Exert from LA Weekly An Abandoned Midcentury Building at Cerritos College Is Becoming a Guerrilla Art Gallery Before It's Demolished by Catherine Womack. For full article visit www.laweekly.com

In 1977, L.A. gallerists Claire Copley, Morgan Thomas and Connie Lewallen created the Foundation for Arts Resources (FAR). The goal of their organization was simple: to support and promote artists and the creation and presentation of conceptual art outside traditional gallery spaces.

FAR is a nomadic, dynamic organization. It has no permanent home, office or staff. Its bylaws demand that its volunteer board of directors pass the baton of leadership to colleagues when their service is complete, effectively instituting term limits and guaranteeing the influx of fresh ideas. Despite its nontraditional characteristics (or maybe because of them), FAR has existed continuously for the last four decades, popping up sporadically over the years in diverse locations across Southern California.

“The [FAR founders] were cognizant of the distributed nature of life in Southern California well ahead of many people,” explains James MacDevitt, a member of FAR’s current board and an art history professor at Cerritos College in Norwalk. “What is most important is that you keep moving. And also that you don’t hold onto power. You let people have opportunities to take charge and redirect the ship.”

With MacDevitt at the helm of FAR’s ship, the organization is celebrating its 40th anniversary with an ambitious project: the FAR Bazaar is a free, two-day “alternative art fair and art collective festival” featuring the works of more than 300 artists. In a nod to the kind of impermanence that has defined other FAR events, the Bazaar takes place inside Cerritos College’s massive old fine arts building, a structure slated for demolition just a few days after the show’s run.

In the old journalism room, where recent copies of the school paper, Talon Marks, still line the walls, artists from the Biomythography collective are turning old editorial cubicles into confessionals. The videos that will play in each confessional deal with the representation of blackness in the media and the problems of toxic masculinity.