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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 is supported in part by a generous grant from the Eastside Arts Initiative.

 

Additional support provided by Prince Street Pizza

Introducing the 4th Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort

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.

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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

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 Mercury Project (San Antonio,TX) for, “L.A. To S.A.” an exhibition curated around the theme of exploring the art practices of a diverse group of artists whose work honed in on the idea of home, familiarity, and comfort. Ultimately giving viewers a glimpse of the interconnectedness that Latine communities throughout the country have.

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.