Lengthy Seashore’s Compound Charts a New Path Ahead

Compound, an artwork and wellness nonprofit in Lengthy Seashore, California, has named January Parkos Arnall as its govt director. She begins within the put up on September 23.

Compound was based in 2020 by Megan Tagliaferri, a longtime resident of Lengthy Seashore, however it closed in 2022 amid a wave of Covid. When it closed, the house’s future was unsure, however the group quietly reopened earlier this 12 months and is at the moment present process a management transition. Tagliaferri, who served as interim govt director, will transition to board chair.

“Megan felt just like the work she wished to do for Lengthy Seashore, with the some 60 companions she continued to be in dialogue with, wasn’t executed,” Parkos Arnall advised ARTnews in a current Zoom interview. “The way in which she thinks about Lengthy Seashore and who’s in Lengthy Seashore, and the way she will be able to create choices with them and for them to come back collectively felt like kismet in some ways.”

Positioned on a 13,000-square-foot campus within the metropolis’s Zaferia District, Compound contains two Artwork Deco warehouses, an outside courtyard and sculpture backyard, and a restaurant, Union. The nonprofit’s first massive outing since its relaunch will likely be a bunch exhibition, “When the Veil Thins,” which opens September 19; curated by Tofer Chin and Mari Orkenyi, it can function Amir H. Fallah, Analia Saban, Aryana Minai, and Roksana Pirouzmand, amongst others.

Parkos Arnall mentioned she took the job as a result of she was drawn to the group’s mission, and that its “mixture of artwork and group and wellness has been actually central to my observe for my complete time in museums. No matter what division inside a museum that I sit, that’s core to who I’m.”

She was most not too long ago director of public applications and artistic observe on the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork in Los Angeles. Previous to working on the Lucas, she spent 5 years on the Museum of Modern Artwork, Chicago, the place she a curator and head of the Efficiency and Public Apply division. She additionally held a curatorial appointment on the Hammer Museum early in her profession.

Parkos Arnall’s curiosity in wellness dates again greater than a decade when she was working on the Hammer, the place Mitra Manesh, a mindfulness educator at UCLA, had staged a collection conscious meditation viewing applications. “Mitra would information a bunch of people via one single piece of artwork and discuss it via many various angles, permit them to spend time with it,” she mentioned. “It was a extremely highly effective means of understanding how this observe of wellness and mindfulness can inflect the ability of the paintings to create connections between and amongst individuals.”

For Compound, Parkos Arnall mentioned one other intention is to bridge not simply artwork and wellness within the programming however to totally combine the meals facet of it, working intently with Union’s chef-in-residence Eugene Santiago. Her curatorial work has additionally concerned working with artists who’ve used meals of their initiatives, like Pedro Reyes on the Hammer or an iteration of Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, when it was staged on the MCA Chicago throughout his 2017 survey there.

In collaborating with Santiago, she mentioned she desires to prepare supper membership–like occasions that can herald individuals who reside and work in Lengthy Seashore as a strategy to type “intentional group constructing across the beautiful meals that Chef Eugene is already serving up, however making it extra accessible.”

Bringing individuals collectively, particularly the local people in Lengthy Seashore, is core to what Parkos Arnall hopes to perform at Compound. “It’s rooted in Lengthy Seashore, culturally and locally, and it additionally speaks to a bigger artwork group in a broader sense,” she mentioned. She desires the group to behave as “one other microphone to amplify what’s already taking place on this wealthy and vibrant group. That’s going to be core to constructing this: attending to know what native stakeholders want, what they need, and the way we may also help serve.

She added, “An area like this works greatest when it’s not plopped down. We’re excited to listen to from individuals who come into this house. I hope tht this may function an invite to come back and construct it with us.”