Home and Elsewhere: Co-Creating an Atlas with Brenda Zhang (Bz)

Through a series of exercises, Twenty Summers Fellow Brenda Zhang (Bz) guides participants in visual and spatial documentation of their individual experiences and narratives of Place, while exploring the shared meanings of “home” and “elsewhere.” Participants are invited to bring cartographic tools from their own traditions, diasporas, or fictions. 

Brenda Zhang (Bz) is a visual artist, designer, organizer, and educator based on unceded Tongva land (so-called Los Angeles). They are a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter University and a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES. In their practice, they investigate physical and cultural construction as entangled processes and use disciplinary tools of art and architecture to imagine futures beyond settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. Bz received a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University. In their free time, they look for birds and trash in the Los Angeles River.