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Please join Positional Projects on Saturday May 6th from 10-4 for ON ALL Day – A Desert Reflection at Llano del Rio, a self-guided tour featuring multiple locations around the 2,000 acres of the experimental utopian community honoring their final May Day celebration in 1917. Host Karyl Newman will share insights into the colony’s history from her Beinecke Fellowship while presentations by special guests will offer new perspectives on California Historic Landmark #933. Please RSVP to reserve your spot, souvenir guide, directions and details.
Guests provide their own transportation between locations. Sites are not wheelchair accessible, guests under 18 must be accompanied by a guardian. There is no fee to participate, however check-in is required. Tickets are limited.
We look forward to reflecting on Llano’s important history and building a new public memory, together.
Join Karyl Newman this Sunday to talk trash over a cup of tea. Newman documents waste abandoned in our landscape on Instagram as @dehsart and large dumpsites @blightsites. She will share her projects mapping illegal waste deposits across our desert, identifying spots for cleanup and providing free reuse resources for artists using the app at blightsites.org. Recently she used debris data to collect over 300 pounds of broken furniture, re-purposed for her stage design at the Wallis Center for the Performing Arts. Take a tour of what was taken HERE.
We will discuss easily accessible online cartography tools to share location based information and how we can re-think waste as a resource.
Please bring a mug, cup, or container to enjoy tea together.
Almost exactly ten years ago, Karyl designed set and costumes for Coy Middlebrook’s production of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, at Deaf West. In 2004, Edward Albee wrote a prologue to the better known Zoo, giving a new window into that upper east side world, At Home.
The Wallis and Deaf West have co-produced an evening uniting these two pieces under Coy’s direction, At Home at the Zoo.
Newman is thrilled to return to this story and cohort, in this production design incorporating images she shot in Central Park with pieces of discarded furniture found at dumpsites, uniting her site photography with material resourcing to offset the often wasteful practice of scenery production while interpreting the savage behavior of illegal dumping with our animalistic instincts.
Over 300 pounds of discarded furniture were gathered from locations around the Mojave, places Newman is well acquainted with through work documenting discards for over 4 years now and by utilizing the blightsites.org mapping tool she created to crowdsource reports of dumping for clean up or as a free reuse resource.
Please see the show.
The LCA has invited Karyl Newman to speak about her research on the Llano del Rio Colony reflecting on her 2016-2017 Beinecke Visiting Research Fellowship on Saturday, February 11th at 2PM.
The recently renovated Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale holds research collected by Paul Kagan while writing New World Utopias and includes photographs and papers about the Llano del Rio Colony and a travel journal by little known feminist architect Alice Constance Austin recently acquired by Yale Professor, Dolores Hayden within the Western Americana Collection.
Karyl Newman was awarded the Archibald Hanna Beinecke Visiting Research Fellowship during the 2016-2017 academic year to support her research on Alice Constance Austin’s plans for the socialist utopian experiment in the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles founded by Job Harriman in 1914. She looks forward to sharing her discoveries in a series of public discussions in 2017 marking the 100 anniversary of the comrades’ exodus from the desert to New Llano, Louisiana.
Beinecke Interior Photo by Will Pryce
Arts Connection, the arts council of San Bernardino County, holds their annual conference, From Competition to Collaboration, on Saturday, October 8.
In September, Arts Connection partnered with artist Karyl Newman to make possible the new ESRI-based Blightsites.org crowdsourced beta reporting application – anyone can participate by adding a geo-tagged image and description of where waste is out of place. This data can be used to organize cleanups or identify locations as material yards for adaptive reuse.
Blightsites founder, Karyl Newman will be speaking about the project as part of the panel:
Arts + Ecology: Creative Problem-solving
Join us for a passionate conversation about the critical role of the arts in generating awareness, developing solutions and activating change towards environmental health and justice. The impact of climate change is already impacting our lives and ultimately our survival. Air quality and water scarcity are real problems we face everyday in our region. How can we as visual and performing artists and administrators develop creative, collaborative projects that engage our communities in positive and effective ways? A variety of perspectives and current projects that harmoniously unite the arts and ecology in San Bernardino County will be shared and discussed.
As part of Mil-Tree’s Plant to Paper Project Karyl Newman will be reading from the writing workshop’s anthology at 6:30 PM on Friday, May 27.
Louise Mathias and Leilani Squire led the writing workshop. Silkscreened handmade paper covers each of the chapbook anthologies of prose and poetry by the participants.
Please join us as we celebrate the opening of the culminative work of the Plant to Paper Project. For months, civilians and veterans have been working side by side to create art in a variety of mediums, all based on paper created by removing invasive species from Joshua Tree land.
The California Arts Council announced a grant for projects that would enrich the lives of California’s veterans, active-duty military and their families through the arts. Arts Connection reached out to Mil-tree, an arts-based, veterans and community organization in Joshua Tree, California with a similar mission. Together, they enlisted the help of numerous other non-profits and developed a project that would offer opportunities for everything from hiking and environmental work, to paper-making, writing and life casting.
The project involved the removal of invasive plants under the leadership of Joshua Tree National Park vegetation management’s team, with support from Mojave Desert Land Trust.
Artists Denise Kraemer and Cathy Allen then guided participants in transforming the plant material into pulp and paper, and lead subsequent workshops for veterans to develop 2 and 3 dimensional works. A silkscreening workshop with the paper and writings was led by instructor, Duan Kellum.
Project filmed by Kate McCabe.
As part of Arttalks: Conversations with Tomorrow’s Experts
Since 2013, Karyl Newman has documented illegally dumped materials left in the Mojave. Using GPS coordinates, she links her images to locations using digital mapping technology, revealing the unseen scope of disregard for our desert. As an artist and researcher, she assembles abandoned objects in place or rescues items to reconstruct stories. In celebration of Earth Day 2016, she is launching a collaborative public map project, Blight Sites, where citizens can contribute their own dumpsite discoveries citing both materials available as a creative reuse resource and areas identified for cleanup initiatives.
By Land or By Sea – a program of FVAF 2016 by Micol Hebron
Inspired by Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, Newman read and recorded the names of neighborhoods built along Lancaster’s Avenue K while inside the silo ruin at the socialist utopian experiment, Llano del Rio. Paired with video she captured during a 2013 dust storm where 60+ mph winds obliterated perception of space, AVE K considers the loosening of land around new housing tracts and solar arrays in the Antelope Valley. The recording begins the podcast, The Next Step, introducing Llano del Rio’s feminist history and a CFP for the centennial event she produced with Cindy Rehm of Craftswoman House in May of 2014.
To learn about how more about how housing tracts impact the desert check out this article.
Brown Bag Lecture Series
While capturing the desert for a time-lapse project in 2013, Newman discovered an illegal dumpsite in Palmdale, CA. Since then she has been documenting and mapping what we leave behind. Visit DEHSART.com, the word trashed spelled backwards, to learn more about her education program, community cleanup boxes and map based on her instagram images aimed at reversing the rubbish in our Mojave.