Art & Art History News - Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Fall 2023

Monday, October 2, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the US from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, his family stories and diasporic experience are the foundation for his investigative practice. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, Danh uses photosynthesis to directly print portraits from the Vietnam War era onto the leaf's surfaces. Danh is also noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape.

He earned a BFA from San José State University and an MFA from Stanford University. His awards include a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, and a 2019 Creative Work Fund, collaborating with the Visual and Performing Art Department at the California State University, Monterey Bay. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He is an associate professor of art at San José State University.

Monday, October 23, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

Tomashi Jackson creates vibrant research-driven works in the mediums of paintings, printmaking, video, photography, fiber, and sculpture. Influenced by California muralist traditions reflecting peoples’ movements of the 1950’s-1990’s, her often immersive work scrutinizes the mechanics of societal power and recognizes the triumphs for the empowerment of communities of color.

Tomashi Jackson (born 1980 in Houston, Texas) was raised in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2016, her Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 2012, and her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2010. Jackson's work has been included in recent solo exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Off the Record at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2021), the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and In the Abstract at MASS MoCA (2017). Jackson's artworks are in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami.

Monday, November 6, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

Jason Stopa paints work that engages with the potential of gestural abstraction in the digital age. Although he attributes techniques and forms to the history of painting, Stopa’s paintings are situated in contemporary culture, where analog and digital are intertwined. Carrying the notion that painting is “about color as light and light as space.”

Jason Stopa (USA, b. 1983) is a painter and writer living in Brooklyn. He received his BFA from Indiana University Bloomington and his MFA from Pratt Institute in NYC. Recent solo exhibitions include Joy Labyrinth at Morgan Lehman, NYC (2021) and Hanging Gardens at Atelier W Pantin, France (2019). Group exhibitions include Beyond the Black Hole, The Pit, Palm Springs (2022), Shelter From the Storm, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2022), Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation, at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, CA (2021), Light (curated by Rico Gatson) at Miles McEnery Gallery in NYC (2021), What's It All About at Jenkins Johnson Projects in Brooklyn (2021). Stopa teaches at Pratt Institute and works for an academic journal at Columbia University.  He is a contributing writer to Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Momus, and artcritical, among other art journals.

Monday, November 13, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, handmade/autonomous, and beyond power structures rooted in colonialism. They collapse binaries and borders, creating new epistemologies between Earth and Space.

She is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She was recently given the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. She has exhibited at LACMA, MCASB, Clockshop, Frieze LA, and Blum & Poe Gallery. She has an upcoming solo museum exhibition with the Columbus Museum of Art. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Monday, November 27, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, he employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. His recent projects have evolved through experimental collaborative projects grounded in laboring with land vis-à-vis adobe brick-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. 

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2011). Solo exhibitions have been held at Artists Space, New York (2023); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio (2018); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Selected group exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2022); San Diego Art Institute (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). esparza is a recipient of a Pérez Prize (2022), Latinx Artist Fellowship (2021), Lucas Artist Fellowship (2020), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (2014). esparza’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.