feMMMes
An Art Happening
June 22, 2024, 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm
Los Angeles State Historic Park
FREE
As Earth tilts toward the sun and the longest day of the year draws to a close this summer solstice, join LA Freewaves and our diverse community of artists and performers under the full Strawberry Moon as we come together to celebrate and unleash feMMMe power in all its forms. FeMMMes is a free event and open to all. FeMMMes power is all around us and within every one of us. It is loving, challenging, spicy, gooey, divine, transformational, physical, mesmerizing, queer as fuck, rhythmic, and regenerative. It is nurturing and healing, even as it demands justice and fights for liberation.
On this night, twelve artists working with music, light, scent, motion, sculpture, botanicals, drumming, roller skates, and more will channel feMMMe energy as they transform Los Angeles State Historic Park (LASHP) into a multi-sensory and multicultural environment. Visitors will embark on a very personal journey within this powerful communal experience, curated by LA Freewaves director Anne Bray and designed to expand and deepen our connection to feMMMe power and possibilities.
The magic begins as Alexandra Grant’s banners invoking a mutual and connected love guide celebrants to the park entrance, where the synchronized velocity of the Derby Dolls will lead us toward the feMMMe circle. Along the way, Parisa Parnian’s participatory spice stall will provide aromatic self-portraits for an intimate feMMMe companion. Bodies will collide, caress, and intersect as Young Joon Kwak’s sculptural performances create instant artifacts of trans connection, and Amitis Motevallli’s biographical rose installation names hidden wounds that must be made visible before they can be healed. Above us, Elana Mann’s projections affirm the power of poetic protest and acts of resistance as they beam across Zanja Madre, or Mother Ditch, a fragment of the 16th-century aqueduct that served El Pueblo de Los Angeles.
The joyfully contagious rhythms of drum and dance collective S.H.I.N.E. Muwasi will lead a procession to the center of the park, where host and proud “sissy butch” Kami Charmeel Dion (Alison De La Cruz) will welcome everyone and call our circle. We then enter Mandy’s World, where multimedia artist Mandy Harris Willliams interrogates desirability, privilege, and influence. East LA collective In Lack Ech of Mujeres de Maiz will channel indigenous herstory in a performance combining poetry, dance, and song, and Carole Kim’s coven of larger-than-life witches will then take the stage and invoke the eternal as they endlessly rise, fall, and regenerate. Finally, the mesmerizing movements of Grupo Folklorico Huaxyacac will end the evening and lead us out of the park.
Our gathering takes place on unceded Tongva land. We acknowledge and thank the elders who have gone before us and their descendents who are among us. This is their rightful home.
