In the Fall of 2022, students from Cal State Los Angeles’ Art and Design in the Community class visited CicLAvia at their offices at the LA Cleantech Incubator (LACI) to learn about the work that goes into planning CicLAvia – and for a tour of the design and fabrication facilities at LACI. The students attended CicLAvia—Heart of LA on 10/9/22, with the prompt to think about their favorite places, spaces, and interactions that they observed at CicLAvia that day.
At CSULA's campus just east of Downtown, many of the students are from communities where CicLAvia regularly occurs, and many of them had experienced CicLAvia in the past and could speak to how it had impacted the way they thought about mobility in Los Angeles.
In the following weeks, students worked with CicLAvia to develop a series of illustrations representing the neighborhoods of CicLAvia—Heart of LA's route. They celebrated the lotuses of Echo Park, the dragon gate in Chinatown, the architecture of the Historic Core, and the vast diversity of foods, people, and wheels on the route.
Art and Design in the Community is a class required for all art majors at CSULA, and the students bring skills and perspectives from a variety of backgrounds: animation, graphic design, fashion, art history, art education, and studio arts. In the class, they discuss the responsibilities of artists and designers to the communities they work within – and the ways that art and design impact communities. In this particular semester, students completed a final project where they proposed improvements to the built environment in their own neighborhoods, such as custom bus shelters, murals, adaptive reuse spaces, wayfinding, light-up crosswalks, public art apps, and more. The class’s conversation about CicLAvia was a way to frame the discussion about the overall impacts of the design of the built environment in our city and different interventions we can take to improve that environment. It was also a fun project to celebrate how we experience our city in open streets.
In the end, the students’ illustrations were produced as a sticker book highlighting their favorite places on the Heart of LA route. We hope you enjoy it!
Thank you to:
Cal State Los Angeles Department of Art,
Fall 2023, professor Colleen Corcoran,
Art and Design in the Community class
Mia Arias
Alice Berman
Kelsey Bueno-Sanchez
Amber Guo
Karina Han
Heo Hyun Kim
Joshlyn Lo
Julio Miralles
Sierra Moder
Brian Munguia
Jasmin Nunez
Michael Rangel
Esmeralda Sanchez-Segura
Alejandro Sanchez
Erick Sandoval
Arian Tandoy
Julissa Vargas
