Litia Perta
LITIA PERTA is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles and teaching at the University of California, Irvine. She is interested in transformation, and in collaborating with others to develop innovative ways (pedagogical, linguistic, theoretical, economic, spiritual, poetic) to support the transformations we came here to live through.
I arrive in Los Angeles by way of canyons and sunsets firing up the sky each night as we drive west, and finally enter the city one morning at the very beginning of the fall.
On a clear night in early November, hundreds of people filed into the Great Hall at Cooper Union. By 7:00, the auditorium’s 900 seats were full and hundreds of people crammed into standing room at the back.
Something brave is happening in Chelsea. Directing Light onto Fist of Father began on an evening in mid-September when a fiery sunset ushered in the first chill of fall’s promise. This solo exhibition by the artist known as MPA will manifest three different stages during its run through mid-November at Leo Koenig Inc.
On the morning Max died, sun flooded the apartment I grew up in. The front door had been unlocked for days to ease the ins and outs of hospice nurses, and of my uncle, who had come to be with us. I let myself in and found my father in the room that had once been mine.
On a street near the Hudson River in the heart of the commercial art world, a small painting hangs at eye level in the side room of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. The piece is a 17 × 22 inch rectangle that bears within it another rectangular frame, this one slanted and rimmed in black—what looks to be the smudged surface of a vehicle window.
A nearly vertical path cleaves to the side of a mountain in India, connecting the town of Dharamsala with the village of McLeod Ganj.
My first real memory of Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs is from a wedding we all attended in the ranchlands of Petaluma. Guests gathered for lemonade in the shadow of the ranch house before hiking deeper into the hills for the ceremony.
I look in the dictionary for the etymology of the word ‘stare,’ and am directed to “See stareblind” (‘stare’ having apparently originated there).
