I have Paid a Price for my Commitment
I have Paid a Price for my Commitment, 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. Object List
Included in the exhibition are Catlett’s students and collaborators on both sides of the US/Mexico border: Samella Lewis and Armando Ortega, as well as artists directly influenced by her life’s work – Silvia Tinoco, Alison Saar and Dale Davis. These lineages are exemplary of the skill and creativity Catlett fostered in every relationship/mentorship she cultivated, shaping aesthetic language and form from liminality and muted histories. She stitched together this life through acts that assembled her communities and her strengths into a mechanism for the greater good.
Elizabeth Catlett embodied the ontological complexities that both forced and enabled her fugitivity. Raised in a Black Radical tradition that operated on both sides of DuBois’ veil, the border, colonialism and the white male gaze, she expanded this beingness with a dedication and fullness. She tended to her children, colleagues, students and friends with fierce maternalism, making space with language and meaning and a powerful materiality that held those spaces open for those who believed that art’s purpose is a counter-narrative to normativity and institutional harm.
I have Paid a Price for my Commitment describes Catlett’s insistence that the people she worked with fully inhabit the worlds from which they came as armor to survive the worlds where art was and is consumed as capital. Traditions, knowledges and histories are tangible matter that structure the mind and making, and Catlett amalgamated these beliefs into a singular yet collaborative practice that relied on creating from the conjunctures of those self-referential landscapes.
Catlett also was a conduit for women’s stories that were tangential to her experiences but were not her own. Artists in this exhibition come from diverse backgrounds, many are immigrants who work with transgressive visual language born from movement to give voice to those whose stories are marginalized. These artists embrace cultural, ritual, ethereal and aesthetic knowledges that transcend geographies and otherness to unite us in the practice of storytelling as care.
I have Paid a Price for my Commitment features Samella Lewis’ final painting. This unfinished work exemplifies describes the boundlessness of her legacy and Catlett’s lineage through arts and the community. Their journey and ours does not end, but is reimagined through artists, scholars and community engagement inspired by and in the spirt of Lewis and Catlett’s vision for the arts. Following this encouraging path forged by revolutionary Black women, this exhibition marks moniz’s final exhibition at the downtown Los Angeles space to begin new programs where she believes they are needed most.
I have Paid a Price for my Commitment opens Friday September 15 and runs until October 29 with programming to be announced.
Artists
Elizabeth Catlett
Samella Lewis
Armando Ortega
Silvia Tinoco
Dale Davis
Alison Saar
Miguel Osuna
Chelle Barbour
Jackson Moniz
Iva Gueorguieva
Michael Vargas
Kearra Amaya Gopee
Jose Guadalupe Sanchez
Ana Morales
Leul Asfaw
Georgina Reskala
Yrneh Gabon
Valeria Tizol Vivas
and Umar Rashid
With performances by Moni Vargas
And Jose Guadalupe Sanchez
Reimagining Mosaic
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.
Mosaic is considered a pattern of diverse elements or colors that in aggregate form a coherent whole. Each artist in Reimagining Mosaic works in this way the create vivid imagery in sculptural forms, ephemera and textiles that in this case tell stories about women. Together, these visual narratives describe the diverse ways women labor to integrate their bodies and ideas with challenges and representations they encounter.
Penna notes, “the exhibition…is characterized by a distinct ability to give the stories that are visualized a powerful emotional content. The materials used by the artists are chosen, gathered, handled, torn apart, woven and recomposed in order to preserve a both collective and individual memory, and to visualize individual intimate experiences.”
The exhibition is an interpretation on an ancient practice made contemporary. Comprised of
“personal stories about a formerly fragmented Self that has been recomposed; stories of a collective memory to safeguard and transmit; stories of personal identities and stories of ‘togetherness’, of community” these works offer portals, perspectives and possible futures built out of enduring elements of the past.
Reimagining Mosaic celebrates how art can shape meaning and the environments that we need to interpret and survive life – histories, politics, aesthetics, colonialism, maternal care and love.
The stories these artists share with viewers are translations from written and oral traditions that Penna states “[have] thus preserved and saved whole cultures from oblivion, and it is no coincidence that in many ancient cultures it was women who took care of transmitting the knowledge, traditions and rituals of the community, and this has been true of both small villages or large ethnicities.”
“Regardless of how we want to define and understand the concept of “mosaic”, it is a composition or recomposition whose significance is to be found in the recomposed whole. Through mosaic art we hope to “recompose” our individual existence or our feeling of community, and to achieve this we will in any case rely on Art, which above all is, and remains, an expression of Beauty,” (Penna, 2023).
Reimaging Mosaic opens at Transformative Arts on June 3, 2023, with an opening reception from 4-7pm. The exhibition runs through July 29, 2023 at 410 S Spring Street Los Angeles, California 90013.
Bridging San Pedro
August 2019 - April 2020
Visual Literacy as Community Practice focused on the development of visual literacy in San Pedro community members through hands-on making and deep listening exercises. Four artists with singular, but intersecting, art projects led community workshops at Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) to foster a greater awareness and association between the Port of Los Angeles, life in San Pedro and art as a daily lived experience. Community members created artworks used to compose the final art pieces. These projects culminated in an exhibition in the AGCC galleries during the first quarter of 2020.
Artists: Blue McRight, June Edmonds, Alexis Slickelman and Cole James
Shaping Clay | In partnership with Tierra Del Sol Gallery and Studio Art Program
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.
Tierra Del Sol’s Director, Paige Weary held our Artist Talk surrounding Shaping Clay on Saturday, July 9th at Transformative Arts.
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.
June Haul by June Edmonds| Glittering Faces and Ashy Ankles by Kori Newkirk
From June 4th to June 19th, Transformative Arts celebrated June Edmonds first major monoprint collection entitled June Haul and made in collaboration with master printer Francesco Siqueiros at Nopal Press and Luis De Jesus Gallery. The title June Haul rifts off Andy Warhol's silkscreen monotypes and highlights Edmonds' prolific activity during her Transformative Arts residency this spring where she first created monoprints from glass transfers to rag paper, then worked with Nopal Press to create a linocut monoprint varied edition on special exhibition.
June Haul focuses on two ideas – Edmonds' masterful color making and the iconography of her practice. In the prints made during her residency, she rearticulates her eye/portal symbol in intimate scale. Each monoprint contains this visual language in a unique color that Edmonds created while the linocut was on the Nopal Press. In conversation with Transformative Arts founder jill moniz and Nopal's Siqueiros about emotion, textual and light, Edmonds added color to each run on the press, creating over 100 art works.
Winning the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship gives Edmonds new freedom to explore her large scale acrylic paintings. June's bounty of print works allows her to stay connected to her community with another modality that contains all the elements and philosophy of her studio practice. Both approaches sustain her desire to speak heart to heart through her aesthetic innovation in all the ways she can imagine.
In conjunction with June Haul, Kori Newkirk will be showing Glittering Faces and Ashy Ankles in which also, Kori is a 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.
Biddy’s Garden
It all begins with an idea.
Transformative Arts presents Biddy's Garden – a purposeful action by a group of artists to cultivate creative expression and specific visual language that centers how we as women experience the earth's vitality. Bridget "Biddy" Mason was a free Black woman who in the 1860s after winning her emancipation purchased a land parcel in Los Angeles, in what would later become the financial district and where Transformative Arts is headquartered now. Biddy's Garden honors Mason's work serving her community with innovation programs and her midwifery with art-making by five Los Angeles-based artists: June Edmonds, Adrienne Devine, Mercedes Dorame, Francesca Lalanne and Silvi Naçi.
This gathering of five women artists – a scared number according to faiths across the global, and in numerology symbolizes freedom, curiosity, and change – represents Transformative Arts commitment to both indigenous knowledges that recognize a pluralism with the natural world, and the creative impulses Los Angeles and women of color are responsible for nurturing. During this six-week activation, some of these makers will create new artworks, host women's circles and tend a small garden inside the TA space that signifies Biddy's contributions to LA, that continue to make space for important visual language and literacy.
Click HERE for an object list
vanessa german
The Artist Channels 33 Technologies of Soul
Transformative Arts is honored to present vanessa german's exhibition The Artist Channels 33 Intimate Technologies of Soul opening November 18, 2021 extended through February 5, 2022.
Please note that during this January Covid-19 surge, we are only open by appointment. Please click here to schedule your intimate experience with german’s Technologies of Soul.
The Artist Channels 33 Intimate Technologies of Soul consists of power figures german made in Los Angeles as life saving devices that allow viewers to reframe their own bodies and narratives against the destabilizing and often punitive American life. Recognizing that art is an instrument of freedom, these specific aesthetic tools enable our consciousness as black people to enter a loving and safe realm that shifts the way we live in wholeness of ourselves without waiting for justice.
vanessa german offers these radical, liberating technologies through the invocation of ancient practices that recognize the medicine inside of us. Her focus on consciousness is a focus on instructive, healing and empowering language attuned to that esoteric knowledge that she makes visual through her sculpture and performance. Her gift to us is the arc of her practice – the mining and surfacing of this medicine as a strategy for collective action of connection, love and power.
Finding the mean of perspective, german balances consciousness above and beyond the dehumanizing realities of disassociation and reductionism. She notes "To be free in America requires more ingredients that America can give." So german returned to her roots to channel the capacity of the conjuncture of body and spirit. She grew up in Los Angeles, and during 2021 came to the city, the ocean and the spirit of the land of so many narratives and materials to engage her process of looking and listening to objects to assemble these consciousness driven figures.
To emancipate us from the soul crushing system of American brutality, german makes space for Black people to thrive. The works are talismans and portals to our more creative and connected selves, and contain all the necessary magic to breathe into life better futures. On view at Transformative Arts, a Black woman-led project, The Artist Channels 33 Intimate Technologies of Soul is an adventure filled with objects for our world to come.
The Artist Channels 33 Intimate Technologies of Soul opening reception on Thursday, November 18, 2021 begins at 6p with a conversation between the artist and jill moniz, Transformative Arts founder. vanessa german will give a performance on Saturday, November 20 at 1p.
vanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. She is a consummate storyteller dedicated to the narratives of Black communities. She has been awarded the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the 2017 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 United States Artist Grant and, most recently, the 2018 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Figge Art Museum, The Union for Contemporary Art, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Flint Institute of Arts, Mattress Factory, Everson Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Studio Museum, Ringling Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. german's sculptures can also be found in public and private collections worldwide. She is represented by Kasmin.
ALI to LA exhibition
In partnership with PBS: Through October 2, 2021, ALI to LA is an artists’ residency that responds to Muhammad Ali's legacy in Los Angeles. Foot work, word play, humanitarian work, community building, resistance and refusal and demanding to be called by his name are some of the radical acts artists are addressing in their work.
Edgar Arceneaux April Banks Kendell Carter Veronica De Jesus Manuel Lopez Mariangeles Soto-Diaz And Kuamen
UMAR RASHID PER CAPITA
PER CAPITA, an immersive experience outside the white cube, extends Rashid's acuity to form space and time as a cosmic journey that reimagines colonial Los Angeles. Rashid's rich iconography questions the role of the individual in the collective shaping of the city. What does it mean to build a city – a gathering place – from diverse migratory peoples and experiences? Whose values dominate and whose heads roll?
Rashid's COLA project focuses on expanding his sculptural practice, specifically conceiving the Babylonian Ishtar Gate through the imagery and materials that define Los Angeles. The Ishtar Gate, once described as one of the world's seven wonders, in Rashid's reimagining translates Babylon's lapis lazuli into Yves Klein blue, lions into pitbulls and asps into rattlesnakes. In Rashid's LA, sentinels of the goddess are titled Yves Klein garden figures and the West African trickster Anansi continues to weave a web of playful confusion, pain as well as potential.
Ishtar is the goddess of love, war, sex and fertility, death and destruction, representing both darkness and light. Rashid uses these contradictions to stretch visual narratives, sifting through layers of history, power and subjugation, as well as divinity, desire and desecration to show us the temporalities of our consumption and creativity.
PER CAPITA examines and judges the city we live in, its miseries and its pleasures. Works for sale benefit transformative arts programming and the Umar Rashid studio.
