Beyond Four Walls—LAND’s Shamim M. Momin on Producing Public Art Today

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) is dedicated to commissioning and producing public artworks, with the mission to bring innovative contemporary art into the everyday existence of communities throughout the United States, enhancing “their quality of life and ways of thinking about their community.” Also central to the organization is the deeply rooted belief that artists deserve opportunities to create work beyond the traditional environments reserved for contemporary art, while engaging with new audiences.

In anticipation of LAND’s annual benefit auction that features a wide selection of work by emerging and established artists, we spoke with LAND’s Director and Curator Shamim M. Momin about LAND’s history, some recent major projects, as well as some highlights from this year’s auction. 

Collin Munn: Can you start by giving us some background on the founding of LAND? What were you doing prior? What led you to the conclusion that there was an audience for an organization like LAND? 

Shamim M. Momin: The core of our mission at LAND came from my experience working on the 2008 Whitney Biennial (with Henriette Huldisch, who is now the Senior Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T.). Many of the artists we wanted to include worked in what we were then calling “expanded practice,” where all different types of artwork were equally important to them within the scope of their work. It just needed something other than a white cube. That didn’t work so well in the museum, so we took over the Park Avenue Armory. It was a pretty dramatic part of that Biennial, and it led to a lot of thinking about the LAND model for me.

When I was going out to Los Angeles for research trips, I realized that there wasn’t a single organization in the city that was dedicated to public art. The artists were really doing these things on their own. You can just randomly occupy the empty corner store and no one is going to care too much; it’s still possible to do that in Los Angeles. It’s not like New York, which is entrenched in all the rules of what you can and can’t do. In Los Angeles, you don’t wait for a curator to come around and put you in a show—you just have the show yourself. This idea of just doing things ad-hoc and having shows in weird places was already very pervasive, and it struck me as interesting that LAND could provide support for artists already working in this way. 

CM: Unlike other organizations that work with site-specific public art exhibitions, the scope and scale of LAND’s projects all fall into one of three categories—can you expand on what those are and what the decision process was for focusing on 3 specific approaches to public engagement?

SMM: The three main types, or scales, of our commissioned programming include large-scale, multi-site, multi-artist exhibitions (group thematic shows that exist over time and space); monographic exhibitions or discrete group exhibitions; and one-night ephemeral performances and durational events. These varying scales each hold the same level of import curatorially, and each hold equal weight to my mind. As part of LAND’s mission, we feel it is critical to engage the public in the various facets of artists’ endeavors and practices, not just a final product that is hung on a wall. We believe that the public deserves the right to experience innovative and thoughtful contemporary art in their day-to-day existence, something beyond the museum or gallery context. We also believe that artists deserve the opportunity to realize projects and ideas that might not make sense in a museum or gallery, which lends itself to our structure.  

CM: Can you tell us a bit more about this year’s “ALL SOULS EVE FÊTE” benefit auction? What can attendees expect to experience?   

SMM: Each year we host a gala with a theme inspired by a literary quote, and this year, the quote is by H.P. Lovecraft: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”

The gala will take place on Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at the historic Ebell of Los Angeles and will be an immersive, macabre evening of dinner, cocktails, dancing, and live performances, capped off by silent and live auctions. Artist Sue de Beer will shoot custom portraits of guests in an immersive setting, replete with handmade costumes and props, straight out of her wildest (haunted) dreams. Artist Jen DeNike will present an interactive performance for guests during dinner. Chef Craig Thornton (aka Wolvesmouth) will create the desserts for the evening, which will surely be a delicious culinary experience. The dress code is “your soul’s fantasy – phantasmal elegance,” so to my mind, the glamorous and dark beauty of Alexander McQueen.

CM: This year’s benefit auction features a wide selection of works by some of the world’s top emerging and established artists—has LAND worked on projects with all of them? Can you select a work available this year that particularly stands out to you? What it grabs your attention?

SMM: All artists included in the benefit auction are a part of what I consider the LAND “family”—artists we have worked with in the past or are planning to work with in the future.  We are so humbled and grateful for their tremendous generosity and support.  

All of the works are stellar and embody a critical group of artists, mostly from Los Angeles. A work I can particularly speak to is that of Eve Fowler—a large painting that was included in her recent exhibition at Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, as it is directly related to the series of 10 billboards Fowler presented in Houston, TX as part of LAND’s exhibition, “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project.” Fowler’s chapter, entitled it is so, is it so, depicted excerpts of text from Bee Time Vine and Tender Buttons by seminal 20th century author Gertrude Stein. Fowler began sourcing Stein’s texts in her work in 2010 and has evolved this body of work in various iterations, including a series of posters with Stein quotes displayed on public streets in Los Angeles.

Fowler is interested in the multiple interpretations a viewer could have seeing this text in public, while making something that is accessible to everyone, or at least a very broad audience. By isolating these quotes from their original context and reproducing them on a large scale, Fowler poetically introduced them into a dialogue with the Texas landscape. The open-ended gestures lured travelers westward and encouraged them to pause and contemplate their space, existence, and destiny.

CM: As far as reach and scale, would you say that the “THE MANIFEST DESTINY BILLBOARD PROJECT” (2013-2015) is the largest exhibition commissioned by LAND thus far? What was the ideation and production process for the exhibition as well as the criteria for selecting the artists you worked with? What forthcoming projects do you have in the pipeline, are any on a similar scale?

SMM: Yes, “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project” is certainly our largest exhibition to date in terms of reach and scale, as it was a two-year project that traversed the entire country along the I-10 freeway. The easiest way to think about the project is in tens: across interstate 10, 10 artists, and each presented 10 billboards. It was 10 “chapters” that unfolded consecutively, which ended in Los Angeles in June 2015.  We collaborated with another organization in each city to activate the project so as not to just be doing it from afar, but really think about where we are and what is going on there.

It was initially conceived by the Los Angeles-based artist Zoe Crosher who, in our conversations in her studio and elsewhere, told me about this notion to create a multi-artist billboard project along a part of the 10 freeway conceived around the complex theme of Manifest Destiny. Together, we expanded the project to cross the whole country, moving from east to west along the 10.

LAND is expanding our scope internationally in 2016—stay tuned for that announcement very soon!