Grand Park
200 North Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
United States
Artists Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Connie Martin Trevino, Jackie Amezquita, Nicole Rademacher, and Paul Donald will lead participatory workshops to commemorate the public histories and cultural memories Los Angeles residents carry that are not, or are no longer, represented by physical spaces and objects downtown. Participants will create ephemeral artworks as “anti-monuments” or "unmonuments" that reflect their own experiences of Los Angeles.
About the Workshops
About the Artists
1PM - 1:45PM
Nicole Rademacher “Topographical Map” Walking Tour
1PM - 2:15PM
Connie Martin Trevino “Ceramic Monument Sculptor” Workshop, Session 1
Jackie Amezquita ”Tamal con Sal” Workshop, Session 1
1:45PM - 2:15PM
Nicole Rademacher “Topographical Map Response” Workshop
2:15PM - 2:45PM
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario “Monumental Maintenance” Performance
2:45PM -4PM
Connie Martin Trevino “Ceramic Monument Sculptor Workshop, Session 1
Jackie Amezquita ”Tamal con Sal” Workshop, Session 2
2:45PM - 4PM
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario “Mythical Monuments” Workshop
Nicole Rademacher “Topographical Map” Discussion
1PM - 4PM
Paul Donald “Recast” Installation and Community Survey
Time: 1PM & 2:45PM
Artist: Connie Martin Trevino
This ceramic workshop invites participants to be creative and get their hands dirty as they consider how future monuments and civic spaces could be recreated to encourage healing, open communication and positive representation. Facilitator Connie Martin Trevino will guide participants through the process of making small clay sculptures which represent the monuments they would like to see in their own communities. Each clay piece will later be fired and clear glazed.
Time: 1PM & 2:45PM
Artist: Jackie Amezquita
Tamal con Sal is an interactive workshop in which participants are invited to paint words of affirmation using natural pigments on tamale-shaped objects made with organic materials such as masa (corn dough), soil, salt, and rain. These tamales will serve as a visual representation of collective energies and an invitation to reimagine the use of materials in artmaking.
Time: 1PM, 1:45PM, 2:45PM
Artist: Nicole Rademacher
Participants will begin this workshop by visiting the public artwork Topographical Map by Joseph Young, located near Grand Park. Inspired by the artwork's portrayal of geological features and water sources, participants will reflect upon and make art about their own experiences of how the landscape has shaped their lives as Angelenos and the recent impacts of changes to land and water usage.
Time: 2:15PM
Artist: Marcus Kuiland-Nazario
Monumental Maintenance is a performance presented by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario in collaboration with the audience to explore the purpose of public monuments. Kuiland-Nazario will examine the concept of the monumental through a series of questions posed to the audience while the artist cleans and maintains the site of a former monument to the father of our country, George Washington.
Time: 2:45PM
Artist: Marcus Kuiland-Nazario
Mythical Monuments is a workshop that continues Kuiland-Nazario’s ideas explored in his performance piece, based on the work of the 1970s performance collective Mother Art. Using collaged images from worldwide monuments and an assortment of historical imagery, participants are invited to create their own mythical monument to monumentalize an idea, event, person, or important life moment.
Artist: Paul Donald
Recast is a participatory artwork created by Paul Donald for the former site of the George Washington statue, which was removed from Grand Park in 2020. A combination ballot box and pedestal, the wood receptacle invites participants to leave public comment about the future of the statue, seeking to reframe or ‘recast’ the current discourse around monuments in a new form of possibility.
Jackie Amézquita is a Central American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Amézquita was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and migrated to the United States in 2003. She holds an Associate degree in Visual Communication from Los Angeles Valley College. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design, and a Masters in Fine Arts from University of California Los Angeles.
Amezquita is multidisciplinary artist working with performance, site activations, installations, and materiality to explore life in different temporalities, modes of integration, and adaptation. In her practice, Amézquita uses growth and decay to inspire forms of non-verbal communications that speak of the cycles of life transformations and temporality. Amézquita is interested in how living organism and other entities integrate and create other environments. These ecosystems underline coexistence among diverse beings, reminding us the life cycle and the after-life.
Los Angeles native Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an interdisciplinary artist, arts educator, performance curator and producer. Kuiland-Nazario’s works are long-term research based cross-genre projects exploring extreme states of emotion such as grief, anger and loss influenced by the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.
Nicole Rademacher (she/her) is an artist and an Art Therapist & Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. The influence of her adoption and reunion (with her biological family) feature prominently in her studio practice where she explores concepts of intimacy, identity, and belonging through visual work as well as in community engagement. She held an artist residency at La Cité Nationale des Arts and has received an Artistic Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Rademacher holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University, a BFA in photography and video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MA in Marital & Family Therapy w/ specialized training in Clinical Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University. She has collaborated and shown work widely both nationally & internationally; regionally she has collaborated and shown work at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in Rancho Cucamonga, LA Art Core, South Los Angeles Contemporary, ONE Gallery, the Los Angeles International Airport, and others. Rademacher lives and works in Los Angeles.
Paul Donald was born and raised in New Zealand before attending the University of Sydney, Australia, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting. After living for several years in Manchester, UK, and then Montreal, Canada, Donald settled in Los Angeles where he currently resides. Donald’s art practice spans painting, sculpture, video, and performance. He has widely exhibited and performed his works in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Canada, and the US. Donald is a faculty member at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, where he teaches studio art.
Donald’s current art practice seeks to enact the idea of self-demolition through the seemingly paradoxical lens of construction. Through performance pieces which employ construction motifs and methods, the artist deconstructs the nature of identity as a kind of social construction, chipping away at structures of whiteness, masculinity, and colonial subjectivity, one wooden object at a time – he makes to break our individual and collective notions of selfhood.