This photo is from 2010, from an exhibit I curated at a museum in southern california. I can’t remember the exhibit name but this is the artist duo Lucky Dragons (Sara Rara and Luke Fischbeck), who used to do public collaborative drawing events as sumi ink club in addition to their public performances under the Lucky Dragons moniker. They’re also friends and part of the artistic DIY community that used to and maybe still runs between Boston - Providence - Philly - Baltimore - DC artist-run spaces. I had come across them at Space 1026 in Philly, which I hung out at and had lots of friends, and later curated a show of Indonesian street art and DIY art in Yogyakarta in 2013.
When I worked with Luke and Sara in 2010 I was a young curator of a large southern california regional art museum and this exhibit was slated for this huge gallery room that had previously been a gym (in a YWCA) before being converted to a museum about 2 decades earlier. When Luke and Sara and I decided to schedule this exhibit, the plan was to do this as a continuation of sumi ink club, where they essentially have the public come and paint in black sumi ink, resulting in murals and zines and drawings. The gallery was so large. When they came back to talk over the show with me, or maybe the week before, we realized there was just no way to cover the whole gallery in paintings. Brilliantly, Luke and Sara suggested constraining art to a narrow band. They made a strip around the room using blue painters’ tape to mark off a two feet high section that ran all around the ex-gymnasium exhibition space. This was a lot more doable! With as little as a dozen people and up to to perhaps a hundred people could fill it with drawings. We announced the collaborative drawing session. All kinds of people came, including my pet peeve, the parents that think they themselves can’t make any art and art-making is only an enrichment activity for kids. In addition to this exhibit which stayed up a couple months they also hosted a performance. Like all of their work, that too was participatory with the audience, and was a brilliant performance.
Lucky Dragons were active at putting out albums and zines particularly in the early 2000s to 2010. They were among the early artists I knew to embrace creative commons for their net releases, which I did as well. But their frequent releases on record labels in addition to their net label works, along with their many pubilshed zines really showed me a model that open source and creative commons could be a continuation or sympatico with the zine and DIY/D.I.T. world I felt such a part of and that continues to guide my ethos and ways of working in artistic community.
Years later I was a Teaching Assistant for Luke at UCLA when he was a guest lecturer at UCLA for a semester. The class was on artistic uses of machine learning! This was way before ChatGPT. We got docker working on our laptops, made python notebooks, tried training data on our drawings. It was challenging to teach this stuff from scratch to undergrads and I cannot remember what we produced! But I loved Luke’s mindset of making the complicated and technical instead homemade, participatory, exploratory and smallscale.