Public Art & Monuments at LA State Historic Park
While walking around LA State Historic Park, you might notice several signs, sculptures, and monuments. These artworks live in the park year round to remind residents and visitors alike of the cultural heritage of Los Angeles and the history of the park.
Explore the different artworks you can find in the park below.
A Park is by the People
A Park is by the People is a monument to the civic labor that willed the Los Angeles State Historic Park into being. It is intended to make a public record of the herculean, but often forgotten, work that goes into changing the public idea of what land could be.
Rosten Woo is a designer, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He produces civic-scale artworks and works as a collaborator and consultant to a variety of grassroots and non-profit organizations. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks in New York and Los Angeles. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York Based non-profit organization dedicated to using art and design to foster civic participation, winner of the 2016 National Design Award for institutional achievement. His book, “Street Value,” about race and retail urban development, was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Endless Orchard
Interdisciplinary artist duo, Fallen Fruit (David Burns & Austin Young) launch the largest public artwork in the world, Endless Orchard. The Endless Orchard is a sustainable, edible, living artwork — fruit trees planted, cared for, and mapped by the public for everyone to share.
A Monument To Sharing is an installation artwork composed of phrases culled from recorded conversations with surrounding community members that wrap around the bases of 32 orange trees in the Los Angeles State Historic Park. The oranges are for everyone to share and the phrases create a 32-line poem that becomes one voice describing what it means to be a great neighbor. Interviews were collected while planting publicly accessible fruit trees front of homes and businesses within walking distance of Los Angeles State Historic Park.
Leading up to the opening, Fallen Fruit planted 150 fruit trees with the surrounding communities of William Meade housing, Solano Canyon, and Chinatown. The trees were adopted by neighbors, planted, and mapped in the front of houses for sharing.
Members of the public are invited to co-create Endless Orchard by mapping existing public fruit trees or planting new ones in front of homes, schools, churches, or businesses. These fruit trees are planted along sidewalks and interstitial urban spaces, allowing us to explore and enjoy our cities in a new way.
“The project is co-created by everyone who participates; together, we will make the largest and most generous collaborative public artwork in the world.”
-Fallen Fruit
Origins
Works by Debra Scacco explore the notion of place. Her LA River works explore the unique history of the river, and the role it has played in shaping modern-day Los Angeles. Each work in the Origins series holds a line drawing of a previous river course at its core. With each line emanating out from the last, the hand-engraved mirrored face of the works traces the radical difference in current a single line will make. The concrete body of the work echoes the physical structure of the channelized river itself. The two pieces on display at LASHP depict river maps from 1815 and 1825.
Debra Scacco received a BA in Studio Art from Richmond University, London, in 1998. She has exhibited extensively both in America and internationally, including solo exhibitions with Klowden Mann and Marine Contemporary in Los Angeles, and group exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London), and Royal Academy of Arts (London). After residing in London for 16 years, Scacco relocated to Los Angeles in 2012. She is represented by Klowden Mann (Los Angeles).
Psychic Body Grotto
LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) commissioned Los Angeles-based artist Anna Sew Hoy to create the large-scale, bronze public sculpture Psychic Body Grotto.
Drawing on the artist’s previous explorations of materiality, spirituality and the relationships we forge with everyday objects, this will be Sew Hoy’s largest and most interactive sculpture to date. Psychic Body Grotto is a room-sized bronze sculpture or “figurative gazebo” for meetings and rituals that have yet to be invented. The sculpture evokes the illusion of being organically generated from the earth, creating a locus for contemplation and relaxation amidst the buzzing cityscape of Los Angeles.
Anna Sew Hoy is a Los Angeles-based artist (born 1976 in Auckland, New Zealand) who received her MFA from Bard College in 2008. Sew Hoy’s work has been shown in the collections of the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for Visual Art in 2015 to support her public sculpture Psychic Body Grotto.
