Community Planning

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