“What had once been a defining geographic feature increasingly became something to engineer around rather than engage with.”
Elaine, can you give us a quick introduction of who you are, and how LA River Arts came to be?
ERW: Esther Margulies, a landscape architect and co-founder of LA River Arts, and I, an architect, were both working on projects along the Los Angeles River when we first began talking about its future. Sitting along the bike path, we would imagine what these spaces could become and wondered why cultural components so often fell to the bottom of project priorities, despite generating some of the greatest public enthusiasm.
As we looked at river cities around the world, we found inspiring examples of how art and culture could help shape a community's relationship with its waterways. Those conversations led us to create LA River Arts, which has now spent more than a decade exploring how cultural programming can help people reconnect with the Los Angeles River.
From the beginning, our goal was not simply to create arts programming, but to help foster a deeper cultural relationship with the river itself. We continue to believe that the future of the Los Angeles River depends not only on ecological restoration and physical infrastructure, but on creating meaningful opportunities for people to gather, create, and build a shared sense of stewardship for this remarkable place.
The presence of Indigenous cultural advisors for the organization is noteworthy. Can you tell us about the cultural significance of the River for the First Peoples of this region?
MM: Our Indigenous advisors have reminded us that the Los Angeles River, or Paayme Paxaayt, is far more than a waterway or a piece of infrastructure. It is a place of deep cultural, spiritual, and historical significance that has shaped relationships, traditions, and ways of life for generations.
While LA River Arts seeks to reintroduce the river as a cultural gathering place for Los Angeles, our Indigenous advisors remind us that for the tribes connected to the river, it has always been that—and much more. The river has long been a source of sustenance, connection, movement, ceremony, and community.
A recent conversation with a Tongva advisor offered a perspective that has helped shape our thinking about the river: the understanding of Paayme Paxaayt as a living being. That understanding invites a fundamentally different relationship to the river—one rooted in reciprocity, responsibility, and care. Rather than viewing the river solely as infrastructure, it encourages us to consider our responsibility to care for and learn from it.
We would never presume to speak on behalf of Indigenous people, but their knowledge and perspectives have been invaluable in shaping how we approach our work and understand the river.
How does this significant cultural history influence LA River Arts’ current mission and programming?
MM: The history of the Los Angeles River reminds us that culture is not something separate from a landscape—it emerges from our relationship to it. The river has long been a place of gathering, movement, exchange, creativity, and connection. That understanding is central to LA River Arts' mission.
The river's cultural history spans many generations and communities. Beginning with the Indigenous communities whose relationship to the river extends back thousands of years. Later, the river shaped the growth of the pueblo and became intertwined with the lives of Spanish and Mexican settlers, immigrants, agricultural workers, industrial workers, and the many groups that helped build Los Angeles. In many ways, the history of Los Angeles and the history of the river are inseparable.
At the same time, many of these stories and perspectives have not always been fully reflected in how the river is understood today. We see arts and cultural programming as an opportunity to create space for a broader range of voices, experiences, and relationships to the river—past, present, and future.
Our work is rooted in the belief that the future of the river depends not only on ecological restoration and physical infrastructure, but also on cultural connection. Through artist commissions, performances, installations, gatherings, and festivals like River Solstice, we invite people to experience the river as a living place with stories, memories, and meaning.
In many ways, our mission is both forward-looking and restorative. We are helping build a new cultural future for the Los Angeles River while recognizing its enduring role as a source of cultural life, connection, and identity for the communities that have called its banks home.
Elaine, you mentioned the freeways were built after the river was first channeled in the early twentieth century. Can you share more about that, and how it affected urban design in Los Angeles?
ERW: The channelization of the Los Angeles River fundamentally reshaped the city's development. Prior to flood control efforts, the river was a dynamic and unpredictable force that influenced where and how people built. Following devastating floods in the early twentieth century, the Army Corps of Engineers transformed much of the river into a concrete flood-control channel, dramatically reducing flood risk and enabling the rapid urban growth that followed.
This new relationship to the river helped shape the Los Angeles we know today. Infrastructure, industry, and eventually freeways were built alongside and across the river corridor. What had once been a defining geographic feature increasingly became something to engineer around rather than engage with.
From an urban design perspective, the river shifted from being a central organizing feature of the landscape to a piece of hidden infrastructure. While that transformation supported growth and public safety, it also contributed to the river becoming physically and psychologically separated from much of the city around it.
What were the strongest cultural impacts of this engineering?
MM: While the environmental impacts of channelization are often discussed, its cultural impacts were equally significant. As the river became engineered and confined, many Angelenos gradually stopped experiencing it as part of daily life.
What had been a place of gathering, movement, recreation, and connection became viewed as infrastructure—something to drive over or pass by. In many ways, one of the city's most important public spaces disappeared from the public imagination.
This shift was especially meaningful because many of Los Angeles' earliest and most diverse communities lived, worked, and created along the river's banks. While those communities continue to contribute enormously to the cultural richness of Los Angeles, their relationship to the river—and the stories embedded within these landscapes—have not always been reflected in broader conversations about the city.
The physical river remained, but our collective relationship to it changed.
How does LA River Arts hope to revive some of the rich history of the LA Basin?
MM: We don't think of our work as recreating the past so much as building upon the river's longstanding role as a place of connection, creativity, and exchange.
One of the things that distinguishes LA River Arts is our commitment to the entire 51-mile river corridor. The Los Angeles River connects dozens of neighborhoods, communities, and histories, yet many Angelenos experience only small fragments of it—or don't experience it at all. We believe the arts can help people see the river not as a series of disconnected destinations, but as a shared cultural landscape.
Artists play a central role in that effort. Through performances, installations, gatherings, and festivals like River Solstice, we create opportunities for people to encounter the river through creativity and shared experience while making space for the many stories and perspectives that have shaped life along its banks.
Ultimately, our goal is to deepen people's connection to both the river and Los Angeles itself. As one of the few places that physically links so many communities across the region, the river has the potential to serve not only as an ecological corridor, but as a cultural one as well.
What kinds of artistic expressions or mediums are you centering, and how do artists get involved with LA River Arts?
RN: We focus on artistic practices that engage directly with the Los Angeles River as a site of collaboration, inquiry, and connection. Our programs span a wide range of mediums, including site-specific installation, performance, dance, music, visual art, participatory projects, and interdisciplinary works that respond to the river's unique ecologies, histories, and communities. Rather than treating the river as simply a backdrop, we encourage artists to work with its natural rhythms, layered histories, and living ecosystems as active collaborators in the creative process.
Through artist commissions, public festivals, intimate river gatherings, and partnerships, LA River Arts creates opportunities for artists to help shape how the river is understood, experienced, and cared for.
Artists can get involved by participating in our open calls and attending public programs. We are especially interested in artists whose work fosters connection—between people, place, ecology, and the diverse communities that call Los Angeles home.
What upcoming programs do you have scheduled?
RN: River Solstice, on Sunday June 21, is a new biennial arts festival that brings together artists, musicians, performers, architects, and community partners in response to the Los Angeles River.
What drew me to the project was the opportunity to work with the river itself as a curatorial framework. The Los Angeles River is a landscape of contradictions—concrete and feral, engineered and alive, refuge and racetrack. Those tensions have inspired artists for generations, and River Solstice invites audiences to encounter them through sculpture, installation, performance, sound, film, food, and participation.
The festival includes live performances by Mary Lattimore, San Cha, Calycosa, and Bob Baker Marionette Theater, alongside the River Assembly, a large-scale installation of artist-designed flags, and a pavilion exhibition featuring artists whose work engages questions of ecology, memory, landscape, and time.
More than anything, we hope River Solstice creates an opportunity for people to slow down, pay attention, and experience the river in a new way. We see it as the first of many programs that will continue expanding the role of art and artists along the Los Angeles River.