Community Planning

PLEASE CONTACT MARTICA STORK, DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS, PUBLIC ART DIVISION, WITH ANY QUESTIONS AT martica.stork@lacity.org.

This art project is part of the Public Works Improvements Arts Program, administered by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. This meeting is an opportunity for the community to meet and engage in dialogue with the artists. Sign language interpreters, Communication Access Real-Time Transcription (CART), assistive listening devices, or other auxiliary aids and/or services may be provided upon request. To ensure availability, you are advised to make your request at least 72 hours prior to the meeting. Due to difficulties in securing sign language interpreters, five or more business days’ notice is strongly recommended.

By attending this meeting, you agree that the materials are, from inception, the sole and exclusive property of the Artists who created the works, throughout the world in perpetuity and are presented to you by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the sole purpose of this meeting. You consequently have no rights, titles, or interests of any kind or nature now or later contemplated in the artists’ renderings, and are not entitled to any compensation of any kind or nature now or later contemplated, for any such use or exploitation of the materials anywhere in the world. You may not screenshot, photograph, share, reproduce, or disseminate any of the shared information including artist renderings, artist statements, or any related information.

A community open mic series at the Pilipino Workers Center. The Center facilitates a safe space for marginalized voices to share stories and create genuine connections through the arts. This season celebrates the 12th anniversary of the longest-running Filipino-founded open mic series in Historic Filipinotown.

The Big Read 2024 project inspired by “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant” by Roz Chast is a generational community recipe book and potluck book group honoring our parents, their parents and generations to come by creating an indelible story of family – both personal and universal – through the foods, traditions and stories that make each family unique.

Through a book circle and recipe exchange and discussion, participants in the project will have their family recipes and anecdotes gathered, illustrated and bound in an old-fashioned spiral cookbook to create a community offering that is a celebration and exploration of how Food is Family. Friends, neighbors and people new to the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock and DC community will gather for a potluck featuring the illustrated tamily recipes from the project cookbook, to celebrate our families and each other. Using the graphic novel as a springboard to explore what is remembered and what remains as our parents age and we along with them – and the heartbreak, joy I and reckoning that this brings – through food we find a shared language and experience that crosses generations, identities and cultures and binds us together through time, memory and taste.

Book club/recipe circles happening in March/April of 2024 with the culminating potluck and cookbook launch in May 2024.

Can a Football Stadium Be a Black History Museum?

Moderated by Khalil Kinsey, Curator, Kinsey African American Art & History Collection

In February 2022, SoFi Stadium marked two milestones. The first was hosting the Los Angeles Rams’ home-field victory in Super Bowl LVI. The second was opening an exhibition of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection. En route to the bathroom or on a beer run, visitors to the stadium’s second level may find themselves taken off guard by letters from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, photographs of L.A.’s early-20th-century Black firefighters, formal portraits of 19th-century Black men and women, and works by major Black artists.

What does it mean to juxtapose this experience with watching professional football players—over 50% of whom are Black—go to battle on the turf below? What have the Kinseys chosen to display, and why at SoFi? And how are other people and organizations, in fields from fine art to poetry, using Black narratives to inform and enrich our understanding of history and contemporary life in unexpected ways?

A panel of artists and athletes visit Zócalo and Kinsey Collection at SoFi Stadium to discuss what one of the world’s largest private collections of Black art and historical objects is doing at one of the world’s grandest football stadiums, why it matters, and where similar efforts are scoring big.

6 PM: In-person audience members are invited for a last, best chance to join a guided tour of the Kinsey exhibition, which leaves SoFi at the end of March

7 PM: Conversation, in-person and online

8 PM: In-person audience members are invited to join us for a reception with a DJ and complimentary food and beverages