LOVE: A conversation between Alexandra Grant and Alma Ruiz

LOVE by Alexandra Grant is an event at MOCA Grand Avenue to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Artist Alexandra Grant will be in conversation with curator Alma Ruiz at the Ahmanson Auditorium, discussing her new book LOVE, recently published by Cameron Books. The conversation will be followed by a book signing and sale of the books in the Broad Lobby. This event is free to attend with RSVP.

What is LOVE? In LOVE: A Visual History of the grantLOVE Project, artist Alexandra Grant’s exploration of that question is documented through a retrospective of her journey engaging in civic art. In 2008, Grant began making editions of her art based on the concept of love and her trademarked LOVE symbol to raise money for arts projects and nonprofit organizations, and this philanthropic art experiment became the grantLOVE project. Partnering with other artists, makers, customers, and to support art projects and nonprofits, Grant explores how fundraising and art can effectively intersect. This comprehensive history of the grantLOVE project—complete with paintings, prints, sculptures, textiles, jewelry, and architecture—provides a visual meditation on what “love” is, as conceived by Grant and the numerous collaborators showcased. Compiling more than fourteen years of grantLOVE works and partnerships and featuring contributions by Eman Alami, Roxane Gay, Cassandra Coblentz, and Alma Ruiz, this book invites you to reflect on the confluence of philanthropy and the arts and celebrates building community around the roles of love and empathy in contemporary art and culture.

Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles–based artist who—through an exploration of the use of text and language in various media including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography—probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. She is the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts-based nonprofits, and her work has been exhibited at institutions across the United States and abroad. Her first show at MOCA was in 2007, curated by Alma Ruiz and titled MOCA Focus: Alexandra Grant.

Alma Ruiz is an independent curator and Senior Fellow at the Center for Business and Management of the Arts at Claremont Graduate University. She is a former senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where she curated numerous exhibitions focusing on emerging artists and the postwar period in the United States, Italy, and Latin America, among them, Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space; Poetics of the Handmade, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, MOCA Focus: Alexandra Grant, Gabriel Orozco, Maurizio Cattelan, Magdalena Fernández, and Ernesto Neto. In addition to her curatorial work at MOCA, Ruiz served as guest curator at the Fundación/Colección Jumex in Mexico City, the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; the Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires; the Craft Contemporary and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Ruiz is a coeditor and contributor to A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1979-2000, and the author of several texts in Alexandra Grant’s recent book LOVE.