words expressing their experience of the pandemic, where they are at now, what they learned, what they wanted to share, their hopes, wishes, dreams, cares , fears, realizations, trauma, expressing the full gamut of human emotions.

“Unfolding Possibilities” is on view in the Recovery Justice: Being Well exhibition, at 18th Street Art Center‘s Airport Campus Gallery, through September 10, 2021.

RECOVERY JUSTICE: Being Well

January 31, 2021 By Debra Disman

I am thrilled to participate in:

RECOVERY JUSTICE: Being Well

March 8, 2021 – July 16, 2021
at
18th Street Arts Center (Airport Campus)

“Being Well” is what we seek together as neighbors, and recalls one of the central guiding principles of the City of Santa Monica, the notion of “wellbeing” as key to civic health. Recovery Justice: Being Well, aims to highlight the recent circumstances that have evolved during the pandemic (racial justice demonstrations and destruction, as well as social discontent and general disconnection) into a series of self-organized artist projects that merges the exterior and interior public spaces of City of Santa Monica property. 18th Street Airport Campus at Santa Monica Municipal Airport will be the site where artists reimagine the city and beyond in the midst of complex social unrest globally. Recovery Justice will recuperate through various means the digital and physical footprints left in a city that struggles to reclaim the seemingly peaceful environment it once had. Artists will develop a palette for making and sharing artworks responding to the street experience in safe, healing and expressive modes. This porous series is a point of departure to reconcile and redefine the concept of justice.

This collage of self-organized artist projects was organized around the common theme of Recovery Justice, facilitated as part of Sara Daleiden’s artist project and ongoing conversations nurtured through a series of online conversations with 18th Street’s artist community called “Creative Roundtables” over the past 8 months. These projects will manifest in outdoor presentations on the side of the building; sculptural, photographic, painting and video work in the galleries; and a series of online and drive-in events in Spring of 2021. The artists’ presentations will also be represented online and via a 360 tour for virtual viewing.”

Participating artists include: Sara Daleiden, Nicola Goode, Susie McKay Krieser, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, M Susan Broussard, Lionel Popkin, Yrneh Gabon Brown, Lola del Fresno, Debra Disman, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Gregg Chadwick, Luciana Abait, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Rebecca Youssef, and Dan S. Wang.

Sara Daleiden’s residency and facilitation work on these projects is generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Bailiwik is also a supporting partner on this exhibition.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR
(such a joy working with Sara)
Sara Daleiden is a Los Angeles-based artist who facilitates civic engagement within developing landscapes, exercising arts and cultural exchange strategies. She encourages local cultures to value neighborhoods, public space, civic art, land and racial and gender equity. Sara has an expertise in working with artists and other cultural entrepreneurs for civic engagement, creative placemaking, network development and small business development.

Her project at 18th Street Arts Center grows out of the placekeeping work that 18th Street has been engaged in over the past six years through our cultural asset mapping project (culturemapping90404.org) and the Commons Lab, which involves community voices to define, center, and connect cultural practices within their own neighborhoods. Her practice investigates the influence of location, scale, market, values and other regional factors on the production of the arts and cultural identity. Through methodologies involving partnership mapping, network building, and the facilitation of self-organizing and advocacy, Sara aims to enhance the advocacy power of artists in influencing neighborhood development in the city. Her durational engagement with 18th Street will spin off land-based activations with opportunities for neighbors, artists, city staff, and the broader public to participate. Sara has been collaborating with arts workers Nicola Goode, Susannah Laramee Kidd, Dorit Cypis and Kimberli Meyer for this artist project.

Pictured is “drift”, a collaboration between myself, and esteemed 18th Street colleague and artist, Luciana Abait.

More To Come!!!

“Drawing Connections” draws to a close

August 10, 2020 By Debra Disman

The exhibition, “Drawing Connections” February 10, 2020 – August 7, 2020 at the 18th Street Arts Center (Airport Campus has drawn (pun intended) to a close. But it lives on in documentation, the video of the show below, the works of the artists who participated, and the words of those who organized and responded to it.

It has been a joy to participate!

Thank you curator Frida Cano, and the incomparable 18th Street Arts Center!

See the show!

“Drawing Connections aims to trace the invisible networks between a selection of current artists in residence at 18th Street Arts Center, both from our 18th Street campus and our Airport hangar. The show highlights how artists from different backgrounds and whose practices range from traditional to experimental art can dialogue through one of the earliest and most fundamental tools for human expression, drawing. This process of mark-making reveals the initial creative impulse that may later take the form of a video, a performance, a piece of music, an art installation, a painting, or a drawing itself. This curatorial exercise intends to delve into the essence of the multivalent creative practices of the artistic community of 18th Street Arts Center.”

Art historian Susan Power writes:

“Defined in art historical terms by its materials— works on paper in pencil, charcoal, chalk, ink, watercolor, and so on—drawing encompasses a broad spectrum of human activity across time and culture. Ubiquitous and perennial, drawing crosses the boundaries delimiting disciplines and geographies. Drawing connects us over the ages to our earliest human ancestors and our childhood selves. Even the etymology of the word, related to the verb “to draw” and deriving from Old English “to pull,” can have a plethora of meanings—drawing arms and drawing blood are two, which tragically jump to mind during these incredibly challenging times. Within the context of our current crises, the very premise of the 18th Street Art Center exhibition “Drawing Connections” takes on unanticipated significance, as do so many other activities often take for granted in our daily lives.

The first open-call cross-campus exhibition since 18th Street Art Center expanded its residency program to the Santa Monica Airport locale in 2019, “Drawing Connections” sought (seeks?) not only to showcase the fertile dialogues between work by all their artists in residence, whose practices cover a myriad of approaches, but also to encourage encounters and conversations among the artists and outside communities. Occupying the two wide corridors running the length of the former airplane hangar, the exhibition space invites circulation and exchange, luring artists out of their adjacent studios to mingle with fellow artists, art world professionals and enthusiasts, friends, neighbors and visitors from afar. But the ways we now connect have also undergone a radical shift with the existential threat of the pandemic. The participatory, experiential dimension of “Drawing Connections” was thus short-lived due to the sheltering-at-home orders in effect since mid-March.

The practice of drawing involves making connections—between the physical and the mental, hand or body and mind, concept and form, observation and imagination, perception and thought, interior and exterior. Reflecting on the conceptual underpinnings of the show, the exhibiting artists contributed work that engages with the medium in all its diversity, representing an astounding array of concerns. Together, the multi-generational group of twenty-five artists offers a remarkable cross-section of approaches running the gamut from traditional to experimental, from intimate and personal to interactive and collective. Together, the artworks converse across materials and techniques, complicating any notion of media-specificity, exploding any sense of unity inherent to drawing, and opening it up to endless possibility.”

Featured artists: Deborah Lynn Irmas, Dan S. Wang, Luciana Abait, Debra Disman, Judith Gandel-Golden, Gwen Samuels, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Julia Michelle Dawson, Lola del Fresno, Loren H. Harris-Heller, Joan Wulf, Doni Silver Simons, Pamela Simon-Jensen, Crystal Michaelson, Daniela Schweitzer, M Susan Broussard, Yvette Gellis, Encounter, Rebecca Youssef, Alexandra Dillon, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Nellie King Solomon, Rebecca Setareh, Ameeta Nanji, and Claudia Concha.

Exhbitionista: “Drawing Connections” at 18th Street Arts Center

April 29, 2020 By Debra Disman

DRAWING CONNECTIONS:

Tour the Show!

It has been an honor to participate in “Drawing Connections” held at the Airport Campus of 18th Street Art Center
in the North and South Galleries | 3026 Airport Avenue
February 10 – May 1, 2020

“Drawing Connections aims to trace the invisible networks between a selection of current artists in residence at 18th Street Arts Center, both from our 18th Street campus and our Airport hangar. The show highlights how artists from different backgrounds and whose practices range from traditional to experimental art can dialogue through one of the earliest and most fundamental tools for human expression, drawing. This process of mark-making reveals the initial creative impulse that may later take the form of a video, a performance, a piece of music, an art installation, a painting, or a drawing itself. This curatorial exercise intends to delve into the essence of the multivalent creative practices of the artistic community of 18th Street Arts Center.”