A follow up to KCHUNG PUBLIC Witches and Witch Hunts event at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Craft Work contextualizes art, music, and performance in the traditions of magic, conjuring, divination, cunning, and trickery. Featuring live performances by Belly Belt, christy and the WOLVES and Sanyu Estelle, DJ sets by Anuradha Vikram and Mayor, Video by Edgar Fabián Frías, and installation by Tanya Brodsky.
Sunday, October 16th
5pm - 10pm
$10 - 30 (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Mask wearing is highly recommended indoors. N/95, KN/95, surgical masks suggested and provided.
Anuradha Vikram:
Anuradha Vikram (born 1976, New York, NY; lives in Los Angeles) is a writer, curator, and educator. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They have written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA and an editor at X Artists’ Books. Vikram is faculty in the UCLA Department of Art. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from New York University.
https://linktr.ee/curativeprojects
Belly Belt:
Belly Belt is a multimedia performer. At her live shows, you can see her dance, sing, lip sync, accompanied by backing dancers, a band, or a projection light show. Belly Belt is very much fashion-oriented. Belly Belt is a video content creator and music maker.
Belly Belt is set apart because she never tries to be a part. Belly Belt is a lucid, living art that, while being a reflection of glitter and glam, always lives in her own bubble of independent, self-aware satire. It’s commentary not only of the contemporary and hip but of herself too. A mirror of a mirror that you can and should get lost in. A funhouse of vanity.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BellyBeltCorporate/featured
christy and the WOLVES:
Artist, musician, writer, educator, agitator, and emotional laborer, christy roberts berkowitz, composes experiences, images, and objects that interrogate personal and collective constructions of power. A third generation Southern Californian and one of LA Weekly’s 2012 “Best of LA People”, roberts berkowitz is the current C.E.O. of KCHUNG Radio (a 2016 Creative Capital Award recipient) and a founding member of The California Poppy Collective, Human Resources for Art Workers, and the Los Angeles Art Union. Her exhibitions and happenings have been hosted and/or commissioned by communities, organizations, and institutions on the unceded lands of the First Nations of the Americas and abroad, including the Los Angeles Dept. of Cultural Affairs (including CURRENT LA Public Art Triennial), MOCA Los Angeles (currently), The Getty Museum, REDCAT, Hammer Museum (including Made in LA, 14’), and American Jewish University, among many others.
roberts berkowitz’s various residencies include the IMMENSIVA AI/XR Residency for Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture (21’), Feminist Field School at the Centre Pompadour Neofeminist Institute in France (19’) and a Glass Residency at the Chrysler Museum (18’) and she has received generous funding from Asylum Arts, The Institute for Jewish Creativity, and The Righteous Persons Fund. Her full-length debut album ”WOLVES,” co-produced by four-time Grammy Winner, Jahi Sundance, under the name “christy” was released in 2022 on Alpha Pup Records. With influences ranging from the Cure to Cat Power, songs from WOLVES have been featured on playlists throughout the world, including two Apple Music Editors' "New in Indie" playlists, and by Pitchfork founder Ryan Schrieber on his "Right Now" playlist for Spotify. "grayscale" is a semifinalist for the Boden International Film Festival and it won best music video at the Lulea International Film Festival, both in Sweden. The WOLVES features producer and actor Colby Groce (My Friends, Winning Time, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Amsterdam) and producer and filmmaker Cheyne Taylor Bush (Cal Arts, 15', Tetrad, Jeffrey).
https://linktr.ee/christyrobertsberkowitz
Edgar Fabián Frías:
Edgar Fabián Frías works in installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, printed textiles, GIFs, performance, social practice, and community organizing, among other forms. Frías is Wixárika and their family is from Mexico, though they have lived in the United States for most of their life. Their art addresses historical legacies and acts of resistance, resiliency, and radical imagination within the context of Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, play, pedagogy, animism, and queer aesthetics. Weaving together the traditional and ancestral with the contemporaneous and emergent.
Born in East Los Angeles in 1983, Frías received dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from the UC, Riverside. In 2013, they received an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, with an emphasis on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy. Frías received their MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2022.
Their work has been exhibited internationally, including the Vincent Price Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Oregon Contemporary, MOCA Jacksonville, Performance is Alive, Project Space Festival Juárez, and ArtBo, among others. Their work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Taschen, Bustle, Los Angeles Times, Slate, CVLT Nation, Terremoto, Hyperallergic, and other publications.
https://www.edgarfabianfrias.org/
Mayor:
Los Angeles based DJ & Producer Mayor brings a hypnotic selection of uptempo breakbeat, electronic, bass and techno.
https://linktr.ee/mayor.me
Sanyu Estelle:
Sanyu Estelle is a Claircognizant ("clear knowing") Soothsayer ("truth teller") that is also known as "The Word Witch" because of her deep love for word origins (etymology) and word culture (philology). She is known for her straightforward card reading style ("the reading you need, not necessarily the reading you want") and her way with words via writing, speaking, and singing. Sanyu identifies as a pigmented (82%), womoonist (as constant as the tides; word to Alice Walker), cissy (femme and fem), flexible asexual (it's a spectrum, seems unwise to call it), travel-apt (Earth is a country), and fashion forward (Funk Flag Flyage) SSJW (Sarcastic Social Justice Warrior).
https://www.sanyuestelle.com/
Tanya Brodsky:
Tanya Brodsky (b. Kyiv, Ukraine 1982), is a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture. Her work draws on the hidden logics and bureaucracies governing each built environment, whether they be the dilapidated playgrounds of her Soviet childhood, or the reorganization of public spaces during the pandemic. Brodsky focuses on the power of mis-steps, misuses, failures and miscommunications, utilizing physical humor as a critical lens for unpacking the social conventions that are reinforced through our relationship to the spaces we occupy. Brodsky holds an MFA from UC San Diego and a BFA from RISD. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic and Carla, and has been recently exhibited at The Magic Hour, Ochi Projects, JOAN, Elevator Mondays, and Visitor Welcome Center. Her public art installation, “Yolki Palki,” is currently on view in West Hollywood.
https://www.tanyabrodsky.com/