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october 3 - november 14, 2020
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Common Ground is an exhibition focused on the planet earth as an ever-shifting politicized landscape of borders, exclusions, and omissions as well as a shared terrain under pressing physical assault. Through paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos, this multi-cultural, multi-generational group of artists explore the reality of a single planet that is humanity’s most divided territory and damaged common ground.
ARTISTS CONVERSATIONS AVAILABLE ONLINE!
Opening Conversation & Virtual Tour
Curators Suvan Geer and Sandra Mueller with participating artists via Zoom on October 10, 2020. Why Artists Make Socio-Political Images Linda Vallejo with Mariona Barkus, Pilar Castillo, Naida Osline and Pamela J. Peters via Zoom on October 14, 2020. Making Art in an Unbalanced World Suvan Geer with Sharon Barnes, Danielle Eubank, Eloisa Guanlao, Maryrose C. Mendoza and Sinan Leong Revell via Zoom on October 17, 2020. Making Change Through Building Community, Sheila Pinkel with leaders from Justice LA & Dignity and Power Now, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Kaos Network and Uncommon Good via Zoom on October 20, 2020. |
The exhibition can be viewed virtually by visiting
Embed Gallery, or in person by appointment only. |
artist bios
Kim Abeles is an artist whose artworks explore biography, geography, feminism, and the environment. Her work speaks to society, science literacy, and civic engagement, creating projects with science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, National Park Service, and non-profits. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to national and international attention. In 2019, she worked with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow to create smog portraits of world leaders with quotes from climate summits. National Endowment for the Arts funded two recent projects: a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics where she focused on Resilience; and, Valises for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work is in forty public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Her process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment.
Mariona Barkus has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States as well as internationally. Barkus’ work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Getty Research Institute, UCLA, Franklin Furnace Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Museum, Long Beach Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Houston Contemporary Art Museum, and Eastern Washington University, among others. Her work has been reviewed in numerous catalogues and periodicals including The Los Angeles Times and Artweek. Some of the books featuring her work are Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern by Arlene Raven; Other Visions, Other Voices by Paul Von Blum with a forward by Lucy Lippard; Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook by The Visual Studies Workshop; From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, edited by Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton, and most recently, American Artists Against War 1935—2010 by David McCarthy, University of California Press.
Sharon Barnes is an inter-disciplinary Los Angeles-based artist born in Sacramento, CA, and raised in Los Angeles. She studied at Otis College of Art & Design where she recently returned to complete her MFA in Fine Arts, and previously earned a BA in Television & Film from CSULA. Barnes has exhibited nationally and internationally, including group shows at the California African American Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Aqua Art Miami, the Los Angeles Tom Bradley Airport and a site installation at the Arco Chato in the Republic of Panama. She has completed residencies at the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI and the Spelman College Art Colony at Taller Portobelo in Panama. Barnes’ work is part of the permanent collection of the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, as well as private and business collections.
Pilar Castillo is a Belizean-born artist based in Los Angeles, and proudly represents the Caribbean diaspora. She has dedicated twenty-years as an art practitioner and professional in the L.A> art community with a focus on public art. As a painter and illustrator, she applies handmade processes to design work ranging from publication to product design. In 2018 she ventured into entrepreneurship opening CastlePillar Design studio. Most notably designing artwork for the 2018 launch of LAX
Terminal 1 for Los Angeles World Airports. Since 2017 she’s been a featured designer with the city’s LA Original brand. Pilar holds an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design, a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures from UCLA’s School of Art & Architecture, and has completed field studies in Amsterdam, Belgium and Cuba.
Danielle Eubank is a painter exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Eubank conceived One Artist Five Oceans, a 20-year project as an expedition artist sailing and painting the waters of every ocean on Earth. Culminating with an expedition to Antarctica in 2019, the Southern Ocean is Eubank's fifth and final ocean. It caps her decades-long quest to paint every ocean on the planet to raise awareness about the state of the oceans and climate change. Eubank is the Expedition Artist for the Phoenicia Ship Expedition, a replica 600BCE ship that sailed from Syria and circumnavigated Africa. Eubank was invited to participate in the UNESCO approved Borobudur Ship Expedition. As Expedition Artist she traveled 10,000 miles with the replica 8th century Indonesian boat from Indonesia to Ghana. Eubank also sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship The Antigua on an expedition to the High Arctic that sailed to the northernmost settlement on Earth. She painted the Henley Royal Regatta 2011-2014. A film documentary about her work, Mozambique VI, premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival. She was a 2018 Creative Climate Award nominee and received the WCA/United Nations Program Honor Roll Award in 2019.
Suvan Geer is an artist whose artworks explore time and things on the verge of disappearing from notice. With her works she probes the transitory in lived experience. Geer’s installations, objects, photographs and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally. They are part of the permanent collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, the Long Beach Museum’s Artist’s Book Collection and the Centre for Political Graphics. Geer’s art is included in Lucy Lippard’s book Lure of the Local: Place in a MultiCentered Society and Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. www.suvangeer.com
Samantha Fields was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1972. She holds an MFA from The Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge. She has received numerous awards and recognition, including a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Grant. Her work has been collected by and exhibited at public institutions including The California Museum of Photography, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, The Crocker Art Museum, The University Art Museum, and The Armory Center for the Arts. She is represented by Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, California. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Harpers Magazine, ZYZZYVA, ArtWeek, Art in America, Art ltd., Artillery, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A profile about Fields is included in Danielle Krysas book, “A Big Important Book About Art: Now With Women!”
Eloisa Guanlao cis a multi-disciplinary artist and scholar. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota, California State University in Long Beach, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and LACHSA for her art and art history training.She currently makes a home in California with her husband and two daughters. Three threads converge in her artwork: migration, technological dependence, and colonialism She finds that one thread inevitably runs into the other two, forming a muddled jumble that can only be sifted through and examined via art–a means of corporeal and spiritual survival.
Ann Isolde is a visual artist and activist who has been involved in the feminist art movement since 1973. She earned a BA from Knox College and an MFA from the University of Colorado. She subsequently joined Front Range Women in the Visual Arts in Boulder, Colorado. In 1975 she drove to Los Angeles to participate in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building. Within a year she began working with Judy Chicago on The Dinner Party Project as facilitator of the team that researched the achievements of 3,000 women in Western civilization. She was one of eight women who painted the 999 names in gold china paint on the “Heritage Floor” of this monumental sculpture now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A member of SCWCA since 1981, she also worked as an administrator in Publications and Exhibitions at both LACMA and the Getty Research Institute before retiring in 2007. She is the editor of Personal Voices / Cultural Visions: Conversations in the Visual Arts Community, Los Angeles 1994-1996 published by the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art in 2018.
Sant Khalsa is an artist, educator and activist whose photography, mixed media and installation works are widely exhibited, published, and acquired by museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and UCR California Museum of Photography in Riverside. Khalsa is a recipient of prestigious fellowships, grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, California Council for the Humanities, Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and others. She was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Society for Photographic Education Insight Award for her significant contributions to the field of photography (2012). Books have included Sant Khalsa: Prana - Life with Trees (Griffith Moon/MOAH Lancaster, 2019), In the Sunshine of Neglect (Inlandia Institute, 2018), Seismic Shift (UCR California Museum of Photography, 2011), Backyard Oasis (DelMonico Books, 2012), Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (Skira/Rizzoli, 2011) and Art in Action: Nature, Creativity and Our Collective Future (Earth Aware Editions, 2007). Khalsa is a Professor of Art, Emerita at California State University, San Bernardino and the founding director of the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts. For more information and to view her artworks visit santkhalsa.com.
Meg Madison is an artist who uses photography to conceptually examine contemporary life. She was born and raised in New York City, studied film at San Francisco State and came to art late with her first solo exhibit at the Kristi Engle Gallery in 2005. Madison embraced art making with community projects, collaborations, and exhibitions in galleries, non-profit spaces, and museums in Los Angeles and beyond. Madison’s early work explored memory, ritual, and the ecological transition from being wanted to being discarded; this was followed by projects on land use, measuring, mapping and the human connection to the land. Jemez Homestead: Stolen Land is a long-term project using the sun to create cyanotype photograms that map a five-acre homestead parcel in the high desert. The paper is snuggled into shrubs and braced against desert plants- the elements of the sun, the wind, the iron salts, the physical presence of land ( the plants shadow) and finally the local well water to develop — all collide creating a print that has touched the land —leaving marks, holes, and scratches on the paper, a metaphor for the contact of land stewardship.
Kaoru Mansour is a native of Japan working as a painter and musician in Los Angeles. She moved to California in 1986 and studied at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles 1987-1989. Recent Selected solo show s include Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert, Bridgette MayerGallery in Philadelphia, En Gallery in Pasadena, ARK in Altadena and Plan D gallery in Los Angeles. Recent selected group shows include USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, El Camino College gallery in Torrance and Vallo della in Lucania Municipality, Italy.
Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza, an interdisciplinary artist and arts educator, has crafted her own visual language of transformation, exalting the everyday in drawings, sculpture, and installation for nearly 30 years. Using memory, material significance, and personal narrative, her work investigates colonized and decolonized perspectives reflecting circumstances of cultural amnesia and assimilation through processes of the handmade. Mendoza is an Associate Professor in Drawing in the Visual Arts and Media Studies Division at Pasadena City College and earned an MFA from the Claremont Graduate University. Her work has been exhibited at the Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles’ Municipal Art Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Baik Art, Solway Jones, HudsonJones Gallery, PlugIn Gallery, YYZ Artist’s Outlet, and many others. Her most comprehensive solo exhibition, Navigating Technics, is currently on display at the Orange County Museum of Art. Mendoza was honored as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2019), and with C.O.L.A. Individual Artist, L. A. Artists’, and Art Matters Fellowships, as well as honorariums from the YYZ Artist’s Outlet, the PlugIn Gallery, and the Pacific Asia Museum. She has enjoyed internships and artist residencies at Art Space Yosuga in Kyoto, Japan, Joshua Tree Highlands Residency, Yaddo Artist Retreat and the Socrates Sculpture Foundation.
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and facilitator. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to visual art. Her colorful abstract paintings, archival eco-prints and installations have been shown broadly in the Pacific Rim region. In 2014, she co-created a twelve-foot wide “Dome of Many Connections” as a gathering place for an international art exchange in Shenyang China. Mueller has curated and directed environmental exhibitions for conferences, galleries and community art spaces. Mueller serves on the national board for the Women’s Caucus for Art and as a Regional Coordinator for The Feminist Art Project. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in intellectual history and found her way to visual art two decades later. Now she presents her concepts visually and keeps a studio practice in Santa Monica.
Pamela J. Peters is a Diné multimedia documentarian and artist from the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Pamela is from the Táchii'nii (Red Running Into the Water People clan). She is a multimedia artist, producing works she regards as "Indigenous Realism" exploring the lives and diversities of real American Indians. As an artist and curator, she pushes viewers to critically analyze the psychological and historical structures of Native Americans in mass media through a Native lens while expressing creative sovereignty. She lives in Los Angeles.
Sheila Pinkel is an artist whose work makes visible the invisible in nature and culture. Currently she is working on carceral issues both in her artwork and in her proactive cultural work in an attempt to create consciousness about the pernicious carceral state locally and in the United States. She is also an emerita professor of art from Pomona College where she taught photography and computer graphics for over 25 years.
Naida Osline is a photo and video artist who combines images sourced from analog and digital processes, blending conceptual and documentary practices. Based in Southern California, she works throughout the Americas, exploring themes of community, identity, gender, aging and transformation, along with the mystical and natural worlds in tension with the human-built environment. Osline’s work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California and internationally. She has done extended residencies in Colombia, SA and Mexico as well as in U.S. national parks. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artillery Magazine, Huffington Post, the OC Weekly, Culture Magazine, Coast Magazine, Artweekand ArtScene. The gallery features a screening of a series of twelve, ten-minute video shorts that comprise Gringotopia (2018), which explores an area south of Guadalajara in Mexico that is a magnet for expatriates from the U.S. and Canada who moved there for a better quality of life. The video series, seen by over 8,000 viewers worldwide, includes English and Spanish subtitles. Osline’s most recent project is a feature length film (with Tyler Stallings) called Hometown Proud (2020) that explores attitudes related to growing up LGBTQ in rural Ohio.
SINAN LEONG REVELL iis a multi-disciplinary artist who works in different art media including painting, photography, ceramics, encaustic and performance. Her work has revolved around the experiences of cultural displacement, politics and identity , referencing both global and personal perspectives on migration and cultural diaspora .Born in China, Sinan migrated to Australia as a child .Buddhist -Taoist and Catholic school attitudes blended disparate cultures. After graduating from Sydney University, she went on to study art, drama and butoh before joining “SPK”,an industrial band in England, After re-locating to the US and spurred by the events of 9/11, she began the “Doppelg-ANGER” series. Inspired by Cindy Sherman’s portraits, Revell channelled an outsider’s outrage at the apathy towards such scenes as gun violence, mass shootings, racism, war. In these staged, photographs, she assumes the character of each of the principal players — victim and oppressor. In portraying the self as capable of both roles-good or bad, Revell shows how we are all connected.
Bonnie J. Smith is a self taught artist, published author and curator with a strong emphasis on textiles. Her work is about what she sees and knows. She created the award winning textile installation “Swimming Upstream” after suffering a life changing injury that confined her to a wheel chair. Once secure in the knowledge that she would recover, Smith created the 12 piece “Swimming Upstream” textile series that became not just her story but of others also trying to swim upstream through life. The series has traveled to the United Kingdom and across the United States. Her work has been exhibited in the United Nations Headquarters as well as embassies around the globe. Smith received the prestigious Leigh Weimer’s Award in San Jose, California in 2017. Her work is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textile where in 2014 she curated the “Forming Our Lives” exhibition. In 2020, her Drought installation based on the Alviso Sea Marshes was featured during the Festival of Quilts by the Dynamic Gallery in Birmingham, England.
Linda Vallejo consolidates multiple, international influences gained from a life of study and travel throughout Europe, the US and Mexico to create works that investigate contemporary cultural and socio-political issues. Recent solo exhibitions include LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (2019-2020); Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2018); bG Gallery, Santa Monica (2017); Texas A&M University Reynolds Gallery (2016); and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles CA (2015). Brown Belongings was featured in the NY Times “Visualizing Latino Populations Through Art” by Jill Cowan (11- 26- 9) and in LA Times “Linda Vallejo and a decade of art that unapologetically embraces brownness” by Matt Stromberg (7-20-19). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, CA, Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, East Los Angeles College Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles CA, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago Ill, and UC Santa Barbara, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA).
Gail Werner earned her M.F.A. in drawing and painting from California State University, Long Beach in 1985. She is a painter working in oil and encaustic. She also specializes in the monotype printmaking process. The Southern California desert and mountain landscapes, plant and animal life, and cultural elements related to her Native American background inspire her work. She is part Cupeño, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay, three tribes located in Southern California. Recent shows include The Skies Above,sponsored by the Autrey Museum at the Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus in Los Angeles, Protecting Mother Earth, at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, Meditations, a four-person inaugural exhibit of the new Long Beach arts registry at the Collaborative gallery, and The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Indigenous Arts of the Neshkinukat Artists at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden Library. She was also included in the juried exhibits, 4th National Monotype/Monoprint Juried Exhibit, Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, Massachusetts, 2015 California Open Exhibition, Tag Gallery, Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, and Ink and Clay 41, Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona. In addition, she painted a mural for the 2016 POW! WOW! Mural Festival in downtown Long Beach.