Happy Hour: Low Doors, Deep Rooms - Artist Panel Discussion

Cartoons, murals and public art let us in fast. A bright color, a clean line, a shape we half-remembered, a wall we always walk by, a sculpture in the lobbyway of our office building, outside a stadium, in a park. In all of these forms, we are given access before we have decided whether we want it or how we want to engage it. And these forms can hold almost anything: humor, grief, violence, the personal and the political at once. This Happy Hour brings the artists from the current exhibition, Cast Shadows, together with other artists working with accessible art forms into conversation with the CXLA community to ask what access really means, for contemporary art, for public art, for the cartoon and the caricature, and for difficult content that needs a way in.

Participating Artists: David Vega, Andy Montiel-Phillips, Coco Pusinella, Nehemiah Cisneros
Homemade Cocktail Mixer - Frannie
Facilitator - Frannie Hemmelgarn & Kim Garcia

About Happy Hour
Happy Hour is Currency Exchange's ongoing series of public conversations, held around the exhibition currently on view. Each edition takes a theme from the show and opens it outward, inviting artists, writers, organizers, and neighbors to talk through what the work is asking and how it connects to the world beyond the gallery. The format is deliberately loose: a drink, a few starting questions, and room for the discussion to go where it needs to. The goal is not to explain the exhibition but to give it company and make CXLA a place where looking, discourse, and thinking together are part of the space's everyday life.

Everyone is welcome