Legacy 2011
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18th Street Arts Center Awards Annual Fellowships to Four Los Angeles Artists
18th Street Arts Center is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2011 Artist Fellowships: Jerri Allyn, Richard Newton, Vincent Ramos, and York Chang
These four artists have each been selected to receive a three-month residency at 18th Street along with an exhibition and project grant.
18th Street Artist Fellows are selected through a competitive proposal process. Artists are asked to respond to an annual programmatic theme. For 2011, 18th Street’s Artistic Director Clayton Campbell set the theme of Legacy. “18th Street is one of the venues organizing a 2011 exhibit for the Pacific Standard Time initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation. PST is concerned with Southern Californian art created between the years of 1945 to 1980, which involves critical examination of an artistic legacy,” says Campbell. This PST initiative has opened up numerous questions and lines of investigation for artists whose work is ephemeral, durational, or fugitive. On account of the nature of the PST exhibit (featuring artists: Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz- Starus, Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara T. Smith, EZTV, and Electronic Café International), 18th Street has decided to devote their entire exhibition year to the theme of Legacy. The selected fellowship artists will occupy 18th Street’s galleries as artists in residence from February through late August 2011, followed by the opening in September of 18th Street’s PST show, Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist space Movement, which will complete the Legacy year at 18th Street.
Our Artist Fellows will address basic questions about how artistic legacy is passed down, whether it should be passed down, and whether ephemeral performative and media based work can be re-performed and re-envisioned by the authors themselves or by new generations of artists. They will explore these questions through public engagement, which opens new lines of thinking while considering the legacy of art-making and intellectual ferment that has made Los Angeles such an amazing site for creativity.
Beginning February 1 through April 30, 2011, Richard Newton will be in residence in the 18th Street Gallery. His project, In the Privacy of Your Own Home, will involve multiple presentations of video, ephemera, and correspondence accompanied by public dialogues with artists active in Southern California from 1960 onwards. Newton will also actively collaborate with younger artists to develop three performances allied with the presentations.
During the same time span, Vincent Ramos will occupy 18th Street’s Project Room with his research-based project, Outsider Art: Others From Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different…Sort Of. Ramos’ project will look at works developed in Southern California in the 1960’s by artists who were not from the region, but whose projects informed and influenced the work of local artists. He will develop new works along with constructing a visual timeline of the many disparate pieces from these “outsider” artists.
Beginning June 1 through August, 30 in the 18th Street Gallery, artist Jerri Allyn will collaborate with Inez Bush and Linda Kunik, and other debating artists. Their project, Debating Through the Arts, is based on a continuation of modeling the United Nation as a paradigm. Besides further debates, they will create a mediation environment that houses and exhibits creative proposals emerging from the debates.
While artist Jerri Allyn activates the 18th Street Gallery, York Chang will manifest his project Second Life in the 18th Street Project Room. Chang imagines his project as the art worldversion of the video game “Second Life” where participants construct their own fictional artistic identities drawn from LA artists between the years of 1965 to1985. His exhibit will reconstruct the offices of Artist Actualization Services, a short-lived but influential artist organization in Los Angeles between the years of 1980 to 1985, which called on artists to constantly reinvent themselves.
18th Street Arts Center values art making as an essential component of a vibrant, just and healthy society. It’s mission is ‘to provoke public dialogue through contemporary art making.’ One of the historic alternative contemporary art centers in the United States, 18th Street is a leader in international residencies and cultural exchange, as well as the home base for seminal not for profit artist organizations Highways Performance Space, EZTV, and Electronic Café International. It’s galleries present emerging and mid career artists in a visual arts laboratory environment where risk taking is encouraged and supported.
For further information, contact Program Coordinator Ronald Lopez at rlopez@18thstreet.org.
www.18thstreet.org
