Dear DNA Friends,

The Frieze-fueled art fair juggernaut is coming to town and with it lots of juicy adjacent events. Read all about these happenings, and more, in Design Things to Do below.

But before you get to that, hold on to your hats for a timely event relating to the ongoing issue of housing Angelenos, ideally in a way that benefits both existing and future communities.

Today, Thursday, February 22, a group of experts in planning, preservation, and housing policy will gather to discuss how to put new wine in old bottles, metaphorically speaking. The federal Advisory Council On Historic Preservation (ACHP) has issued a Housing and Historic Preservation Policy Statement stating that “housing shortages, especially shortages of affordable housing… have grown to crisis proportions,” and “rehabilitation of historic buildings is a critically important component” of a multi-pronged effort.

It so happens we covered shining examples of exactly this strategy in our “Awesome”  choice for February in FORT: LA’s Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now, the new media project I’m co-producing.

We showcased a trio of classic buildings in South Los Angeles –– two by the architect Paul R. Williams, and the legendary Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue –– that were successfully turned into affordable housing in the last decade. Take the 28th Street YMCA, shown below, where Koning Eizenberg Architecture daringly connected a new structure with several floors of studios to the Williams-designed, lovingly preserved, 1926 YMCA. It shows how existing buildings can be upcycled into livable places that also sustain the community’s connection to its past.

28th Street YMCA connects new and old to create housing. Photo by Eric Staudenmaier

The ACHP statement dovetails with efforts at the City of Los Angeles to expand the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (ARO) as part of six strategies to ramp up housing availability per state mandates. This change in the law enabled, almost overnight, the conversion of thousands of historic office buildings in downtown LA into lofts. The goal now is to apply it across Los Angeles, and to far more recent, obsolete buildings. Imagine “home sweet home” in a reimagined 1970s office park or defunct strip mall.

If you're interested in hearing more, head to City Hall for the Housing and Historic Preservation Roundtable from 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM. Or catch it live-streamed on LA Cityview Channel 35 and at @cityoflosangeles (Facebook) and @cityoflosangeles (YouTube.)

Design Things To Do

 

In Tune With Itself: Bennet Schlesinger
February 24th–April 13th
Opening: Saturday, February 24, 6:00–9:00 PM
Marta, 3021 Rowena Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta is an elegant gallery focused on works at the meeting points of art and design, meaning that designers of objects of utility get “to explore the occasional abandonment of function,” say the gallerists Benjamin Critton and Heidi Korsavong. One such designer is Bennet Schlesinger, creator of an exhibition of new light works and moveables, entitled In Tune With Itself (ITWI), opening this Saturday. 

Schlesinger, a self-described “Waldorf kid” from the school whose Rudolf Steiner pedagogy emphasizes craft and teaching through making, will display these lovely lights with handmade papers (below), tables laminated with tile, ceramic sconces, and beanbags studded with hand-made ceramic buttons (in collaboration with fashion designer Emily Dawn Long.)   

As for the show’s title, Marta explains it thus: “The simultaneous resolution and delicacy of these works settle us into the quietude of the room...the gradual diminishment of music into rich silence, having reached the end of a composition.”

Click here for details.

Lights by Bennet Schlesinger. Image courtesy Marta.

 

Invisible Collection becomes Visible
Phillips Los Angeles, 9141 Nemo Street, West Hollywood, CA 90069
Public viewing: February 24th to March 3rd, 12:00–5:00 PM
Opening reception: February 28th, 6:00–8:00 PM.
By appointment only: March 4th–March 14th

More functional art! The Invisible Collection is an online platform for luxury, limited-edition furnishings by a stable of select, mostly European designers. This Saturday, the company will become visible with the opening of a curated collection in residence for a year at the Weho branch of the auction house: Phillips Los Angeles (designed by Formation Association.) Opening to dovetail with Frieze, expect to find distinctive seating, mirrors, and tables from France, Portugal, and the U.S. including the luxe Alpha Centauri Discoball (below), designed by Studio MTX, creator of "architectural embroidery" for parent company CHANEL Maisons d'art.

At the opening you can also meet Invisible Collection co-founder Isabelle Dubern-Mallevays, former creative director of Dior Home and Diptyque Home, along with US-based rep and curator of this showcase, Mattia Nuzzo.

RSVP for the opening reception here: losangeles@theinvisiblecollection.com 
Book appointments to visit by emailing: mattianuzzo@theinvisiblecollection.com

Galia Linn's Strength and Vulnerability. Photo courtesy Emma Gray HQ

In Praise of Dematerializing
Fundraiser for MATERIAL Press and Neutra VDL
February 25, 4:00–7:00 PM
2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039

Angelenos of a certain age may remember WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, the publication founded in 1976 by UCLA architecture and planning grad, Leonard Koren. It quickly attracted a following for its innovative photography, graphics, style, and quirky meditations on spa bathing. It gave early play to numerous young talents including April Greiman, Taki Ono, Matt Groening, Peter Shire, and Herb Ritts. Then, 34 issues later, in 1981, Koren shut down the magazine, throwing his baby out with the bathwater.

This act of going out while on top has stayed with me. Koren modeled the view that not all acts of creation or institutions have to exist in perpetuity. Sometimes they are better off thriving for a brief moment of glory, living on as a sparkling memory.

So I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming fundraiser at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences to benefit the printing of Material Press and its Issue Five. The organizers say this will be their last printed issue. The evening’s theme, curated by artist David Horvitz, is dematerialization, and performers will explore “concepts like reduction and dissipation, diffusion and disappearance to explore the transition and impermanence of material forms.”

I should add that the fundraiser is also for the Neutra VDL House, which is famed for its dematerializing, nearly all-glass architecture. Hopefully, that building will live on in perpetuity!

Click here for information and tickets.

Note about WET magazine founder Leonard Koren: he went on to write and publish the brilliant book Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, and many other publications about art, taste, philosophy, and sensuality, including his latest, On Creating Things Aesthetic. 

The Neutra VDL Studio and Residences. Photo by Julius Shulman, courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Hello, LARA! Goodbye LARA?
Launch party for Los Angeles Review of Architecture
Saturday, February 24 · 6:00–9:00 PM
Bestor Architecture, 2030 Hyperion Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90027

Speaking of magazines that may or may not have a limited life, the New York Review of Architecture is launching the first issue of a new, sister publication, the Los Angeles Review of Architecture (LARA), guest edited by Mimi Zeiger. 

It will kick off with a party hosted at Bestor Architecture in Silver Lake. Join a throng of LA architects and the people who write about them by subscribing to LARA here.

As for whether this is a flash in the pan or a magazine with legs, publisher Nicolas Kemper says the inaugural LARA is a single special issue but adds, “We would like to develop it into a proper vertical that can continue publishing in Los Angeles but are trying to be careful to do it right.”

Click here for information.

Excerpt from the flyer for the LARA party.

 

The Art Juggernaut Arrives
Frieze Los Angeles
February 29–March 3, 2024
Santa Monica Airport

The art world juggernaut arrives in town next week, with Frieze taking up temporary residence for the second year at the Barker Hanger in Santa Monica. An extra structure will be added to accommodate the 95 select global galleries that rent a prized vendor spot in this massive art marketplace. Frieze will also feature a public exhibition of site-specific artworks by Sharif Farrag, Ryan Flores, Derek Fordjour, Pippa Garner, Matt Johnson, and Cynthia Talmadge, situated throughout the Santa Monica Airport grounds. There is so much going on that I leave it to art critics at The ArtNews to give you a comprehensive guide.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (More Perfect), 2024, digital print on wallpaper, 366 × 665 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sprüth Magers. Image at top of this newsletter: Terry Allen, MemWars, 2016, video still. Courtesy: the artist and L.A. Louver. You can see both at Frieze LA.

Felix Art Fair
February 28–March 3, 2024
Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles

Meanwhile, Felix lands again at the Hollywood Roosevelt where its labyrinth of rooms decked out with art offers a more homegrown experience. Felix also promises an art-fashion collaboration with Dover Street Market (the DTLA-based, cool fashion emporium imported from London). In a site-specific structure inside the hotel’s ballroom by artist and sculptor Oscar Tuazon, expect to see co-creations by visual artists including David Hammons, KAWS, Cauleen Smith, Sterling Ruby, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Ed Ruscha, David LaChapelle, Lauren Halsey, and brands such as Comme de Garçons, Denim Tears, ERL, OTTO 958, Total Luxury Spa, Brain Dead, Vans, and Levi’s OTTO 958 Spring/Summer 2024.

Perrotin and The Pit

Meanwhile, I’d recommend attending the Frieze-adjacent attractions, such as the February 24 opening of the new home of The Pit gallery in Atwater Village, hosted by gallery co-founders and artists Adam D. Miller and Devon Oder. Additionally, the February 25th opening of Perrotin Los Angeles, with an inaugural exhibition during Frieze Week dedicated to Izumi Kato. Architecture firm Johnston Marklee is transforming the former Del Mar Theater located in Mid-City at 5036 West Pico Boulevard with a super-graphic “echoing the legacy of billboards and advertising that define the urban boulevards of Los Angeles.”

Rendering by Johnston Marklee, courtesy of Perrotin.

 

What Does Water Want?
Walking tour with artist Rosten Woo and Clockshop
Saturday, March 2, 2024, 1:00–4:00 PM
Meet at: LA-RIDL (Los Angeles River Integrated Design Lab), 2400 Altman Street, Los Angeles, CA 90031

In these recent rains, the channelized LA River did its job — propelling vast amounts of water right out to sea — preempting flooding of numerous neighborhoods. But LA is sited in a flood plain, and, left to its own devices, the river would swell and wend its way hither and thither through numerous tributaries. This is why an upcoming tour led by the artist Rosten Woo and Clockshop — the Frogtown-based arts and culture nonprofit — sounds very interesting.

"What does water want, and what do we want from water?" are the questions being posed by Woo and Clockshop. Woo will show people “how our LA watershed interacts with the cultural and ecological histories of these neighborhoods,” and the many ways that “water is captured and released and the ways that humans degrade and improve water and land.”

After all, the success of the concretized river at hurling a reported 80% of rainfall out to sea also means the failure to collect much of that much-needed water for future use. Solving both issues for the flood channel is front and center for Clockshop and other groups and individuals working on the future of the river.

The free tour is full but there are waitlist slots. If you don’t make the cut, read up on Clockshop’s many other events, including their upcoming Kite Festival.

This portion of the LA River, in Elysian Valley, has been restored to a more natural state. Photo by Frances Anderton 

Julius Shulman Prize for Jerald Cooper
March 2: Open House at the Robinson Residence in West Adams/Hang at The Living Room, 2636 Crenshaw Blvd
Specifics to come: @hoodmidcenturymodern

A vibrant voice in architecture is Jerald Cooper, location scout, set design consultant, onetime music manager, and founder of @hoodcenturymodern, a very popular Instagram account on which he opines on modern architecture from a Black vantage point via videos, photos, and commentary.

Now he has been announced as the recipient of 2023’s Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award, for creating “a national visual discourse exploring and describing 'Black Modernism' in architecture, communities and spatial experience.” 

Cooper will receive his award at Woodbury University, home of the Julius Shulman Institute, in early March, and the public is invited to two events on March 2: an Open House at the Robinson Residence in West Adams, and a later hang at The Living Room, 2636 Crenshaw Boulevard.

To stay up with news and tickets for these events, subscribe to Cooper’s Instagram, @hoodmidcenturymodern, and watch his website here.

Jerald Cooper, founder of @hoodcenturymodern. Image courtesy Julius Shulman Institute

What I'm Digging

Pets for Renters

Nothing says, “you are on a lower status in life,” like the denial of pets to renters. Pets provide companionship, warmth, possibly even immune protection for young children, and many other benefits that should be available to everyone. Yet, rental property owners are allowed to ban them in apartments. So this bill, requiring owners to accept pets, is intended to rectify this. AB-2216, starting its passage through the legislative process now, would even prohibit additional monthly fees for pet owners, or "pet rent." That part seems questionable. Pets can tear up a place. Dogs can be aggressive and loud. Some conditions are arguably appropriate. But generally, giving everyone the right to a furry friend, especially in a world becoming increasingly lonesome and disconnected from flora and fauna, is a great thing. 

How lucky I am to be a renter who's allowed a pet, in this case, dear Twinkle, with a bookcase styled by her pet co-parent Robin Bennett Stein. Photo by Frances Anderton

Oceanwide Saga

I have been following with fascination the saga of Oceanwide Plaza, the high-end condo, retail, and hotel project that stalled in 2019 and has been graffitied on some 27 floors by fearless taggers. Now, the city council has voted to shell out nearly $4 million for cleaning and fencing, without a clear path to recouping the money or completing the building. This seems to be the worst of all solutions: a waste of taxpayer money, a still unfinished building, and goodbye to what is currently a gigantic piece of outlaw public art that makes a far more searing indictment of the follies of capitalism (and over-emphasis on luxury housing) than any MFA–sanctioned artworks at the upcoming art fairs.

Screenshot from Spectrum News.

Aluminaire House, Illuminated

Aluminaire House, now in Palm Springs. Photo by Frances Anderton