SCI-Arc Channel and Carla have teamed up to co-produce a series of short films that focus on LA-based artists who are working around issues of community and social justice.

Spurred by the ever-shifting relationship between art and the community, this film follows art critic and journalist Catherine Wagley, who looks directly at artist groups and collectives who engage with the community through acts of mutual aid and support as well as artistic collaboration. Spotlighting Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Los Angeles Poverty Department, and Summaeverythang, Wagley investigates artistic practices and spaces that resist art world hierarchies, making room for experimentation and exploration in the community.

SCI-Arc Channel and Carla have teamed up to co-produce a series of short films that focus on LA-based artists who are working around issues of community and social justice.

With only 3% of monuments in Los Angeles devoted to women, the need to preserve their histories is a crucial feat. In this film, writer Neyat Yohannes reflects on the trailblazing women whose influence has helped shape the city that millions call home, and the erasure that is at stake if their legacies remain unprotected. Yohannes explores the Woman’s Building, as well as spaces designed by LA architect Helen Liu Fong, to speak about their broader impact and importance to larger cultural and community movements taking place in Los Angeles.

The film also features the life and legacy of artist Corita Kent, the so-called “Pop Art Nun,” as told by Nellie Scott, Director of the Corita Art Center. In 2020, the Corita Art Center spearheaded a campaign to save the studio of Corita Kent from demolition. Scott relays how after a nearly ten-month-long campaign, Corita’s former studio was designated as a Historic-Cultural Monument with the invaluable help of the LA Conservancy, Hollywood Heritage, and preservationist and architectural historian Kathryn Wollan, among others in the community.

SCI-Arc Channel and Carla have teamed up to co-produce a series of short films that focus on LA-based artists who are working around issues of community and social justice.

Noticing a shortage in resources for formerly incarcerated women, People’s Pottery Project, a non-profit ceramics studio in LA’s Glassell Park neighborhood, offers stability, support, employment, and empowerment for women, trans, and non-binary individuals. Through the sensitive and intuitive art of ceramics, PPP offers the opportunity for a second chance at life, encouraging growth and healing through community building in the arts.

People’s Pottery Project was founded in 2019 as an artist-driven initiative whose mission is to empower formerly incarcerated women, trans, and nonbinary individuals through the arts. Through paid job training, People’s Pottery Project provides access to a healing community, and meaningful employment in its collective non-profit ceramic business. PPP’s flexible programs allow participants to earn a living wage at every point of involvement with the business, from training, to fabricating, to ongoing employment. Through their collective work, members gain a platform to connect to others, share their stories, and ultimately transform dominant narratives about those who have experienced incarceration.

SCI-Arc Channel and Carla have teamed up to co-produce a series of short films that focus on LA-based artists who are working around issues of community and social justice.

Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena weaves contemporary technology with Indigenous traditions, dissolving the borders of colonial logic to generate weavings that tell of landscapes not-of-this-world. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, and handmade/autonomous to override power structures rooted in colonialism. Sourcing imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Rosalena programs her loom to turn pixels into thread, showing how information derived from new world geographies and extractive tech can be broken down into material form, collapsing binaries and borders, and suggesting new connections between Earth and Space.

This film is based on a review by Allison Noelle Conner in Carla, Issue 24.