upcoming events
To read more about an event, please click on the image to its left.
Most of these events are in Southern California. When something looks too amazing not to share, even if it’s out of the area, we’ll include it.
Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design
The exhibition intends to highlight new material practices alongside the rich milieu of ideas that accompany their making, including revisiting the term “nature,” “innovation,” and “sustainability.”
Lucianne Tonti: A Gathering
Sold Out! Please join us for a private gathering and dinner welcoming Lucianne Tonti to Los Angeles. Lucianne is internationally recognized as an investigative fashion journalist, commentator and expert in regenerative fashion systems. Her award-winning book Sundressed: Natural Fibres and the Future of Fashion was published in 2022. She is currently at work on a new book, Good Witch Hunting.
Biocentrics: LA Film Premiere
Join us for the Los Angeles premiere of Biocentrics, a documentary film that explores the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of preserving biodiversity. Please note, no tickets will be sold at the door.
We Carry the Land
We Carry the Land is an architectural exploration of space, time, and form born from an alignment of varied Indigenous foundational ways of being. This courtyard installation is commissioned and produced by Materials & Applications (M&A).
Non-Binary Code
Ben Cuevas’ solo exhibition featuring a new series exploring identity, gender, textile-based media and coded meaning.
OPEN CALL: Contextile 2024
The deadline period for submitting applications is from 15 September 2023 to 15 November 2023 midnight.
Ross Gay Reads From His New Book
Gay’s collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.
Influences/Influencers: California Fibers
Opening Reception Saturday, September 9 from 3 to 7 pm, showcasing the breadth of the influential and innovative work created by members of California Fibers.
Ferne Jacobs: A Personal World
a comprehensive selection from Ferne Jacobs’ 50 years of artmaking
LeiLani Nishime & Kim D. Hester Williams on Decolonizing Ecological (In)Justice
The Pomona College Humanities Studio Events welcomed LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams, co-authors of Racial Ecologies, for a discussion about decolonizing ecological (in)justice.
Color: Soil, Flower, Food
Lesley Roberts and Anne LaForti talk about the sources of color, soil health, plant magic, and local ecologies.
Ferne Jacobs Threading Time: Five Decades
This exhibit brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of her multi-dimensional forms in thread, starting from the 1960s and carrying through to the present.
Smithson Holt Lecture
Rebecca Solnit, Lucy Lippard and Lisa Le Feuvre join DesertLAB in conversation.
Image: Nancy Holt standing in one of the Sun Tunnels, outside Lucin, Utah. Photograph: Ardele Lister. © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Material & Mind: An Author Talk with Chris Bardt
An in-depth exploration of the interaction between mind and material world, mediated by language, image, and making—in design, the arts, culture, and science.
Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance
The Work of Radiance is a retrospective of the groundbreaking 30-year career of Myrlande Constant, and the first solo U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the work of a Haitian female contemporary artist.
Indigenous Voices on Our Changing Earth
Join author and Native Literature Professor Emeritus Stan Rushworth and ecologist and activist-scholar Melissa K. Nelson for a unique conversation exploring ideas from Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about the current climate crisis.
Arthur Simms and the Skin of Disparate Objects
The artist transforms collections and inspirations into poetic assemblages wrapped in hemp at Karma Gallery in Los Angeles.
Groundwork: the 2023 So Cal Fibershed Symposium
Save the Date for the So Cal Fibershed’s inaugural symposium exploring local fiber and ecosystems.
Sympoeisis: Making With
Save the Date for Sympoeisis: Making With, exploring local fiber and ecosystems. Opening Reception Saturday, Feb 25 at 2pm
Truth Telling: Voices of First People
Truth-Telling is a multidisciplinary cross-section of well-known Native artists from across the US and Canada, featuring the works of eight contemporary Indigenous artists: Christi Belcourt, the late T. C. Cannon, Nicholas Galanin Yéil Ya-Tseen, Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, Margaret Jacobs, Rose B. Simpson, Duane Slick and Benjamin West. Their visual truth-telling presents a counter-hegemonic view of Native people.
Shaped by the Loom
Shaped by the Loom places Indigenous aesthetics and ways of knowing at the center of Navajo textile production, highlighting the localized and land-based knowledge systems that guide the process behind the finished product. Rather than reifying the object, this perspective foregrounds the active and generative practices that shape and animate this art form.
I Can't I Won't I Will I Do
Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by the book, both as a solo practitioner and in the public sphere of community engagement. As a maker and teaching artist she creates work and projects which push the body and boundaries of the book into new media and materials, inviting altered ways of viewing the world and how we inhabit it.
Trade Fare Social
Works in Trade Fare Social address present-day challenges of the Student Debt Crisis, Bodily Autonomy, Sustainability, and Economic Systems.
ruinous ravishment
A three person exhibition with artists Christopher Miles, ceramic sculpture; Jamie Vasta, glitter works on wood; and Amy Usdin, fiber sculpture.
Contemporary Perspectives in Fiber Arts
Works selected for the exhibit express a wide variety of themes interpreted in diverse textile materials and processes – a hallmark of contemporary fiber art.
Margaret Wertheim: Value and Transformation of Corals
Author Talk and Book Signing from a co-author of The Crochet Coral Reef project.