Grand Central Market

For its inaugural public project, Active Cultures brought together three Los Angeles-based artists for a community-focused collaboration in partnership with Los Angeles’ historic Grand Central Market. Inspired by the Market’s rich history, downtown location and diverse community, artists Sarah Rara, Nancy Stella Soto and Mecca Vazie Andrews brought together the Market’s visitors and tenants as creative collaborators through a series of public workshops, open conversations and communal meals to create a sustainable, site-specific, audience-led production.

Grand Central Market is a storied and multifaceted site that has long attended to community building and economic growth through food—and like many spaces that foreground new tastes alongside generations-old practices, it provides a lens to understand growing concerns about accessibility, history, and waste. As the cultural phenomenon of food continues to flourish in practice and in the public imagination, so too do the perils of consumption, raising the question: how can we, as individuals and as a society, creatively contribute to our daily rituals in sustainable and engaged ways? This project proposes an investigation of labor, consumption, re-cycling, and creative production by unfolding the process of creation into wholesome steps that allow participants to reconsider their relationships to food, fashion and art.

Over the course of two weekends in November, visitors to the market contributed to the vision and voice of a unique production that culminated in a public performance. On Saturday, November 16, Sarah Rara leads a textile-treating workshop using foodstuffs collected from the market’s tenants and deadstock materials gathered from Downtown LA’s garment district, drawing inspiration from the world of text found in the food hall. On Sunday, November 17, Nancy Stella Soto guides a sewing workshop using the garments prepared the previous day to create universal, everyday clothing. On Saturday, November 23, Mecca Vazie Andrews conducts a movement workshop, culminating in a final performance where the clothing, sounds and movements created during the first two workshops are presented in an audience-led public performance.

Each day of the program featured public conversations with the artists, market tenants and chefs, as well as accessible communal meals.

This project was curated by Asha Bukojemsky.