Upcoming Events

Panoramic Vistas, Visionary Dreams - with Sara Velas at PRS

Panoramic Vistas, Visionary Dreams

Thursday, November 5, 2026 - 7:00pm

**At the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz**

3910 Los Feliz Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Tickets: $14 (at PRS)

Sara Velas, Founder and Director of the Velaslavasay Panorama, presents an overview of the panoramic form through the lens of utopian thought, visionary living and frontier explorations.

This illustrated lecture includes information on the only 360-degree panorama painting of Los Angeles - Sara Velas' Panorama of the Valley of the Smokes (2000), which depicts the LA basin in an era of pastoral and agricultural roots, indigenous possibility, and the foreshadowing of westward migrations. Looking at the heritage-mode of panoramas, few are non-battle paintings. Exceptions include works like Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1987) by Werner Tübke in Bad Frankenhausen, an allegorical and surreal depiction of socialism, and the monumental Clear World of the Blissful (1929) by Elisàr von Kupffer.

The talk also previews the Velaslavasay Panorama’s new installation opening November 12th, 2026, Florence-In-Ruin: An Excavation, featuring a moving panorama constructed from archives related to art history, the Port of Long Beach, and the Alameda Corridor.

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

Sara Velas is an artist, curator, graphic designer and native Los Angeleno whose work bridges 19th-century spectacle and 21st-century immersive inquiry. She is the Founder and Director of the Velaslavasay Panorama, an institution dedicated to the panorama phenomenon that she established in the year 2000 on Hollywood Boulevard to explore tropes of cinema and visual storytelling in collaboration with a wide range of artists, designers, movie makers, cultural practitioners and more. An Honorary Member of the International Panorama Council, Velas led the creation of the world’s only collaborative USA><China panorama. Sara and her longtime collaborator Ruby Carlson are founders of Immersive Research Media Associates (IRMA360), a consulting project on immersive art and entertainment. Born in Panorama City, California, Sara Velas studied Painting in St. Louis at the tail end of the 20th century, receiving her BFA from Washington University in 1999. Velas is an avid architectural preservationist and co-wrote the nomination which issued the first instance of cultural historic protection to a trailer park—a testament to her belief that forgotten spaces, like forgotten technologies deserve a second life.

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Florence in Ruin—or—The Great Escape
Doors open: 7:30pm
Slide Show by Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson w/Introduction by Norman Klein & Margo Bistis: 8:00pm
Garden Reception: 8:30 - 9:30pm

Tickets $18 (Free for VPES Members with advanced RSVP to vpes@panoramaonview.org)

Archivists Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson will present a 20 min. experimental slideshow Florence in Ruin—or—The Great Escape for the opening of the installation Florence in Ruin: An Excavation by Sara Velas, on view at the Velaslavasay Panorama November 13th thru December 19th, 2026.

Originally presented at the 2024 Magic Lantern Conference aboard the Queen Mary, the former Cunard ocean liner, Florence in Ruin—or—The Great Escape is an experimental dual-projection slide lecture combining 35mm and magic lantern slides. The work interrogates the development of modern academic conceptions of visual beauty, geolocating art and beauty within the circulation of images and value through the port complex. Drawing on cinematic references ranging from Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space (1997) and Reveries: Going Deeper (2020) to David Zucker’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), among others, the lecture offers a playful invocation of Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses.”

This event is the inaugural iteration of the series The Archival Phantasist, made in collaboration with Velaslavasay Panorama curators/artists Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson and curators/writers Norman Klein and Margo Bistis, who will introduce the performance and lead an informal discussion in the garden to follow. 

Florence in Ruin: An Excavation

On View November 13, 2026 - December 19, 2026

An installation that organizes and displays a psychic fixation on the Alameda Corridor and the Port of Long Beach as a terminal for corruption, paranoia, petroleum industries, and the transmission of art history. 

Florence in Ruin: An Excavation is a part of the 2026 Hyper SoCal initiative, which brings awareness to nonprofit and municipal art venues supporting working artists in Southern California. The exhibition is made possible in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiast Society.