Mourning Home: Collective Futures in Los Angeles

Image by Myshell Curry: Brianna Mims pictured with the Thomas Mann House in the background.
Su. November 15, 2026
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: Thomas Mann House

A site-responsive performance collaboration which explores grief and mourning through the transatlantic currents of the slave trade and the European exile community.

Language: English・By Invitation Only

 

Info

Mourning Home: Collective Futures in Los Angeles is a site-responsive performance collaboration between homeLA and the Thomas Mann House. Featuring Los Angeles-based artists Harmony Holiday, Brianna Mims, and Chris Powe, Mourning Home examines our collective grief and mourning. Through textual, sonic, and embodied storytelling, the project explores the convergent and divergent results of forced and voluntary migration as modes of survival. Centering the ongoing generational effects reverberating from the transatlantic slave trade of African peoples, these new performance works illuminate the precarity and resoluteness of the body under surveilled grief. By refusing isolationism, the artists offer public moments to wail, whisper and return to community nourishment. Here, we mourn the loss of home, known and unknown.  

 

Grief and mourning manifests in congregation, procession, and collective breath; collaboration becomes a mechanism for processing this gravity together. Ivie Obulor, Executive Director of the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism and a 2026 Thomas Mann Fellow, researches mourning as a social practice. We often understand mourning as something personal, an individual encounter, but her work opens up larger questions: how do communities mourn? How do cities hold loss? How might mourning help us recognize shared histories of rupture, displacement, and transformation? 

 

Collective mourning can be a spatial experience. homeLA and the Thomas Mann House share an investment in Los Angeles as a sprawling site of complexity. The city is shaped by the continual reimagining of what “home” can mean. The Thomas Mann House stands as a historical marker of intellectual refuge and cultural production—a place where artists and thinkers exiled by European fascism found sanctuary in Los Angeles and, from that position, produced new cultural and political imaginaries. Through California Modernist architecture - environments built for stillness, connection, and contemplation—space is carved out for memory, dreams and healing to coexist. These shared histories coalesce to deepen our understanding of a shared humanity, divining a future that fully acknowledges past violences and honors present communal processing to weave belonging into the next phase of our societal development. homeLA’s work centers Los Angeles as a layered, contested landscape, where histories of migration, and belonging intersect, shaping and reshaping the city’s cultural fabric. Together, we invite the visitors to the Thomas Mann House and all that are curious about moving through grief, to ponder if mutual emancipation is even possible next to the enormity of build-up and physical release that we call mourning. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and dissent as we as artist-citizens grapple with the notion of social transfiguration. 

Participants

Mims
Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Mims is an artist, abolitionist, and facilitator based in Los Angeles. Her practice spans performance, advocacy, public art, social practice, and fine art objects. She experiences the body as a site of liberation and her first place of inquiry. Grounded in embodied knowing, her work explores relationships between self, community, land, and more-than-human life. She is interested in questioning as a tool for collective understanding, the role of interpersonal relationships in building healthy communities, and the sacred wisdom held within cultures and ecosystems. She is the founder of Marooning Bodies, an immersive worldbuilding game and artistic ecosystem rooted in maroon histories, biomimicry, and communal imagination. She is also the creator of Uncle Ronnie’s Room, an installation and advocacy project centering her uncle’s incarceration and the collective labor of abolition. Mims’ work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Converse, LA County Department of Arts and Culture, NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and residencies in Senegal and Ghana. 

Harmony Holiday
Harmony Holiday is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working across dance, film, music and archives of black culture. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever (2022) and Maafa (2025). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at the Los Angeles music and archive venue 2220arts. Holiday is a staff writer for LA Times Image and 4Columns and has had featured writing in The New Yorker, Bookforum, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Drift, among others. Her first solo exhibition, Black Backstage, exploring the aspects of black performance culture that cannot be spectacularized through film and sound sculpture, was presented at The Kitchen in New York in 2024. Holiday won a 2025 Creative Capital Award and has received fellowships from The Poetry Foundation, Silver’s Foundation, The Rabkin Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among other awards for her writing. Holiday is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln for Yale University Press, a book of memoir and music criticism, and her next collection of poems, among other writing, film, and curatorial projects.  
Chris Powe

Los Angeles native, Chris Powe, is an exciting new voice on the alto saxophone. He honed his skills in high school, took private lessons under the tutelage of esteemed multi-instrumentalist Scott Mayo, and attended the Fernando Pullum Community Arts Center (FPCAC), which is in the heart of Los Angeles’ Black creative community, Leimert Park. Powe earned his bachelor’s degree in Music Business/Management from Berklee College of Music, and then returned home to Los Angeles to build his career. He has held residencies under his own name, played multiple venues across the city, and made his debut with his EP The Search, which is now available on all streaming platforms! 

Bernard Brown

Bernard Brown is an award-winning performer, choreographer, arts activist, and educator who situates their work at the intersection of Blackness, Queerness, and belonging. With an extensive performing career, Brown also serves as Director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves, choreographing for stage, specific sites, film, and opera presented globally including invitations, residencies and commissions from The Getty, On The Boards, REDCAT, among many others. Invested in expanded notions of home, Brown is an interim Co-Director and the Curator for homeLA, where he previously served as performer, choreographer and advisory board member. His other curatorial work has been seen at the California African American Museum and the Highways Performance Space, among others. A first-generation college graduate, Brown earned his MFA from UCLA and BFA from Purchase College. He is an Associate Professor at UC San Diego, a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique Instructor, and was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times has called him “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”

Ivie Obulor

Ivie Obulor was the first anti-racism officer of the city of Heidelberg and is director of ECCAR (European Coalition of Cities against Racism). She supports more than 150 European cities in their anti-racist transformation. The roots of her work lie in community organizing: as founder of Migration Hub Heidelberg she strengthens migrant communities, and with RosaMag she co-edited Schwarz wird großgeschrieben. Ivie Obulor works at the intersections of civil society, politics, and administration to shape social change. She is a 2026 Thomas Mann House Fellow.

Partner

A collaboration of the Thomas Mann House and homeLA, presented with the friendly support of UNESCO's International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities. homeLA is supported by the California Arts Council, a state arts funding agency, and fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.