Ours is a City of Writers

New approaches to writing are everywhere in evidence across the contemporary art world. In Los Angeles, where many communities are oriented around pedagogy, presentational spaces, and new sites of distribution, critical and discursive engagement with art and art writing has been especially pronounced. Innovative writing in our city, from fiction and poetry to theory and criticism, seems to find corresponding forms and practices in art. Ours is a city of writers who matter a great deal to artists; of artists who are also writers; of writers who are also visual artists, musicians, filmmakers or curators; and so many others besides.

Invited writers have selected artists to collaborate and vice versa. While in some cases writers are producing new texts in response to their artist-collaborators’ work, other associations have fostered artists taking on the function of writers, displaying materials not initially intended to be art objects, and collaborating to make new artworks that exist among the distinctions of language, object, and event. Each scenario results in a piece of writing, artwork, performance, lecture, or program, exhibited in the gallery and staged as live events. Taken together, these amities trace threads of belonging in Los Angeles, communities that preexist and survive the project and allegiances that have come to fuller form within it.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.