Yarn Bombing Los Angeles: Award Yourself
February-June 2015
Yarn Bombing Los Angeles (YBLA) proposed a grassroots approach to the award ceremony. Awards and medals are often bestowed from higher authority for predetermined award categories. Historically, awards are associated with military groups and the preservation of certain social orders and ideologies. Instead of awards in predetermined categories, YBLA asked community participants to craft their own awards for under-recognized personal achievements. Community members could award themselves for making amazing cups of coffee or hours spent caregiving for another family member.
Yarn Bombing Los Angeles transformed a selection of these awards into large-scale installations on the Side Street Projects site to create a path of honor. The personal achievements signified by the awards became monumental through the scale change. At the same time, the grassroots and handcrafted nature of the award point to anti-monumental. The redefinition of the public monument is a common theme that runs throughout YBLA’s temporary, collectively generated public work. Through play with the meanings and aesthetics of the monument, YBLA continues to challenge the ideologies underpinning site-specific public art.
Public Events
Love (Yourself) Workshop
Saturday, February 14, 2015, 11-2 PM
Award Yourself Workshop
Saturday, February 28, 2015, 11-2 PM
Award Yourself Opening Party
Friday, March 13, 2015, 6-10 PM
Award Yourself Closing Event
Saturday, June 13, 2015, 11-2 PM
BIO
Yarn Bombing Los Angeles is a fiber arts community that engages thousands of people online, worldwide, and locally in the Los Angeles area. YBLA currently collaborates with city governments, museums, alternative art spaces, and public spaces to create thought-provoking, community-generated public art installations.
YBLA's work blends and reinterprets different artistic genres of street art, public art, fiber art, social practice, craft, and high art. YBLA's mission is to create a form of community-generated, site-specific public art that is tactile and accessible, while at the same time initiating dialogue about cross-generation connections and craft history.