Rosten Woo
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© 2025
For my “other” work – civic design projects, click here. For some selections of writing, click here.
What Water Wants (2024)
During twin crises of floods and droughts, how can Angelenos reimagine our relationship with water? Clockshop and Los Angeles-based artist Rosten Woo consider this in What Water Wants, a temporary art commission on the Los Angeles River. Woo activates a section of the Glendale Narrows channel in Elysian Valley to situate visitors within the hydrological networks of the greater Los Angeles Basin, one of the city’s most misunderstood and complex infrastructural systems. In a 30-minute experience, the audio tour moves between a guided meditation and speculative disaster horror, evoking multiple perspectives of the river’s history and future as if flipping through sonified apertures. The sound composition was designed for binaural listening to sonically transport listeners across geographic time and space, allowing them to experience water’s flows, speeds, and movements across the basin.
Clockshop’s three-year project with artist Rosten Woo aims to engage communities along the river in Northeast LA to foster an understanding of human/water interactions in their own backyards, from parking lots to wetlands. This initiative is in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy and California State Parks as part of the Bowtie Wetland Demonstration Project, a three-acre stormwater filtration and habitat restoration project along the banks of the LA River. The project will culminate in a permanent art commission at the Bowtie once it opens to the public. Sound design and score by Celia Hollander.
Reframe: Santa Monica City Hall Murals (2024)
In 2023, I started working with an amazing team at Metzli projects (including Joel Garcia, Robin Garcia, and Susannah Laramee Kidd) on a public process for Santa Monica's Reframe Initiative. The project involved public education, public mediation, and a “citizen assembly” style process designed to create healing and positive movement with concrete resolutions around a controversial WPA-era Mural by Stanton Macdonald-Wright that frames City Hall and prominently depicts contact between settlers and first peoples. The end product was a set of recommendations (unanimously approved by Santa Monica’s City Council) and a sourcebook of ideas for ways to move forward and respond to the mural.
Mutual Air (2018-2020)
This project emerged from an artist-in-residence appointment at the Exploratorium, a community museum dedicated to awareness, located in San Francisco. Mutual Air is a distributed ambient sculpture. Thirty networked bells installed throughout Oakland work to display disparities (and unities) in air quality across the city. Each bell is a self-contained, solar powered kinetic sculpture that reacts to global C02 data and hyperlocal measurements of particulate matter. Together they work to produce an ambient soundscape layering information about the moment to moment content of the air into everyday experiences. Individuals and institutions sign up to "host" bells in areas with dynamic air quality.
In conjunction with the public sculpture, four short films about the logistics and politics of measurement screen in the Exploratorium's Bay Observatory.
Mutual Air is a project by Rosten Woo and the Exploratorium with key partnerships and cooperation from the Oakland Museum of California, Chabot Space and Science Center, City of Oakland Public Art Program and Cultural Affairs Division, and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Mutual Air is generously supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s Open Spaces Program. IoT platform in-kind support provided by Particle.
Another World Lies Beyond (2018)
Consisting of a video animation, an audio tour of The Huntington’s grounds, and an accompanying pamphlet, Woo’s project is grounded on the research of Robert V. Hine (1921–2015), a scholar of the American West who focused on utopian communities in California, as well as on the quixotic journey of John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886), who was commissioned by the federal government to survey the U.S.-Mexico border. The audio tour, inspired by Hine’s increased reliance on oral histories as he lost his eyesight, invites visitors to re-experience the gardens and the landscape through their layered histories. By bridging these histories to the environment, Woo creates a dialogue between indoor and outdoor spaces and objects, as well as between the archives, collections, and the gardens.Takachizu (2017)
Takachizu = Treasure Map. In 2017, I opened a museum space in Little Tokyo with nothing in it. Over the following year, Little Tokyo residents brought objects of personal or communal significance from Little Tokyo to be documented and described. The space filled up and community show and tell events created spaces for intergenerational conversations about the neighborhood, it’s history of forced displacement and return, and strategies for surviving and thriving into the future. Takachizu events included screenings of home movies curated by Visual Communications, Performances by Hirokazu, and community show and tells on themes of economy, food, spirituality, political history, theater, sports, housing, and aging in place.
This project was commissioned by Little Tokyo Service Center and Sustainable Little Tokyo in the service of grounding a long-term political and cultural strategy for a thriving neighborhood, one of the United States’ last remaining Japantowns in the midst of a downtown real estate boom
A Park is Made by People (2016)
California State Parks commissioned this permanent work to tell the story of the Chinatown Yards Alliance and the creation of the Los Angeles State Historic Park. The 20-year saga is simultaneously one of the landmark cases of Environmental Justice in America, and a bittersweet story of half-fulfilled dreams.
The project consists of a central sculptural and an additional 9 markers spread throughout the park - each with an associated audio segment that threads dozens of interviews and oral histories into a warts-and-all story of political action, community organizing, and backroom deals - all the pieces that came together to create the 32-acre park that sits at the site today.
The Back Nine (2016)
In 2016, the City of LA began to rezone each of the city’s Community Plan Areas, beginning with Downtown Los Angeles. The rezoning of Downtown LA has huge ramifications for the community of Skid Row. One of the city’s largest concentrations of low-income housing as well as an epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.
In conjunction with several other projects (see Our Skid Row) designed to help organized and represent the viewpoint of Skid Row residents in these planning discussions, I designed and built this nine-hole golf course in collaboration with the Los Angeles Poverty Department. It served as the set for their play of the same name, and functioned as a playable nine-hole golf course.
Each hole in the course tells a story about the history and future of real estate development, housing, and homelessness in Los Angeles’s Skid Row. The golf course was built and designed with help from Tiffanie Tran and LeeBuild.
Willowbrook is / es . . . (2012)
The Los Angeles County Arts Commission asked me to produce a visioning tool for residents of Willowbrook - an unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles county between Watts and Compton –to communicate their hopes and dreams to planners. Instead, I produced a series of publications, events, and installations designed to make visible what was already there. The project was funded through an NEA program designed to spur "creative placemaking." I interpreted this to mean the ways that people invest their neighborhoods with care and meaning. In Willowbrook, a largely residential neighborhood (on the cusp of receiving a "transformative" amount of investment from the County), a lot of this care and creativity was most visible in the backyards and driveways of people's private homes.I spent a year in Willowbrook getting to know the place. I built a public billboard and telephone tree that surveyed residents their favorite places; produced a zine and survey system modeled on Christopher Willats' West London Social Resource Project; organized a local art, music and food festival (featuring Banda Las Reynas and the Centennial High School marching band) and commissioned a series of home, garden, and vehicle tours. The goal of this activity was to create windows through which Willowbrook professionals (the experts and administrators who were employed in creating "change" for Willowbrook) might see Willowbrook, the place, a little better.
Willowbrook is. . . / es . . . is a book about Willowbrook, CA. It is the book-documentation of the project and features photography by Alyse Emdur, an introduction by Pastor Dolores Glass, interviews by Jesus Hermosillo, and design by Tiffanie Tran and myself.
Envisioning Development (2008-2010)
Envisioning Development is a series of workshops and teaching tools that I developed with the Center For Urban Pedagogy. Each installment demystifies a different aspect of land use and planning using multiple modes of engagement: didactic visual primers; exploratory, tactile tools for group discussions; and interactive online information graphics. The series is developed with the collaboration of many community partners, including organizations like The Pratt Center, The Fifth Avenue Committee, and Make the Road NY. The first module What is Affordable Housing? was released in 2009. The next module, "What is Zoning?" came out in 2013.
The Bowtie (2010-present)
Clockshop and the California State Parks System asked me to develop a project for the Bowtie, a 13.5 acre parcel of land adjacent to the Los Angeles River. The Bowtie is owned by the California State Parks, purchased as a preventative measure (with community groups hoping to prevent the site from turning to industrial uses) with the eventual goal of connecting to the Los Angeles River State Park to make a massive 100-acre greenway. In the meantime, the Bowtie appears to the casual viewer as a more or less abandoned post-industrial vacant lot.
The Los Angeles River Signage Program is a set of three connected signage systems that takes visitors through the vacant lot in maps, diagrams, and stories, using the uncanny beauty and mystery of the location as a hook to talk about real-estate speculation, native plant ideology, and water systems, respectively.
The LARSP is now closed to viewers as it transforms into a daylight stormdrain. It will open again in 2027 with a new work by me! In the meantime you can still take this walk in your mind.
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (1999-2019)
A lot of what I do today was invented through trial and error while I was at CUP. I was the co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, an New York City non-profit organization that illuminates the built environment to help everyday people engage politics. The organization produces publications, media environments, and curricula through collaborative research and design. Initially a collaborative art and design practice, today CUP is a non-profit organization that employs scores of educators, designers, and researchers and connects disparate communities. I am enormously proud of the work produced at CUP during my time there, and the work that CUP continues to do today. Visit CUP
With CUP I produced many exhibitions and developed many ongoing programs: making policy public - a quarterly series of illustrated guides to public policy; Urban Investigations - a high school program that challenges young people to investigate the politics of their neighborhoods, and envisioning development - a series of teaching tools for community organizations dealing with land-use issues. I also organized, People and Buildings, a monthly series of public programs that provided a space for discussions at the intersection of design and politics.