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Artboard 1 100 Request for Qualifications (RFQ) Untitled 3 01 East Palo Alto Heroes & Legends Public Art Plan APPLY NOW
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Dyson & Womack
3327 Verdugo Rd.
Los Angeles CA 90065
Email: info@dysonwomack.com
Phone: +1 323 685 2800
UPCOMING EVENTS

PAiD: Public Artists in Development

Dyson & Womack launch a new initiative with the County of Los Angeles with opportunities for artists including the creation of an Artist Council and free professional development workshops for public artists.

 

The open call for the Artist Council is open from April 1 – May 12, 2025. Apply Now!

 

East Palo Alto Heroes & Legends

Dyson & Womack with the East Palo Alto Community Archive seek artists for a permanent public art commission “Heroes & Legends” at Cooley Landing Park.

 

Apply now through April 30, 2025. 

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PAiD Artist Spotlight: Noé Olivas @calmatetupedo PAiD Artist Spotlight: Noé Olivas @calmatetupedo Nothing to Lose is a temporary sculpture of wooden handcuffs meticulously crafted from the oak of a repurposed library table. Informed by Black liberation activist Assata Shakur and the legacy of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the words, “We have nothing to lose, but our chains,” are carved onto the wooden handcuffs, the chain links are broken. The sculpture references the handcuffs manufactured by Hiatt and Company, an English company historically known for their production of steel, chains, and shackles used during the transatlantic slave trade, and connects the enduring impact of American slavery with the Prison Industrial Complex. Once a library table that has now been transformed into a sculpture and placed back into its original environment, Nothing to Lose encourages the public to study the U.S. criminal justice system and carefully consider the importance of social justice in their community. It serves as a revolutionary visual call and response, urging collective action toward radical love, solidarity, and liberation. Originally from San Diego and now working in Los Angeles, noé olivas is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and co-founder of Crenshaw Dairy Mart, a community space centering ancestry, abolition, and healing. He was raised in a working-class, first-generation Mexican family, where labor was not abstract but everyday, embodied, and inherited. This lived experience grounds his artistic practice. Working across sculpture, installation, ceramics, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, performance, site-specific intervention, and archival research, olivas’ work explores what he refers as the Poetics of Labor: the socio-political and spiritual dimensions of labor, lineage, and liberation. Noé Olivas was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack.
PAiD Artist Spotlight: Autumn Breon @autumnbreon PAiD Artist Spotlight: Autumn Breon @autumnbreon The Maroon Station is a public art installation anchored by an inflatable architectural environment consisting of a dome connected to a slide. Participants enter one at a time by climbing the structure and sliding into the dome’s interior, where they encounter a shared spatial experience centered on orientation and collective presence. The project draws from the history and practice of maroonage, the sustained acts of escape, refusal, and world-building carried out by enslaved people who formed autonomous communities beyond plantation systems. Just as marronage has existed wherever slavery has existed, fugitivity rooted in care has appeared wherever oppressive forces have attempted to constrain imagination and liberation. The Maroon Station approaches this history as an ongoing infrastructure that continues to appear across time and place wherever fugitivity, care, and collective survival are required. The slide functions as a threshold into the station. Sliding activates the body’s kinetic memory of slipping between conditions and realities. The motion invites participants to move deliberately from one world into another, echoing how maroon communities emerged through acts of disappearance and reappearance beyond the reach of dominant systems. Autumn Breon is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work engages queer Black feminist praxis, historical memory, and speculative futures. Her practice spans performance, installation, and public art that centers liberation and care. Inspired by ancestral technologies and maroon ecologies, she creates portals to other realities through ritual, research, and play. Breon studied Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, and her work often explores spatial freedom beyond Earth. She’s exhibited at institutions including Hauser & Wirth, LACMA, and the Brooklyn Museum. Autumn Breon was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack.
PAiD Artist Spotlight: Brian Sonia-Wallace @rentpo PAiD Artist Spotlight: Brian Sonia-Wallace @rentpoet If These Stalls Could Talk is a public art installation held within restroom stalls, where poetry by trans and queer writers is engraved in metal that covers the doors. Transforming an often politicized site into an archive of lived experience, their words take on permanence, authority, and memorialization. In recent years, restrooms have become symbolic terrain in debates about gender and belonging. The engraved texts offer care, reflection, and quiet courage, reminding us that dignity is infrastructure — something lived, practiced, and shared. These poems invite pause not as hesitation, but as comfort. They honor the ordinary passage through a public space, the small acts of survival, and the human capacity to witness and hold one another in safety. Brian Sonia-Wallace is a poet, educator, and public artist based in Los Angeles. Former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, he is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (HarperCollins) and Maze Mouth. His work centers on creating art that bridges civic space, public memory, and lived experience, often collaborating with LGBTQ+ communities, youth, and elders to amplify voices that are rarely heard. Sonia-Wallace’s practice spans performance, writing, and participatory public projects that transform everyday spaces into sites of reflection, care, and dialogue. With a focus on intimacy and monumentality, he explores how poetry can function as infrastructure—shaping how we move through, inhabit, and witness the city. His projects have been presented in theaters, galleries, and public spaces across Los Angeles, always seeking to make the ordinary extraordinary, and to honor dignity as both a lived experience and a shared civic value. Brian Sonia Wallace was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack.
PAiD Artist Spotlight: Mims @bj_mims Marooning Bo PAiD Artist Spotlight: Mims @bj_mims Marooning Bodies is a worldbuilding platform led by artist Mims, using play, ritual, and collective imagination to design liberated futures through an immersive worldbuilding game, public installations, and a growing collection of Future Relics: art objects inspired by imagined futures created through gameplay. The Collective Prayer Stool is one such relic. The Collective Prayer Stool originates from a future history near the Savannah River, where communities practice collective grieving and shapeshifting as civic acts. Composed of a prostration stool, the Collective Prayer Book, and a prayer stone housing the Marooning Bodies x Botanica Cimarron herbal tincture, its legs are cast from memory-holding matter: ash from burned letters, soil from ancestral land, and fragments from kitchens, jails, and gathering spaces. Mims will share a site-responsive dance performance at the site of the stool, unfolding in three movements each guided by a different herb within the herbal tincture, treating the body and landscape as intertwined spaces where memory, grief, and possibility can be held at once. Marooning Bodies is also hosting an LA Public Library Tour throughout March, April, and May, bringing facilitated gameplay sessions to communities across the county for an immersive experience designed to explore community-building as a creative practice. Mims is an artist, abolitionist, and facilitator based in Los Angeles. Her work spans performance, advocacy, public art, social practice, and the creation of fine art objects. She experiences the body as a site of liberation and approaches it as her first place of inquiry. Grounded in embodied knowing, her practice explores relationships between self, community, land, and more-than-human life. Brianna Mims was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack.
PAiD Artist Spotlight: Lena Chen @lenachen Staged PAiD Artist Spotlight: Lena Chen @lenachen Staged as a Chinese banquet, Five Flavors weaves oral histories from Asian American women workers with a performance lecture on the history of Chinese American food, immigration, sex, and labor. Each story is paired with a dish representing a flavor from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM): salty, sour, bitter, sweet, or pungent, which corresponds to an organ and emotion. As dishes circulate among participants, the lecture traces the connections between Panda Express, American colonialism, Julia Child, cultural appropriation, and Western feminism - while firmly situating itself in the contested and gentrifying site of Los Angeles Chinatown. The performance becomes a potluck of stories, representing Asian American womanhood through the metaphor of consumption and using food to heal fears, anxieties, anger, and resentments in Asian communities. Born to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, new media, and social practice. Her practice explores race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Performance Studies, Chen studies the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. She holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from Harvard University. Lena Chen was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack.
PAiD Artist Spotlight: Edgar Ramirez @e_ramirez PAiD Artist Spotlight: Edgar Ramirez @e_ramirez I Want to Be Free (That’s the Truth) is a temporary public artwork in motion, composed of a 40-foot shipping container transformed into a monumental moving painting. One side reads I WANT TO BE FREE; the other reads THAT’S THE TRUTH. Traveling throughout Los Angeles County’s streets, the work introduces moments of color, movement, and reflection within the city’s daily flow. The container is wrapped in vinyl and painted with house paint, drawing from street signage, posters, and worn industrial surfaces found in neighborhoods surrounding the Port of Los Angeles. The work reclaims this familiar language and redirects it toward something shared and human. Layered color and weathered marks reflect a process of erasure and transformation, where surface and language carry traces of endurance, survival, and resilience while remaining bold and legible at a distance. As it moves through the city, the container transforms an overlooked industrial object into a collective voice within public space. The work offers a reminder of freedom as both personal and shared, inviting moments of recognition, reflection, and connection within the spaces that keep the city moving. Edgar Ramirez is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice draws from the industrial landscapes and visual language surrounding the Port of Los Angeles. Working through abstraction and material process, he engages themes of visibility, labor, and endurance, focusing on surfaces shaped by use, time, and accumulation. Street signage and the built environment inform paintings that emerge from overlooked elements of the urban landscape, reflecting the physical and emotional conditions of the city. Edgar Ramirez was commissioned through the Public Artists in Development (PAiD) program and is a member of the PAiD Artist Council. PAiD is a Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture program funded by the Mellon Foundation with support in development and delivery by Dyson & Womack. @plazadelaraza @lacountyarts
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