Exhibition by gloria galvez
January 12th—March 9th, 2025
Opening: Sunday January 12th, from 11-2pm
with lecture by wildlife biologist, environmental educator and environmental justice advocate, Miguel Ordeñana.
Closing: Sunday March 9th, from 11am-2pm
bat habitat journaling and sketching with Brian Young from Nature Nexus Institute
Gallery Hours: Saturdays from 2pm – 5pm.
Nineteen species of bats are known to reside in Los Angeles; they live in the crevices of freeway bridges and in the foliage of deciduous trees. Concerned naturalists and itchy residents alike (some species of bats eat mosquitos!) welcome their local bat population into human-made bat houses, while many others detest the presence of them in their attics and yards. Despite their proximity, most Los Angeles residents do not think of bats when they consider who lives in our city.
home is where the bat is, is an exhibition that employs a study-room environment to offer guests a space where they can think about bats, their dwellings, peculiarities, and future, specifically that of the bat population living in Hermon Park, where Art in the Park’s gallery is located. The study-room features both indoor and outdoor components, holds artworks that resemble and embody tools, methodologies, exercises, and other educational materials for “students” to learn from. Together, these items put forth a variety of bat-musings that facilitate a critical re-understanding of bats, their ecosystems, and their needs as a means of debunking harmful human perceptions and hopefully, in turn, rehabilitating the bat population and offering ways to relate to bats and their habitat.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Bed & Breakfast has collaborated with the artists and other community members on an educational booklet for guests to take home. Additionally, galvez has worked with Art in the Park Director, Liz Goetz, to create flowers for bats, a garden of native flowers that will create an ideal environment for nighttime pollinators like moths (a food source for bats) and other pollinators like hummingbirds, bees, and beetles. The garden will live at Hermon Park, a public park where galvez has collected echolocation data of the Mexican free-tail bats who live in the area.
gloria galvez is an artist, educator, organizer, and nature steward whose artistic practice zig-zags across drawing, video, sculpture, and communal experiences — while every so often interweaving into these forms and their making, community organizing and citizen science insights and frameworks. within this practice, her current focus invokes alternate and simultaneous realities that prompt rebellious and revealing questions about the current social-political conditions of things – both living and nonliving things – both human and non-human things.
Bed & Breakfast is rooted in hospitality and thinking critically about social, structural, and emotional obstacles that prevent a public from experiencing both the arts and the broader acquisition of knowledge. B&B’s programming began in its founder’s bedroom and largely remained there for a decade hosting exhibitions, open hours, and overnight stays (bedtime stories and breakfast included), fostering warmth in an often cold, uninviting art world. B&B looks for new ways to eliminate hierarchies by offering early childhood and youth programming, fostering skill-sharing in their projects and working in public spaces such as parks and libraries.