David Jenkins
Painting major Francisco Tapia paint the old Fine Arts Building with the phase “He will not Divide Us”. On Saturday Jan. 27 the community was invited to paint the paint with whatever seemed fit to them. There was paint and all sorts of equipment provided free of charge to the community. Photo credit: David Jenkins
As the old Fine Arts Building goes, through it art came and presented itself to the community in the form of paintings, literature, crafts, film, sculpture and many other types of art.
All of the art was organized by a non-profit arts advocacy Foundation for Art Resources. The FAR Bazaar event allowed the public see what individual and collective minds put together.
Having a two-day art festival, many artists from many art collectives and universities participated in bringing their art to the old Fine Arts Building.
Universities such as:
ArtCenter College of Design
CalArts/California Institution of the Arts
Claremount Graduate University
Otis College of Art and Design
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Riverside
University of Southern California
One of the people who came the show was writer of the Los Angeles Times and food critic, Johnathan Gold.
“I’ve seen some really good stuff,” he said.
Gold continued, “I’ve loved the room with the melting ice blocks and the sounds of Hiroshima. It was really well done. I’ve been seeing great stuff all day. Be that the retrospective that was here in 76 that they recreated with people who were local artist then [24 Southern California women]. It’s stunning, so many of these things would be entire, important gallery shows on their own but the idea of putting it all together in one space is just phenomenal.”
Many students participated in the art gallery as an audience. Microbiologist major Chris Wong, was among the students.
“This is the first art gallery that I’ve ever attended and it’s pretty intense. A lot of what I’ve seen today is quite open with current events. I’m not really into politics and stuff like that but I think I can say I don’t mind seeing someone express their political opinion through art. It was really different than someone trying to tell me their opinion with mere words,” he said.
So many ideas were expressed at FAR Bazaar, from activism to the type of art that one individual might understand and another might not.
LACC Art professor Laurel Paley is another person who came and saw what the artist at FAR bazaar presented. She has a history with the Cerritos arts departments. She used to teach part time in the graphic design area.”Bonnie Barrett invited me, she’s the chair of the department, we used to work very closely together. I also heard about it on Facebook […] I try to keep tabs on them and try to help my former students see which schools they want to transfer to. So, I like to see what the different schools are up to, what are their ideological slights? How are their students doing? What do their resumes look like? So for me it was a little reconnaissance I kind of wanted to see how the different schools are dealing with things.”
Throughout the event Paley was able to see and enjoy the group work that was put into most of the art.
“A lot of what the program FAR Bazaar was about artist working in collectives and groups and I wanted to see how they handled that and what the different collectives were doing, making their projects how it differs from, [what] individual artists are doing in their projects. So for me I was very impressed I had a wonderful time.” She said.