Obras de arte: 1ero. de junio - 25 de semptiembre de 2016
Adéntrate en el estudio de un artista en ejercicio. Crea obras con títeres, compositores, bordadores y constructores de nidos.
Exhibited...
Join the Artists in residence in our open studio exhibit, where practicing artists can exchange their skills and interact with the community.
Create your own puppet, build a nest, test your embroidery skills, discuss what skin color means to you in a delicious way and interactive way, and share your scar stories at Art Works.
Nanci was in the gallery from May 31st – July 11th, 2016
Create mono prints and portraits from your scars and reveal the stories behind them with Nanci Amaka. Nanci is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist focused on ideas surrounding trauma, identity, memory and the liminal spaces between experience and language. Having spent her formative years in a rural rainforest village in Nigeria, she now lives and works on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Nanci’s paintings and drawings explore global displacement due to widespread ecological destruction. Her sound sculptures and textile pieces address the effect of trauma on our sense of identity. Her lectures and performances are about the experiences of people she’s interviewed on the matter and her own personal narrative. Nanci received a BA in Visual Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from California College of the Arts.
Her work focuses on memory, trauma, and identity; which are all shared human experiences. Scars are also ubiquitous. We have all fallen down, cut ourselves, or been hurt at some point in our lifetime. Sometimes, these events stay with us on our bodies and minds. Bringing together the shared human experience of going through hard times and coming out on the other side, Santa Cruz Scar Stories is a continuation of a project working under the hypothesis that the action of remembering allows for understanding ourselves in a new way.
Miss Tanq was in the gallery from May 31st – June 30th, 2016
Step into the Poetry Parlor and forge your own poems with Kevin Devaney. Kevin is a graduate of the Sarah MissTANGQ is a Chinese-American multi-media artist and first-generation mystic-nerd. She is deeply inspired by the hyphenated experience and explores this through mask-making, animation, installation, and performance art to create cross-sensory and interdisciplinary work. From the many junctions of her identity, she explores the fertile unions where collaboration between seemingly disparate elements can facilitate transformative, emergent experiences. She adapts ancient mythologies for contemporary storytelling and investigates the ways ancestral traditions inform diasporic futurisms. Uniting hand-made and digital mediums, she creates ritual synesthetic experiences for live stage performances and studio art installations.
She uses clay, paper-maché, textiles, and organic materials harvested from nature and repurposed objects to construct wearable sculptures that fuse cultural traditions, ancient divination practices, numerology and symbology, animism and cosmology. She believes that activating multi-dimensional perception creates new possibilities within our imagination, remixing our past, current, and future to understand ourselves and our potential.
Through 6 years of working as the Director of Engagement for a non-profit serving marginalized communities, she has developed and led nationally renowned educational programs and workshops that unite arts exploration with humanizing liberation pedagogy. She has developed mask-making workshops that use divination to explore archetypes, identity and mythology. These themes also reflect the queer and immigrant experience as it seeks to transform what has been inherited by society and culture into a creative undertaking of self-creation. As an activist, artist and educator, she facilitates the passageway through the inner and outer worlds to birth new narratives of being. As an emerging artist working professionally since 2014, her work has been featured in numerous galleries and performance spaces in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, the Bay Area, Hawaii, Mexico and China. She has been the recipient of awards granted by Artist Trust, 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. She has completed residencies with the SOMArts Cultural Center, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Xucun International Art Commune in China. Her most notable performances recently have been at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA.
Carmina was in the gallery from June 28th – July 11th, 2016
Recreate domestic spaces with food, drink and cultural conversation in La Casa de Cultura y Comida with Carmina Eliason. Carmina is a Bay Area artist who uses photography, social practice, and performance to make interactive spaces to instigate conversation, connection, and reflection on culture, identity, and contemporary social issues. She is currently an MFA candidate at San Jose State University. Carmina’s work has been exhibited regionally, as well as in Mexico and Iran. During the day Carmina is a photography and fine art teacher and at night she dreams Star Trek characters are her sidekicks.
Beginning with stories and experiences from her own life, Carmina engages the public in conversational exchanges about topics that are difficult to talk about such as domestic violence, immigration, and identity. Carmina often recreates common domestic spaces based on the homes and culture of her family who live in Mexico to start these conversations. In the past, she has made tortillas to explore feeling like a multicultural imposter, tea to talk about domestic abuse, and salsa to create conversation about the differences and similarities between Pakistani and Mexican culture.
Lanier is a composer, recordist, and educator. Lanier’s music often explores ideas like audience interactivity, improvisation, the intersection of popular and classical musics, and the pairing of electronic and acoustic sound. For Lanier Sammons, audience-interactive music-making provides both a chance to share the pleasure of musical creation and a rich set of compositional challenges. Lanier’s work aims to explore the new ways of thinking about musical form and material that participatory processes offer and to confront audience interactivity’s particular demand that the composer craft consciously and effectively the social environment in which and from which the music emerges. Through this exploration, Lanier hopes to provide visitors with engaging, expressive, and novel musical experiences that pull back the curtain on the acts of composing, performing, and recording music.
Sasha was in in the gallery from July 12th-August 8th, 2016
Build human-sized nests out of fabric scraps with Sasha Petrenko. Sasha is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary artist, educator and Artistic Director of The New Urban Naturalists. Her work utilizes sculpture, performance, prose and visual media to draw parallels between earth science and human relationships. Petrenko’s projects have been featured widely at national and international venues including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Lab, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum of San Francisco, the University of California, Berkeley, the Los Angeles County Arboretum*, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center for Performance in New York, Oberpflalzer-Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany and at Kulturfolger in Zurich* Switzerland.
Sasha will be working on a series of human-scale baskets or nests created from repurposed materials and donated textiles. She will be requesting textile donations from the public and in exchange will offer several drop-in weaving workshops where visitors can help build the collective nests or learn to make their own.
Abigail was in the gallery from July 12th – August 22nd, 2016
Taste the recipes of historical and contemporary Santa Cruz in our gallery kitchen. Abigail Han is a practicing artist originating from Singapore and currently living and working in Los Angeles. She makes experimental films and uses performance, video, installation, and drawing in her work and is interested in exploring concepts of collective memory, fragmentation of identity and language. Her work has been exhibited in Singapore, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Hong Kong, Paris, and the Czech Republic. She recently graduated with an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
Abigail bridges the private space of the kitchen with the public space of the museum. Exploring Santa Cruz’s place on the coast as a hub for trade routes, the gallery kitchen will feature how historical recipes are an amalgamation of cultural roots. How does culture shape the food we eat? How does the food we eat shape culture? Given Abigail’s Singaporean roots, food has always been an interest to her. But the food’s place of preparation has remained a mystery, an offstage space. A void of historical and cultural knowledge. During her residency, Abigail charters the kitchen to the surface where she will explore historic and contemporary recipes with the public.
Kevin was in the gallery from July 26th – August 22nd, 2016
Step into the Poetry Parlor and forge your own poems with Kevin Devaney. Kevin is a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program and a spoken word advocate. He is the founder of the Santa Cruz’s Only Weekly Poetry Open Mic, the Sarah Lawrence College Spoken Word Collective, The Northampton Poetry Brothel, Northampton Poetry, and the former Art Bar & Cafe Philanthropub. In his free time, he likes to try to devise new ways for art to intersect with daily life.
Kevin Devaney is a poet who is interested in writing the raw, moving poem of the moment. He wants to find the door to your heart, forge the key, and transport it underneath your pillow with words. The rest of it is, of course, up to you.
Visita a Gabriel en la Galería del 23 de agosto al 25 de septiembre de 2016 Crea con Gabriel: Jueves, 15 de septiembre, 11 a.m a 5 p.m. Viernes, 16 de septiembre, 11 a.m a 9 p.m.
Examina la no permanencia de la memoria y sus consecuencias para la justicia mientras crea historias orales con Gabriel Sosa. Gabriel es un lingüista y artista interdisciplinario que trabaja principalmente en dibujo, sonido y video. Se graduó en 2016 del programa de Maestría en Bellas Artes en la Escuela del Museo de Bellas Artes de Boston. Es originario de Miami, Florida.
Gabriel Sosa recurre tanto a su trabajo como intérprete judicial como a su propia historia familiar para crear archivos de dibujos e historias orales. Los testimonios exploran la potencia y la falibilidad de la memoria a través de una serie de entrevistas con visitantes del museo, integrando sus métodos de investigación con su experiencia de interpretación en el sistema de justicia.
Visit Stef in the gallery from August 9th – September 25th, 2016
Tell your own stories of movement and place through the art of embroidery with Stef Wolf. A Santa Cruz artist Stef focuses on a childish whimsy and the intersection between social justice and an empathic connection. A major concern for her is an authentic connection in a world that seems increasingly defined by bifurcation and political subterfuge. Not only does Stef focus her art on empowering others through teaching hands-on textile art skills, and she is also the co-founder of The Fábrica: Community Textile Arts and Salvage Cooperative and a graduate of San Jose State University.
Visit Grant in the gallery from August 23rd – September 25th, 2016
Create social justice puppets with Grant Wilson. Grant is a puppet builder, social-political street theatre performer, community advocate & arts publicist. He designs large puppet builds and revels in the creative use of cast-off materials, shaping forms with simple tools and integrating multiple elements. They are designed to move and interact with people and the environment, creating the entire puppet-making process to encourage participation. Grant is a co-founder of the Santa Cruz Art and Revolution Convergence in 1998, which received a Gail Rich arts award in 2002. He is not only a graduate of UCSC (Psychology with an Art Therapy emphasis, but he has also continued to be involved in collaborative community projects in Santa Cruz.
“Estas cosas son sobre momentos en nuestras vidas que fueron traumáticos y sobre ser dueños de ellos”
Nanci Amaka, artista-en-residencia — Serie de historias de cicatrices: cicatrices de Santa Cruz
“La máscara cobra vida sólo cuando alguien se la pone, en realidad está hecha para ser encarnada”
missTANGQ — Huang Meng Yu 'missTANGQ', activista, educadora, y artista-en-residencia
This summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History ventures into new territory -- by putting the artists themselves on display. In so doing, the show Art Works gives a whole new meaning to the concept of “open studios.”
