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 main 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.
Introducing the 3rd Ellsworth Artist Residency cohort
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.