December 8, 2018 - January 13, 2019

Automata Windows: Model Cities December 2018

MODEL CITIES / CITIZEN CONTROL
A Collaborative Installation and Happening

Kimberly Varella and Robby Herbst


On View: December 8, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Opening Reception and Happening: December 8th at 7 p.m.

Model Cities / Citizen Control is a collaborative window installation at Automata Arts in Los Angeles by Kimberly Varella and Robby Herbst. Using found text and images the installation represents a history of the federal government's Great Societies, anti-poverty program known as Model Cities. This American program, now largely forgotten, paid federal dollars for experimental community- initiated projects, with the goal of alleviating economic, social, and spacial issues in 150 disenfranchised urban areas.

The installation reflects on the idea of “citizen control” of anti-poverty programs, a goal of Model Cities in its infancy. Model Cities / Citizen Control is made up of graphics, texts, images and letterheads collected from community, regional, and national newspapers, and historical archives, demonstrating some of the many approaches communities took in exercising their "control".

This project is the first named collaboration between Varella and Herbst who’ve worked together for many years on unattributed collective art projects of the Llano Del Rio Collective and the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.

Citizen Participation—A Model Cities Happening
December 8, 2018 at 7 PM
This is a free event. Click HERE for reservations (suggested but not required)

The idea of “participation” was as important to the Model Cities program as it was to the art of the happening developed during the same era.

The Model Cities Happening will begin loosely around 7:30 and will play with notions of history, participation, and the legacy of liberal Model Cities program for our reactionary era.

Excerpts from: A Special Message to the Congress on the Nation’s Cities From Lyndon B. Johnson (March 2, 1965)

"Let us be clear about the core of this problem. The problem is people and the quality of the lives they lead. We want to build not just housing units, but neighborhoods; not just to construct schools, but to educate children; not just to raise incomes but to create beauty and end the poisoning of our environment "

" This is an effort which must command the most talented and trained of our people, and call upon administrators and officials to act with generosity of vision and spaciousness of imagination."

About The Artists
Robby Herbst is an inter-disciplinary artist whose works engages contemporary and historic experiments in socio-political aesthetics. Works take the form of drawing, publication, organizing, group-work, and object making. Projects include; New New Games, The Llano Del Rio Collective, New Pyramids For the Capitalist System, and The Journal Of Aesthetics & Protest. He’s had exhibitions and projects at Commonwealth & Council Gallery (Los Angeles), LACE (LA), The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Southern Exposure (SF), Dumbo Arts Center (NY), and participated in group exhibitions at MOCA (LA), The Hammer Museum (LA), PS1 (NY), the Ross Art Museum (OH) and NGBK (Germany). He’s been awarded grants and residencies from the Andy Warhol Foundation, The Headlands Center For the Arts, The Graue Award, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, The Durfee Foundation, and the Danish Arts Council.

Kimberly Varella is an artist and designer whose multi-platform practices surround books and other type of multiples. She works indiscriminately with artists, museums, and other cultural institutions. Books of note include Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA (ONE Archives and USC Libraries), Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Tang Teaching Museum); Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial (Cooper Hewitt); and Made In L.A. 2014 (Hammer). She is also the co-founder of Reading Ours, a micro-gallery celebrating the book and other types of multiples in a small garage in Los Angeles. She lives and works and Los Angeles.