Artbound

In this new season, Artbound travels back to pre-industrial Los Angeles to explore one of its key and most controversial figures – Charles Lummis. Writer and editor of the LA Times, avid collector and preservationist, Indian rights activist, and founder of LA’s first museum, – The Southwest – Lummis’s genius and idiosyncratic personality captured the ethos of an era and a region.

The highly skilled labor of artisans migrating from Mexico and Latin America are the backbone of high-end design and retail in Los Angeles, producing some of the most exquisite furniture, textiles, and design goods. Artbound uncovers their stories and their role in making Los Angeles and Southern California the creative capital of the world.

U.S. Marine Sergeant Christian Ellis was a machine gunner in Iraq, whose platoon was ambushed, leaving him with a broken back and only one of a few survivors. Ellis returned home to join millions of Americans who struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and inspired the first opera about the Iraq war -- "Fallujah" -- a production by the Long Beach Opera.

Artbound explores the programming of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, investigating new programming and curatorial approaches that are redefining what it means to be a 21st century museum. This episode features three new programs by The Underground Museum, Wolvesmouth, and Public Fiction.

Artbound explores the groundbreaking opera Hopscotch, which unfolded in cars throughout Los Angeles, telling a single story of a disappearance across time. Audiences experienced the work in both the intimacy of a car, where artists and audiences shared a confined space, or in a larger central hub, where all the journeys were live streamed to create a dizzying panorama of life in Los Angeles.

Architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne partners with Artbound to look at the future of Los Angeles by examining its architecture, urban planning, transportation and changing demographics, giving us a glimpse of Los Angeles as a model of urban renewal for the nation and the world.

An Artbound special episode in partnership with the Grand Central Art Center. “Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser” considers the usage of “female Hysteria” throughout the decades in operatic form. Vireo is the brainchild of long-time collaborators, composer Lisa Bielawa and librettist Erik Ehn.