The Academy Museum, opening September 30, 2021, will be the largest institution in the United States devoted to the arts, sciences, and artists of moviemaking. The idea of a museum dedicated to Hollywood and the film industry was first discussed by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, founding members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Fairbanks also became the Academy’s first elected president in 1927. 90 years-plus later the vision of giving visitors an unprecedented opportunity to peer behind the screen of the dream factory is becoming a reality.

In 2012, Pritzker-Prize winning Italian architect Renzo Piano, together with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, led by Luigi Priano (Associate Architect), and Gensler, was commissioned to design the 300,000 square-foot campus. The project is currently led by Bill Kramer, Director and President of the Academy Museum.

Lauren Bon is an ecological artist and her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

An inside look at the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s Summer 2020 exhibition “Every. Thing. Changes.” with an introduction by Curator Wendy Gilmartin and Assistant Curator Nina Briggs, accompanied by interviews with exhibition participants including Imogen Teasley-Vlautin, Jose Herrasti, Anthony Carfello, Loren Adams, Yara Feghali and Viviane El-Kmati. The exhibition presents 20 new works documenting the collective view of life in Los Angeles in its new decade. The newly commissioned texts and visual works exhibited in “Every. Thing. Changes.” were developed over the course of spring 2020, and are the outcomes of a “call and response” process between five initial L.A.-based writers, their texts, and the visual responses of five L.A.-based collaborators (of the allied design disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, urban design). The 10 writers/designers then chose one additional collaborator each to bring into the process, for a total of 20 new visual and text-based works. 

Curated by Mimi Zeiger, Soft Schindler brings together contemporary artists and architects to explore questions of softness within the narrative of Pauline Schindler’s history at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House.

Soft Schindler participants, through their respective practices and presented works, show the incompleteness of binary ideas in architecture, sculpture, and design— femininity vs. masculinity, inside vs. outside, heavy vs. light, rational vs. emotional—framing such notions outmoded. Each of these practitioners makes non-conforming aesthetics and ideologies manifest in space.

Soft Schindler October 12, 2019 – February 16, 2020

Artist Oscar Tuazon reflects on the role of his project the “Los Angeles Water School [LAWS],” a multi unit structure engaging with the Los Angeles River. For several years LAWS provided a platform for bringing people together around the question of water through exhibitions and panel discussions commencing with a community organized exhibition called Language and a roundtable engaging Tongva histories of the river and indigenous thinking around water.

The Property Houses of Los Angeles have provided the physical elements of narrative storytelling to the motion picture industry of Los Angeles for years. Also known as prop houses, they act as specialized archives catering to the needs of the art department. Art directors and production designers rely on these houses to enrich the fictional spaces that are hidden between the words within a script. Join Dapper Cadaver founder BJ Winslow, and Nights of Neon owner and artist Lisa Schulte, as they discuss the backstory of managing the items and decorations of cinema, events, and the aura of Hollywood.

Join artists Lisa Anne Auerbach, Hannah Greely, Patrick Jackson, and Kori Newkirk as they discuss their site-specific installations for Frieze Projects at the inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles, held from February 15-17, 2019.

Design as a human right, not a luxury or a privilege, has been a part of SCI-Arc’s mission and pedagogy since the school’s founding in 1972. It is in this spirit that, in January 2019, SCI-Arc in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, turned the school’s attention to one of the most pressing issues of our moment and our city: homelessness. In a four-day, all-school workshop, SCI-Arc came together as a community of designers to make a contribution to the body of thinking on homelessness.

Join Lars Jan and Marcelo Spina on SCI-Arc Channel as they discuss the nature of artistic collaborations, crossing genres, emerging technologies and progressive activism as a prelude to the West Coast debut of The White Album—Jan’s timely adaptation of Joan Didion’s seminal essay about California’s shifting cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

Please join SCI-Arc Channel and Alvarius B. for a satirical look into an alternative 2043 in Los Angeles. Listen closely as the most wanted man alive delves into the absurd, musing on everything from latte makers and Charles Darwin to Twitter and grey alien Geritol.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Visual Strategists David Delgado and Dan Goods talk about how they visualize various aspects of NASA’s earth science satellites.

Join Art Forum writer, Kavior Moon as she discusses Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum with exhibition curators Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale.

Join LAXART Executive Director, Hamza Walker and Deputy Director, Catherine Taft, as they discuss the history of “alternative spaces,” LAXART’s diverse programming and their current exhibition, “Remote Castration.”

A landmark exhibition, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ featured more than 120 extraordinary paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by one of America’s greatest artists.

Frances Anderton, KCRW Executive Producer and Host of DnA: Design and Architecture, shares recollections of her introduction to the world of Los Angeles architecture in the 1990s and reflects on her participation in KCRW’S Which Way, L.A. and hosting of DnA: Design and Architecture.

Join SCI-Arc Channel for a glimpse of the recent exhibition ‘Larry Bell. Complete Cubes,’ presented by Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

Descend deep into the lower floors of audio consciousness with godfathers of American Avant-Noise, Wolf Eyes. Join us as they unpack their 20 plus year history, sonic idiosyncrasies and PSYCHO JAZZ IN L.A., held at Silverlake’s Zebulon in the Fall of 2017.

Chef Jordan Kahn and Architect Eric Owen Moss discuss their unique collaboration on Vespertine restaurant and the intersection of food and architecture with SCI-Arc Director/CEO Hernan Diaz Alonso.

An exhibition walkthrough of Rick Owens Furniture at MOCA Pacific Design Center. Exhibition Curator Rebecca Matalon and Marcelyn Gow discuss the architectural and artistic influences in Rick Owens’ furniture designs.

A ‘behind the scenes’ look into the Mineral Sciences Lab at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County with Dr. Aaron Celestian, Associate Curator, Mineral Sciences.

Experience Sarah Cain’s vivid installation Now I’m Going to Tell You Everything, the inaugural project for the ICA LA’s courtyard wall and step into Skip Arnold’s archival and atmospheric artist’s journey Truffle Hunt.

Join SCI-Arc Channel as we take a look inside L.A. based artist Walead Beshty’s studio and his recent Regen Projects exhibition, “Equivalents.”

SCI-Arc faculty members Marcelyn Gow and Florencia Pita discuss the work of Monika Sosnowska and its connections to brutalist architecture and the projection of multiple histories in a gallery talk on Monika Sosnowska’s recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles.

An exhibition walkthrough of Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

An exhibition walkthrough of Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at LACMA

SCI-Arc and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles Complete Innovative, Sustainable and Affordable Home for Local Veteran and Family.

An exhibition walkthrough of Diamonds: Rare Brilliance at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.