OXY ARTS

Great little gallary, I visited for a rotating exhibit that had fun learning games for kids, interactive and media based.

Awesome experience at OxyArt!! Nice gallery.

Beautiful space. Not only art installations, but often music events are scheduled here as well.

An excellent venue that supports student creativity and expression!

Great welcoming community space.

Great classes and community events, art displays✨💕

Very good I even drew this when I was there

Great art exhibition spot

Oxy Arts is an arts and culture space run by Occidental College. A public center funded by private money, progressive and community-oriented while wearing the full garb of a gentrification horseman, it occupies what is probably an uneasy position in Highland Park. I'm always a big fan of the arts, and to be perfectly honest, my interactions with Highland Park are limited to the corridors of York and Figueroa that cater to people from outside the neighborhood, but I like Oxy Arts. I've visited twice, both times as a guest of the college. It's a lovely venue, an attractive gallery with a lot of room to set up chairs for a seated event. The current exhibition, on view for a couple more weeks, features work by Occidental's 2022-2023 artist in residence, Kenturah Davis. I got a chance to admire her art when I went for an event called 30 Years On: Pan-Asian and Black Solidarity and Conflict Since the LA Uprising. This was part of Occidental's Community Book Program, which featured my book this past year. I've done a lot of book events, but this was a new one for me. I learned a lot from the other panelists, a group of academics and organizers with tons of insight into the history of L.A. My other visit to Oxy Arts was to run one of a series of writing workshops, which was free and open to the public. I'm not saying my particular instruction was a great gift to the community, but I do think this sort of free programming is a wonderful thing. If you have any interest in arts and culture, Oxy Arts is worth checking out.

Better as a science experiment than an art exhibit, FLOW was a major disappointment. There are barely 2 rooms, and the first one is a major fail. First, you have to make an appointment, which is a joke, since there are no visitors in the first place. Even when you make an appointment, you have to call a number listed on the door outside before they will let you in. They act like they're doing you a favor by admitting you even though they should be happy to have an audience. You are first ushered into a dark room with a screen on the inside displaying what is on the camera mounted on the front of the building inside, which is supposed to explain how the eye interprets images. The space is poorly designed because they forgot to add ambient light so you go from being in sunlight outside to total darkness inside. I tripped over the base of the screen, and almost toppled it in addition to stubbing my right toe and scraping the top of my foot (I was wearing sandals). For the theme of "Optics," the third and final installment of the exhibit, the irony of the poor layout was not lost on me. Whoever designed this show was probably on a heroin bender at the time, and should be forever banned from designing anything else in the future.