The Listen List: October
After attending the Black Portraitures: The Black Built Environment conference at the end of last month we’ve been thinking a lot about archives and the spaces communities make for themselves. This list focuses not just on what is happening in the city, but where culture is being documented, shared and kept alive.
Here is what’s on our radar for October.
TO SEE: Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images
This October, the Hammer Museum opens the first major museum survey dedicated to Jamaican born artist Mavis Pusey.
Across a career spanning five decades, Pusey developed a distinctive language of geometric abstraction, drawing from architecture, movement and the changing urban environments around her. Mobile Images brings together more than 60 paintings and works on paper, including pieces from her Broken Construction series exploring destruction and renewal as a way of thinking about social change.
After spending the past month thinking about the Black built environment, this feels like a natural place to continue. Pusey’s work asks us to look at cities not simply as backdrops, but as things constantly being built, broken apart and remade.
Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images
Hammer Museum
October 11, 2026 to February 28, 2027
Free admission
TO EAT: Trinistyle Cuisine
Sometimes, you just want some GOOD roti and there are very few places you can get Trini food in Los Angeles, which makes Trinistyle Cuisine a gem.
The restaurant grew from a street food and catering operation, with roti & doubles becoming some of its signatures.
TO JOIN: WalkGood LA
Walk Good LA has built a community around something deceptively simple: gathering people together to move, breathe and feel better.
Their programming includes yoga, meditation, running and other wellness experiences, much of it centred around The WalkGood Yard and outdoor spaces across Los Angeles. Their monthly BreatheGood programme, for example, brings donation based community yoga to Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.
If you are looking for a way into LA community that does not revolve around drinking, networking or having to explain what you do within five minutes of meeting someone, start here.
TO VISIT: Watts Towers Arts Center Campus
Alongside Simon Rodia’s “Nuestro Pueblo”, the campus includes the Watts Towers Arts Center, Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center and Garden Studio Gallery. The site continues to host exhibitions, arts programming and guided tours, even as renovation work continues across the campus.
After conversations around the Black built environment last month, we have been thinking about what it means for a structure to become part of a community’s memory.
The Towers are more than something to photograph and leave. They sit within a much longer history of Watts as a place of artistic production, resistance and cultural life. Visit slowly. Take the tour. Spend time in the surrounding arts campus.
COFFEE SHOP: Endorffeine
Endorffeine is for people who really want to talk about coffee.
Hidden inside Chinatown’s Far East Plaza, the tiny coffee bar is run by Jack Benchakul, a former biochemist whose approach to brewing is as precise as that background might suggest.
Water chemistry is considered alongside extraction. The roaster selection rotates through names including Sey, Drop, Ilse, Prolog, April and Leaves. The menu stays deliberately focused, with espresso and pour over taking centre stage. Benchakul has personally become central to the experience of visiting the shop, preparing drinks from behind the small bar with the kind of attention that turns making coffee into its own form of practice.
TO ATTEND: Black Women’s Film Conference
Hosted by the New Negress Film Society, this annual conference brings together screenings, conversations and community, celebrating the work and creative practices of Black women and nonbinary filmmakers.