Compound, an art and wellness nonprofit in Long Beach, California, has named January Parkos Arnall as its executive director. She begins in the post on September 23.
Compound was founded in 2020 by Megan Tagliaferri, a longtime resident of Long Beach, but it closed in 2022 amid a wave of Covid. When it closed, the space’s future was uncertain, but the organization quietly reopened earlier this year and is currently undergoing a leadership transition. Tagliaferri, who served as interim executive director, will transition to board chair.
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“Megan felt like the work she wanted to do for Long Beach, with the some 60 partners she continued to be in dialogue with, wasn’t done,” Parkos Arnall told ARTnews in a recent Zoom interview. “The way she thinks about Long Beach and who’s in Long Beach, and how she can create offerings with them and for them to come together felt like kismet in many ways.”
Located on a 13,000-square-foot campus in the city’s Zaferia District, Compound includes two Art Deco warehouses, an outdoor courtyard and sculpture garden, and a restaurant, Union. The nonprofit’s first big outing since its relaunch will be a group exhibition, “When the Veil Thins,” which opens September 19; curated by Tofer Chin and Mari Orkenyi, it will feature Amir H. Fallah, Analia Saban, Aryana Minai, and Roksana Pirouzmand, among others.
Parkos Arnall said she took the job because she was drawn to the organization’s mission, and that its “combination of art and community and wellness has been really central to my practice for my whole time in museums. Regardless of what department within a museum that I sit, that’s core to who I am.”
She was most recently director of public programs and creative practice at the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Prior to working at the Lucas, she spent five years at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where she a curator and head of the Performance and Public Practice department. She also held a curatorial appointment at the Hammer Museum early in her career.
Parkos Arnall’s interest in wellness dates back more than a decade when she was working at the Hammer, where Mitra Manesh, a mindfulness educator at UCLA, had staged a series mindful meditation viewing programs. “Mitra would guide a group of individuals through looking at one single piece of art and talk about it through many different angles, allow them to spend time with it,” she said. “It was a really powerful process of understanding how this practice of wellness and mindfulness can inflect the power of the artwork to create connections between and among people.”
For Compound, Parkos Arnall said another aim is to bridge not just art and wellness in the programming but to fully integrate the food aspect of it, working closely with Union’s chef-in-residence Eugene Santiago. Her curatorial work has also involved working with artists who have used food in their projects, like Pedro Reyes at the Hammer or an iteration of Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen, when it was staged at the MCA Chicago during his 2017 survey there.
In collaborating with Santiago, she said she wants to organize supper club–like events that will bring in people who live and work in Long Beach as a way to form “intentional community building around the exquisite food that Chef Eugene is already serving up, but making it more accessible.”
Bringing people together, especially the local community in Long Beach, is core to what Parkos Arnall hopes to accomplish at Compound. “It’s rooted in Long Beach, culturally and in the community, and it also speaks to a larger art community in a broader sense,” she said. She wants the organization to act as “another microphone to amplify what’s already happening in this rich and vibrant community. That’s going to be core to building this: getting to know what local stakeholders need, what they want, and how we can help serve.
She added, “A space like this works best when it’s not plopped down. We are excited to hear from people who come into this space. I hope tht this can serve as an invitation to come and build it with us.”