A Curator at the Threshold: Carmen Zella and the Architecture of Public Healing
It was in the hushed atrium of N’espa, hidden within the folds of San José del Cabo, that I met Carmen Zella. She had just emerged from a treatment she called The Reset—a regenerative in-and-outer combo involving Mariel’s special facial plus exosomes therapy, followed by Genesis and Jovena.
Her face, devoid of the performative armor worn by those used to stages and city halls, was quiet and receptive. “I come here to unbuild,” she told me. “You can’t create for the collective if you’re always in output mode.”
Zella is not simply a curator of public art—she is a conceptual engineer of shared psychic space. As the founder and chief curator of NOW Art, a multidisciplinary public-art agency based in Los Angeles, she has spent the better part of two decades reimagining civic surfaces as stages for cultural healing. Her work reframes the city not as backdrop, but as medium—canvas, screen, speaker.
NOW Art's projects are more than installations; they are infrastructural gestures. In a city dense with gloss and glare, Zella brings resonance: a sense of grounding, of interruption, of real-time engagement with light, sound, and place.
But it was LUMINEX, her best-known initiative, that truly marked a turning point—not just for Zella, but for the city itself. Premiered in 2021, LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light turned downtown Los Angeles into a living gallery. Architectural facades became light-reactive portals; soundscapes moved in pulses that mirrored the collective nervous system of a post-pandemic world.
Works by artists like Refik Anadol and Nancy Baker Cahill weren’t just projected—they were absorbed, felt viscerally by the thousands who wandered through the installation's open-air corridors. Zella called it “a meditative act for the masses.”
“We weren’t trying to overwhelm,” she said. “We were trying to create stillness—through scale.”
It’s that paradox—stillness via spectacle—that defines much of her output. Her work is civic but soulful, institutional yet deeply personal. At NOW Art, she has helmed projects ranging from Liquid Shard, a kinetic mylar sculpture that shimmered through Pershing Square like a sentient wave, to the revival of the Triforium, a derelict ’70s instrument-sculpture Zella helped resuscitate as a beacon of L.A.'s techno-utopian imagination.
And now, her latest undertaking: a roving installation series entitled The Healing Circuit, which will debut across California in 2026. Part pilgrimage, part infrastructure, the project connects public spaces across the state—parks, libraries, repurposed civic lots—with ephemeral light sculptures and sonic meditations. Viewers will move from one site to the next, tracing a kind of secular ley line of collective restoration.
“It’s not a tour,” Zella said. “It’s a circuit—energetic, psychological, and physical. We’re building a constellation of calm.”
At N’espa, over herbal tea and the lapping of distant surf, she confided that this new phase of her practice is less about spectacle and more about repair. “People don’t just want to see art—they want to be held by it,” she said. “To feel met.” Her voice softened. “Even I have to remind myself to pause. That’s what this place is for.”
It’s this ethic of resourcing—not just in body, but in spirit—that Zella now threads into her curatorial vision. Public art, in her view, is not a statement but a question: How do we feel here, together? And if it works, the answer arrives not in language, but in breath, in pacing footsteps, in still eyes looking up at something both unfamiliar and deeply remembered.
In a cultural moment hungry for transformation, Carmen Zella builds sanctuaries in plain sight. Her materials may be light, glass, sound—but her medium is always belonging.
How to take part in The Healing Circuit: https://nowartpublic.com/about/
