Above, COLA fellow Sabrina Gschwandtner
The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs is presenting the 2019 COLA (City of Los Angeles) individual artist fellowships exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal art gallery. The fellowships Honoring the City’s Creative Spirit show will have its opening reception this Sunday, May 19th, from 2 to 5 p.m. The exhibition will run through July 14th.
The COLA Fellowships are awarded annually to Los Angeles-based exemplary mid-career artists, each of whom receive $10,000 grants. They’re chosen following three review rounds by peer panelists who’ve served as curators, educators, non-profit gallerists, museum directors, or past COLA Fellows.
Above work by Aleida Rodríguez
This year’s winners in design and visual arts include Juan Capistrán, Enrique Castrejon, Kim Fisher, Katie Grinnan, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Alice Könitz, and Olga Koumoundouros. In the literary and performing arts, winners include Suzanne Lummis, Aleida Rodríguez, Sandy Rodriguez, Stephanie Taylor, Peter Wu, Jenny Yurshansky, and Dwight Trible for performing art.
Viewers will find the personal and even autobiographical in these works, with Capistran focusing on depictions of the neighborhood in which he grew up: his Psychogeography of Rage photography series documents guerilla-style, temporary installations throughout South Central LA (above.) Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Capistran utilizes poetic transdisciplinary forms to question socio-political ideology.
Koumoundouros reimagines her own life through the life cycle of a flying fish, offering narrative mixed media work that seeks to combine “the flow of energy and earthly bound materal resources.”
Yurshansky offers an installation that tracks the matrimonial links of her family; while Castrejon’s
Könitz offers a temporary modular structure for the exhibition that evokes our primal need for shelter. Her functional, beautifully designed work includes shutters, closed every evening when the gallery closes.
The German-born, LA-based artist founded Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA). LAMOA was featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2014, and received the Mohn Award. An image from LAMOA is depicted above.
Lincoln Heights-based Kim Fisher, above, has exhibited internationally; here her Los Angeles Hedge presents a dramatically-scaled hedge overlaid with flat planes of color and everyday ephemera.
Grinnan, who will offer a musically performed intrepretation of her wooden EEG-based sculptures at the reception (above), is a UCLA-graduate who has had solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, the Hammer Museum, and most recently at Commonwealth and Council.
Gschwandtner (work above) has created large-scale public arts commissions in New York City and presently resides in Echo Park.
Originally from San Diego, independent artist and educator Rodriguez’ most recent work (above) includes the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, a series of maps and paintings about the intersections of politics, history, and culture.
Taylor is a sound and visual artist based in LA who exhibits her work internationally. The Ontario-born Wu creates decidedly vibrant works. Yurshansky’s artist book was published by Pitzer College Art Galleries.
As a leading progressive arts and cultural agency, the DCA provides support and access to Los Angeles’s vibrant communities through quality visual, literary, musical, performing, and educational arts programming.
At the reception, as noted, Grinnan will present a performance of her work 5 Seconds of Dreaming, with musicians Kozue Matsumoto and Eugene Moon. Her wooden sculptures are based upon diagrams of her brain activity during sleep. The highly tactile works have been stringed to create instruments the musicians will play, offering their interpretation of her visual work in musical form.
The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is located at 4800 Hollywood Boulevard in Barnsdall Park, from May 23 through July 14, 2019 with an opening reception on May 19 from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The COLA Performance and Literary Presentation will take place on June 1, 2019 at Grand Performances in the Spiral Court at 300 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90071.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by COLA
