Pixels of a House That Is No Longer

2024
24” x 36” 
Beaded Tapestry (ceramic beads and cotton rope woven on a large tapestry loom)
Installed at the Grove House at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA

The grove house was a residence in Claremont that was set for demolition until Pitzer College purchased the property for $1 and moved it onto campus in 1976. This purchase and moving is a key part of Pitzer’s mythology. aA the institution has grown to become a prestigious “social justice college,” the Claremont Colleges’ expansion involved the displacement of Árbol Verde, a Latino neighborhood south of sixth street. As the institutions continually amass wealth, they churn out well-intentioned, often wealthy students from outside of Los Angeles who move to the northeastern neighborhoods of the city after graduation. 
I am interested in how abstraction, pixelation, weaving, and beadwork traditions can account for houses that are no longer. After extensive archival research about displacement and the Claremont Colleges, this tapestry is based on a 10x11 pixelation of one of the Árbol Verde homes residents were displaced from — a home that did not get to be moved on campus. The weaving is loose like transient student community, the beads are escombros (rubble and blueprints), and the pixels are remnants. The image is made and unmade. The weaving is architectural in scale, because abstraction is the only kind of infrastructure that feels right. 

There beads serve as a kind of ceramic witness to gentrification. Inscribed on the beads are different motifs: tread marks, indexing the moving of houses; inscriptions of archival records documenting student support for the displacement of Árbol Verde residents to build student housing; and messages about displacement in northeastern Los Angeles. Magnesium dioxide is experimented with as a kind of stain and mechanism to create volatility, reflecting a certain kind of unpredictability and precarity that many are subjected to as a result of gentrifying projects. These elements allow the tapestry to be viewed at multiple levels, both for the image of the house but also as a conjunct of beads charged with inscribed meanings.

A house can never be rebuilt exactly as it was, but there are liberatory and generative happenings that can emerge from rubble. These happenings can be woven together into something.