Califas Legacy Project showcased on Google Arts & Culture

Califas Legacy ProjectCelebrate Hispanic/LatinxHeritage month with with a visit to Museo Eduardo Carrillo’s Califas Legacy Project on Google Arts & Culture.

Get to know the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ralph D’Oliveira, Carmen Leon, and Yermo Aranda. You will also discover Califas: The Ancestral Journey/ El Viaje Ancestral, a moveable mural book produced by Felicia Rice, Moving Parts Press, in collaboration with Museo Eduardo Carrillo.

View Exhibit Now

(Scroll down the Latino Art Now page until you see Museo Eduardo Carrillo.)

Or click below to go directly to our new Califas Legacy Project exhibits on Google Arts & Culture:


Califas Legacy Project: January – April 2021

The Califas Legacy Project has unified the Monterey Bay Crescent through public retrospective and multi-generational exhibitions, zoomed in opportunities, streetside art viewing, portable murals, documentary videos, panel discussions, and a Latinx-based symposium.

SEE FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

The Califas Legacy Project grew out of the recognition that our region represents an opportunity to fill in a missing piece of American art history. The story of Chicano/a art on the Central Coast is decades long, rich and varied.  

In 1982, Professor Eduardo Carrillo conceived of the “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California” conference to bring together artists, scholars, and creative social instigators to take stock of La Raza y El Movimiendo after several decades of political awakening and action. Together with Philip Brookman, Tomas Ybarra Frausto, and Juventino Esparza, he assembled a remarkable group for a multi-day symposium. They argued and agreed that the Chicano movement in all its variety and manifestations was very much alive and needed continued nurturance. 

Now, almost forty years later, the Califas Legacy Project features the art and ideas of our region’s Chicano/a/x and Latinx creative leaders, our elders in the movement and the next generation artists across the Monterey Bay Crescent.

The nine organizations participating in the Califas Legacy Project
Museo Eduardo Carrillo
Monterey Museum of Art
Moving Parts Press
Santa Cruz Art League
Santa Cruz Public Libraries
Watsonville Public Library
UCSC Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences
UCSC Library Special Collections & Archives

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Museo Eduardo Carrillo 
TITLE: The Califas Legacy Project 
(online retrospective of Califas Legacy artists with video vignettes and the book, Califas The Ancestral Journey/ El Viaje Ancestral)
DATES: March 5, 2021 ongoing
ADDRESS: museoeduardocarrillo.org and Google Arts & Culture
CONTACT: Betsy Andersen spark@cruzio.com

Carmen León Exhibit at Google Arts & Culture

Monterey Museum of Art
TITLE: The Califas Legacy Project: The Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral 
Virtual exhibit of CALIFAS artists, partners, and the book, along with other Moving Parts Press books)
DATES: January 8 – April 11, 2021
ADDRESS: 559 Pacific St, Monterey, CA 93949
CONTACT: Allyson Hitte ahitte@montereyart.org
Programming TBA

Monterey Museum of Art
TITLE: Change = Action/Time: Generational Activism in Chicanx and Latinx Art
(Zoom symposium)
DATES: January 9 (10:00-5:00)
CONTACT: Allyson Hitte ahitte@montereyart.org
ADDRESS: https://montereyart.org/event/symposium/

Santa Cruz Art League
TITLE: The Califas Legacy Project
(Online retrospective of Califas Legacy artists with video vignettes and the book, Califas The Ancestral Journey/ El Viaje Ancestral) with Museo Eduardo Carrillo
DATES: March 5 – May 31, 2021
ZOOM RECEPTION: March 5, 2021 (5:30-6:30)
ADDRESS: 526 Broadway Ave, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
CONTACT: Valeria Miranda valeria@scal.org
Online exhibition: Click here to view
View recorded panel discussion with the Artists/Charla con los Artistas

Santa Cruz Public Libraries
TITLE: Califas: The Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral 
(Series of banners displayed in street facing windows with the book displayed inside)
DATES: January 8, 2021 ongoing
ADDRESS: 224 Church St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Contact: Diane Cowen cowend@santacruzpl.org and Susan Nilsson nilssons@santacruzpl.org
Programming TBA

Watsonville Public Library
TITLE: Califas: The Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral 
(Series of banners displayed in outward facing windows in the City Hall rotunda with the book displayed inside)
DATES: January 8, 2021 ongoing
ADDRESS: 275 Main St, Watsonville, CA 95076
CONTACT: Alicia Martinez alicia.martinez@cityofwatsonville.org
Programming TBA

Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, UCSC
TITLE: Eduardo Carrillo: Comunidad de Califas
(Virtual exhibition of Eduardo Carrillo monographic retrospective)
DATES: February 3 – April 3, 2021
ZOOM RECEPTION: February 3, 2020 @ 4:00-5:00pm
(Tour of the virtual exhibition hub, website, and a panel discussion) Register here
ADDRESS: https://art.ucsc.edu/sesnon/eduardo-carrillo
CONTACT: Shelby Graham sgraham@ucsc.edu and Louise Leong lleong1@ucsc.edu
Programming: Sesnon website

Institute of the Arts and Sciences and UCSC University Library with Moving Parts Press
TITLE: Rising From the Ashes: The Artistry and Perseverance of Moving Parts Press
(panel moderated by Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UCSC, sponsored by UCSC Special Collections and IAS, featuring Felicia Rice)
DATES: January 28, 2020 (5:00-6:30pm)
ADDRESS: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pvl55rODS0CJcG-15MRQsw
CONTACT: Teresa Mora tmora1@ucsc.edu and Felicia Rice frice@movingpartspress.com

Brief description of the event: 
In June 2020, book artist Felicia Rice completed her most recent piece, The Necropolitics of Extraction. Two months later the book, along with Rice’s studio, was destroyed by the wildfires that ravaged the Santa Cruz Mountains. The only extant copies of the work are those that had already found homes in various institutions across the country. Despite this massive loss Rice’s work continues as Moving Parts Press works to rise through the ashes.
 
Rice’s work has always hinged on collaboration and community in order to explore and comment on some of the most tangled issues of our time, from questions surrounding identity to the sustainability of our planet. This event invites a number of her closest collaborators, including UCSC Arts Faculty, T.J. Demos and Jennifer González to join Rice in conversation about her work, the process of collaboration and the impact of the medium of artists’ books. 

We thank the generous sponsors of the Califas Legacy Project

California Arts Council
California Humanities
Arts Council Santa Cruz County
Santa Cruz Arts Commission
Hit and Run Press
Dis-Placed

Dis-Placed: Now in Our On View Gallery

Museo Eduardo Carrillo thanks documentary filmmaker, Pedro Pablo Celedon, for the introduction to Los Angeles artists Peter Liashkov and Marianne Sadowski and through them, Nguyen Ly.

These three artists come from many parts of the world and felicitously met in Los Angeles. Find out more by reading Dianna Santillano’s thought provoking essay which looks deeply at the art.

In their work they address their own migrations, the reverberations of newness and not being of a place, becoming of a place…

They also see in their chosen southern California community those people around them that are unhoused. They find empathy in and parallel to the issues of un-rootedness, searching for anchor and harbor.

View Peter, Marianne and Nguyen’s artworks here and see if you aren’t prompted to find kinship with those around you.

Dis-Placed: Peter Liashkov, Nguyen Ly and Marianne Sadowski

This exhibition brings together three L.A. artists from different continents whose life and works have been informed by their diasporic identities. Mining from personal and observed experiences, the art of Nguyen Ly, Peter Liashkov and Marianne Sadowski explore diverse types of displacements in poetic and deeply poignant visual memoires.

Read More of the essay by Dianna Marisol Santillano

The artworks featured in DIS–PLACED are experimental, both in technique and materiality. Their approach is one that is rooted in printmaking and yet Ly, Liashkov, and Sadowski push this medium to new frontiers, as if crafting a new visual language. Their art is layered and textured, utilizing mixed media, and ranging from two and three dimensional forms to installation. The handmade and conceptual acuity is the strong and unifying element among these artists. Through the process of reworking, layering and reconstituting archival materials and photographic images through various print methods, these artists are also producing knowledge, allowing these artworks to communicate epistemological meaning born of personal memory and testimony. This approach endows their work with a patina of nostalgia while being in conversation with today’s sociopolitical dialogues and neocolonialism.

Indeed, Ly, Liashkov, and Sadowski correlate transnational politics and the effects of capitalism with the personal in a creative practice that is immersed in reflection and memory. In the case of Nguyen Ly, his work weaves together printmaking, sculpture / installations and stitching. His art investigates his trajectory from post-Vietnam war, where his family fled as refugees when he was a child, to eventually getting sponsored and coming to the U.S. The origins of these lithographs were based on old family photos – which triggered Ly’s blocked childhood memories. NL6. Pants, 2012 and NL5. Shirt, 2006 are beautifully crafted clothing, perhaps a nod to his father who was a tailor, made out of paper lithography, old family photos and recycled tea bags ⎯ all threaded together to resemble the traditional clothing of his grandmother. Every element here signals towards his process-based approach to artmaking and harkens back to inquiries about his family’s journey and cultural traditions.

As in Ly’s work, Peter Liashkov’s practice is also infused by memory and movement across continents due to war and the subsequent cultural and linguistic negotiations. Born in France to Russian refugee parents (his father fought in WWI), his family fled to Argentina when he was a boy as a way to evade the communist threat. At age 15, Liashkov and his family relocated once again, this time ending up in the U.S. His work thus reflects these childhood transitions, mapping geographic borders, displacement and subsequent adaptations to new languages and cultures. Utilizing a variety of media, Liashkov uses images of his childhood superimposed with archival documents, and rendered in a way as to look like old relics. Foot Hold 1, 2014, is a collage print comprised of Xeroxed photographs of his father, immigration papers and letters on a Pellon cloth made to look like crumpled paper, giving this work the look and feel of age. Superimposed on these archival materials is the artist’s foot, as if inserting himself and his life’s trajectory and movement into his family’s past, connecting him to the history that has always left him feeling like he had one foot here and one foot there. This feeling is one shared by many with similar pasts never quite feeling like he fully belonged to one place or the other; A well-known feeling among “subjects formed in-between”, to quote Homi Bhabha.

In a different but congruent experience of displacement, the art of Marianne Sadowski brings focus to the current unhinged homeless situation in Los Angeles. Born in Mexico City, Sadowski hails from a Mexican mother and a German father who left East Germany for West Germany and thereafter moved to Venezuela, eventually settling in Mexico. This led Sadowski to explore the concept of home, one’s constant search for a home and the desire to create that home space. Her work explores the question what is ‘home’ in a city that has been plagued with displacement in the hands of gentrification.

As with the work of Ly and Liashkov, Sadowski’s work is multi-faceted, utilizing photographic images and drawings to create multimedia prints and remarkable codex-like artist books, as in Street Blues, 2020. However, in contradistinction to Ly and Liashkov, she utilizes her own photographs taken over many years to document the reality of the streets of L.A. and its homeless situation. In Home-less LA-Sideview, 2021, Sadowski transforms her photos of homeless encampments into vintage-looking cyanotypes. Using the postcard format, she visually dispels the notions of L.A. as a glamourous and desirable city. Instead, she depicts the ground level reality and the ubiquitous nature of the unhoused in the city.

In Life on the street III, 2021, an image of an unhoused man and his belongings is superimposed on various maps of Los Angeles, including an old map of the Mexican and Spanish land grants. By juxtaposing these images, Sadowski makes connections across time and space and demonstrates two types of displacements within this geographic terrain. She aligns historic displacements with the current unhoused phenomena, both of which, for Sadowski, are a result of systemic and institutionalized corporate/government greed.

Whether it is due to migration resulting from wars of the past, or current socio-economic factors that produce displacement and injustice, this exhibition brings into dialogue both their subsequent and continued legacies. In these deeply personal works, Nguyen Ly, Peter Liashkov and Marianne Sadowski open us up to consider how the political affects the personal and how from personal testimony, new ways of knowing and understanding emerge.

—Dianna Marisol Santillano

 

Artist Collaboration

Peter Liashkov and Marianne Sadowski

(click to enlarge)

 

Peter Liashkov

 

Nguyen Ly

 

Marianne Sadowski

On Ed’s 24th Death Day

Today is the day Ed died 24 years ago, on July 14, 1997. His widow, Alison Carrillo wrote this poem in his memory.

On Ed’s 24th Death DayEduardo Carrillo

You left when I was young

Now I am old

Fresh from fifty…to crone

Will you know me?

“My, how you’ve grown!”

Still in love, even pining

Living more than twice our years together

Will I ever not know you?

 

Califas Legacy Project Online Exhibition

Carmen Leon, Ralph D'Oliveira, Yermo Aranda, Amalia Mesa-BainsThe Califas Legacy Project online exhibition, offered by the Santa Cruz Art League (SCAL) and Museo Eduardo Carrillo, tells an untold story of Chicano/a/x artists living in the Central California Coastal region. This exhibition includes artworks by Guillermo (Yermo) Aranda, Ralph D’Oliveira, Carmen León, and Amalia Mesa-Bains.  We expand the geographic art historical narratives about Latino artists in the United States that are primarily centered in large, urban environments such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. 

The Califas Legacy Project has unified the Monterey Bay Crescent through public retrospective and multi-generational exhibitions, zoomed in opportunities, streetside art viewing, portable murals, documentary videos, panel discussions, and a Latinx-based symposium. In 1982, Professor Eduardo Carrillo conceived of the “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California” conference to bring together artists, scholars, and creative social instigators to take stock of La Raza y El Movimiendo after several decades of political awakening and action. Together with Philip Brookman, Tomas Ybarra Frausto, and Juventino Esparza, he assembled a remarkable group for a multi-day symposium. They argued and agreed that the Chicano movement in all its variety and manifestations was very much alive and needed continued nurturance. 

Now, almost forty years later, the Califas Legacy Project features the art and ideas of our region’s Chicano/a/x and Latinx creative leaders, the elders in the movement.

Our commitment is to secure the preservation of these artists’ legacies and awaken a new generation to the richness of the Monterey Bay Crescent artists contributions.  Theirs is an un-contained influence – linking the powerful social movements of the 1960s to the next generation of Latinx and other artists. The exhibition surveys work from over four decades per artist, thereby sharing their artistic evolution and making visible what has been here all along.

The Califas Legacy Project fills a vacant part of American art history.

Read more about the Califas Legacy Project | FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

View artworks by Guillermo (Yermo) Aranda | Ralph D’Oliveira | Carmen León | Amalia Mesa-Bains

 

Guillermo Aranda

Guillermo (Yermo) Aranda is an elder and wisdom keeper of the history and ancestral teachings for Chicano/Native/Mexica identified peoples. He was the co-founder of El Centro Cultural de La Raza, a cultural art center focusing on Latino and Indigenous Art forms. As the Centro’s first Administrative Director, Aranda initiated the Chicano Park Murals in San Diego in 1973. Chicano Park is now recognized by the City of San Diego and the State of California as an historical site.

Ralph D’Oliveira

Ralph D’Oliveira has painted more than 100 murals in California and abroad during his 40+ year career as a muralist. He has done dozens of projects with schools and school children. In 2013, he traveled to Norway to do a mural project in Trondheim. He coordinates his projects collaboratively with neighbors and students in schools. He views all these projects as a way to build community. Ralph draws on his multicultural background incorporating native Chumash and Mexican roots.

Carmen León

Carmen León is a painter and teacher of art. In 1975-76, she was involved with a grassroots arts center, the Academia del Arte Chicano de Azlan, painting some of the first murals in Watsonville. In 1985, she began teaching art in the schools, focusing her involvement with the Latino community and drawing on her Peruvian and Mexican heritage. León was one of the co-founders of Galeria Tonantzin in San Juan Bautista, CA, a venue for women’s art. 

Amalia Mesa-Bains

Amalia Mesa-Bains is a curator, author, visual artist, and educator. In her home altars, ofrendas, and writing, she examines the formation of Chicana identity and aesthetic practices, the shared experiences of historically-marginalized communities in the United States, especially among women of color, and the role of multiculturalism within museums and cultural institutions. Her work is in collections worldwide and in 1992 she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

 

Eduardo Carrillo: Comunidad de Califas

Virtual Exhibition at UCSC’s Sesnon Gallery

Dates: Wedneday, February 3 to Saturday April 3, 2021
Location: online  at https://art.ucsc.edu/sesnon/eduardo-carrillo

Zoom Reception: February 3, 2020 @ 4:00-5:00pm | Register Here
The reception will feature a tour of the virtual exhibition hub, website, and a panel discussion with Amalia Mesa-Bains, Philip Brookman, and others.

Contact:  Shelby Graham sgraham@ucsc.edu and Louise Leong lleong1@ucsc.edu
More programming will be presented throughout the exhibition on Sesnon website—for updated exhibition information check the Sesnon Gallery website.

Image credit: Eduardo Carrillo, Las Tres Mujeres de Tepeyac, 1994, Oil on linen, 48” x 54”, Collection of the Art Museum of South Texas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Keeler

2020 Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship Winners: Virtual Group Show

Museo Eduardo Carrillo invites you to a virtual group show of the 2020 Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship Winners. The Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship, established in 1997 in memory of UC Santa Cruz Art Professor Emeritus and famed Chicano muralist Eduardo Carrillo, is awarded to the most talented emerging student-artists in the Art Department. Since its inception, the scholarship has benefited over 300 students.

View the exhibition on the UCSC Art Department website

Slow Build: A Collaborative Exhibition with Borderline Art Collective

Borderline Art Collective is a Bay Area artist group. The members share the desire for a cooperative environment to work alongside peers, the aspiration to sustain art in the Bay Area, and the commitment to community involvement and social justice.

This show is a digital iteration of Borderline Art Collective’s ongoing project: Slow Build, a collaborative format art exhibition. The four artists of Borderline Art Collective have each collaborated with an artist from outside of the collective, engaging in a call and response digital exchange of visual language. The Borderline artist begins the conversation with a single digital image of her own work. The selected artist responds in kind with a work inspired by the first image, to be posted two weeks after the first post. The Borderline artist will then respond to that image with another work, and finally, the selected artist will submit the fourth work, inspired by the progression thus far.

Participating artists:
Danielle Andress (BAC) and Elena Adler
Marissa Geoffroy (BAC) and Kristi Arnold
Amy Lange (BAC) and Nathan Becka
Tescia Seufferlein (BAC) and Anna Rotty

Slow Build Gallery

Initiating Artworks    see artist reflections on the work»

 

Response #1        see artist reflections on the work and view video»

 

Response #2        see artist reflections on the work and view video»

 

Response #3    see artist reflections and view video

(click to enlarge)

 

Slow Build: An Essay by Chris Cohoon

Two of my favorite exercises to engage people with art are Blind Contour Portraits and Exquisite Corpse Drawings. The fun, imaginative collaborations bypass inhibitions for those of us conditioned to fear failure, because there is no way to win or lose. Both activities live in the freedom of ridiculousness. Exquisite Corpse was born from absurdity. Surrealists exited the Dada movement, which expressed the existential vacuum of reason amidst the madness of Humanism’s technological triumph in gaseous trenches. Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prevert, and Marcel Duchamp searched for meaning from within without the constraints of conventional philosophy. Together, they employed play; shedding conscious thought to uncover the automatic synaptic storms of the subconscious. As a communal exercise, Exquisite Corpse is the chimera of the collective subconscious.

Read More of the essay by Chris Cohoon

The partnership between Museo Eduardo Carrillo and Borderline Collective for Slow Build is not the Surrealist, nonsensical juxtaposition performed as a conceptual work that it may appear to be at first. Given context, the only opportunity for the insertion of chance is the initial meeting between members of the two groups. Everything else makes perfect sense.

In January of 2020, I was involved with Monterey Museum of Art’s Art of the State Symposium. The theme was California Community: Artist Colonies and Collectives Past, Present, and Future. Traditional geographic communities such as Monterey/Carmel by the Sea and Arroyo Seco/Laguna Beach were covered in the program along with the Dada and photographic communities that developed in San Francisco. Despite the disparate seeds from which each community sprang, whether cheap housing, beautiful vistas, or strong personalities, the golden thread that connected each of the historical accounts was charity among artists – not feel good philanthropy, but that ancient understanding that the greatest of virtues is to put the needs of others above your own.

The final presentation of the symposium covered the present and future potential for artist communities. Borderline Collective spoke about their practice as a contemporary collective in the Bay Area (with one member in Chicago). They take on the virtue of generosity drawn from their communal, artistic predecessors and blow it up in the best way possible. Rather than existing as a collective for the benefit of their own work, they developed a practice that is about giving to other artists by creating spaces to promote art that would otherwise have little opportunity to exist. The collective provides a place for art to live which may not be marketable but adds substantial value to the present cultural conversation to shape a better future.

As chance, fate, or providence would have it, Betsy Andersen, Executive Director of the Museo Eduardo Carrillo (MEC), attended Borderline’s presentation and recognized a kindred spirit to that of the Museo’s namesake. Eduardo Carrillo was known for his generosity. As a prominent member of California’s Chicano Arts movement, his work brought recognition to a grossly underrepresented community. He founded El Centro de Arte Regional, Baja, California’s first Art Center, to mentor youth and develop arts in Mexico. He then returned to the U.S. and became a respected artist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he often allowed students and even passers by to pick up a brush and contribute to his murals. Like it’s namesake, MEC continues to share Chicana/o art, generously partnering with other institutions and creating incredible education programs. In the spirit of Carrillo, they design mentorship opportunities for young Latinx artists to work with and learn from older artists. And, as evinced by this exhibition, they seek out artists who give of themselves so that others flourish in an act of multiplication. For Slow Build, MEC sketched out the opportunity, unfolded the paper, and handed it to Borderline who drafted a beautiful concept, unfolded the paper, and handed it to others. Generative art, that which creates beyond itself, doesn’t get more exquisite than this.

—Chris Cohoon

 

Initiating Artists’ Introductions/Reflections

Danielle Andress

Danielle Andress is a Chicago based artist. She produces primarily non-functional weavings that investigate our relationships with consumable images and objects. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Danielle is a co-founding and active member of Borderline Art Collective (San Francisco) and an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
 www.danielleandress.com

Danielle Andress   “Untitled (When Surface Was Depth)”, jacquard woven cotton on latex balloons, dimensions vary, 2020

Marissa Geoffroy

Marissa Geoffroy moved from New York to the Bay Area in 2014. She received her MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts (CCA). Marissa is a painter, photographer and sculptor. She is intrigued by spaces and architecture, and by the philosophical implications of human perception. She is also a founding member of Borderline Art Collective, which aims to support local artists, provide a venue for discourse, and expand art appreciation in the Bay Area.  www.marissageoffroy.com

Marissa Geoffroy   “Untitled (Wood Puzzle Collage)”, wood & acrylic paint, 12″ x 14″ x 3″, 2020

 

Amy Lange

Amy Lange is an artist based in San Francisco, California. She received her BFA in Fibers from the University of Oregon in 2009, and received her MFA from California College of the Arts in spring 2017. She is a founding member of Borderline Art Collective in San Francisco. Amy makes objects, images, and installations inspired by the surfaces of other worlds using repurposed textiles as a jumping-off point.  www.amy-lange.net

Amy Lange   “Crust #4”, flour, house paint & t-shirt, 20” x 20”, 2020

 

 

 

 

Tescia Seufferlein

Tescia Seufferlein is an Oakland based installation and textile artist. Born and raised in the Silicon Valley, Tescia earned her Bachelor in Fine Arts and Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies from UC Berkeley in 2005. Tescia lived in New York City and Brooklyn from 2005-2015, working and living as an artist, costume designer and fabric painter. Although, she is a classically trained painter, her work today is based more in conceptual installations with political and social undertones. Most recently, Tescia’s work has been grappling with public displays of mourning and how we as a society cope with death and tragedy. Tescia graduated with her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. Seufferlein has shown work in Bushwick, Manhattan, Paris, and San Francisco.  www.tesciaseufferlein.com

Tescia Seufferlein   “Repeated Reflections Series-M14 Freeway Lights “, photograph, 18″ x 24”, 2020

Responding Artists’ Introductions/Reflections

Elena Adler

Elana Adler (b.1986) is a multidisciplinary artist who portrays social hierarchies and systems. She is interested in how the web of hierarchies and systems breathes and functions alongside systematic and symbolic boundaries, creating exclusion and inclusion. Utilizing the grid as an accessible visual language to discuss complex systems and structures of power; she challenges expectations of material potential. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017.
www.elanamarteadler.com

Responding to Danielle Andress’ “Untitled (When Surface Was Depth)”

Elana Adler“not consisting of an ever-changing flow of time but a calculable set of things”,
3D sewn felt grid, 72″ x 72″ x 72″, 2020

Kristi Arnold

The main objective of my work employs methods of distortion, transformation, dark humor, absurdity, contrasting color palettes, and the play between positive and negative space. Often, the imagery is overtly apparent, resembling certain icons found in popular culture, science fiction, and nature, while other times they are more concealed. By exploiting these situations through the juxtaposition of opposites, I hope to incite ideas that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and between beauty and ugliness.
http://www.kristi-arnold.com/

Responding to Marissa Geoffroy’s Untitled (Wood Puzzle Collage)

 

In this piece, I worked from a photograph of a garden that I had visited in Japan from a few years ago during a residency. I found similarities between the colors and textures of Marissa’s piece to be comparable to the imagery of the Japanese garden.

In reaction to Marissa’s piece, I wanted to use the same type of collage method but through a different medium. My approach to printmaking incorporates collage-like methods of printed cut out shapes. I have had this unfinished print hanging in my studio for some time. Once I saw Marissa’s work, I immediately drew a correlation between the color, shape and textures of her piece and my mokuhanga print.

 

Nathan Becka

Nathan Becka is from Kansas City, and is curious about all of the things we are surrounded by and understanding our emotional attachments and their unnoticed significancies.
Nathan Becka IG

Responding to Amy Lange’s Crust #4

 

When Amy asked me to collaborate on this project I was immediately excited. Our practices are so different that could not imagine what we would end up making. But as I made my response to her, it occurred to me that it might mostly be our materials that are different.

The images in my video all came from a collection I have of old chemical industry and technology business-to-business magazines. I wanted to pull out anything that could relate to space or space travel. Deciding what to do with my out of context scraps reminded of other work Amy’s made which involved shredding second-hand clothing into strips that she wove and crocheted into a spacesuit and survival gear for other planets. Unraveling a magazine is not so different from a sweater. I look forward to seeing what happens when we weave it all back together.

 

Anna Rotty

Anna Rotty lives in Oakland, CA. Growing up in Massachusetts, she received a BFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. Anna has been part of the San Francisco Artists Studios since 2017 after a month-long residency with One Plus One Plus Two Collective. She is the co-founder of Work in Progress, an art discussion and critique group bringing together individuals practicing activism through creative outlets and promoting collaboration and support through the arts. She has recently exhibited with Incline Gallery, SF Camerawork, PhotoPlace Gallery and UMass Amherst. Projects have been featured with Stay Home Gallery, Juxtapoz and Six Feet Photography, and her alternative-process photography was recently recognized by the Denis Roussel Award. Community and collaboration is an important part of Anna’s practice. Anna is currently working as a Poll Worker Coordinator with the San Francisco Department of Elections.
www.annarotty.com

Responding to Tescia Seufferlein’s   “Repeated Reflections Series-M14 Freeway Lights”:
Contemplating Vastness and Worm’s Eye View

 

In response to Tescia’s piece “Repeated Reflections Series-M14 Freeway Lights” I began thinking about the lack of tactility in digital space and perspective. She created an insular repeated space that felt both vast and meditative, and similar to when a thought won’t escape, repeating over and over in an attempt to revise itself into something digestible. I wanted to see it bigger and touch it with my hands.

I printed the piece out and started to live with it on the wall of my studio, getting to know it, changing its direction over time, and moving the light source to see how it interacted with my physical space. I could see the image subtly in reverse on the backside of the paper and thought about an exchange. It bent and moved partly in my control, but with the print being so large, and me being alone, it had the ability to move in ways on its own. I let it dictate the space and I documented how light and shadows played into it, eventually piercing holes through the paper thinking about impact and transparency.

Initiating Artists Respond

Danielle Andress responds to Elana Adler’s “not consisting of an ever-changing flow of time but a calculable set of things”

 

Marissa Geoffroy responds to Kristi Arnold’s “Untitled”, Mokuhanga and colored pencil on paper” with “Untitled (Wood Wave)”

 
I am really responding to the squiggly curving branches and roots in Kristi’s drawing. I am picturing them coming to life in 3D as wooden twig-like forms. I am also planning to mimic her palette in this drawing – the spectrum of yellow to green to blue, the interplay of the pink and purple, and the white of the paper.

My first piece for this project was constructed of wood, and Kristi’s response depicted trees as the subject of her drawing. Her representation of the living wood is very evocative of the material for me, and so for my response piece I have returned to my initial medium. I have abstracted the branches and roots into wave forms, and have painted the sides with acrylic paint, using the color palette of Kristi’s work.

 

Amy Lange responds to Nathan Becka’s untitled video

Nathan Becka Still from ” Collaboration with Amy Lange”, video, 2020
Final response video by Amy Lange: “Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it like waves”
 
Alternative Realities: Tescia Seufferlein responds to Anna Rotty’s “Alternative Horizons” with “Fire Tree”

 
As Anna and I have gone back and forth we have been playing with light, indoors and out. I began to play with the light of the fires, the orange sky seeping into my windows. Anna was doing the same!! I had a great image of this mini palm trees shadow against the orange light; it was gorgeous. I then began playing with my kaleidoscope and the light. It began to create these stain glass windows type images.

 

Final Responses from Responding Artists

Homage to Rohm A: Elena Adler Responds to “Trick Mirror” by Danielle Andress

Inspired by Robert Rohm, who made a series of instruction based installations using instruction and manila rope. I have been recreating my own versions of these installations. The images are documentation of the performative process.

 

Kristi Arnold Responds to Marissa Geoffroy’s “Untitled: Wood Wave”

 

AC On: Nathan Becka’s responds to Amy Lange’s video “Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it like waves” 

 

Sisyphus:  Anna Rotty responds to Tescia Seufferlein’s “Fire Tree”

Tess’s piece “Fire Tree” gave me the sense of being within a space just outside a larger reality. Both repetitive and ethereal I couldn’t help but think of my days spent in Church as a kid, beneath an ornate ceiling, contemplating the stories of faith and forgiveness, but also of shame, guilt and punishment. Over the last few months, Tess and I have both been working with materiality, light and reflection to create seemingly larger worlds within the walls of our home. With the fires and the virus penetrating everyday thought, I considered my safe and privileged distance from these threats, thinking about interior and exterior, finally landing on an image reminiscent of a fiery hillside, conjuring consequence. I’ve been contemplating the human perspective and our impact on the land and the resilience and power of nature.

UCSC Oakes College students create Museo exhibit on Google Arts & Culture

As part of a course titled “Building Websites for Social Change, a team of students from UCSC’s Oakes College collaborated to create an exhibit for Museo Eduardo Carrillo on Google’s Arts & Culture Platform. Due to the COVID-19 shutdown of in-person instruction, the class was conducted completely online via Zoom. Thanks to the students Davis O’Shea, Jazmin Sosa Herrera and Kaelen Alexander, and to instructor Vicki Winters! Scroll on to read students’ reflections on working on the exhibit, and view the exhibit itself.

Davis O’Shea:

I am a third year at UC Santa Cruz majoring in the History of Art and Visual Culture. I grew up in between the Bay Area and Nayarit. I am especially interested in visual cultural studies, graphic design and sound design.

My experience working on the Museo Eduardo Carrillo exhibition was thoroughly educational and enlightening. Not only was it an opportunity to learn about how to prepare and curate an exhibition as a team, but it was also an opportunity to work with and learn about local latinx artists such as Eduardo Carrillo, Amalia Mesa Bains, and others. Furthermore, it was really a unique experience learning about this entire process (team meetings, curation) in an online setting and exhibiting on the Google Arts and Culture platform. One personal highlight from the project was creating the collage at the beginning of the exhibition. While creating the collage, I was able to fully engage with the artworks directly and respectfully. As I arranged and cropped the artworks, my eyes latched on to the fine details and I grew to appreciate consistencies shared between the pieces. Many of the artworks tell powerful local and ancestral stories which resonate with the Califas Legacy writings. I hope that viewers can appreciate the details and the stories embedded in these artworks and writings. I also hope to apply the knowledge/skills that I have developed throughout this project (such as curation, research and design) in future professional and personal projects.

Jazmin Sosa Herrera

I am a third-year student double-majoring in Spanish Studies and Politics at UC Santa Cruz. I’m from San Diego, CA, and spend the majority of my time working as a Pre-Law Peer Adviser under the university’s Career Success Center, where I mainly focus on providing students with information regarding the law school application process and advise in professional development.

Working on the Museo Eduardo Carrillo exhibit has been a very rewarding and positive experience. Being able to learn how to create and edit exhibits through Google Arts and Culture was a new experience that I was able to use as a creative outlet for myself. The artwork displayed is very touching so being able to view it and structure how it should be displayed in the exhibit was really honorable. One particular thing I really enjoyed about this project was being able to read the Califas Legacy stories and tying them to some of the artwork. Those stories were very fun and relatable for me to read. Some other things I learned besides how to edit exhibits on Google Arts and Culture were how to convert images. I hope to use these skills in the future with personal projects, as well as the data entry skills I honed through this experience.