Chats About Change
Chats About Change: Critical Conversations on Art and Politics is five conversations addressing contemporary themes that artists and activists are developing in Los Angeles today. The dialogues will critically engage the topics of; participatory structures in culture, confrontational art practice, the dialectic of the spiritual and the political, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the politics of land use in a session co-organized with Sandra de la Loza. Chats About Change, independently organized by artists Elana Mann and Robby Herbst, represents a grassroots response to the national phenomena of the institutionalization of social practice art within hegemonic institutions. Chats About Change aims to strengthen local networks of politically oriented artists through a self-organized forum fostering analytical reflection and response. The events will take place at California State University Los Angeles, “The people’s university,” and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the innovative contemporary arts institution. Chats About Change asks questions, wages debates, and supports the community of people seeking experimental ways to affect Southern California and beyond.
Fashion and Textiles 2014-15 Guest Speaker Series
Kenya Miles
Traveling Miles Studio is a hub for creative expression through various avenues in the fiber arts. TMS embraces and explores the art and alchemy of natural dyeing and is at once wholly inspired by both the tactile and ephemeral. Kenya Miles is the artist & alchemist behind Traveling Miles Studio. From the valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico to the red clay roads of Ntonso, Ghana, Kenya's process is a ledger of years of wandering and apprenticing around the globe. Utilizing sustainable materials, her work honors ancient practices while harmoniously drawing on a distinctive contemporary voice.
http://www.travelingmilesstudio.com/home
Future Force Geo Speculators – Workshop
Future Force Geo Speculators is a collaborative group founded by artists Carole Frances Lung, Ellen Rothenberg and Christine Tarkowski. Their impulse to form this collective stems from their common interest in the use of “textile” as a creative and social medium. Though each artist intersects with the material within their creative production, each capitalizes upon unique aspects of “textile” as cultural or historic carrier. Their themes of collective or individual exploration include: histories of textile and garment manufacturing from cottage industry to global production; craft/art/design dialog; social and gendered histories of labor; and textiles as surface, sculpture and architecture. The mission of FFGS is to function as an artist collaboration, which through research and production furthers the collective knowledge and output within this field.
FFGS’s creative practice engages in a pluralistic production research format. We value the physical process of hand and studio based making as well as project driven research to generate ideas and artistic solutions. Our terrain of output is variable in that we do not prioritize one form of making over another. Forms of output include architecturally scaled works, public proposals, propositional models and drawings, texts, performances, social actions, publications, and installations. We are interested in exploring the studios’ relationship to historical production, the interweaving of American craft and manufacturing traditions, utopic communities, notions of Sci-Fi Feminism, and the monumental relative to the inconsequential.
http://futureforcegeospeculators.wordpress.com
Christine Tarkowski
Christine Tarkowski is a Chicago based artist who works in a variety of mediums including sculpture, printed matter, photography and song. Her works range in scale from the ordinary to the monumental. Equally variable is her scope of production which incorporates the making of permanent architectural structures, cast models, textile yardage, and temporary printed ephemera. Many of her recent works point toward the flotsam of western culture relative to systems of democracy, religion and capitalism. Those systems often intersect with or concern themes of conversion, salvation, and belief and are malleable systems relative to a believer's desires.
Her solo exhibitions include Whale Oil, Slave Ships & Burning Martyrs at Priska Juschka Fine Art in New York, Imitatio Dei at the Museum of Contemporary in Chicago and Last Things Will Be First And First Things Will Be Last at the Chicago Cultural Center. She has been included in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, RISD Museum, and The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. She has created commissioned projects for the Manilow Sculpture Park at Governor's State University, Mass MoCA, Public Art/City of Chicago, and Franconia Sculpture Park. She currently is an Associate Professor in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been the recipient of grants from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and awarded residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, J.M. Kohler Arts in Industry. She is currently an Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, Columbia College Chicago/3Arts 2010 Fellow.
http://www.christinetarkowski.com
Ellen Rothenberg
Ellen Rothenberg's work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Her installations and public projects often employ the iconography of social movements and their residual documents to interrogate the mechanisms underlying contemporary political engagement and social dialogue. Her work - architecturally scaled installations, public projects, performance, collaborations, and writing - uncover histories embedded in the present, particularly those of women, labor, and feminism. Her approach to form and material is informed by these concerns, and inflect meaning beyond their historical conventions.
Her work has been presented in North America and Europe at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of London, Ontario; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Royal Festival Hall, London; The Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; among others. Awards include NEA Regional Fellowships, The Bunting Institute Fellowship Radcliffe College Harvard University, Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, The Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowships, and grants from CEC Artslink, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The LEF Foundation, and NEA Artists Projects. Rothenberg is an Adjunct Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an Artist Teacher for the Vermont College Fine Arts Graduate Program.
http://www.ellenrothenberg.com/about.html
Liz Collins – Talk and Demo
Liz Collins is a New York City-based artist and designer best known for her installation and performance project KNITTING NATION, and her amazing knit textiles and fashions. She is also a revered and sought-after teacher, and has taught and lectured at some of the best art and design schools in the US. Collins has had solo exhibitions at AMP Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Occidental College, Los Angeles; Textile Arts Center, New York; AS220, Providence, RI; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee. Her work has also been included in numerous exhibitions at institutions including the ICA Boston; Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York; the Museum of FIT, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Modern Art; and the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York. Collins’ awards include a United States Artist Target Fellowship (2006) and a MacColl Johnson Fellowship (2011), and residencies at Haystack, Yaddo, Shetland College, QueerArts Zagreb and AIR Alaska. Collins designed her own fashion line from 1999-2004, showing during New York Fashion Week; becoming a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America; and selling her collections in the high fashion designer market to influential New York style outlets like Barneys and Kirna Zabete. Collins received both her BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and was an Associate Professor there from 2003-2013. She has been a guest lecturer and critic at many art & design colleges including Pratt Institute; Maryland Institute College of Art; School of Art Institute of Chicago; Vermont College of Fine Arts; School of Visual Arts; Parsons the New School for Design; and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University.
Jenny Taylor from LA Fiber Shed
The Los Angeles Fibershed is a proactive organization working with the concept of bioregionalism. We value the interconnectedness of humanity and human systems with the natural environment. With a focus on fiber, we seek to develop a more intimate relationship with the landscape by listening, sharing knowledge and practicing problem solving in support of the changing bioregion.
We are committed to bringing high fashion and excellent design standards to locally grown and processed fiber: a new model of integrity for the textile and fashion industry in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Fibershed illuminates local resources and talents. We host re-skilling classes to teach spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dyeing and more.
The Los Angeles Fibershed activities are a living model of how "slow fashion" garment and textile production can function hand-in-hand with global and personal health, principles of sustainability, local economies, and regional agriculture.
Mark Greenfield
Roger Herman
Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-size collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city. Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues. Mark Bradford has received many awards, including the Bucksbaum Award (2006); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002). He has been included in major exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2004); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001). He has participated in the twenty-seventh Bienal de São Paulo (2006); the Whitney Biennial (2006); and "inSite: Art Practices in the Public Domain," San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico (2005). Bradford lives and works in Los Angeles.
Featured in Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 4 (2007), Paradox
Links
Pinocchio Is On Fire
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mark-bradford on May 19, 2014
Joseph Bañuelos
Bañuelos graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Art. He began his design career in 1969 at the Art Group in L.A. During those years, he was exposed to the great designers and illustrators of the day. He credits his knowledge of design and craftsmanship to working under the watchful eyes of the Huerta brothers: Hector, Carlos and Octavio. Along with senior designer Roger Johnson, the Huertas taught Bañuelos about design, typography, art direction, handlettering and illustration. Those experiences proved invaluable when he opened his own studio in 1974, in Orange County. His portfolio includes work for national brands such as Mazda Motors, OBAGI Medical, Zeiss Optics, Ossur, Allergan and Disney. Several iconic Southern Caolifornia images—the original Carl's Jr. "star" and Hoag Hospital's logo—are credited to Bañuelos. Currently he is the creative director of DevicePharm, a leading ad agency for biotech, pharmaceutical, life sciences and medical device companies. (devicepharm.com). Bañuelos's work has won awards from Communication Arts, Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, New York Art Directors Club, The One Show, Print and the Beldings. He is both an Advisory Board Member and a Fellow of AIGA, in Orange County.
Phil Chang
Phil Chang received his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has had solo exhibitions at LAXART and Pepin Moore. His work has been exhibited in group shows at Marlborough Chelsea, Renwick Gallery, and The Swiss Institute. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum.com, and has appeared in Aperture, Blind Spot, and C-Photo. In 2010, Chang completed Four Over One, an artist’s publication that is published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Textfield, Inc. Chang’s curatorial projects have included Affective Turns?, a group exhibition that he organized in March 2012. He is currently visiting faculty in the Department of Art at UCLA and a lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.
Retrieved from http://www.philchang.com/ on May 19, 2014
Gilda Davidian
She is earned her MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2014 and her BFA from CalArts in Photography and Media in 2006. Her work has been exhibited at Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles, and was included n the exhibition 31 Women in Art Photography at Humble Arts, New York in 2010.
Samantha Field
Samantha Fields was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1972. After receiving her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is currently a Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge.
Her work is represented by Western Project in Los Angeles. She has an extensive exhibition history, including shows at Kim Light/LIGHTBOX Gallery, Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago, The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Solway Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, Dirt Gallery in Los Angeles, POST Gallery in Los Angeles, Domestic Setting Gallery in Mar Vista, California, Suzanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, Lemberg Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, Texas, and Galerie Enholm Englehorn in Vienna, Austria. She has also participated in the community based collaborative exhibitions REBEL REBEL and East West Trading Post at artist Annie Shaws innovative Los Angeles project space, The New Chinatown Barbershop.
With her husband, artist Andre Yi, she co-founded the Los Angeles based website zerodegreesart.com, which documents their community of artists and critics. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, ArtWeek, Art in America, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Retrieved from http://www.samanthafields.net/about/ on May 19, 2014
Stuart Karten
After growing up and graduating college on the East coast, Stuart came to Los Angeles for a summer and ended up staying for more than 30 years. He worked for companies including; Gould Medical Products, Mattel, and Baxter until founding Karten Design. It was at Baxter that he had a transformative experience. He was designing a disposable plastic bone marrow biopsy needle and, when he started researching, he found that doctors would actually wad up cotton pads into their hand to prevent themselves from getting hurt as they pressed the plastic needle into the bone. He started looking at the form factor and the forces at work and redesigned it to be safer and easier for the doctor to use. His experience developed a belief in the power of design research to inform products that create positive experiences for their users. Stuart sees design and business as two innately intertwined disciplines. He founded Karten Design with the goal of “Connecting Creativity and Commerce™,” creating emotional bonds between consumers and products to help companies build brands and revenue. Today, Stuart builds relationships with our partners and helps them to envision how they can use design strategically. He oversees projects across Karten Design to ensure a focus on meeting clients’ business objectives.
Dan McCleary
Retrieved from http://www.danmcclearystudio.com/ on May 19, 2014
Jed Ochmanel
By Danielle Sommer in Art in America
Jed Ochmanek may call his newest series of paintings "flats," but "depth" more accurately captures what was on display in "Breed St.," the artist's third solo exhibition at Young Art. When viewed from the center of the small gallery, Ochmanek's work—a trio of colorful rectangular panels (all 2012) hung flush with the walls and stretching nearly from floor to ceiling—evoked reflected light, fabric and blown-up photographic negatives; up close, each was seen to feature masses of information in the form of paint pigment and dust, resulting in endless strata of texture and detail.
For the last few years, Ochmanek, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and is currently living in Los Angeles, has experimented with a technique that involves pouring multiple layers of very thin, oil-based enamel paint onto slim plates of industrial metal, such as mirror-polished stainless steel. During the process, the pigments tend to separate from their binder, drying in unique and unrepeatable patterns, which Ochmanek amplifies by letting dust from the environment settle where it will, layering different colors atop each other and allowing the paint to dry in between pours.
For "Breed St.," Ochmanek used the gallery's architecture as the only limit for his 8-foot-tall, rectangular paintings. Never one to clutter a room, Ochmanek chose one panel in gold (Beekeeper), another in soft pink (Plateaux) and a third a dark denim blue (Dead Flag Blues). Over the gallerist's desk hung two reliefs in cast concrete. Neutral in color but still full of captured texture, these two pieces represented a new type of material process for the artist, which he plans to explore further.
The surfaces of Ochmanek's panels reward attention. With Beekeeper and Plateaux, this crust registers as a grainy quality from a distance; with Dead Flag Blues, on which Ochmanek used a squeegee, it looks more like a tight weave. Traces of Ochmanek's process can also be perceived in the works' gentle gradient shifts, or in the sudden disruption of color within a panel, where the liquid from one pour has obviously obscured the previous pour, producing what looks like a water stain. All in all, the paintings turn on the tension between the layers of detail they contain and their status as "flats"—a word that brings to mind surfaces devoid of any texture. Ochmanek exacerbates the tension by using metal thin as canvas, as well as by relying on devices like Velcro or magnets to hang the panels so snugly against the gallery wall that they often look like they've been painted on. What results is a weighty dialogue with time: while you can try to grasp one of Ochmanek's pieces in an instant, the piece fights back, insisting that you experience to no small degree the duration of its making.
Retrieved on http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/jed-ochmanek/ on May 19, 2014
Corky Quackenbush
Quackenbush is known for the dozens of animated short films he created for MADtv on Fox TV, as well as his parodies of the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (TV special) for Christmas episodes of series such as That 70s Show and the George Lopez TV series. These earned him mention in the book The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass by Rick Goldschmidt. Quakenbush's films are generally known for adult-oriented themes of comic violence, and they often find humor in the blending of the innocent with the "profane".
Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corky_Quakenbush on May 19, 2014
More links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corky_Quakenbush
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0702792/
http://www.spacebassfilms.com/Works.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_RH44K0x_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMtsoFoJKMw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knVv3sX4TL0
Garson Yu
Garson Yu is Founder and Creative Director of yU+co., a digital media design and production company located in Hollywood. Since 1998, yU+co has created over 200 film title sequences, establishing Garson Yu as one of the industry’s leading motion graphics designers. In 2006, Yu opened yU+co[lab], a division in Hong Kong specializing in new media, interactive and experiential design. A native of Hong Kong, Garson holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art. Having won numerous industry awards and critical acclaim, he lectures frequently at design conferences and universities around the globe and has been featured in various design publications. Garson is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, Switzerland.
Lorraine Wild
GAUGE Spring Speaker
Lorraine Wild is an award-winning designer, a founder of Greybull Press, and a member of the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, where she has taught since 1985. Wild received her BFA from the Cambroon Academy of Art. She worked at Vignola Associates in New York before receiving her MFA from Yale School of Art. Her thoroughly informed and deeply sympathetic understanding of the nature of art and design has brought her commissions for monographs on artists and architects as far-ranging as Mike Kelley and Ludwig Miens van der Rohe, as well as books and exhibition catalogues for institutions such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, UCLA's Hammer Museum, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Lorraine is an AIGA medalist (2006)
Kim Abeles
Visiting Artist
Kim Abeles is an artist who crosses disciplines and media to explore and map the urban environment and chronicle broad social issues. The Smog Collector series brought her work to national and international attention in the art world, and mainstream sources such as Newsweek and Dan Rather.
Abeles' mid-career survey, Encyclopedia Persona A-Z , toured the United States and South America, and was awarded the Best Regional Museum Show category for 1993-94 by the International Association of Art Critics.
She represented the U.S. in both the Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam and the Cultural Centre of Berchem in Antwerp. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the United States Information Agency, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is archived in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Publication Design Collection of the Smithsonian.
Abeles was awarded grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Peter Norton Foundation and fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and the California Arts Council.
This lecture is presented by Duchamp’s Leg, Student Arts Organization.
Mark Allen
Visiting Artist
Mark Allen is the founder of Machine Project, an alternative arts space that stages performances, workshops and installations. Machine Project exists to encourage heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious. They provide educational resources to people working with technology. They also collaborate with artists to produce site-specific works, and promote conversations between scientists, poets, technicians, performers, and the community of Los Angeles as a whole.
Sean Aldrin
Visiting Designer
Sean Aldrin M.F.A., Assistant Professor of Art at Northwest Missouri State University attended Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Center College of Design.
Aldrin a Fine Artist and Design professional working in Los Angeles since 1991 has been exhibited extensively across the United States and abroad. Professor Aldrin has shown at Ace Gallery Los Angeles and developed creative advertising for a wide range of clients including MGM, NBC, Pillsbury, Boeing and Heineken.
Mitzi Valenzuela
Visiting Photographer
CSULA Art alum Mitzi Valenzuela is now a well known photographer for Hot Rod Magazine and Vintage Pin Up Photography.
Petrula Vrontikis
Winter Design Speaker
Petrula Vrontikis has been a leading voice in graphic design and design education communities for over 20 years. Her work has appeared in over 100 books and publications, and is part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. She is the author of the book inspiration=ideas: A Creativity Sourcebook for Graphic Designers and is an editorial contributor to design publications including the AIGA.org Forum.
She lectures at conferences, universities, and to professional organizations worldwide about her work with Vrontikis Design Office, about graphic design education, and on the subject of inspiration. In 2003 she was selected by Graphic Design: USA as one of 100 People to Watch.
She has taught the senior graphic design studies course at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California since 1989, and was as a national advisory board member of the AIGA from 1999 to 2001. She has served on numerous local, national, and international design juries. In 2007 Petrula received an AIGA/Los Angeles Fellows Award honoring her as an essential voice raising the understanding of design within the industry and among the business and cultural communities of Los Angeles.
Cindy Bernard
Visiting Artist Lecture
Cindy Bernard's work explores how our perception of reality is coded by culture. Since graduating with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985, her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Internationally she has exhibited in England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Canada and Italy. A director and advisor to Foundation for Art Resources from 1985 to 1990, her art production incorporates curating and organizing exhibitions and events involving art and experimental music as well as public projections. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Art Matters Inc., California Arts Council, Anonymous Was a Woman, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Phyllis Green
Visiting Artist Lecture
Phyllis Green’s sculpture explores issues of gender in romance and in art and issues of craft and decoration. She states “the use of female imagery as form and content, and the use of the medium of clay, continue to be devalued by the art establishment, if not by the culture in broader terms. “ One of her intentions is to challenge the lingering modernist assumption that decoration and ornament, as feminine, are enemies of “high art”.
Raised in Canada, Phyllis Green moved to California to pursue graduate studies in art. She was awarded an M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. in 1981, and began her professional art career in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a C.O.L.A. grant by the City of Los Angeles. Her work as a sculptor and animator has been exhibited extensively in exhibitions locally, nationally and internationally. It was included in "From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in 20th Century Art", "Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity", both at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in “Fiction@Love” at MOCA, Shanghai in 2006. She has lectured in colleges and universities around the world, and is currently an adjunct faculty member in the Art Departments of Loyola Marymount University, U.C.L.A. and U.S.C. Phyllis Green produced and hosted a radio show on the visual arts, LOOK/hear on KXLU, Los Angeles, from 1996-1998. She was appointed to the Santa Monica Arts Commission in 2000, and elected Chair in 2004.
Frank Romero
Visiting Artist Lecture
Throughout his 40 year career as an artist, Frank Romero has been a dedicated member of the Los Angeles arts community. As a member of the 1970s Chicano art collective, Los Four, Romero and fellow artists Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha and Gilbert Lujan, helped to define and promote the new awareness of La Raza through murals, publications and exhibitions. Los Four's historic 1974 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was the country's first show of Chicano art at a major art institution.
Since then, Romero has successfully balanced a career in both the public and private arenas. He has completed over 15 murals throughout the city, and was a key contributor to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival with “Going to the Olympics,” a large scale mural which adorns one of Los Angeles’ busiest freeways (Highway 101). He recently restored this mural with a grant by the Amateur Athletic Foundation, as well as working on new murals for SPARC (Ritchie Valens Park in Pacoima) and North East Trees (along the Los Angeles River) and in Silverlake.
Romero has shown extensively in the United States, Europe and Japan. Notable exhibitions include: "Chicanarte" (L.A. Municipal Gallery), "Hispanic Art in the United States" (Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C. and national tour), "Le Demon des Anges" (Nantes, France; Barcelona, Spain; Lund Sweden and Brussels, Belgium), and "American Kaleidoscope" (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.). His work is featured in many permanent collections, including the National Museum of Art in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, CA.
Sherry Frumkin
As owner of a Santa Monica gallery since 1990, Sherry Frumkin has organized over 200 exhibitions with local and international artists. Los Angeles Magazine named her gallery in 1991 as the “best new gallery for emerging artists” in Los Angeles. Exhibitions organized at the gallery have been reviewed in major local, national and international art magazines. Works by gallery artists have been acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Laguna Art Museum among other public collections, and by numerous private collectors. She has participated in international art fairs and introduced challenging work by artists from Japan, China, Canada and the former Yugoslavia to Los Angeles.
Tim B. Wride
Tim B. Wride is the founding Executive Director of The No Strings Foundation, a non-profit foundation established in 2004 whose mission is to provide direct funding to photographic artists. Also, at the time when Mr. Wride judged the Art of Photography Show 2007, he was the Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). During his initial 12-year tenure as Curator of Photography at the LACMA (1992-2004), Mr. Wride curated over twenty-five permanent collection focus exhibitions as well as numerous larger exhibitions including: "Retail Fictions: the Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew" (1997); "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography after the Revolution" (2001); "Donald Blumberg" (2002); and "Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick" (2004). He is the author of the catalogues that accompanied these exhibitions, and also contributed the photography component and an anthology essay to the exhibition "Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000" (2000) which traced the interaction of fine art and popular culture in creating the identity of California. Wride co-curated and wrote the Aperture monograph for "Pirkle Jones: Sixty years of Photography" (2001) a travelling exhibition that premiered at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and also curated "To Protect and To Serve: Photography from the LAPD Archives" (2002) that has traveled internationally. Most recently, he curated "Hurrell's Men: Hollywood, Glamour, and Masculinity," an exhibition that will be traveling through 2007 for the Sheldon Galleries in St. Louis and "Long Exposures: Contemporary Photo-Essays."
Robert Williams
Robert Williams was born in 1943 and raised in Alabama and Albuquerque, Williams eventually gravitated to Southern California and the Chouinard Art Institute, but not before immersing himself in the country's nascent youth culture of hot rods, rock n roll, and bowling alley rumbles. He recounts a boyhood spent in drive-in theaters and dirt tracks, honing a life and a style that had little to do with the world of square day jobs he entered after leaving Chouinard in 1963, when, through sheer happenstance, an unemployment agency handed him a job as art director at the studio of his hero, Ed ""Big Daddy"" Roth. Along with tales from his time at Roth studios-which resulted in his famous Roth ads for Hot Rod magazine, not to mention several infamous run-ins with the Hells Angels-Williams demythologizes the 1950s, recalls his association with Zap Comix and R. Crumb, and reflects on todays retro rodders and his own hot rods.