03/10/2025
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.
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