Slanguage is an exhibition space and artist collective in Wilmington, Los Angeles, California founded by Mario Ybarra Jr., Juan Capistan and Karla Diaz in 2002. [1] Slanguage works with community artists, curators and historians on projects and workshops. Slanguage describes its art-making practice as a "three pronged approach" including "education, community-building, and interactive exhibitions." [2]
Slanguage divides its space between experiments with media and ideas, and public performances and exhibitions. The New York Times cited Slanguage as an example of an "ever more important" type of exhibition space that provides a forum for work "uncongenial to an increasingly conservative art establishment" and for the work of students graduating from art schools "in numbers the commercial gallery system cannot begin to absorb." [3]
From September through November, 2009, Slanguage was the resident artist group with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as part of MOCA's Engagement Party program. [4] [5] Other Slanguage projects include Sweeney Tate, a 2007 art installation at Tate Modern, [6] and The Peacock Doesn't See Its Own Ass/Let's Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London, for the Serpentine Gallery's Uncertain States of America exhibition in 2007. [7] [8]
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's original space, initially intended as a temporary exhibit space while the main facility was built, is now known as the Geffen Contemporary and located in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2019, it operated a satellite facility at the Pacific Design Center facility in West Hollywood.
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Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
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Social practice or socially engaged practice in the arts focuses on community engagement through a range of art media, human interaction and social discourse. While the term social practice has been used in the social sciences to refer to a fundamental property of human interaction, it has also been used to describe community-based arts practices such as relational aesthetics, new genre public art, socially engaged art, dialogical art, participatory art, and ecosocial immersionism.
Cindy Bernard is a Los-Angeles based artist whose artistic practice comprises photography, video, performance, and activism. In 2002, Cindy Bernard founded the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound, which presents site-relational experimental music. Her numerous Hitchcock references have been discussed in Dan Auiler's Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998), essays by Douglas Cunningham and Christine Spengler in The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage and Commemoration (2012) and Spengler's Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014).
Grand Arts was a nonprofit contemporary art space in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, whose mission was to help national and international artists realize projects considered too risky, provocative or complex to otherwise attract support. It was co-founded by Margaret Silva and Sean Kelley in 1995 and operated until 2015 with sole funding from the Margaret Hall Silva Foundation.
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Noah Davis, was an American painter, installation artist, and founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. When talking about his work, Davis has said, "if I’m making any statement, it’s to just show black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it," and describes his work as "instances where black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide." Davis died at his home in Ojai, California, on August 29, 2015, of a rare form of soft tissue cancer.
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