Curated by Keith Walsh

Art by Michael Green, Robby Herbst, Michele Jaquis, Vincent Ramos, Michael Shaw, Laurie Steelink, and Keith Walsh.

Sociality unites seven Los Angeles artists who dynamically engage ideas and systems of association, self-representation, grass roots political organization, and humanism with communities within and beyond the art world. 

Our work is founded on the principles that artists who make art are shaped by their social environs, whether experienced or mediated. We are responsive and committed to an art that attends to social issues as forms of commentary, consciousness, self-determination, resistance, and constructing potential solutions to the challenges of forging communities within the atomistic realm and tropes of the capitalist art world and society.  

The gallery is a temporary political center and social space that allows us see the world anew, to recognize the art exhibition as a hub and generator for making connections beyond its doors.   We avoid dry analyses and hypotheses by utilizing dynamic means to engage objective subjects and subjectivities. Sociality presents our agency for personal, cultural, political emancipation and community building.

MICHAEL GREEN is a painter, printmaker, and architectural designer living in Los Angeles. His compact and visually mesmerizing paintings articulate complex patterns of historical relations that undergird social issues, The Doomsday Clock, and urban environments. He recently exhibited at the Elephant Room Gallery, Chicago, and Hive Gallery in Los Angeles. Green is a former member of Avant-sound groups The Flying Lutterbachers and Burmese.

ROBBY HERBST is an inter-disciplinarian. He is oriented towards historic and contemporary vanguard, avant-garde, and countercultural practices aiming to reorient society. Along with individual authored works, he’s the instigator of the Llano Del Rio Collective and co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Llano Del Rio’s portfolio addressing the work of street-food vendors will first be available on May Day through Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. He’s got an MFA from CalArts.

Operation Manuals are a series of drawings, vinyl banners, and lesson plans directed in public spaces. The body of work draws inspiration from De-school Primer, a free-schools publication printed in the Bay Area in the early 1970s. Issue 13 (1974) of the Primer was a 10’ X 12’ poster titled Operation Manual For The World’s Largest Paper Space Ship. The poster consists of a central image framed by text. The text constitutes a score directing the posters users in ways to engage the image, functioning as prompts for the imagination. Formally the poster draws from a graphic style reminiscent of Peter Max, Lawrence Halprin, Mad Magazine, and Fluxus. De-school Primer was a part of a network of projects developed in proximity to the Portola Institute, an “education incubator” founded in Menlo Park, CA. in 1966. Portola’s most known project is the Whole Earth Catalog. Herbst’s Operation Manual artworks provide useful prompts addressing contemporary culture.

MICHELE JAQUIS (b. 1975 Buffalo, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. She earned an MFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in sculpture and experimental studio with a minor in psychology from Hartford Art School/University of Hartford. Her work has been exhibited in alternative spaces, galleries, museums and film/video festivals including El Camino College Art Gallery (Torrance, CA), Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), PØST at MiM Gallery (Los Angeles), SoLa Contemporary (Los Angeles), Shalom Institute (Malibu, CA), Five Points Gallery (Torrington, CT), Siverlake Independent Jewish Community Center (Los Angeles), Platt and Borstein Galleries at American Jewish University (Bel Air, CA), DAC Gallery (Los Angeles), Ara Art Center (Seoul), Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn), ReelHeART International Film and Screenplay Festival - Nominated for Best Short Documentary & Best Editing (Toronto), Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles), and the Brood Film Festival: 21st Century Parenthood in Film (Exeter, England). Solo exhibitions have been at Cerritos Collge Art Gallery, Proxy Gallery and Gallery 825 among other artist run spaces that have since closed. Awards include a Best Documentary Award in the 2008 Director’s Chair Film Festival (Staten Island, NY), 2009 Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency Grant, and numerous Faculty Development Grants (2011 - 2022) from Otis College of Art and Design. Currently Jaquis is an Associate Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Artists Community Teaching Program at Otis College, where she engages students in collaborating with each other and community partners, while overseeing all undergraduate minors.

Through long-term projects utilizing a range of media, my work examines the complexities within personal and social relationships, identity, language and communication. For me, the social/emotional process of making art is just as important as what is ultimately made. My recent text-based drawings and altered American flags attempt to counter the increased division, xenophobia and racism since Trump’s election, and the recent backlashes against “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.

VINCENT RAMOS (b. 1973) has exhibited internationally, including Frieze Projects Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Crisp London and Los Angeles, Las Cienegas Projects, the 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, and The Dallas Biennial. His awards include a 2020 C.O.L.A. Fellowship, 2015 Friends of Contemporary Art Fellowship and the 2010 California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. Ramos’s public work El Monte Legion Stadium Nocturne (2014) can be seen at the El Monte Station of the Los Angeles Metro. Vincent received his BA from Otis College, Los Angeles and his MFA from Cal Arts.

Ramos transforms research and archival material into new work, recovering the lost histories of Los Angeles’s marginalized communities, critiques of Hollywood’s representations of Mexicans and Mexican-American, connecting his Venice CA roots with the neighborhood’s working-class communities and its pivotal role in the histories of West Coast beatnik culture and conceptual art. His work has been featured in Al Dia, Artweek, the LA Times, and Xtra.

MICHAEL SHAW is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was included in the recent exhibition It’s My House! at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021 and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. Shaw is the creator and head of the architectural-based art project, “Housing’s Final Frontier.” You can learn more about his work in his photo- and art-illustrated article, “Urban Theater in Plain Sight: The Drama and Ceaseless Advancement of Gentrification in Los Angeles,” in Space on Space magazine. Shaw is also the creator and host of The Conversation Art Podcast, launched in 2011.

The focus of my work is on residential real estate. I create cyanotype images of local homes of all kinds, in various phases of construction. My experience with the incessant development and advanced gentrification of the greater Westside of Los Angeles has inspired me to investigate how urban residences function as symbols of identity and bellwethers for inequality. For me, construction sites are more than just urban noise that most simply ignore or tolerate— they’re a form of urban theater, saturated with visual signs of industry and progress. They are also a setting to which carpenters and construction workers commute from all over to build houses and luxury apartment buildings they’ll never live in, and which sooner or later will result in the displacement of long-time residents as gentrification unfolds. Real estate porn of Zillow and Red Fin allure potential buyers and keep market followers plugged into the latest bottom line, but my images address other bottom lines: the homes going up are not just future homes, but also harbingers of homes lost.

Multidisciplinary artist LAURIE STEELINK identifies as Akimel O’otham and is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. Born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in Tucson, she received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She served as archivist for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in New York, and was director of Track 16 Gallery in west L.A. from 2002 to 2016. In 2012, Steelink founded Cornelius Projects, an exhibition space in San Pedro, CA that she named after her father. The curatorial focus at Cornelius Projects is primarily the cultural history and the artists of San Pedro and the Harbor Area. Steelink’s work has been exhibited internationally, and she has participated in Native American Indian Marketplaces at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and with the Santa Fe Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"Laurie was born into a generation that was impacted by one of the last vestiges of the U.S. Government’s active attempts at full hegemonic assimilation of Native Americans through the promotion of adoption programs of Native infants into white families. Laurie was adopted out of her Akimel O'otham Nation in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in Tucson. She grew up with a strong foundation in political consciousness and activism with her adopted family and studied art in college receiving both a BFA and MFA in Visual Art. Recently (in the past 20 years) Laurie has been re-connecting with her biological family and her cultural roots, which has had a profound and self-evaluative impact on her artistic practice. To overcome and heal from a forced identity schism, Laurie has immersed herself in becoming familiar with both Native artist communities, and has participated in ceremonial/spiritual gatherings. She has expanded her curatorial practice to include working with the annual Many Winters Gathering of Elders at Angeles Gate Cultural Center by assisting with event coordination, curating Native artist group exhibitions, and as an exhibiting artist herself. Critically engaging in both the long tradition of “Indian” marketplaces and the current emergence of contemporary Native American artists, Laurie’s newest work is entering a fascinating intersection of these arenas by creating dialogue of humanization, new visual language, and respectful co-existence between these two worlds."

​--Gina Lamb, Assoc. Professor, Intercollegiate Media Studies, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA

KEITH WALSH (b. 1963) received a Cultural Trailblazer award from the LA Department of Cultural Affairs for 2021-22. His work is currently in Angela Davis: Seize the Time at the Oakland Museum of California. Recent exhibitions include the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, Torrance Art Museum, r_d_f_a, PRJCTLA, the Dallas Biennial, the Kleefeld Art Museum, and SoLA Contemporary. Walsh directed Cubist Spinoff, a garage gallery in Inglewood. His work has been featured in Artforum, Artsy, Art and Cake, Artillery, Artweek, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, The LA Weekly, Visual Art Source, and VoyageLA. His alt-folk-punk one-man-band, The Keith Walsh Experience, frequently performs in the LA area. The new KWE album Revolutions in the Sun will be released on May Day 2023. Walsh has a BFA in Experimental Studio from the Hartford Art School/University of Hartford and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University.

Walsh makes drawings informed by the histories of multiracial socialist and liberation activism in the U.S. and Los Angeles since 1919. Researched independent or organizational theory and sited praxis are engaged as strategies for an art that recovers obscured histories, addresses systemic social issues, and builds networks of solidarity and community. These histories also generate frameworks for subjective creative processes such as information selection, rhetorical stance, and visual composition-- weaving threads of action and consciousness that link the past to the future. A presented or situated drawing marks a temporal distillation of collected notes and images, field research, mapping activities, and visual studies. His practice redirects the formal and representational agencies of Constructivism, Dada, Conceptual Art, and Pictures Generation work toward fortifying the emancipatory cultures of the political left and revolutionary art.

For more information please contact Alan Standen via latategallery@gmail.com or 310.409.7854