About the Public Project.

Classroom of Compassion (David Maldonado and Noah Reich) is a collective that over the past five years has explored the role that public memorials have in helping communities process grief. For Things With Feathers, TMR’s trio of projects for Art Rise, Classroom of Compassion presents a large-scale floral altar to remember the many Angelenos we’ve lost amid the pandemic and in particular those from communities that have been disproportionately affected. The work is envisioned as a space and moment to grieve and memorialize the many angels of LA together.  Titled Los Angeles, I hope u know how loved you are, the work is sited in Downtown LA on a lot on Mateo Street that currently functions as a car wash. Through a public outreach campaign that will last throughout the presentation of the installation, Classroom of Compassion and TMR asks members of the community to submit photos and stories of loved ones they have lost amid the pandemic. The photos are used to create a looping in memoriam video that projects on a screen embedded in the altar and also on a microsite that functions as a virtual form of the work. Classroom of Compassion hopes that this space gives those that are grieving the loss of friends and family an opportunity to process their loss with others like them, and in turn hold space for their healing journey. An accompanying series of online public programs activates the work throughout the duration of its presentation.

About Things with Feathers.

Over the past year the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how we exist in the world. The scale and complexity of this public health crisis have exacerbated a wide-range of inequities and injustices while ushering in multiple waves of shocking loss. More than 130 million people worldwide have been infected with this virus and almost 3 million of them to date have lost their lives to it. Recovery itself is ambiguous as hundreds of thousands cope with lingering post-infection symptoms that medical experts don’t fully understand. Between vaccines and new variants the incertitudes instigated by this virus flourish—making a return to normalcy seemingly improbable. While the virus ravages bodies, it also wrecks the lives those bodies live. Our daily routines are now very different, our personal and professional responsibilities overlap and expand, and distance tests our resolve. People continue to lose their jobs, businesses close, and too many face food and housing insecurity. We mourn experiences that are hard to envision happening in our future and often ponder what holding space with others will look like in our shared tomorrow. These unprecedented losses bring with them multiple forms of grief that manifest in feelings, emotions, and behaviors that are as painful and hard to understand as the losses we’re enduring. This reality severely impacts our mental health and well being and feels both too large to comprehend individually and too intimate to share publicly.

Things With Feathers strives to raise public awareness about the various kinds of grief we’re currently embodying and the necessity to acknowledge grief as the first step toward healing. Titled after Emily Dickinson’s famous description of hope as a thing with feathers, this project comprises three new public art commissions that shed light on loss and the grief it provokes while imagining ways to heal and persevere. Each of the commissioned artists and collectives have practices forged by long-standing relationships to communities and their respective commissions build from that in responding to our present. Through these works, Things With Feathers aims to recognize individual experiences of loss while also reminding us of their collective nature and the need to heal together.