A powerful quote by revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett is now a Transformative Arts exhibition highlighting Catlett’s influences on artists who employ visual language as world building praxis. The artists featured in the exhibition are border crossers, disruptors, and practitioners of maternal care and Black and Brown ecologies visualizing a complex yet accessible iconography that prioritizes communities.

Transformative Arts X Art 1307 presents Reimagining Mosaic with artists Sharon Barnes, Lisa

Bartleson, Joan Wulf and Shipiba artists Celestina Ángulo Chavez and Lauriana Rojas Martinez.

This exhibition celebrates the ongoing collaboration between jill moniz and Cynthia Penna, across projects, continents and visual languages.

Sometimes, you just need a door to open...

At Transformative Arts, we talk a lot about the power of visual language and literacy. We believe in the ability to transform our communities, neighborhoods, environments as well as our mental and physical wellbeing through our engagement with the arts. 

Sometimes, that feels more necessary than other times. When the weight of existential dread bears down on us, we look to the portals and open doorways our artists are inspired to create.

We activate these oculi, portals and passageways for our mental, bodily and spiritual health and to avail ourselves of the possibilities and opportunities that artists so generously provide for the greater good. 

Our founder woke up yesterday with a twilight message that said to look for the open doors. So she went into the stacks and brought forth portals of all kinds as guideposts for the given directive. We hope in these next two weeks you can join us on a  trip or many through the doorways the artists we work with are called to bring into this transformative space.

Opening Saturday August 6, 3-6p, then Monday-Saturday 12-6, August 8-19. 

Umar Rashid

Kyungmi Shin

Kori Newkirk (not for sale)

Miguel Osuan

Srijon Chowdhury

Mae Engron

Iva Gueorguiev

Transformative Arts is founded on a collaborative model and focused on building visual literacies across communities. We are excited to announce a new pop up exhibition in partnership with Tierra Del Sol Gallery and Studio Art Program. Shaping Clay opens Saturday June 25 through July 16 with a special artists conversation moderated my Maddy Leeser, contemporary artist and Tierra Del Sol Ceramics Leader.

Shaping Clay features Studio artists Marlena Arthur, Karen Goldstein, Abraham Khan, Michael LeVell, Erika Lopez, Eric Lue, Jackie Marsh, John Peterson, Jeffrey Rinsky, Lexington Sherbin, and Alex Trim. These artists come to Tierra from cities across Southern California and Global Diasporas. Their work is born from their unique imaginations, a story telling impulse and the joy of working and shaping a material that contains so many stories of its own.

Transformative Arts founder jill moniz works closely with Tierra Del Sol Gallery and wanted to celebrate this relationship by sharing it with our larger community. Shaping Clay points to moniz's love of sculpture, transformative art making as well as the power of working together to support vital programs and practices for the greater good.

Join us this Saturday from 3-6p for the opening reception of Shaping Clay and stay tuned for more information about the artist talk.

Artists

Karen Goldstein (b. 1967 in California) works in the Careers to the Arts program and has been at Tierra del Sol since 2013. For the last several years she has been focusing her creative practice on ceramics, embroidery, and various textile work. Goldstein is inspired by the seasons of nature, especially springtime when there is a resurgence of new life and the landscape is full of blooming flowers and blossoms. She hopes viewers can enjoy the happiness with which she makes her artwork. Goldstein also enjoys swimming, cooking, and keeping her things in order.

Marlena Arthur was born in Los Angeles in 1994 andhas been making art since she was a child. She joinedTierra del Sol’sart studios in 2016. Marlenais a prolific multi-disciplinary artist who paints, draws, sculpts and makes textiles. Much of Marlena’swork centers onunique characters with a combination of inspirations including My Little Pony, Equestrian Girls and TimBurton.The original stories regardingthese characters are aboutfriendship, adventure, camping and teamwork. Marlena’s love of art is palpable whether she’s drawing a color wheel of personality traits, sculpting a grinning bear with a honey pot or knitting a pom pom hat. “Making art makes me happy.” –Marlena Arthur

Abraham Khan (b.1973) has been with Tierra del Sol working in the Careers in the Artsprogram since 2019. Khan makes paintings, textiles, andsculptures that are colorful, playful, and thoughtfully composed. A source of happiness for Khan, his art practice provides opportunity for him to work frommemories and use his handsto create a physical likeness. Favorite characters from Khan’s youth, including Bugs Bunny, Alf, Chucky, and Cookie Monster, inspire him, as does skateboarding and surfing. Khan loves music and plays keyboards and drums. He also enjoys helping his mom, babysitting his nephew and hopes to travel to Las Vegas to play the slot machines. Khan, born in Canada, resides in Van Nuys.

Michael LeVell works as a studio artist with the progressive art studios of Tierra del Sol Foundation. He has an innate ability to draw furniture and architecture in perfect perspective; he uses this ability to produce intricate sculptures in clay as well. His devotion to the magazine Architectural Digest inspires LeVell’s creative process. He often recreates photo spreads with his own original repeated visual motifs and color palette. A recent development in his work has been the inclusion of figurative drawings, which he also in stills with a sense of structure and pattern. LeVell is one of the original eight artists who helped found First Street Gallery studio program in 1989 and was honored with a retrospective exhibition in 2014 to celebrate First Street Gallery’s 25th Anniversary. His work has been shown and sold around the world in such locations as Los Angeles, New York City, Boston,San Francisco and Japan.White Columns, NY, presented a 2018 solo show of LeVell’s elegant paintings and ceramic sculptures in CONDO Art Fair NY, gaining critical acclaim and the praise of Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winning art critic with NY Magazine.LeVell’s work has also been presented at Outsider Art Fair NY, and Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles.

Ericka Lopez has been with Tierra del Sol since 2013 and working in the Careers in the Arts program since 2019. Lopez creates intricate tactile work in both textiles and ceramics. Her fiber sculptures are stitched using threads, buttons, beads, fabric scraps, and found objects. Her proficiency with familiar handbuilding techniques in clay, including coil and slab, enable Lopez to create large scale vessels which are distinctive, dynamic, and beautifully structured. Lopez hopes her works can be experienced through an exploration of touch.

Eric Lue born November 30, 1985 and has been with Tierra Del Sol since 2008.

Jackie Marsh has worked as a studio artist at the progressive art studios of Tierra del Sol since 2009. Marsh produces fantastical depictions of animals and flowers in painting, drawing and ceramics. In both her two and three-dimensional work, gestural mark-making is combined with a vibrant and loosely applied color palette todefine her delightfully exuberant style. In addition to being a studio artist, Marsh also teaches art classes at Upland Art Studios, the Joslyn Senior Center and other venues. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Chan Gallery, Pomona College,Claremont, California; California Baptist University, Riverside, California; Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California and Zask Gallery, Palos Verdes, California. When she’s not developing her art career, you can find Marsh at work providing compassionate care to the animals of local animal shelters.

John Peterson born September 19, 1983 and has been with Tierra Del Sol since 2013.

Jeffrey Rinsky (b.1991) has worked as a studio artist at Tierra del Sol since 2018. Rinsky loves to make drawings on paperas recently started with epic ceramics. He works with a variety of themes stemming from his personal interestssuch as holidays, music & topics currently relevant in his life, bringing the immense positive energy he radiates as a person to his artwork. When Jeffrey is not working on visual art he enjoys playing the drums and guitar.

Lexington Sherbin began working in the Careers in the Arts program at Tierra del Sol in 2019. Lexington’s artwork comes from a place of gratitude and hope. He says that acts of humanity and judgment-free displays of care have inspired him to paint. Whether his paintings feature flowers or faceless entities, the real subject of his artwork are his feelings of gratitude and hope, his love of life and his appreciation for acts of goodness. Lexington works with different media and techniques to bring his inspirations to life, with the aim of spreading gratitude and hope to others in this world.

Alex Trim born in 1985 and has been with Tierra Del Sol since 2019.

Kori Newkirk is the current Transformative artist in residence. Newkirk's installation is a playful experiment and use of our space. Here, he is working out ideas and thinking about his relationship to his/our neighborhood. All the  materials used here are collected from within a 1.5 mile radius of Transformative Arts and Newkirk's home around the corner. 

Newkirk's residency is an homage to Toy and Garment Districts of downtown Los Angeles. These spaces long ignored by people in power but populated by salt of Los Angeles are now vulnerable to developers and gentrification that threatens to reshape our in an image we must resist.

These confluences have shifted Newkirk's vision, if only for the moment. There is a thread in Newkirk's practice that trends towards the subtractive. This installation is not that. The residency gave him the opportunity to try piling on to see how these accumulative effects transform his and our perspectives. 

Additionally, this installation marks the swan song of Newkirk's antennae as motif, even as he continues his exploration of the analog. His interest in questioning the past, particularly how we receive information remains a fundamental part of his practice. 

Kori Newkirk's work at Transformative Arts began over a year ago when he created the SONIC SURVIVAL STRATEGIES Volume 90013, where artists in our neighborhood made cardboard boomboxes to visually replicate the energy of the area's prolific boombox sounds. 

This new installation is bookended by June Edmonds TA residency project that culminated in June Haul. The conversation between the artists and works makes certain for us the benefits of our programming at Transformative Arts.