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For forty years, Nib Geebles and Abira Ali have been recording the unspoken, everyday details of their hometown in their beloved calendar.
LOS ANGELES – Shuttered storefronts, parked cars, hand-painted signage, power lines, graffiti and bright signage are essential components of LA’s visual landscape, but what if they were the focal point?
For the past forty years, artists Nib Geebles and Abira Ali have placed the unspoken, everyday particulars of their hometown on their locally celebrated calendar, gesturing with irony at the politics of urban space in a rapidly evolving city. Urban decay is the muse of the 2026 calendar, “Unknown Landmarks,” from malls in Highland Park to flower shops in Eagle Rock.
Gordon Henderson, who goes by the pseudonym Nib Geebles, and Ali began working together through letters they exchanged when they were seventeen. Collages, envelope-wrapped shells, and surreal postcards served as their first collective works, paralleling an enduring, decades-long collaboration that ground their practice in everyday Northeast Los Angeles.
Both consider documentation and conservation as a central part of their work. As you flip through the calendar pages, Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard disappear from view, replaced by local establishments often owned by immigrants or still in existence.
“It’s transforming now and there will be a lot less of these mom-and-pop stores,” Henderson said. Hyperallergic. “Shops with a very personal look, like handmade signs. It’s still done and they still teach it, but it’s less appreciated.”
The pieces’ loose lines and selective imprecision are complemented by made-up “holidays” scribbled in days on the calendar: “Reconsider your cherished stereotypes,” it reads. Many of these holidays have persisted throughout the decades since the calendar’s inception in 1985, with both the messages and the medium itself testifying to the mundane absurdity of the passage of time.
“I was drawn to line drawings, and I liked the idea that it was subconsciously oriented,” said Henderson. “I developed this loose and free approach to drawing. I used to draw with a marker or a rapidograph, which was popular in the 1980s. But then Abira said, ‘Why don’t you try dipping?'”
The idea for the calendar project came about when Henderson, as a child, drew monsters over the illustrations in his father’s trade calendar. The first year he produced 25 copies and sold them all, fueling his quest to capture both the architecturally attractive and the comic. In addition to their creative practice, Ali works as an illustrator and Henderson as an announcer NPR‘S LAistwho billed himself as both an artist and an entertainer.
The pair distributed the calendars themselves to small businesses in the area, including North Figueroa Books, where they displayed pieces of the past month’s calendar. At their final screening, they pledged proceeds to the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA).
Ali and Henderson see politics as an integral part of their calendar project, continuing to protect these institutions and the communities they serve.
“We have to stand up for the place we lived, the city we love, the city we live in,” Ali said.
Although described as an existentialist and slapstick art calendar, underlying the humor is both a commitment to collectivity and resistance to conformity. The artists consider observation as an act of care, incorporating these elements into the 2026 calendar and the calendar to come.
“The goal of this little-known historical series is really to get people to just go for a walk and take a look around their neighborhood,” Hendrson said, “and see how interesting it is.”
