Bring, Read, Take, Build

Smart Gals’ Reading Preserve
Lit Swap & Sewing Circle at Future Studio

Saturday, September 5, 2009
1:00 – 5:00 pm
Admission: One Book to Barter

Future Studio Gallery
5558 N. Figueroa Street
Highland Park, CA 90042
(Walking distance from the Metro Gold Line Highland Park Station)

We labor to support ourselves. We labor to earn leisure. We labor for things we believe in, striving toward an esteemed goal. As Labor Day approaches, Smart Gals and Future Studio invite you to come work with us. Side by side, we’ll stitch together Smart Gals’ ever-expanding Reading Preserve, a temporary sanctuary dedicated to the simple pleasure of the printed page, designed by visual artist Edith Abeyta. Constructed from found fabric and repurposed books, the Reading Preserve is a handcrafted, flexible installation featuring quotes from our audience’s favorite books and random bits of text. The Reading Preserve will return to its annual home at the West Hollywood Book Fair in October, but rather than present it to you, we invite you to participate in its creation. Our process is manifold. Guests can help us sew, weave a paper ground cover, type literary passages onto fabric or simply read aloud from a cherished book. Borrowing a page from 19th century Cuba, reading aloud to workers in the tradition of “el lector” reminds us that stimulating the mind while the body labors can be subversive and sublime. The cost of admission is low. Simply bring a book you’re ready to part with and barter it for another. Leftover volumes will be folded into Future Studio’s Abandoned Phone Booth Lending Library. Come October, harvest the fruits of our labor when we can rest and read silently together in the sanctuary of The Reading Preserve.

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Edith Abeyta (edithabeyta.net) is an installation artist residing in Los Angeles. Frequently engaging in projects that involve audience participation and multi-artist collaboration to address social issues, historical concepts, and the relationship between art audiences and art making. In 2007 she was awarded a fellowship from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research as part of their CO-OPs program including a residency at the University of Utrecht. Summer, 2008 she traveled to Thailand to mount an installation for the group exhibition Navigational Accessories that she curated at the Eastern Center of Art and Culture, Burapha Art Museum and University. She is currently curating an exhibition of participatory art practices in Los Angeles at the Municipal Art Gallery with Michael Lewis Miller.

By day, Future Studio (chickenboy.com) is a graphic design company, specializing in book design. By night (once a month, on the second Saturday), it's Future Studio Gallery, showing an ever-changing variety of visual art (in conjunction with Northeast Los Angeles's Gallery Night). And, it also serves as host to Chicken Boy, the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles, who roosts up on the roof.

Smart Gals is a nonprofit, public benefit organization dedicated to developing the greater arts community in Los Angeles, by constructing original events in unlikely places and creating transformative social gatherings through The Reading Preserve™, our site-specific performance series Are You Interested?™ and our one-of-a-kind semi-literary salon, The Speakeasy™. Now in its ninth year, Smart Gals has been featured in the LA Weekly, Los Angeles City Beat, LA Alternative Press, The Los Angeles Times, Bitch, Los Angeles magazine and on KPFK radio. Smart Gals’ visionary approach to collaborative work has introduced audiences and artists to a wide array of alternative venues, from a local church basement, to a machine shop in El Segundo, to Cleveland High in Reseda, to the land and sites along the Metro Gold Line.