April 16 through May 14, 2022

With barely a pause to catch its breath after The Future Is Brown, which paired the works of veteran Chicano and Latino artists with up-and-comers, Bermudez Projects opens the second installment of its audacious FAST FORWARD series with FAST FORWARD | The Future Is Female.

Determined to offer a glimpse of the future – one where white male artists no longer dominate the art world – the exhibit unites a diverse cadre of women artists whose artistic practices have broken new ground for their originality and mastery of their respective media.

Featuring an outstanding multigenerational roster of female artists, The Future Is Femalebrings together Blue Chip powerhouses like Marina Abramović and Louise Nevelson; mid-career leaders like Ann Diener, Blue McRight, Yolanda González, and Linda Vallejo; and rising stars like Ana Serrano, Leticia Maldonado, and Erynn Richardson. And, after a seven-year hiatus, the gallery is proud to present the return of one of its most popular and best-selling artists, Amanda Beckmann. (See below for the complete roster of artists.)

In paintings, large-scale drawings, photographs, installations, neon, sculpture, and collage, these women tell overlapping stories of racial and cultural identity, socio-economic inequity, body politics, history and memory, the environment, nature, and sex.

Highlights of The Future is Female include Louise Nevelson’s intimate sculpture, Night Leaffrom 1969; Blue McRight’s large-scale sculpture (over 9 ft), Sea Stack, made from salvaged metal bait baskets, plastic objects, nylon nets, and thread; Leticia Maldonado’s intricately sculpted neon flower bouquets; Ann Diener’s massive, heavily-layered paperwork, Evolving Terrain; Ana Serrano’s massive McMansion, No. 1; and Linda Vallejo’s installation Objects of Opulence, specifically made for Bermudez Projects.

Why focus on female artists? It’s 2022, but according to the National Endowment for the Arts, female visual artists still earn 20% less than male artists. And it’s even worse at auction, where works by female artists are rated lower by wealthy men, leading to a 50% pay gap when the gavel falls.

Says Bermudez Projects founder and curator Julian Bermudez, “We are celebrating these women and their art. They each have dynamic stories and backgrounds, and their works reflect that. It’s extremely important that we show audiences just how powerful these women are. If the major institutions won’t give them their due, we will.”

“The future of the art world is going to be non-white. If the current trajectory of support from collectors is an accurate measure – and they are the ones who will sit on museum boards or support institutions – then the entire landscape of that world will look like the rest of the US. We just want to keep the conversation going.”

FAST FORWARD is a 5-part series presenting works by key figures in Black, Latinx, Women, and Queer art history, juxtaposed with works from a select group of emerging artists.

The complete list of artists in FAST FORWARD | The Future is Female:

• Marina Abramović

• Amanda Beckmann

• Francesca Bifulco

• Ann Diener

• Camille Rose Garcia

• Yolanda González

• Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle

• Louise Nevelson

• Leticia Maldonado

• Blue McRight

• Erynn Richardson

• Leigh Salgado

• Kristine Schomaker

• Ana Serrano

• Clarissa Tossin

• Linda Vallejo

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

FacebookTwitterRedditLinkedInTumblrPinterestVkEmail

HERland: Women Artists in the MOLAA Collection

by Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator

This exhibition was intended to be on view at MOLAA during the Spring of 2020.
Upon the Museum’s reopening to the public, we will present the exhibition in the galleries.

In a world where the discussion about empowering women, race, class, and equity is more relevant and necessary than ever before, we are so pleased to present Herland, Women artists in the MOLAA Collection. An imaginary territory where female artists, with different approaches and even different ways of looking, define a new powerful land with new meanings.

This selection of women artists that we present today is part of the MOLAA Permanent Collection, and by sharing them with our public we begin a new approach to our history as an institution, in addition to broadening our perspective and delving into those works that speak of certain topics, many times invisible in the history of art, such as the creation of female artists.

Because art is knowledge and experience, at the same time we discuss our heritage, we focus on Latina and Latin American artists possessing a unique poetic style, who continued a path started at the beginning of the 20th century linked to a dreamlike and surrealist, representation, imagination, boundaries and distorsions, exploring possible worlds in connection with the female unconscious and personal ideology.

Thus we approach an infinite imaginarium of ideas and concepts, where each of these artists explores their creations, through impressive figurative and symbolic paintings, photographs, and drawings, the depths of fantasy, mystery, illusion, the dream from a clear singular view where the work functions as a matrix to be deciphered.

November 14 through December 26, 2020

Extended through January 16, 2021!

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 14, 6-9 pm

Bermudez Projects is excited to present Metamorphosis, an exhibition of paintings and prints by LA artist Yolanda González. This is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

For more than four decades, Yolanda González’s paintings and antic ceramics have been characterized by a vivid use of color – palettes of blues, reds, greens, and yellows characteristic of her Chicana artistic background and the 20th century German Expressionism that have influenced her work.

But González’s imagery in her groundbreaking Metamorphosis series in the 1990s shows a double turning in her career, reflecting both the present world and life as she experienced it a generation ago.

Metamorphosis is more somber, darker, and less representative…and, in its way, far more visceral, cathartic, and emotional.

González says people familiar with her recent work will be surprised at this body of work, which at the time of its creation lacked the proper platform to be understood and embraced.

The change towards this darkness dates back 27 years ago, when Yolanda was in an Artist-in-Residency fellowship in Japan. There, at age 29, she found herself suddenly experiencing a change in her life, a change in the way she viewed her spiritual and emotional environment, and the way she viewed the world. The death of a dear friend brought her face to face with the concept of mortality, and led to a dramatic shift in her art-making philosophy.

González returned to the US 1993, and worked on her Metamorphosis series from 1994-1997.

These new works reflected what she had learned of fundamental Japanese aesthetics, along with Zen concepts which transfixed González by the simplicity and intensity of monochromatic materials. The result was a series of emotionally wrought, semi-representational, and (mostly) black-and-white painted shapes that allowed for viewing in any orientation. She actually painted their surfaces as she twirled them in different directions … the spinning symbolizing the disorienting spirit of loss she felt.

After completing the series, González put these paintings aside – with the exception of a few being exhibited in Finding Family Stories at the Japanese American National Museum.

In 2020, González began a new series, Metamorphosis II, to honor and reflect on the death of her mother (who passed in January) with whom she was extremely close. There was also the impact of the world-wide despondency of the Covid-19 pandemic. Once again, González finds her work simplifying and darkening in response to her lived environment.

The works in Metamorphosis and Metamorphosis II reflect the artist’s transformation and reinvention of herself both in body and soul. Void of any bright colors or figurative representation, they are raw, visceral expressions of González’s soul.

The exhibition will present approximately 30 artworks – mixed media paintings and etchings – and be accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalog with an essay by Hollis Goodall, Curator of Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Latinx works of art represent a growing part of the NEHMA collection and reflect a significant influence in Western American art. New acquisitions by Yolanda Gonzalez, Leo Limón, Paul Sierra and Eloy Torrez will be featured in Latinx from the Collection as well as a grouping of paños, artworks created on handkerchiefs by artists incarcerated in Texas penitentiaries.

Latinx from the NEHMA Collection is co-curated by USU Art History Professor Alvaro Ibarra and NEHMA Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Bolton Colburn.

Yolanda González: Sueño de Familia / Dream of Family examines the artistic legacy of one family across 150 years from Mexico to the United States. Centered on the practice of Yolanda González, the exhibition creates a family portrait across five generations through works spanning the 1870s to the present, including drawings, paintings, ceramics, and printmaking. The exhibition considers transnational, long-term, and largely matriarchal transmissions of artistic inquiry and vocation, broadening the origin story of connected visual lineages of Chicana/o artists of González’s generation.

Sueño de Familia references both González’s iconic ongoing series of portraits Sueños (2000-present), or “dreams,” and the act of dreaming – from associations forwarded through imagery within the artworks themselves, to aspirational notions of dreaming with and for one’s family. As the works speak to each other across time, this exhibition charts a family tree of artists and elucidates new understandings of multigenerational, feminist art histories. González’s family of artists includes great-grandfather Juan Nepomuceno López (b. 1860 - d. 1940) trained in Mexico by a French teacher, grandmother Margarita “Mague” López Ibarra (b. 1906 - d. 1999), active between 1920 and 1978, mother Yolanda “Yola” López González (b. 1930), who took up ceramics at the age of 83, González herself (b. 1964), prolific across diverse media since the 1980s, and niece Lauren Stacia González (b. 1988), an artist working in painting, printmaking, and ceramics.

Building Bridges in Time of Walls: Chicano/Mexican Art from Los Angeles to Mexico brings a multigenerational selection of works by Chicano and Latino artists from Southern California, all of whom are of Mexican heritage. The exhibit examines how these artists explore their cultural hybridity through five significant themes: Rebel Diamonds from the Sun, Imagining Paradise, Outsiders in their Own Home, Mapping Identity and Cruising the Hyphenate. Simultaneously, in widening the lens of how Chicano and Latino art is viewed beyond its strict geographical home, the exhibit illustrates these artists’ inexorable ties to Mexico and how they transcend singular identity and borders.

In over 50 years of existence, the ever-evolving Chicano art has shaped itself into one of the main movements of the American creative canon. Established among four cultures ―the Pre-Columbian, the invasive Hispanic, Mexico itself, and the United States of America― Chicano art draws on all four and evolves out of both its roots and the decades of oppression its practitioners and their families have sustained.

Born in the middle 1960s ―along with Vietnam War protesters and the Black Power Civil Rights movement― the Chicano movement challenged racial categorization and derisive stereotypes widespread in the Anglo population as well as the dropout-riddled public education establishment that proclaimed Latinos too inferior to attain a middle-class standard of living.

These issues became the subjects of early Chicano artists. The expressionistic, outspoken realism of their works appealed to an art public that had become jaded by successive establishment trends in non-representative painting.

And, even though Chicanos and Latinos have made progress economically, socially, and politically, they continue being a marginalized group. The advancements and hardships of the past five decades have helped shape Chicano and Latino art’s evolution. These artists have expanded their creative expression, demonstrating an agility to develop and refine their own mythologies, methodologies and philosophies. They have introduced a remarkable school of art into the history of art itself.

Building Bridges in Time of Walls: Chicano/Mexican Art from Los Angeles to Mexico brings a multigenerational selection of works by Chicano and Latino artists from Southern California, all of whom are of Mexican heritage. The exhibit examines how these artists explore their cultural hybridity through five significant themes: Rebel Diamonds from the Sun, Imagining Paradise, Outsiders in their Own Home, Mapping Identity and Cruising the Hyphenate. Simultaneously, in widening the lens of how Chicano and Latino art is viewed beyond its strict geographical home, the exhibit illustrates these artists’ inexorable ties to Mexico and how they transcend singular identity and borders.

Spanning traditional painting to avant-garde conceptualism, this exhibit includes nearly 30 renowned artists and seminal collectives: Carlos Almaraz, Asco, Judy Baca, Cindy Santos Bravo, Enrique Castrejon, Jamex and Einar De La Torre, Gary Garay, Gil Garcetti, Camille Rose Garcia, Harry Gamboa Jr., Roberto Gil de Montes, Ramiro Gomez, Yolanda Gonzalez, Judithe Hernández, Sálomon Huerta, Los Four, Leticia Maldonado, Patrick Martinez, Johnny Rodriguez, Frank Romero, Gabriela Ruiz, Shizu Saldamando, Ana Serrano, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, and Linda Vallejo.

BUILDING BRIDGES IN TIME OF WALLS: CHICANO/MEXICAN ART FROM LOS ANGELES TO MEXICO

This is a traveling exhibition

MOLAA’s first exhibition to present works solely by Southern California-based Chicano artists, will introduce audiences to this unique school of American art through a series of landscapes spanning 40 years. The exhibition will feature paintings, drawings, photographs, mixed media works and rare studies by artists such as Carlos Almaraz, Yolanda González, Gronk, Wayne Alaniz Healy, Ramses Noriega, Frank Romero, Jamex and Einar de la Torre, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Shizu Saldamando, Roberto Gutíerrez, Jose Ramirez, and Ana Serrano. In addition, street artists Man One, Jaime “Germs” Zacarias, Vyal Reyes, and Johnny KMDZ Rodriguez have been invited to create new, original artworks—inspired by some of the works on view in the exhibition—to convey the breadth and relevance of today’s Chicano art. Julian Bermudez, Guest Curator
 

Take 10 draws from the renowned collection of entertainer and arts advocate Cheech Marin, who has amassed one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive private collections of Chicano art. Chicano art is characterized by rich colors and bold, intense imagery that embody and embrace U.S. Latino traditions. Take 10 consists of 42 works in oil, acrylic, watercolor and glass by 33 of the most significant Chicano artists. 
 

Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden

THE NATURE OF SCULPTURE…. ART IN THE GARDEN

301 North Baldwin Avenue
Arcadia, CA 91007
United States

626.821.3222

Our exhibit celebrates art in the garden. Enjoy our outdoor gallery displaying the work of more than 80 artists from Arcadia, Pasadena, Altadena, the San Gabriel Valley and northern and southern California. The artists will display their outdoor art in spots they’ve selected throughout the Arboretum. Wander the gardens and experience how the harmony of nature and sculpture elevates the human spirit. The exhibit opens April 1 and continues to August 1. Free with regular admission; members free. 

Artists Reception April 11, 2pm-4pm (Tickets $25.00)

 

Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France 

CHICANO DREAM

20 Cours Pasteur

33000 Bordeaux

Tel: 05 56 01 51 00

June, 27th - October, 26th 2014,  

From the Cheech Marin Collection. 

http://musees-aquitaine.com

LAX

WELCOME TO LA PLEASE COME AGAIN

May, 2014 - FEBRUARY 2015  

Terminal 7