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AC invites you to ☀️ Sunstead ☀️ an artist-led eve AC invites you to ☀️ Sunstead ☀️ an artist-led evening celebrating the longest day of the year. 

Conceived by Portland-based artist Meech Boakye, this gathering centers fortune telling and meditative offerings to mark the transition into summer. 

June 20, 2026
4:30 PM – 7:30 PM
at the Audubon Center at Debs Park

The picnic will feature non-native ingredients often labeled “invasive,” inviting reflection on the political and cultural histories embedded in how plants, and humans, are categorized. 

Meech Boakye’s research examines foraging as a cultural practice increasingly restricted by private property, land access, and ideas of ecological purity—connecting conservation conversations in Portland and Los Angeles to broader questions of migration, adaptation, and belonging, and how so-called invasive ecologies emerge through human histories of trade, displacement, and cultivation.

Sunstead is hosted in partnership with the Audubon Center at Debs Park. The picnic will feature a light meal, performance, participatory actions, as well as artist-designed picnic blankets for seating on the ground.

☀️ Link in bio for tickets! ☀️

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This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
The third and final film in our Seeds series is Ag The third and final film in our Seeds series is Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), selected by artist Clarissa Tossin. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Clarissa on seeds toward the end of their cycle, touching on food waste, and what industrial agriculture considers unfit for display.

Thursday, May 28, 2026
7 PM (Doors 6:30 PM)
at @now_instant

Please note: seating is limited! Doors open thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Your RSVP does not guarantee you a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served.

🌱 RSVP at the link in bio!

This series is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Active Cultures and KCRW present Compost After Wri Active Cultures and KCRW present Compost After Writing — a reflective writing program by compost artist and writer Cass Marketos (@cassmarketos )

🪱 LA Times Festival of Books, USC, April 18–19, 2026.
🪱 at KCRW Booth #031 (Cardinal Zone). 

Visitors are invited to pause, sit, and respond to a set of reflective writing prompts Cass has created, exploring ideas of transformation, memory, and what we leave behind. You’ll write on seed paper that you can take home to plant or compost.

🪱 On Sunday, April 19 at 2 PM Cass will join us for a short reading and to lead the writing activity. Copies of her book will be available at the booth!

Cass’s new book, Compost After Reading, is a practical manifesto for purposeful decomposition. It’s also compostable.

Come say hi! 

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Slide 1: Courtesy of Cass Marketos
Slides 3 and 4: Summer Solstice, 2025, at the Audubon Center at Debs Park. Photos by John Jay (@johnjay.img )
Book Club returns this weekend! Join us on Saturd Book Club returns this weekend!

Join us on Saturday, April 4 for our fourth session, where we’ll be discussing ‘Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures’ by Anita Mannur.

📚 Sign up via the link in bio to receive full details ahead of each session.

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The Active Cultures Book Club invites our community to engage with texts that delve into the interconnectedness of art, food, and ecologies through collective reading and conversation.
Join the Active Cultures Book Club for our fourth Join the Active Cultures Book Club for our fourth session, where we’ll be discussing Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures by Anita Mannur.

Saturday, April 4 
at The Garden at Bakers Bench 
1027 Alpine St., Los Angeles

In Intimate Eating, Mannur examines how cooking and eating shape intimacy, belonging, and political life. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer theory, she introduces the concept of “intimate eating publics,” spaces where marginalized subjects gather through food, blurring the lines between public and private life. Moving across film, literature, television, and performance art, she traces how racialized South Asian and Arab bodies become visible within culinary cultures, and how shared acts of cooking and eating produce new forms of kinship and community. The book rethinks food as a site where race, migration, gender, and social connection are negotiated, and where alternative futures of collective life can emerge.

The Book Club is free and open to all.

Sign up at the link in bio to receive our Book Club communications, which include full location details prior to each session.
We are hiring for a Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern We are hiring for a Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern to support our artistic program in 2026! ⁠Full job description and link to apply in our bio.

The Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship is a ten-week, full time position beginning in June 2026. The intern will assist in the research, planning, and implementation of AC’s programs —across our performances, events, and public art initiatives—while gaining curatorial experience and close work with our team, artists, and cultural partners in Los Angeles and beyond.
⁠
We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Image: 
Cocina CoLaboratorio: Migratory Table, February 6, 2026. Presented by Active Cultures and LagoAlgo. Photo by Rubèn Garay.

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