Jody Pinto: B.I.G. shares how an artist shaped one of the most successful public works projects in Southern California, the 2001 Beach Improvement Group Project (B.I.G.), which led the redesign of South Santa Monica State Beach and Palisades Park. Presented in a public beach club steps from Jody Pinto’s project, the exhibition unfolds through drawings, photographs, and archival materials. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free public programs featuring the artist, landscape architects, and scholars, including talks and guided walks. A pocket-sized publication with a map extends the exhibition beyond the gallery, highlighting elements of the design and allowing the public to develop a new relationship with this dynamic landscape. Pinto has remained an under-historicized artist and her meaningful contribution to Santa Monica is largely unknown to the public. This exhibition increases recognition of her work and give visitors a new appreciation of the beachfront.

Jody Pinto (b. 1942) is an environmental artist based in New York whose work considers relationships between the human body, landscape, and architecture. She works in drawings as well as largescale site-specific public works. She has completed nearly 40 collaborative projects, including a wide range of master-planning, functional elements, and landscape interventions, as well as free standing and integrated structural elements. She has received numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Design Achievement Award, National Design for Transportation Award, American Institute of Architects Honor Award “Art in Public Spaces,” and two National American Society of Landscape Architects Design Honor Awards. More than the subject of the exhibition Jody Pinto: B.I.G., Pinto is the primary collaborator and lender of most drawings, photographs, and ephemera that are on view in the exhibition.

Christopher Mangum-James is the deputy director of Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), an arts nonprofit organization that commissions and produces ambitious site-specific contemporary art. In a key leadership position overseeing fundraising, communications, and curatorial work, Mangum-James has realized a wide-range of projects including a monumental sculpture park by Lauren Halsey, the restaging of a historic ephemeral earthwork by Lita Albuquerque, and a survey spanning twenty years of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s collages, zines, and artist books. He previously worked at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Hammer Museum.

Oscar Peña is an artist and architecture writer whose work explores public space and vernacular design. His writing and photography have appeared in PIN-UP, Log, ABOUT:, and New York Review of Architecture. Based in New York City, Peña is the cocurator of Jody Pinto: B.I.G.

Founded in 2009, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) is a nonprofit arts organization that curates and commissions site- and situation-specific public art projects. LAND’s work is rooted in the belief that people of all social, economic, and cultural backgrounds deserve the opportunity to experience art in their everyday lives. In turn, artists deserve the opportunity to realize place-based public art projects, unsupported through traditional institutions. LAND supports diverse artists, curators, and community-based organizations to produce free, museum-quality public exhibitions and programs that examine the complex, multilayered, and intersectional conditions that shape our collective understanding of Los Angeles. By doing so, we circumvent barriers that keep broader audiences from encountering contemporary art in their everyday lives. LAND believes contemporary public art can help us see ourselves and our neighbors in new ways, expanding our shared capacity for empathy, understanding, creative solutions, and collaboration across communities.