homeLA presents 10 Years: A Benefit
10 Years: A Benefit is a special event that honors homeLA's decade-long history
We are celebrating our 10th year with a benefit on May 6th, 2023 and returning to the home in Mt Washington that first launched the project in May 2013.
homeLA’s 10 Years: A Benefit will be an interdisciplinary performance event that honors homeLA’s decade-long history with an evening of dance, art, architecture, as well as an archive exhibition and silent auction to support homeLA’s artistic programming and operations. This indoor/outdoor event takes place on Saturday, May 6th, 2023, from 7-10p.
10 Years: A Benefit takes place in, around, and in respect to a home and family who have dedicated over a decade of work to supporting artists with GuestHaus Residency (GHR)–an artist residency that, since 2011, has partnered with over 40 LA-based organizations and institutions to provide over 70 housing residencies.
Designed by Fung+Blatt Architects, the Mt Washington home maintains the Californian Modernist aesthetics and functionality of indoor/outdoor living that reference the design sensibilities of Schindler and Neutra. Artists included in the benefit will respond to this family home, its modernist architecture, and the history of Mt Washington–one of the first suburbs of Los Angeles.
The evening’s program will include works by long-time homeLA artists: Emily Marchand, Odeya Nini and Flora Wiegmann. Marchand and Wiegmann will revisit two iconic works originally created for the first homeLA: a cocktail and wine bar in the home’s 1st floor roman tub and a moonlit dance meditation in and around the cavity of a formerly unfinished pool. Voice artist, Odeya Nini, will sonically occupy the 3rd floor living room, exploring the acoustics and architecture of space.
The event will also introduce the work of younger inspiring dance artists and homeLA education programs alumni Fransheska Martinez, Jessica Sanchez Rae, Jenny Sandoval, and Mercedes Villegas. In addition to these performances, homeLA will honor the work of the hundreds of artists and hosts over the years with an archive exhibition curated by Mara McCarthy of The Box gallery that chronicles homeLA’s past through programs, props, costumes, films, and more. The event will include food and drink creatively conceived by Marchand and DJ sets by DJ Sam Widaman.
Benefit guests will also enjoy film work by homeLA founder and artist,Rebecca Bruno, and Olfactory Readings by artist and perfumer, Susan Barbour.
As part of their ticket options, homeLA is offering a VIP Ticket that includes an exclusive architectural tour of Architect Young Woo’s Residence (1964-66) in Mt Washington. The residence, published in the Architectural Record, was awarded the magazine's "Award of Excellence for Home Design" as "one of the most significant houses of 1967." Tour will be led by John K Chan (AIA, LEED AP) and Grace Oh from Formation Association, LA-based award winning architecture and environmental design collaborative.
For the last ten years, homeLA has partnered with hosts to provide opportunities for dancers and performance, sound and media artists to produce one-of-a-kind work that responds to the architecture, history, and ethos of a dwelling in Southern California. Its programming has captured the imagination of thousands of Angelinos over the years, providing memorable, intimate, unique art experiences that expanded the notions of home and the possibilities for performance and gathering in Los Angeles. 10 Years: A Benefit will surely do the same.
Host Committee: Timothy Lefevre, Alex Sloane, and Samuel Vasquez
So much gratitude to our sponsors Stacen Berg, Alex Hurt, Christina Quarles, Alex Sloane, and Samuel Vasquez.
This event is sponsored by Assenti’s Pasta, YOLA and Josh Widaman, Estate Winemaker.
Additional Details: homeLA events require proximity and are intimate events that include live video recording and photo for documentation and accessibility purposes.
COVID: This event will be held indoors and outdoors. In line with Disability Justice, we ask that you please mask indoors.
About the Artists
Susan Barbour
Susan Barbour is a poet, scholar, visual artist, wine expert, and perfumer whose creative practice explores subtle forms of human connection. Through human body odor workshops, performance art pieces, and “scent walks” through endangered ecosystems around the world, Barbour’s recent work invites us to reclaim the hidden power of our innate olfactory intelligence. She also creates bespoke perfumes designed to enhance—rather than disguise—the body’s natural musk. A self-taught visual artist who began as an artists’ model, Barbour has exhibited her experimental hair drawings, intaglio prints, and neon nudes at museums and galleries in LA, New York City, and Europe. As an author of poetry, essays, scholarship, and a forthcoming novel, she forges new literary forms to explore possibilities for meaning-making in the wake of loss and in the context of turbo-capitalism. Barbour holds a B.A. from Dartmouth, an M.F.A. from Johns Hopkins in Poetry, and a D.Phil. in English Literature from Oxford. She also holds the Level 4 Diploma from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust and is a certified French Wine Scholar. She has been the recipient of fellowships from The Beinecke Library at Yale, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, The Huntington Library, The Jentel Artist Residency, The Rothermere American Studies Institute, The Siena Art Institute, Castello di Potentino, and The Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. She has lectured at Johns Hopkins, École Polytechnique, and Merton College, Oxford and held research positions at Columbia University and Caltech. She currently divides her time between New York City and LA. @susanbarbourartist
Rebecca Bruno
Rebecca Bruno is an artist working across dance and visual art. In 2012, Bruno founded homeLA, a performance project dedicated to dance process in private space partnering with body-based artists and Los Angeles residents. Bruno collaborates with Mak Kern on Objects for Others, a project that embraces chance and meditation by pairing a dance sensibility with kinetic sound sculptures. Bruno’s works have been presented by such venues as The Hammer Museum, The Norton Simon Museum, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Lloyd Wright Sowden House, the Neutra VDL House, REDCAT Theater, the Bootleg Theater, FLAX Foundation at Tin Flats, The Pit Gallery, Honor Fraser Gallery, Navel LA, Springbreak Art Show, Compound Yucca Valley, Eden’s Expressway NYC, Judson Church NYC, Ponderosa Germany, Dance Studies Association Malta, and the LAB, Jerusalem.
Emily Marchand
Inspired by the native and manufactured landscapes of Los Angeles, Emily Marchand makes textiles and ceramics embedded with vegetables, fruits, eggs, plants, flowers, birds, and animals. What began as an investigation and exploration into Big Agriculture, seed banks and food scarcity, has generated a closer look into her own relationship to food, cooking, gardening, community, feeding friends and unhoused neighbors. Adjacent to her art practice, she cooks for a living as a food stylist, and as a volunteer for local non-profit organizations feeding the unhoused community including Brown Bag Lady, Downtown Women’s Center, and MEND Poverty. Marchand received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Selected projects include Solarium at The Pit (Glendale, CA), Current: LA Food Public Art Triennial (Los Angeles, CA), homeLA (Los Angeles, CA), Genius Loci at Setareh Gallery (Düsseldorf, DE), soft ammunition at NowSpace (Los Angeles, CA), and Artists + Institutions at MAK Center (Los Angeles, CA). @emily_marchand
Odeya Nini
Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary vocalist and composer. At the locus of her interests are performance practices, gesture, textural harmony, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, in works spanning chamber music to vocal pieces and collages of musique concrète. Her solo vocal work extends the dimension and expression of the voice and body, creating a sonic and physical panorama of silence to noise and tenderness to grandeur.
Odeya's work has been presented at venues and festivals across the US and internationally, such as The LA Phil, Merkin Concert Hall, Resonant Bodies Festival, The Broad Museum, and MONA from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, Australia, Mongolia, Madagascar and Vietnam. Her performance of I See You was included in the The New Yorker’s 10 notable performances of 2021. She leads vocal sound baths, workshops and retreats exploring the transformative and healing qualities of embodying the voice. @odeyanini
Flora Wiegmann
Flora Wiegmann works in live performance, dance and film, and has exhibited at a wide array of venues across the U.S. and internationally. Site-specificity and research-based projects have led her to uncover new systems for dance-making and a wider curiosity for bodily experience as the work itself. She is co-founder of the Laboratory for Embodied Intelligences with artist Nina Waisman, creating work that embodies scientific data and allows participants to try on non-human perspectives in order to upend human-centric viewpoints and gain reverence, and therefore, empathy, for other creatures. During the pandemic, she relocated to an Island in the State of Washington where she volunteers with Pacific Mammal Research. She is also an active member of Transition Lopez Island (part of the worldwide Transition Movement), with a focus on strengthening local food economies. @florawiegmann
Fransheska Martinez
Fransheska Martínez is 19 years old and a freshman at Cal State University Long Beach with a major in dance. She started her dance journey on a competitive team as a teenager until the age of 16, where she performed and competed at various events and conventions. She was part of AB Miller’s Dance Conservatory where she gained her knowledge and skills as a dancer. In 2022, as a senior in high school, she participated in homeLA’s education program, inSITE, where she performed, choreographed and collaborated with students from AB Miller’s TV Production to produce a dance film. She has also performed at UC Riverside along with students from Riverside City College. She is currently on an adult hip hop team where she will be competing in World of Dance in the following months. Her work embodies her artistic style and creativity. @franshesskaa_m
Jessica Sanchez Rae
Jessica Sanchez Rea is currently a first year majoring in Dance at Cal State University of Long Beach. She started her dancing journey at the age of 13 with Ballet Folklorico at Orgullo Mestizo Ballet Folklorico Dance Company in Fontana CA, a dance company that reaches the origins of our Mexican culture and community through dance. She is still with the company today . She learned other genres and techniques her freshman year of high school at the AB Miller Dance program, and r joined their Dance Conservatory for the next three years. At the conservatory, Jessica learned not just dance but life skills and the value of friendships and family through the dance community. The faculty in the AB Miller Dance program, especially Nicole Robinson, helped her and encouraged her with the decision of going to Long Beach as a dance major. She now lives in Long Beach and is working towards a Masters in Dance in order to give to others the opportunities and experiences she was given.
Jennifer Sandoval
Jennifer Sandoval began her dance training at the age of 9 at Dance In Motion Dance Studio in Woodland Hills where she trained in Hip Hop, Jazz, Ballet, Modern, Contemporary and Break Dance. She stopped dancing for 2 years but picked it back up her freshman year of high school. She became part of the A.B. Miller Conservatory of Dance Program her sophomore and continued until graduation. At the conservatory, she furthered her dance training and acquired the skills necessary for choreography, instructing, costume/makeup designing and leadership. Being passionate about dance, she decided to further her dance training at California State University Long Beach. She is currently a second year Dance BA major. In the future Jennifer hopes to dance in the commercial industry and teach.
Mercedes Villegas
Mercedes Villegas is a 18 year old first generation college student who is attending California State University Long Beach as a Pre-BFA dance major with a psychology minor. Dance has always been a part of her life starting with tap when she was 2 years old. She currently enjoys learning street dance and African styles. During her high school years at AB Miller in the dance conservatory program she acquired valuable skills in leadership, teaching, choreography, and site-specific work with homeLA.
