Our Community

Laura Brody sculpts for the human body and its vehicles. She developed and curates Opulent Mobility, a series of exhibits that re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. Her art has been shown at the Ikouii Creative, ACE/121 Gallery, Brea Gallery, the Charles River Museum of Industry, Westbeth Center For the Arts, California State University Northridge, Gallery Expo, the Dora Stern Gallery at Arts Unbound, and The World of Wearable Art.
Ms. Brody works as a professional costume maker and designer, an artist, and as an educator. She is passionate about reuse, sustainability, and re-imagining disability.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

The first seven years of my life were spent in a remote, rural region known as Tierra Caliente in Michoacan State, Mexico. My family and I emigrated to Los Angeles in 1975 and it was, in many ways, akin to traveling from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, given the rudimentary conditions to which we were accustomed. This experience – of leaving one land for another, having to constantly redefine what it means to be a human being, a man, a part of a community – is a constant and central theme within my work. I am interested in narratives and vignettes about the seemingly discarded or unimportant moments that shape our culture. I believe that these discounted moments harbor importance and, in isolating these moments, I endeavor to stimulate reflection.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @abelalejandre

Local self taught artist from Whittier. My art is influenced by poetry. “There is beauty in the shimmer of the gutters” is probably the best way I can explain my art.

Adeline is a California based punch needle and tufting artist. Inspired by nature and abstract art, Adeline has created many unique pieces that focus on original patterns and fun color palettes. Adeline continues to explore the world of fiber art by combining punch needling with weaving and embroidery techniques.

Adrienne DeVine has developed her visual language on a foundation of materiality, semiotics and African culture. Her work is held in public and private collections, and her exhibition history includes universities, galleries, the California African American Museum, and a group exhibition in Berlin. Early in her career, she worked in the graphic arts and printing industry, and then went on to an administrative career working in academia, philanthropy, and community-based organizations. She earned her BA from California State University Long Beach and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @adriennedevinemixedmediaart

Adrienne Wade dedicates her life to inspiring change in the world through art, natural living, self-transformation and (w)holism. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and naturalist who has created all her life. From her celebrated San Pedro Waterfront Arts District murals to her Venice street art happenings, with art on display in Los Angeles, New York, Europe, French Polynesia, Iowa and on exhibition in Hollywood’s legendary Barnsdall Art Park. She has studied art and design, permaculture, plant based medicines, wildcrafting and place making) and is a documentary film and television engineer.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @adriennewadeart

AG” is a Los Angeles born and raised fine artist whose work is categorized as Afro surrealism. Creating artwork that explores the intersection of identity, culture, spirituality and heritage, AG” creates vivid, dreamlike images that challenge the viewer’s perceptions of reality and invites the viewer to engage in a deeper exploration of the themes represented.

My name is Ahlise Vela and I am a local LA illustrator and muralist. I make art from wood cuts, to paintings, to sewn things based on characters I have created. I like to create silly moments or every day moments for them to be in so that the viewer, and myself, have a place to live a vicarious existence in or just something to nod at.

Artist painting surrealist gore and cute decapitated animals. Transforming found objects into works displaying bright colors and painful wounds. Mixing the light and dark of life for the purpose of emotional expression and healing.

AJ Peterson is the designer, tufting artist, and educator behind Magic Carpets. She teaches workshops in Los Angeles, creates rugs that explore themes of spirituality and queerness, and is passionate about sharing the craft of tufting with others.

Alejandra Germann has always been inspired by color, nature, and the female form. Her work reflects the powerful connections women have in being female and being part of nature’s relentless strength and beauty. Ale has her roots in Southern California and is currently teaching Visual Arts to 10th graders in the Bay Area.

Alexandra Bowman is an Oakland-based painter, illustrator and muralist whose figurative, colorful paintings mirror the diversity and vibrance of her community. She uses scale and linework to depict both real and imagined compositions of togetherness. Bowman’s practice focuses on ways to celebrate visibility and a myriad of racial, cultural and gender identities through visual storytelling.

Allison Honeycutt is a fine artist based in Los Angeles, California and Graduated from NSCAD University with a BFA in 2003 and went on to get a Post-Baccalaureate in studio art from MIU in 2013. She works in a variety of media, particularly fiber sculpture/ sculpture, works on paper and installation. Her work is defined by taking pleasure in the exquisiteness of imperfections and of blending the profound with the absurd. Every Empire leave some grief in its wake, even those that benefit from the Empire will experience grief when they realize what they had given up in order to flourish, as well as grief when the empire itself starts falls.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @allisonhoneycutthunt

The author of Carnival (NOT A CULT media), Alyesha Wise is a poet, teaching artist & TEDx speaker from Camden, N.J. Alyesha currently resides in Los Angeles, Ca and is the co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement (S.L.A.M.) – an organization providing poetry education and extensive programming for poets. Alyesha is currently the Hollywood (Da Poetry Lounge) Slam Team head coach and served as the Los Angeles (Get Lit) Youth Slam Team co-coach from 2014-2017. Along with other slam highlights, she is a 2-time Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist. Alyesha has been featured on different platforms and publications such as Huffington Post, Bustle, Afropunk, PBS, POPSUGAR, Buzzfeed, Free Speech TV and more. She has collaborated with Brave New Films and additional media platforms, having featured in the Google Interstellar Project, in conjunction with the hit film Interstellar. Ron Howard once wrote about Alyesha’s work, “Very Powerful.”

Amabelle Aguiluz is a Filipina American multidisciplinary artist, weaver, and teacher. Her work is deeply rooted and connected to the body, nature, and the healing power of plant medicines. She uses both traditional and unconventional textile techniques to transform various fiber materials into sculptures and site-specific installations. Her work is a reflection on themes about impermanence and everyday moments in life.
Amabelle lives and works in Los Angeles County.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Amy Kaps is an international interdisciplinary artist recognizable by her signature palette of Black and White Stripes with Pink accents. Conceived in Columbus, Ohio, born in Brooklyn, NY, raised in suburban New Jersey and Cologne, Germany, she currently resides in Venice, CA and occupies a studio in DTLA.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Amy Smith is a self-taught contemporary artist always evolving. Her artwork includes murals, stencils, collage work, illustrations, digital graphic design, paint, and spray paint, all to create one-of-a-kind pieces that reflect both her passions and fury, juxtaposed through the lens of imagination. While some of my work is driven by political, social, and environmental injustice, most reflect my deeply-rooted optimism and belief in the power of the feminist spirit, unity and love. 

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction, Rainbow Shift

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

I like to work with what I have and what I have is usually cardboard. I like to have range in the theme of my art. Those themes can vary between cute, horror, or nature.

Andre Miripolsky is an artist of extraordinary creative abilities. As colorful a man as the exuberantly colorific art he creates, his signature style of pop imagery is bright, whimsical, energetic, and downright fun. A true multi-media artist, Andre is much more than a painter, taking his unique pop-style into sculpture, mobiles, graphics, branding, production design, sets and costumes, and now, NFTs. His sense of humor has been embraced by film and music stars, creating several art costumes for Sir Elton John – most notably the often-photographed “Piano Jacket” made for the famous Central Park concert. He has also collaborated on projects for Bette Midler, Quincy Jones, Robin Williams, the Rolling Stones, MTV, and Mattel, where he was commissioned to create a one-of-a-kind “Miripolsky Art Barbie.”

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Andrea Castillo born and currently living in Los Angeles, California, received her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in 2014. Her work has been shown at Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) Seasons LA (Los Angeles, CA) Plaza de la Raza (Los Angeles, CA) the CCCM, Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts (Los Angeles,CA)She has been the recipient artist in residence for Vermont Studio Center (Johnson,VT), Grand Central Art Center (collaborative) (Santa Ana,CA), Signal Fire (Portland, OR), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA) with artist grant. Publications including her work are ArtMaze Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, YoungSpace and Voyage LA Magazine.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Weaving provides a direct link to Andrés Janacua’s Indigenous past with the currents of cultural politics today. Echoing the patterns and textiles within his P’urhépecha community, they have become formative vehicles for him to exercise weaving as symbols of Indigeneity and its discontents. Janacua is invested in the conditions of subjecthood through means of tradition and how this may frame contemporary identities. “That is, if by working in a customary means anchors Indigeneity to the past, how will we ever be contemporary?”

Andrew Arthur is a California native, born and raised in Los Angeles where he currently resides with his wife and two children. A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, Andrew has presented paintings in various gallery shows and exhibitions for the last 20 years. My art is about communication. Each painting’s abstract composition is legible.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram: @andrewarthurart

Website: https://andrewarthurart.com/about

Andrew Murga is a Los Angeles based artist working in the disciplines of oil and acrylic painting. His work is inspired by the rise of meme culture coupled with current social events and issues.

Andy Wilcox is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. At Cal Poly Pomona he teaches design studios at all levels with an emphasis on interdisciplinary practice, urbanism and the found conditions of wilderness within the vast infrastructure of Los Angeles. As an artist, he uses found imagery reorganized into new associations and contexts to explore wildly integrated ideas of landscape as the social and cultural construct it is.

Exhibition: There From Here

Aneesa Shami Zizzo is an artist and arts-based researcher in Los Angeles upcycling materials to create fiber art. Her work references the sublime and world mythologies to evoke a sense of the collective unconscious within her imagery. Zizzo’s work has been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums, including the Torrance Art Museum, the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum, among others. She is also the co-owner and director of Studio 203, an artist-run space in Los Angeles promoting fiber art, craft-based work and social practices.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

I am a multidisciplinary artist, born in Oaxaca Mexico and raised in Los Angeles. My art represents my multicultural background and experiences as an indigenous artist raised in Los Angles. My art always tells a story with the colors I use, the typography I create, or in the characters I insert in the landscapes I capture.

A. Colliard (b. 1990) is an artist based in Oakland, California. They hold a BFA from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus in printmaking. A drawer at their core, they have honed their focus in recent years towards medium and large-scale mixed media drawings that feature fantastical botanicals with peaceful characters. They have also created large scale murals and worked with clients such as Airbnb, FrameStudio, Target and Google.

Ann Weber makes monumental sculpture out of found cardboard boxes exploring the themes of relationships, community, and sustainability. Weber’s sculptures have a mystery or double meaning to them. Neither entirely representational nor abstract, but something in between, she wants the viewers to bring their own associations to the artwork. She received her BA in Art History from Purdue University and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts studying under artist Viola Frey, whose large-scale sculptures greatly influenced Weber’s work. Weber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

AnnLi Tico is a Bay Area native and a Los Angeles based artist, who graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with degrees in Art and Economics in 2021. Her work spans multiple mediums, and focuses on the expansiveness and intricate details of the natural world, as well as the living spaces we create for ourselves. Through the use of found materials, pattern, and repetition, she attempts to create work that captures the feelings these places evoke, and is playful and inviting to the viewers.

Exhibition: There From Here

Arezoo Bharthania is an interdisciplinary Los Angeles based artist. She earned her MFA from CSU Long Beach and her MA from CSU Northridge. She has exhibited in venues around the world. She is the recipient of Museum manager award of Lancaster Museum of Art: CEDER and COTA Dean purchase award of Kleefeld Museum, Long Beach. She had her solo exhibition at LA ArtCore in 2023.

ARi is a Reiki Master, Sculptor, and Painter who uses art to share stories of her encounters with the spirit realm. She developed her love of art in adolescence to now pursue it full time in the hopes to represent other healers in her community. ARi centers her art around women who are actively breaking generational traumas to uplift and inspire them. She highlights the importance of Death and Rebirth as an essential part of the healing process.

Exhibition: SOMOS

Art Carrillo is from Los Angeles with a bachelors degree in art. He’s an acrylic, photorealist painter that paints a little bit of everything. There’s a lot to paint about so he’ll never stick to one subject. His goal is to never waste your time when you walk into a gallery. He hopes to create work that is worth staring at.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Mario Solorzano, a self-taught mixed media artist from Pomona, California, creates emotionally evocative and surprising artwork. His pandemic-inspired journey quickly led to exhibitions in California galleries and installations at places like Stevens Steakhouse and Retro Taco Riverside. Known for his unique blacklight-reactive style and hidden surprises in his work, Mario has received awards at the Del Mar County Fair and painted murals for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He not only dedicates his talent to art but also gives back to the community by curating the Klownski Foundation’s gallery wall and supporting various charitable causes. Mario’s love for portraits and a drive to create larger-than-life art make him an artist on the rise.

I go by the name Maripistolera, a journey that started many winters ago when I left Mexico. My fondest memory takes me back to Dia de Muertos celebrations in the cemetery, where I witnessed the striking contrast of beauty and darkness. Those memories stayed with me, inspiring my first drawings of Calaveras.

My art draws from my Mexican roots and the vibrant pop/goth culture, with influences ranging from the iconic Frida Kahlo to the renowned Gustavo Rimada. I proudly define my style as “Mexican Goth Surrealism,” where tradition meets the avant-garde.

Born and based in Los Angeles and active in the Southern California graffiti scene since the early nineties, multimedia artist Augustine Kofie (b. 1973) works in painting, collage and mural interventions. Kofie’s fine art practice draws together the languages of graffiti’s deconstructive lettering, mechanical drafting, modern architecture, and plunderphonics, creating a unique take on constructivist abstraction, or as the artists refers to as ‘Vintage Futurism.’ Kofie has been featured in Juxtapoz, Graffiti Art Magazine, The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti, Le Petit Voyeur and VNA Magazine 26.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Azul is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles. Art provides avenues of exploration, a process of the figure escaping into a space beyond. Her work emphasizes the imaginative mind, a liminal space that dares us to cross boundaries of physical distance and time. It reveals the psychological process of reclaiming childhood and its limitless possibilities.

B-Luv brings a background in media and graphic design to his creations. While his art began as a personal catharsis after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, B-luv discovered that the therapeutic nature of art could not only help him, but anyone dealing with adversity in life and love by spreading the messages of Love and Peace…especially timely in today’s political and social climate. His work ranges from fun, to heartfelt, to political, to strange, but all carry with them the message of Love.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

Bad Talents® is the creative identity of mixed-media artist, Shelby Alexander, and the pseudonym under which she exhibits her fine art nationally. Bad Talents lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and also studied fashion design at Pratt in NYC. Her artwork explores themes of beauty, consumption, and the environmental impacts of the clothing we wear.

Midwest Transplant. Mark Maker. Emo Kid. I make work from the heart. Vulnerable concepts and ideas and stories are something we all share as individuals. My goal is to connect with yours through translating my own.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, on soil infused with ancestral knowledge, Bea Lamar’s earliest memories shimmer in candlelight, sketching alongside her father. This intimate haven laid the foundation for her lifelong dedication to art, advocacy, and storytelling.

Immigrating to the United States, her initial focus on aeronautical engineering shifted towards a more spiritually resonant journey that combines science and art. Lamar’s work explores the seen and the ‘felt’ yet-to-be-seen, capturing a delicate equilibrium between the mystical and the pragmatic, the individual and the collective.

As an artist, seeker, and advocate, her interdisciplinary art practice employs a diverse range of mediums to dissect urgent global issues like climate migration and societal inequality. Works such as “Silence” and “Absence Speaks” navigate the intersection of the personal and the political, utilizing art to delve into topics like PTSD, incarceration, and environmental challenges.

Bella is a textile artist and garment maker living and working in Los Angeles. In her work she explores the ecosystem of the home, from the utilitarian realities of household chores and to the beauty that exists in the everyday and beyond. She aspires to create art that celebrates the power and resilience of women, questions our collective history, and honors the natural world.

Betty Wood (she/her) is a queer folk fibre artist working at the intersection of craft and fine art. Her wall hangings and rugs are made slowly with hand tools, playing with expectations of scale and materiality. Betty’s art delves into themes of sexuality, gender, mythology, history and natural forms, with pieces centering on the domestic sphere, capturing transient or lost spaces in comforting textiles.

Bianca Argueta (she/her) is a Salvadoran descendant artist who resides in Los Angeles, California. Argueta received her Painting and Drawing BFA degree from Cal State Long Beach. Her artistic practice investigates inner city life and intergenerational trauma caused by war and a dysfunctional home. In recent work, Argueta samples images from various sources, recollecting memories from childhood that coexist with cartoon characters. Her artistic influences include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Saville, and Kerry James Marshall.

Exhibition: Rituals

Billy Frolov is an American painter whose work explores the interior landscape of domestic space and the objects that inhabit them. Serving as portals to memories and places no longer accessible, her paintings aim to fill voids longing for comfort. A student of craft and hobbyist tradition, Frolov builds her work with tenderness from sentimental processes and material that indicate the function and psychic nature of their subject. Though born in Buffalo New York, Frolov largely grew up in suburban Virginia outside of DC. She relocated to Los Angeles in 2013, graduated from ArtCenter College of Design in 2018, and her first solo show ran at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles in January 2020.

Heavily influenced by the underground music and proud Latin American culture of Los Angeles, Black Light King has found an intersection between graffiti and street art. At a young age, he discovered a love for art as an expression and at 15 discovered the power of neon. Black Light King is part of that movement, painting neon and blacklight commissioned masterpieces across building interiors, exteriors and painting live during underground happenings. You can find some of his most notable works across the many districts of Downtown LA. More incredible is Black Light’s ability to hide his identity while painting his murals behind the mask of a luchador. Black Light King says he wears a mask as a vehicle to transcend boundaries.

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival

I am a 23 year old visual artist based in Culver City, CA. Ranging from botanical to social commentary subjects, my pieces draw attention to both the natural world and the industrial world. My saturated, vivid color palette exaggerates what is seen in everyday life, striving to move audiences to reflect on the world around them.

Brenda Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles, California. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at Dartmouth College in 2015, majoring in both Studio Art and Japanese Language and Literature. She continued her studies in art through a post-baccalaureate program at Brandeis University from 2017 to 2018. In 2020, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Davis. She has shown work in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Singapore. She lives and works in California and was the Spring 2023 Artist-in-Residence at Arts at Blue Roof’s “A Room of One’s Own” residency in South Los Angeles.

Dark artist & award winning tattoo artist.

Brian Ray currently spends half of his time as a technologist leading a 40 person team of Data Scientists; the rest of his time is dedicated to his Art Practice. He has been involved with art since college 25 years ago. Participating initially in the art community in Chicago and then touching NY a bit, he has become one of the up-and-coming new-breed traditional mixed with digital. He creates oil paintings and NFTs. He lives in his art studio in ArtHouse Lofts and frequents Soho Warehouse. Always interested in networking with other artists and folks in the art scene. 

Brittany Delany (she/her) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is based in Los Angeles, California. As she grew up playing sports and learning dance moves from Janet Jackson music videos, she found dance homes in several communities including hip hop, jazz, contact improvisation, modern and postmodern dance. She loves to research, teach and perform around the world.

Exhibition: There From Here

Buena Johnson is a local Los Angeles visual artist, arts instructor & owner of Buena Vision Art Studio. The aim of her work is to inform, uplift, educate, motivate positive change & heal. Her style is realism/photorealism and her main medium is Pencil. Graduating from Pratt Institute of Art in New York & moving to CA, she experienced the heart of Hollywood and her first early series of artworks focused on Jazz, Blues, Gospel & Entertainment legends whose influence is still felt today. Buena’s work transitioned into an uplifting Angel series influenced by her spiritual upbringing. With continued racism & the killing of more & more African Americans, Buena has begun a series that addresses America’s history of slavery & injustices whereas she acts as a recorder, truthteller, & an advocate.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @buenavisionart

Bunnie ‘Bonnie’ Reiss was raised with the wide-blue sky’s of Colorado. She was a tiny rebel with a large imagination, knowing at a young age that she quite didn’t fit in and the world was a much bigger place than the quiet suburban landscape that seemed to endlessly surround her. She eventually relocated to San Francisco and received her MFA from San Francisco Arts Institute. She grew into herself, found a community of artists that she would spend many years building, living and creating many things together. After traveling through France and across the US, she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue larger mural and installation-based projects. Her work is heavily influenced by her Eastern European background, with its tradition of folk art, bright colors, and community engagement. Her extensive travels have also added an extra layer of conversation, which makes her creations unique. Her brightly colored folk murals decorate many countries and can be found all over the world.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

C. Jean is a career artist whose love of nature and ecology are a substantial part of their practice. Reuse, and creative incorporation trash is more common in recent works. C. thinks about how each project is composed, carefully building stories through semiotics.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Cait Ball makes stuff for the wall. The table too. She is a third-generation Jewish Californian artist, currently teaching art at an LAUSD high school. Process driven, sometimes conceptual, her work begins with questions.

My artwork comes from many different interests but I am particularly drawn to people, urban life, and the areas inside us where the heart and the mind merge. I’m drawn to human tenderness and goodwill. I love color, lines, shape, and intersections between digital and handmade art. My paintings often start from photographs or digital work that is rendered in oil or acrylic or both and pieces started on canvas are frequently figured digitally and reworked, in a process of back and forth between the digital and the real.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

Carlos Mares is a visual (digital) artist, poet, artivist, and erudite, who exhibited two digital paintings at “The First Floor Gallery in Santa Clarita’s City Hall, CA” and his paintings were mentioned in Newsletter from “Center for Hispanic Excellence: La Casa Latina at University of Pennsylvania” (by Maritza Santiago-Torres, Office Coordinator on April 21, 2020).  His digital paintings depict a story filled with history and his own personal experiences. His artwork has been featured in various group shows throughout the US and Los Angeles.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Carmen Mardónez (1988) is a Chilean textile artist living in Los Angeles, California, since 2017. Her artwork seeks to radically reimagine intimate spaces of memories, dreams, and discovery, exploring variations around traditional embroidery by combining oversized formats, textile sculpture and the recovery of textile waste.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Los Angeles-based artist Carolyn Mason works primarily in sculpture using a variety of materials from wool to pinecones to expandable foam. Her work reflects a fascination with botanical and regenerative forms. Born in Walnut Creek, CA, Mason received her MFA degree in Sculpture from Mills College in 2005. She has exhibited at Torrance Art Museum, Mt. St. Mary’s University, Tufenkian Fine Arts as well as in a solo exhibition at Winslow Garage (all Los Angeles, CA). She has curated an exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum and is a recipient of the Fellows for Contemporary Arts (FOCA) Curator’s Lab.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Chelsea Boxwell moved to California from Texas to pursue a Masters in Fine Art from Claremont Graduate University. Since graduating in 2017, she has held the position of Executive MFA Chair on the Alumni Board while living and working in Los Angeles. Chelsea combines paintings and fabrics into what she calls “multi-dimensional paintings” that become large-scale, often site-specific, and sometimes interactive painting environments. She also has an ongoing series of small, 12×12 inch, “Candy Paintings.” Chelsea has recently shown works at PØST, Royale Projects, Charlie James Gallery, Fabrik Projects, MASH Gallery and a public art installation in Inglewood, CA.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Chelsea Dean’s studio practice includes printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpture, and collage techniques. She reconfigures the tenuous boundaries between architecture, home life, personal artifacts, and the inherent messiness and transmutability of domestic ideals. Her process involves meticulous and emotionally charged exploration, documentation, collecting, and reimagining of the urban and rural landscapes she calls home. Recent work is informed by her field studies and found objects from abandoned homesteads in Wonder Valley —a sparsely populated High Desert region of Southern California which experienced a building boom brought on by the United States Small Tract Act in the late 1930s. Yet, by the early 1960s, thousands of homesteaders abandoned their desert homes and cabins, leaving the landscape dotted with tangible evidence of lost dreams. By layering collected elements and information Dean has observed and gathered, her recent work simultaneously embraces and pushes back against the entropy setting in on the long lost fantasies of others.

Chenhung Chen is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist whose mixed media drawings, photography, sculptures, and installations navigate modernity through her transforming of mainly found industrial materials. Chen’s work investigates physical, social, and spiritual structures and how they intersect in contemporary culture.

Born in Beigang, Taiwan Chen has lived and worked in Taipei, Taiwan, New York, N.Y., and Los Angeles, CA. During a couple of residencies and international traveling experiences, Chen is situating herself between cultures and expressing herself from a global perspective.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

L.A based artist influenced by color, indigenous patterns, graffiti and pop art. Bringing these influences together to show an artist narrative of a 1st generation immigrant. Using this art to educate and bring attention to our beautiful culture.

Instead of ink or paint, Chiho Harazaki uses tape as her primary medium. Tiny pieces of tape cut with a precision knife and scissors compose a whole picture. Informed by her experiences living in both Japan and America, Harazaki’s subject matter includes a variety of cultural, historical and social comment.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @chiho_harazaki

Chloe Cusimano is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working with photography, cyanotypes, weaving, and sewing. They are pursuing portraiture as a process of documenting and reconfiguring body parts into whole images and structures. Their art practice is grounded in queer play, which they define as simply being non-reflective of idealistic, heteronormative aesthetics and values. Through playful methodologies, they intend to uphold subjective experiences and subvert predominant normative assumptions about play. Chloe is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Emotions run deep, yet still, in Ronk’s work. As an artist, he longs for a sense of symmetry, sequence and harmony, but these things do not always come easily. Although he strives for meticulous order, his work ultimately remains flawed. It is in this tension, between his desire for perfection and the ultimately flawed reality of the finished piece, where the true beauty of his work lies.

His subtly textured minimalist colorscapes and bold type influenced paintings echo and oppose the multiplicity of visual stimuli encountered in city life overwhelmed by noise, poverty, excess and an over dependence on technology. Influenced heavily by nature, the human form, architecture, advertising, and typography— Ronk creates visual experiences that viewers are subconsciously familiar with and inexplicably drawn to. Intentional, yet often contradictory, use of symmetry and imbalance, repetition and uncluttered space, rich palettes and monochromatic schemas, all exist within his work. Serenity amongst the chaos, Ronk’s art invites a deeply meditative pause that never ceases to captivate.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Christian Moeller is a sculptor and installation artist. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany where he lived and worked until he moved to the United States in 2001. Initially trained as a structural engineering draftsman and then as an architect, he came to art equipped with a pragmatic skill-set that would prove indispensable to his creative practice. His interactive work has been shown at museums, galleries and art festivals internationally. Many of his recent works can be seen as urban scale objects and installations which have found permanent homes in public spaces throughout the world, from Seattle to Singapore.

Christian Spruell is a SFAI alumni and Skowhegan alumni. He has exhibited many works throughout the states, but predominantly in California and New York.

Exhibition: There From Here

Christine Rasmussen is an American artist raised in Pakistan, Vietnam and the United States. Now based in Los Angeles, Rasmussen earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley. Her work has been featured in multiple juried exhibitions, a number of solo exhibits and various publications. She has works in the collections of Imagery Estate Winery, the Hilbert Museum of California Art and various private collections worldwide. Rasmussen is represented by George Billis Gallery LA.

Exhibition: There From Here

I began my artistic journey after my family moved to San Jose, California and now I have been working professionally as an artist for more than thirty-five years. I possess a BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA in Sculpture from Claremont Graduate University. My work is included in many private collections worldwide as well as being featured in numerous television shows, independent films, books and magazines and media publications. I have lectured and facilitated workshops in museums, art galleries, colleges and schools throughout the country. My greatest reward comes from sharing my lifelong creative journey to the world!

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @chukesart

Colette Miller created the Global Angel Wings Project in 2012, in the streets of Los Angeles, the City of Angels. They were painted to remind humanity that we are the angels of this earth. They are human sized interactive street art, wings that people take photos with and thus become part of the art. The first pair were painted illegally but the response was natural, immediate, and spontaneous – from people of all sorts and backgrounds, both those who were photographed and those who asked for the wings. Colette has painted wings globally – Kenya, Australia, Taiwan, France, Cuba, Juarez Mexico, and more, and many in the USA. Though some are commissioned and others gifted, the wings themselves are free to the world, never owned by anyone, not even Colette, though they are of her provenance and her work.

“Emotional, truthful, and vulnerability show through my work, while also grasping the dynamism that my colorful flowers display. There is a hint of playfulness in my work as well.”
Colleen Sandland is an American painter and textile artist whose works have been exhibited nationally, as well as in Switzerland, Canada, and the Netherlands. Her central subject is flowers. The drips symbolize life and emotion as well as the ‘vastness of life and how fast it changes”. The compositions are created using acrylics and ink on canvas.

Colette von is a self-taught, visually impaired artist. She has a degenerative retinal disease called Cone Dystrophy, which often presents as material in her pierces. Her work focuses traditionally features high contrasting figures or expressions with limited color palettes, accentuating the subject.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Connie Nakamura finds secret messages in beautiful and funny images torn out of magazines. Listening to ideas that come from everywhere, her curiosity is fed by things like a broken digital bus display or text printed on trash on the street.

A multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Los Angeles. She studied Illustration and received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena where she found a freedom in working in paint, collage, and assemblage.

Her most recent show is at the FOG Gallery in San Francisco.

Past exhibits include Art Center College of Design and the Folk Tree in Pasadena.

I’ve always had a love for the arts. I grew up performing music with my colorful family, which includes my uncles—The Chambers Brothers. Music was life to us, and led to my earliest exploration of the performing arts, singing at venues like the Roxy, LA Street Scene, The Whisky-a-Go-Go, and the Hollywood Bowl. My love for books connected me to both the written and visual art’s which fueled my passion to create.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram: @msconnievee

Website:https://connievee.com/

Jina Chae is a Los Angeles-based artist who was born and raised in Korea, where she earned her BA in Textile & Design from Chung-Ang University. She has worked as a fashion designer for 10+ years in Seoul and LA.

Longing to fulfill her dream of becoming an artist, she searched for a way to blend her design skills and experience with her passion for the arts. Her first foray into the art world came in 2018, working as a creative director for an art gallery in Seoul, where she curated multiple exhibitions featuring emerging artists. Now living and working in LA as an artist under the name ‘Coolprettyfreak’, she hopes to empower other women and immigrants to explore the arts.

Exhibition: There From Here, Rainbow Shift

Courtney (they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Los Angeles. After graduating from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance, they joined L.A. Dance Project where they have worked with choreographers such as Bobbi Jene Smith & Or Schraiber, Benjamin Millipied, Pam Tanowitz, and more. With interest in many different facets of art, Courtney spreads herself across genres such as photography, painting, dancing, and film. Letting curiosity drive their research, Courtney hopes to be able to create safe and open spaces within many art communities around the world for exploration and collaboration.

Cristian Rivas is a Southern California based artist. Pulling inspiration from her Mexican heritage, the human condition, and human anatomy, she creates brightly colored paintings.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Cynthia Ortega is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Ángeles, exploring neo surrealism as a first generation Mexican American. She primarily works with acrylics, ink, and color pencil. Ortega experiments with color and patterns to achieve surreal paintings. She uses a limited color palette and under paintings of cool tones that are topped off with warm tones to feel nostalgia and timelessness. Many of Ortega’s paintings are depicted through anthropomorphism to contortions of figures, incorporating familiar objects or a dream dreamt from the night before. She has exhibited artworks from central to southern California including Rancho Palos Verdes, Fullerton and Bakersfield. She has a mural painted in Long Beach at Retro Row Ink where she is also working as a tattoo artist. Ortega received her AA for Transfer at Porterville Community College (2017) and is working towards her BA at California State University of Domínguez Hills.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Daniel Gonzalez Humegido is an artist from the SGV, specifically near Rosemead and South El Monte area. DGH mainly works with oil and acrylic paintings, with his subjects being from personal experiences to stills from films and skate videos.

Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work explores the rituals and traditions she experienced as a child of immigrant parents. Color and pattern is integrated throughout her work as she describes the vibrancy of her traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to social-political commentary on past and current immigrant experiences. As she completed her B.F.A. at CSULB, she began to reflect on her traditions through the American lens. American tile patterns are used as the veil through which she remembers these events. Her work has been exhibited throughout California and abroad including Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Sweden, with galleries such as Artbug Gallery, Luna Anais Gallery, Artshare LA, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Residency Art Gallery and Thinkspace Projects. She has been a keynote speaker for the undocumented commencement at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and continues to hold a strong connection to her Mexican-immigrant roots.

Exhibition: Inner Links

I paint to relieve stress. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive. All of my work is an expression of stress and navigating through it. I hope my work helps you get through something you’re going through.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Darlyn Susan Yee creates fiber-based socially engaging figurative sculptures and installations to engage the viewer to explore the relationship between materials and form. She re-contextualizes the more feminized traditions and practices of fiber art inverted through the use of industrial materials to explore issues of gender identity, sense of place and purpose, and cultural identity and commonality. Her recent focus is on repurposing and up-cycling materials, and using traditional fiber techniques to create installations of exaggerated clothing, and temporary public art displays.

Darlyn has created the outsized sweaters to convey home, warmth and comfort. And she has chosen the very deliberate acts of knitting, crocheting and stitching to deliver the unsettled themes of our times and to underscore the timelessness of their sentiments. These slogans heard in the past year have now become a part of the fabric of her life.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Daryl Bibicoff is a Los Angeles based artist that works with acrylics and mixed media to create textural paintings. He is a diversified painter and has an extensive body of artwork. Daryl has the utmost passion fad a contemporary artist.

As a native-born Angeleno, artist Dave Lefner has always had a love for the city that surrounds him… for Lefner, this sunny, urban landscape serves as the perfect inspiration for his detailed, very limited-edition, reduction linoleum block prints.

He received a BA in Art from California State University at Northridge in 1993.  It was there he discovered a love of typography, the colorful, abstract NYC cityscapes of Stuart Davis, as well as his biggest inspiration-  Picasso’s series of linocuts from the 1950s.

Lefner is widely recognized as a Master of his craft. Represented by several galleries in the States, he has exhibited abroad, as well.  A solo exhibition in 2018, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, garnered him a Los Angeles Times article, the third of his career.  His detailed prints are also in numerous private and public collections, including the Permanent Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, as well as being featured in a 12-minute documentary short, by Serena Creative, which airs frequently on KCET’s (PBS Socal) “Artbound.”

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Davia King is an abstract expressionist artist who uses bright colors. By layering thin layers of acrylic ink and aerosol she captures a visual interpretation of creative energy. By allowing the composition to take on a life of its own rather than try to force a preexisting idea, each piece is unique and cannot be replicated twice exactly the same way. King then enrolls the public to act as her models as she captures each person in a blind contour style while creating a moment of connection. She is regularly live painting and collaborating with the public at different private and public events throughout the Los Angeles area where anyone present can become a part of her next piece.

Creative Careers: 4th St Bridge, Angel City Brewery Festival

I believe we are living in a time where being visible and proud is more important than ever. Pools for me are metaphor rich environments. This current series of paintings of men in swimming pools is a world that exist next to and yet a part of the broader world, much like the gay community.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

David Puck is a young British multi-disciplinary artist, working in traditional painting, makeup, digital, video content, and public murals. Their work primarily explores human experience and mental health, exploring areas of identity, narrative, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Their mission is to foster healthy, compassionate connection and understanding. They work closely with local communities and artists, often collaborating and creating community engagement. They are originally from the UK and work between there, Los Angeles, and travelling.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town, Angel City Brewery Heritage Festival

Instagram: @davidpuckartist

Born in San Luis Obispo and raised in Los Angeles, Debbie McAfee has a unique view of California that has influenced her art and life. Debbie attended California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA and received a BFA in film and photography. She is a member of Los Angeles Art Association and has exhibited at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood and at ArtShare LA in the Los Angeles Arts District.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Deborah Lynn Irmas lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. Her artwork is an exploration of the materials and memories from her childhood that have shaped her life. These elements have become the foundation of her artistic practice and have enabled her to tell stories that resonate with her personal history.

Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by the book, which traverses tapestry, installation and sculpture to push familiar forms into works that arrest and baffle, while simultaneously offering places of contemplation and solace. As a maker and teaching artist she invites altered ways of viewing the world and how we inhabit it.
Disman was the featured artist for the Big Read in LA in 2016, and was commissioned by LA’s Craft Contemporary Museum to create an interactive book for their 2017 exhibition, “Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California”. She is the recipient of a 2016- 17 WORD Artist Grant / Bruce Geller Memorial Prize and a 2021-22 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship.
A 2018 Studio Resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica, she is currently an artist-in-residence at 18th Street Arts Center and the LA Department of Cultural Affairs.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

I am a Southern Californian, born and bred. I received my training as a painter at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine; Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California; and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Atelier de M. Nallard, Paris, France. I have a Bachelor of Science Degree in Philosophy from U.C. Santa Cruz; and a Masters Degree in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College, Pasadena, California.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Auction

Website:debravodhanel.com

Derick Edwards is an artist from Central Coast California who graduated with his BFA in drawing and painting from California University Long Beach. With over 10 years of drawing and painting experience, he has had work shown in Central Coast California, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and New York. He utilizes figures to help tell narratives centered around time, memory, and nostalgia.

Exhibition: Rituals

Diana Haro is a South Central L.A. self taught artist who discovered a passion for painting at a very early age. Her artwork is inspired by Mesoamerican art and works with various art forms including painting, print making, photography, drawing and digital art that conveys messages and evokes reactions.

Diane Cockerill is the fourth generation in her family to live in Los Angeles.
She studied Fine Art at UCLA and has shown work at several local and national galleries as well as in Tokyo, Paris, Hungary, and South Korea. After receiving her first point-and-shoot at the age ten, she later transitioned to a 35mm camera with a more serious interest in photography. New technology introduced the digital world and the immediacy it provided suited her shooting style. Diane is now fully immersed in photographing her native city.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

I’m a mixed media artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. My art is a study of self that aims to discover what influences my headspace as I maneuver social, cultural, and political differences from one country to another—diving deep into the psyche to uncover what lies beneath rather than what meets the eye.

Jacob Root (DistrangedDesign) is a self taught 22 year old stencil Artist / Street Artist from New Zealand. His work touches on themes of Happiness, Sadness, Love, Heartbreak and other themes that he sees all around him in his coming of age years.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Exploring the real and the referential, parallels of light and consciousness underpin Donna Gough’s conceptual framework. Linking elements from drawing, sculpture, installation and light-based media, her practice is an ongoing enquiry into concepts of the ‘unknown’ and the illusion of time (ourselves) flowing from the past towards the future as a subjective experience of consciousness.

Gough’s approach to installation and neon aesthetics is often focused on conceptual wordplay, exploring the relationship between art and the duality of language through the complexity of the human experience. She is interested in the effect light has on our psychology and spatial perception, with its inherent ability to confront the eye and mind of the viewer.

Exhibition: There From Here

Doris Bittar’s interdisciplinary art maps and researches patterns from shared and overlapping heritages, which she calls a form of “cultural DNA.” Bittar has shown widely in solo and group exhibits in the US and abroad. Her publications include opinion pieces and essays on art. Performative poetry and fiction recently entered her artistic practice as an extension of Colonial Colonnade, her current project that intertwines Arabic and English texts. Bittar’s art is housed in public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and the Arab World. An immigrant from Lebanon, Bittar received a BFA at the State University of New York and an MFA from the University of California San Diego. Bittar’s teaching career includes the University of California San Diego, California State University San Marcos, the American University of Beirut, among others, and was a visiting scholar at NYU.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

My art is a product of the industrial and media saturated world we live in. From my earliest memories, I remember TV commercials and manufactured toys. In my work, I explore the relationships between technology, media and human emotion.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Duncan Sherwood-Forbes uses wire to draw through the air in sinuous curving lines. He began figure drawing at age 11 in the year 2000, and picked up wire at age 16. Rooted in drawing, his wire practice has undergone constant refining and redefining, with formal education and creative exploration in the studio with other media filtering back into his favorite medium – wire. Today his work is dominated by the human figure, simplified down to its essential curves and lines.

E.L. Rodríguez is an emerging visual artist who had her first gallery exhibition and first publication last year. Her work has been featured in Modern Renaissance magazine as well. She is a self-taught artist with a B.A. in English Literature. She specializes in oil painting and functional pottery.

I am a Mexican American artist that resides in Long Beach. Most of my work is figurative and depicts Mexicans from el Rancho existing in North America.

Exhibition: Rituals

EL MAC is an internationally renowned artist born and based in Los Angeles. He began painting both smaller indoor works as well as public murals and graffiti in Phoenix in the mid 1990s, and since that time has developed his unique visual aesthetic and rendering style which utilizes repeating contour patterns. His work draws on influences from classical European art, social realism, symbolism and devotional art, as well as the Chicano and Mexican culture he grew up around. He is best known for his meticulous paintings and large-scale murals exploring feminine beauty and honoring ordinary, overlooked, or marginalized people.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction, Street Schooled

Elana is a designer and artist based in Los Angeles. She enjoys the process of collage by layering and combining different elements. She moves from digital to physical by using photoshop, mixed media, collage and paint. Elana incorporates movement into her work by using a range of luscious bodies, inanimate objects, vibrant colors, and distorted figures. The theme of pleasure is seen throughout her pieces and feels like a sensual dream.

Elena Jacobson is an artist in Los Angeles. She also enjoys working with artists in her role as co-curator at Gabba Gallery.

Elizabeth Munzón (b.1990) is a Long Beach CA based oil painter of Mexican descent born in the San Fernando Valley and raised in Sylmar, a suburb of Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) with an emphasis in Figurative Painting and Drawing and a minor in Marketing from California State University, Long Beach in 2017. Munzón’s work often addresses her Mexican-American ethnic identity by finding parallels between her personal relationships and Mexican mythologies, traditions and folklore.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Maximalist illustrator with mixed media techniques.

Elmer Guevara was born and raised in Los Angeles and is currently working bicoastally in New York City. In the 1980s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that dialogue about identity and concepts of inter-generational trauma.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @3lmski1

Painter and songwriter Eloy Torrez was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He grew up there and in Barstow, California. He studied art at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles and lives and works in Los Angeles, creating an extensive body of work that includes studio paintings, public art and music compositions. His body of paintings and murals is a manifest of life in Los Angeles and a tribute to its people.

Exhibition: The Observer and the Observed

Emilia Cruz is a first generation Mexican American artist born in San Diego, CA, 1993; currently residing in Simi Valley, CA

Cruz is enrolled in the Illustration program at Art Center College of Design. She teaches art classes for kids at Plaza de la Raza’s Cultural Center for the Arts and Education, located in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, CA. She was recently commissioned by CNN en Español for Proyecto Ser Humano (Humanity Project), as well as a Netflix series called Gente-fied, and was asked to design a mural for Netflix Selena: The Series.

Exhibition: The Observer and the Observed

Emily Elisa Halpern creates large, abstract representational oil paintings featuring socio-political content.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

Emily Hoerdemann is a Los Angeles based collage artist.  Her works challenge feminist themes with humor and grace, utilizing analog collage with tangible materials to capture the sensory experience of time, nostalgia, and memory.  As a result, each work is a delicate placing of aesthetics and color.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram:@millyhoerdemann

Website:Emily Hoerdemann

Deeply rooted in and inspired by Los Angeles, Enkrypt Los Angeles’ work not only tells the stories of the streets but of artists too. Head IT technician of one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world turned touring photographer /videographer with the help of her close friend and well-known rapper, Reverie, Enkrypt escaped the corporate world to follow a blooming passion sprouted from picking up a camera. Transitioning from the tech industry, where Enkrypt set aside her creativity for years, to that of a creative one was  a process. 

INSTAGRAM:http://enkrypt_losangeles

Deeply rooted in and inspired by Los Angeles, Enkrypt Los Angeles’ work not only tells the stories of the streets but of artists too. Head IT technician of one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world turned touring photographer /videographer with the help of her close friend and well-known rapper, Reverie, Enkrypt escaped the corporate world to follow a blooming passion sprouted from picking up a camera. Enkrypt is influenced by gang culture and telling stories about black and brown folks. She grew up in Northeast LA, Highland Park daughter of a single mom who struggled to get her daughters by. The streets raised Enkrypt and was a product of her environment for a long time, knowing that one day she would be able to earn the wisdom to change her reality. Enkrypt tries to bring out the ugly, make it beautiful for everyone else to see and appreciate it a bit more than its stereotypes.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Erik Barrios-Recendez, also known as E. Barrios, is a Chicanx LGBTQIA+ artist from Los Angeles whose artistic journey is a testament to the transformative power of art aimed at rewriting and complicating narratives that historically excluded LGBTQIA+ voices. Committed to unearthing hidden stories shrouded by the passage of time, Barrios celebrates the resiliency of the creative spirit to overcome adversity. Drawing inspiration from archives, art history, and realms of joy and desire, Barrios crafts non-linear forms of storytelling that rebel against traditional patriarchal structures. Their work transcends mere expression, catalyzing open conversations and fostering understanding of our contemporary world’s diversity through collage, sculpture, video, and painting.

A recent Berkeley Art Practice undergraduate program graduate, Barrios has made outstanding contributions, earning a place in the UC Berkeley Art Practice Honors Program 2023 cohort. E. Barrios’s art has been showcased at esteemed venues such as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Worth Ryder Gallery, and Vincent Price Art Museum. Their recent acceptance into the Spring 2024 Ellsworth Artist in Residency cohort at Art Share L.A. marks another significant milestone in their artistic journey.

Erin DeVine explores the relationships between nature, humanity and consciousness. Daily observations and past experiences come together in her work to illustrate the shared experience of life. In addition to painting, she also makes digital art and earned a Certificate of Excellence in 3D modelling from Pasadena City College. In her painting practice, Erin continues to challenge and push her limits by experimenting with new techniques. Through experimenting, Erin hopes to discover more effective ways to communicate the intent of her art to the viewer. The intent of her art is always morphing and responding to the forces of the world.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @erindevineart

Esmeralda Villarreal is a Los Angeles County native self-taught artist who has been honing her art skills since the mid 2000’s. She fell in love with painting and mastered her craft by looking within herself to find inspiration and growth. Esmeralda’s evolution had her teetering from Realism, to Fantasy, to Mexican Folklore, to Chicano pop art. Priding herself in being a Chicana, her art does often give a nod to her roots and the rich culture her past generations come from. Esmeralda’s art has been shown in various local exhibitions and art shows in Los Angeles and surrounding counties.

Exhibition: SOMOS

Folklore is the human attempt to pass on truths. Henry Glassie said it best, “it stresses the interdependence of the personal, the social; the aesthetic, the ethical, the cosmological; the beautiful, the good, the true. Practically, folklore is the study of human creativity in its own context” My art can be summed up as confessions of paper, a way to visually communicate truths, accessing the space occupied by folklore. Paper conceals and communicates meaning, and can be destroyed and overlaid in various modes. I begin a piece by abstractly representing an image in paint, which I then cover with paper: scraps found, created from pulp, or hand illustrated. I then peel away the paper, leaving a construction bearing a nonlinear but viscerally personal connection to its origin. The accumulated papers mimic the debris that sticks to memories; it mirrors waking life’s uncanny transfiguration in our dreams. Where realism trusts only what can be tested and seen, folklore presents a world vibrating with meaning, a morally charged and heavily fated universe that rejects logic in favor of the non-linear.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted, This Town Has HeART

Estefania Ajcip is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. Through painted portraiture, she explores childhood experiences and the absence of a father figure. Throughout the art-making process, she uses hopeless letters that she wrote as a little kid to her father and photographs of her nieces to compensate for the past she never had with him. These letters would contain wishes and promises like any other child and father will do to endure the absence of a loved one. While reading, she noticed that immigration played a key part in her letters. They tell the disrupted yet fragile story of a father and a little girl who lived miles away from each other. Estefania works with 3D, and mixed media. The 3D objects have an emotional connection to the past, and the rich color to her Mayan culture. Part of her process involves the use of child-like drawings symbolizing the dualities of looking into the past and present. Although the letters are a constant reminder of the melancholic passage of memory, it took a mother, and two little girls to adjust to life without a husband and a father, a journey her family shares with millions of other immigrants who seek better opportunities and living conditions. Every letter, and every effort was a beautiful journey, it was a way of getting closer to Papi (dad).

Evan Mendel is a painter/muralist born in 1988, and raised in the Valley just outside of Los Angeles CA.  Evan grew up being influenced by cartoons, skateboarding, surfing and graffiti.  These influences led him to pursue his artistic ambitions further into his late teens and early 20’s, experimenting with making abstract and figurative based paintings.  Without any formal art education, Evan was self-taught through trial, error, and observation.  He has since painted several large-scale murals in Ventura, CA and Los Angeles.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @awonderfulmistake

Fabian Debora was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Boyle Heights and began his career in 1988 as a graffiti artist 1995 as a member of the East Los Angeles Streetscapers. He was mentored by many Chicano artists and muralists.

Exhibition: Street Schooled, SOMOS

Farzad Kohan’s sculptures and paintings explore themes like love, migration, and identity, and often incorporate appropriated media and found objects. Partially inspired by his personal history and surroundings, Kohan places an emphasis on form, allowing the successive stages of art making to become analogous to diasporic experience, as diverse, sometimes opposing, elements are sampled, brought together, and accumulated. These apparent stages are integral parts of each finalized work. Kohan’s formalistic process is revealed, for example, as he layers then strips abstract works through painting, collage, décollage, and sanding, creating built-up yet weathered surfaces that are at once chaotic and methodical. Allusions to the passage of time, gradual transformations, and hidden stories are found in the tactile details of his treated panels.

Exhibition: There From Here

Finnley Kirkman is a self-taught multimedia artist flirting with the complex power dynamics inherent to human relationships. The uncomfortable tension between the empowered and disempowered undergirds her work across media. Her practice incorporates photography, textiles, painting, video, and sculpture.

Floyd Strickland is an emerging multi-disciplined artist from Los Angeles Ca. Drawing inspiration from his childhood environment, Strickland often uses realistic figures that are juxtaposed with cartoons creating dream-like paintings.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @floyd_strickland

Francisco Palomares is a native Angeleno of East LA. He discovered the magic of oil painting from skimming through books featuring the works of classic artists such as Rembrandt, Francisco de Goya, and Diego De Velasquez. He was mesmerized by the way strokes of paint from a brush can bring to life people, places and things; it was magical in the young eyes of Palomares. His passion for art would lead him to begin his art training at Ryman Arts, receive a BFA at CSULB, and study art across the Pacific Ocean . He is a current resident artist at Art Share LA were he continues to innovate and inspire the community.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Curation: Voices of Los Angeles

Frankie Fünke (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist in visual & performing arts. Known for her unique style, Frankie’s work has been featured in NFT Now, Superchief Gallery (LA), Neo Shibuya TV (Tokyo), The Crypt Gallery (LA & NYC), Rug Radio (NFT NYC), and TAG (LA). Frankie describes her work as “manifestations for the highly anxious and mentally unstable”, hoping to “inject humour into the black hole that is navigating mental health.” Frankie’s latest work depicts iconic moments in pop culture through the lens of a person on the verge of emotional breakdown.

Frannie Hemmelgarn is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative output includes oil painting on canvas and wood, cyanotype print making and temporary and spontaneous installations in nature. Her work, which trends towards abstract and figurative, is inspired by the vibrant colors and intricate patterns found in nature and the role that energy and rhythm play in our experiences as humans.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Born in Munich, Germany, Ekecs graduated from the Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in 1990. Work as a commercial photographer took him around the world, and he soon settled in Los Angeles. Over the years, his clients have included Time Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, HBO, Lufthansa, and Audi, among many others.
A longtime resident of downtown Los Angeles, Gabor Ekecs is a fine artist as well as a commercial photographer, and has steadfastly worked to challenge our assumptions about image, meaning, and perspective.

Exhibition: The Observer and the Observed

 Bill Mayer, Producer of Gay DD

A fast outrageous, attention-deficit LGBT cabaret and all-around funk-tacular experience.

INSTAGRAM

Genavee Gómez (b. 1996) is a painter originally from Wilmington Ca., now residing in San Pedro, Ca. She received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach. Her body of work focuses on confidence and the comfort in one’s own skin. Growing up as a young Mexican American girl, she reached an age where displaying “flaws,” that many in her own Mexican and American cultures did not find appealing or attractive, were ideas that she both struggled with and found beautiful. This became the subject she wanted to speak about most in her paintings.

Exhibition: Rituals

Genesis Cuen, is a visual artist, illustrator, and dancer. Their art’s purpose is to create a conversation around their Mexican indigenous cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs, blending that with modern concepts and techniques. Genesis’ visual art, entices and invites the viewer to ask who or what the subject is and makes them view an ordinary common object as the sacred gift that it is. Cuen hopes to inspire others to research and discover their own roots, and to teach those that share similar cultural experiences something new about themselves.

Genevieve Lavalle is a textile and fiber artist based out of the Midwest that uses upcycled and dead stock fibers to create her colorful textile pieces.

Giovanni Rubio is a multi media artist, that considers him self as a cultural worker. Currently, he is has his own digital design business and he is an art instructor he has facilitated art and public art workshops for young people at parks, recreation centers, housing projects, public schools, charter schools and junior colleges throughout the greater Los Angeles County area.

Exhibition: SOMOS

Glenn Waggner was born and raised in Southern California. Growing up in the beach communities, he was immersed in the 1970s surfing and skateboarding culture. Always drawing and sketching, Glenn has worked in the architectural profession for many years. It was not until the year 2000, that oil painting was “discovered”. This freer, looser medium was the perfect fit that allowed art to be made using vivid color and no precise lines.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram:@glennwaggner_art

Website:https://www.glennwaggnerartist.com/

Gregg Stone is an award-winning professional artist who exhibits internationally. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952, a tenth generation Californian. His Mexican heritage reflects and inspires his work. College education consists of an associate arts degree from Orange Coast College and bachelor of arts degree from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. With masterful manipulation of watercolors, gouache and Japanese sumi-ink, Gregg developed his own style, which he calls ‘Modern Realism.’ His creations have to be viewed in person to appreciate the attention to detail and three-dimensional, life-like quality.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Twins Nikolai and Simon Haas (b.1984) create irreverent sculptures that explore themes related to nature, fantasy and sexuality. Originally from Austin, Texas the brothers began collaborating in 2010 each bringing their respective passions and distinct specialties together utilizing materials such as marble, bronze, ceramics, beads and more. The Haas Brothers have had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad and maintain their studio practice in Los Angeles, CA.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Hagop Belian is a self-taught mixed media collage artist. His work is an exploration in the concept of synergy: the creation of a whole that is greater that the simple sum of its parts. The source materials of his work come from books and materials dated from the early 1500’s to 1800’s , and are retrieved from public domains and libraries from around the world. By constructing unlikely relationships between images, Hagop brings new meaning and purpose to the subject matter, thereby challenging society’s preconceived notions regarding race, gender, and culture.

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival

I am a fiber artist and I specialize in hand hooked and machine tufted rugs and sculptures. I live in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia with my 8 year old former Nepali street dog, Ganga. I grew up in San Luis Obispo, California in a family that encouraged a lot of crafting. My mom taught me how to knit as a very small child and my grandmother encouraged me to paint and draw in her studio whenever we went to visit. I moved to Canada in 2012 to attend McGill University where I studied Religious Studies and Anthropology. When I graduated in 2016 I moved to Nova Scotia where my love of fibre art was quickly re-kindled. My mom signed us up for a rug-hooking class that summer and what can I say, I was hooked immediately. During the pandemic I lost my job as a bartender and decided to use my first CERB cheque to buy myself a tufting gun, and I haven’t stopped tufting since.

Hayley Perry is a fourth generation rugmaker using the technique of traditional North American Rug Hooking, where each loop of fiber is hand pulled with a small crochet-like hook. She resides in Massachusetts and has a rug hooking studio and shop called Loop by Loop Studio in Rhode Island.

Mexican American artist based in Fullerton, with paintings ranging from psychedelic subjects to ordinary life. Mixing the strange and common to show a different perspective.

hero is a contemporary artists that creates socially charged images with his blend of mixed media and spray paint. While acquiring his degree in film, his schooling introduced him to notable artists from the 20th century. His passion for graffiti and street art took him to the alley ways and aqueducts in Los Angeles, where he was introduced to some of the most infamous graffiti artists. His vast influences have inspired him to focus on the process of creation and the evolution of self exploration. He has been known to create paintings using everything from smoke bombs to designer fabrics. Hero gained global notoriety when he created an 80’s based character “AlfPacino,” which was quickly printed, stenciled, and stickered by fans around the world.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

Hirotaka Suzuki is a Japanese artist living in Southern California. In his hand brushed painting, he focuses on transforming issues into surreal expressions to emphasize reality. In other words, he intentionally hides his ideas inside puzzles and expects viewers to discover them in his artwork. These representations derive from everyday occurrences, historical events, and imaginary stories. He both enjoys and suffers during the creative process.

Annie Hong is a self-taught Visual Artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Hong’s insatiable curiosity in all things beautiful and creative has led them to be a jack-of-all-trades in the arts, leading them to explore the worlds of murals, canvas painting, body art, installations, digital illustration, and more. Their drive for creation lies in their passion for community and representation for the underrepresented, which is fueled by their own lived experience as a queer, gender-nonconforming, first generation Korean American artist.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Ash Anderson is an illustrator and graphic designer based in West Hollywood, CA. His illustration practice explores biology and its connection to human culture and experience, with a particular focus on folklore. He received his BFA in illustration from California State University, Long Beach.

Exhibition: Rituals

Hunter Blaze Pearson is an up-and-coming artist from Malibu, CA. He primarily works in acrylic, colored pencil, and resin. Thematically, Hunter loves to juxtapose the light and dark elements in life to emphasis the beautiful balance of our world. He blends his talent for photorealistic pencil drawing and graphic acrylic painting to create bright and striking pop art pieces that are entirely hand painted.

Huyen Khanh (Michelle) Do is a musician, artist, and dancer local to Los Angeles. She focuses on watercolour, acrylic, and graphite pieces, and has been a winner of Art Battle Los Angeles on multiple occasions. She has shown at Art Share LA, ShockBoxx, and Las Lagunas Gallery among other locations.

I am an interdisciplinary L.A. based artist that works with paintings, print media, digital media, and artist books. My work embraces the art tradition from Mesoamerica to explore how historical events are interconnected and reverberate into the present. My work blends pre-Columbian iconography, Catholicism, generational myths, oral folklore, and contemporary pop culture to collapse the centuries separating the different artforms. My palette, depiction of the human body and surreal environments are influenced by the surviving pre-Columbian codices, murals, and ceramic figurines to affirm my presence as a Chicano in the United States and to reclaim my indigenous history.

Exhibition: Rituals

Jack Zoltak born in Los Angeles and currently resides in Los Angeles, California. He studied drawing and painting at UCLA, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, with teachers that included Harry Carmean, Vernon Wilson, John Asaro, Peter Liashkov, among others. He has participated in exhibitions in Santa Monica, Los Angeles and once in San Francisco beginning in 1983.

Jackie Farkas received her BA in Art with honors from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Studio Arts from Mills College. Jackie’s art has been included in various exhibitions, including Expand at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Terra Incognita at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, and Collect! at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley. Her paintings are featured in Curate LA and Saatchi Art. Her work is in individual and corporate collections both nationally and internationally. Jackie was born in Los Angeles, California where she currently lives and works. Her works are available at Saatchi Art, the world’s leading online art gallery.

Exhibition: This Town Has HeART

Jacqueline Valenzuela (b. East Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from California States University Long Beach (2019). Her work has been exhibited throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including the South Gate Museum (South Gate), Brea Gallery (Brea), South Pasadena City Hall Gallery (Pasadena), The Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts of the Mexican Consulate (Los Angeles), ArtShare L.A. (Los Angeles), and most recently at Flatline Gallery (Long Beach) for, “Sitting on Chrome” an exhibition curated around the theme of exploring the different artists who have interconnected their art practices with their passion for lowriding.

Valenzuela is a multi-media artist whose practice is centered around her experiences as a woman within the Chicano world of lowriding. Her art practice reflects the deep roots she has planted in the lowrider community by bridging the gap between fine art and this underrepresented community

Exhibition: Street Schooled

Jaja Dario is a visual artist, philosopher, and scientist at heart, born and based in Los Angeles. With a compass and color perspective, she confronts elements of the collective unconscious by painting patterns of feeling tones that give shape and form to her sublime encounters with songs. Jaja grew up in Manila, where she tripped hard and earned a BFA in Studio Arts – Painting from the University of the Philippines in 2004—her creative experience and practice hones in on the notion of the transcendent function and humanity’s quest for wholeness.

Jamie C Parker is a freelance photographer and ICU nurse, who uses photography as a means of  expression to explore her history of depression, and channels her art as therapy. Through her  work, she aims to empower women, challenge traditional beauty standards, push boundaries, and  continually better herself. In addition to her portrait work, Jamie has been published for her  photojournalistic work in the ICU.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram: @colettepark

Website:https://www.coletteparkphoto.com/

Janice Lau is an illustrator based in Los Angeles. She draws inspiration from nature and animals. She has two dogs, a Pomeranian and a Corgi, and she loves to imagine going on adventures with her pups through her illustrations.

Art has been a part of my Journey for the majority of my life. My Grandfather is a painter and my Uncle always had sketch pads. I adapted and took on the challenge of understanding the craft by practicing and giving myself projects to do. In 2013 I took it a step further and started experiencing Acrylic learning every aspect I could to painting and it was beautiful.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram: @jaypgallery

Website: https://jaypgallery.bigcartel.com/

Jazmin Garcia exudes art in all its forms. Her start as a backup dancer for MIA opened her mind and the doors to the rich arts LA provides. Jasmine moved from dancing to music production to hosting her own podcast where she interviews local LA scene artists. Her tangible art style ranges from geode epoxy resin to abstract fluid art inclusive of vibrant pinks, purples, blues, and naturals reflective of her home base in the South Bay. When Jasmine isn’t creating art she can be found hiking some of the highest peaks in Southern CA.

SOCIAL MEDIA: florecita_ jazz

PODCAST: Can I just say

Jazmin Jude is a horror artist based in Los Angeles, She studied Illustration at Otis College of Art Design and graduated in 2021. Her mediums include Watercolor, Pen and ink, and Oil. She holds an Artist Residency at The Hive Gallery and Studios in Downtown, Los Angeles. She started drawing in 2009 making show bills for bands and then went on to make her own collection of drawings of monsters.

Jazmyn Martinez is a Los Angeles native ceramic artist based in the Arts District. She began her ceramic studies in 2019 and has experience in hand-built and wheel-thrown functional pottery. She is trained in horsehair and raku firing and creates art that can be used by all.

Jen P. Harris (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multifaceted practice combines research, painting, and collage to engage with the many pasts that shape our present. Harris holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from Queens College of the City University of New York. She is a recipient of a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and grants from the Puffin Foundation, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and Iowa Arts Council. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States. The New York Times, Columbia Journal, Guernica Magazine, CultureCatch, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have reviewed or featured her work. Harris is a current contributor for the artist-run publication The Coastal Post and maintains a studio in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles.

Exhibition: There From Here

Based in Los Angeles, Gunlock has received an MFA at California State University, Long Beach in 2003. A 2022 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, she has exhibited nationally and in local venues such as Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Launch LA, and Angels Gate Cultural Center. She has been Artist in Residence at Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland; Playa in Summer Lake, Oregon; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; and Shoebox Projects in Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, among others.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

Jennifer Korsen is an LA-based artist that works with many mediums. Her mixed media pieces, murals, and street installations can be seen regularly around Los Angeles in galleries, pop-up shows, and public spaces. Korsen’s recent work is centered around the heart in several different environments and interpretations. Showing nonstop since 2009, her anatomically incorrect hearts are instantly recognizable. Her studio work, murals, and street installations have become a staple in Los Angeles and have been featured in Movies, TV shows, and local and international print publications and art books.

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival

Jeremy Labib is an LA based Dark Artist who loves drawing robots, monsters and strange locales. His inspiration comes from the horror and sci-fi fiction he enjoyed at a young age and continues to enjoy in his present. He works mostly in pen and ink, utilizing definitive detail and gestural expression to create his works.

​​Jeremy Novy’s unique brand of street art is ripe with thoughtful social examinations. Novy has combatted a homophobic lack of representation with a celebration of gay iconography, bringing joviality and warmth to disused urban spaces. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he curated the first major exhibition of its kind, “A History of Queer Street Art,” premiered in San Francisco in 2011 and later toured to Pop Up Gallery in Los Angeles and Yale University. Since graduating from Pecks School of the Arts, Novy’s art has been met with acclaim across the country.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

Instagram: @jeremynovy

Jesse Fregozo is a native Angeleno who primarily works as a painter. He vocalizes the struggles of marginalized communities through the representation of identity and culture as a primary focus. Fregozo uses locations around his community as symbols of identity and a cultural lifestyle that has been carried down generation after generation. Fregozo straddles the line between design and pop culture in the development of his work. His intense works on canvas, paper, photography, and design are mediums for the development of his artwork.

Exhibitions: Street Schooled, Ellsworth Artist Residency Program, SOMOS

Jessus Hernandez is an LA based artist that merges geometry with the beauty of cityscapes in a multi-dimensional world filled with color. His work simplifies the complexities of city life by converging flat shapes and perspective to create geometric abstract compositions.

By utilizing acrylics and aerosol paints, he has developed a painting technique where he skillfully creates clean lines and winding circular shapes that give his artwork a three dimensional futuristic quality. Through his commitment to detail and command of strong colors, he draws the eye of the viewer to his architectural perspective to reveal dimension, shadows, and the overall depth of his works.

You can find Hernandez’s numerous commissioned artworks and murals in public and private collections such as the Paypal Headquarters. He has also exhibited his works in multiple galleries in the U.S. and Europe and was a featured artist in the CONTEXT Art Fair in Miami Art Week 2018 and 2019 and in the L.A ART SHOW 2020 ZIN Los Angeles.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

JJ is a surreal artist. She tells her experiences through her paintings. Every object is a symbol and key to unfolding who she is.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Joan Scheibel is a contemporary abstract painter currently living and working in Los Angeles. Scheibel received a full scholarship from the prestigious Otis/Parson College of Art and Design and would later study Illustration at Platt College of Design. Scheibel established a prominent career in graphic design owning a business that was at the forefront of album packaging, branding and advertising.

Turning her attention inward for a more personal form of expression, Joan has pursued a fine art career for nearly a decade. Her work quickly earned acknowledgment from collectors, peers, and galleries throughout California, New Mexico, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and New York. Ms. Scheibel is a consistent winner of the juried ArtSlant Showcase awards given to emerging and mid-career artists that exhibit both great potential and commitment to their practice.

“My Shadow appeared and I started painting. Guess we can never escape ourselves.”

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

In 2000, she graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a Masters of Fine Art (MFA). Joanne has exhibited throughout California; nationally in Korea, France, England, Switzerland, Scotland, Greece, Spain, Germany, Japan’s Belgium, Holland and Italy. Her work has also been selected for Lunar Codex, a very special project partnered with SpaceX to deliver the images of art in a time capsule to be permanently affixed to the surface of the moon, selected by Era Contemporary Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as part of “Legends Of The Moon”.

Joe O’Neill is a Los Angeles based painter working in multiple styles from realism to abstraction. A longtime interest in words and letters, both their visual structure and their meanings, is a common thread throughout his work. Joe studied art at Santa Monica College and San Francisco Art Institute (BFA 94). In addition to Gallery shows he paints signs, private commissions, and has created work for many TV shows and feature films.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

John Cuevas lives and works in Palm Desert, Los Angeles and Oceano, California. In 2005 he attended the School of Architecture, California Polytechnic, Pomona. In 2007 he received a BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Avocado Festival, 4th St Bridge Stairs

John Galan is an emerging international artist and teacher. His work focuses on the inextricable connection between humankind and natural world. Having grown to appreciate the connection between the physical body, particularly the gut, and mental health, John now looks to the foods and healing practices passed down by his ancestors to help treat his body and mind. The ongoing series combines the universal archetypes of the lungs, brain, and heart with symbolic imagery from contemporary Chicanx culture and cuisine. With each artwork, Galan reminds himself and others of their inherent strength (cactus lungs), wisdom (corn brain), and light (pomegranate heart).

Exhibition: Inner Links

Born and raised in the Midwest, John Lonsdale is a painter based in Los Angeles, with works exploring the relationship between nature and its impact on our emotions.

Born and raised in East Los Angeles, John Zender Estrada experienced a rich and diverse cultural environment drawing from the strong personalities of the Chicano youth around him. At fifteen he lived in Mexico City where he gained a love and respect for Los Tres Grandes, the famous Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Actively involved in establishing the Los Angeles style of graffiti art, John was one of the many early pioneers that created the graffiti movement in the early eighties. John recreated himself as Zender One (the rising mountain) and had his first one- man show at Otis titled “Zender-Neo Expression” in 1987.

He would begin his professional art career with the graffiti art on canvas. He has had several one man shows and many group shows, exhibiting with many other well-known Graffiti artists such as Retna, Chaz, Mear, Futura 2000, and many others.

Deeply committed to making public art Zender has produced over 300 murals in Los Angeles and throughout the United States. He created many brush murals in East Los Angeles which led him to create a large body of Chicano art.

Exhibition: Street Schooled

Johnny Naked is a multi-talented artist with a long, established career in the visual arts. He began his artistic endeavors while growing up in the city of Philadelphia, independently honing his photographic & storytelling skills through numerous personal projects.

Naked currently resides in Los Angeles, California, making his living as a visual media artist through the crafts of: filmmaking, photography, writing, and acting.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Born in Helena, Arkansas, Johnny Taylor grew up in and around Memphis, Tennessee. Early inspirations were MAD Magazine, Star Wars, and the rock band KISS. When he entered school, Johnny drew variations of these subjects ad infinitum. This interest in drawing led to a job producing a weekly comic strip at age 10. Thus encouraged, the young cartoonist determined that he would always make art.

Taylor began painting as a student at the University of Memphis (BFA, Art History, 1996). On New Year’s Eve of 1992, he made a resolution to paint three paintings a day, every day, for the entire year. By the end of 1993, Taylor had begun exhibiting the fruits of his labor. Showing paintings regularly ever since, he has not strayed far from the hard-edged cartoon style that marked his initial efforts. Primarily painted in acrylics with screen printed and stenciled elements, Taylor’s output has tapered from his earlier, dizzyingly prolific period.

Exhibition: There From Here

Jonah Elijah is a Houston, Texas native now working in Los Angeles. He received his BA in studio art from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017 and a MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2020. Jonah Elijah’s work encapsulates black life in America and addresses controversial issues that actively affect the African American community. Using materials to explore economic inequality, displacement, or human rights Elijah’s artist practice embraces discomforting realities. Whether in his paintings or installations, Jonah layers his work with coded language offering an abstracted or representational view of what it’s like to be black today.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @jonah.elijah

Jonathan Sacha Maghen (b. 1977) is a designer living and working in Los Angeles, California. They are the founder and Design Director of Primary Foundry (2019–present), and their studio practice.

IN-FO.CO (Inventory Form & Content) is an independent design and editorial studio, run by Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey in parallel with the publishing imprint Inventory Press.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Josh Cabello (b. 1997) is an artist born and based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on creating queer sanctuaries. He paints lush, imagined gardens, conjuring a world where anyone who enters can be still, commune with oneself, and be engulfed by nature. These works draw on queer traditions of play and excess, mingle with themes of intimacy and delicacy, and work to decenter hypersexuality and masculinity within the queer experience. He has exhibited at venues including Lauren Powell Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; SoLA Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and the Cohen Gallery, Providence, RI.

Josiah O’Balles, is a Afro-Chicano, multi disciplinary artist and advocate from Los Angeles. His artwork is informed and inspired by the heroes, beauties, and struggles within the working class BIPOC community, the motion of music, and his interest in his own personal lineage and history. He seeks to utilize his art to aid, amplify, and progress the causes and stories of his community, and in return hopefully learn more about himself in the process.

Exhibition: Inside Out

I am a contemporary artist specializing in paintings, murals, illustrations, NFTs, art licensing, and art direction. I have been lucky enough to paint murals from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, to have collectors and support all over the world and continue to grow as a person and artist. I work mostly in acrylic on canvas or paper, digital illustration, pen and ink, and murals. I create art to make something bigger than myself.

Juliane Backmann was born in Muenster, Germany and studied photography at the Academy of Photo Design in Munich. Now living in Los Angeles she has been working on numerous fine art projects that include documenting urban landscapes as well as a number of portrait series, utilizing different photographic approaches, like assemblage and collage and unconventional darkroom techniques. During the last decade she has been creating video works as well. Her photographs, collages, and installations have been exhibited throughout the United States and Germany and her video works have been screened and awarded at international film festivals.

Exhibition: The Observer and the Observed

Julie Beloussow draws from contemporary visionary art and psychedelic aesthetics in her paintings, which feature iridescent pigments and unconventional materials like holographic foil and marbled papers. Through her work she explores themes of perception, neurodiversity, and identity.

Living with conditions such as ADHD and autism, Beloussow reflects her experience of navigating the world as neurodivergent. Fasciation, a genetic anomaly affecting the appearance of plants, frequently appears in her work as a symbol of neurodiversity. Her art is a deeply personal and introspective narrative motivated by the desire to bring visibility to an often-invisible community.

Exhibition: Rituals

I grew up garbage picking in the alleys of Detroit in the 1970s and developed a preoccupation with the fate of discarded things. In my late teens a dozen 1950s portable TV sets at the curb came home with me. I had no idea what I was going to do with them but I knew they weren’t meant for the landfill. My early 20s were spent visiting antique stores buying kitschy vintage Life Magazines. In my late 20s I expanded my appliance acquisitions into commercial dryer doors and taught myself cabinet making using How To manuals. In the late 90s I started my own product placement agency and spent the next twenty years using the medium of television to increase awareness of my clients’ products. In 2018 I closed my business and decided to revisit my stored collection of vintage TVs. One big change in those 20 years was technology. I discovered an online archive of newspapers that opened up endless high-resolution advertisements and introduced me to events from the 1940s to 1960s to capitalize on as subject matter. Since the big wooden console televisions that were once the centerpieces of 1940-60 family life were taking up too much space in my workspace I sheared the stylishly designed fronts off of the sets and mounted them on wood. This began a new iteration of my work creating new opportunities to explore the darker side of the “good old days.”

Exhibition: There From Here

I believe that everyone perceives themselves—in some way—as a minority of sorts. It is my hope that Kondomozo and Ubume may act as an ambassador of “Other-ness” and that people of all backgrounds will feel at home with them, or curious about them.

Justin N. Kim is a Korean born abstract painter who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Justin earned his MFA from California State University, Northridge in 2018. Justin paints abstract and color field paintings, imaginary maps and circuit boards visualizing melded order and structure found within man made subject matters. His works are collected worldwide.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Kadie DiCarlo currently practices at Icehouse Arts Complex in Long Beach, California.

Kadie’s affinity for finding effective color combinations with oil and acrylic paint largely sums up her studio practice. She enjoys creating smaller works that later become larger mental landscapes to therapeutically release her mental battles with chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder. Kadie uses her cerebral experiences to create images and atmospheres that are endlessly tangled.

Alongside her art practice, Kadie is a multi-instrumentalist and has performed under the moniker, Jagged Jein. Her band performs locally and produces new music regularly.

Exhibition: Rituals

Kaitlyn Hahn is an artist and graphic designer working out of Los Angeles, CA. She studied Studio Art and Digital Arts at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH with an emphasis on multimedia and interdisciplinary projects. Born and raised in LA, she utilizes her family history around the garment industry to reflect the experiences in rapidly changing communities. By layering pieces of the places we call home, she uses these elements to reflect on our own built truths and the ways in which we retell these narratives.

An abstract expressive finger painter with a bold and passionate eye, Kamelyta has always had an eye for colors. Working in bright, vibrant colors, she uses acrylic as her medium. Her assertive, brilliantly colorful palette reflects her own feelings and emotions. Born in Malaysia, Kamelyta is currently living in the Inland Empire with her two teenagers.

Kar_Part is an LA native, mechanical engineer product designer turned street artist fueled by a growing frustration with socio-political, economic, and behavioral conditions. His series, ‘Totem Dolls’ begun in 2020 features a collection of dubious billionaires, fellow artists, and iconic historical figures. Covering a variety of styles and media, all of Kar_Part’s artworks begin on the streets before expanding to limited and open edition works on canvas and wood panel.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

Instagram: @kar_part

I am an artist who has been living and working in the Los Angeles area for over 30 years. I do abstract paintings and also assemblages. The assemblages are made of found materials.

Karina Vazquez is one of the twenty-one artists exhibiting in our There From Here show.

Growing up, I always found a way to be creative and work with my hands. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Psychology and began my career in the field of genetics and family planning. While this is an industry that I am still passionate and proud of, it wasn’t long before I realized I needed to dig deeper. Shortly thereafter, I made the jump to the industry of Interior Design and Custom Furniture, thus reigniting my creative passion. Now located in Los Angeles, CA, I work full time in the Fine Art industry, and come home to paint and create for myself. My typical mediums are acrylic and ink on canvas and paper.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @katttmandooo

Kate Carvellas was born in Baton Rouge, LA. While visual art was a passion her entire life, and after more than one detour, she ultimately attended George Mason University, where she received a BFA in Theater. She moved to Los Angeles in 1992 to work in the entertainment industry. It was not until 2004 that she allowed herself to return her focus toward the visual arts after a 18 year break. At first, she focused on collage, creating thematic compositions from mass media imagery. By 2007, she had transformed her practice to focus on three-dimensional artworks using objects she has collected from thrift stores, yard sales, and flea markets. Her sculptures, however are created using plaster gauze, cardboard and/or repurposed styrofoam She allows her artworks to “talk about” her conflicts, confusions, and insights. Assembling and rearranging objects and creating sculptures allow her to “re-construct” and redeem her personal narrative.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Katie Berman is a textile artist based out of Durham, NC working within the realm of responsibly-made fiber art. She received her BFA in Surface Design from East Carolina University in 2012, specializing in weaving and fabric manipulation through hand dyeing and printing techniques. She currently explores narratives that celebrate community and our shared humanity through original, tufted wall hangings and fiber sculptures using self taught, evolving methods such as natural dyeing and punch needle rug hooking. Her work has been exhibited at Meredith College, Art Encounters, The Carrack, the Durham Arts Council, 311 Gallery and the Sertoma Arts Center.

Katie Shanks is a Los Angeles based fiber artist. Since receiving their BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach in 2010, they have made it a point to connect with and emphasize community and connection They are also a founding member of the art collectives Somewhere in LA, Level Ground, and Acceptable Risk Los Angeles. Over the years, they have enriched their practice taking scenic byways through millinery, fashion, installation, and performance—embracing the multifaceted nature of the work and always pursuing new mediums to best communicate feeling and convey meaning. Their work has long been inspired by the landscapes—natural and urban—that surround them in their vast and varied home-state of California. Accepted into Tulane’s MFA Program in Sculpture in the Fall, it will be necessary to close this chapter to open and explore the next.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Kelly Pérez is a Venezuelan-born artist, CG Animator and Director currently living in Los Angeles, CA. Her unique style captures an inherent sense of motion wrapped up in vibrant colors, and the result is unbridled visual eye candy for any viewer. Abstract expressions of emotion, to be interpreted and felt uniquely by each individual, are at the core of her artwork.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

I document Los Angeles. I walk the streets religiously trying to expose every alley, avenue, and crack the sidewalks have to offer.

Exhibition: On the Ground

Instagram: @streetwisela

Kiara Aileen Machado is a contemporary artist born in Lynwood who depicts and explores the construction and freedom of identity, femininity, and culture in her work. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California State University Long Beach in 2018. She has had the honor of participating in many groundbreaking events that have been pivotal to the foundation of Central American communities: first ever Central American and Caribbean Colloquium at Cal State LA, first art show highlighting Central American artists at UCLA, and Duke University. Her artwork has been seen in museums across the United States, and recently at Band of Vices as part of the ‘In the Paint’ art initiative headed by the Los Angeles Lakers to identify and support contemporary LA-based artists. She has recently exhibited work internationally in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris.

Exhibition: Products of Empire, L.A. Abstracted

Krista Moy (she/her/hers) is a multi-disciplinary artist residing in Los Angeles. She is a writer and comedian, though finds her first love of storytelling was painting. Her paintings tell the story of the self’s journey with the divine feminine.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Kristen Huizar is an artist born and raised in Commerce who has recently graduated, earning her BFA in Drawing & Painting at CSULB. She works with ink, wax pastels, acrylic paint, thread, and graphite on a variety of surfaces. The texture and surfaces she uses as ground encompass what makes up her environment. Derived from time spent with close friends, new and old, intimacy is depicted through routines and patterns presented through objects and figures embedded in real-life environments. Her work is implicitly autobiographical by elevating the small, everyday moments of fleeting life.

Exhibition:  Rituals

My name is Kishara Buford and I am an artist, creator, and designer. I was born and raised in Southern California and the blend of different people and cultures have had a big influence on me and my work. I love experiencing new things, learning about different backgrounds and expressing out of the world ideas in my art. I’m passionate about my work and strive to create beautiful moments that speaks to a deeper meaning. I let my imagination run wild and filter it through emotions to create surreal experiences.

Korean-born Kyong Boon Oh received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BS in Mathematics from Korea University. She was a painter before but her choice of metal wire, a childhood toy that she tried during 13 years of health problems, gave rise to her current art practice of hand-weaving wire. Now she has expanded her mediums to sculpting. She is a founding member of SSGOC (Stone Sculptors Guild of Orange County).

Transcendent end is hidden in our own depths, waiting for the chance to occupy a conscious moment. Kyong Boon Oh tries to discover the moment and reveal it through her art practice. Oh’s art practice has two objectives, one focus on identity, the other defocus from it. The tension from the two makes her walk a line between emotion and meditation. As a Korean-born living abroad with a cultural barrier, she desires to project a possible identity by adopting from both historical and imaginative imagery with a nomadic perspective. But at the same time, she enters into a meditative state, viewing a single thread of wire or a single linear form of stone as my stream of consciousness, pursuing intimacy with the medium with the labor-intensity, and considering the negative space that is left behind as “a place of reconciliation.” That interiority alludes to transcendence of the self.

La Dama Luna is an independent artist, illustrator, and photographer born and raised in Mexico, now based in Los Angeles. Her body of work is inspired by weird dreams, sleep paralysis, Mexican folk tales, and the occult.

I am an artist who works with fabric, thread and a home sewing machine to create contemporary quilts that are non-representational abstractions. My pieces are driven by personal pleasure that meticulous work gives me, labor that requires time and dedication, as well as the challenge that results in seeing what large dimensions can be reached or how much accumulation I can generate from these small actions and simple materials. I have also always incorporated texture into my work, including ceramics and glass. I want to create paintings, but without using materials associated with western art history and challenge the idea of what paintings can be- what can be called a painting.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @artlovely

Leah Smithson is a Los Angeles based artist with a surrealistic nature to her work, mixing both traditional and new media (i.e. Virtual and Augmented Reality). She’s worked and exhibited throughout the US and abroad, including most recently a mural at the Apple Tower Theater in Downtown LA. Having moved around as a kid, her style comes from a patchwork of influences from classical painting to cyberpunk. She uses nature & portraiture to express the complexities of being human. As a muralist, her goal is to create little rabbit holes of experiences in the cityscape, providing moments of inspiration to remind us that our lives are about more than just surviving.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Creative Career: Angel City Brewery Festival

Leigh Salgado is a nationally exhibiting artist based in Los Angeles. Her undergraduate studies were in Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts at UCLA. Afterwards, she attended the Santa Monica College of Design, Art & Architecture. Her signature style: hand-cut paper transformed into painting, was first executed in the ‘90s. Harkening back to the Mexican medium of papel picado, it has led to numerous shows: LAUNCH L.A. Gallery, MOAH (the Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA), LAX airport Tom Bradley International Terminal, Oceanside Museum of Art, Vincent Price Art Museum and Brand Library & Art Center, among many other venues.

Leopoldo was born in the border city of Mexicali, Mexico and lived on both sides of the border until he moved to LA at age 18. He grew up going to thrift stores with his parents and started collecting vintage magazines and books at an early age. At some point in his life he started cutting out images and texts from these books to create designs, a process that he maintains to this day. His designs are all handmade using vintage images, a typewriter, photocopies and screenprints.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Lili Lakich began working with neon in 1966 while still a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her illuminated sculptures have been exhibited in galleries and museums in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada. Her public art commissions include

“L.A. Angel” at Calfornia Plaza, “Guardian” at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach and “Flyaway” at the Van Nuys FlyAway. In 1981, she founded the Museum of Neon Art in her studio on Traction Avenue in the Arts District where she began teaching neon design and fabrication.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Lisa Amundsen Giannini is a visual artist based in Los Angeles. Originally from New York, Lisa earned her BFA in Studio Art from NYU. Upon graduating, Lisa shifted her professional focus to graphic design, and has gained a greater appreciation for the freedom of fine arts after nearly 10 years of designing professionally. During the COVID pandemic she realized how precious and short life is, decided to move across the country to Los Angeles, and devoted more time to her art practice. Since moving to California, Lisa has been exploring her personal history through her paintings. Her art stems from an interest in mortality, sources of life, and the human condition.

Neon light boasts two primary identities: a jubilance that reflects the radiance of midday, and an evening persona of romance and excitement, where in surging flickers of curved encapsulated candles intrigue passersby. Lisa Schulte, an American sculptor born in Long Island, New York, has mastered the many “faces” of neon, earning her moniker, “The Neon Queen.” Lisa studied in Kansas under Master Neon Tube Bender Freddie Elliot, and her growing prowess sparked the beginnings of “Nights of Neon”– a (35-plus years running) Los Angeles neon studio and boutique creative space providing custom neon pieces for films, events, and branding.

After amassing experience and exposure, Lisa shifted her focus to envisioning and creating intricate, abstract designs often absent in neon, and for the last decade, Lisa has turned inward to create personal pieces she has exhibited in museums and fine art galleries nationwide. In a recent series, the artist externalized the metaphor of unity by pairing two disparate mediums – white neon and found wood – in a novel harmony; their differences highlighting the inherent beauty possessed by each. The artist is presently creating abstract pieces built from neon and wood.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

I’m a native Angeleno, first generation Mexican/ American. I’m a self taught artist and I’m queer too. I started my career in 1998. In 2013, it took a sharp turn when I read a quote in an Alexander McQueen biography. In it, he referred to himself not as a black sheep, but as a pink sheep. This idea of being different led me to create my series SHEƎP. My LITTLEZ are a sub series of SHEƎP. and are inspired by things I love.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Liv Aanrud earned her B.F.A in painting from the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire in 2001 and an M.F.A from Rutgers University, in 2011.

Aanrud’s work has been the subject of one person exhibitions at BozoMag, New Image Art, Arvia, 1700 Naud and TSA-LA in Los Angeles. She has also had solo shows at Bay College, Marquette, MI; Finlandia University, Hancock, MI; Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe; Pamela Salisbury Gallery and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; Oasis Gallery, Marquette, MI and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York City.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions across the U.S., Taiwan, Germany, and Spain. She has an upcoming solo show at Kravets Wheby Gallery in New York City.

Liv currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Lois Keller (b. 1968, Greenbay, USA) A reflection of her personal narrative – having been adopted and never knowing her birth parents, Keller’s paintings, drawings, and installations explore themes of identity and belonging with an invitation to embrace the unknown. Keller earned a BA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. as well as having a long career painting for Opera, Ballet and Theatre as a scenic artist. Currently she works outside capturing not only time and the environment but the current consciousness of society as well.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Lorenzo Baker is an accomplished artist and alumnus of Dillard University (’14) and Otis College of Art and Design (’18). His artwork has garnered critical acclaim and recognition, including a feature in Umber Magazine Issue #4, and an invitation to speak as a guest artist in the Museum of African Diaspora (MOAD) In The Artist Studio program. Most recently, Lorenzo completed a year-long project and collaboration with The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and in April of 2022 Lorenzo’s artwork was showcased on the popular television show Bel-Air.

Lorenzo Baker is a multi-disciplinary artist utilizing parafiction and perifacts to complicate ideas of collective memory. Fluctuating between the indexical and the symbolic, Lorenzo’s art practice takes shape as digital collages, ready made sculptures, site specific multimedia installations and sometimes unsanctioned public activations.

I have been an artist since age 15. I paint, draw, and make mixed media collages. BA in Fine Art-Painting from UCLA. My work is expressive, often edgy, sometimes serene and calm.

Lucy Eyears (b. 1992) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her paintings reflect the interplay between the external and internal worlds. She explores the idea of growth, and the connection between nature and our emotional states. Her work is influenced by color theory, and neo-expressionism. She deconstructs her imaginative still life with bright colors, expressive, broad brushstrokes, and abstract movements. Her process is intuitive, allowing instincts to guide her through each piece, finding forms and shapes as she works through different emotions.

LUZ is a painter and digital illustrator who is currently creating work inspired by his fascinations with gore, anatomy, cartoons & mythology. His pieces have become known for their abstract characters and psychedelic style but many don’t realize how dark the nature of his work truly is. LUZ utilizes vibrant colors & cartoonish imagery to transport the viewer to his own universe. In this universe darkness is disguised as vibrance. LUZ’s works have been displayed at SuperChiefNFT in NYC and can be found on SuperRare, withFOUNDATION, & MakersPlace.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Twitter: @sikotic4

Lynn Heinz is an artist living and working in the Los Angeles area. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from UCLA. Her work has been included in shows at Coastline Community College; Lancaster Museum of Art and History/Cedar; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art; LA Artcore; Shoebox Projects LA; and Shockboxx Projects.

Artist, curator, multi-award winning illustrator, mentor and entrepreneur, Man One believes in the transformational power of art, its power to save lives, and make the world a better place. Growing up, Man One developed his love for art and his skills as a graffiti artist on the streets of LA. His art is comprised of his trademark bold, colorful art strokes.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Marcie grew up in LA and is known for her use of bold colors as well at her subject matter. Her first tools were acrylic and water color paints, until college introduced her to an array of different mediums and techniques, including oil painting, this not only reinforced her love for this passion but helped her grow as an artist.

Exhibition: There From Here

Marcus Cota is a Queer Chicanx visual artist who utilizes the use of traditional printmaking practices and contemporary technological processes to create visual representations of restorative justice.

Exhibition: Rituals

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Studied drawing and sculpture at MEEBA, painting at Anibal Carreño workshop and Art Vision with Rosa Faccaro. Specializes in sculpting the human figure in wood. Since 1983 she has participated in both solo and group exhibits around the world and won more than twenty awards and distinctions.

Mi nombre es Maricruz Sibaja,Soy originaria del Istmo de Tehuantepec Oaxaca. Vengo de una familia de artistas, estudie dibujo en la Ciudad de México y Arte en New Mexico.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Marie-Jose (b. 1992 San Francisco) is a contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles. Along with painting, collage & mixed media are some of the vehicles utilized for exploring the multiplicity of the Black femme experience. They employ surrealism as a tool for inspiring a previously indiscernible future and occasionally reimagining the past. Influenced by artists such as Rene Magritte, Kerry James Marshall, and the artist’s Nigerian heritage, many scenes offer Black figures among dreamlike cloudscapes and thematic metaphors that refer to the intricacy of life, the consequence of introspection, and emotions of vulnerability, hope, and courage. Marie-Jose has participated in several exhibitions and fairs nationwide, including the LA International Art Show in 2020, the Affordable Art Fair in New York and Aqua Art Miami in Miami Beach in 2022. They were also a recent 2022 Artist in Residence participant in Albuquerque, NM and Fukuoka, Japan and made their international debut with a two-person exhibition with Studio Kura in Itoshima.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Marissa Brown is a biracial, Black and Portuguese, Multidisciplinary artist. Her primary language comes from movement of the body and translates into works of live performance, film, installation, photography, and publication. She has her BFA in Performance and Choreography from University of California Irvine and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been shown extensively in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Under the name Lone King Projects, she creates and shares intimate moments of expression.

Maritza Torres is a Xicana Artist based in East Los Angeles/ Tongva Territory. She is best known for her graphic style and portrayal of the empowered woman. She has made a point to look for intersectional spaces to work with and make her work accessible to poc, queer and working class communities. From 2020 to present Torres engaged in a more fluid and self care based work style. She hopes to forge ahead into a new realm of art unifying past, present and future.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Mark Acetelli was born in Detroit into an artistic household. Mark’s mother herself was a painter and some of his earliest memories was the smell of turpentine and oil paints. Growing up surrounded by his mothers work, she inspired and encouraged him to become an artist.

Mark’s paintings are inspired by the intensely personal introspective journey of life, from the ever changing complexities of love, loss, birth and transformation. The context of his work he describes as “Simple expressions of complex thoughts created by capturing the physical mixed with the spiritual.” He seeks to evoke a feeling rather than a defined image. Mark’s application of paint is an extension of that thought process. Using traditional brushes along with palette knives, rags and his hands, he continuously builds up and tears down, adding and subtracting, stripping away layers to achieve greater clarity and emotion. He uses primarily oils and encaustics to create thickly layered canvases with texture and depth.

Exhibition: There From Here

With several successful exhibits in and around downtown Los Angeles, San Francisco and Southern California, Mark Peacock’s photography captures scenes from the streets, classic Americana and historic architecture. He considers himself somewhat of a documentarian, archiving the nostalgia of his native home town. 

With many solo and group art shows to his credit his photographic prints are highly sought after and used for set decoration in various film, television and commercial productions.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Mary Lai is a Los Angeles based visual artist & designer with a B.F.A. in Graphic Design. She creates vibrant contemporary artwork that has been exhibited worldwide. Her scope of work includes paintings, mixed media art, digital art to large scale murals and installations. With nearly 20 years of art and design experience from fashion accessories to fine art, Mary has worked with several notable brands, clients and projects. She continues to refine her craft and explore what it means to create art in the physical and digital world.

Exhibition: Street Schooled

Matt Deifer is a passionate Los Angeles based artist/entrepreneur who harnesses the world of the surreal in his artwork. His exquisite array of photography and bodypainting celebrates spirituality, therapy and adventure. “I love pushing boundaries, stimulating the five senses, exploring light.” An East Coast native, his studio is located in Mid-Wilshire, where he works as a locations agent.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @mattdeifer

Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez is a poet, speaker, and performance coach from Jacksonville, Florida. He has toured as far as Abu Dhabi and nearly every major city in the United States and Europe, performing, teaching and coaching poetry. Matthew is the co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement (S.L.A.M.) – an organization providing poetry education and extensive programming for poets. A 2018 Four Corners Fellow and a teaching artist for nearly ten years, Matthew has spent the last four years working in youth detention centers across Los Angeles County. He has opened for artists such as Wu-Tang and performed for platforms such as BuzzFeed and NPR. Matthew is also a three time Southern Fried poetry slam champion and an award-winning poetry coach. Cuban’s favorite activity is making people feel great; sometimes he does this through poetry.

Los Angeles area artist for nearly 20 years. B.F.A in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. Born 1975, Died t.b.d. 

On a daily basis I am a creator. Most days currently I spend painting, and building art. I paint on found objects a lot, mostly wood from discarded desks and tables and repurposed wine boxes. I usually have one or more different series that I am working on so if I don’t feel inspired to do one, I can distract myself with another and still feel like I’ve been productive. But most days I still wake up and paint.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Megan is an experimental artist exploring color therapy, shape, mixed media, and digital collage. She requires no formal training and believes play and practice are her greatest teachers.  She is also inspired by classic cinema and juxtapose, satirical messaging. Modern, iconic artists like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Banksy, Basquiat, and Disney motivate Megan.

Exhibition: Ideas of Practice

Instagram:@pixiepropaganda

Megumi Nakazawa, founder of Faces of Mass Incarceration is a 22 year old artist who uses oil portraiture to tell stories of the formerly incarcerated, system impacted and survivors of crime. Faces of Mass Incarceration challenges stigmas and seeks to dignify and uplift the image of those who are often outcast in society. With the goal of painting 100 portraits, Megumi paints each person from life in a span of 2-3 hours. As she paints, the subjects are given the freedom to share their stories. These stories are documented in audio form, giving viewers the opportunity to see the humanity, beauty and dignity in each individual.

Exhibition: SOMOS

I am a Mexican artist based in LA. I come from indigenous roots and portray that in my work. I have been on a reconnection journey and have been creating a series of paintings that represent the different stages of this journey as an immigrant and indigenous woman of color.

Melissa Horn is stargazing coddiwomplin’ solivagant who emerged under an Aquarius sun in Pennsylvania. She is a self taught artist who dabbles in various genres of photography but is especially fond of tossing them all together into a piping hot pot of proverbial soup to create surreal works for all to savor. Best enjoyed with a pinch of salt.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Tongva (Long Beach), Descendant of Chichimeca & Mescalero-Chiricahua Ndé Apache Tribe Mer Young is an Indigenous published artist who has created a body of artwork manifested in collages, drawings, paintings, and founder of Mausi Murals public artworks. Young’s artworks aim to inspire, celebrate and elevate repressed indigenous, first nations, and native cultures and women of color. Her works also focus on matters of immigration and the uprising to justice, equality, and complete freedom of Black Lives.

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival

Emerging, surreal pop artist, and sculptor from Los Angeles, CA. Self taught creative and enthusiast to the arts and performance. Bohemian inspired works with a bit of magic and spirituality.

Exhibition: Rituals

Micah Clasper-Torch is a Los Angeles based artist, designer and educator who is among a new wave of artists specializing in punch needle rug hooking and tufting techniques. Blurring the line between fine art and design, she creates limited edition collections and one of a kind pieces that range from fashion and accessories to wall hangings and mixed media artwork. Micah is also the founder of Punch Needle World, an online shop, community and educational platform dedicated to the art and craft of punch needle. Both her personal work and teaching style are rooted in history and traditional technique, while passionately encouraging modern applications for this craft, and championing its visibility in the art world.

Michael Massenburg was born in San Diego and raised in Los Angeles California. Michael pursued his studies at California State University, Long Beach and Otis School of Art and Design and has exhibited in galleries and museums, completed private commissions, and worked on public art projects throughout the country and abroad. Along with his art-making practices, Michael is a teaching artist, community organizer and activist for various organizations and causes. In his practice he strives to investigate the language and imagery to explore the issues class, race and culture in their relationship through rituals. In each artwork, he assembles constructions of objects and images in an attempt to engage the subjects through representational, psychological and spiritual perspectives.

Exhibition: The Observer and the Observed

Michael Shaw is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. Shaw is also the creator and host of The Conversation Art Podcast, launched in 2011. His work was most recently included in the exhibitions Sociality at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House! at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. He has been a member of the LA Tenants Union since 2019, where he advocates for tenant empowerment, helps guide tenants in crisis and attempts to address the more egregious threats that further gentrification. You can learn more about his work in his recently published, “Urban Theater in Plain Sight: The Drama and Ceaseless Advancement of Gentrification in Los Angeles,” in Space on Space magazine.

Michael is a Vietnamese artist based in LA/OC. His work focuses on the yearning and the frustration of wanting a lover. Roses and thorns are turned into a double edge sword.

Exhibition: Rituals

Michelle Andrade received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Her text based drawings engage the leavings of everyday conversation and elements of her personal interior monologue. 

Michelle currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Michelle Montjoy lives in Oceanside, California. Her art practice encompasses installation, sculpture, embroidery and socially-engaged projects. A past recipient of Creative Catalyst and California Arts Council grants, her work has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Produce Gallery, ICA North (formerly Lux) the San Diego International Airport, Oceanside Museum of Art and more. Her recent project is Breathing Room, a space for quietness and reflection at the New Children’s Museum in San Diego. She and her spouse have three adult daughters, a new puppy, and her 92-year-old mother lives nearby.

Exhibition: A Common Thread

Born August 12, 1950 in Panama Canal Zone. BFA Univ. of Florida 1972. MFA Univ. of Florida 1974. Moved to LA 1975. Been here ever since. Shows LA, NYC, Miami, 1975-2022.

Exhibition: Rituals

Molly Champlin is an artist and educator living and working in San Gabriel. Her process is generative–modeling and collaging curious digital debris to animate her oil paintings, video, and installation work. Employing glitches, abstraction, and a painterly love of light and color, she searches for traces of the metaphysical in virtual and real landscapes. Her work has been featured in group shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Japan. She has been the recipient of the Kleefeld Scholarship, Nell O. Fog Endowed Scholarship, and the Cal Alumni Association Leadership Award. She has a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from CSU Long Beach.

Exhibition: Rituals

I am the Artist Monica Dollison, most people call me Malvi. My paintings boarder on the realms of dreams and reality. I hope to convey through my painting a sense of peace and spiritual awakening.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Mónica works with a wide array of materials and processes. She most often incorporates a technique from sculpting or jewelry-making into her art, although, for her, jewelry and sculpture go hand in hand. Being a tactile person, Mónica finds satisfaction in the smoothness or roughness of metal, the tackiness of paper mache clay, and the dusty layer that natural clay leaves on her hands. She often finds it necessary to marry more than one material in the production of one piece.

Monica Seggos is a self-taught Greek-American artist who focuses on building narrative environments. Each environment is a synthetization of multiple mediums with the primary objective of forming a coherent whole that contains several layers of meaning for maximum impact. For each project, she conducts research, develops a narrative, translates it into visual metaphor, and introduces disruptive elements into a tableau. She incorporates variations of sculpture, as- semblage, mixed media, painting, photography, costume, video, wordplay, poetry, found objects, Olfactory Art, Post-Internet Art, and Body Adornment within the mise-en-scène. The juxtaposition of contrary elements creates an engaging, immersive cabinet of curiosity.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @monicaseggos

Montana Mills is the nephew of artist and master printmaker, Richard Duarado, who founded Modern Multiples Fine Art Prints. Mills continues his families legacy by running the screen printing establishment passed down to him as well as founding Big Brother Publishing. Modern Multiples create original, fine art limited editions utilizing a multifaceted arsenal of traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques.

Exhibition: Old’s Cool, New’s Cool- Printmaking at Modern Muliples

Instagram: @montanimals

Morgan M. Barajas is a Los Angeles based visual art alchemist strongly influenced by Romanticism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. He is fascinated by the interplay of the spiritual and the physical, and aims to render this often invisible relationship in his work. Originally trained in Cinematic arts, Morgan was inspired by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to paint his own storyboards. What followed was an all consuming love affair with visual art marking, that enlightened his approach to creating. Utilizing oil paint, pastels, charcoal, ink, graphite, and sometimes organic matter in his work, every piece is a unique alchemical experiment all its own.

Exhibition: Products of Empire, Spring Benefit and Art Auction, Locals Only

Morley is a Los Angeles-based street artist. Blending humor, hope and his unique perspective on life, he specializes in bold, typographic posters which he wheatpastes within the urban landscape. His work has been featured in The LA Times, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, LA Magazine and on television networks such as ABC, CBS, Netflix, Comedy Central and Showtime.

Creative Careers: Let’s Paint the Town

Instagram: @morleyartist

A Latina born and raised in San Diego, California, Michelle Ruby aka Mr. B Baby, uses elements of her heritage as inspiration for her striking and lively art work. Mr. B Baby is heavily influenced by her community, as well as her Puerto Rican/Mexican upbringing. By combining vibrant colors with traditional imagery, Mr. B Baby is able to uplift her audience and intrigue her viewers. The artist’s aim is to bring happiness and joy to her collectors and community, while also having stronger messages intertwined, all of which are open to the viewer’s interpretation.
​Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival

Ms.Yellow (Nuria Ortiz) is a self-taught Mexican-American muralist, artist, craftswoman and teaching artist. She has dedicated her time to the creative development and empowerment of communities, working closely with schools, cities, community centers & more to develop workshops, murals & mentorship to the youth. Her artwork and murals have been displayed​ in museums, galleries, and streets throughout the United States and around the world such as Egypt, Haiti, Japan, Spain, France, Australia and Mexico, centering on themes such as culture, folklore, sisterhood, education, unity, love and social justice.

Exhibitions: Spring Benefit and Art Auction, Art Share L.A. CANceptual

Marina Yermakova Timm (b. 1985) is a Russian-born LA-based collage artist. She creates original works on paper as well as designs for commercial projects. Marina’s main influences are the artists of the Russian avant-garde like K. Malevich and A. Rodchenko, as well as the Dadaist movement of the post WWI Europe.

Nia Simone spent her early childhood in Compton, California. It was not until she turned seven that her life would change, and she would spend the rest of her formative years in Columbus, Ohio. By the time Nia was a teenager, she was criticized for being “different,” causing her to channel her disdain for being set apart through her art. This further allowed Nia to form a connection to her viewers through a shared feeling of not belonging–allowing Nia to see how powerful her empathetic paintbrush can truly be.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Born in Mexico, Nico is a queer photographer, capturing LA’s LGBTQIA+ community with a focus on drag shows, concerts, and cannabis events.

From the moment when, at 7 years old, I stood on a New York subway platform with my mother and sister watching the trains coming in with colorful drawings, I have been intrigued by graffiti. To most, graffiti is just a form of vandalism, but in truth graffiti it is a natural expression of people’s feelings and emotions. Photography has always been my passion and since my childhood I’ve used the urban landscape as my inspiration, finding beauty where others may see grime. My work is a combination of my photographs; at times using anywhere between 5-100 photographs, hand cut and individually applied. Some pieces may include painting, stenciling, reclaimed barn wood, corrugated metal and found objects. All of my work is then applied onto a wood panel and finished off with several coats of resin.

Nikki Gagas, born and raised in the suburbs of Boston, grew up influenced by Los Angeles street art and the props/production design of the entertainment industry. She has a strong passion for many types of art and mediums including: design, graffiti, acrylic painting, digital illustration and especially cardboard. After graduating from art school she moved across the country to Los Angeles to fulfill her childhood dream of creating art within the entertainment industry. Today, Nikki has the privilege of working on high profile television shows that give her a wide range of creative freedom.

Noelle Kraus is an artist working primarily in acrylic paint on canvas. Originally from New York, she currently resides in Los Angeles. Please feel free to contact Noelle for showings, commissions, or to inquire about any of the artwork shown on her site. You can also keep up to date with Noelle’s work by following her on facebook, instagram, and tumblr.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit + Art Auction

Nuke One is a multi-disciplinary artist that has been engaged in Street Arts since 1984. Born and raised in Boyle Heights, Nuke, was constantly surrounded and inspired by Chicano artists and murals and at the age of 5, his curiosity and passion for murals began and the rest is history. Nuke is one of the major contributors for the mural located at 4th Place and Hewitt Street, called ‘Undiscovered America’.

Creative Careers: Angel City Brewery Festival 2021

Nychole uses her art as a personal understanding of feminine energy, strength, and beauty. Soulful and Afrocentric, she strives to show the relationship of feminine energy and the universe. Her images unite the human experience with symbolism and elements of space and time. Her art conveys the infinite potential and divine nature that lives within us all.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Obed Silva is an Assistant Professor of English at East Los Angeles College. For the past four years, however, he has been refining his skills as a painter. Currently, he paints out of the Homeboy Art Academy in Boyle Heights under the instruction of master muralist and painter Fabian Debora. Obed’s paintings have been exhibited at the dA Center for the Arts, Brea Gallery, Able ARTS Work among other art venues.

Exhibitions: Street Schooled, SOMOS

As a Filipino American immigrant based in Los Angeles, my art is a reflection of my experiences navigating two cultures and the struggles that come with being an outsider in a foreign land. Growing up in a community where conformity is highly valued, I dropped out of art school to pursue my own path and challenge societal norms through my work. My art is an intimate expression of my journey, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and the search for a sense of home. Through bold colors, abstract forms, and a mix of traditional and contemporary techniques, I aim to create a visual narrative that resonates with individuals from all backgrounds who have faced similar struggles. My art is a form of resistance, reclaiming my voice and creating a space for myself and others to be seen and heard.

Adriana “ONNI” Martinez was born in Californias Harbor Area, raised in the city of Wilmington. She channels the vibrancy of family and Chicano culture into her works of art. Working mainly with oil paint and fine detail, ONNI has recently taken on more of a mixed media approach. With her technique and use of texture, she is able to create layers and dimension within her pieces – bringing her painting to life. Through her lens, she weaves a visual narrative that reflects the stories and heritage of her community. Infusing her creations with a blend of tradition and contemporary flair.

Exhibition: SOMOS

I am an emerging multi-media artist from Los Angeles, born and raised on the East side of town. A self-taught creative with a passion for art, photography, music and performance. I consider my self a 21st century artist in the making.

Born in Athens, GA (1979) and raised in Jacksonville, FL, Otha Davis III also known as Vakseen is a self-taught, museum-exhibited visual artist, and a diamond and multi-platinum music executive/producer. While working on hit records has played a driving force in his career, Vakseen has been an active realist painter since moving to Los Angeles in 2011. Known for his vibrant, pop culture-influenced acrylic paintings, his artwork has been exhibited by museums, galleries and major brands around the world.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Chicano artist from East LA.

A musician and performer, working on acrylic pieces from salvaged wood. Originally from Asheville, NC. Currently living in Burbank,CA. Inspired by imagination and nature.

I am a mixed media artist whose exhibits include the California African American Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the LA Art Show, and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. I grew up in New York City, a child riding the damp subway and trudging to school through the freezing slush without a winter coat. When the other children lined up with money to buy lunch, I hid on the floor of the bathroom with my strawberry yogurt and drew pictures and phrases to avoid thinking about the hot soup out there. Today I am drawing pictures with phrases; I am still that child. Now when I see desperate families, especially refugees, my response is personal. My path led through drawing, painting, filmmaking, writing, sculpture and installation to creating a graphic novel that continues my life-long dedication to humanitarian issues.

Exhibition: Products of Empire

Instagram: @pamdouglasart

Immersed in a layered urban paradigm of reality versus fantasy, Patrick Haemmerlein creates a visual soundtrack as a backdrop to his stark silhouettes. Splashes of water color’s punctuate the delicate balance between urban sprawl and rural wildlife. He explores their coexistence through the beauty of contradiction. As if the metropolis itself is submerged in introspect, Haemmerlein breathes life into these unique time capsules with images that mimic arteries and measured rhythm; intertwining past, present, and future. Haemmerlein begins his journey by taking countless photos of his environment, exploring both urban and rural perspectives. He then manipulates the photographs, layering the images over torn pages of poetry, dictionaries & sheet music from the 1800’s and early 1900’s. The result is a timeless tangible sonnet to the world he loves, and his thirst to rediscover it endlessly.

Paul Botello was born and raised in East Los Angeles. Paul Botello is the brother of East Los Streetscraper co-founder, David Botello. His involvement with art began at the age of 8, helping his brother work on murals (David Botello, or East Los Streetscapers). He went on to earn his BA and MFA at UC Los Angeles. In 1997, he was a visiting professor at Pitzer College in Claremont.

In 1994 he traveled to Berlin, Germany where he collaborated on a giant mural titled “Global Chessboard.” He continues working on murals both in Los Angeles and abroad. He considers his work as symbolic narratives exploring both personal and public issues. He most often brings his distinctive personal style of energy, color and composition to focus on social issues.

Exhibition: Street Schooled

Los Angeles based multi-media artist specializing in fine art painting. My style varies from day-to-day, always drawing upon daily interactions and stories from the past & present to fuel the next creative outlet. I enjoy collaging together art history, modernity and humor into a somehow cohesive and intriguing composition. These long-term layered compositions create surreal storylines and meaning that is dependent on the viewers interpretation.

Exhibitions: Ideas of Practice, Inner Links

Perseus Lira is an Italian artist, who now lives in Los Angeles, California since 2021. Pietro was born in 1985, in Legnano where Milan’s Province in Italy. Perseus and his family lived in both Lombardy (northern Italy) and Sicily (southern island of Italy), growing up in the north, a Sicilian heritage, Perseus revealed these origins and reflected them in his artworks now. 

He studied classical dance for many years – perhaps this choice to use his body as an exercise in harmony came from his love for the severe magnificence of Sicily’s temples, the richness of its Baroque, the deep blue of its sea and the inexplicable amalgam of its almond cakes. Harmony is unattainable without discipline and so, with the idea of following a path of beauty in his life, he studied and received his BFA from Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan, specializing in the restoration of contemporary artworks in 2007, and MFA in 2010.

Lira worked for the restoration of Amundsen’s glass slides in Norway, and also worked in London. After that he went back to Italy and started focusing on working on his artworks while teaching fashion design illustrations. Perseus started from a cultured and classical approach to the human figure, but as he gradually apprehended the truth about his life and himself, he began to reflect on exploration and research in his work, though this did not make him an experimental artist, but rather an experimenter. He cultivates careful watchfulness towards the invisible, but will dedicate the same attention to the tomato purée he never fails to make each summer, in a family rite that is first and foremost a way of being thankful to life. For him art and life are mutually dependent, and there are no limits to exploration. Perseus Lira’s artistic practice contemplates the use of rigorous techniques, excellent materials, and long preparation in the search for original forms of expression – where trial and error are both a limitation and a new horizon.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Phoebe lives and works in Los Angeles alongside her ride or die, Das Bibi the cat. A self-taught oil painter, Phoebe first learned how to paint using a “How to Paint Clowns and Characters” book from the 1960’s.

Exhibition: Inner Links

I’m Reginald Tucker (Artist name R.Tucker), an artist passionate about exploring the abstract and in particular the materiality of paper. I fuse geometric precision with sculptured abstraction, meticulously crafting works that play with color combinations and contrasts reflecting a fusion of abstract themes alongside embedded commentary on culture, design, and fashion. My artistic journey is grounded in innovation and my development of the Recycled Abstract platform and a transformative composition technique using recycled rolled magazines to create 3D paintings and collages. These magazine abstracts or ‘magistracts’ offer a tangible, interactive experience where texture and depth merge to captivate the senses, while the patterns, words and arrangement of the magazine themselves work to communicate my message. This innovative approach has been acknowledged through exhibitions in LA, Long Beach and Miami in both physical and digital media formats.

Rachael Kucken is a self taught, Los Angeles based artist who strives to create immersive worlds by pushing traditional oil painting methods. This is done by meticulously detailed images being layered on glass and mirrors to add depth, movement, and self reflection. In doing so, she hopes the care put into each subject immortalizes them in ways they may not have been before, because it’s what she believes they deserve in this ever changing experience.

Exhibition: Fields, Factories, Fame, and Fallacy

Instagram: @littlelambcake

Los Angeles artist Ramón Vargas makes paintings that draw from his own life experiences to amplify and investigate the cultural realities of Brown communities. His figurative paintings blend realism with a surreal sense of color and place, often incorporating heavy symbolism, repeating patterns and flat geometrical elements. Utilizing a representational approach, Ramón alternately celebrates and subverts prevailing concepts of identity, tradition and interpersonal relationships. Throughout his career, he has held arts-related administrative, faculty and consulting positions for non-profit and grassroots organizations, and is a known mentor for arts education and community outreach in Los Angeles and Orange County. In addition to painting, he is also a muralist and printmaker and has shown his work in Los Angeles, New York and throughout California.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Rand White is a Los Angeles based contemporary visual artist. Rand’s style is the bi-product of growing up in the Mid-City section of LA and years of formal art training. Throughout his life, Rand has studied drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and film & video production. Rand describes his style as a mix of abstract, post modernism, graffiti and urban art. He uses abstract shapes and lines to serve as a backdrop for color exploration and design.

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction

Randi Matushevitz is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles best known for her large-scale mixed media drawings, video, and installation projects that explore raw human emotions and the delicate nature of the human connectivity. Her drawings, paintings, and installations have been exhibited in galleries, art fairs, cultural centers, and museums in the US and Abroad. Her artwork is collected publicly and privately. Public acquisitions include Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Brain Center, Las Vegas, NV, the Marjorie Barrick Art Museum (Las Vegas Art Museum Collection at UNLV), Las Vegas, NV, Southern Glazer Wine and Spirits, Miami, and the Enter Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany. She is the awardee of a 2023-24 California Arts Council Artist Fellowship.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Laws was born in 1990 in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Her favorite sound is the deep, quiet void of a nighttime snowfall. Her favorite smell is the piquant earthiness of desert creosote after a rain shower. She is a Libra-Cancer-Cancer.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Rebekah Villacorta was born in Los Angeles, they studied art at the University of California Irvine with a focus in new genres using writing, performance, and photography. Currently they work and live in Los Angeles. Their practice focuses on dysfunction, futility, and the ever-growing anxiety weighing on us all.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Randy de Leon, a.k.a. REBORNZ, is a native of Los Angeles, California, who picked up the love for art at a very young age; he drew funky animals ever since he was a kid. As a young adult in the late 90s and early 2000s, he explored every opportunity to express his creativity in the form of Graffiti in the street art scene.

To pursue his career and gain recognition for his art, he didn’t exactly lead a very smooth life and he got into trouble a lot of times while trying to express himself such as hanging around with a Los Angeles tagging crew to slipping out at night to cover the streets with his art. It got so serious that he got himself jailed, where he got the chance to meditate on how to lead a decent path and be a better artist that people could look up to.

This triggered him to create a new identity for himself and strive for other means to survive and maximize his creativity. Hence, he made up the name ‘REBORNZ’ in 2004 to indicate that he wants to leave the past behind and discover a better way forward. Luckily for him, he developed his art and graduated with a degree in communication arts.

Exhibitions: Street Schooled, Inner Links

Ree Magaña is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator. Their goal as a creative is to amplify underrepresented artists’ voices and advocate for the decolonization of contemporary arts spaces.

Born and raised in Damascus, Syria. Drawing in LA for the past 10 years, trying to escape commercial art and do my own thing.

Exhibition: Rainbow Shift

Rerun is a Los Angeles based artist/vandal. That Illustrate his life experience through his paintings of cats. Shining light on various topics to see the world in a different perspective.

Exhibition: Inner Links

RHYESEYES (she/her) is a queer, self taught artist based in Los Angeles. Many of her works are inspired by her friends and family, the human body, and psychedelic vibrations. She currently works as a Resident Service Coordinator, providing helpful resources and technology access to older adults. RHYESYES loves bringing art into the mix, as it enriches and builds community for low-income seniors.

A native Angeleno, Ricardo Estrada’s work reflects the essence of his community. Estrada’s work is a mixture of multiple philosophies that cross generational gaps and portrays the complexity of the Mexican American identity.

Ricardo Miranda has been shooting fine art and editorial photography for 25 years. He documents the people of Los Angeles using photography, film, and video to create socially interactive art. His projects include work in Latin American, Asia and Europe. He holds a B.F.A from the School of Photography at California Institute of the Arts.

Exhibition: Inside Out

My art is for everyone, but specifically for La Raza. A way to represent my upbringing in Southern California. To express our desires to be accounted for and respected. This series of work each drawing contain 3 ideas, 1st, something organic that grows from the earth, highly recognizable in the community. 2nd, a young woman, a chola, one that will give birth to the future. And 3rd, an image that too many would represent spiritually and light. Through these 3 images I’m able to show life a life cycle from be born out of the earth, to gaining consciousness, an identity, and finally to death, where our mind and spirt ascend to the cosmos, the light.

Exhibition: Inside Out

Raised in the Midwest, Richard McDowell is a painter, visual artist, writer, art curator and former gallery owner. Preferring to paint in a series, he enjoys all mediums from pencil, to crayola, to oil, in order to capture life on canvas.

His work is an attempt to understand the world in all its chaos and beauty. “If there was no chaos, there would be no need for art in the world, and I would not exist.”

Exhibition: Spring Benefit and Art Auction (2022), The Troublemakers (2023)

The Artwork of Rick Ortega transcends time and takes us on a mystical journey into an ancient way of life. His paintings reveal an array of indigenous symbols from Mexico’s past, turning his colorful compositions into modern day codices which reveal the history, myths, legends, and spiritual beliefs of the Mexica people, better known as the Aztecs. Each painting captures the heritage of his ancestors, who held the arts with high regard, truly believing that the Tlacuilo (The Painter) had his heart rooted in God and would transfer the symbols of divinity to his paintings. This ancient tradition of creativity is the root of Mr. Ortega’s art.

Exhibitions: Inside Out, SOMOS

I’m a self-taught artist and native Angeleno. In 1998, I started my career. In 2013, it took a sharp turn when I read a quote in an Alexander McQueen biography. He referred to himself, not as a black sheep, but as a ‘pink sheep.’ It was a magical moment, it felt personal. I was different, this was different. Even though I had no idea of what it meant, inspiration started flowing from every direction. I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t expect to be working on the streets, but I knew that SHEƎP belonged out and about. ‘e(we) are ALL Queer’ is the message behind SHEƎP. e(we) are all different. It’s a truth that connects us all. SHEƎP is for everyone.

Creative Career: Let’s Paint the Town

Instagram: @littlericky001

Kelly “RISK” Graval has been synonymous with the Los Angeles art community for over 30 Years. From his early days as a founder of the West Coast Graffiti movement to gallery and museum exhibits around the globe, including the 2012 “Art In The Streets” at the LA MoCA and the hugely successful “Beyond The Streets” exhibits in Los Angeles and New York. His work is shown at top galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, New York, Miami, and London.

Exhibition: Typecast LA

Rocio Magadan is a multidisciplinary artist from Carson, CA. Her paintings, ceramics, photography, zines, and drawings are composed from family, LA music scenes, and community archives. Magadan’s work are abstract compositions of 1980’s geometric shapes, nostalgic images, and Los Angeles South Bay narratives. She has exhibited at O’ Project Space, Lethal Amounts,The Mistake Room, and Espacio 1839. Magadan has participated in yearly zine events as co-planner and member of Xicanx Crybaby zine collective. Magadan received a B.A. in studio art from California State University Dominguez Hills Spring 2022.

Raquel Natalicchio is an award winning independent visual storyteller based in Los Angeles, CA. She is currently focused on photo documenting social justice and immigration issues in the United States and along the US/Mexico border. “ As a storyteller I believe in the power of image and story as having the ability to not only inspire but also expand our awareness. Images allow us to dive into all the layers of our world and gain a greater understanding of our environment and each other. They also are a place where worlds can be created and the future imagined.”

Exhibition: On the Ground

Instagram: @rockmyworldrocky

Rollence Patugan is an American Photographer based out of Los Angeles, CA. Identity, diversity, and visibility are undercurrents of Rollence’s work.

Rosalyn Myles is a Los Angeles native. She attended Mills College in Oakland and then completed her education with a Masters Degree in Art from California College of Art. Rosalyn is a multidisciplinary artist who works in installations, textiles, photography and collage. She’s shown her work all over the US in museums and galleries and is currently working on a project that will take her to Cuba.

Rose Pearlman is an artist, teacher, and textile designer. With a background in fine arts and a love of well designed functional objects, her creations blur the lines between art and craft and pushes the boundaries with non-traditional techniques and materials.  Rose’s work has been featured in fiber magazines, galleries, and numerous online design sites. Her book, Modern Rug Hooking, was published with Roost Books in 2019. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.

RUDY COLE is a Panamenian artist who resides in Pasadena,California. He studied art at Pasadena City College, Art Center College of Design, and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative art. Rudy’s field of expertise are paper collage with mixed media using charcoals, pastels and acrylic. He is also known for his outstanding life like charcoal portraits of cultural, political, and famous figures. Rudy Cole has featured in solo exhibits at Bergamot Station, Pasadena Central Library, Walt Girdner Photo Studio & Gallery, The Inn at Spanish Bay, and group shows throughout California.