For LA Design Weekend, Downstream Prophecy: What Serves The Current Canvas (free)
- Elysian Valley Gateway Park 2914 Knox Avenue Los Angeles, CA, 90039 United States (map)
Photo by Diana Light on UnsplashJoin us for a contemplative workshop hosted by @folk.lounge to create a social textile with cross stitch embroidery exploring the natural rhythms of release and renewal. A practice of memory editing as we navigate seasonal transitions.
As both an artist and community facilitator, Shagane Barsegian also known as Shagho (she/her) will guide participants in creating a collaborative topography that captures our personal and cultural feelings about navigating change.
Co-creators will layer their memory, intention, & vision to a flowing tapestry of stories. Rivers are natural editors, carrying some things downstream while depositing others on banks, carving new channels while filling old ones.
Guests
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Darío Herrera is a multidisciplinary historian and community organizer from Northeast LA whose work is grounded in a desire to understand, question, and propose new definitions of heritage in marginalized communities. As Community Programs Manager at Clockshop, he oversees Take Me To Your River: A Cultural Atlas of the LA River, a three-year project mapping the collective history of Northeast LA communities through oral histories and interactive storytelling.
Clockshop is a Los Angeles-based arts nonprofit that works with artists to deepen the connection between communities and public land, building a shared vision of a future based in belonging and care. Founded by filmmaker Julia Meltzer in 2004, the organization produces free public programming and commissions contemporary artist projects, centering working-class communities of color through collaborations at Los Angeles State Historic Park and Rio de Los Angeles State Park in partnership with California State Parks.
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A celebrated cultural event producer whose work has illuminated Los Angeles for the past twenty years. She has produced everything from large-scale public festivals to intimate literary salons, including eight years as Production Manager for the iconic Día de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Through her studio, Cherie Creative Company, and at Frogtown Arts, she curates programs like The Frogtown Artwalk and Stories, Poems & Songs—inviting people of all walks of life to connect through creativity, arts and culture along the LA River.
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Mattia, who performs as Magmatic, is a poet and musician based in Frogtown, Los Angeles. Since moving to LA in 2020, his poetry has been featured in Crocetti's Poetry magazine and recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Mario Luzi, Camaiore Proposta, and Lord Byron awards.
Magmatic creates video poetry that blurs the lines between poetry and electronic music, performing live along the Los Angeles River with layered piano, guitar, synth, and electronic drums. His immersive sonic experiences blend electronic and rap sounds to capture the spirit of the waterways and urban landscape he calls home.
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An artist, photographer, and digital creative based in Los Angeles. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2017 with a BFA in Web & Multimedia + Photography. Drawing inspiration from cycling, hiking, and backpacking adventures, she creates work that bridges commercial and fine art practices. Her clients include Youth to the People, tokyobike, Hedley & Bennett, Anthropologie, AWAY, and the LGBTQ Center of Los Angeles.
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A is a fourth-generation textile artist based in California and founder of the Mixed Stitch. Rooted in her Northwestern Iranian and English-American heritage, she creates original designs that weave together tradition and innovation. Her work honors ancestral craft while reimagining it through a contemporary lens.
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Born in Vladivostok, she is of Armenian and Russian heritage and has traveled the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. With a background in luxury fashion, wearables, and human-computer interaction, she is a seasoned multidisciplinary design leader, blending creativity and innovation with global teams.
Her artistry spans textile arts, leatherwork, painting, and illustration, grounded in her MFA in Human-Computer Interaction (California College of the Arts) and a Fashion Design degree (Oregon State University). A trained facilitator, she is passionate about fostering community, collaboration, healing, and shared learning. As the founder of Folk Lounge, Shagoh is dedicated to uniting people through the exploration of ornamentation and sacred symbolism across cultures.
LA Design Weekend is a weekend-long celebration of LA's sprawling, spectacular design scene—broken down into bite-sized, neighborhood-based experiences. LADW is a hands-on, community-driven experience that welcomes everyone to step behind the scenes and into the spaces where creativity really happens. This year, honoring the resilience of the creative community while spotlighting the makers, spaces, and ideas that continue to rebuild, reimagine, and inspire.
* Explore the LA Design Weekend website to learn more about new events, tours and salons!
News
Kristine Schomaker knows what it's like to build authentic creative community—she's been connecting artists through Shoebox Arts (website | instagram) for over 15 years, helping 500+ artists transform their careers. When she invited Folk Lounge founder Shagane Barsegian into one of her community conversations, we thought we'd discuss intergenerational craft circles and community building. Instead, they unraveled everything about creative shame, what happens when ancestral calls disrupt your tech career, and why loving yourself when you're not useful to capitalism might be the most revolutionary practice of all. The conversation covers unemployment as spiritual boot camp, the brutal UX of government systems, dance as healing for parts therapy can't reach, and why the ceiling of your genius depends on how low you're willing to go. If you've ever been ashamed of your messy, non-linear creative process, this conversation is medicine.
Rivers teach us about selective preservation—what flows forward, what settles into memory banks, what carves new channels through time. For those of us gathering at Folk Lounge to explore embroidery as cultural practice, this natural editing process offers a framework for examining how we carry forward ancestral knowledge while releasing what no longer serves our collective becoming.
When knowledge transmission breaks—whether through buried rivers, displaced communities, or interrupted traditions—the knowledge continues through different channels and methods. Recent research reveals how Indigenous river epistemologies, hydrofeminist frameworks, and community-based restoration offer alternatives to systems that treat water, culture, and memory as problems to be managed rather than relationships to be maintained.
I've been thinking about interconnectedness a lot lately—how the patterns we see in folk art, the wisdom embedded in traditional practices, and the way natural systems work all point to something deeper about how change actually happens. When I learned about systems thinking for research praxis at a recent California Institute of Integral Studies event, something clicked into place.
When astronomer Dr. Hilding Neilson looks up at the Big Dipper, he sees two stories simultaneously. The Western version: seven bright stars in Ursa Major, roughly 79 to 124 light-years away. The Mi'kmaq version: Muin the bear being hunted by seven brave birds through an eternal cosmic drama that teaches about courage, seasons, and the interconnectedness of all life.
Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" represents the latest chapter in humanity's oldest story: our attempt to understand our place in the cosmos. While the Voyager photograph gave us an unprecedented view of our world, the psychological and spiritual impact it created echoes themes that have resonated across cultures for millennia.
Every creative choice now involves actively mediating between seemingly opposed forces: planetary boundaries and human creativity, global networks and bioregional rootedness, AI efficiency and seven generations thinking. We are living through the end of late capitalism and the emergence of what we might call the Time of Regenerative Negotiation—the first period in human history where cultural producers must consciously work within planetary limits while building life-sustaining alternatives.
Philosopher Ernst Bloch's "The Principle of Hope" argues that human dreaming contains what he calls "anticipatory consciousness"—active projections of possibility that can shape reality. For those of us at Folk Lounge exploring ornament, culture, and nature, this insight reframes decorative traditions as repositories of collective longing.
Behind the embroidered rushnyky that grace kitchen tables and the geometric patterns that edge bedroom linens lies a visual language as rich as any written script. Across the Slavic lands—the vast territories spanning from Russia and Ukraine to Poland, Czech Republic, and the Balkans—women have stitched meaning into fabric, creating what appears to be simple household decoration but carries layers of cultural knowledge.
Every traditional medicine chart maps the same beautiful truth: invisible currents shape visible reality. Life force flows through pathways that modern anatomy can't locate, yet gentle interventions along these phantom routes measurably transform our entire being. What if our creative practices operate through similar hidden networks—energetic webs that connect individual making with collective flourishing in ways our culture has forgotten how to see?
Kristine Schomaker knows what it's like to build authentic creative community—she's been connecting artists through Shoebox Arts (website | instagram) for over 15 years, helping 500+ artists transform their careers. When she invited Folk Lounge founder Shagane Barsegian into one of her community conversations, we thought we'd discuss intergenerational craft circles and community building. Instead, they unraveled everything about creative shame, what happens when ancestral calls disrupt your tech career, and why loving yourself when you're not useful to capitalism might be the most revolutionary practice of all. The conversation covers unemployment as spiritual boot camp, the brutal UX of government systems, dance as healing for parts therapy can't reach, and why the ceiling of your genius depends on how low you're willing to go. If you've ever been ashamed of your messy, non-linear creative process, this conversation is medicine.
Picture Owen Jones in 1851, standing before the Great Exhibition's glittering palace of iron and glass, watching the world's first global showcase of industrial might. While others marveled at steam engines and mechanical looms, Jones was studying something else entirely—the patterns carved into ivory combs from India, the rhythmic geometries of Persian carpets, the flowing curves of Chinese porcelain. These objects carried crystallized intelligence, ways of thinking made visible through centuries of human hands working with materials.
In glowing screens, pixels arrange into roses through simple repetition—the same principle medieval embroiderers knew when building flowers stitch by stitch. Yet long before pixels existed, artisans knew this truth: complex beauty emerges from simple repetition. From ancient sacred geometry to Soviet textiles, archetypal symbols travel across cultures and technologies, carrying spiritual meaning through the language of beauty.
In the shadowed depths of Russian forests, where mist weaves between ancient birch and pine, lives a figure both humble and profound—the Старичок-Боровичок, the Little Old Mushroom Man. Standing just two inches tall with a gray beard and a mushroom cap crown, this forest grandfather embodies thousands of years of Slavic wisdom about the delicate relationship between humans and the natural world. Far from mere folklore, these woodland spirits represent a sophisticated understanding of forest ecology, moral reciprocity, and the transformative power of respecting nature's hidden laws.
In villages across the globe, away from watchful eyes and social media, sacred rituals of self-adornment persist. A woman carefully wraps her gele in Nigeria; another applies henna patterns in Morocco; elsewhere, silver jewelry is positioned with reverence. These aren't acts of vanity but profound ceremonies—moments where adorning the body becomes an intimate celebration of one's very existence as worthy of beauty and care.
In a world of quick online tutorials and rapidly changing art supplies, there exists a timeless resource that has guided generations of artists through the material foundations of their craft. Ralph Mayer's "Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques," first published in 1940 and continuously updated since, represents not just a technical manual but a bridge connecting contemporary makers to centuries of accumulated wisdom about the physical substance of art.
Beneath the iconic palm-lined boulevards of Los Angeles lies a richer, more resilient botanical story—one of aromatic sages, sculptural manzanitas, and vibrant wildflowers that have evolved in perfect harmony with our Mediterranean climate. These native plants, adapted through millennia to thrive in our distinct cycle of wet winters and dry summers, offer more than just beauty—they conserve precious water, support local wildlife, and reconnect us to the authentic character of our region.
In the shadows of Pasadena's historic Craftsman homes and nestled among its native landscapes lies a forgotten language of pattern and place. The clay relief tiles of Ernest Batchelder—once adorning fireplaces, fountains, and facades throughout the city—represent not just architectural ornament but a philosophy of creation that connects human craft with natural inspiration. By exploring these traditional techniques in connection with the very parks that inspired Batchelder's designs, we can reimagine how craft traditions might once again become living practices.
Remember the wonder of looking through a kaleidoscope as a child? The world transformed into fragments of jewel-toned light, shifting and recombining with each small movement. This childlike perception—where colors dance and vibrate with life—is our natural birthright. Embroidery offers a path back to this chromatic awareness, inviting us to see the world not through monochromatic lenses but through the full vibrant spectrum of color that has defined human creation throughout history.
What if our deepest fulfillment comes not from acquiring more but from experiencing more deeply? What if the richest life emerges from reconnecting with capacities that lie dormant within us? Through simple acts like threading a needle, mixing colors, or shaping clay with our hands, we open pathways to dimensions of experience that have always been our birthright—an embodied, perceptually rich, communally connected, and culturally vibrant way of being.
Remember the wonder of looking through a kaleidoscope as a child? The world transformed into fragments of jewel-toned light, shifting and recombining with each small movement. This childlike perception—where colors dance and vibrate with life—is our natural birthright. Embroidery offers a path back to this chromatic awareness, inviting us to see the world not through monochromatic lenses but through the full vibrant spectrum of color that has defined human creation throughout history.
In the span of five generations, my family's journey stretches from Armenian mountains and Russian shores to French villages and Los Angeles sunsets. This living timeline—from my grandparents born in pre-Soviet times to my American-born children—encompasses world wars, migrations, and the quiet revolutions of daily life across continents. What remains after these journeys are not just stories but objects made by hand—tangible threadlines connecting us across time and place.
Beneath our skin exists a universe as vast and complex as the stars above. The human body—home to trillions of microorganisms, intricate neural networks, and systems in constant flux—functions as an ecosystem within the larger web of life. Yet in our rush to understand the world beyond us, we often forget to listen to the wisdom dwelling within our very cells.
In the heart of Los Angeles, amidst concrete and steel, a quiet revolution unfolds every few Sundays. Small groups gather in urban parks, fingers nimble with colorful threads, creating not just art but community—stitch by stitch. These embroidery socials, where the ancient meets the contemporary, offer profound insights that mirror nature's own wisdom.
In a sunlit corner of the library, a weathered six-volume set sits largely untouched by casual browsers. Stith Thompson's "Motif-Index of Folk-Literature" catalogs thousands of recurring elements from global storytelling traditions—from magical transformations to impossible tasks, trickster animals to supernatural helpers. Yet these academic tomes share a profound connection with the vibrant textiles displayed in museums and handcraft markets worldwide. The same symbolic language that shapes our oldest stories also flows through the embroidery traditions that women have preserved across generations and continents.
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