3550 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089

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Fram Kitagawa, founder and director of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the creators of Play the LA River talk about creative approaches to placemaking and community vitality on two continents.

This event is co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation with support from the UW-JSPS Joint Symposium on Socially Engaged Art in Japan

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For nearly two decades, contemporary art at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale has drawn attention tosatoyama mosaic landscapes in Japan where traditional practices connect people with nature. Kitagawa Fram’s ideas for how art can address the social problems of an aging and urbanizing population appear for the first time in English in the new book, Art Place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art and Nature, from Princeton Architectural Press. 

Play the LA River—organized by the collective Project 51—is a public art and community outreach project that invites communities across Los Angeles, and especially those living alongside the 51-mile LA River, to reimagine the river as a civic space that can connect people and revitalize ecosystems. The project further aims to help people find the river and to transform visitors into stakeholders and stewards of its future. Three Project 51 team members will join this conversation: Allison Carruth (a professor of literature and environment at UCLA), Barron Bixler (a documentary photographer and designer) and Catherine Gudis (a professor of public history at UC Riverside).

The conversation will examine local identities and planetary concerns and will look to the future of how art can revitalize both urban and rural communities.

Kitagawa writes, “The desire and skill to engage with the local people around the natural environment that they contend with daily has become a central theme of the triennale. . . . This exemplifies quotidian life here and encapsulates the whole of art.” 

Bios
Fram Kitagawa served as the general director of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2015. and has made a major contribution to the development of the Echigo-Tsumari region of Niigata Prefecture through art. He has also served as the general director of the Setouchi Triennale since 2010. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Republic, the Order of Culture from the Republic of Poland, the 2006 Japanese Education Minister’s Award for Art (in the field of art promotion), and the Order of Australia: Honorary Member (AO) in the General Division (2012). The English translation of his Echigo-Tsumari “concept book” Art Place Japan has just appeared from Princeton Architectural Press.

Allison Carruth is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the English Department, Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She has written Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food, and her current research examines art-science collaboration, environmental writing and digital and urban ecologies.

Barron Bixler is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work focuses on the altered landscapes of the new American West. His photographs explore the collisions of—and interstices between—urban, suburban, industrial and rural spaces.

Catherine Gudis is Director of the Public History Program at University of California, Riverside. Her current research explores the ways in which public art, performance, and history can help frame and socially activate urban space and place in Southern California.

Together, Carruth, Bixler, and Gudis are among the founders of Project 51 and its year-long performance, Play the LA River.

Brad Monsma and Amiko Matsuo are translators of Fram Kitagawa’s Art Place Japan and founders of Vibrant Lands Satoyama Institute, a nonprofit focused on developing interdisciplinary arts residencies in Japan. Matsuo is a ceramic artist and Monsma is Professor and Chair of English at California State University, Channel Islands.

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