Participating Artists

Alice Clements, Andrea Lambert Fritz, Anthony Bodlovic, Appojax Design, Carolyn Chen, Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney, Cedric Tai, Christopher Velasco, Christopher Wawrinofsky, Dakota Noot, David Allen Burns, Duo Frank, Franklin Mural Project, Front Yard Poetics, Hannah Eko, Hannah O’Brien & Oscar Corona, Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra, Jennifer Bruce, Jess Minckley, Jesse Bliss, Jessica Hemingway, Joey Mason, Jonathan Gomez, Juliana Snapper, Kelly Stark & Gabrielle Hovendon, Kenzo Martinez, Laura Bartczak, Margie Schnibbe, Maru Tatu, Mayookh Barua, Michael Hillman & Citrus College Ceramics, Miggie Wong, Molly Painter, Nathan Cheung, Old Boy, oneHouse Arts, Paegie, Psychic Fronds Network, Richard of Hollywood, Sarah "Vulture" Vasquez, Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, Soyoung Shin, Starbr33d, Taleen Kali, Xiao Xiao Wu, Yvette Nicole Kolodji and more!

Alice Clements, "Tell me your story"

Location:

The grassy area between the sidewalk and Sparkletts, right across the street from Society of the Spectacle.

Time:

2 PM to 5 PM

Short Description:

Sit on a giant telephone and tell your story.

Long Description + Bio:

This project is about community and communication. There are 2 parts.

1. Participants are invited to sit on a handmade telephone receiver-shaped bench and take turns sharing a story or memory of something that happened to them on York Blvd. Tin can telephones will also be available to play with.

2. Participants are encouraged to call a phone number and leave a message with their story. These stories will be made into an artist book that will be kept in a safe location for the community to visit and read.

Alice Clements works principally with sculptural installation and performance, using handcrafted props and scenery. Her work balances humor with an exacting consideration of materials and conceptual rigor.

This community art project is a response to the changing landscape of our shared city, making space for stories and memories of the past, and providing a platform for community members to connect and enjoy the public space.

Andrea lambert fritz, "pick your poison in highland park"

Exact Location: Roving

Exact Time: Random throughout the day

Short Description: Watch Analog or Digital YouTube Videos in the car.

Long Description: While driving along York boulevard, stopping to enjoy the various art exhibits and performance, lend your ear to this: The battle between Digital and Analog video rages on.

While in the car, stuck in traffic, click or type this link: https://andreaklambert.com/york/ in your smartphone’s browser to see Andrea Lambert Fritz’s investigation of both sides of filmmaking. Watch just the analog for clips of her reading, or watch the AI Digital for truly polished and intentional AI created work. Or watch both! Each program is thirty minutes long. Meant to entertain and divert while handling that most LA of issues, traffic.

Bio: Andrea Lambert Fritz is a queer writer, multimedia artist and digital creator with Schizoaffective Disorder. Themes of abjection, mental illness, the transgressive and the occult

inhabit her work. Author of Jet Set Desolate, Scaffolding, Neon Hysteric and other books. Anthologies: Avalanches of Poetry III, Golden State 2017, Impact and elsewhere. Writing in Blanket Sea, The Because Better Project, OCCULUM and elsewhere. Lives in Reno with her husband and cats. andreaklambert.com .

Anthony Bodlovic, "Eureka!"

Locations:

1. York and 63rd

2. York and Branch - 6101 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90042

3. York and 50th

Time:

12-5pm

Short Description:

Wax sculptures commemorating York Boulevard’s lost spaces and former residents

Long Description + Bio

The title refers to the original name of York Boulevard, before it became New York Boulevard and eventually the York we know today. Drawing from the past, the project commemorates places where people once gathered, social spaces now gone. These moments are translated into a series of wax sculptures that mark these lost sites.

Wax is used for its connection to the body and to memory. It will soften and melt over time, echoing how these spaces fade and how memory shifts.

The sculptures of hands function as small monuments not only to these places, but to the people who moved through them and the connections formed there, honoring the fleeting and often overlooked moments that quietly shape the history of a street.

Anthony Bodlović is a Los Angeles–based performance artist, professor, and practicing art therapist. His work combines personal therapy, ethnographic observation, and social bonding. Drawing from ritual practices, fringe belief systems, and the social dynamics of cults, Bodlović examines how individuals and communities construct meaning, identity, and belonging. His performances and sculptural works explore the boundary between private experience and collective mythology, revealing how stories, symbols, and gestures become embodied over time. Through humor, sincerity, and participation, his work invites audiences to consider how belief is formed, sustained, and shared.

Appojax (Alex j. cabalu), "Love's Afoot (Mahjong Sosyal)"

Location: Front of Pop-Hop on York Blvd.

Time: 6am - 6pm

Description: Chalk Art looks 3-d from a certain viewpoint. I love to play Mahjong with traditional tiles, and that means learning some Chinese. These are every of the 36 bamboo, dot and character including the 4 winds. Find the flowers and dragons strewn about!

www.appojax.com

Pictured, work by Teresa Chandradibya and Appojax Design, Minion Air Tour (2024 Pasadena Chalk Festival x 2024 Burbank Jackalope Art Festival)

carolyn chen & family, "family walk (after boléro)"

Location:

Walking along south side of York Blvd from Super A at Ave 53 to York Park at Ave 50

Time:

4pm-5pm (or whenever the children revolt)

Short Description:

A family walk to the park, accumulating sonorous objects. Anyone interested is welcome to join the procession with their own sonorous objects to drag.

Long Description + Bio

We will walk to the park as a family, accompanied by the sound of our own toys and gradually accumulating, increasingly sonorous acquired objects dragged behind us, illuminating the microtopography of the paved landscape on York Blvd from Super A at Ave 53 to York Park at Ave 50.

Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. She lives a mile north of York Blvd.

Cassia Streb and Tim feeney, "waking hour (York Blvd edition)"

Location:

Alleyway between Baller Hardware and Shorthand (Ave. 49 and 50)

Time:

10 to 1 (10am to 1pm)

Short Description:

A sonic clock marking hours through irregularly masking noise textures

Long Description + Bio

Waking Hour acts as a sonic clock marking the passing of the hours via noise textures that irregularly mask one another.

The sounds you hear are taken from York Blvd, Highland Park, mixed with sine tones highlighting specific frequencies found at this location.

Every quarter hour, the sound slowly thickens, enveloping participants in a hyper-real sonic environment, before suddenly reemerging into their natural surroundings. The sounds are configured such that the participant is listening only to the surrounding urban soundscape at every quarter hour.

Each block of sound lasts 15 minutes and follows standard time.

The audience is free to wander through the listening stations.

Cassia Streb and Tim Feeney build site-and situation-specific “hybrid” installations and live sounding actions, for placement in any accessible indoor space or outdoor grounds. Their work moves participants through these locations, introducing sound alongside that of their normal environments, such that observers experience and recall new, altered, or strangely familiar senses of place.

As composers and musicians living in an urban environment, they are hyper-aware of the cacophony of sounds that surround us, from planes, air conditioners, other machines, to organic sounds like children playing, birds singing, and leaves rustling. With these elements, they engage the sonic and cultural memory of a place, highlighting, emphasizing, and masking aspects of its acoustic and history.

The duo has released a number of recordings that you can find on their websites, cassiastreb.com and timfeeney.com

cedric tai, "ribbon dancing on the bridge above the 110"

Location:

The York blvd. bridge above the Arroyo Seco Parkway (the 110)

Time:

Whenever there's an audience, from 10 am - Noon & 2 pm - 6 pm.

Short Description:

Message for cars, ancestors, protest, Palestine, mutual aid, and funsies

Long Description + Bio:

Inspired by the joy of waving a sign as a pedestrian above the highway during the Jan. 30th General Strike in LA, my proposed performance for the LA road concerts is to do ribbon dancing on the bridge above the 110 on York (by myself and encouraging others to join me). They will have a range of colors and statements including:

1. Performance is happening

2. Serendipity is the presence of ancestors.

3. What are you able to give? What do you need?

4. You could’ve been walking

5. Transmute your commute

6. In 50 years all the abandoned highways will be covered in weeds

7. (A section from JJJJErome Ellis’s poetry)

8. How many have died in Palestine? (Boeing, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, RTX formerly Raytheon, Elbit Systems)

9. There are over 50 wars going on right now

10. War Crimes Don’t Cover Up Sex Crimes

11. The Re-distribution of Wealth is coming soon!

12. The land does not belong us, we belong to the land - Stephanie Glazier

Depending on support, or audience participation, these sayings may also be in Spanish and also put onto other signs that could be held up or put in clear view to a car on the highway.

Cedric Tai is an un-disciplinary artist, educator, and friend who thinks through sculpture, talking, writing, performance and experimental exhibitions to hone in on neurodivergent experience, labor and politics.

Christopher A. Velasco

12 Noon

Juan Valdez will be documenting York Blvd.

Juan Valdez, the Tourist, is a photography series shot on both film and digital across Los Angeles, capturing everything from iconic landmarks to hidden corners most locals overlook. It began with two parallel passions: flipping through found photo albums to examine outfits, poses, and candid moments frozen in others' vacations, and observing tourists as they navigate Hollywood, fascinated by how openly and intentionally they engage with their environment. These albums became a visual archive, documenting how people present themselves when they want to be remembered somewhere. The tourists brought it to life. I wanted to match that energy, to step in front of the camera and inhabit it myself.

I position myself as the subject, handing the camera to strangers on the street or the occasional assistant, adopting the poses, expressions, and quietly genuine connection with the place that visitors seem to naturally embody. Each image is composed to resemble the casual tourist snapshot; unscripted, straightforward, featuring a person simply standing somewhere meaningful to them. The tension between film’s warmth and digital’s sharpness subtly reflects the series’ own push-and-pull between the familiar and the new.

The twist, of course, is that I’m not visiting. These are my surroundings. By stepping into the tourist’s role, I traded the artist’s usual control for the same vulnerability any tourist accepts when they ask a stranger to take their picture. The result is a series of self-portraits that aren’t really about me but about the places themselves and what it takes to finally pay attention to them.

Christopher Anthony Velasco (born 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for exploring the queer brown body and blending horror with camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2019, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.

Velasco has contributed to his field through various internships, including positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Library as a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is an adjunct professor at Moorpark College and East Los Angeles College, and he teaches at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts).

His work has been prominently showcased in exhibitions at respected venues such as the Art Center College of Design, AD&A Museum, Avenue 50 Studios, the California Institute of the Arts, the Hibbleton Gallery, the Getty Museum, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. Additionally, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and has performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects. Velasco's work is part of collections at The Getty Museum, Alta Med Art Collection, Cerritos College Art Gallery, UC Santa Barbara Department of Art, Keck School of Medicine at USC Research, and East Los Angeles College Photography Department.

Caption for image:

Christopher A. Velasco, Sunset Blvd., from Juan Valdez, The Tourist series, 2015

Chris wawrinofsky, "chalet mt tiberius"

Location: Super A Parking Lot

I’m building a portable ski chalet in the bed of my pickup truck. It has a skiable slope which will likely become a performative element. I will debut my handmade snowboards and launch the ‘Popsickle Snowboards” brand. I will also sell ski swag out of the cabin.

Chris Wawrinofsky is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He has taught at a variety of institutions including, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts College of Art, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Otis College of Art and Design. While living in New York he worked as a carpenter, sign painter, Xmas tree seller and fabricator for a variety of artists. This broad range in work experiences shaped his studio practice allowing Chris to hone his craft. Currently, he is the Art Studio’s Manager at Occidental College where he operates his DIY foundry and raku kiln. When faced with the task of investigating what an artist does, during a trip to Salem his father quipped, “Why not give ghost tours, but contextualized in art?” and went on to suggest the name the venture: “The Ghost Art Walk Tour.” In 2006, Chris’s father purchased 20 acres in the Great Basin desert. Chris has continued to toil in building a "sculpture graveyard"amidst this serene backdrop on the Utah/Nevada border. Visitors will see an amalgam of monumental works in ceramics, steel, lumber, aluminum & some bronze.

dakota noot, "combo and baby sliders"

Location: Triangle on York/Figueroa

Time: 12 - 5

Short Description:

Combo and Baby Sliders places freestanding foamcore cutouts of a burger, fries, soda, and a set of small sliders at the intersection of York and Figueroa. These are set within eyeshot of Penny's Burgers, Burger King, and Jack in the Box. Rendered in crayon and color pencil, these oversized fast food monuments invite the neighborhood to consider what it's already been looking at all along.

Long Description:

Combo and Baby Sliders is a site-specific outdoor installation of hand-drawn, freestanding foamcore cutouts. These burger, fries, soda, and a cluster of small sliders. It's a full spread, rendered in crayon and color pencil. Installed at the intersection of York and Figueroa in Highland Park, the work is conceptually flavored by surrounding fast food: Penny's Burgers, Burger King and Jack in the Box.

Where those establishments offer the real thing, Combo and Baby Sliders offers the drawing of it: flat, handmade, and colorfully mutated. The cutouts don't advertise anything. Instead, they exist as humor and uneasy digestion.

Dakota Noot is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator. He uses drawings, paintings, and installations to create animal-human hybrids that explore rural yet fantastical, queer identities. Originally from Bismarck, North Dakota, he continues to show in both North Dakota and Los Angeles, including solo and two-person shows at Highways Performance Space, MuzeuMM, and PØST. Noot has exhibited in group shows at Charlie James Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Torrance Art Museum and “Queer Biennial: What if Utopia?” at LAST Projects. His series of cutout drawing-installations have been shown at Art in Odd Places, LA Freewaves, Cerritos College Art Gallery, and Otis College. Noot has been featured in Hi-Fructose magazine.

david allen burns, "Red flags"

Location: Multiple

Time: All Day

Short Description:

Red Flags is an installation of square flags mounted at a 45-degree angle.

Long Description + Bio

"Red Flags" is an artwork installation project that uses the visual language of a universal signal— a red square held at a fixed angle. Historically, red flags have always meant the same thing: danger, urgency, or the arrival of a threshold moment requiring attention. In this work, that clarity becomes both a metaphor and a call to action. For many of us who came of age after the Baby Boomer generation, our culture has trained us to recognize signs of crisis while simultaneously teaching us to ignore responsibility for the outcome. Television, media, and public discourse have spent decades presenting red flags while reassuring us that someone will handle the consequences. 'Red Flags’ calls attention to this cultural inheritance. Each artwork installation asks to acknowledge or ignore what we already know but often choose to avoid.

David Allen Burns is a life-long Californian and native of Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in Studio Art from UCIrvine and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts. David is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for creating art projects that investigate the boundaries of public spaces, including urban geographies, historical archives and time-based media. Prior to his work with Fallen Fruit, David was core faculty in two programs at CalArts from 1994 to 2008. David's curatorial practice investigates narrative structures in contemporary art with notable exhibitions for the journal Leonardo at MIT; the Armory Center for the Arts and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Concurrent to the development of his career in contemporary art and academics, David has also built expertise in corporate branding strategy, advertising and television as a technical consultant for projects with Mercedes Benz, Discovery Channel, SEGA Gameworks and others. Burns’ immersive art projects have been exhibited at Manifesta Biennale, Italy, Melbourne Triennial, Australia, Ars Electronica, Austria, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Netherlands Architecture Institute at Maastricht, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Armory Center for the Arts, Machine Project, and Artists Space in New York amongst others. Notable time-based artworks have shown in festivals and exhibitions including; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, The Tate Modern/Tank.tv, London, The Armenian Museum of Experimental Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, and in festivals including; InsideOUT, OutFest, MIX, NEWFEST, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and others. Reviews and publishing may be seen in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Forum, Artillery, X-tra, Cabinet, Paper, Rhizome, The L.A. Weekly, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and more. Awards include: National Endowment for the Humanities, Creative Capital, Metlife Grant, Art Matters, Goodworks, YouTube Featured Video, LA Weekly’s Best of L.A., Rhizome.org new media award, Yahoo! Best of the Web, Berkeley Film Festival, Best Experimental and Sydney Underground Film Festival, and more. David's work activates the nuances of social spaces, public archives and cultural indexes as an authentic negotiation by creating works of art that are expressions of people and place and reframe the real-world and real-time.

Much of my work as an artist is created collaboratively – whether that be in collaboration with the public participation, civic process, or other artists and fabricators. The history of artworks that I have created primarily exist within the public realm. Commissioned permanent artworks that are site-specific for museum spaces, public parks, biennials, as well as private collections. My art career began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. This early work uses cartography and geography as an indexical tool to create serialized and site-specific works of art that often embraces public participation. The body of work includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, public art installations, and exhibition projects. Using fruit (and public spaces and public archives) as a method of interrogating the familiar, the art works investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for new urban green space, this work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of public and private. I have learned that fruit can be many things; it’s a subject and object at the same time it is aesthetic. Fruit often triggers a childhood memory; it’s emotional and familiar. Everyone is an expert on the flavor of a banana. Much of this work is linked to ideas of place and family, and much of these works echo a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share the world with others. I believe that contemporary art is a common denominator to change the way we all experience the world.

duo frank (todd moellenberg and argenta walther, "car keys"

Location: York Blvd & Ave 66 (both sides of the street)

Time: 12-5 p.m.

Short Description:

Traffic on York Boulevard translated live on toy pianos

Long Description:

In Car Keys, Duo Frank “plays” the entrance and exit of cars onto and off of York Boulevard near the 110, adjacent to a parking lot with a possibly abandoned bus. On two toy pianos, black cars are rendered live as glissandi (sweeps) across the black keys in the direction and speed of their movement, and white cars as glissandi across the white keys. Standing frames will define the performers’ field of view, marking the space through which cars pass and become musical material. Todd and Argenta will experiment with multiple configurations, placing the toy pianos side by side, across the street from one another, and in other configurations in live response to the site. Passersby are invited to play the piece as well, and cars will be noticing, activating the piece as both performance and shared public encounter. Car Keys attends to the shifting rhythms of traffic over the course of the day. These flows reflect the ongoing transformation of Highland Park as it becomes increasingly commercial and generates greater volumes of traffic.

Duo Frank, consisting of vocalist Argenta Walther and pianist Todd Moellenberg, performs classical and experimental music across southern California. Recent performances include Gabriel Fauré's proto-feminist revision of the Adam and Eve story, and a west coast premiere of Jean Barraqué's modernist Trois Mélodies, which includes the poetry of flâneur Charles Beaudelaire. They are currently generating creative projects through sidewalk observation and their developing intimacy as friends.

franklin mural project, "who gets to tell the story"

Locations: OxyArts, Caracol NELA (6181 N Figueroa St, Los Angeles 90042)

Time: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Short Description:

Who gets to tell the story about your neighborhood? What story would you tell?

Long Description + Bio:

The Franklin Mural Project is a four story mural project on the Franklin High School Campus. Our goal is to tell a long-form story of place over four distinctive eras. The first floor depicting a “pre-contact” Tongva Landscape was completed in 2009. After a long hiatus, we are currently working on completing the second floor mural showing a native landscape struggling under and against the oppression of Spanish colonization and the mission system. For this event, we are asking the NELA community at large to give us their ideas on what stories, historical events, and geographic landmarks should be included on our third floor mural (1900-2000) and fourth floor mural (present moment to imagined future)? For more information about the project please follow us on Instagram (@FranklinMuralProject) and visit our website (FranklinMuralProject.com).

front yard poetics: an open mic

Location: 5676 York Blvd

Times: 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Short Description:

A poetry open mic featuring two special out-of-town features.

Long Description:

Join some of L.A.’s wildest poets in a front yard as we bring street poetry back to the street, or at least a small piece of land adjacent to the street. The event will be accentuated by two special out-of-town features. Jack Shit from Nashville, TN, and America’s favorite madman James Norman of Las Vegas, NV.

hannah eko, "honey is the knife"

Location: Passport Vintage

Times: 11-2 pm

Honey Is the Knife: An Emotional Reading. A live literary experience blending tarot-like emotion pulls, conversation, and curated readings from Honey Is the Knife. Viewer draws from a Box of Emotions deck, share as much or as little as they’d like, and receive a resonant passage in return, part reading, part reflection, part collective care.

Long + Bio: This is a participatory literary performance that blends intuitive practice, conversation, and live reading. Using a Box of Emotions deck, I invite participants to pull a single emotion (could be grief, desire, envy, tenderness, rage…) and sit with it for a moment. From there, we enter a brief, guided conversation shaped by curiosity. Each exchange becomes a bridge into Honey Is the Knife, my hybrid work of personal narrative, cultural reflection, and emotional inquiry. I select and read a passage in response to the feeling that has surfaced, offering language where there may have been none, or resonance where there may have been isolation. The project treats emotion as a shared archive rather than a private burden. It asks what happens when we slow down long enough to name what we feel, and when literature meets us there, precisely, intimately, and without performance. It is a reading, a ritual, and an invitation: to be seen, to listen, and to remember that our inner lives are worthy of attention.

Bio: Hannah Olabosibe Eko is a Nigerian-American writer, multimedia storyteller, and book doula. A graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy, she holds a Master’s Degree in Community and Economic Development from Penn State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the founder of The Lit Club, a cannabis-inspired literary salon, creative community, and event series at the intersection of art, healing, and pleasure justice. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed, Bust magazine, Fractured Lit, Aster(ix), and elsewhere. She currently makes her home between Los Angeles, California and the universe.

hannah o'brien and oscar corona, "lemon line"

Location: 6087 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90042

Time: All Day

Short Description:

Around 100 lemon halves in a line along York

Long Description + Bio

Lemon Line is an Earthwork executed as a public art performance by Hannah O’Brien. The line of lemons dotted along York Avenue leans into the challenging collision between ecology, and urbanization in Los Angeles.

the highland park neighborhood orchestra makes popcorn

Performers:

The Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra

Leo Drake - percussion

Ainsley Drake - brass

Abe Smith - brass

Noah Smith - percussion

Aaron Drake - accordion and winds

(General public encouraged to join!)

Location: The Pop-Hop Books Co-Op, 5002 York Blvd

Time: 12-5pm

Short Description:

Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra pops sonic kernels outside Pop-Hop

Long Description + Bio

The Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra (HLPNO) is a curious, collaborative community-based ensemble that loves making sound together. An open public call brings both new and veteran musicians together with a shared interest in exploring what music can be when it is open, participatory, and alive in the moment.

HLPNO usually gets together Tuesday nights at 7:00 PM at the York Boulevard Neighborhood Park in Highland Park to rehearse - but sometimes it doesn’t work out. These are very informal - part rehearsal, part improvisation, part social gathering. Musicians of all levels are invited to join, whether bringing an instrument, a sound-making object, or simply to listen and participate.

At its core, the orchestra is less about perfection and more about presence. The group embraces spontaneity, environmental sound, and collective intuition, often incorporating unconventional instruments and site-specific elements into its performances. Projects range from ambient neighborhood concerts to playful public interventions such as Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra Makes Popcorn, a live sonic installation where the textures and rhythms of popcorn become part of a communal musical experience.

There’s talk of a Highland Park Neighborhood Orchestra Auxiliary Protest Band as well.

HLPNO is intent on fostering a sense of connection through sound, bringing our community together so we can share the experience of making sound (sometimes music) together. We want to cultivate moments of collective energy, curiosity, and what might best be described as the ecstasy of communal music-making.

For the most up-to-date information on rehearsals, performances, and events, please visit the orchestra’s Instagram page @hlpneighborhoodorchestra.

jennifer bruce, "hey baby!"

Driving up and down York cat-calling people on sidewalks, in other cars. I think it might be fun to have more cat-callers in the car, will consider. Not sure if I will have a visual so people know for sure that my aims are not of a creepy nature :)

Unexpected affirmations, play and the temporary equalizing nature of being singled by a cat-call. A roving ecstatic communication exchange for affirmation and play.

Jennifer Bruce is an LA-based interdisciplinary artist and long time lover of The LA Road Concerts.

I'll be driving up and down the 3.9 miles, maybe park here and there. A loud sexy, soundtrack will be projected out open windows. Intermittently for the duration of the event.

jess minckley, how i relate to change

Location: Next to Belle’s Bagels

Time: 12-3pm

Short Description:

Therapeutic, community artmaking collaboration

Long Description + Bio

Artist Jess Minckley is the founder of Art Therapy for All, a local nonprofit that seeks to provide access to art-based mental healthcare, therapeutic community art-making, and education in Southern California and the greater Seattle area. As a studio artist, Jess's work has become more focused on collaboration as a means of closeness, which promotes belonging and fosters one finding their purpose. Passers-by are invited to make any kind of art they'd like. They may also respond to the prompt of change, considering how their neighborhood, neighbors, home, and self are evolving/have evolved. Anyone who wants to contribute their artwork can leave it behind, making a large patchwork artwork to be exhibited in exhibitions by Minckley and other artists.

jesse bliss poetry reading

Location: PopHop Books

Times: 12:00-12:30 PM

Jesse Bliss will read poetry and excerpts from her

book I LOVE MYSELF GOLDEN to celebrate the

10 year anniversary....

Short Bio: Jesse Bliss is a writer, director and producer. She is Founder and Artistic Director of The Roots and Wings Project.

Bio:

Jesse Bliss is one of the most innovative and impactful forces in American Theatre. She is also an acclaimed arts educator. Her work has been showcased globally at prestigious venues such as the United Nations, Off-Broadway, the Edinburgh Festival, Traxx at Union Station, Lincoln Heights Jail, S.P.A.R.C at the Old Jail in Venice, The Last Bookstore, King Eddy Saloon, The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, Casa 0101 Theater, Theatre of Note, Hollywood Fringe Festival, Occidental College, UCSC, UCLA, California Institute of Integral Studies, 7th West, Graf Angeles, and the California Arts Council among many others.

Starting as a child, Bliss creates and directs original work, bringing stories to light that have otherwise been left out of the narrative. A staunch advocate for women, her plays explore experience with humor, grit, and grace, incorporating unique visual, movement and auditory elements. Miss Bliss not only brings transformative work to traditional theatres, but also to site-specific locations, inviting audiences on unique and unforgettable adventures.

Through her beloved characters, she explores the relationship of women to adversity, trauma and patriarchy, claiming their power, joy and freedom. Her body of work consistently explores rising above the confines of oppression by any means necessary, offering not only a direct reflection of our world, but also possibilities of another way it can be. Characters grapple with self-love, romantic love, motherhood, survival and the pursuit of justice against all odds.

A vocally trained songwriter, Bliss creates original scores and collaborates with powerhouse musical talent to bring rhythm and unparalleled musical accompaniment to her plays. Classically trained as an actress, Jesse has performed throughout her career.

As Founder and Artistic Director of The Roots and Wings Project Theatre Company, Bliss collaborates with femme writers, bringing collective voice to matters specific to women. With solidarity at the forefront, she works diligently to uplift the voices and experiences of all women. System impacted, she started entering high-security prisons for the incarceration of a loved one at 16 years old. Unbeknownst to her, this was the beginning of a lifetime of deep healing work with those being held in incarceration.

She is author of the celebrated graphic chapbook “I Love Myself Golden”, illustrated by Alfie Numeric and loved on both sides of the walls. Her company holds a writing and theatre program at a women’s prison as well as classes for professional and high school-aged writers. Poetry has also been a cornerstone of Bliss’ work. An enigmatic performer, Bliss has shared her poetry at prestigious venues throughout the nation and the world.

She is also a journalist, having programmed Pacifica Radio’s THINK OUTSIDE THE CAGE 90.7 FM as a producer and host for a decade. Bliss has taught, developed curriculum and consulted with the Institute for the Future, California Arts Council, The Geffen Playhouse, Inner-City Arts among countless others. She has received commissions from the California Arts Council, Eastside Arts Initiative, The TahDah Foundation, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Poets and Writers, and ArtEquity, among others.

Bliss is a native of Phoenix, Arizona with roots in Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland and New York. She resides in Los Angeles with her daughter.

jessica hemingway, "dance down york"

Location:

I don't have exact businesses or residences in mind but would love to perform at a mix of the two. The ideas I had for businesses were the Super A parking lot, MorYork, the sidewalk in front of Joy (for anyone waiting in line), outdoor patio of the Hermosillo, The LA Police Museum (quite possibly the biggest reach), or Pop Hop Books & Print.

Time:

Top of every hour of the event or in as many locations as possible

Short Description:

Dance Down York is exactly that. A simple and approachable line dance happening in different locations down York Blvd.

Long Description + Bio

I am seeking to provide a moment of communal dance for any and all in locations that don’t typically foster dance; I will provide the music and the steps to a simple and repeatable line dance with the hope that we will all dance together. If people join in, that’s great. If people just want to watch, that’s great. If everyone ignores me, that’s great too. All forms of participation are accepted.

Jessica Hemingway is an artist based in Los Angeles working primarily in Dance, Theatre, and Performance Art. She likes duration, athleticism, intensity, repetition, humor, chaos, danger, posing, endurance, making faces, retro technology, color, & cats.

joey mason, "york boulevard sketches"

Locations and Times:

Delia’s, 9-11 a.m.

Bob Baker Theater, 11-1 p.m.

Palace Cleaners, 1-3 p.m.

Penny’s Burger, 3-5 p.m.

On-Location Sketches of Local Landmarks

Joey will be live-sketching along York Boulevard through the day, capturing neighborhood landmarks. Stop by to see work in progress and pick up a York Boulevard art print or book!

Joey Mason is a local sketch journalist, illustrator and art director who captures local places and events through vintage-style on location ink drawings. Inspired by mid century cartooning, carnets de voyage and street photography, he hopes to document the city and cultivate an appreciation for everyday life. Joey is known for his street collections including Figueroa Street Sketches and York Boulevard Sketches, and his coverage of protests in LA since 2016.

jonathan gomez, "no borders passageway"

"The installation will consist of three passageways that function as symbolic points for freely crossing borders. Alternatively, the structure may take the form of a single passageway that combines three distinct forms. It will be installed on the sidewalk adjacent to Ashley’s sound/DJ piece.

Each entryway structure will be approximately seven feet tall. On both sides of each passageway will be two circular placeholders for visitors’ feet—similar to the markers used at TSA security scanners. These positions invite participants to stand with one foot on each side of the passageway, intentionally placing themselves “across” the border.

**Materials / Physicality**

The materials used to construct the structures will be determined through field research along York Blvd in the coming weeks. My goal is to incorporate materials that honor and represent the cultures of communities displaced through gentrification in the area.

**Participatory Activation**

I will remain near the structure—at times activating the space through movement—and invite passersby to engage with the work through the following questions:

1. What does it mean to be between borders?

2. What responsibility comes with being on one side of a national border?

3. How are people treated differently across borders?

juliana snapper, "howl-in"

Location: York Park Amphitheatre

Times: All Day

Short Description:

Howl-in

Join an ad hoc coyote choir. Everyone is welcome!

Long Description:

Howl-in invites you to play in an interspecies overlap of sound making. By howling together we strengthen our individual voices while expressing shared sufferings in a pack.

Coyotes, wolves, whales and other pack animals howl complex messages to each other across large distances, and they join howls to sound a collective body.

We humans howl when we hit a limit; When our feelings are too much for words, we howl in grief, longing and deep protest.

You already know how to howl. And we can use that ability to howl as a short-cut to your full vocal power. In terms of body mechanics, the yelp and wail of the howl are sophisticated actions — they are actually the pillars of operatic technique!

By exercising our howls together, we gain the expressive endurance we need for sustained protest, and we cultivate fresh strategies of collective expression that can reach beyond the limits of language.

Everyone with breath in their body and a lump in their throat is warmly invited to come and participate. No singing experience or musical ability required. Shy and terrible voices are extra welcome.

What we will do:

1. Learn (remember) how to howl (10ish min)

-how to use your voice to howl sustainably

-how to bend and shape your howl

-how to make secondary howl-sounds like whoops, whines, growls

2. Practice together. (15ish min) Imagine a beastly choir rehearsal. I will guide the group through 3 free-form “songs without words” exploring intense emotions with playful experimentation.

3. Howl show!! (10ish min) We present what we just rehearsed.

Juliana Snapper is a grammy award winning singer, a radical opera director, and a third generation choral conductor. She loves to work with mixed groups of musicians and non-musicians. Lately, she is fascinated by the sounds that become possible in human throats when we try to connect with animals in various ways using our voices.

kelly stark & gabrielle hovendon, "botanical record, los angeles"

Location: Allez-LA (5227 York Blvd)

Times: 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Short Description:

Handmade biodegradable “fruits” offering plantable seeds for the neighborhood

Long Description:

Decades ago, residents of Highland Park and beyond planted fruit trees for future strangers to enjoy. They joined a long history in Southern California: Franciscan priests brought sweet oranges to the missions; Charles Lummis planted citrus at El Alisal; Central American and Japanese immigrants grew loquats around the Eastside.

Today, lemons, limes, pomegranates, papayas, avocados, guavas, figs, and more cover the neighborhood. But many of those original trees are now nearing the end of their lives.

Botanical Record, Los Angeles asks: what does it look like to pass that generosity forward? Dozens of handmade “fruits” made from biodegradable botanical matter and plantable paper will be hung from a tree on York Boulevard. Each will contain simple planting instructions and seeds from local, easy-to-grow fruit species. The tree will also feature a gallery placard inviting visitors to “pick” a fruit, take it home, and grow something new. The hope is that the installation will encourage people to think more closely about botanical stewardship and planting for the next generation.

Kelly Stark is an art director and artist living in Highland Park. She has recently worked on experiential design projects for Nike and Luna Luna, and is currently studying Ayurveda. Her watercolors look to nature and meditation to explore themes of unpredictability and transformation.

Gabrielle Hovendon is a writer and artist living in Pasadena. Focusing on themes of place, identity, and power structures, her writing has appeared in publications like Electric Literature, the Missouri Review, and Passages North. Her most recent art installation was “Surface Tension” in Crestline, CA.

kenzo martinez, "world face"

Location: The Pop-Hop Books co-op

Time: Noon - 7 pm

Short Description:

Short interviews and portrait session

Long Description + Bio

What are the bridges that connect all of us? What parts of us do we all share ? What is uniquely us? World Face explores these ideas with short interviews and portrait sessions. Kenzo Martinez / artist, organizer, bookseller, zine maker, curious.

laura bartczak, "river trio (panorama study)"

Location: Post Office parking lot on York Blvd

Time: 5 to 6 p.m.

Short Description:

Ongoing movement installation performed by Kirsten Schnittker, Kendra Adler, and Elle Erdman.

Long Description:

A repetitive, cyclical movement pattern performed by three dancers. The dance builds upon everyday movements which over time alter the timing, synchronicity, and musicality of the phrase, heightening the mundane. The dancers find an internal score together, moving through accidental unison and near collisions. The ongoing nature of the performance becomes at times hypnotic, allowing the audience to hone in on both the individual and the whole.

The introduction to this dance is a slow, sculptural improvisation that is suggestive of landscapes and panoramic views. The score is rooted in body and earth systems, and accentuates the nuances of the site. This work has been developed outside in public parks and spaces, where the sound, lighting, and audience has become dependent on the surroundings.

Laura Bartczak is a choreographer, photographer, and performer based in LA. She is interested in excavating inherent narratives that are present in the body. She utilizes film and dance to explore body language and natural movements that spontaneously evoke emotion.

margie schnibbe, "get out the vote!"

Location: Roaming

Time: noon-3pm

Short Description:

Margie Schnibbe roams York Blvd promoting voter registration.

Long Description + Bio

Margie Schnibbe will travel along York Blvd on foot and via Metro Line 182, encouraging pedestrians and passengers to register and vote in upcoming California elections.

Margie Schnibbe is a multidisciplinary artist whose performance work probes the intersections of the personal and the political with humor and a critical edge.

“Voting is an investment in our communities. Your vote drives the change you want to see.”

maru tatu

Location: In front of Lupita’s Party Store

Time: 3-6pm

Short Description:

painting of the front of the party supply store!

having a group of friends jamming live music while I do the painting demo.

mayookh barua

Location: The Pop-Hop

michael hillman & citrus college ceramics

Location: Jugos Azteca

Time: 8:00am-3:00pm

Short Description:

FREE Wheel thrown mugs and cups from Citrus College Ceramics

Long Description + Bio

Your cup/mug helps an art form to continue and flourish, essentially unchanged for thousands of years. Much of what is known about cultures and societies is recorded by their pottery making and decorating. I hope this piece conveys to archeologists, in the future, that our society valued and encouraged the arts.

These mugs and cups, made from the earth, thrown on a wheel, fired to 2380 degrees in a kiln, can be washed in a dishwasher, placed in a microwave oven, heated in an oven, and are 100% lead free!

Michael Hillman holds a Masters Degree in Art, and two Bachelors of Art in Ceramics and Art Education. Professor Hillman has been an educator and a practicing studio artist for the past 31 years, recently earning a commission to design the Glendora Gold Line Metro Station. Professor Hillman has received the Citrus College Distinguished Faculty Award and most recently the Shining Star award for Vision. His professional career experiences include working for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty, & with the City of Glendora. Professor Hillman started the Empty Bowl Project at Citrus College and for this was awarded the city of Glendora’s Humanitarian Award.

miggie wong, "share your stories about the historic manor"

Location:

4908 York Blvd, Highland Park

Time:

Depending on the availability of a helper or other artists who share the space and can accompany the piece; can be displayed for just an hour. If possible, please kindly collect the piece when the event is over. Artist will arrange time to pick up after the event. Thank you.

Short Description:

Inviting visitors to share their stories about this building.

Long Description + Bio

This site-specific installation, combined with one of the artist's migratory houses, reflects on the ongoing transformations of society, the environment, and the urban landscape. It highlights not only the evolution of surrounding buildings but also the shifting dynamics of human connection that give the manor its lasting significance. During Road Concert, the artist invites participants to engage directly with the building’s history. Through storytelling, visitors contribute to a collective memory, reconnecting with the landmark and one another. This project creates a living archive of experiences, celebrating the past while honoring the evolving story of the neighborhood.

Participants may choose to comment on the artwork through the artist’s social media platforms or send a direct message to the artist. Selected stories may later be shared anonymously. Contributors are encouraged to use thoughtful, non-aggressive language to ensure the stories remain accessible and welcoming to a wide and diverse audience.

molly painter, "not net not knit not knot not yet"

Location: Corner in front of the of the former Sprakletts parking lot, across from Delia's

Time: Noon - 5:00 PM

Short Description:

a woman sits creating an ever-growing resemblance of a net to prosthelize a post aquatic technology future

This project began riverside observing nets collected in haphazard piles. Small fish were strangled in the enormous heaps, rotting in the sun as there is little point in culling every tiny bycatch. Oceans are full of monstrous nets, their tiny nooses sliding effortlessly around the gills of swimming things. Nets terrify me. Counterintuitively, I’ve created swaths that resemble Fisherman’s nets rendered in neon Mason’s twine. Instead of capturing everything inside, my structure is crocheted around a central spine enabling everything to fall out.

I often work in public, so I’m frequently asked what I’m making. I answer initially that I’m making art. This begs follow-up - “yes, but what is it?” to which I reply: “Well, it isn’t a net.” I’m often asked if I’m knitting, which I’m not, and if it is knotted, which it isn’t. The pieces are crocheted; they unravel from a single point. The object looks net-like enough that people confidently assert that things could get caught in it. This assumption interests me. Perhaps future humans will lose all understanding of the nuance of nets when we have collectively forgotten how to catch fish. That moment hasn’t happened. Not yet. Therefore the working title of the piece is the Not-net-not-knit-not-knot-not-yet.

nathan cheung, "Notice to protect"

Location: in front of Joy

Time: All Day

"Notice to Protect is a participatory street performance that flips the bureaucratic language of eviction notices, landlord postings, and immigration enforcement documents into declarations of collective care. Inspired by my work organizing in tenant and immigrant rights movements, the project responds to the shared logic of displacement embedded in both housing and immigration enforcement.

The project begins with a public station along York Boulevard where visitors are invited to fill out brightly colored “Protective Notices.” Modeled after official paperwork, these forms ask participants: What do you want to protect here? What should never disappear from this street? What makes a community safe?

Throughout the day, performers dressed as fabulous “community safety mothers” will ceremonially serve and post these notices along York Boulevard. Transforming the act of “serving papers,” the intervention turns documents of removal into declarations of presence. Mothers will be reading poetries of care as well.

Drawing inspiration from the words of Assata Shakur, the performance imagines a queered abolitionist future—one where safety is held by community caretakers rather than police, and where neighbors stake collective claims to belonging, protection, and care."

Community Safety Mothers Serving Protection Notices

Notice to Protect responds directly to the layered histories and ongoing changes along York Boulevard, a street where long-time residents, immigrant communities, and small businesses increasingly coexist with rapid gentrification and rising housing pressures. The project draws attention to the often invisible bureaucratic tools of displacement—eviction notices, landlord postings, and immigration enforcement documents—that quietly shape who can remain in a neighborhood and who is forced to leave. Inspired by my experience organizing in tenant and immigrant rights movements, the work also engages findings from the report “Disappeared and Displaced: ICE Pushes LA Tenants Toward Eviction.” The report documents how immigration enforcement can destabilize households, leading to income loss, housing insecurity, and the threat of eviction, creating overlapping forms of displacement in Los Angeles communities. By inviting participants on York Boulevard to write and publicly post “Protective Notices,” the project makes visible these otherwise hidden systems of removal while collectively reversing their logic. Instead of documents that mark absence or eviction, the notices stake presence—transforming the street into a temporary archive of what neighbors want to protect, remember, and keep alive in the face of displacement.

Nathan Cheung is a Los Angeles–based artist, organizer, and photographer whose practice moves between photography, installation, and social practice. Informed by his experience as an undocumented immigrant from Hong Kong and his work in tenant and immigrant rights organizing, his projects explore queer nightlife, migration, and chosen family. His work documents spaces of joy, resistance, and collective survival while experimenting with sculptural forms and public interventions that hold community memory and imagine liberation beyond institutions and borders.

https://www.nathanscheung.com

old boy (paul Mcgarry)

Location: Outside In Theatre

Times: All Day

Description:

Between August 2017 and August 2020, I lived on Buchanan Avenue near 49th Street in Highland Park, which included the first six months or so of the COVID-19 pandemic. I witnessed and heard the demonstrators along York Boulevard from my studio a few blocks above, following the murder of George Floyd.

I have been a certified bilingual (Spanish) English Learner teacher and teacher-trainer for a living since I was 24 in 1982. I have been a guitar-playing singer-songwriter since 1970. One of the first songs I learned to play and sing was the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By.” Shortly thereafter, I heard and learned Cat Steven’s/Yusuf Islam’s “Where do the Children Play”. I started writing songs in the fall of 1970 after the untimely deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, my first song focused on the “age gap” and the street and campus protests to end Americans’ involvement the Vietnam War.

My project recognizes the legacy of singer-songwriters,such as Jackson Browne and Billie Eilish, who once lived in Highland Park. I would like to choose York Park as the location to gather a crowd by singing songs people know as well as a few originals. For even though I am an “Old Boy”, and “my body’s aging, my hearts forever young”" A lifelong singer-songwriter encourages passerbys’ accompaniment in singing songs we all know.

Paul McGarry “Old Boy” grew up in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. After graduating from high school in 1976, he went to NYU to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Two years later, after hitchhiking back across the country to pursue acting in Hollywood, Paul studied at the Dick Grove School of Music in Studio City. In 1979, he attended UC Santa Cruz to complete his bachelors degree in American Studies. Since 1982, Paul has worked more than full-time as a bilingual educator to children, adolescents, and adults as well as a teacher-trainer and administrator for English-learners. He has graduate degrees from USC and CSULA in education and TESOL, respectively. Paul (now “Old Boy”) still writes, performs songs, acts and teaches.

onehouse arts

Location: York park (4948 York Blvd)

Time: 10 to noon

Short Description:

Kaprow’s propositions written in chalk by children

Long Description + Bio

This performance draws from Allan Kaprow’s 1976 articulation of non-theatrical performance and his six propositions on everyday actions as performative and research-based. Six children begin outside York Park, writing in chalk directly onto the ground and gradually extending into the park. Each child inscribes one passage, forming a dispersed trail of text. As they move, pause, and write, their gestures become part of the work, unfolding without a fixed stage or clear boundary between performer and audience.

Visitors may encounter fragments of text, follow the path into the park, or pass by without recognition. The work exists through these shifting encounters, where ordinary actions—writing, walking, observing—are reframed as performance. As the chalk markings fade through time, weather, and use, the piece dissolves back into everyday life, emphasizing process, participation, and the transient nature of both art and experience.

OneHouse Arts Bio

OneHouse Arts is an experimental children’s art organization based in the San Gabriel Valley, dedicated to protecting and sharing authentic children’s creativity. Through process-based teaching, exhibitions, and public projects, OneHouse creates spaces where children’s work is valued as meaningful cultural expression. onehousearts.org

paegie

Location: Future Music (5112 York Blvd)

Time: Afternoon

Paegie is a singer songwriter making music that encompasses rock, jazz, folk, and soft-singer songwriter.

“I am a Pasadena native. I was born and raised in NELA. I grew up climbing through construction sites of homes and hiking urban structures to follow coyotes. My art reflects the feelings collected when I experience friendship, love, and forgiveness.”

psychic fronds network "sidewalk talk with psychic frond"

Location: 5034 York Blvd.

Time: 2 pm- 4 pm

Short Description: Messages from the Psychic Shrub - direct descendant of the Burning Bush

Long Description + Bio

In an age where more and more people are looking for answers while moving away from the impersonal nature of technology and towards palpable real life experiences, we present the Psychic Fronds Network.

Our resident Psychic Shrub is a direct descendant of the burning bush known throughout history as a conduit between important figures such as God, Angels, and Moses.

Here at Sidewalk Talk, we have ´The Translater’ stepping in as the conduit between the Psychic Shrub and the people. Messages of observations and goodwill will be relayed from the inherited wisdom of this verdant source, as well as questions answered.

The Psychic Fronds Network is a collective of Artists, Musicians, Filmmakers, Spiritual Shakers intent on the practice of generating creative and psychic oxygen to combat the inertia of an over-processed world intent on suffocating

richard of hollywood, "frocks: WTO"

Location: Fig and York

Times: 1PM - 3PM

Is it a toga, is it a mumu? What is that?

You can find Richard of Hollywood often on Hollywood and Highland in the intersection.

Sarah "vulture" vasquez, "birds without borders, with labels"

Location: Works are posted in various places along York Blvd.

Times: 10am - 1pm

Short Description: Bird portraits labeled “Native”, “Migrant”, or “Naturalized” questioning human borders.

Long Description: A series of bird portraits are placed along York Blvd. They are painted, repeated, and labeled as either “native”, “naturalized”, or “migrant”. In nature these words describe patterns of movement, adaptation, and survival. Birds settle where conditions allow and migrate when seasons shift. Their presence is not questioned. Birds cross borders freely without judgement. In human society, the same labels carry weight, tension, and consequence. What is natural for birds becomes political for people. By installing these Californian birds along York Blvd., I am creating a trail of migration that mirrors the overlooked, constant movement happening above us everyday. This work asks: Why is migration natural for birds but politicized for people? Sarah Vasquez is an artist and bird enthusiast. Working in watercolor, acrylic or oils, birds often appear as symbols in her work. Sarah was raised in Colton, California. She earned her B.A. in studio art at CSU Fullerton and is currently working toward an MFA in studio art at CSU San Bernardino.

semi-tropic spiritualists, "the signs are everywhere"

Exact location

6012 York Blvd.

Exact times

QUESTION: what are the start and end times for the full event? We will likely want our piece present for the duration, but knowing the exact times will help us decide that for sure.

Short Description:

Sidewalk installation of signage and tracts exploring neighborhood history

Long Description + Bio

The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists present their new work The Signs Are Everywhere, which includes signage and a pamphlet distribution station installed on the sidewalk outside 6012 York Blvd. This is the former location of the historic Free Tract Society, which closed in 2019.

The Free Tract Society was founded in 1897 and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1900, five years before the establishment of the original Semi-Tropic Spiritualist camp in Los Angeles. The Free Tract Society created print materials with the purpose of proselytizing their beliefs, spending their final decades operating out of a large storefront on York Blvd. From there, they distributed their materials proclaiming messages of salvation and damnation.

As part of the early spiritual and cultural milieu of the original Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, we are interested in exploring the memory of this unique LA institution which, like the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s camp, has now disappeared. The Free Tract Society operated by using technologies of mass communication from their day to spread their often apocalyptic messaging to the community and world. We borrow the forms of street-corner evangelists and religious tracts to continue our ongoing series of works that connect these historical models with current instances of media mass communication and the spread of apocalyptic rhetoric.

Semi-Tropic Spiritualists began in 2012 as an ongoing series of performance works, interactive objects and illustrated texts by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg. Their works explore the history of spiritual belief and metaphysical practice in Southern California through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that temporarily created their own idealized community – a campsite meeting place, founded in 1905, outside the city limits of Los Angeles. Combining historical research with invented rituals, objects, and texts, the project seeks to examine the utopian impulse to manifest idealized belief structures into built realities, and the complications that result from this transformation. Addressing issues of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, and the changing natures of the built environment and historical memory, the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists function as an experimental model for communities dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge.

The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists have exhibited their installations and performance works at Richard Telles Fine Art, Visitor Welcome Center, General Projects, Irenic Projects, Klowden Mann, and The Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles; Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA; and Llano del Rio, CA, among other locations. Their book, The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Guidebook, was published by Insert Press in 2018. Their limited edition Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Symbology Divination System was produced in 2023, also by Insert Press. Both artists received their MFAs from CalArts in 2008.

soyoung shin, "bbq meat sticks"

Location: York & Aguilar

Time: 12pm-2pm

Description:

Serving up bbq Meat Sticks

Soyoung loves bbqing so much, sometimes her friends call her BroYoung.

Taleen Kali, “Shoegaze Soundbath”

Location: The Pop-Hop

Times: 3-4 PM

“Songs For Meditation” is Taleen Kali’s 2nd EP, a soundbath album out on Dum Dum Records.

A complete departure from the band’s previous releases, the second EP is an instrumental soundbath album that oscillates from noise rock to ambient; a sonic drone meant to put its listeners in a meditative trance.

While the band’s 1st album “Soul Songs” was lyrically dense and jam packed with heavy riffs and soaring synths, the band has traded in their signature oblique post-punk romance for a completely improvised instrumental album that favors sonic spaciousness over density.

With all its sparseness, Songs For Meditation contains multitudes. The album was recorded in a single sitting by Grant Capes inside a warehouse space after the band got vaccinated in April of 2021. It features crystal singing bowls in the keys of D, F, A, as well as harmonium played by Kali. Bass drone and synths come courtesy of long-time friend, bandmate, and collaborator Miles Marsico (TÜLIPS, New Technology)."

Taleen Kali is an artist, musician, and L.A. native. She is the founder of the literary collective Dum Dum Zine & Records and produces the annual DUM DUM FEST. She performs soundbaths and meditations

“I want to democratize sound healing to not just private spaces like yoga studios and clinics, but make it accessible publicly to any passers by who might need a bit of sound healing.”

Xiao Xiao Wu, Hanging Under the Eaves

Location: at the crosswalk across the street from Baller Hardware

Time: 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM (installation on view throughout the event)

Short Description:

Embroidered banner hanging above the street like laundry

Long Description + Bio

Hanging Under the Eaves is a textile installation based on an embroidered banner created using appliqué techniques. The work references the everyday image of fabric hanging beneath the eaves of houses, a scene commonly associated with domestic labor and daily life.

In this installation, the embroidered banner is suspended above the pedestrian space, transforming a familiar household gesture into a public spatial experience. By elevating the textile into the street environment, the work shifts a traditionally private form of labor—sewing, stitching, and fabric work—into a visible collective setting.

The project reflects on how textile practices carry memory, labor, and cultural experience, while also exploring how domestic imagery can be translated into urban public space.

Xiaoxiao Wu is a Los Angeles–based installation artist working with textile, sculpture, and mixed media. Her work explores themes of cultural migration, domestic space, and the relationship between the body and everyday labor. Wu received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, and her work has been exhibited at venues including Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Art Share LA.

Textile material study for Hanging Under the Eaves

Yvette Nicole Kolodji, “Late to the Party”

Location: Society of the Spectacle (4563 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041)

Time: All day (12 PM - 5 PM)

Short Description:

A sculptural poem demonstrating nature's adaptability to an urban environment.

Long Description + Bio

Late to the Party is a sculptural poem highlighting the interaction nature has with the urban environment. Although we think nature lives outside the city, it still finds a way to adapt to our concrete climate. My poem “late to the party / a wildflower / stuck on the freeway” demonstrates this interaction. Thus, this sculptural poem places my poem on a miniature freeway sign alongside giant California poppies. The grandiose scale of the flowers symbolizes nature’s adaptability over human-made urban environments.

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet and artist from Whittier. She is the moderator for the Southern California Haiku Study Group, a mentor and council member for Confluence Haiku, a youth council member for The Haiku Foundation, a membership secretary for Haiku Poets of Northern California, and a member of the Arroyo Arts Collective. She was the 2025 conference coordinator for Haiku Society of America as well as a judge for the 2025 Poetry Out Loud Competition for Placer County and the 2024 Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest. She also was the guest editor for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku of the Day blog for June 2023. She tends to blend her art with her poetry. Her poetry and art has been published in many haiku journals and has been recognized as a winner of the 2025 Riverside Insect Fair Poem Contest and 2023 Santa Clarita Sidewalk Poetry Contest; runner-up for the 2025, 2022 and 2021 Golden Triangle Contests; received honorable mentions in the 2022 Haiku Society of America Rengay Award and the 2021 Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest; and short listed in 2014 for The Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Award. Her art has also been exhibited in various locations in Southern California. She loves promoting the arts and enjoyed advocated for the arts as an Activate Delegate for Arts for LA in 2025.

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