LITLIT Panel - Archiving Los Angeles: Art, Community, and Infrastructure

Presented in partnership with SCI-Arc, Archiving Los Angeles: Art, Community, and Infrastructure is a discussion of archival work in its many forms. In the city of Los Angeles, which is constantly changing, burning, evolving, and disappearing, our panelists consider the ways in which we can capture the city, whether it’s through traditional or emerging forms of archival work. Moderated by journalist Michelle Peng, we welcome Tom Carroll (Los Angeles Times 404), Hailey Loman (LACA), Darío Herrera (Clockshop), and Pierce Myers (SCI-Arc) to discuss the storytelling behind it all.

Join us June 6 + 7 at LITLIT for this and other panels! Held at SCI-Arc, LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair is a free festival celebrating the West Coast Literary Arts, presented by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Learn more about the presses, publishers, and the whole weekend here!

Archiving Los Angeles: Art, Community, and Infrastucture will take place on Sunday, June 7, at 1 p.m. at the SCI-Arc Library.

Tom Carroll is a content creator for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the Times in 2022, he created, produced, and hosted the web series Tom Explores Los Angeles. He has produced stories for NPR and Gimlet. His documentary Charlie’s Lot won Best Documentary Short at the 2020 Arizona International Film Festival. A fourth-generation Southern Californian, he is a graduate of Occidental College and the University of Southern California.

Hailey Loman is an artist based in Los Angeles. Loman is the co-founder and co-director of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), an artist-book library and arts archive dedicated to contemporary art-making. Loman launched the Oral History Group (OHG), an oral history cooperative that enriches and complicates LACA’s collections. She codeveloped Archive Night School (ANS), an after-work education program that emphasizes learning from each other’s experiences to create new works that privilege the desires and needs of our communities.

Darío Herrera is a multidisciplinary historian and community organizer from Northeast Los Angeles. His upbringing and experiences have inspired his intersecting passions in food justice, educational reform, and archival work. Cognizant of the power of history, his work is grounded in a desire to understand, question, and propose new definitions of heritage in marginalized communities. He holds a BA in history and French from Williams College.

Pierce Myers is a researcher and writer based in Los Angeles. He currently manages the Research Program of the Resilient Futures Task Force at SCI-Arc, which focuses on fire resilience, rebuilding, and insurance. His recent essay “Mesoeconomy of Fire” synthesizes this research, and will be published in the upcoming edition of Real Review. Previously, he worked on geospatial and payment software products and has worked for artists including Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof, and K Allado-McDowell. Past research has included posts at Strelka, the Berggruen Institute, Experimental Design, and USC’s World Building Media Lab.

Michelle Peng is a senior reporter for Charter, a San Francisco Standard company, focused on labor, workplace issues, and the economy. Her writing on climate, housing, and the built environment has also appeared in Time, Los Angeles Public Press, and Dwell Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles with two huge house cats named after her favorite SoCal gas stations.