Winter 2021, #44

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives. -Rebecca Solnit

Editor’s Note

During this pandemic year, the Center has been working from home, using remote ways of seeing, as well as focusing our attention locally. This is reflected in two new exhibits produced for our Los Angeles space over this year: one about the most inaccessible, remote, and far-flung parts of the USA—its unoccupied island territories—and the other, an exhibit examining the neighborhood right outside our front door. One looks at the vestiges of America’s global empire; the other looks at the minutiae of a (sort of) ordinary street. At the moment, though, the most immediate things are these words you are reading here, now, in the newsletter itself, which brings notions from the wide world, to your eyes and mind. For those of you reading this in its printed form, there is the additional tactile experience you are having with the physical material of this informational medium—paper—whose production throughout the land is also explored in this newsletter, in another dialogue about the local and remote. Whether you are reading an electronic or paper copy, it’s in your hands now, and we are on the same page. Glad to share this immediate space with you, and wish you the best of all possible futures, when whatever is on the horizon finally arrives.