IN CLOSE: Barbara T. Smith: Proof Closing Day Celebration with Active Cultures
On the closing day of Barbara T. Smith: Proof, ICA LA and Active Cultures celebrate Smith’s kaleidoscopic practice with In Close, a gathering of food and performance. The afternoon will feature a new performance by artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, with musicians Rachel Beetz and April Dawn Guthrie, alongside a furl of squash orchestrated by artist and cook Eden Batki.
Join us in an ode to the year of Barbara, to the squash and the seasons, to feeding and being fed.
Performances start promptly at 3:30 and 4:30 PM.
About Active Cultures
Active Cultures is a public arts organization in Los Angeles exploring the confluence of food and art through public projects, programs, and publishing. Our mission is to nourish interdisciplinary and experimental practice, inspire curiosity, and feed empathy through artist-led, collective experiences and generative conversations. Read more about our programs here.
About the Artists
Through a practice that incorporates sound, sculpture, scent, and performance, artist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs creates new myths and their paraphernalia: hymns, relics, costumes, instruments, rites and rituals for an alternate past, and still-possible future. Pennypacker Riggs is the creator of the site-responsive choral ensemble, Song of Eurydice, and Community Chorus, a drop-in vocal experiment. She has presented work at High Desert Test Sites, Getty Center, The Broad, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Anchorage Museum, and LA Public Works Triennial.
Composer, flutist, and improviser, Rachel Beetz explores presence through sound and listening. Her works recreate physical atmospheres based on her deep-listening adventures in the wild, exploring hidden worlds of nature and machines. Combining experimental field recordings and electronically modified flutes, her works examine community, environmentalism, and women’s work through sound, textiles, and lighting. Her projects have been featured in concert halls and galleries in Australia, Iceland, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. You can hear her on the Orenda, Blue Griffin, iikki, Neuma, and Populist record labels. She is currently a co-director of the Wasteland Ensemble and Populist Records.
April Dawn Guthrie is an LA-based composer/cellist/vocalist originally from Kansas City. Guthrie’s creative practice strives to highlight injustices, and to reflect upon and pay homage to dissenters. Through performing and recording cello she has worked with Björk, The Industry, WildUp, Angel Olsen, Amanda Palmer, Blue Planet II, BBC’s Big Cats, the Alan Parsons Project, and more. In 2019 her composition and collaboration with Matthew Paul Olmos of so go the ghosts of méxico, part three was recognized for Best Original Music/Songs of 2019 by Theatre Jones.
Eden Batki is a peripatetic multi-disciplinary artist, storyteller, and consultant working in photography, food, and film. Her documentary film Weedeater (2016) is a dreamy, experimental portrait of a plant communicator and soil healer. Batki gets commissioned to create dinners with and for other artists in galleries and homes internationally, meanwhile selling her homemade body balms, incense and herbal smokes under the name Eden’s Herbal’s. Batki worked as Production Manager on CNN’s Explore Parts Unknown: The Perfect Dish Asia, and as Production Consultant on the Emmy and James Beard-award winning Little Los Angeles series with Anthony Bourdain. Currently Batki is working on a project researching her Hungarian roots in relation to food and land.
