OPENING RECEPTION: ADORNMENT/ARTIFACT
LORENA ENDARA
JANUARY 28, 2023
5-8PM
Join us SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2023 as we welcome photographer Lorena Endara to the “ADORNMENT • ARTIFACT” Group Show at Eastern Projects. You can preview a few works for her upcoming SOLO SHOW this spring with the gallery.
Opening Reception:
5-8pm.
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It’s also our favorite time of the year, CHINATOWN celebrates its CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL, starting with the 124th Annual “Golden Dragon Parade”! With over thousands and thousands of individuals lining the parade route and thousands viewing the telecast each year, this colorful celebration along North Broadway in Chinatown has become the premiere cultural event in the Southern California Asian-American Community.
PARADE BEGINS AT 1pm
OPENING RECEPTION: ADORNMENT/ARTIFACT
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 19,2022
6-9PM
Join us this Saturday, November 19, 2022, 6-9pm fro the Opening Reception of:AdornmentArtifact
ON VIEW November 19, 2022- March 5, 2023
ADORNMENT ARTIFACT is a five-site experience across Los Angeles that highlights contemporary aesthetics as a living part of Nubian heritage. Conceived as community-based engagement bridging past, present and future, ADORNMENT ARTIFACT centers Nubia, in all its complexity, at the epicenter of global cultural production.
ADORNMENT ARTIFACT refuses the separation of antiquities and the present, the division of ethnic groups into exclusive categories and the ownership of cultural ideas and imagery by the sanctioned few. The impulses that Nubian makers shape into visual language are expressed across time and place in the multiple ways featured artists create and affirm making that elevates awareness, inspires literacy and transforms exposure to memories, histories and new narratives. These liberatory moments enable marginalized communities to define and reclaim our own identities and our own values.
The Transformative Arts team, our artists and our collaborators are committed to ensuring that the arts remain in our neighborhoods for our greatest good. We invite you to return again and again and visit our sister sites across the city to connect and collaborate with people and stories that share the legacy of Nubia’s rich traditions
The ancient heart beats in us…
DAVEY LEAVITT
EVERYTHING IS FINE KEEP SWIPING
A(MEN)
10.01-11.05-22 | OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY OCT. 1ST 5-10PM
*A hybrid show comprised of a selection of past works from “Everything is Fine Keep Swiping / How to Cage a Wagging Tail” (2021) and a preview of new works under the title “Everything is Fine Keep Swiping / A(MEN)” (2022)
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST:
Dear God (or to whom it may concern),
Please free us from our expectations, archaic masculine roles, attributes and behaviors constructed by history, society and politics. Rid our world of toxic masculinity and replace it with a new way of being — a way of love, tolerance, sensitivity and compassion as we transition away from the patriarchy and into gender equality. Grant us strength as we unlearn and welcome these new ideologies so we can evolve together in peace and harmony. Grant us courage as we overthrow the antiquated powers that be and bear witness to when the cowboys cry. “I am not my father”, yet a piece of him remains within me, which I try to improve daily. So I am my father, albeit a mere reflection of him, but that’s not all I am. I am also my mother, my sister, my brother, my partner and my friend. She, her, he, him, they, them.
Amen
ARTISTS BIO:
Davey Leavitt aka Davey Detail (born 1983) is an American artist and designer based in Los Angeles, CA. Davey’s work is often expressed conceptually, within the context of cultural narratives, duality and the human condition. His process explores the relationship between graphic design and fine art, with careful consideration for material, form and aesthetics. Davey’s practice is multidisciplinary and involves painting, sculpture, installation, screen printing, graphic design, fashion design, furniture design and spatial design. He is most notable for his former role as co-founder and creative director for the artist collective known as CYRCLE. (2010-2020).
Davey’s murals with CYRCLE. can be seen around the world in public spaces, upscale restaurants and boutique hotels. His fine artworks have been included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the Museum of Contemporary Art Puerto Rico, as well as in the private collections of notable figures such as Shepard Fairey, Ari Emanuel and Sean Combs. While working with CYRCLE., Davey collaborated with artists and brands including, HBO, Reebok, Uber, Audi, Pharrell and TED Prize winner- JR, amongst others.
Eastern Projects | 900 N Broadway #1090 - Los Angeles, CA 90012 | Tuesday-Saturday 12pm-6pm
SATURDAY AUGUST 20, 2022, 5-10PM
OPENING RECEPTION:
“ALPHABET SOUP II” GROUP SHOW
EASTERN PROJECTS is proud to present our SUMMER 2022 GROUP SHOW: “ALPHABET SOUP II” with artists Big Sleeps, Chaz Bojorquez, Cryptic, Defer, Retna, and Prime. Join us this Saturday, August 20, 5-10pm, no reservations required. These artists are all ” HANDSTYLE” masters of their craft, traveling the world and representing Los Angeles and West Coast graffiti. The first “Alphabet Soup” show took place at the “Boathouse Gallery” in Lincoln Heights in the summer of 2013. Some of these artists were emerging, a few already established, come see the evolution of their practices 9 years later.
Each artist created a serigraph print for this occasion, they will be available for purchase starting Saturday August 20.
Alphabet Soup ll runs from August 20, 2022- September 17, 2022
TEXTHTMLAdd Section
Alphabet Soup ll Group Show Artists Talk with David Brafman and Steve Grody
Saturday, September 3, 2022, from 5-7pm
Free admission, no reservation required
Conversation with Los Angeles leading artists, Chaz Bojorquez, David “Big Sleeps” Cavazos, Cryptik, Alex “Defer” Kizu, Jose “Prime” Reza, and moderated by David Brafman
With special guest Steve Grody.
David Brafman has been the Getty’s rare books curator since 2002. In 2011 Art collectors Ed and Brandy Sweeney wanted to amass and donate to Getty Research Institute (GRI) a master-piece book, a black book of graffiti and tattoo art that represented crews throughout LA. They were directed to Brafman, whose career stemmed from his favorite high school pastime: tagging D-trains with Egyptian hieroglyphs while they slept in the Brooklyn Rail Yards. Through the Sweeney’s Brafman invited art-crews from all over the city to GRI to view and page through books and manuscripts that somehow resonated with his nights in the Brooklyn yards. 151 of Los Angeles’s most renowned graffiti and tattoo artists pored through Renaissance writing manuals, emblem books, and catalogues of horse-brands, volumes on perspective and sacred geometry, virtuoso calligraphic penwork (both European and Islamic) and a 1751 book from Naples on Peruvian Quipu ‘knot-language.’ There were others.
In 2012 The 151 responded by donating 143 works on paper—some were collaborative—bound into a unique black-leather 4 x 1 foot volume (when opened), called Getty Graffiti Black Book. The artists, however, wanted another title. They had been struck by a 17th-century liber amicorum (“book of friends”), a genre of manuscript originally sold as bound blank leaves, passed from hand to hand to be filled with signatures, poetry, mottoes, and coats of arms—artistic symbols of social identity. A kindred object to a street writer’s black book. So, the artists insisted on the Getty Black Book’s real title: They named it LA Liber Amicorum, for it had transformed rival crews into an LA Book of Friends.
10 years later Getty published a mini-me trade version: LA Graffiti Black Book (Los Angeles, Getty Publications: 2022) with an intro. by Brafman.
Steve Grody has been documenting graffiti in Los Angeles since the early 1980’s, canvasing the neighborhoods with his camera. Over the last 20 plus years, he has amassed over 20,000 images of graffiti, murals, the artists, and their environments. In 2007, he published his first book from his archives,Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art.
