About The Ellsworth Artist Residency Program
The Ellsworth Artist Residency program is dedicated to creating an accessible studio space for artists and is a dynamic opportunity for emerging artists to work and develop their visual art practice. The residency includes professional development opportunities including studio visits with curators, critics, scholars and artists as well as inclusion in a group exhibition in Art Share L.A.’s gallery. A selection committee, consisting of professionals in the field, including curators, scholars, and artists, reviews all the submitted applications.
About Terry Ellsworth
Terry Ellsworth was a prominent figure in the downtown art community and – for more than a decade – an incomparable Art Share L.A. team member. He saw what the building could become during the Arts District’s revitalization and infused decades of his art experience into the evolution of Art Share L.A. His affability and his commitment to accessible, community-based art anchored the organization through its biggest transitions. As Art Share L.A.’s Ambassador, Terry would often install art shows and walk the building’s hallways sharing stories. He was a magnetic storyteller who held friends’ and patrons’ ears at each event with equal parts history and humor.
The Ellsworth Artist Residency Program is generously supported in part by the Eastside Arts Initiative and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support provided by Prince Street Pizza
Introducing the 7th cohort of the Ellsworth Artist Residency Program
Mike Saijo
A native of Los Angeles, Mike Saijo guides his viewers through the complexities of “memory reconstruction”: how memories are built, what goes into the creation of memory, and how it is preserved. Saijo touches on themes of loss, entropy, transformation and mapping the unconscious. Influenced, in part, by ancient manuscripts, he reclaims history by redefining it based on human experience. Saijo transforms objects like books, office supplies, and building materials to construct art with a wide range of subject matter, from mid-century modern architecture, WWII photos, cinema stills, imaginary landscapes and ethnographic history. Saijo cites graffiti street art and Oshuji-Japanese calligraphy as some of his chief influences, dating back to his first “book piece” made using the pages of a New Testament Bible issued by the US Army in 1944. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, and at shows in the Japanese American National Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has conducted presentations about his work at The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks and Edward Schwartz Federal Building. His work is now in the permanent collection of The Skirball Cultural Center with plans to be exhibited this year.
He has recently completed a public art project commissioned by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Department of Parks and Recreations.
Saijo has also been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dwell, and New York Magazine. His story about Intersections was recently published in the LAist website and featured on National Public Radio on 89.3 FM.
Bad Talents
Bad Talents is the creative identity of mixed-media artist, Shelby Alexander, and the pseudonym under which she exhibits her fine art nationally. Shelby lives and works in Los Angeles. Shelby graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and she also studied fashion design at Pratt Institute in NYC. Her work references the pollution of the fashion industry, while highlighting the tension between the modern experience of beauty, consumption, and industrialization—and the long-term environmental impact of the clothing we wear.
R.Tucker
Reginald Tucker (Artist name R.Tucker) is a mixed-media artist and a trailblazer in both art and finance. Known for his innovative use of repurposed materials, Tucker’s work reflects his commitment to thinking outside the box, a theme that has defined both his personal and professional life. Without formal art training, Tucker embraced the role of an outsider, forging a unique path in both the art world and his career.
In his professional life, Tucker has been a key contributor to the development of the Opportunistic Portfolio and a Unique Strategies allocation at two separate large public pension plans, helping to seed and anchor new strategies and platforms that broke away from traditional investment models. This approach of embracing non-conventional strategies mirrors his creative process in the art world, where he continually pushes boundaries by blending repurposed materials with abstract compositions.
Tucker founded Recycled Abstract as a platform to explore new artistic forms that fuse the historical significance of past mediums with modern innovations that leverage tech. Through his work, he preserves the communicative power of magazines—once a dominant but now fading medium—capturing snapshots of societal norms and values that are reinterpreted through his abstract 3D collages. These pieces reflect how cultural norms evolve, giving new relevance to discarded materials.
Tucker frequently exhibits in Long Beach and Los Angeles, including Culver City, Downtown LA, and Santa Monica, earning recognition for his ability to blend the past with the future. Each piece challenges conventional boundaries, offering new perspectives on art, culture, and the power of the preservation of tradition and transformation of the forgotten.
The 6th Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Marina Claire
As a welding, painting, fabricating, and tattooing artist, Marina’s work is a constant manipulation of the physical: metal, paint, ink, and bodies. Plato’s inquiries into the timeless perfection of imagined geometric shapes, and into how geometries might lie behind all nature, inspire her to make objects that (though necessarily imperfect because they will never have perfect straight edges, and must eventually erode) tease our minds toward the perfect. The objects she makes — always imperfectly embodying perfection — ask viewers to drift within that gap between the non-physical, conceptual realm and our tangible, sensory experience.
Marina is the recipient of the 2024 Etcheve Rising Star Fellowship and has exhibited work nationally and in Germany, including the Maryland Federation of Art, NRM Gallery, Sleep Center (New York, NY), Infinite Balcony (Brooklyn, NY), Sidestreet Arts, ADX, Past Lives, Blind Insect (Portland, OR), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Echo Park Art Gallery, bG Gallery, and TAG Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Philosophy from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College in New York. She studied sculpture with Katja Strunz on a scholarship to Universität der Künste Berlin. She is currently fabricating museum exhibition displays and making ideas physical through paintings in Los Angeles.
Elena Peng
Elena Peng is an interdisciplinary designer driven by imagination, the sense of self, and the art of fusion. She is a firm believer in the power of interdisciplinary knowledge which fuels my ability to break rules and forge new paths in fusion.
As a designer with industrial design background, she cares about spirit in an unconventional way that she doesn’t just design physically. She crafts experiences spiritually. Object as her physical media to express and explaining the feeling. She explores materials like ceramics, wood, fabric, metal and any potential material to dig the fusion possibility.
Lamar Jones
The 5th Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Erik Barrios-Recendez
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.
Andrés Janacua
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?”
Ramón Vargas
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.
The 4th Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Estefania Ajcip
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).
Bea Lamar
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.
Victoria May
Victoria May works primarily with textiles in conjunction with other humble found materials, creating unusual mergings that reflect the tension between calculated human efforts and random forces. Her work is fueled by an intense curiosity about putting disparate things together and working with surplus items and unwanted materials that come across her path. Combining raw and refined motifs and processes, these material explorations question a societal obsession with newness and appearances. She frequently uses layering, exposing deeper strata or a surprising interior. The works attempt to pull back and find beauty and tenderness in the imperfect or even the abject, but also in the absurdity of human endeavors. May has taught a wide range of art classes in college and workshop settings. She is an avid advocate for material reuse in art and community.
Her work has been exhibited at art institutions in the Bay Area and more locally at the Maloof Foundation, Craft Contemporary, Roberts Projects, Quotidian and other Los Angeles galleries. She has had residencies at Jentel Arts in Wyoming, Kala in Berkeley, California, the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, California and the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica, California. She received a Santa Cruz County Rydell Fellowship and was named a Silicon Valley Artist Laureate.
The 3rd Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Pável Acevedo
Pável Acevedo is a printmaker/muralist originally from Oaxaca, Mexico based in Los Angeles. Pável Acevedo’s artworks are influenced by the traditional Mexican printmaking imagery of Taller Gráfica Popular Mexicana and traditional family folk tales.
Pável’s printmaking work has been showcased between the Bay Area of San Francisco and Southern California and other states such as Texas, New Mexico, New York, Mississippi, Washington; and internationally in Belgium, Canada, Mexico and Colombia.
Pável Acevedo has worked as an independent art educator at Self Help Graphics, Plaza de la Raza, Breesee Foundation, Riverside Art Museum and I learn America. He’s also part of the professional artist roster from Speedball. His past residencies include: “Beyond the press” at Self Help Graphics, KALA Art Institute, College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita and Horned Toad Print Shop in El Paso, TX.
As a mural artist he’s been commissioned to create murals by Chaffey College’s Wignall Art Museum, La Sierra University’s Art & Design Department, and the city of Riverside. He has also crafted murals for “We Rise LA”, Self Help Graphics and for private collectors commissioning public murals in Los Angeles. His artwork is part of public collections at Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, Tx. The Met library in N.Y., in California at Self Help Graphics, Riverside Art Museum, KALA Art Institute.
Sara Janti
Born in Tehran, Iran, Sara Janti is a mixed media artist and jewelry designer who currently lives and works in Southern California.
Sara has always had a deep connection to creating objects, her recent works tell her stories of life and own experience as an Iranian woman who is living in diaspora.
Influenced by the recent movements in Iran and the role of Iranian women leading the movement, by mixing images from old Iranian artifacts and self portraits, she has unveiled a series of works that describe Iranian women who are fighting for their own basic human rights. Her mixed media pieces are a reflection of the current status in what is happening and how it is affecting lives.
Michael Shaw
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.
The 2nd Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Marissa Brown // LONE KING PROJECTS
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.
Jesse Fregozo
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.
Steven Rahbany
Steven Rahbany is a Los Angeles based artist who has been exploring a hand sewn pillow technique for the past few years. With a graphic design background, he blends typography and shapes with sewing to weave nostalgia and present issues. His work has been exhibited in group and solo shows at galleries such as The Houston Contemporary Art Museum, TAG Gallery, Agora Art Gallery in New York, and Photo LA.
The inaugural Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort alumni
Jacqueline Valenzuela
Valenzuela is a multi-media artist whose practice is centered around her personal 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.
Lorenzo Baker
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.
Kyong Boon Oh
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.