Los Angeles, CA (Echo Park)/Where were you born?

© Jasmin Chang 2010

I stumbled upon the Echo Park Farmers' Market and met these women at a booth representing the Echo Park Time Bank.

Answer: (from left to right)
-El Salvador.
-Findlay, Ohio. It's a small town.
-New York City.

I ask what brought each of them to Los Angeles.
-I came here to LA when I was 6, but then we moved to the valley because of the gang violence in the city then, but I came back later because LA's fun. It's a magnet.
-We moved from Ohio to Denver to LA because my mom remarried and my stepfather got a job with the LA Philharmonic as a violinist. This was back in '81.
-I always wanted to come to LA. It was always something my mom would talk about, but we never came, so I always saw it as this place where I would eventually go.

Question: What does community mean to you?

Los Angeles, CA (Downtown Arts District)/Do you have any tattoos and if not, why?

This Saturday, I went to the first of a series of planned quarterly open studio tours in the downtown arts district. It's always so interesting seeing where and how artists work and it was in a really interesting area of downtown, with coffee shops, huge warehouses, graffiti walls, artist studios, vintage stores etc. that I never knew of... I'll definitely be back for more exploring.

Meet Jeremy Quinn, an artist I met in the Rise Industries studio.


© Jasmin Chang 2009

Answer: I don't have any tattoos and the only reason is that I haven't thought of something that I want permanently on my body. Michelle, my wife, recently got a tattoo and seeing that one, I kind of want to just pick something and go with it, because it looks so good. The thing I used to want was a scarab beetle with wings, but I wanted to go to Egypt and find one carved in stone and I haven't been to Egypt, so that kind of died. The think I've currently been interested in is the spacecraft thing (Jeremy had shown me some prints that he had made recently using spacecraft images.) or something like that, maybe Pioneer.

Question: Do you live near where you grow up? If so, why did you stay and if not, why did you move away?