Seeds and a dish with chicken and berries on a decorative table

David Horvitz performs at Soup & Tart: Los Angeles, June 8, 2023.

Active Cultures is a public arts organization in Los Angeles exploring the confluence of food and art through public projects, programs, and publishing.

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Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez

A Micro-Residency

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Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth)

An ongoing artist residency

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Meech Boakye: Research Poems

A digital garden and artist project that will grow and flourish throughout the seasons

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FEATURED PROJECT

In Close

On the closing day of Barbara T. Smith: Proof, the ICA LA and Active Cultures celebrated Smith’s kaleidoscopic practice with “In Close,” a gathering of food and performance. The program featured a new performance by artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, with musicians Rachel Beetz, April Dawn Guthrie, and Heidi Alexander alongside a furl of squash orchestrated by artist and cook Eden Batki.

We've been reflecting this week on In Close, a gat

We've been reflecting this week on In Close, a gathering of food and performance to close out "Barbara T. Smith: Proof" at @theicala⁠ in celebration of Smith's kaleidoscopic practice.⁠
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In an ode to the year of Barbara, to the squash and the seasons, to feeding and being fed, Pennypacker Riggs orchestrated a blend of sound, song, sculpture, and ritual action. In her words, the performance, I C U, invited audience into a realm that transcends traditional boundaries, unfolding as a melodic journey that is part concert, featuring bass flute (Rachel Beetz), cello (April Dawn Guthrie), a surprise electric guitar (Heidi Alexander); part hidden chorus (Jess Basta, Sarah Blank, Arlene Deradoorian, Hilda Rasula, and Stacy Wood); magic show; mythological theater; and a timestamp for transition. Per Pennypacker Riggs, I C U is not merely a spectacle: it is a reflection of the artist’s ongoing exploration of midlife and its complexities—a psychological odyssey that defies conventional notions of “crisis.”⁠
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The performance culminated in a moment of vulnerability as Riggs, saddled by her young child, crawls the length of Smith’s exhibition on her hands and knees: a solemn and silly bow to Smith that smudges the lines between public performer and private person.⁠
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Head to our link in bio to read more about the evenings program and watch a full video of the performance ✨️ ⁠
📷 @ginaclyne

We are hiring! Active Cultures is very pleased to

We are hiring! Active Cultures is very pleased to announce the 2024 Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship to support our artistic program in 2024.⁠
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Full job description and link to apply in our bio!⁠
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Kindly share this post with those who may be interested! We cannot wait to meet our applicants.⁠
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The Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship is a ten-week, full time position beginning in June 2024. An interest in contemporary art and performance, as well as food studies and foodways cultures, is preferred. Additional areas of interest might include community organizing, arts administration. AC will prioritize applicants who demonstrate strong writing and research skills; an enthusiasm for public art initiatives and supporting artists; and a willingness to learn, ask questions, challenge themselves, and work independently.⁠
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Image: @paigeemery_ performs at Soup & Tart: Los Angeles, June 8, 2023. Photo by @roadworkstudio.⁠
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#gettymarrowundergraduateinternship⁠
#gettymui⁠
#losangeles⁠
#activeculturesla⁠

This February 5-9, 2024, follow along with our IG

This February 5-9, 2024, follow along with our IG for Meech Boakye's final Story Residency! ⁠
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This Residency follows the fourth and final chapter of Meech's digital Garden, Research Poems, which you can explore at researchpoems.com. 🐑⁠
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Research Poems is a digital garden and artist project that will grow and flourish through four seasons. Over the next year, Boakye will investigate four different plants, foraged and gardened, in DIY cheese-making experiments. Beginning with Stinging Nettle and an introduction to foraging, each plant-centered chapter is grounded in transdisciplinary research shaped by the artist’s real-time exploration of the metonymic relationship between the digital and the non-digital. As the project continues, they will tend to this garden with notes from the field; poems written collaboratively with AI; recipes; sonic outpourings; and more. Herein, Boakye explores how gardens can offer a framework for cultivating experimental knowledge systems, embedded in the fragmented and temporal. Together these shifting parts generate a kind of “commons,” an assemblage of the digital, the speculative, and the ecological, to be explored with each visit to the garden.⁠
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Image: Meech Boakye, “Sheep at Sour Milk School” (2023).⁠ courtesy of the artist.

Announcing the fourth and final chapter of Researc

Announcing the fourth and final chapter of Research Poems by Meech Boakye! Visit the Garden at researchpoems.com, link in bio!⁠
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Research Poems: Together is the fourth and final chapter of Meech Boakye‘s two-year investigation of DIY cheese-making experiments. This digital garden began with Stinging Nettle and an introduction to foraging and now concludes with a rumination on failure, learning, and death. Boakye reflects on their experience at Sour Milk School; examines rennet and ritual; and makes ricotta. Together in the garden we graze and move through cycles instigated by inquiry, process, and flavor. ⁠
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Following this chapter, Boakye returns as our next Story Resident. View their first residency from Spring 2023 in our Instagram highlights!⁠
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Finally, a huge thank you to @ghostyboi for stewarding this beautiful and truly keystone project to The Garden series. More from Meech can be found on their Instagram and website, meechboakye.com.⁠
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Image: Sheep, Flock in Owens Valley, Ansel Adams (1941). Public Domain.

On the closing day of Barbara T. Smith: Proof, @ic

On the closing day of Barbara T. Smith: Proof, @icala and Active Cultures celebrate Smith’s kaleidoscopic practice with “In Close,” a gathering of food and performance. The afternoon will feature a new performance by artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, with musicians Rachel Beetz and April Dawn Guthrie, alongside a furl of squash orchestrated by artist and cook Eden Batki. ⁠
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Join us in an ode to the year of Barbara, to the squash and the seasons, to feeding and being fed.⁠
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RSVP with link in bio!⁠
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Performances start promptly at 3:30 and 5:00 PM.⁠
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@carolynpennypackerriggs⁠
@rachelbeetz⁠
@aprildawnguthrie⁠
@edenbatki⁠
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Images: Barbara T. Smith during the fabrication of The Celebration of the Holy Squash, 1971. Image courtesy the artist and The Box, Los Angeles.⁠
Photo by Sarah Lyon. Courtesy of the artist.⁠ © Barbara T. Smith. Photo: Boris Sojka.⁠
Installation view, Barbara T. Smith: Proof, Institution of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 7, 2023–January 14, 2024. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.⁠
Eden Batki, How Would I Have You Taste Hungary / Eating Alone Part Two, Active Cultures' Digest, Issue 08, February 2021. Courtesy of the artist.⁠

Thank you for another year! From our Director:

Thank you for another year!

From our Director:

Hi friends, as we wind down for the season and prepare for a rest, I wanted to thank you all for joining us at the table this (our fifth!) year at Active Cultures.

Out of a year punctuated by large, exuberant gatherings like Soup & Tart: Los Angeles and our fifth-anniversary Winter Benefit, flourished a quietly expanding project called The Garden. Featuring artist commissions, writing, a reading group, new partnerships, and a special project at Printed Matter’s return to the LA Art Book Fair, The Garden was seeded two years ago by AC’s Curator and Editor Anna Cho-Son, and has become a rhizomatic undertaking that continues to inspire. Anna is departing Active Cultures after nearly four years on our small team, having started her tenure as our first Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern. It has been a highlight of my career to work beside Anna, whose distinctive voice, humor, and ethos have indelibly shaped this institution. I’ll miss her dearly when she leaves us in the new year.

Taking the bittersweet with a dose of jubilee, I hope you’ll join us and our friends at the ICA LA on January 14 as we celebrate the closing of Barbara T. Smith’s retrospective. We have invited friends and artists Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs and Eden Batki to choreograph a celebration of ends and beginnings… which *may* also feature an ode to the squash.

As ever, we at AC are dedicated to enduring relationships with artists and our community, to hold each other close with empathy while trying to hold spaces for plasticity and change. And you have held us: because of your support in this work, we have been able to seed so many fruitful projects, programs, performances, and meals together that filled this year. We are humbled to be able to work with artists, cooks, curators, poets, performers, and sister organizations who see our mission in their own practice. I am deeply grateful to each of them, for their dedication to making these spaces with us, and for steadfastly sharing their work with us and with you.

I invite you to join us in the year to come and wish you all a happy holiday!

Thank you for coming and much love,

Laura x

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