Dear ICA LA Community,

Our season of sound featuring the work of artists Milford Graves, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, and Christine Sun Kim is now live and our extensive schedule of related free public programs is well underway. We are excited to be offering monthly Introduction to ASL classes led by Shmuel Khorsandi in partnership with the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD). The next class will be held at ICA LA at 3pm on Saturday, March 11. For more advanced students, GLAD is also offering an 8-week series of courses taught by Deaf individuals and designed to teach the intricacies of ASL and Deaf culture. Visit here to learn more.

Beyond ICA LA’s walls, there is a lot to celebrate in and around our neighborhood in the Arts District of DTLA. In this edition of our ICA in LA newsletter, you’ll find a compilation of what to watch, where to visit, and what to read.

Until next week,

Team ICA LA 

DBL Whammy!: Queer crime film screenings presented by Lucy Talbot Allen
Whammy!, 2514 Sunset Blvd
Friday, February 24, doors open at 7:30pm

Whammy! is a brick-and-mortar VHS store, microcinema, and event space—the last of its kind in the days of streaming platforms. Tonight, Lucy Talbot Allen programs a queer crime double feature including BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, an early aughts queer crime film starring and directed by Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, followed by a secret film from 1992, one of the earliest features from a genre- and era-defining director on the '90s festival circuit. For future screenings, look to their events calendar.

Free Jazz
Streaming on Criterion Channel

The free jazz revolution that exploded in the late 1950s and early ’60s took music into hitherto unexplored realms of adventurous tonality, boundary-breaking improvisation, and ecstatic personal expression. Led by visionaries such as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy, and Milford Graves, free jazz extended beyond music and left its radical imprint on cinema. This eye- and ear-opening journey brings together definitive records of the movement such as Space is the Place and Ornette: Made in America, among others.

Performance: Tatsuya Nakatani
Streaming on ICA LA's YouTube Channel

Revisit last week’s performance at ICA LA by avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound Tatsuya Nakatani. Nakatani’s distinctive music is centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture.

This program was presented in partnership with LAXART and in conjunction with Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency.

Black History Month Prosperity Market @ CAAM
California African American Museum
600 State Dr
Saturday, February 25, 11am–3:30pm

As Black History Month comes to a close, celebrate Black farmers, chefs, and entrepreneurs at the Prosperity Market pop-up at CAAM! Expect your favorite farmers market goodies, discover delicious prepared foods and handcrafted artisan goods, enjoy a jammin’ DJ session, cooking demonstrations, a kids' corner, and additional wellness offerings.

RSVP

Josh Johnson at Canary Test
Canary Test, 526 E. 12^th Street
Saturday, February 25, 8pm

Canary Test is a space that celebrates performance, video, installation, and sound art. Their exhibition GLASS featuring artist and choreographer Josh Johnson opens this Saturday, featuring a live performance by the artist. Johnson studied dance in Los Angeles and New York, performing with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Forsythe Company, and he has collaborated with artists like Anne Imhof, Kandis Williams, and Patrick Belaga. He is also part of the ensemble Moved by the Motion, together with Wu Tsang, Tosh Basco, Asma Maroof, Fred Moten, and others.

Harold Mendez: A sentence, or a spell
Commonwealth and Council
3006 W 7th St, Suite 220
Through Saturday, February 25

Don’t miss the final days of this exhibition featuring new work by Harold Mendez, a Los Angeles-based artist known for his artistic meditations on the transnational narratives of migration, exchange, and violence that have shaped the histories of the Americas. 

Before you go, revisit ICA LA's 2020 presentation of Mendez's work, take a self-guided VR tour of the exhibition, or listen to musician Jeff Parker's collaboration with Mendez that took place within the installation.

Christine Sun Kim: Secession

Released on the occasion of Christine Sun Kim’s solo exhibition Cues on Point at Secession, Vienna, this is the artist’s first monographic publication. Featuring an essay by ICA LA's Curatorial Assistant, Caroline Ellen Liou, and a conversation between the artist and Matthew Hyland, the book also includes an artistic intervention in which Kim invited colleagues working in visual art, dance, music, literature, and activism to create one or two sheets with staff lines. As the artist explains, these musical staffs are a tribute to the sign language interpreters she works with and the people who have spoken on her behalf. The fifty-five contributions gathered in the book illustrate the unbelievable diversity of creative visions, underscoring the importance of exchanges of ideas with other artists in Kim’s practice. Available in the ICA LA Shop. For more information on Kim’s new site-specific mural at ICA LA, visit our website.

New selections at North Figueroa Bookshop 
North Figueroa Bookshop, 6040 N Figueroa St

This bookstore in the heart of Highland Park is a joint venture of Rare Bird and Unnamed Press with the collaborative support of founding publisher sponsors, Grove Atlantic and MCD Books. As Los Angeles-based independent book publishers, Rare Bird and Unnamed have been collaborating on projects for the last few years—the first of which, a landmark two-volume retrospective of William T. Vollmann’s photography, art, and prints titled Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness, is scheduled for release in 2023.