LA Commons engages communities in the creation of public art that tells their unique stories and serves as the basis for dialogue, interaction, and a shared understanding of Los Angeles.

One Grain of Sand is an eclectic gathering of visual artists, musicians, performers and educators who draw from the rich ancient tradition of puppet and mask art to build communities while creating theatrical rituals and processions that explore the hopes, dreams and challenges of these times.

S.H.I.N.E. MUWASI (in the hands of God), formed & established by Rene Fisher-Mims with an intent & purpose to spread the knowledge of West African Drum culture to women in the community. With a vision of healing, empowering, caring, and inspiring women to play the instruments of our African descent, SHINE wishes to pass on the wisdom to those who desire to gain awareness of this culture through teaching, and performing in different areas.

Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.

Marcos Lutyens´ artistic practice targets the psychic and emotional well-being of his audiences by skillfully leading participants in hypnotic exercises that affect the deepest levels of their psyche. His works take form in installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, short films, writings, and performances.

Venues and communities that Marcos Lutyens worked with on this presented project, called Rose River Memorial, include Building Bridges at Bergamot Station, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, UMSL in St Louis, MO, Harlingen, Texas, OCMA in Orange County, Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, Lakeside Village in Culver City, Earth Day in Ojai, Capitol Building in Topeka, Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, Burbank City Hall, Las Vegas, NV, Biennial of the Americas, LA Convention Center, State Capitol in Nashville, Bakersfield, Crown Center, Kansas City, MO , Tranquillity Park, Houston, Salinas Valley Health, Salinas and Inner-City Arts.  In the time of COVID-19, Lutyens also created a series of 12 Zoom performances to help the healing process of people in various countries around the world and is currently working on integrating Augmented Reality into Covid memorialization.

In his explorations of consciousness, Lutyens has collaborated with celebrated neuroscientists V. Ramachandran and Richard Cytowic, as much as studying under shamans from different cultures. From these investigations and research, he has worked with visitors´ unconscious states in museums, galleries, and biennales around the world.

Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, CA) is a Samoan-Mexican American artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, sculpture, and performance. Her work investigates the “brown body’s (dys)function as capitalist commodity, as a resistance to somatic fixity, an examination of the multiplicities of consciousness, and survival as immigrants and first generation Americans.”

UCLArts & Healing’s mission is to transform lives through creative expression by integrating the innate benefits of the arts with mental health practices for self-discovery, connection, and empowerment.

Diana Lynn Wallace is a Remo-endorsed Drum Circle Facilitator, teaching artist, singer/songwriter and composer based in Los Angeles. She uses a large variety of drums and percussion from around the world for her Rhythm Experiences and Sound Healing.

Selected by the renowned Dance Magazine as 25 dancers to watch worldwide, Micah Moch is a dancer, choreographer, and performance capture artist. With performances in Brazil, China, Russia, Serbia, Canada, and Mexico and over 40 states in the U.S. at the world’s leading concert halls such as Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Hollywood Bowl' and most recently with The Dallas Opera and San Francisco Opera. In addition to his diverse and innovative on stage dance work, Micah frequently performs in and choreographs award-winning feature films, television shows, music videos, and commercials. Some of Micah’s credits include performance capture for Director James Cameron’s feature film Avatar, dancing in Comedy Central’s television series Key & Peele, and choreographing music videos for GROUPLOVE, Mayer Hawthorne and 80's pop sensation Rick Astley's.

Ashley Blakeney (she/her/hers) is an arts healing facilitator and arts administrator. With a specific love for photography, expressive writing and music, Ashley holds a passion for using arts healing approaches to empower folks to utilize art as a tool of storytelling and healing. Ashley began her tenure as Executive Director of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart in July 2021, eager to deepen and operationalize the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s work at the intersection of abolition and healing, with intention and care. In 2015, she received a certification from UCLArts & Healing Certificate program in social emotional arts. While facilitating in classrooms, Ashley used her training to cultivate safe-spaces and build powerful and meaningful relationships with her students. For over a decade, Ashley has committed her personal and professional practice to helping communities feel more engaged, centered and seen. Ashley received her BA at the University of Southern California.

Project 1521 is a California cadre of poets, writers and artists who came together in response to the 500 years since the arrival of Hernan Cortéz to the Americas and to reflect on the artist Sandy Rodriguez’s contemporary Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón. In October, 2021, independent HINCHAS Press (www.hinchaspress.com) published Tlacuilix: Tongues In Quarantine (ISBN #978-1-954640-90-0), a collection of contemporary poetry. Like their counterparts during the 1560’s pandemic in Mexico after the arrival of Hernan Cortéz, the poets of Project 1521 wrote through a catastrophic pandemic and lock-down.

Guided by the tlaquilos who wrote the Florentine Codex, the poets touch the themes of cultural subjugation, hybridity, and intertextuality. The writers are Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Julia Bogany, Darren J. de Leon, Sara Harris Ben-Ari, Arminé Iknadossian, Diana Magaloni, Linda Ravenswood de Montano. Project 1521 writers created new text in response to original artworks by Sandy Rodriguez.

Project 1521 contends with the living history of the Spanish decimation of the Aztec people and actively seeks ways to mitigate the effects on the children of the Americas, highlighting the skills, concepts, and knowledge of past scribes as a way to understand our current textual landscape. In 1576, the indigenous scribes and artists finishing the Florentine Codex sequestered to survive a raging plague.

Tlacuilix: Tongues In Quarantine is the first book by Project 1521, a California cadre of poets, writers, scholars, and artists. The book honors people who have endured family separations, colonialism, and institutional violence through cultural affirmation and various forms of resistance.

Sara Harris (Ben-Ari) is a Los Angeles-based assemblage + audio artist + activist + performance poet + certified Master Gardener with over two decades pubic radio-reporting on immigration + urban landscapes + environmental justice. Co-founder of RadioSonideros sound collective and of local non-profit 1866 (www.solanocanyon.org). Host of Hear in the City; Radio Realities from the Urban Landscape (www.soundcloud.com/hearinthecity). Co-director The Fragmentations Only Mean (documentary, 2021 with Jesse Lerner, www.thefragmentationsonlymean.com)

Bee Harris (They/Them) is a queer nonbinary artist and community herbalist who currently lives in Topanga Canyon CA on unceded Tongva land. Bee runs Rainbow Waters apothecary and can often be found serving tea at The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Their herbal work focuses on collective care and encourages people to form reciprocal relationships with the plants around them.
Bee's art practice flows between installation, performance, ritual, sound, drawing and sculpture.

Current interests include diatoms, water magic, interspecies communication, and co-creating electronic music.

Bee enjoys swimming and spending afternoons at home in the medicinal garden with their partner, dogs and the many varied creatures of the canyon.