The View From LA: the grassroots design events fuelling the city’s creative heart

Despite dwelling in a sprawling commuter city, Los Angeles creatives are coalescing at grassroots design events, often hidden in unassuming industrial nooks. Produced by independent design studios, galleries, and publishers who are committed to fueling the city’s creative heart, they mark an especially ripe time to get lost in design.

In the 1972 BBC Documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, the celebrated design critic suggests, “Devising a guide is a good way to explain a city, and Los Angeles needs some explaining. It’s normally regarded as an unspeakable sprawling mess.”

Here’s a guide to recent and recurring happenings offering a curated and personal design experience unique to Los Angeles. Found off the beaten track, they are boisterously thriving in Northeast Los Angeles neighborhoods.

LitLit at The Pit — Atwater

LitLit (the Little Literary Fair) was recently hosted by The Pit in collaboration with Los Angeles Review of Books. Located in Atwater, the art gallery paused its exhibition schedule for one day, opening its 13,000-square-foot space to forty small presses and independent publishers from all over Los Angeles and the West Coast.

Exhibitors like Heavy Manners, Color Bloc Creativ, Slant’d, As Is Press, and Gross Magazine reflect LA’s diverse community of independent literary and design outfits. Short and sweet, LitLit also included blitz programming throughout the day, where visitors could drop in on four panels with West Coast authors, publishers, and other literary devotees.

Acid-Free Lite at Marta — Los Feliz

Tucked behind a 7-11 at a manic intersection in Los Feliz, Marta is an art space with both curatorial and publishing practices. Naturally, they hosted Acid-Free Lite, a three-day book bender produced by a programming committee of local publishers, librarians, artists, and designers. This year was undeniably California-focused, a lighter and local variation of the annual international fair, Acid-Free Los Angeles Art Book Market and Bazaar.

Over 50 West Coast independent publishers including A History of Frogs, Deadbeat Club, New Documents, and Curious Publishing, posted up throughout Marta’s gallery, courtyard, and neighbouring native plant peddler, Plant Material (@plant_material). A bucolic setting for perusing books, thanks to the baked-in landscaping and LA’s blessed weather.

Intro / LA 2024 at Small Office — Atwater

Overstimulated by rows of booths with tidy stacks of cool books? Looking to sink into inspiration? Intro / LA is a pure design experience creatives can get lost in.

Now in its 11th edition, design and creative consultant Paul Valentine has sharpened the exhibit to a fine point. He’s invited a curated group of 12 LA-based, globally-born designers into his multi-disciplinary space, Small Office. It’s a quiet, industrial space in Atwater programmed to function as a working design studio, a small design shop, and on an occasion like this, an exhibit of fantasy interior scenes that invite interaction with design objects and furniture.

In developing the concept, Valentine harnessed colour, tension, and perforation to design the spaces in between each exhibitor, using transparency to build subliminal relationships between the pieces. He notes: “I started to think about what I was influenced by when I started getting into design. One of those things was the tension and use of technically advanced fabrics in high-tech architecture of the 80s and 90s.” He cites Paris’ Centre Pompidou and London’s Lloyd’s building as sources of inspiration. Reflecting, “The workings of those buildings are very exposed and mechanical. So tension back then was seen as hi-tech.”

Coincidentally, Brit-born Valentine went from being an indie kid to a drum and bass kid in the early 90s, when analogue music shifted to electronic technology, and a famous club in Manchester, the Hacienda, became a storied party destination. He observes: “Out of necessity, Ben Kelly who designed the interior used high visibility motifs on the steps and on the pillars because people were on ecstasy and drinking. It looked good but it was also to stop people from injuring themselves.”

Intro /LA celebrates the mixture of the inner experience and the high-tech physical interior of club culture in the 80s and 90s, where you got lost in the experience. The space reflects this and has been thoughtfully designed not only in consideration of the spaces in between each vignette, but in the subliminal relationships that unfold as you move through the space.

The roster of exhibitors represents a cultural and gender mix of designers (in favour of women), each at various points in their careers. They represent a new guard of creatives, with multi-disciplinary practices.

Designer Jialun Xiong uses blocklike forms and geometric principles to create sleek, refined pieces that transform humble materials into poetic expressions.

Spatial designer Adi Goodrich’s Shape Tower is a monolithic feat, built in cherry with black lacquer details and featuring customised face shapes on the cabinetry.

Group Sports, composed of duo Sarah Jamal Naim and Annie Render, has brought its interactive material practices to the show, developing this year’s spatial dividers, “where neon dreams collide”. The duo are also exhibiting their saltgrass weighted body cushions, which are part of their swamp collection. Group Sports partnered with local manufacturers to collect the deadstick and scraps from production processes.

According to the studio’s Instagram, these interactive weighted body pillows are “inspired by the historic ecology of the LA basin”. Composed of a set of latex-core “blades” you can intertwine with, “it offers a grounding and playful presence for moments of sensory saturation”.

Designer Sam Klemick’s delightful pieces include the Patchwork Big Bell Chair and a pack of floor pillows, where ultra-modern boucle fabric is stitched together with delicate silks that feel vintage. The clash of her modern forms with salvaged Douglas fir and leftover fabric outlines considerations of fusing beauty and environment.

Also sharing in the conversation are Christopher Norman, Objects for Objects, Ombia Studio (Cristina Moreno), Rachel Shillander, Taidgh O'Neill, Waka Waka, and Willet (Ben Willet).

Intro / LA is a rare chance to encounter the work of designers practicing in LA, each with their own typography of design language, yet in deep conversation, based on the arrangement of the exhibition. There is harmony and chaos creating a coherence in rhythm, made of crests and troughs. The pieces together transmit a signal: Does tech make you feel better or worse?

As it turns out for Valentine, “It made me realise I enjoyed that time in the 90s where you had to go somewhere to experience it and the anticipation of not seeing it on Instagram first.” Somehow, he’s found a way to recreate some of that anticipation and suspense.

LA is a spatial anomaly. In Reyner Banham’s seminal text Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, he noted a tendency for the city to develop as enclaves or villages organised around shared open space. These independent design events in small niches of the city are a continuation of this, encouraging creative spirit in a famously perplexing city. Blink, and miss it.

Dive deeper into some of the topics and pieces covered in Meg’s column, including some designers to follow and further reading/watching re: Reyner Banham.

• Follow: @acidfreelosangeles @smalloffice.info

• Visit: Intro / LA on view through November 22
  • Exhibitors: @adigoodrich @christophernormanprojects @groupsports @jialunxiong @objectsforobjects @ombiastudio @la.lland @samklemick @taidghoneilldesign @wakawakainc @willett

• Read: Op-Ed: Photo essay: L.A.’s architecture of insecurity + Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

• Visit: @thepitla @marta.losangeles

• Watch: Reynar Banham Loves Los Angeles, 1972

• Plant native plants: Plant Material