CLUI Visitors and Visitations

THE CLUI IN LOS ANGELES, home to the Center’s main offices, exhibit space, bookshop, and recently renovated research library, welcomes visitors from near and far. Educational groups often visit us, or invite us to visit them, in-person and remotely, including, in 2024, art, architecture, design, and landscape architecture classes from schools such as ArtCenter, CalArts, Carnegie Mellon, Harvey Mudd, Otis College of Art and Design, Taubman College at the University of Michigan, UCLA, University of Nevada Reno, and the University of Southern California.

School groups visit the CLUI regional locations, too. Sometimes a class will spend several days based out of our facilities, engaging in on-site research in the region, as Texas Tech’s Land Arts of the American West field program did in September 2024, camping out for a week at our Wendover site, as they have for almost every year for over 20 years. Other times a group will come for an hour or two, to tour the exhibits and facilities, as a UCLA architecture class did, visiting CLUI Swansea, as part of their research studio on Owens Lake’s architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and ecology in October 2024.
 

In March 2024 scholars, students, architects, and artists attending the Beyond Provenance symposium at Princeton remotely toured CLUI Swansea, located on the shores of Owens Lake, (2,700 miles away from the school's campus) via Zoom. Attendees convened in a room covered in carpet tiles depicting satellite imagery of Owens Lake, and video and audio material from the 2023 CLUI project The Fountains of Owens Lake was also on view as part of the program, organized by Erin Besler and Sarah Hearne.

Other off-site programs and exhibitions in 2024 included contributions to Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York; Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World at the V&A Dundee in Scotland; and the final stop of the touring exhibition Hollow Earth: Art, Caves, and the Subterranean Imagery at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in England.

The CLUI was an exhibitor at the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar, at USC’s Doheny Library in October 2024. The 19th edition of this annual event focused on the history of water in Los Angeles, and Southern California collections and archives of all types gathered to show selections from their holdings. CLUI contributions included postcards depicting water in California from our Merle Porter Postcard Collection, and a Coast Realty Archive presentation of real estate listings along the Pacific Ocean shoreline. ♦