Debra Disman

Artist

  •

Luciana Abait

RECOVERY JUSTICE: Being Well

By

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!!!

“Building Networks of Empathy”

By

I am honored to participate in:

“Building Networks of Empathy”

at the Airport Gallery of 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA

October 26  – December 15, 2020 

The exhibition Building Networks of Empathy is the second of a two-part show that asks us to consider the ways in which art empowers not only the artist, but its viewers to transform their most difficult experiences into enlightened outcomes. The first part of the show is an ongoing online-only exhibition entitled Facing Darkness, which encouraged artists in our community to reflect internally on our current moment of pandemic, isolation, and structural inequity laid bare.

For this second part, which will be physically installed in 18th Street Arts Center’s spacious Airport campus hangar galleries, artists were asked to respond to how they have changed as a result of their inner reflections on darkness, and to imagine new futures and societal structures as we see our way out of crisis. Each artist grapples as well with the role that art can play in social reflection, expression, and cultural paradigm shifts as a result of a deeper understanding of each other, and the empathy that follows. The exhibition sees empathy not only as a way to share and understand what others are going through, but also as a natural and endless resource that we can all rely on when crisis and emergency hit, with hopes that we can turn this moment of collective fear into a sublime experience.

Debra Disman, Chromatic Interactions: The Golden Thread, 2020. File cards, pencils, crayons, thread. Installation. 76 x 90 inches. Photo by Debra Disman. Courtesy of the artist.
Debra Disman, Chromatic Interactions: The Golden Thread, 2020. File cards, pencils, crayons, thread. Installation. 76 x 90 inches.
Photo by Debra Disman. Courtesy of the artist.

“I was commissioned to create an interactive book for Craft Contemporary’s 2017 exhibition, Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California, which opened shortly after the 2016 presidential election. Visitors could choose file cards in an array of colors, draw and write on them, and insert them into the pocketed pages of the book. A range of feelings, responses, and concerns were expressed through the cards, which the Museum Staff saved and gave to me at the end of the show. I stitched them together grouped loosely by theme, to express the network of empathy they depicted, held together by golden thread.”

This exhibition may be viewed by appointment only. Please visit here to sign up to visit the exhibition!

Participating artists include: Alexandra Dillon, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Rebecca Setareh, M Susan Broussard, Julia Michelle Dawson, Lionel Popkin, Ameeta Nanji, Siru Wen, Elham Sagharchi, Debra Disman, Luciana Abait, Sheila Karbassian, Daniela Schweitzer, Joan Wulf, Loren Harris-Heller, Nung-Hsin Hu, and Susie McKay Krieser.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a live Zoom panel featuring Alma Ruiz and Karen Sherman, moderated by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, on November 12, 2020 at 12pm. For this panel discussion, curators, artists, activists, advocates, and scholars are invited to meet virtually  to reflect on the public opening of Facing Darkness, and consider how the show renders a public crisis and artists’ circumstances evident and knowable. Moderated by artist-scholar Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, with talks by curator Alma Ruiz and dancemaker Karen Sherman, (Inter)facing Darkness will frame a dialogue on how artists are operating as second responders, as thought leaders, and resource gatherers at this time. Participants will be invited to speak on their experience of the show at this moment. Register here.