Visions from the New California is a collaboration between the Alliance of Artists Communities and six artists’ residency programs in California. Each site offers its own way of serving its artists-in-residence, though all share a common vision that supporting living artists with time and space to create new work is essential to human progress.

Click on the names below to read more about each program:

18th Street Arts Center
Santa Monica

Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Woodside

Exporatorium
San Francisco

Headlands Center for the Arts
Sausalito

Kala Art Institute
Berkeley

The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center
Saratoga

  


18th Street Arts Center


18th Street is a community which values art-making as an essential component of a vibrant, just, and healthy society. Led by Artistic Director Clayton Campbell and Executive Director Jan Williamson, the mission of 18th Street Arts Center is to “provoke public dialogue through contemporary art making.” With its focus on financial and technical support of the creative projects by California artists, the Residency Program at 18th Street Arts Center helps build and strengthen the creative community in the State, increasing both the production of contemporary art and the opportunity for California residents to experience this work.

18th Street operates three tiers of residencies:

  1. Long-term residencies are the organization’s “anchor tenants,” artists and organizations in residence from the beginning who have helped to define the character and scope of 18th Street arts residencies.
  2. Medium-term residents, who are offered a three to five year residency term.
  3. Short-term residents, local and international, who live and/or work at 18th Street for less than one year.

The residencies vary, depending on whether they are strictly for artist ‘time and space’, or ‘engaged’ residencies that are part of an annual exhibition and residency theme.

Over the past 15 years 18th Street has a demonstrated history of fostering the work of many of Los Angeles’ most interesting emerging and mid-career artists at the crucial point when such recognition made a real difference in their careers. This includes amongst its past and current roster Cornerstone Theater, Community Arts Resources, Side Street Projects, Highways Performance Space, California Lawyers for the Arts, EZTV, Electronic Café International, Continuum Movement Studios, and individual artists in residence such as Guillermo Gomez Peña, Coco Fusco, Lita Albuquerque, Michelle Berne, Tim Miller, Alma Lopez, Keith Antar Mason, Dan Kwong, Alex Donis, and Denise Uyehara. Technical assistance for artists-in-residence includes free access to six professional development workshops a year, free or bartered services offered by the residents, coordinated by 18th Street staff; grant writing consultation, fiscal receivership, and an office co-op.

Several examples of the high quality and breadth of work provided by organizations and artists currently in our Long-Term Residency Program include:

  • EZTV, a resident organization, has a 25-year history specializing in new media. They have supported hundreds of independent video, digital, and sound artists, and the founders, Michael Masucci and Kate Johnson, are accomplished artists in their own right. Recently Adobe Software and the Art Institute of California unveiled the first designs of an online museum about EZTV’s history and contributions to digital art history, micro-cinema and desktop video.
  • Lita Albuquerque, a resident artist and mentor at 18th Street, is an internationally renowned installation artist, who is widely acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent art works executed in the natural landscape and in public sites. She has been commissioned to work in locations nationally and internationally. Albuquerque, with architect Mitchell De Jarnett, installed the largest public art commission in California State government history, entitled GOLDEN STATE, a plaza design spanning two city blocks at the center of the Capitol Area East End Complex in Sacramento.
  • Highways Performance Space, a resident nonprofit organization that manages the site’s 100-seat theatre, has promoted the development of contemporary, socially involved artists and art forms since1988. Each year, more than 225 performances are presented, with total attendance exceeding 18,000. Highways is committed to presenting art, dance, experimental theater, music, poetry, comedy, literary readings, visual art, and workshops that explore issues of cultural identity and community and which target the region’s under-served artists and culturally marginalized communities.

Since 1995, 18th Street’s International Exchange Program has hosted 200 artists from abroad from many different countries including Nigeria, Cameron, Sudan, Pakistan, Israel, Finland, Sweden, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, China, and Australia. The artists come for two to six months at a time. The staff and volunteers support each artist by helping them navigate the city and find the artistic community that suits their creative style. Their presence at 18th Street has enlivened the multi-cultural dialogue of Los Angeles.  

18th Street’s Presenting Program has a 14-year history. Our roster of more than 700 artists who have participated in one or more of our programs is a cross section of the multicultural population of California visual and performing artists. We have mounted nearly 100 group exhibitions in the past 15 years including: 50 Years–Hiroshima; Ascendance–Spiritual Journeys in Contemporary Art; Rapid Response–Artists React to 9-11; Light Among Shadows–Artists and Human Rights; Flip the Scrip–Graffiti Black Books from East LA; Black Panthers–Photography of Pirkle Jones and Ruth Marion Baruch; Nature…Interrupted; The Leopard Spots–Rave Culture in 90’s Los Angeles; Imaging the Great Western Metropolis–Five International Photographers; and War As a Way of Life. 

In 2007-08, 18th Street provided residencies for artists and curators who created new work as part of the 2008 annual exhibition theme The Future of Nations. The artists created new works that addressed issues related to the Constitution, demographics, the urban environment, and war and conflict. In 2009, the theme, Almost Utopia, looks ahead ten years to Los Angeles in 2019. Each year, 18th Street chooses a theme around which many of the residencies and exhibitions are based, which gives the center a focus and the artists a commonality in their work and research.

www.18thstreet.org

Alliance of Artists Communities © 2009
255 South Main Street | Providence, Rhode Island 02903
www.artistcommunities.org