Fowler in the City: Art, Land, and Urban Memory in Downtown LA
Sunday, November 16 | 12:30 PM - 3:00 PM PT | IN PERSON; OFF-SITE IN DTLA
Image courtesy of artists
12:30–1:30pm: Artist studio visit with Noara Quintana
2:00–3:00pm: Walking tour with Paige Emery in DTLA
Join the Fowler Museum for a two-part, off-site program that responds to the exhibition Construction, Occupation and explores themes of displacement, memory, and resistance in Los Angeles’s urban landscape. This layered, artist-led experience will begin with a visit to the studio of Noara Quintana, who will share how her work engages architecture, contested space, and histories of erasure. The program will continue with a guided walking tour of Downtown LA led by Paige Emery, whose practice invites participants to experience the city as a site of both construction and resistance. Through the lens of materiality, memory, and the layered lives that shape LA’s streets and spaces, each artist will offer a distinct yet interconnected perspective, forming a shared reflection on place, presence, and power.
Paige Emery is an ecological artist and herbalist whose work explores the intersections of healing, environmental justice, and memory. Rooted in practices of art, ancestral medicine, and eco-philosophy, her work invites deeper engagement with place—blending plant rituals, sound, and embodied walks to connect people with the land and its layered histories. Emery has presented work at institutions including: Biosphere 2 (Arizona), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Biennale Gherdëina (Italy), and Earth Medicine Apothecary. Her practice includes guided ecology walks, guerrilla gardening as resistance, and multispecies rituals that explore how landscapes hold memory and meaning across time.
Noara Quintana is known for her experimental work with materials such as concrete, rubber, and aluminum. She centers her practice on refashioning everyday objects and contexts, creating exuberant installations that lay claim to alternative imagined worlds and propose new gestures and relations. In her work Margem do Céu (On the Verge of Heaven), featured in the exhibition Construction, Occupation, Quintana explores themes of displacement, shelter, and migration through a suspended sculpture that evokes the domestic spaces of the July 9 Community Center. Interweaving ideas of occupation, belonging, and everyday aspirations with her signature motif of Brazilian flora, Quintana reflects on the materiality of the city and the dreams of those who inhabit it. Her work echoes Brazil’s colonial past while critically engaging with the forms and legacies of its built present.
This program is in partnership with UCLA World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Published: Thursday, October 30, 2025