Montalvo Announces New Lucas Artists Fellows in Visual Arts for 2019–2022
SARATOGA, Calif. — Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program is proud to announce its most recent Lucas Artists Fellowship awards to 33 artists of exceptional talent from across the US and the world. This distinguished group includes individuals from 16 countries working in the fields of visual arts, architecture, urbanism, and design. This includes visual arts media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, design, and printmaking, as well as artists working in the fields of performance, social practice, and sound art. These Fellows were born or reside in the following countries: the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Mexico, India, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea, Spain, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Taiwan, the Philippines, Italy, Venezuela, and England.
Every three years, by discipline, the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) invites a distinguished panel of international nominators to identify up to three emerging, mid-career, or established artists who have the potential to become significant voices of their generation. These artists then pass through a highly selective jury process. Each artist selected is awarded three months in the Lucas Artists Residency over three years, with the ability to return multiple times. Lucas Artists Fellows are also welcomed to bring collaborators into residence with them. This represents significant ongoing support for an artist’s work over a three-year period.
Located within a 175-acre public park and historic property in the heart of the Silicon Valley in California, the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) is an interdisciplinary creative incubator and cultural producer dedicated to investing in artists from all disciplines and geographical locations and to supporting the creative process and sharing of ideas. The LAP provides artists with time and space to develop new work, take risks, and forge collaborative partnerships. The LAP also supports artists as they engage the community in critical conversation through the creation and presentation of new work and varied public program offerings. This approach is grounded in Montalvo’s belief that artists’ voices enrich our world and serve as a catalyst for debate about issues important to us all.
Montalvo houses the oldest artist residency program on the West Coast of the US, hosting artists since 1939. The new LAP facility at Montalvo was inaugurated in late 2004 and has hosted over 1,000 artists from more than thirty countries since its opening. The LAP’s campus comprises 11 free-standing, state-of-the-art artist studios and residence spaces designed by artist-and-architect collaborative teams, and a Commons and Library. As part of this selection, Montalvo inaugurates a new residency fellowship in collaboration with Santa Clara University, through the generous support of Charmaine and Dan Warmenhoven. The first Fellow of this collaboration is Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Rafa Esparza.
“The Lucas Artists Residency Program is the soul of Montalvo,” said Executive Director Angela McConnell. “It is one of the key ways in which we reaffirm our mission to engage the community in the creative process and has gained us international recognition as a creative incubator and a model of curatorial practice.”
Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program Director Kelly Sicat said, “We look forward to welcoming this truly remarkable group of artists into the creative community of the Lucas Artists Program. We are honored to have the opportunity to support their practice in such an incredible facility, and to be able to share their work with the greater Silicon Valley community.”
The 2019 Visual Arts jury has awarded Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellowships to the following artists:
Indira Allegra
Oakland, California, United States
Indira Allegra’s memorial practices articulate the presence of and communicate with unseen forces behind haunting events and desires. She uses weaving as an ideology and methodology to re-imagine what a memorial can feel like, the scale on which it can exist, and how it can function. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Museum of the African Diaspora and The Alice, and group exhibitions at the Center for Craft Creativity and Design, The Arts Incubator in Chicago, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among others. Her commissions include performances for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, and City of Oakland. She has been the recipient of the Artadia Award, Tosa Studio Award, Windgate Craft Fellowship, and Jackson Literary Award, and has received support from the Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, MAP Fund and Queer Cultural Center. Allegra’s work has been featured by BBC Radio 4, Art Journal, KQED, and Surface Design Magazine. She has been a visiting artist at Southern Denmark University and Mills College, a former Tag Lecturer at East Carolina University, a Shelly Osborne guest artist at UC Berkeley, and a Lia Cook Jacquard artist in residence at the California College of the Arts. Read more.
Ali Asgar
(Tara)
Orono, Maine, United States
Born in Bangladesh, Ali Asgar
(Tara) is a transdisciplinary artist and cultural producer whose work focuses
primarily on the body and the relationship between body and space. Asgar’s early
work and activism were around the areas of gender, sexuality, and social norms,
which often reflects upon their personal struggle and experience of growing up
in conservative Bangladeshi patriarchal society and its attitude toward members
of the LGBTQI community. The controversial and politically charged nature of Asgar’s
work—exploring gender and eroticism—exposed them to significant risk in their
home city of Dhaka, where Asgar staged provocative street performances and
gallery exhibitions intentionally designed to challenge the conservative sexual
mores of the culture. Isolation and displacement play a key role in Asgar’s current
works and thought process. As an artist whose provocative art and personal
identity placed them at extreme risk, Asgar was awarded a prestigious
fellowship from the Artist Protection Fund in 2016. Asgar is currently working
on an MFA in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Read more.
Chloë Bass
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Chloë Bass is a multiform
conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication,
and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to
address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes
expand. Bass has held numerous fellowships and residencies; 2018 included a
residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC
Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and
internationally, including recent exhibits at the Knockdown Center, the
Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the
Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James
Gallery, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work
have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn
Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews,
among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December
2018; she also has a chapbook, #sky
#nofilter, forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. She is an Assistant
Professor of Art at Queens CUNY, where she co-runs the unique MFA program Social
Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette. Read more.
Lex Brown
The Bronx, New York, United States
Lex Brown is an artist,
musician, and writer. Her work plays with the scale of personal and emotional
experience in relation to large systems of social and economic organization. Brown
has performed and exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; The Hammer Museum, REDCAT Theater, 356 Mission, and Luis De Jesus
Los Angeles in Los Angeles; the Kitchen, New Museum, the High Line,
International Center of Photography, and Deli Gallery in New York; and the
Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. Brown is the recipient of various awards and
residencies, including a Sommerakademie Fellowship in Bern, Switzerland;
Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine; and the Susan B. Whedon
Award in Sculpture from Yale University. Brown holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Yale
University. Consciousness, a
survey of Brown's work spanning the past 8 years, is newly available from
GenderFail. Her first paperback work of fiction, My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a
sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, is also
available online. Read more.
2019 Visual Arts Selection Jury
Binh Danh
Binh Danh (MFA Stanford; BFA San Jose State University) emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2012 he was a featured artist at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. He is represented by Haines Gallery (San Francisco) and Lisa Sette Gallery (Phoenix). He lives and works in San Jose and teaches photography at San Jose State University. Read more.
Nellie King Solomon
Nellie King Solomon is not interested in making traditional paintings. She instead experiments with materials to see what they can say about painting. Solomon's background in architecture and Supergraphics has laid a foundation for her work. She studied architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, and holds a BA in Art from University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has taught at Stanford University and California College of the Arts and has worked as an artist assistant to David Ireland, and in architectural restoration on the Palazzo St Polo in Venice. She lived in Paris, Venice, Barcelona, and New York City before returning to California. Solomon’s work has been featured in Art in America, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Art Practical, Wallpaper, Harvard Review, ArtBlitzLA, Zyzzyva, and Architectural Digest, among other publications. She has exhibited at The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Crocker Art Museum, Bolinas Museum, Brian Gross Fine Art, Braunstein/Quay, The Battery, Ochi Projects LA, Ochi Gallery Sun Valley, N’Namdi Contemporary in Chicago, Detroit, and Miami. Her work is collected by Steve Wynn, Blue Shield, Visa, Yves Béhar, Sabrina Buell, and The UC Berkeley Art Museum. Read more.
Betti-Sue Hertz
Betti-Sue Hertz is a contemporary arts curator, writer, and educator working at the intersection of visual art, transcultural exchange, and socially relevant issues. Her current highlights include being the Public Arts Director at TLS Landscape Architecture for Lion Mountain Park in Suzhou, China; Project Curator at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis; and Co-Director of On Susan Sontag: Media, Modernity & Morality, a San Francisco Art Institute lead multi-venue season of programs that will take place in the fall of 2019. Hertz was Director of Visual Arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 2008–2015, where she curated numerous exhibitions that often focused on global art and political agency. In 2019, she was appointed as director and chief curator of the Wallach Art Gallery. Read more.
Takeshi Moro
Takeshi Moro was born in Japan, raised in the UK, and currently works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moro studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. He completed his MFA graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moro’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and Serlachius Museot (Finland). His work resides in the permanent collection at Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), as well as in various private collections. Read more.
Rory Padeken
Rory Padeken is Assistant Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art. He is currently developing exhibitions with Diana Thater, Richard Misrach, and Tabaimo. In 2013, he led SJMA’s curatorial team on the museum’s largest and most ambitious exhibition program to date, Around the Table: food, creativity, community, which included 30 artists, 18 commissions, and 43 community partners. He has also curated several exhibitions from SJMA’s permanent collection and served as curator of record for traveling exhibitions from museums across the nation. Prior to his first appointment at SJMA as curatorial assistant, he was the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council Fellow at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He received a BA in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His MA thesis focused on British artist Tacita Dean. Read more.
