Saturday, Sept. 14–Saturday, Oct. 12
Opening reception: Saturday, Sept. 14, 6-9 pm
Zoe Moon, Holy Trinity: Grandma, Grandpa and Me, photo print, 2024
The CalArts Reef Residency and MM/DD/YYYY present BIG TENT, a group exhibition featuring works by residents Anaís Azul, Alex Barlas, Nick Ginsburg, Zoe Moon, Wes Weisbaum, Shu L. Xu, Yangbin Zhao and collaborating artists Edgar Arceneaux, Justine Faith, Samuel Garnett, Clay Hollander, Cameron Masters, Abigail Stanton, and Kaiwen Ren.
This is the inaugural exhibition of MM/DD/YYYY, the CalArts Reef Residency’s resident-run gallery. To mark the occasion, an artists' reception takes place on Saturday, Sept. 14 from 6 to 9 pm.
74 years ago in a Downtown LA parking lot, more than 7,000 visitors crowded into two conjoined circus tents for the West Coast’s largest-ever Southern Baptist congregation. Dubbed the Canvas Cathedral and Big Tent, services ran for eight consecutive weeks, its main entrance framed by a sign reading Greater Los Angeles Revival.
The CalArts Reef Residency, now in its ninth year, sits at the evangelical meeting’s former address on Washington and Hill. The residency and Big Tent share themes—fellowship, meditation, outreach, inward and/or outward revival—that could lend some tidy subtext to the exhibition. But this collection of works was made without pre-agreed aesthetics or conceptual uniformity in mind. Instead, BIG TENT is predicated on the works’ unforced connections, outcomes of residents’ and collaborators’ sharing of the residency’s time and space.
BIG TENT runs through Saturday, Oct. 12, with viewings by appointment only.