Threads run figuratively and literally throughout the work of Yazd-born, Los Angeles-based artist Roksana Pirouzmand. She presents us with terracotta casts of her mother’s hands and grandmother’s feet, stones hand sewn into velvet dresses, hours-long Skype calls back home upon a giant indoor swing—all of which reveal a sense of personal family history obscured at a distance and connected through material means. It is this corporeal and psychological separation from home that underscores her performance, sculptures, and installations and lays bare an intimate experience of the Iranian diaspora.

Susan Silton first moved to downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s and has been immersed in the city’s multiple worlds ever since. Her work in many ways focuses on the acts of gathering and witnessing. In September 2018, Susanna Newbury sat down with the artist to discuss decades of development and gentrification in Los Angeles and pinpoint how Silton’s work frames and criticizes an active art of lyricism and its political grounding in a contracting public realm.

The House of Dust by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles was an extensive project of many parts: a hybrid of computer-generated poetry, sculpture, happening, and pedagogical experiment. On the fiftieth anniversary of House of Dust, writer Janet Sarbanes and artist Ken Ehrlich of the CalArts School of Critical Studies led the creation of a new house—the House of Glass—designed and built on campus by CalArts students.