Maya Livio, recipient of the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence, will lead a conversation with artist Huntrezz Janos and writer and researcher Emma Kemp as part of her research project “Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.”

In Los Angeles, a city in which questions of land use are particularly visible as sites of negotiation for human and more-than-human thriving, artists have been at the forefront of envisioning new approaches to shared livability. Offering proposals for alternative land use practices, creative practitioners have been activating local communities and devising models that reimagine what cohabitation can look like.

In this conversation, programmed and moderated by MAK Center and SOM Foundation Researcher-in-Residence Maya Livio, artist Huntrezz Janos and writer and researcher Emma Kemp will present their work. Janos will discuss ExtraTerraceTrill, a sustainable infrastructure project and prototype for an off-grid community space in LA. Kemp will introduce No Canyon Hills, a community coalition working to protect an area of the Verdugo Mountains that is under threat of luxury development. Placing these projects into dialogue, this discussion will survey the challenges and possibilities that artist-led land use projects can surface.

HUNTREZZ JANOS

Huntrezz Janos is an Afro-Hungarian artist whose work transcends dimensions but often takes form in ours as 3D interactive experiences. She is the black transgender founder of ExtraTerraceTrill, a sustainable community space currently under construction in Los Angeles, and she currently works independently as a self identified transcorporeal artificer both on and offline. Janos is a CalArts experimental animation alumni and current USC student soon to complete a Masters of Science degree in Integrated Technology, Design, and Business. She proudly creates AR, VR, 3D prints, animations, as well as architectural and automotive designs from solar power, and is widely recognized for her creative use of the virtual medium, poetry, and performance.

EMMA KEMP

Emma Kemp is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles, working across art, ecology and cultural criticism. She is an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art and Design, where she has taught writing and design since 2015. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts (2014), where she is Program Coordinator of the CalArts Summer Institute. Her essays have appeared in X—TRA Journal of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Flash Art, CARLA, and others. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a Utah Humanities Fellowship, an Al Larvick National Grant, and the Ithaca New Voices literary award. Kemp is co-founder and director of Concerning Landscape, a non-profit and interdisciplinary research studio exploring ecocritical activism through their primary project, No Canyon Hills (NCH), which is working to protect a significant ecological area in LA’s Verdugo Mountains.

MAYA LIVIO

Maya Livio is a writer, media-maker, and curator whose research and practice are invested in the relationships between ecosystems and technological systems. She is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University and divides her time between Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Her work has been featured in and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, NPR, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, among others. She has also commissioned and programmed media arts old and new as Curator of Medialive, an annual international festival at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and the Media Archaeology Lab, a collecting institution for historical technologies. Livio is currently the Researcher-in-Residence at the MAK Center for Art & Architecture. In 2023, she was a Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Resident. She holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder and MA from the University of Amsterdam.

ABOUT RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE

The Researcher-in-Residence is the inaugural residency program between the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center, provides an architect, artist, or research dedicated space and time for innovative work that addresses pressing issues related to the built environment. This year’s topic seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs.

Join us for a tour of Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village on Saturday June 1! Two tours at 10:00am and 12:30pm will be led by Preserve Bottle Village Committee board members and will guide visitors through the site, and provide the history of Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey’s life and work.

Please RSVP here and bring cash for a requested donation of $10.00 per person, which goes towards the conservation of the site.

An artist, collector, builder, writer, entertainer, caretaker, and retired factory worker, Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village is an artist-built environment of bottle-constructed houses that served as her artwork, home, and attraction for visitors in Simi Valley, CA. 

From the first structure she built to house her extensive pencil collection in 1956, Bottle Village would eventually become a collection of sixteen buildings and structures made out of bottles and other materials, almost entirely discarded items sourced from a local dump. Though damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Bottle Village is a nationally recognized landmark and one of the few existing female built “folk art” sites worldwide. Please join us in activating the site and preserving the legacy of Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey!

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“Permanence was never the test of folk art.”

— Esther McCoy from Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village

Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey (1896–1988) began building Bottle Village in her 60s, a collection of bottle-constructed houses that became her life’s work. The site housed her extensive pencil collection, her assemblage artworks, herself, and her family. Visitors periodically visited and Prisbrey would host, give tours, sing songs, and tell stories. As an artist-built environment and Prisbrey’s home, Bottle Village is the embodiment of an evolving social sculpture. Formed in July 1979, Preserve Bottle Village Committee is a non-profit organization created to acquire and preserve the historic site when it was facing demolition after Prisbrey had to sell the site to a private developer. In the context of Prisbrey’s vision, the task of preservation becomes a question, how would she want her work to be viewed, restored, or rebuilt when she is no longer around? These imperatives become essential to providing a direction forward for Bottle Village. 

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present a public discussion with writer, curator and art conservator, Rosa Lowinger and architectural historian and former Acting Director of Preserve Bottle Village Committee, Daniel Paul. They will discuss their individual practices in relation to the ongoing preservation of Bottle Village in the context of the exhibition Kathi Hofer and Preserve Bottle Village Committee. 

ROSA LOWINGER
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art and architectural conservator and writer. She is the founder of RLA Conservation, LLC (www.rlaconservation.com), a practice with offices in Los Angeles and Miami. Rosa is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and American Academy in Rome, where she conducted research on the history of vandalism to art and public space. Her books include: Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt: 2006) and the recently published Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House: 2023). She will be the keynote speaker at the 2024 Docomomo US Conference to be held in Miami.

DANIEL PAUL
Daniel Paul began historic preservation volunteer work at Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village 30 years ago, just one week after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. During his 15 years onsite, he coordinated with a noted rebuilding team, State Offices, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for damage repair monies, he authored public facing materials, and in 1996, wrote the National Register of Historic Places landmark application that helped protect Bottle Village. Daniel holds a master’s degree in art history from the California State University Northridge. His master’s thesis presented the origin story of 1970s-era Late-Modern glass skin office park architecture.

Related Exhibition

Join artists and writers for some words about spaces, an afternoon of readings that explore working with and against architecture and its physical and psychological effects. Organized in conjunction with Garage Exchange Vienna–Los Angeles: Plastic, Plastic, Plastic featuring work by Kerstin von Gabain and Ellen Schafer at the Mackey Apartments Garage, the afternoon features readings on memory, intimacy, precarity, air conditioners, subletting, getting locked out, doors that won't stay shut, windows, and the daily survival strategies artists use to navigate the spaces around them. The reading event is organized by Olivia Leiter and Rahel Levine.

Readings by Michael Kennedy Costa, Dorit Cypis, Angella d’Avignon, Steve Kado, Olivia Leiter, Rahel Levine, Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Christopher Yang, Kim Ye, and Kim Zumpfe.

Related Exhibition

Come to the Schindler House during visitor service hours 3:00PM — 5:00PM to receive a tarot reading by an invited guest from artist Renée Petropoulos. Readings will take place in the Chase Courtyard on Petropoulos’ shag carpet installation.

First come first serve and free with the price of admission.

RENÉE PETROPOULOS

Renée Petropoulos, a Los Angeles native, received her BA in Art History specializing in Islamic Art, MA in video, and MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her interest in nationalism and identity via pattern, repetition, and color is reflected through her public works such as the one found in the Los Angeles International Airport Delta Terminal. She lives in Venice, California and is Professor emeritus at the Otis College of Art and Design in the Graduate Studies Department.

Cynthia Vargas and Seeking Zohn co-curator Mimi Zeiger will explore the translations, triangulations, and displacements that arise between Vienna, Los Angeles, and Guadalajara. Vargas, a curator and researcher whose family is from Guadalajara, will share reflections on Zohn’s architecture and narratives of transnational identity.

CYNTHIA VARGAS

Cynthia Vargas is a curator, researcher, and explorer. Her practice encourages curiosity, generosity, and well-being. In 2020, she founded Stairwell, an experimental art space and residency housed in a domestic space in the Westlake-MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Recent residencies, exhibitions, and collaborations include Carmen Argote, Dog Glove Hand; Leonardo Bravo, Constant Relation; and Big City Forum, Stories that Move. Cynthia serves on the board of Clockshop and Barnsdall Arts.

MIMI ZEIGER

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles–based critic, editor, and curator. She was co-curator of the 2020-21 cycle of Exhibit Columbus and the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Projects include Soft Schindler at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen. Zeiger has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Aperture. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. She is a SCI-Arc visiting faculty member.

Related Exhibition

Come to the Schindler House during visitor service hours 3:00PM — 5:00PM to receive a tarot reading by an invited guest from artist Renée Petropoulos. Readings will take place in the Chase Courtyard on Petropoulos’ shag carpet installation.

First come first serve and free with the price of admission.

RENÉE PETROPOULOS

Renée Petropoulos, a Los Angeles native, received her BA in Art History specializing in Islamic Art, MA in video, and MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her interest in nationalism and identity via pattern, repetition, and color is reflected through her public works such as the one found in the Los Angeles International Airport Delta Terminal. She lives in Venice, California and is Professor emeritus at the Otis College of Art and Design in the Graduate Studies Department.

LINDA BESEMER

Linda Besemer has taught painting and drawing at Occidental College since l987. She has also taught academic courses in and gender theory in the Women’s Studies Department. She has served as the Chair of both the departments of Art History and Visual Arts and Women’s Studies. In 2005, Professor Besemer was awarded Occidental’s faculty honor for professional achievement: The Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award. And, in 2006, she was granted an endowed professorship and became The James Irvine Distinguished Professor of the Arts.

Besemer’s paintings have been featured in numerous museums, most notably: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC, SITE Sante Fe, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Albright Knox Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Arts, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, The Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, and The Palm Beach ICA.