November 30th:   Edgar Arceneaux (Co-sponsored by the Department of Black Studies)

Edgar Arceneaux is a Los Angeles-based artist working in the media of drawing, sculpture, and performance, whose works often explore connections between historical events and present-day truths. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. His work has been featured at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Performa 15, New York; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, San Francisco; S.J. Quinney School of Law, Salt Lake City, among other venues. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art 2D Area at the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design.

December 7th:  Regina Mamoux (Co-sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies)

Regina Mamou is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on the desire to understand the diversity of ideological systems. This interest stems from her familial background, where she grew up aware of the implications of ideology as it was intertwined with politics and religion. Regina’s mother, a Polish-American, and Regina’s father, an Iraqi immigrant, raised her multiculturally. As a former Chaldean Catholic priest, her father left the clergy and Iraq for fear of persecution. For this reason, she has continued to work on projects examining cultural structures and systems for over a decade.

Regina is the first artist-in-residence at The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Los Angeles, California, since 2020. In her residency, she investigates the relationship between the Middle East and the Soviet Union – specifically, Iraqi-Soviet bilateral relations. She is currently developing an immersive, experiential installation that views the nuances of this aspect of Cold War history. Her extended research has also included travel to the former USSR, specifically to places such as Central Asia, where Islam and Sovietism uniquely interweave.

Regina holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a 2009–2010 recipient of a Fulbright to Amman, Jordan. In addition to her solo practice, Regina has collaborated with Lara Salmon under the name “Research for the Bermuda Triangle.”

November 16th:   Rodrigo Valenzuela

Rodrigo Valenzuela works across photography, video, and installation, merging his interest in art history, architecture, the concept of work, and the realities of laborers. Valenzuela builds scenes in his studio, often working with simple building materials such as cinder blocks, pipes, wooden palettes, corrugated metal, and two-by-fours. The resulting monochrome photographs constantly shift between flatness and architectural space, and between documentary photography and fiction, encouraging an incessant yet pleasurable tension. His compositions resemble miniature ruins built from studio detritus and are documentative of the artist’s performance in the studio. Simultaneously, they clearly reference certain Modernist masters – be it Abstract-Expressionist painters or Minimalist sculptors – as well as Latin-American Brutalist architecture.

Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has received the Joan Mitchell Award, Art Matters Foundation Grant, and Artist Trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include BRIC Arts Media, NY; Screen Series at the New Museum, NY; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, AU; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Recent residencies include the Dora Maar Fellowship, Ménerbes, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami FL; Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.

November 9th:   Cathy Thomas

Cathy Thomas is a creative critical scholar working on African American and Caribbean literature as well as being a comic arts scholar. She has written several articles, book chapters, two chapbooks, a syndicated comic strip, and short films. She is currently completing two books. Her spec fiction novel PoCo Mas explores a historically unprecedented Afrofuture attentive to the long histories of Humanism, afterlives of anti-black violence, and aftershock of weather through the lens of Carnival and the poetics of mas(querade). Her collection of linked slipstream stories Girls on Film explores the mother-daughter-alien relation across time, race, and the silver screen. She is also researching her monograph Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the Department of English. She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow working with sf/fantasy writer Nalo Hopkinson at UC Riverside, received her PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, her MFA in Creative Writing at CU Boulder, and a BA in Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology at Wesleyan University. Prior to academia, she worked in a genetics lab, at a neuropsychiatric center focused on mindfulness, in Hollywood, and on HIV clinical research.

November 2nd:  Helena Arahuete and Silvia Perea

View from the interior of the ‘House above the Morning Clouds,’ 2009. Photograph by Tycho Saariste.

Co-sponsored by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and AD&A Museum Council

From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete

Art, Design & Architecture Museum

September 23-December 17, 2023

Architect Helena Arahuete will discuss her practice and then be in conversation with curator  Silvia Perea who curated the retrospective exhibition, From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete.

Amidst the pressing environmental concerns arising from the construction industry today, From Within shines a spotlight on the architect Helena Arahuete (b. Belgium, active in Los Angeles), whose work engages the natural world in an exceptionally sensitive manner. One of the few practitioners who still adheres to the original principles of organic architecture, introduced by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright over a century ago, Arahuete brings this tradition into the 21st century, integrating it with the current discourse on sustainability.

Organic architecture rejects codified styles. Instead, it fosters a creative process that, much like nature itself, evolves from within, engendering structures with profound beauty. Besides addressing functional needs and environmental conditions, this process of building seeks to harmonize all elements, or ‘organs,’ of a project among themselves as well as with their surroundings. Design strategies ensuring this cohesion range from defining a building’s volume through geometries inspired by natural forms, to including water, vegetation and rocks in interiors, or using large spans of glass in exterior walls and locally sourced materials all throughout. As a result, organic structures boast robust, yet fluid profiles that often blur the boundary between architecture and landscape.

Arahuete’s interest in organic architecture dates back from her student years in Argentina. After graduating from the School of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires, she further embraced the organic creed during a 23-year tenure at the office of renowned architect John Lautner in Los Angeles, where she eventually rose to the position of Chief Architect and Associate. Following Lautner’s passing in 1994, Arahuete established her own firm and continued to work according to organic principles, while adapting them to evolving technological resources and her own values. Ever since, she has produced a unique body of work that not only responds to her clients’ requirements and the environmental conditions of her projects’ sites but also elevates experiential, environmental and structural design.

As the first retrospective of Arahuete’s career, From Within traces her significant contributions to organic architecture by focusing on her domestic projects, which prevail in her practice and afford a holistic glimpse of her innovative spirit. As such, the exhibition expands the scholarship of this chapter of architectural history, traditionally centered on the work of male practitioners.