Taking the Cure: A Talk with Lyra Kilston
$10
An illustrated talk on the 19th-century health seekers, who fled overcrowded cities in pursuit of nature cures. Starting with the rural sanatorium movement in Europe, she then focuses on the healthful beacon of California, which lured people with illnesses and their (often dubious) healers in droves.
Lyra Kilston is a writer and editor in Los Angeles focused on architecture, ecology, design, art, urbanism, oddballs, and lesser-known histories.
Lyra's first book, Sun Seekers: The Cure of California (Atelier Éditions (http://atelier-editions.com/store/sun-seekers-the-cure-of-california), 2019), looks at three moments in Southern California history and the many eccentric newcomers—from fervent nature-cure healers to modern architects to barefoot vegetarian hermits—who built up the region’s renown as a center for healthy, natural lifestyles long before the 1960s.
Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Next City, Artforum, Wired, TIME, Hyperallergic, Art in America, ICON, frieze, museum and biennial publications, and inspired an award-winning KCET documentary. She is an editor for the Getty Museum, a consulting editor for Hyperallergic, and on the Advisory Council of Minerva Projects. Previously she was on the research and curatorial team of the architecture exhibition Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, presented at the Getty Museum and the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
Like Southern Californians of a century past, she enjoys curative sun baths.