Visual Arts Curator Essence Harden, who organized Deborah Roberts: I’m, is joined by Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, to discuss Roberts’s practice and works on view at Art + Practice. Harden and Raiford previously co-curated Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary at CAAM in 2019, which featured work by Roberts. This talk takes place at Art + Practice in Leimert Park.

In Conversation: Essence Harden and Leigh Raiford

Artist Justen LeRoy offers insights into Lay Me Down in Praise, his three-channel film installation at Art + Practice that asks how the scream, moan, and melisma—also known as the vocal run— provide a sonic route toward Black environmentalism.

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Artist Walkthrough: Justen LeRoy

On opening day of Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul—the North American debut of the UK-based, Turner Award-winning artist—experience a live musical performance by Cammock and Roshanak Kheshti, UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. The exhibition’s two-channel film, performance piece, poetry, and print series draw from Cammock’s research in the archives of the Amistad Research Center (New Orleans) about artist Elizabeth Catlett’s struggle for agency, creative autonomy, and support throughout her 1976 commission for the Louis Armstrong sculpture in New Orleans’s Armstrong Park.

HELEN CAMMOCK @ ART + PRACTICE

Nest Global x Art + Practice Panel Discussion at Hauser & Wirth

"Finding Soft Ground," Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s exhibition at Art + Practice (A+P), considers the conditions, precarity, and imaginative determination of safety for Black women. Utilizing the three galleries of A+P, Fazlalizadeh transforms each space into distinct installations examining the street, home, and natural world in relation to terror and refuge.

In Conversation- Tatyana Fazlalizadeh And Essence Harden

 Tru Sound for an intimate sonic response to J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time. Centered on Leimert Park, this live experience explores the mapped autonomy of Black communities through sound, space, and memory.

Using site-specific field recordings, reinterpreted dictionary plates, and archival material, Tru Sound creates a layered listening session that reimagines how Black life resonates within and beyond architecture.

ARCHITECTURAL LISTENING WITH TRU SOUND

Artist and filmmaker, Arthur Jafa,  is joined by multidisciplinary sound artist, Justen LeRoy for an intergenerational conversation centered around Jafa’s latest catalogue, Live Evil. This catalogue explores the wide range of Jafa’s practice, including historical, philosophical, and artistic offerings, through essays and conversations.

In Conversation: Arthur Jafa and Justen Leroy

Memory, communication, and storytelling lay at the heart of archival practices. Julien James weaves these elements together in his introspective photobook, I Love You Always, All Ways. Join us for an evening of legacy, archival practice, and storytelling through photographs with James as we dive into his book and work. 

This program is presented by Art + Practice and LORE Leimert Park as part of the Behind the Page program series.

I Love You Always, All Ways is a tender, introspective photobook about fatherhood, legacy, and becoming. Told in three acts and framed by handwritten letters from father to son, the book offers a layered meditation on time, memory, and the quiet inheritances we carry. Shot over several years, it weaves together portraits, still lifes, ephemera, and fragments of family life to explore the liminal space between being a son and becoming a father.

The structure moves like a film—part bildungsroman, part memoir, part love letter. This isn’t a singular story, but rather a layered one, a nonlinear unfolding of joy, grief, softness, and survival. The power of the book lives in its restraint: the pauses, the glances, the everyday moments made sacred through attention. Old snapshots live alongside new ones. Time loops. Memory folds. And through it all, love stays—always, all ways.

BEHIND THE PAGE: PRESERVING FAMILY MEMORIES WITH JULIEN JAMES

Artist Talk: Diedrick Brackens
January 8, 2020

Artist talk with Los Angeles-based artist Diedrick Brackens. Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX) discussed his practice of handweaving textiles to explore themes of Black and queer identity, and American history. Brackens also described his process of making his weavings and the techniques used—drawing from West African weaving, quilting from the American South, and the art of European-tapestry making—to create abstract and figurative works.

This program was organized on the occasion of A+P’s exhibitions Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning and Ramsess: The Gathering.

Photo: Artist Diedrick Brackens during a public program at Art + Practice Public Program Space. 08 January 2020. Photo: Lisandra Vazquez

Artist Talk: Diedrick Brackens 01.08.20

6° is a single-day virtual symposium bringing together six L.A. non-profit art organizations. Tune in for individually presented programs from each institution, as we aim to begin a collective and open conversation around racial inequalities in the art world. 
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What are the systematic inequalities in relation to L.A. arts education? How and when do they show up? Three arts professionals involved with various levels of arts education in the city —  K-12, University, and continuing and adult-focused education — will have an informal conversation to showcase their work and personal experience that attempt to overcome these inequalities. Through sharing their own efforts and observations, the panelists will discuss possible tools and strategies others can implement to make arts education more accessible and inclusive for all. A+P’s Exhibitions and Public Programs Manager, Joshua Oduga, will moderate the discussion.

Speakers:
Karina Esperanza Yanez
noé olivas
Rebecca Renard-Wilson

6°: Making L.A. Arts Education More Equitable

The second installment of Bookmarked!, a series from A+P highlighting literary artists of LA, welcomes Walter Thompson-Hernández, multimedia journalist for the New York Times and author of the new book 'The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland'. A+P’s Nereya Otieno spoke with Thompson-Hernández about women of color who have been sources of inspiration through his writing journey.

A focus of Thompson-Hernández’s work is to highlight Los Angeles culture, often showing sides that lack awareness in larger cultural conversations. In this program, Otieno and Thompson-Hernández connects important women of color in his life and literary growth to themes and ideas present in A+P’s exhibition Collective Constellation: Selections from The Eileen Harris Norton Collection.

Artist Talk: Diedrick Brackens 01.08.20

Art + Practice

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