Black — Still
M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard
Los Angeles, CA
Summer 2023
Black — Still, a multi-sensory installation and its complementing programs explore narratives of wellness, access, and cultural expression with specific attention to marginalized communities. Rendered in simple, familiar materials, the project's reverential volume is responsive to various obstacles on, above, and beneath the courtyard’s ground, while its dark finish celebrates Black in a response to traditional and modernist notions in architecture predicated on whiteness. The volume shapes a space of joyous contemplation, sound-dampened from the adjacent noises of Wilshire Boulevard, offering shade, shelter, and a cooling mist during the summer months.
In addition to its cultivation of calm, Black — Still engages the underlying geological conditions of the M&A X Craft Contemporary Courtyard, where tar oozes and methane gas rises from the ground, elements originating from the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits and underground oil seeps. Throughout LA, this primordial matter pushes through human-made infrastructure. The project’s wall assemblies of inside-out lath and plaster reproduce a familiar form of material seepage and call attention to the formlessness and expansive potential of “surfacing.” Black — Still is complemented by a series of public wellness events and workshops, center exchanges between creative practice and self- and community care practices.
Images courtesy of Sam Wadieh
Deluge at Black — Still
An evening of ambient and experimental sound from boundary-pushing artists and performers Algorythm.Code, 69999, and Kelman Duran featuring Harmony Holiday. Black — Still was activated with a set of site-specific soundscapes, creating a heightened engagement between visitors and the installation. The interior of the installation was reserved as a space for guests to immerse themselves in deep listening, with the surrounding courtyard acting as a space for connection and conversation. Together, the space became an environment for introspection and communal engagement around the radical possibilities of Black space and sound.