After you’ve been to Infinity Mirrored Room at the Broad and Rain Room at LACMA and that incredible garden at the Getty, it becomes unclear how to find more art experiences to enrich your life. Thankfully, artist and engineer Som Vilaysack has used technology and/or actual wizardry to create a live map of art events happening across the city.
Screen capture courtesy Som Vilaysack
It came about through a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention type situation. When Vilaysack first started exploring L.A.’s art scene for himself, he would literally hand-sketch maps to guide him as he hopped from gallery to gallery. But this is the 21st century—there’s no such thing as “hand-sketching” anymore—so Vilaysack created an auto-updating map that finds this week’s art events on Facebook and plots their locations. First he mapped L.A. and then, like a proper supervillain, he set his sights on the world.
Screen capture courtesy Som Vilaysack
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Granted, the map is constrained to events listed on Facebook, but it nonetheless provides a crazy thorough snapshot of gallery openings and artist lectures in your vicinity at any given time. That’s important because, in the words of someone who came up when I googled art quotes, “art is the highest form of hope.”
Thomas Harlander is a staff writer at Los Angeles magazine. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. He recently wrote: A Beautiful New Park Is About to Open Just East of Chinatown
