Art, aesthetics, and race— The (re)visualization of geographic imaginaries in Los Angeles

Keywords: art, aesthetics, gentrification
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

Art, aesthetics, and race— The (re)visualization of geographic imaginaries in Los Angeles

There is a disjuncture concerning the role art has in gentrifying neighborhoods within and across cities. This tension plays out uniquely in Los Angeles where cultural erasure is prominent through practices of ‘white-washing’ in a city dense with street art. This is juxtaposed to the large-scale anti-gentrification protests led by activists fighting against ‘artwashing’— the process by which developers and artists appropriate and aestheticize markers of urban decay through arts-led development projects in order to market real estate to consumers seeking an industrial backdrop. Adding to the expansive literature on the implications of geographic imaginaries in (re)producing spatial inequalities, my research seeks to illuminate the contested process through which certain artistic styles and community voices are made visible while others are made invisible. My research examines the minimal Indigenous representation in the public artworks and embed it in the tumultuous history of Indigenous displacement perpetuated by settler-colonial logics. Public art can operate as a litmus test for and producer of historical consciousness, making it essential to examine the ways in which certain institutions promote specific forms of (in)visibility. Drawing upon decolonial epistemologies I apply murals as a creative and theoretical space, a site of epistemological inquiry and an activist space that intervenes and subverts hegemonic narratives.