Public programs
Stockhausen & The Dogon
Transmission to Sirius B
Stockhausen & The Dogon People: Transmission to Sirius B presented an evening of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and his reverence for the Dogon people of Mali highlighting their ancient reciprocal philosophies with his cosmological framework. The evening which was organized through the Joshua Tree National Park and was presented at Cap Rock debuting the never before seen documentation by the explorer, ethnomusicologist and documentarian Douchan Gersi of the Dogon Sigui ceremony of 1972. Transmission to Sirius B, was the first in a series of events to lobby attention for the protection of National Parks and Wildlife. The event coincided with the Perseid Meteor and saw images and films projected onto Cap Rock in the Joshua Tree. The National Parks Service granted two nights from sundown to sunrise.
Tertium Organum
Traversing Space
As part of the exhibition Mysticism and Mathematics: Tertium Organum—Traversing Space, presented by the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Pasadena Art Alliance, and Label Curatorial, Los Angeles artist duo Beck+Col present a performance activating five costumes from their forthcoming film Horror Without End! in collaboration with Lauren Powell Projects. Drawing on themes central to the exhibition—including the intersections of esotericism, mathematics, and expanded states of consciousness—the performance stages a ritual-like choreography inspired by the teachings of P.D. Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff. Three dancers revolve around a central figure while a fifth performer moves between them and the audience, accompanied by music from Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann and an atmospheric soundscape. Through elaborate costumes and movement-based storytelling, Beck+Col explore altered states, symbolic triads, and non-human mythologies, creating a surreal procession that echoes the exhibition’s investigation of metaphysical ideas expressed through geometry, science, and performance.
Joan Quinn Captured
Brand Library
As part of the Brand Library and Art Center's 2012-2014 historic restoration, Label Curatorial organized the official re-opening of the center in 2014. The show presented a series of capsule arenas featuring the Light and Space artists Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Laddie John Dill, and post war Los Angeles luminary artists Billy Al Bengston, Charles Arnoldi, Don Bachardy, Tony Berlant, Claire Falkenstein, Joe Goode, Frank Gehry, George Herms, David Hockney, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Allen Ruppersberg and Beatrice Wood in dialogue with their notable works and their portraits of the impresario Joan Quinn. Expanding upon the trajectory of Quinn’s international alliances, the exhibition also featured the London 'Them’ artist collective including Dame Zandra Rhodes, Luciana Martinez de la Rosa, Duggie Fields, Kevin Whitney and Andrew Logan. As close affiliates of Warhol and West Coast editor of his Interview magazine, the show included Quinn’s polaroids of Warhol, sketches by Jean-Michel Basquiat and and documentaries of both NY artists.
City Lights Dilexi
A Gallery & Beyond Symposium
City Lights Books event celebrating the publication of Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond. Organized in connection with research from Label Curatorial, the program explores how San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery became a vital meeting ground for contemporary art, experimental music, film, and performance in the late 1950s through early 1970s. The event highlights the gallery’s role in fostering overlooked collaborations among artists and composers whose interdisciplinary work helped shape later developments in minimalism and conceptual art.
Galleria Carla Sozzani
Dalí, the Paradox of Fashion
On Thursday, June 21, 2018, Laura Whitcomb presented Dalí, the Paradox of Fashion at Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan—an evening devoted to her book exploring Salvador Dalí’s fascination with fashion as both spectacle and alchemy. Whitcomb illuminated the Surrealist master’s lesser-known collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Paco Rabanne, and Kaisik Wong, as well as his iconic designs for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo’s Bacchanale. Rare excerpts from Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971)—a film Dalí adored—were shown, revealing Arnold and Wong’s visionary tableaux vivants later echoed in the Teatre-Museu Dalí.
LA County Arts & Culture
Sound Arts
Whitcomb served as curatorial producer for Los Angeles County’s first permanent sound art installations, a landmark civic initiative that placed commissioned sound works by Christopher Garcia at Atlantic Avenue Park and Mekala Session of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra at Athens Park. At Atlantic, Garcia’s composition for the park’s new restroom explores indigenous Mesoamerican sanitation infrastructures in an immersive, site-specific score that reframes everyday public infrastructure as a space for deep listening and historical reflection.
To inaugurate the Athens Park work and celebrate civil rights leader A.C. Bilbrew and her library’s 50th anniversary, Whitcomb organized an evening at the A.C. Bilbrew Library featuring Mekala Session performing live, improvisational sets in dialogue with the Golden State Mutual collection of Black art and its histories. Together, these programs intertwined sites of collective listening, civic ritual, and Black cultural memory, modeling the socially embedded sound and movement strategies that The Artist Within Us All will extend. The protocols, relationships, and civic competencies developed through this project—around permitting, accessibility, community consultation, and site-responsive sound in public space—will be directly mobilized for The Artist Within Us All, which proposes three city-based performances that similarly engage municipal partners and local communities as active collaborators rather than just passive audiences.
Three Landscapes: JB Blunk, Anna and Lawrence Halprin
Blum & Poe
Alongside the exhibition Three Landscapes: JB Blunk, Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Blum & Poe presents a conversation with Daria Halprin, scholar Janice Ross, and moderated by Laura Whitcomb.
BLUM presented an exhibition of more than twenty ceramic works alongside salvaged old-growth redwood tables by the legendary Northern California-based artist JB Blunk, watercolors from Lawrence Halprin and paintings by Gordon Onslow Ford who all shared a passion for their natural surroundings as well as Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Curated by Mariah Nielson and Ruthanna Halprin Hopper.
Norman Zammitt
Karma
Karma presents Norman Zammitt, Band Paintings 1973–1992, open from November 10, 2023, to January 6, 2024, at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. This is the Los Angeles artist’s first solo exhibition in the city in over a decade. For over twenty years, Zammitt worked from daybreak to sundown seven days a week in a former dance studio in Pasadena to create a series of horizontally striped canvases in numerous sizes that would come to be known as the Band Paintings. Using an idiosyncratic color-theory system of his own invention, the artist logarithmically calculated pigment weights precise to the thousandth of a gram, then suspended his mixtures in an acrylic medium. The transitions between stacked lines of colors project a luminosity as ethereal as the scattered rays of the sun. Inspired by and created in greater Los Angeles, the Band Paintings made their mark on the city: November 16, 2000, was officially “Norman Zammitt Day” in Los Angeles.
Norman Zammitt
Karma NY
Karma presents a conversation between Cecilia Alemani, Sarah Crowner, Jeremy Frey, and Laura Whitcomb on the occasion of Norman Zammitt, A Degree of Light at 549 West 26th Street, New York. Laura is working on a catalogue essay for the forthcoming monograph from Karma.
Dilexi Gallery and the Anderson Collection
Stanford
This program explored the history of the Dilexi Gallery and the Anderson Collection artists represented including Jay DeFeo, Manuel Neri, Roy DeForest, and more. The conversation featured Jim Newman, co-founder of the gallery; Laura Whitcomb, author of "Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond;" and Jason Linetzky, director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Hosted by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University on January 25, 2024.
Warner Jepson: Indeterminate Convergences
Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
In conjunction with Warner Jepson: Indeterminate Convergences Label Curatorial oganized an evening presenting never before released music of Jepson while providing the opportunity for local and world renowned sound artists to perform their own music on Jepson’s Buchla synthesizer. The audience served the role as curator through chance operation procedure randomly selecting the performers. The event highlighted intersecting genres, re-engaging the elements and community based rituals that catalyzed one of the greatest cultural revolutions in American history.