FAR Bazaar

FAR Bazaar 2017
Alternative Art Fair & Art Collective Festival

January 28-29, 2017 | 10AM-10PM | Cerritos College

Cerritos College, in partnership with the Foundation for Art Resources (FAR), presents FAR Baazar 2017, an alternative art fair and art collective festival.

This coming year, 2017, marks the fortieth anniversary of FAR, one of the oldest non-profit arts advocacy groups in Southern California. Throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century, FAR helped to produce some of the most significant alternative art events in Los Angeles. From the monthly Art Talk Art lecture series of the 1980s to the massive FAR Bazaars of the 1990s, FAR was blazing trails for today’s LA art community.

In February of 2017, after over 55+ years of use, Cerritos College will be retiring and demolishing its existing Fine Arts complex. This crumbling mid-century modernist gem, now sits side-by-side with its replacement, a massive new Fine Arts building. Before the old building is torn down, however, Cerritos College, with the help of FAR, will transform every abandoned classroom, faculty office, and administrative space into temporary exhibition spaces, each guest-curated by local art collectives and alternative art spaces, as well as the graduate programs from regional universities and art schools. Because the building is slated for destruction immediately after the end of the event, there is ample opportunity for these various groups to explore alternative methods of installation and even transform the individual spaces into walk-in tableaus that directly engage with the pedagogical nature of the environment.

January, it should be noted, is the month for the region’s major commercial art (af)fairs, in particular the Los Angeles Art Show and Art Los Angeles Contemporary. The FAR Bazaar, as a non-commercial alternative art fair, highlights the significant contribution that art collectives, artist-run spaces, and local art schools have on the regional art scene overall. Much like the art fairs provide access to disparate commercial galleries from across the globe, the FAR Bazaar allows the various art communities that are physically spread far and wide across the megalopolis of Southern California to come together temporarily in one place for easy access and for productive exchange.

At the same time, in the new Fine Arts building, there are a series of scholarly panel discussions covering issues such as the history of artist collectives and artist-run spaces in Southern California and the growing plight of aging mid-century modernist architecture. In the newly-relocated Cerritos College Art Gallery, there are two exhibitions debuting the same weekend as the FAR Bazaar, one featuring the work of this year’s Cerritos College Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence (Stephanie Deumer), and the other highlighting work by former FAR board members, amongst them current professors and administrators from Otis, Occidental, UC Berkeley, Scripps, and Art Center.

The event also includes food trucks, ongoing musical performances, video screenings, and an art book/print fair.

For more information, please contact James MacDevitt at (562)860-2451, Ext. 2616