Tea Afar with April Banks

When We Are Lost, The Land Anchors Us led by Zoë Toledo, with M&A

Join us for tea with artist April Banks, who will lead us through a sweet tea ceremony in the southern Black tradition. This is followed by a community conversation with M&A led by Navajo designer Zoë Toledo on architecture, archives, land, and kinship.

These events are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

Part of Black–Still Summer Programs

Materials & Applications (M&A) presents Black — Still, a multi-sensory installation by enFOLD Collective that marks M&A’s second project in the M&S x Craft Contemporary courtyard.

Black — Still is on view at 5814 Wilshire Boulevard from May 28 through September 10. A complementary series of programs centered around well-being will take place in and around this program. Admission to the M&A x Craft Contemporary courtyard to view the M&A project is free.

About Black — Still

Black—Still’s design and its complementing programs explore narratives of wellness, access, and cultural expression with specific attention to marginalized communities. Rendered in simple, familiar materials, the reverential volume is responsive to various obstacles on, above, and beneath the courtyard’s ground. While its dark finish celebrates Black in response to traditional and modernist notions in architecture predicated on whiteness. The volume shapes a space of joyous contemplation, sound-dampened from the adjacent noises of Wilshire Boulevard. Offering shade, shelter, and a cooling mist during the summer months.

In addition to its cultivation of calm, Black–Still engages the underlying geological conditions of the M&A X Craft Contemporary Courtyard, where tar oozes and methane gas rises from the ground, elements originating from the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, and underground oil seeps. Throughout LA, this primordial matter pushes through human-made infrastructure. The project’s wall assemblies of inside-out lath and plaster reproduce a familiar form of material seepage and call attention to the formlessness and expansive potential of what lies below the surface. Black–Still will be complemented by a series of public wellness events and workshops that center exchanges between creative practice and self- and community care practices.

Learn more about Materials&Applications events here. These events are free and open to the public.