Each year Clockshop commissions a contemporary artist to use the form of the kite to create imagery related to the natural environment of the park and speak to its history.
5th Annual People’s Kite Festival Artist: Maria Maea
Artist Maria Maea presents two unique kites borne of the connective threads between Latin American and Oceanic cultural traditions as a first-generation Mexican and Samoan artist. The kites are an anchor to the spaces Maea has sown roots in: her places of origin, Los Angeles, sites her art practice have led her to create in; she adapts the visual symbols of each and makes them her own. Their flight celebrates connection beyond borders, where open airspace and ocean channels become conduits that bridge these geographies to one another.
After the Micronesian nautical practice of rebbelib, a navigational guide that charts ocean currents and bodies of land with bamboo and shells, Maea created palm stem frame and an internal spiraling arrangement of Oaxacan carrizo reeds. Outlines of figures from personal photos emerge as an extension of stenciled geometric patterns, a gift from the artist’s mother from Samoa. They are spraypainted onto mulberry paper, a material link to siapo, a Polynesian textile made from the inner bark of mulberry trees, and in doing so, Maea interprets and personalizes graffiti culture’s histories of art and resistance in Los Angeles.
To create the second kite, Maea wove palm into a triangular body reinforced with paper sails. Its horizontal axis fans open like wings outstretched midflight, and its form takes inspiration from the lupe, also called the pacific pigeon, which is a culturally significant bird in Samoa and vital to rainforest ecologies as a seed disperser. Foraged from the streets of Los Angeles, the palm is both an iconic emblem of the city and an often disregarded fixture of our urban landscapes, and the act of harvesting and weaving forges a kinship with the material that is then transposed into the work.
Fabrication and test flight supported by Yaeun Stevie Choi.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, California) is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film, and sound. Maea deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry through artworks that act as a residue of her lived experiences as a first-generation Angeleno of Samoan and Mexican heritage. Using repurposed objects, living and dead palm fronds and other organic matter, concrete, and rebar, she builds film set-like sculptures that offer dimensions of multigenerational duration and nonlinear narrative-making. Maea’s work has been exhibited or performed at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Lisson Gallery, New York (2023); Murmurs, Los Angeles (2023, 2022); and more. She was an artist-in-residence at the Palm Springs Art Museum (2022) and is a recipient of the Artadia Award and the Mohn Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) grant.
