NEWS
“Forty minutes south by car, in Free the Land! Free the People! at Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), an exhibition of video interviews, schematics and ephemera documents CDM’s efforts toward ‘prototyping and building’ what the exhibition materials call ‘abolitionist pods’ – solar-powered gardens housed in geodesic domes. One of these pods stands on the parking lot behind the former milk shop, a far cry from the Getty Center’s $1.3 billion mountaintop view, and is used to host health and wellness workshops for the surrounding community.”
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Free the Land! Free the People! explores Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s abolitionist pod project — a blend of art, architecture and science designed to address systemic issues such as food insecurity and housing instability. Built in 2021, the abolitionist pods are autonomously irrigated, solar-powered geodesic domes that serve as hubs for community empowerment and healing. Also a part of PST Art, the exhibition showcases illustrations, architectural renderings and archival documentation related to the evolution of the pods. In conjunction with the exhibition, CDM will host workshops on food justice, art and more.
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“…that’s the metaphor of community: we’re organisms; we affect each other. Our behaviors affect each other. We’re also affected by systems that have been created around us, too… capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy - we’re affected by that.”, CDM Co-founder noé olivas
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A few exhibitions will be very large—indeed, cosmic… Many more will be medium-sized and even grassroots in scale, such as Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s abolitionist pod, a permanent installation at the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village. It is a self-sustaining community garden consisting of a series of plant-filled geodesic domes, which also became sites for the community and art programming during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Our exhibition is a study of our last three years researching and building these pods,” says alexandre ali reza dorriz, one of Dairy Mart’s co-founders; it ties together issues such as “the Black liberation movement and food justice”. Crenshaw Dairy Mart is one of several organisations that are first-time PST Art participants.
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“The role of healing and abolition within the context of community building, especially within abolitionist institutions, brings an even deeper layer of hope for the future. Abolitionist institutions, like the Crenshaw Dairy Mart by their very nature, challenge existing structures of oppression and envision a world where art, justice, and care are central. The focus on healing within these spaces acknowledges the traumas inflicted by these structures and recognizes that transformation requires addressing and mending these wounds. At CDM we believe Incorporating healing into community building emphasizes the importance of not just changing systems externally but also nurturing individual and collective well-being. It’s about creating environments where everyone has the space to heal from the impacts of systemic oppression.” says Ashley Blakeney, Executive Director of Crenshaw Dairy Mart.
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“Practicing abolition at CDM, we believe borders are harmful to our society and ecosystem,” olivas said. “I hope the future of immigration is centered on care and ends the practice of disposability of the human beings that have often left their homes because of the U.S. government’s impact on their homelands.”
The biggest conduit of optimism? olivas said it’s the connective tissue of community.
“The most rewarding part has been working with my community to make this project possible,” he said. “Working with my partner and curator Ana Briz, CDM team, my artist assistants, and my gallerist, Charlie James and his team, has been very special for me. I feel supported. It’s been very meaningful.”
As the exhibition comes to a close — but olivas continues his years-long practice of creating around themes of immigration and labor — his hope is that migrant communities find freedom.
And as politicians continue to operate from a place of control and competition, his view of the world depicts something different.
“What always gives me hope are the children in our family and community. There is an Ifa proverb from the sacred Odu-Ifa that says ‘the doll-carrying masquerade who bears the Agba drum fiercely and repeatedly to perform rituals because of children,’” olivas said.
“When we are fighting for a world that practices abolition, we are building a better world for our children, to live a better life with dignity and respect. We are creating a kinder world that moves with care.”
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The titular Gilded Dreams (2024) bisects the front room, smartly installed as a barrier that is nevertheless askew, torqued from instead of parallel to the entry. A massive powder-coated steel fence shimmering a treacly gold, it stands erect, a looming if punctured lattice wall. Given the modest space, walking around the outsized Gilded Dreams requires hugging the walls: the work wryly re-imagines the phenomenological assault of minimalism, or perhaps ever more to the point, Bruce Nauman’s interrogatory and ritualized engines of entrapment. But where Nauman’s Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) performs the reflexive psycho-somatic stakes of enclosure, olivas insists on particularizing the task-based laborer.
Here perhaps a better comparison is the parallax of material and subject that characterizes Melvin Edwards’s pieces, those formally astute chains and barbed wires that bespeak histories of racism as much as sculpture. For his part, olivas solicits referentiality; the fence—a readymade matrix exquisitely acted upon—redoubles those cleaving the United States border with Mexico, perversely following its cartography into the Pacific. As with related works of the detritus of shredded and coiled tire impressions tucked into corners, Gilded Dreams conjures the landscape of the Southwest (olivas none too subtly pierces the metal scrim with a Looney Tunes-like cut-out of a saguaro cactus, recognizable from Imperial County or the Sonoran Desert).
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The summer of 2020 brought to the mainstream widespread interest in reimagining care and healing in the face of racial capitalism and its carceral solutions. Abolitionists spoke publicly about putting an end to the conditions that cause harm, and working to build sustainable solutions. Imagining a safer world is the first step in imagining abolition, and a safer world can be defined by a community’s access to drinking water, food, and shelter. While prison abolition argues for a world without carceral punishment and attempts to undo the United States’ current invocation of “correctional facilities” as catchall solutions to social problems—what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has acidly called “the prison fix”—the abolitionist imaginary is what animates the desire to construct a world centered on love, care, and freedom. The Los Angeles-based art collective and gallery, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), founded in early 2020 by artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz, and noé olivas, insists that the arts can be integral to imagining and also living abolition. From addressing food insecurity through their abolitionist pod to organizing events and programs that foreground a social justice curriculum, CDM’s cultural output models the work of creating a safer, healthier, and more just world. In keeping with these themes, I asked the CDM co-founders to reflect on their three pillars: ancestry, abolition, and healing.
–Ana Briz
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Hollywood has a dismal record for people of color trying to work behind the camera. Of the top 100 grossing films of 2022, only one in five were led by directors from underrepresented groups, and that number has been stagnant for several years, according to a 2023 report by USC.
Hollywood isn’t the end goal for everyone who makes films in the community, says Blakeney. For that reason, she intentionally promoted the festival as a space for BIPOC filmmakers to experiment, learn, and grow safely.
Hollywood invests a lot in a particular type of racial trauma story. While the festival didn’t shy away from painful truths, many films celebrated other experiences, with a wide range of genres in the lineup including blocks of experimental, romantic, thriller, and mental health films.
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The South LA art and activism nonprofit Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM) will hold its inaugural film festival this Saturday at the Miracle Theater in Inglewood, showcasing a diverse range of short films by 19 LA-based filmmakers of color. The selections include documentaries, narrative films, music videos, and works in progress, some shot on iPhones and others and others made with professional equipment, but all resonating with the CDM’s guiding principles of “Ancestry, Abolition, and Healing.”
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On the ground floor, Inglewood-based artist collective and gallery CDM transform their space into a labyrinth of images, videos, sculptures, and texts that highlight the enduring mobilization led by artists and grassroots organizations to halt the development of prisons in L.A. county, which culminated in the passage of Measure R in 2020. Curated by artist Autumn Breon and CDM co-founder alexandre ali reza dorriz, the installation straddles the line between art, community archive, and political resource. Photo and video documentation of Stained: An Intimate Portrayal of State Violence (2012), a participatory performance by CDM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, appears in the first gallery. A response to the 2011 ACLU report detailing widespread, systemic abuse in the L.A. county jail system, the work incorporates testimonials from Cullors’ older brother, Monte, who was incarcerated for several years. Nearby, a 20-pound sculpture of wings Cullors crafted from Monte’s clothing (worn on the occasion of her performance Prayer to the Iyami, 2020) gives tangible form to carceral traumas underlining CDM’s calls for abolition.
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This Article profiles and interviews seven artists and organizers who are leaders throughout five distinct Los Angeles grassroots, abolitionist organizations at the forefront of dismantling and abolishing the largest penal system in the world, which is comprised of lethal policing and carceral institutions operated by the County and City of Los Angeles. Through an examination of the tools and strategies for protest employed by these five organizations, we highlight the organizers’ utilization of a distinct language of aesthetics as a principal instrument for abolition in the contemporary abolitionist movement. This Article identifies a growing number of contemporary Los Angeles based artists, collectives, and organizations which have built coalitions that have instrumentalized aesthetics through a myriad of performances, exhibitions, and public activations and interventions to address the abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) in such an accessible and effective manner that these coalitions have frequently influenced policy change and community healing. In this Article, abolitionist aesthetics is identified as the contemporary artistic movement where artists, collectives, and organizations have employed the arts to address abolition of the PIC toward an effective social and political change. This Article also argues that the messaging and imaging of the contemporary abolitionist movement work, and the arts within this contemporary abolitionist movement work, rely heavily on the internal environments and community dynamics of the contemporary abolitionists who lead the movement, notably being Black women feminists who have introduced a radical Black, queer, and feminist politic steeped in a spiritual practice into the organizing science for the movement as it intersects with the arts.
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CDM-FAACE 2022-2023 Inaugural Cohort Oto-Abasi Attah, Autumn Breon, and juice wood Interviewed by Marc Lamont Hill for The Grio. Watch Video here.
In a movement that can often be reduced to its darkest symbols—chains, cages, and orange jumpsuits, to name a few—this ability of artists to create spaces of levity and healing is especially pertinent. And for the artist collective Crenshaw Dairy Mart, this looks like the Abolition Pod. Inspired by the community fridge movement in Inglewood, the team wanted to build a safe structure that would grow food for neighbors and foster conversations around abolitionist praxis. First located in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s parking lot, the pod now sits next to a 90-day transitional housing facility, the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village.
The Abolitionist Pod allows the CDM team and the larger community to “practice abolition in real time,” says co-founder Cullors. He says CDM members underscored in their contract with the museum that they would not permit use of law enforcement to protect the art. “When they asked, ‘Well, what happens if someone harms the art?’ we said, ‘We believe we can fix that. But we can’t bring someone’s life back.’”
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Alternative models have also been emerging, such as the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship, through which three artists participate in a program of lectures, workshops, and critiques. Fellows also receive a $100,000 grant, provided through an anonymous foundation for the program’s first year. The fellowship was started by USC Roski MFA grads Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz, and noé olivas.
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In celebration of Pride Month, LA County Library’s Compton Library is partnering with the Crenshaw Dairy Mart on a special Storytime program and a curated book list of LGBTQ-themed books for all generations. The collaboration aims to support LGBTQ+ youth and authors during a time of increasing violence and legislative backlash.
Polling conducted by The Trevor Project indicates that 71% of LGBTQ+ youth—including 86% of transgender and nonbinary youth—say state laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ young people have negatively impacted their mental health. This collaboration aims to show solidarity with LGBTQ+ youth by making their stories more visible and promoting LGBTQ+ writers and/or illustrators who are also impacted by growing censorship.
“We’re excited to partner with Crenshaw Dairy Mart, which, like Compton Library, is an institution focused on cultural enrichment and encouraging open dialogue,” said Library Director, Skye Patrick. “Uplifting LGBTQ+ stories is always important, but especially so during these turbulent times.”
“In the midst of such openly anti queer and trans legislation, it is important that we show LGBTQ young people and their families that they are loved and supported, and that they deserve to thrive,” said Vic Quintanar, Program Director at Crenshaw Dairy Mart.
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At the end of last year, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), a nonprofit cultural space rooted at the intersection of art and activism, announced its upcoming Fellowship for Abolition and the Advancement of the Creative Economy (CDM-FAACE). The first three artists selected as fellows are Autumn Breon, juice wood, and Oto-Abasi Attah; they will each receive a $100,000 stipend and healthcare.
The theme of the inaugural fellowship is “Inglewood and Prototyping the Abolitionist Imagination,” stressing the importance of CDM’s location in Inglewood, a historically Black city from the 1960s through the ’90s (though Latinos are now the majority), bordered by South Central LA to the East, the 405 freeway to the West, and the 105 freeway to the South. All three fellows have roots in Inglewood, and they spoke about the impact that restrictive housing covenants (known as redlining) and freeway construction have had on communities of color in South LA.
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The bag, evoking a quilt patch, summoning the North Star, is also embedded with another type of code: poetry. The third collaborator in this project is the poet Nissi Berry, whose poem carrying freedom is laser engraved on a leather panel at the back of the bag. Berry, a formerly incarcerated woman and mother, describes how she wrote the piece: “I just wanted to embody the idea of freedom. I thought about Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free’ and how she sang it with her entire being,” she says. “And that’s how I wanted to write the poem, with my entire being.”
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In conjunction with their new exhibition North Star: Healing Generations, which focuses on the movement to free Black women from incarceration, Crenshaw Dairy Mart is holding a community conversation about abolition and healing. Co-Founder Patrisse Cullers and Creative Director of Zakarias 1925 Rita Nazareno will discuss how quilts were integrated into the Underground Railroad and how they continue to be a powerful image in the abolition movement today. Their fireside chat will be accompanied by a performance by Nissi Berry, a previously incarcerated Black poet. She’ll be reading selections from her book, Carrying Freedom, as well as poetry featured in the North Star show.
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Spurred by the ever-shifting relationship between art and the community, this film follows art critic and journalist Catherine Wagley, who looks directly at artist groups and collectives who engage with the community through acts of mutual aid and support as well as artistic collaboration. Spotlighting Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Los Angeles Poverty Department, and Summaeverythang, Wagley investigates artistic practices and spaces that resist art world hierarchies, making room for experimentation and exploration in the community.
The Crenshaw Dairy Mart, home to an artist collective and art gallery housed in a former dairy mart in Inglewood, California is dedicated to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice. Bridging cultural work and advocacy and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its surrounding community, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart emerged from a need to serve Black and transnational individuals through programming, events, and arts installations. From an investment in abolition, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart seeks to weave community solidarity through new modes of accessibility which cultivate and nurture communal arts and education.
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Artist and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors sits down with Roy at the Crenshaw Dairy Mart. She explains what abolition pods are and how they play a role in helping people find liberation by fighting food apartheid.
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Inglewood has been at the center of division and displacement since it first bloomed into a Black neighborhood. Many parts about its growth were out of Black residents’ control even after it was racially desegregated in the mid-’60s, at which point white flight and the construction of entertainment complexes like the Forum galvanized them to think about how to create a self-sufficient city. And that continues to be the case, as many in the community still feel shut out on the approval process for even more massive sports complexes, while at the same time a gentrifying wave of white, wealthier homeowners poses an uncertain future for families living near the poverty line. In response, artists and organizers, including Crenshaw Dairy Mart, have banded to support each other and navigate their longevity and Inglewood-first values outside of a white-dominated art market.
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Before the Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), founded in early 2020 by artists Patrisse Cullors, noé olivas, and Alexandre Dorriz, opened its gallery space, it set out to build connections with its Inglewood neighbors and to honor the long history of community arts and organizing in the neighborhood. Its programming includes community artists and organizers both in and outside of the mainstream art world—its founders all have MFAs from USC, even if they also have organizing backgrounds (Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter), while both of the recent, inaugural artists-in-residence do not. In collaboration with resident artist Paul Cullors, the Nigerian-American artist Oto-Abasi Attah created a mural outside the Dairy Mart of murdered South Central rapper and local entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle, titled Saint Nip (2020). This spring, CDM’s founders installed a geodesic dome (abolitionist pod [prototype], 2021), a prototype for community gardens that could be placed throughout the city, in the parking lot of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA—still occupying space in the institutional sector. CDM’s presence within institutional boundaries perhaps primes the art world, often inclined to ignore such community-driven ventures, to embrace and pay attention to its work.
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You can now pick vegetables in the parking lot of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA thanks to a living, breathing pod created by artist collective Crenshaw Dairy Mart. The edible installation, titled “abolitionist pod (prototype),” was created for Art Rise, the offshoot of We Rise, an initiative of the LA County Department of Mental Health in which exhibits, pop-ups, and programs emphasize healing and mental health throughout the month of May.
Along the walls of the dome-like structure, pockets teem with herbs, kale, and lettuce. Periodic mist keeps the plants moist, creating a vibrant, humid ecosystem in the middle of Downtown LA. Through an abolitionist framework focused on mutual aid, autonomy, and community care, the artists hope to build edible pods across neighborhoods in LA as a way to bring generative, healthy foods to places impacted by systemic racism.
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“…cofounder Patrisse Cullors and her University of Southern California art school pals Alexandre Dorriz and Noé Olivas were looking to develop an entirely new ecosystem in the Antelope Valley when the opportunity arose two years ago to take over a 1965 grocery turned liquor store in Inglewood. “It was this concept of freeing the land, a place where artists and activists and abolitionists would come together,” says Olivas, noting the trio opened the location in late February with an acclaimed exhibition examining the decade of activism behind ballot measure R, which passed on March 3 and gives the Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission power to directly subpoena sheriff department personnel while requiring the commission to develop a jail reduction plan…”
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“…Who and what determines what counts as art in the year to come—and for the sake of the future farther out on the horizon? Artists, curators, gallerists, museum directors, auction specialists, social and political activists—the cast of active players in the art world is eclectic and diverse. And then there are the institutions that help give that cast a pedestal or a stage. For our second issue dedicated to Deciders, the editors of ARTnews looked to the present in an attempt to foresee what’s yet to come in a year with a lot on the line…”
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“…But Cullors is also a performance artist whose practice merges political organizing with creative expression. In June she debuted A Prayer for the Runner, a two-channel video work-cum-Zoom webinar in honor of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was murdered in Georgia by white supremacists while he was out for a jog; the piece is a collaboration with the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. And in October, she staged a new virtual performance titled Malcolm X Revisited through L.A.’s experimental gallery REDCAT.
“My practice has always been deeply tied to my activism,” Cullors told ARTnews. “As I’ve evolved in my politicization, my practice also became very politicized, and it became clear that my art practice is an extension of my political values.”
Cullors trained early as a dancer in L.A., but as a teenager grew frustrated by the dance world’s rigidity and the whiteness of a space in which she felt that she was typecast to be a backup dancer for hip-hop videos. “I couldn’t see a place in the dance world for me or my body type,” she said…”
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“…With Crenshaw Dairy Mart, artists PatriSSe Cullors, Alexandre Dorriz and Noé Olivas are trying to bridge the disparate worlds of art and abolitionist thinking. Hear how Cullors connects modern-day abolition with art and how the practice of art can help the world show up for each other and racial equality…”
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“…USC Roski welcomes back Roski 2019 alumni Patrisse Cullors, Alexandre Dorriz and noé olivas. These artists founded the Crenshaw Dairy Mart in Inglewood, California. The art space is home to an artist collective and art gallery dedicated to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice. Bridging cultural work and advocacy and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community…”
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“…The virality is happening through millions of regular normal people who use the hashtag because they see the necessity to call out racism, to call out white supremacy, to call out anti-Black racism,” says Cullors. “I wasn’t a celebrity, we weren’t really known outside of our own cities and states seven years ago. That is the power of grassroots organizing—to be able to get folks to recognize how important it is to see themselves in each other.”
The organization has evolved, too. Over the past seven years, it has grown into the Black Lives Matter Global Network, made up of 12 chapters. In July, Cullors assumed a secondary role, executive director of the network, overseeing these regional leaders spearheading movements in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. This past summer, the network’s foundation started providing grants of up to $500,000 from its $6.5 million fund to support the grassroots work of its affiliate chapters. The network is allocating an additional $6 million to outside organizations that focus on Black transgender issues, groups she says are often underfunded…”
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“…If you follow Patrisse Cullors, you know that she is a very busy person. Every day, the Black Lives Matter co-founder helps wade “through the messiness of the internet” with her news digest. And amid frequent speaking engagements concerning politics and the movement for Black lives, she is also an active artist and helps run the beloved collective and gallery Crenshaw Dairy Mart.
This Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3, Cullors is premiering her latest project: Malcolm Revisited, a video work that will launch Black Lives Matter’s Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign for the November presidential election. The film is screening for free on REDCAT’s website both nights.
Malcolm Revisited builds upon a 2016 video work in which Cullors responds to Malcom X’s “The Ballot or The Bullet,” his legendary 1964 speech urging Black Americans to vote when President Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection. As Cullors observes, “Our visionary Brother Malcolm saw the vote as a tactic in the larger strategy for freedom…”
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“…Coinciding with Dia De La Raza and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and in anticipation of the upcoming presidential election, we are pleased to announce two new publications by Los Angeles based artist Ruben Ochoa. The editions are in three languages, English, Spanish and Mandarin - reflecting the cultural heritages of Ochoa’s family - and subvert the imagery of an old ‘Open/Closed’ sign he admired and appreciated from his mother’s Mexican food restaurant, to create a new universal call to action: the dual language ‘VOTE' sign. Following Sister Corita Kent and Self Help Graphic’s history of community advocacy, Ochoa conceived of these silkscreens as a social initiative aimed at getting out the vote. In that interest, 60% of proceeds from every print sold is being donated by Aliso Editions and Ruben Ochoa to three organizations seeking to foster and protect our participatory democracy: Artists 4 Democracy, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, and Dignity & Power Now…”
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“…Join us for VPAM in the Studio, a new series of short-format interviews designed to introduce artists and their practices to our museum community. Each virtual program will be recorded live on Instagram and made available on Facebook and YouTube platforms. This program will feature noé olivas and is hosted by Joseph Daniel Valencia, VPAM Exhibitions & Programs Manager…”
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“…We needed a rubric of engagement that establishes a precedence of expectations, accountability upon one another. We're going into a relationship, a collaborative relationship, not just a contract. When you enter the premises, what are the expectations that you have with one another? Like, how are we going to love up on one another? Obviously, like the five of us that are here in the studio the most from USC, we had the precedence of how we want to ensure safety, lessen harm. All these things to establish a safe environment.
[For] the whole rubric of engagement we actually brought on Mark-Anthony Johnson. He helps out with Dignity and Power Now and Justice L.A. This rubric of engagement is kind of like in collaboration with our sister orgs.
As far as how do we go about running an abolition space, and especially thinking about defunding the police? Like, there's no way we're gonna call police. We can handle the situation…”
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“…Voz Alta: Time & Space is organized and curated by Southern California-based artist noé olivas. As a former intern of Voz Alta, olivas is interested in reviving these histories alongside his art practice of community healing and engagement.
The exhibition will take form as a video installation at BEST PRACTICE, while additionally functioning as a project space for the interviews and performances that will take place. The oral history videos produced from the exhibition will also be accessible to the public on various online platforms. The stories will be guided by Carlos Beltran, photographer and facilitator of the last location of Voz Alta in the historical Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego, and Stephanie de la Torre, community member, poet, and a board member of the first and second locations in Downtown San Diego. Invited media artist, Evan Apapodaca, will be translating these oral stories into short narrative films…”
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“…The show includes documentation, ephemera and work by artists and activists (including Dairy Mart co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who has long been engaged in justice reform causes). The show provides a good opportunity to reflect on the long-term commitment and dedication necessary to effect change. But I was particularly moved by one of the smaller gestures: a dandelion placed in the crack on the floor, a poignant symbol of resilience.
As Cullors told Art in Odd Places in 2013: “The dandelion is kind of seen as abused, people will kick it up in their yard when they see it grow in their garden ... you try to uproot it and it gets stronger, so it grows deeper. ... We thought that was a powerful image for us — even if you try and beat us and uproot us, we will get stronger, we will survive…”
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“…What the three founders had in mind for the space was that it would be part artist collective and part gallery, a place guided by eight principles rooted in “ancestry, abolition, and healing” that also serves as a cultural network for the community of Inglewood. Their first exhibition focused on Measure R, a ballot measure that Cullors—also a cofounder of Black Lives Matter—worked on with multiple groups across the country to push for alternatives to incarceration. When the pandemic hit, they shut down the gallery, but Cullors, Olivas, and Dorriz immediately set up the Care Not Cages relief fund for incarcerated artists who are among those disproportionately affected by the outbreak. They also partnered with artist Lauren Halsey to distribute art-supply kits alongside produce boxes in South LA and Watts through Halsey’s Summaeverythang community program. This work—whether it’s paying for the artwork of incarcerated artists or providing a place for education, liberation, and activism—has been the product of listening and looking at the history of their community, explain the founders…”
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"…The dairy mart is not just an art space, it's an activist space," said Cullors. "It's a space where we see the role of Inglewood and South Central as a critical part of the landscape of Los Angeles and, I would argue, the country…."
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“…Full sales proceeds for each print will be donated by Alison Saar, Leslie Ross-Robertson and L.A. Louver to local Los Angeles community organizations Dignity and Power Now (DPN), Summaeverythang Community Center and Crenshaw Dairy Mart…”
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“…At a time when Black and Brown neighborhoods are wary of new businesses opening in disenfranchised communities, the team behind Crenshaw Dairy Mart is clearly being intentional with how it approaches the space. Olivas says that the team, especially during COVID-19 times, has offered the surrounding businesses the use of the lot in the back of the Mart in case they might need it.
The team also keeps the history of Black-led arts organizations at the forefront of their approach, particularly when it comes to the history of Los Angeles during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Brockman Gallery, Dr. Samella Lewis’s Museum of African American Art, Suzanne Jackson’s Gallery 32, to name a few, are the spaces that Dorriz says the team has consistently kept in mind.
“We're within this long legacy of Black-led arts institutions,” says Dorriz. “And Noé and I as sort of these co-conspirators in this space, [a term] which Patrisse used first… We're just navigating that and thinking of that history and what happened to those spaces. At what cost those Black-led art institutions struggled with the rest of the greater Los Angeles art world — the mostly white art world…”
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“…This weekend, August 7—9, Crenshaw Dairy Mart is presenting the digital exhibition “Black August” and premiering the documentary Whose Streets? by Damon Davis. Debuting on PBS’s educational platform POV for 72 hours only, the feature-length film looks at the 2014 Ferguson rebellion, and is accompanied by a virtual selection of programming and works by Lola Ogbara, Jen Everett, and Adrian Walker.
Co-directed by Davis and Sabaah Folayan Whose Streets?will be streamed to the public six years after the murder of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson, which sparked the movement in Ferguson, MO. The film sheds light on the repeated violence against Black neighborhoods, following the history of Black resistances that have occurred in the month of August—like the Haitian Revolution, March on Washington, and the Nat Turner Rebellion—thus earning the title “Black August.”…”
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“…The Crenshaw Dairy Mart is kicking off their “Black August” event this month with the debut of the 2017 Damon Davis documentary Whose Streets? on PBS’s educational platform, POV on August 7. “Black August” is set to run through August 9.
The Crenshaw Dairy Mart is the home to an artistic collective and art gallery that is dedicated to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice, bridging cultural work and advocacy, and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community.
As the Black Lives Matters movement continues to slowly push the needle for civic and social progress, “Black August” sets to champion artists, support the community and further amplify voices fighting for change…”
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“…August is a month whose days have been marked by milestones of Black struggle.
In August 1791, a group of enslaved laborers in Haiti launched a rebellion against French colonial authorities that led to independence. Exactly 40 years later, Nat Turner led a rebellion of enslaved workers in Virginia — a rebellion that today bears his name. August 1965 was when the LAPD pulled over Marquette Frye in Watts, a traffic stop that led to an uprising that lasted six days. It was another day in August 1971, when George Jackson, an inmate at San Quentin State Prison and author of the influential autobiography and manifesto “Soledad Brother,” was killed in a melee he was said to have started after overtaking guards with a smuggled gun, an action for which some say was he was framed…”
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“As we call ourselves artists, we lead as organizers first,” Patrisse Cullors told Hyperallergic by phone. Cullors is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, she is also an artist who received her MFA last year from USC’s Roski School of Art & Design. Earlier this year, Cullors and two of her USC classmates, alexandre dorriz and noé olivas, founded the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, a space that fuses art and activism, in Inglewood. “We’re focused on liberation of the community first,” Cullors said. “Art has a place in that liberation. Every one of our peoples has used art as part of liberation struggles. We see ourselves in that lineage.”
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“…In a former dairy mart just blocks from the ever-lengthening shadow of SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles’s Inglewood neighborhood, the founders of the art space Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM) have spent the past two years having conversations—with each other, with artists, and, most importantly, with members of the surrounding neighborhood. Founders Patrisse Cullors, Noé Olivas, and Alexandre Dorriz intended for the space to function not only as a gallery and studio, but as a repository for local culture and a place of community gathering. Just weeks after its inaugural exhibition opened, however, the United States entered lockdown, and communal gatherings became impossible. Now, as the pandemic surges in California, protestors continue to organize, and the importance of community support becomes a vital issue for art spaces across the country, CDM’s founders want to model a more holistic way for institutions to show up for the people they serve…”
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“…By disseminating the work of imprisoned people, the exhibition works to “ensure their narratives surrounding this pandemic are public, forthright, and asserted on view.” Curated by Ana Briz, independent researcher, writer, and curator, and Alexandre Dorriz, artist, writer, and co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, the money raised from print sales will go directly towards producing books for the artists, and to the incarcerated artist’s immediate family.
Protest posters, poetry, collage, hyper-stylized pencil work, and detailed illustration – the mediums are varied and dynamic, reflecting the many ways experience can be expressed. One piece by Larry White depicts the meeting of the prison walls with the words “Prison is a crime,” illustrated across it. What they all have in common, though, is that they are illustrations of Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s vision: a world that denounces cages, and imagines care and dignity…”
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“…CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic is an online exhibition that centers fourteen artworks produced by six currently incarcerated artists. All but three of the artworks exhibited on GALLERYPLATFORM.LA were specifically made in response to the global pandemic that, as of June 23rd, at least 48,764 incarcerated individuals have tested positive for. In naming the disproportionate effects on the incarcerated community, this exhibition seeks to highlight a community’s recorded responses to this moment, ensuring their narratives surrounding this pandemic are public, forthright, and asserted on view…”
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“…Conceived during our era of social distancing, A Prayer for the Runner debuted on a Zoom webinar as a two-channel video. On one side of a split screen, Cullors appeared in a candlelit room, barefoot, dressed in a gauzy emerald robe and silver metallic pants, the words “BLACK POWER” written across her black t-shirt. Writing in black marker on a knee-high stack of blank paper, she presented “LAPD BUDGET” to the viewer as a sacrificial offering, then fed it through a shredder suspended from the ceiling. One by one, as she shredded “JAILS,” “PRISONS,” and “POLICE,” the sheets momentarily held their shape in midair as they fell out of the machine, shattering to pieces as they landed on the growing mound of shreds below. In the background, a pair of outstretched wings hung on the wall…”
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“The Crenshaw Dairy Mart is an artist collective and gallery in Inglewood that bridges cultural work, advocacy, and art. Co-founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alexander Dorriz, and Noé Olivas, their current exhibition has reopened and can be seen by appointment.
The exhibition, “Yes on Measure R! Archives and Legal Conceptions,” is about the social justice organizing that led to 2020’s successful ballot Measure R, which significantly strengthened civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Department. The exhibit also looks at art’s pivotal role in those movements…
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“THE THROUGH LINE between my art and activism is a political framework based on the liberation of Black people in particular, but also marginalized communities at large. I’m trying to aestheticize a politic so that art becomes a forum and a container for what I believe in politically as well as what I believe in spiritually.” - As told to Delia Brown
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The Crenshaw Dairy Mart will participate in the inaugural For Freedoms Congress
Please join us
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Cullors designed the program, Social and Environmental Arts Practice, in collaboration with the college. The artist, who recently received her master’s from USC’s Roski School of Art and Design exploring the intersection of performance and activism, has worked to reform the criminal justice system during the last 20 years.
Her relationship with the college began about a year and a half ago when she was asked to teach a course in the school’s online social justice program. She said yes with one caveat: that she would teach a class on art and activism.
“In our social justice work, we’re not doing the best job of training young organizers around the tool of art and why it could be a part of the lexicon of making change,” she said.
About six months into teaching, Cullors asked to create her own program. “There was no hesitance from them,” she said. And for the past year, she’s been working with the college to create a program specific to social practice art, aimed at creating social and political change.
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Patrisse designed the degree to utilize art as a way to positively effectively respond to social and environmental problems in ways that inspire and mobilize community-based solutions.
In 2013, Patrisse co-founded the global movement with the viral Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which has since grown to an international organization with dozens of chapters around the world fighting anti-Black racism. In January 2016 Patrisse Cullors published her memoir, "When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir." Her memoir became an instant New York Times Bestseller.
Unlike traditional MFA programs in which students concentrate on a specific medium, form, or discipline, the interdisciplinary MFA in Social and Environmental Arts Practice centers concept, purpose and intentional engagement with community over specific disciplines or media. A student entering into the interdisciplinary MFA in Social and Environmental Arts Practice might combine multiple disciplines and media, or work within a single discipline or media focused within the frame of social practice theory.
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NOE OLIVAS AT RESIDENCY
Residency Art Gallery is beyond ecstatic to present HOMEBASE. This group exhibition will run from June 22ndthrough August 10th, 2019, with an opening reception that will take place on Saturday, June 22ndfrom 6pm to 9pm. HOMEBASE will feature work from Noah Humes, Kathie Foley-Meyer, Ramiro Gomez Jr., Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Patrick Martinez, Star Montana, Noe Olivas, Devon Tsuno, Raymundo T. Reynoso (EYEONE) and Felix Quintana.
For all intents and purposes, HOMEBASE serves as a love letter to Los Angeles. This exhibition’s endeavor is to draw attention to those stories of those Angelenos not seen in everyday media, as well as highlight unnoticed areas in our city. Stories such as homelessness, community, family and everyday struggles to just exist in a city with one of the largest wealth gaps in the United States. Participating artists were challenged to create works that aesthetically capture narratives, moments and settings that embody our internal, localized perception of this city we all love and call home. This exhibition came to fruition through Grand Park’s Our L.A. Voices, held in April of this year, in which Residency Art Gallery participated.
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An economy can be defined as the “efficient use of material resources.” The Works in “economies” probe how social inequities are embedded in seemingly innocuous market forces and social exchanges: What are the Human costs? Whose lives matter?
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Patrisse Cullors AT San Diego ART INSTITUTE
FORGING TERRITORIES features African-American and Latinx members of the LGBTQ community pioneering in a frequently inhospitable land. It presents artists engaged in cultural storytelling that describes themselves, their friends, and their environments in striking visual ways. It is an exhibition that combines established and emerging artists with a shared queer history.
About that word, queer. Rubén Esparza, founder and director of the Queer Biennial in Los Angeles and curator of FORGING TERRITORIES, has said:
“Decades back the word QUEER was a derogatory term used to de-humanize LGBTQ people. Now we’ve subverted the word and use it to both symbolize empowerment and serve as a reminder of a people’s struggles. QUEER is an umbrella term, and under its canopy are people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, gender fluid, poly-amorous, and questioning.”
SDAI presents this exhibition of LGBTQ artists of color in support of its commitment to cultural and gender equity and to serve as a catalyst in advancing remarkable regional art and artists.
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Alexandre Dorriz AT Los Angeles MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY
LA MAG Learn: Tête-à-Tête with Alexandre Dorriz and Danial Nord
Saturday, August 17 at 2:30 PM
Meet exhibition artists Alexandre Dorriz and Danial Nord for a talk about their works in Offal.
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For the Last two years, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has been immersed in art, exploring the intersection of performance and activism while earning her mfa from USC’s Roski School of Art and Design.
Cullors, a political organizer who has worked for 20 years to reform the criminal justic system, turned to her exhaustion as a source of inspiration…
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wearing a ball gown fashion from mops, Noé Olivas sways through santee alley, part of rafa esparza’s “a la calle” performance
A Surreal parade
artist rafa esparza leads a quirky fashion exhibition through santee alley, ground zero of downtown’s garment district
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