You See LA: October 2023
Five things to see and do in L.A., handpicked by CAP UCLA's Edgar Miramontes
The arts are an essential part of UCLA. They inspire dialogue, encourage creativity, and drive real lasting change, across disciplines, borders, and backgrounds. They also create opportunities for increased engagement with our surrounding communities.
UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance Executive and Artistic Director Edgar Miramontes has curated a diverse selection of things to see and do in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, my adopted city, is a place of many offerings. The sounds, scents, and feel of every neighborhood, enclave, and geographic area offer something new — and if you listen closely, you can find the familiar. Los Angeles is a city of many diverse neighborhoods and if you are new to the city or were BORNXRAISED, you find your own Los Angeles as L.A. is a place for all. Of course, not without its issues, but nevertheless, a city that manages to sustain itself by the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of its people, especially artists and its cultural workers.
You name it and you can find it in L.A.
This time of year is one of my favorites — as summer turns into autumn — not only because of its cultural and meandering offerings, but because you still get a few warm days as late as early October and find that the Pacific Ocean is the warmest it’ll ever be to take a swim. I love to swim in the ocean. The in-between of seasons, the in-between in general, is where I am at my happiest in L.A. — finding and being in its beautiful city imperfections.
L.A. still surprises me and the next five places offer me quite a bit of respite in my wanderings.
Reparations Club
Jazzi McGilbert, left, founder and owner of Reparations Club, chats with customer Katy Burgess as bookstores reopen fully to browsers. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
I first learned of Reparations Club in the midst of the pandemic. As much as I tried to listen to a good podcast, or see a good film/documentary, I needed the sensation, the tactile, of holding a book. At the time in which we were not able to be in a room together, to breathe together, Reparations Club offered breath in setting up their mobile book cart outside its recently opened building to be able to order books and pick up in person. I picked up Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman and Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry by Soyica Diggs Colbert on two different occasions.
As I engaged more with Reparations Club books, I learned they are more than a bookstore or retail shop. They are a concept bookshop and creative space founded and owned by Jazzi McGilbert. Gilbert says, “Reparations Club is a physical offering for Black people in L.A.” Now that we’re able to be in spaces, Rep Club hosts a variety of events including readings by emerging and seasoned writers, queer game night, and what is most exciting is that the space feels like anything can happen there.
Angels Knoll
View from Angels Knoll.
Writing about physical spaces, it reminds me of other spaces where one can just be, but also be an audience member. I truly enjoyed, when time permitted, to take a book and sit on the grass of Angels Knoll, a small parcel of greenery adjacent to Angels Flight, for some, made famous by the film (500) Days of Summer.
It sits in Bunker Hill in downtown L.A. overlooking not only an encompassing view of Los Angeles, but another great gathering space, Grand Central Market. It is a great place to watch the city perform for you. In fact, I worked on a performance project where Grand Central Market was the stage for Argentine theater artist Mariano Pensotti who collaborated with Los Angeles writers on a free installation/performance project designed for downtown pedestrian encounters. Writers would project their imagined, in the moment, stories of those passing by onto several projection screens throughout market. Grand stories made from what appears to be mundane. People would stop to read these or be the lead character in the work. It was incredible. Grand Central Market is many-a-things, and it carries Los Angeles varied histories with it and at the same time, surprise you with art happenings.
Self Help Graphics & Art
A mural by Kalli Arte Collective adorns a wall at Self Help Graphics & Art in Boyle Heights. (Sarahi Apaez / For De Los)
Looking east from Angels Knoll sits Self Help Graphics & Art, a community, artist-centered space that has shaped Los Angeles through cultural and annual events, arts engagement and education, and youth and community outreach. It has and continues to be an inspiration to me as it has lived its values at the intersection of art and social justice, situated within the Chicana/o and Latinx context and beyond.
I especially look forward to its popular and culturally relevant events such as the longest running and free annual Día de los Muertos celebration, which draws over ten thousand people to its festivities; it’s Holiday Marketplace; and its one-day-only Annual Print Fair & Exhibition, which happens every last weekend in June.
Crenshaw Dairy Mart
Nana performing live at the Crenshaw Dairy Mart for the Freedom Summer Speaker Series. (Crenshaw Dairy Mart)
Similarly, the recently opened Crenshaw Dairy Mart is a future-thinking space that centers ancestry, abolition, and healing as values to how this gallery, community-centered, performance space takes shape. The space imagines a future of what an art space can do starting with their initial project Abolitionist Pod, which was first unveiled at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in May 2021. It includes hundreds of fruit and vegetable plants sourced from local Black farmers and gardeners and is the first prototype for similar pods that the Crenshaw Dairy Mart will implement across L.A. County to combat food insecurity. It is an impressive and motivating framework that works as an artwork and radiates out to attempt to move the needle in how we can engage with one another. It is an exciting new-ish place to drop in and engage with many of their programs including community screenings, exhibitions, LIVE at the Mart, and more.
18th Street Arts Center
Exterior view of the 18th Street Arts Center. (18th Street Arts Center)
Coming back West, the formidable 18th Street Arts Center, the largest artist residency program in Southern California that includes Highways Performance Space & Gallery, has been pivotal to my expansion as a participant, both as an artist and audience member, to the power of art and its change-making ethos. I am fascinated by the Center’s Culture Mapping 90404 ongoing project, a community produced map highlighting the history and cultural assets of the Pico neighborhood of Santa Monica. And what can I say about Highways, it is a place that invites all sorts of folks and holds a special place in as I performed there in my early dancing career.
Header image: McGilbert, right, with an assistant at Reparations Club in May 2021. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
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