The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery presents two connected exhibitions:
Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art AND Shangri La: Imagined Cities.
The highly topical and groundbreaking Los Angeles / Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI). The DCA-commissioned contemporary companion exhibition, Shangri La: Imagined Cities, provides a critical juxtaposition to Doris Duke’s Shangri La (which rounds up its national tour in LA and spurred the idea for the Initiative) through the presentation of contemporary works that produce a multiplicity of worlds, interpretations, and investigations without ignoring the implications of organizing around particular geographic or religious lines.
Designed to build a greater understanding of the role of Islamic arts and breakdown negative stereotypes surrounding Islamic culture, the first-of-its-kind, pioneering LA/ Islam Arts Initiativemarks the first time a city has brought together 30 major cultural institutions from The Getty to CalArts to ignite a dialogue to ensure the complex voices of the communities are heard, seen, and experienced.
Underscoring Los Angeles’s role as one of the epicenters of visual constructions regarding Islam and the Middle East, through architecture, film and its large Middle Eastern and Islamic populations, LA/IAI infiltrates our city from October-December, presenting a series of events throughout the fall, including video installations, scholarly symposia, films, concerts, performances, and other activities.
Please visit www.laislamarts.org for more information.
