A Network, Not a Nucleus

The more I find myself in conversations across Los Angeles - rooms where culture is being mapped, funded, and discussed at scale - the more I understand why 11:11 has always been difficult to explain. For years, when people asked what we do, I would list it out. “Exhibitions, murals, events, youth programs, community building.” It was all true, but it never quite answered the question. Even people who had known us for years would pause when trying to describe us to someone else. Our board struggled to speak about us. We were referred to by the things we had produced, not by a clear understanding of why we existed. I could feel the gap every time.

I used to think that meant we needed better language. That if I could just tighten the pitch, land on the right phrasing, it would click. But what I’ve come to understand is that we weren’t struggling to explain our work. We were struggling to name the system we were building.

In 2021, Addy and I tried again to put words to it. We wrote that we were building a network of cultural oases - places that give artists the tools to create socially engaged, community-rooted work in public space. It felt right when we wrote it. It held everything we believed in. But when we shared it, it didn’t land. It felt too abstract, too expansive, too wordy. We had the language before we had enough proof.

Looking back, I can see that we had been building toward that idea long before we ever said it out loud.

In 2014, we were given access to a 2,200 square foot retail space on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. It had been sitting empty since it was developed. The local Chamber of Commerce and BID helped us secure it, but the terms were clear. We could be asked to leave at any moment. The goal was to find a paying tenant, and we were just filler. In the meantime, our supporters made a case that instead of letting the space sit lifeless, it could be activated. That art, music, and people might do more for the property than empty white walls ever could.

Our first show in the Tarzana Gallery was called Sudden Impact, and it lived up to its name. The space transformed immediately. We built a rhythm of monthly exhibitions, workshops, and packed openings. It became a place where people didn’t have to leave their own region to feel part of something larger and electric. We sold artwork. We built relationships. We watched a space that had never held life suddenly full of it and necessary.

We stayed for a year. Then we were asked to leave. A Verizon store was moving in.

It broke my heart more than I expected. Not because it was surprising - we had always known it was temporary - but because we had seen, very clearly, what happens when a space like that is allowed to exist. What we built was real. It just wasn’t protected. The Verizon store lasted maybe a year or two. Then it went back to sitting empty again.

That experience stayed with me. Not as a failure, but as a glimpse of something incomplete.

A few years later, we saw that same energy at a completely different scale. In 2017, during the second year of Reseda Rising Art & Music Festival, everything clicked. We shut down a quarter mile of Sherman Way - one of the largest corridors in the Valley. According to LAPD estimates, 12,000 people showed up for a one-night event. Two live music stages, a beer garden featuring seven Valley breweries, over 150 local artists, and organizations from across the Valley showing up with intention. At one point, Addy and I just stood there hugging each other, with tears running down our faces. We had spent years building toward something like that without knowing if it would ever fully materialize. And there it was.

What struck me then, and even more so now, is that none of that energy was imported. It didn’t come from somewhere else. It had always been here. What we created were the conditions for it to be visible all at once.

That realization connects directly to something I named in my last piece. In a region as vast as the San Fernando Valley, cultural capital does not naturally convene into a single downtown or centralized district. It exists in the margins. In garages, backyards, homes, classrooms, temporary spaces, and informal networks. It is dispersed across distance and daily life. Which means that if we want it to be visible, if we want it to compound, it cannot rely on proximity alone. It has to be connected.

That is what we meant when we named “a network of cultural oases.”

A cultural oasis is not just a building or a program. It is a place where the conditions exist for creativity to take root close to home. Where an artist has space to work, where community can gather without needing to leave their neighborhood, where ideas can be tested, shared, and expanded in real time. It is defined by access, consistency, and the ability to return. For us, one oasis created a moment. A network of them creates infrastructure.

---

I met Shannon Currie Holmes in 2012. I was in my mid 20s, right after I moved into a tiny, dark apartment in the newly forming NoHo Arts District. It was walking distance to the Metro, a few bars, some scrappy venues, and one gallery. I walked in once, met her, and then just kept coming back. I was that eager curator-to-be who found something that made sense and refused to let go of it. Shannon and I quickly fell into platonic love.

Shannon owned Cella Gallery, focused on the New Contemporary movement. She had been building satellite galleries for years, activating underutilized properties as a way to support artists and contribute to community revitalization. We realized that one of the spaces she had activated was in the same building where we had started the Canoga Park Art Walk in 2010. We had both been drawn to the same empty property, for the same art activation concept, years apart, without ever knowing the other existed. It was a shocking coincidence and it felt like proof that the need was bigger than any one of us.

She lent us her gallery to host Refuse to Destroy in 2012. I poured everything I had into curating that show. We packed the space. And she saw something in me before I fully saw it in myself. From there, she became a mentor, a sounding board, and incredible friend. Someone who believed in the work as it was still taking shape. I went from showing up at her gallery years before to becoming her assistant as she held the role of Exhibition Supervisor at Brand Library & Art Center. I watched how she built exhibitions with the same care and intention inside an institution.

Years later, in 2025, I brought her on full time at 11:11. She stepped in as I was moving Third House from vision into buildout, helping carry it across the line into something real. And then, in the middle of a conversation that didn’t feel particularly monumental at the time, she said something simple: “What if we opened multiple Third Houses?” It wasn’t a new idea. It was a recognition.

Because in that moment, everything connected. The mission Addy and I wrote in 2021. The storefront in Tarzana. The energy of Reseda Rising. The years of building things that couldn’t last.

It was never about one space. It was always about a network.

In the summer of 2025, I opened Third House, a community-led art studio in Van Nuys. Self-funded, full of risk, matched with just as much belief that it was the right move. Within six months, it stabilized and moved into the black. Not because it is large or heavily resourced, but because it is aligned. A handful of resident working artists, one dedicated staff member, and a consistent rhythm. More importantly, it is not entirely ours to control. We create the framework. The community brings it to life.

On any given week, the space shifts depending on who walks through the door. A resident artist working through a mural commission design. A group of organizers mapping out their next public activation. Conversations that stretch longer than planned because people finally have somewhere to sit and think together. A small performance where someone tests something new in front of a room that feels safe enough to hold it. An exhibition organized by community members who need a place to tell a story that otherwise would not have been told.

It is not a venue in the traditional sense. It is not a program that begins and ends. It is a place where practice can take root and be shared.

That is the difference. That is the proof we didn’t have in 2021.

When I think about the next five years, I am not thinking about expansion in the way people often assume. I am thinking about continuity. About what happens if this doesn’t disappear. About what happens if there are more than one of these spaces, positioned across the Valley in a way that reflects how people actually live here. Spaces that are close enough to home to be used regularly, and connected through shared programming, shared artists, and shared intention.

A network of these spaces is not an abstract idea. It is the continuation of what we have always believed. When artists have the time and space to create, to collaborate, to stay in conversation with their communities, they don’t just produce work. They lead. They imagine different ways of living and being together, and they make those possibilities visible. When we build systems that support that work, the impact extends far beyond the walls of any one space. It reaches into neighborhoods, into public life, into the ways we understand each other. And in a region as vast and dispersed as the San Fernando Valley, one space is not enough to hold that potential. It has to be shared, multiplied, and connected.

If this vision resonates, you can help us build more spaces like this by supporting the work here.

Through Sherman Way

Written by:

Erin Stone, 11:11 Projects

Co-Founder/Executive Director

We used to flip a plastic trash can lid upside down, sit inside it, and push each other down the hill. It was a moderately steep residential street. Burning plastic under our legs. No supervision. Just gravity and asphalt.

From my house you could just see more houses. Stucco and driveways repeating themselves block after block. I grew up across from an elementary school, and that campus was my entire geography. As a kid, I played handball against its walls and skated in the parking lot. As a teenager, I snuck out climb the roof, and watch the streetlights hum over rooftops that all looked the same. One afternoon my dog escaped and barked outside my classroom door. Home and public space overlapped.

“Biking distance” in the Valley meant something different than it did elsewhere. It meant crossing major thoroughfares. It meant weaving through dense traffic. It meant Sherman Way.

I was never interested in the mall version of the Valley. The fluorescent caricature exported in the 1980s — the Valley Girl as shorthand for superficial suburbia. You couldn’t escape the strip malls. The malls were a center point. It structured the map whether you liked it or not. But instead of going inside, we drifted to the abandoned mini golf course behind it.

We sat on cracked concrete where the fake waterfalls no longer ran. We climbed over barriers that were meant to keep us out. We made something out of the margins of what was built for consumption. The mall was there. We just chose the edges. We were inventive and restless.

Long before subdivisions and arterial roads, this land was home to the Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam peoples. It was a network of thriving villages connected through seasonal waterways, oak woodlands, and trade routes that tied the region into a broader Southern California system.

In 1797, Spain established Mission San Fernando Rey de España, reorganizing the land under colonial agriculture. It later shifted through the Mexican ranch era into American private ownership. In the early 20th century, the Los Angeles Aqueduct enabled annexation; access to water bound the Valley to the growing city of LA. After World War II, housing policy, freeways, and aerospace industry expansion transformed it into one of the nation’s largest suburban regions- planned primarily for residence and movement, not congregation. Places built this way do not automatically generate visibility. They generate neighborhoods.

Growing up, I didn’t know this history as deeply. I knew that when people wanted to participate in something visible and electric, they went “over the hill.” In the early 2000s, when I started making art, that pattern became impossible to ignore. In 2008, Addy and I went to a warehouse show in LA where I exhibited work and friends’ bands were playing. At some point we looked around and realized how many of us were from the Valley — the musicians, the organizers, the audience. We had all traveled away from home to be part of something that didn’t seem to exist where we lived. But it did.

The San Fernando Valley holds nearly two million residents. Entire neighborhoods here are larger than some American cities. And yet, we introduce ourselves to non-Angelenos as “LA-based.” Rarely “San Fernando Valley.” Over the last 20 years of doing this work, I’ve had the privilege of stepping back far enough to understand that this is not about a lack of talent. It’s about structure.

Art in the Valley is not absent. It’s decentralized.

It’s in garages and backyards. In storage units where bands rehearse. In immigrant households layering tradition and adaptation. It doesn’t announce itself through tightly packed arts corridors because the region wasn’t designed for clustering in that way. It’s dispersed and in the margins.

Funding models often favor compact districts with clear boundaries. Cultural tourism follows walkable nodes and transit lines. Investment compounds where visibility already exists. The Valley’s scale and layout operate differently. Our neighborhoods are expansive. Our corridors are long. Movement here has historically depended on cars and distance.

That doesn’t make the region culturally empty. It makes it harder to see. As a teenager riding through Sherman Way traffic, I felt like we were constantly searching for something to plug into. Now I understand that feeling differently.

If artists left to build careers elsewhere, it’s because recognition accumulated in other parts of the city. “Los Angeles” carried more weight than “San Fernando Valley,” because cultural capital tends to gather where institutions, media, and philanthropy are already concentrated. For years, I watched artists from the Valley cross the hill for opportunity, for visibility, for legitimacy. I did it myself. That migration made sense. The infrastructure we needed existed there.

But the landscape is shifting. As the city grows more expensive and centralized districts become less accessible, more artists are staying in- or returning to- the Valley. Not as a fallback. As a practical and creative choice.

This is the moment that matters. The ingenuity has always been here. What hasn’t always been here are the systems that allow it to anchor.

The work now is not to rebrand the Valley or compete with downtown. It is to build connective tissue for what already exists- across long corridors, across neighborhoods that function like small cities, across communities that have been making culture without formal scaffolding for decades.

I grew up riding through traffic looking for somewhere to belong. Now I’m committed to helping build the kind of infrastructure that makes belonging visible- here.

If this is a moment of possibility, then clarity matters. A meaningful cultural presence in the San Fernando Valley will not emerge organically from momentum alone. It requires deliberate structure:

1. Permanent, artist-controlled space. Short-term pop-ups generate energy. Long-term real estate builds ecosystems. The Valley needs secured cultural hubs: owned or protected spaces where artists can work, exhibit, gather, and remain without displacement cycles resetting progress every five years.

2. Distributed infrastructure, not one arts district. Because the Valley is geographically expansive, tt requires multiple nodes connected through programming, transportation partnerships, and coordinated calendars — a network rather than a nucleus.

3. Funding models that recognize scale. Traditional grant frameworks favor compact, walkable districts. Valley-based cultural investment must account for our distance, car-dependency, and decentralized visibility. Metrics should include regional reach, school-based engagement, and corridor-based public art — not just foot traffic density.

4. Professional pathways that anchor artists locally. Residencies, apprenticeships, public art commissions, teaching opportunities, and paid administrative roles must exist here. When artists can build full careers in the Valley, cultural capital compounds locally.

5. Civic alignment that treats culture as infrastructure.Public art, creative workforce development, and artist-led programming should be integrated into economic development plans, transit corridors, and neighborhood revitalization strategies. Culture should not be an afterthought added once construction is complete; it should shape planning from the beginning.

6. A shared narrative.Visibility compounds where identity is claimed. The Valley needs artists, institutions, and residents who name where they are. Not as a subdivision of somewhere else, but as a cultural region in its own right.

7. Regional recognition proportional to reality.The San Fernando Valley is larger in square miles than the rest of the City of Los Angeles and holds roughly half of its population. It is not peripheral geography. It is half the city.

As Los Angeles prepares for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, systems are being built to move visitors through venue corridors and into surrounding neighborhoods. Sepulveda Basin will host events. It sits at the 405 gateway at the threshold between the Valley and the rest of the city.

If the Valley is treated only as a venue site or pass-through zone, the pattern repeats.

If it is recognized as a co-equal cultural region with mapped arts destinations, coordinated programming, and investment along transit corridors, the moment becomes catalytic. Otherwise, we are left with hundreds of thousands of displaced locals who make up over 2 million visits to the Sepulveda Basin per year.

Visibility follows infrastructure. Infrastructure follows recognition. The Valley must be planned as part of the whole, not adjacent to it.

None of this is theoretical. It is structural.

The Valley does not lack creativity. It lacks alignment, permanence, and reinforcement.

And those are solvable problems.