News from Somewhere
To paraphrase Bill Hader’s SNL character Stefon, Los Angeles’s hottest club is Marta. Appropriately east of Western Avenue (the dividing line, for some, between the staid west and the artistic east of the city); run by Benjamin Crittenden and Heidi Korsavong; and with every opening as full of kids and their Rachel Comey–wearing parents as they are of the local design cognoscenti (spotted this time were lighting designer Brendan Ravenhill, SCI-Arc’s Anna Neimark, and more), Marta has become the place to see good art and even better people. The latest reason for everyone to dust off their dresses and put their kids in party pinafores was an astonishing new exhibition, A Garden Of…
Anchored by a giant metal structure/sculpture/thing some people wanted to climb (a greenhouse, according to the source text), the show is fun and generous and smart and perceptive. “Beautiful work,” said Ravenhill, keeping an eye on his eight-year-old, when cornered by a writer and her baby. Also cornered was the architect Michael Meredith, cofounder, with Hilary Sample, of MOS, the Harlem-based architecture firm behind the exhibition. “The garden [from the title] is the greenhouse at the center of the exhibition space,” he explained. Why a greenhouse? “Because it was a structure that allowed us to include other people.”
These included rug maker Urban Fabric, boutique apparel company Slow and Steady Wins the Race, and the artist Tony Cokes, who were enlisted as collaborators by MOS on tactile floor coverings, work wear, and a bench-like object with a seat made from curving metal letters, respectively. The work attributed solely to MOS—powder-coated aluminum baskets that at least one toddler tried to climb into, an anthropomorphic stepladder that looks like it’s standing on ballerina toes—is just as fun.
A Garden Of… is informed by Meredith’s obsession with William Morris, and the introductory text incorporates a quote from the Arts & Crafts designer and activist’s 1890 utopian novel News from Nowhere: “The fields were everywhere treated as a garden made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all…” Back in 2025, pleasure can seem hard to come by. “He was so radical,” Meredith said of Morris. “You think times are really bad now, but the 1850s to 1900s were really pretty bad.” Times are bad, times were bad, but at Marta, through October 18, this time will be good.