The oldest brick building in Southern California is getting an artistic glow-up.

La Puente Valley Historical Society, stewards of the 170-year-old Rowland Mansion in the City of Industry, is partnering with homeLA for a performance event featuring the works of four artists who delved into, confronted and then reinterpreted the narratives surrounding the home.

“Redrawing the Rancho” from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Nov. 9 promises to transform the home through taste, sound, dance, performances and art installations, said Chloë Flores, executive director and curator of the nomadic performance group, which engages with sites around Los Angeles and creates multimedium art based on them.

Flores said what struck her first about the mansion was its location, completely landlocked between warehouses and industry, without even a proper street address. People drive into the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District lot to access the home.

“It felt like the Rowland Mansion was struggling in the face of its own erasure. I remember thinking,‘Who decided it was a good idea to close off a historic home from public access?’” Flores said. “That alone said so much about how we value — or neglect — our histories.”

The notion of “home,” especially historic homes that are supposed to educate, often connects people to place.

“But this one seemed forgotten, surrounded by the same forces of industrialization that once displaced its land,” Flores said. “That’s where the project began — asking what happens when we actually listen. What stories start to surface when artists, historians and community members engage a place like this anew? The mansion holds the story of California’s land grants and settler expansion, but it also carries quieter histories of labor, migration and care.”

It’s those “overlooked narratives” that can be brought back through artists’ work,” Flores said.

The mansion was an ideal canvas for Eva Aguila, Nao Bustamante, Victoria Marks and Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, who intertwined histories of colonization, agriculture and industrialization that shaped the Rowland Mansion into performance.

Guests will eat homemade buñuelos and champurrado adapted from archived Rowland Mansion recipes, attend a celebratory ribbon-cutting performance for a mansion replica bird house, experience dance on the grounds and in the house, and participate in a ritual commemoration of a new pergola installation.

“Most of all, audiences will encounter the layered histories of this place through art and witness how artists are bringing them vibrantly into the present,” Flores said.

Eva Aguila’s piece, “The Land Holds Your Name,” grew out of the story of the 169-year-old grapevine still growing on the Rowland Mansion property.

“She was immediately drawn to it and wanted to understand its story — who planted it, who cared for it, and what it revealed about the history of colonization and agricultural labor in Los Angeles,” Flores said. “Her research led her deep into archives and even DNA testing at UC Davis to trace the vine’s lineage”

Aguila has been caring for the vine ever since. Flores said she’s cleaned and cleared the area around it, built a new pergola to support its growth, and will prune it again in February: Long after the event ends, her care continues.

For the event, she’s created a ceremonial performance around the vine that’s part memorial, part ritual that honors the Indigenous people whose labor and presence have been erased from its history.

This work also connects to her broader inquiry, “Vino de Sangre,” which traces the intertwined histories of wine, land, and colonial labor across California and Mexico. In that sense, her project at the Rowland Mansion becomes one branch of a larger conversation about ancestry, ecology, and repair, Flores said.

Home, for the artists at homeLA, is not a fixed place.

“It’s something we have to keep redefining and protecting together,” Flores said. “With homeLA, I’ve tried to reimagine home as something communal and interdependent — a space where artists and audiences can reckon with the politics of place, equity, and belonging in Los Angeles.”

“Right now, as we’re seeing homes raided, burned, and priced out of reach, the idea of “home” feels especially charged. The San Gabriel Valley — and Los Angeles more broadly — carry so many overlapping stories of migration, labor, and resilience. This project asks what it means to create a sense of home in the face of displacement, and how art can help us reimagine belonging as something we build through relation and repair.”

The artists said their involvement with the Rowland Mansion doesn’t end with the event. Several of the works will continue into the spring, what Flores calls “living processes of care.” It is something that Amy Rowland, of the pioneer family that built the mansion, understands well.

The sixth-generation descendant of pioneer John Rowland serves as president of the La Puente Valley Historical Society and is leading the charge to preserve and celebrate the old homestead, which the L.A. Conservancy calls “a rare, extant piece of California history from its pre-statehood, pioneer days.”

The November event is actually a long-playing ode. Early next year, “Redrawing the Rancho” will be part of a Getty Research Institute webinar tied to their theme of “Repair,” which feels like the perfect continuation of what artists have been exploring at the mansion.

“Redrawing the Rancho” is set from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Nov. 9 at the Rowland Mansion, 16021 Gale Ave., in the City of Industry.

Tickets are $39.19 general admission; $28.52 for artists and educators; and $17.85 for students and seniors.