Twain ConversationalistsFriday, September 17, 2010

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KEN BRECHER is President of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the non-profit organization that supports LA Public Library programs and technologies not funded by the City. An anthropologist by training, Ken’s previous roles included Executive Director of the Sundance Institute, President of the William Penn Foundation, Director of the Boston Children’s Museum and Associate Artistic Director of the Mark Taper Forum.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. He serves as a project director, photographer and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written several books published by the CLUI, including Back to the Bay: An Examination of the Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996).

GEORGE HERMS is one of the founders of the California assemblage school of sculpture, which emerged in the Beat years of the 1950s. Alongside – entwined with – the work of writers including Burroughs and Kerouac and artists such as Kienholz and Rauschenberg, George transformed the twentieth century’s lost, discarded, and ultimately found objects into poetic, meaningful installations, sculptures and wall pieces. George’s solo exhibition Five Years of Madness is currently on show at New York’s Nyhaus gallery.

ADOLFO V. NODAL is a producer, curator, art adminstrator, historic preservationist, and public cultural policy wonk. When Al is not busy working on the very interesting challenges and exciting projects at the Metabolic Studio, he is focusing on his curatorial practice that is currently devoted to the distressed cities of Havana, Tijuana and New Orleans. He is now working on a new book focusing on the restoration of the historic neon signs of Los Angeles.

MATIAS VIEGENER collaborates with David Burns and Austin Young on Fallen Fruit, an investigation of urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community, which recently curated EATLACMA, the exhibition that brought Building 209: Garden Folly to the LACMA. His fiction and criticism are widely published, including in Artforum, Afterimage, High Performance, American Book Review, Fiction International, Semiotext(e) and X-tra. He has shown work or performed at Chicago’s Mess Hall, The Whitney Museum, The Drawing Center in New York, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art.