All Programs
KGAP 96.7 FM-LP
Materials & Applications is happy to announce the public launch of M&A Radio, Los Angeles’ only terrestrial architecture radio program, on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM. We are now broadcasting on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM and streaming online, here.
M&A Architecture Radio publishes audio issues of contributions --podcast episodes, field recordings, interviews, experiments, etc-- about the built environment. We publish two issues on air each year, with each broadcasting via 96.7 KGAP from our terrestrial tower in Burbank for six months out of the year. Over the air, these works are played on a random loop, so listeners encounter found and coincidental audio. Listeners may also tune in from this website to find a curated archive of projects that we are broadcasting via our radio tower, as well as works that are exclusive to our website due to profane content.
About K-GAP 96.7
KGAP (96.7 FM) is an architecture radio station run by Materials & Applications and broadcasting from the hills of Burbank, California. KGAP partners with Los Angeles-based radio network Lookout FM to share critical and curated programming centering on architecture, art, and critical practices.
About Lookout FM
LOOKOUT FM is a new independent FM radio network in Los Angeles. Broadcasting in Burbank on 96.7FM KGAP and Hollywood on 99.1FM KZUT, LOOKOUT FM is an observatory: curated audio programming with a wide outlook: varied perspectives on the world expressed through music, documentaries, lectures, poetry, and discussion. Partnered with voices from the indigenous community, the music community, the arts community, and the academic community, LOOKOUT FM offers long-term perspectives on that which lasts: nature, and the arts.
Threads: A Conversation about Textiles in Art and Architecture
On the occasion of Veil Craft, Materials & Applications with Craft Contemporary presents a conversation between practitioners across art and architecture on the topic of textiles and fibers. Veil Craft draws upon the materiality of a city under constant construction, transforming the debris netting that adorns building sites into a meditative pocket park that gestures toward cultures of maintenance, histories of gendered labor, and the presentation of the body. Threads convenes a community formed through practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material to explore connections between and beyond.
PARTICIPANTS
Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her BA from Yale University in English literature and a MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the 01SJ Biennial, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the Sundance Channel. Her honors include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination, and her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.
Casey Baden is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, text, natural dye, sun-lit photographic exposures, painting, weaving, clay, and installation. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she completed her BFA at New York University, 2014, and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Combing craft (the handmade, embodied knowledge, enduring labor) with figuration, intimate personal experience, and the domestic, Baden attempts to foster the critical space of emotion and create opportunities for immersion and embodiment. Presently she is the co-founder of an artist-run space and arts fabrication project called Full Service Creative and the co-founder of an up-and-coming fiber resource center, Textile Resource LA.
Current Interests is a Los Angeles-based architectural design studio founded by Matthew Au and Mira Henry. As a creative collaboration, Current Interests’ built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking. Matthew and Mira are design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture and have visiting faculty appointments at Princeton University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live as she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Computational textiles are textiles that respond to cues in the environment or use the changeable properties of the material itself to communicate information, thereby transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. Davis is interested in developing computational methods and designs in relation to specific bodies in specific places, engaging specific social, cultural, and political constructions.
Figure is a San Francisco-based architecture collective led by James Leng and Jennifer Ly, RA. Their work explores relationships between art, architecture, and community. Their current interests include unexpected materials, dollhouses, and rocks. James and Jennifer received their architectural education from Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of California, Berkeley. They have received numerous fellowships and awards, and have been published in The Architectural Review, Log, and CLOG, among others. They are also lecturers at UC Berkeley.
Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. She completed her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Opazo has exhibited works internationally including at the Museum of Visual Art, Santiago, Chile, CAM Gallery, ACRE, the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and CalArts. She has been awarded various residencies including at the Banff Centre, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, The REEF, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MASS MoCA. She recently had her work published in Artforum and Lumzine.
Veil Craft by Figure
About Veil Craft
Even as the pandemic brought Los Angeles public life to a halt, construction continued, unabated and deemed an essential activity. Shimmering veils of green, white, orange, and black construction textiles are found across the city, their presence signaling many things: perhaps a future shelter for those without or, more often than not, a simple indication for the public to keep out. Referred to often as construction tarps or debris netting, these robust, porous, and colorful textiles have inadvertently become a near-permanent facade aesthetic through the ubiquity of construction in the city of Los Angeles.
Veil Craft is an architectural installation made from these textiles, transforming the courtyard of Craft Contemporary into an unexpected pocket park. The street wall, faced in commonplace green debris netting, masquerades as another construction site on Wilshire Boulevard. Yet the base of this wall opens up into a deep awning, producing a generous, shaded porch that invites the public into the courtyard interior. Beyond this threshold is a courtyard within a courtyard, draped with long pleated panels of white debris netting hung thirty feet up. In this shaded inner space, the pleated fabric creates varying effects of transparency and texture while playfully parting to make way for serendipitous intersections with existing courtyard elements. The various spaces perform a continuously shifting and unfolding act of veiling and revealing as one navigates through the courtyard, and the careful stitching and assembly of the textile panels juxtaposes references to domesticity, body and garment, and ornamentation alongside typical construction practices. Both playing into and upending these material associations, the installation brings forward the everyday, invisible materiality of Los Angeles’ changing landscape in order to interrogate it.
The M_A x Craft Contemporary partnership in the museum courtyard itself transforms into a public venue for a series of summer events that bring artists and storytellers together into dialogue, with renewed focus onto questions of urban change, labor practices, and community engagement. Ultimately, Veil Craft aims to activate an interest in the overlooked materiality of our built environment, bringing together expert and non-expert publics in conversation about Los Angeles’s material culture.
M_A and Craft Contemporary gratefully acknowledge the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Veil Craft is additionally supported by the Pasadena Art Alliance.
Veil Craft is the inaugural exhibition of M_A x Craft Contemporary, a five-year partnership between the two institutions exploring craft through art and architecture. Veil Craft is a site-specific installation by San Francisco-based architectural studio Figure, which takes its inspiration from the everyday construction materials in Los Angeles to transform the museum’s courtyard into a temporary pocket park.
Exhibition Images
Material Realities: At Work
A unionization workshop with The Architecture Lobby and the MOCA Union
The last year has been a strange one for workers. Will there be layoffs? What is really expected of us? Are we being treated equitably? Can we have a say? Crisis can reveal and make more urgent the questions we’ve had all along.
Even before the global pandemic, workers in building and creative industries struggled to pay off student debt, support their families, and maintain their own well-being. A professional culture that celebrates genius and undervalues labor complicates matters. What can be achieved when we recognize that we are all part of the same, precarious labor force?
M&A celebrates May Day this month by learning about unions: what they are, how to establish your own, and who they empower. Join us for a workshop with Architecture Lobby organizers Keefer Dunn and Shota Vashakmadze, plus a presentation from Olivia Leiter of the MOCA Union. Together we’ll work through the pragmatics and aspirations of labor organizing for architects, students, and scholars alike.
SPEAKERS
Keefer Dunn is a licensed architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a sole practitioner, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the host of a radio show about architecture and politics called Buildings on Air. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and has previously served as the group’s National Organizer.
Olivia Leiter is an artist living in Los Angeles. She has had recent screenings and exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, and Human Resources, Los Angeles. She is on the organizing committee of the MOCA Union.
Shota Vashakmadze is a PhD student at UCLA and an organizer with UAW 2865, a union representing 19,000 student workers in the University of California system. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and helps coordinate its unionization working group.
At Work is the first event of Material Realities, a series of workshops and conversations about the positions we hold within a multitude of material circumstances. While we may be "architects" and "designers," we are also workers, tenants, kin, and allies. Material Realities explores our intersectional subjectivities to understand how we may collectively better our conditions.
Material Realities: At Work was organized by Aubrey Bauer, Kate Yeh Chiu, Mateus Comparato, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, and Dana McKinney.
Why Not Things?
M_A Storefront hosts Why Not Things?, a new installation by Jesse Hammer that presents a visual inventory of the testimonials, material objects, and numbers that have emerged around the mutual aid initiative Heat Aid. A collection of things and graphics lend themselves to a stylized portrayal of energy, water, and talismans of refuge. The project simultaneously offers itself as a storage space for donated water units, and presents a visual accounting of the unfolding crisis of shade and water inequity. Somewhere between an Enzo Mari puzzle, a fashion storefront display, and an IRL infographic, the installation amplifies the literal container of the Storefront to extend itself to something that is thick with an attitude about the issues at play. Re-imaging the crisis through the ethos of mutual aid, Hammer’s project evokes how the sharing of things, alongside language and information, become tokens of love for a community in need.
Exhibition Images
About Jesse Hammer
Jesse Hammer is an Architect and Designer whose work explores colorful graphic forms, humor, and conceptual commentary with a nod to historic and cultural references. Having worked in both the abstract and practical realms of architecture, their unique experience is grounded in intellect and playfulness. They run a studio practice based in Los Angeles and hold a Masters of Architecture from UCLA.
Heat Aid was organized with M_A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck