About the Project.

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.

About the Commissions.

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, The Mistake Room’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 disproportionately affected. The work is envisioned as a space and moment to grieve and memorialize the many angels of L.A. 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 will ask members of the community to submit photos and stories of loved ones they have lost amid the pandemic. The photos will be used to create a looping in memoriam video that projects on a screen embedded in the altar and also on a microsite that will function as a virtual form of the work. Classroom of Compassion hopes that this space will give 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 activate the work throughout the duration of its presentation.

A South LA art space focused on art and community healing, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart was founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alexandre Dorriz, and noé olivas, artists who share a deep commitment to social justice. Recently, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart launched a multi-faceted initiative titled Pray for LA that will encompass multiple projects aimed at confronting the relationship between systemic racism and the ways the pandemic has affected communities of color. For Things With Feathers, The Mistake Room’s trio of projects for Art Rise, the collective activates domingo, a rolling social sculpture based out of a 1967 Chevrolet step-van repurposed as a rolling space for art and healing. Working with the largely working-class immigrant communities of Pico Union, olivas puts the delivery van to work as a site of service to its peers and community, distributing care in the form of food, healing kits, and art supplies, and providing a site for collective creativity to a community disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Deeply inspired by Southern California custom lowrider culture when conceiving domingo, olivas prioritized amongst the first renovations to the vehicle when acquired in 2011 the lowering and altering of the airbag suspension of the vehicle. This system not only provides a smoother and safer ride, where each wheel may lower independently, but it is also a play off the philosophy of “low and slow,” to stay grounded, rooting into its habitat, to move slow, to be accessible through function and through programming, and to bow for its audiences.

Gisela McDaniel is a diasporic, indigenous, Chamorro artist based in Detroit who for years has collaborated with survivors of various forms of violence through a practice that mobilizes storytelling as a method for healing. Recording interviews and conversations with people who want to share their stories,  McDaniel creates soundscapes that go beyond bearing witness to violence and instead center narratives of care and perseverance. These soundscapes are remixed to allow for McDaniel’s collaborators to share as much or as little of their story as they want. Accompanying these soundscapes are intricately textured paintings of McDaniel’s collaborators that she creates through in-person sittings or photographs that people send to her. In these paintings, individuals are often portrayed through a gaze that privileges the possibilities of their future rather than just the burdens of their past. Wearing their favorite articles of clothing and incorporating objects of important significance to them, McDaniel’s collaborators are seen anew in her works. For Things With Feathers, The Mistake Room’s trio of projects for Art Rise, McDaniel conducted interviews with individuals in Los Angeles and elsewhere whose experiences with violence shed light on the injustices and inequities that the pandemic has exacerbated.  McDaniel recorded their stories, and created a soundscape that accompanies a major public mural of her collaborators in Downtown LA. The textured, mixed-media mural and accompanying sound work highlight various experiences of healing, and remind us that there will be vibrant lives to live after this moment.