Olympic Art on the Rise
LA’s Cultural Affairs Dept. is collaborating with Olympic/Para-Olympic officials in Paris to construct murals in the French city in anticipation of its hosting the 2024 Olympics.
Paris and LA will be the next Olympic/Para-Olympic hosts, this year and in 2028.
Through a Cultural Affairs grant, the Los Angeles artist, KATBING is collaborating with Parisian artist, Kekli, to create the work.
As part of the project to promote French-American shared values of inclusion and equity in the public space, Los Angeles-based muralist KATBING and Paris-based artist Kekli will be jointly designing and painting a new celebratory mural overlooking an important transit plaza in the Quartier Porte de Clignancourt neighborhood in suburban Paris. This selected artist-duo was the result of a local open call process administered by Cultural Affairs and a series of community meetings/juries that were facilitated by the City of Paris, the US Embassy, and Paris-based nonprofit Hypermur to select finalists and optimal pairings with French muralists.
The mural to be produced by KATBING and Kekli will be the last project mural that will be premiered before the Paris 2024 Olympics. In this project, KATBING will travel to Paris for a six-week period in May-June 2024 to jointly produce the mural with Kekli. KATBING will be accompanied by a Los Angeles-based videographer to film and document the production process and the public unveiling of the mural in the summer of 2024. A documentary short film of the project will then be premiered in Los Angeles in July 2024 and published on the Cultural Affairs website to present to audiences locally and beyond.
Congratulations to Cultural Affairs and the artists for creating the LA/Paris connection, and beginning more than four years of Olympic fever in LA!
