Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

FOCAFellowships

In 2006 FOCA implemented a new program, the FOCAFellowships. Commensurate with our mission to support California artists, every other year we award direct unrestricted grants to mid-career artists in recognition of their significant contributions to the California art scene. Selection of Fellowship recipients begins with five distinguished curators nominating ten artists each. From this pool of fifty, a jury of three arts professionals selects the grantees.

FOCAFellowships are designed to encourage and support California artists with an exhibition history of 10-25 years.

The 2010 FOCAFellowship Recipients

ANDREA BOWERS: Step it Up Activists, Sand Key Reef, Key West, Florida, Part of North America’s Only Remaining Coral Barrier Reef, 2007-2009

Andrea Bowers has an MFA from CalArts and is represented by Suzanne Vielmetter Gallery where she will have a solo show this year. Andrea Bowers says her work "focuses primarily on direct action and non-violent civil disobedience enacted through the lives of women. I present the stories of activists to express my belief that dissent is essential to maintaining a democratic process, as well as to illustrate the importance of a political strategy that stands in opposition to violence and war. My work explores the intersections between art and archival processes, and between aesthetics and political protest." Her work takes the forms of video installation, drawing and bookmaking, yet also encompasses a wide variety of other materials and interventions.

DANIEL MARTINEZ: Freedom Without Love

Daniel Joseph Martinez has an MFA from CalArts and has exhibited in the United States and internationally since 1978. Since 1996, his work has been the subject of three solo museum exhibitions and catalogues: The Things You See When You Don’t Have a Grenade! (Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, CA 1996); Coyote, I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me, Or Simply Another Mexican Dead (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, 2001); and The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant: Daniel Joseph Martinez: United States Pavilion, 10th International Cairo Biennale 2006 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 2006) in addition to the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art biennial exhibitions. Daniel Joseph Martinez investigates in his practice social, political and cultural mores through his artworks, which have been characterized as "nonlinear multidimensional propositions." He uses a complex artistic vocabulary which includes text, sculpture, installation, painting, video and photography in ways that can be disturbing, poetic, humorous or revelatory.

The Fellows of Contemporary Art hosted an exhibition of work at their gallery in Chinatown by Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez on October 17th, 2010 through December.

Past recipients of the FOCAFellowships include Dorit Cypis, Martin Kersels and Julio Cesar Morales (2008) and Vincent Fecteau, Evan Holloway and Monica Majoli (2006).

The 2008 FOCAFellowship Recipients

The recipients of the 2008 FOCAFellowships were Dorit Cypis, Martin Kersels, and Julio Cesar Morales.

An exhibition of the works of these fellowship recipients was on display from September 28 through November 30 at the FOCA space in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. A conversation with the Martin Kersels, Julio Cesar Morales and MOCA Associate Curator Bennett Simpson took place at MOCA’s Ahmanson Auditorium on Saturday, November 15 from 3–5 p.m.

About the Artists:

DORIT CYPIS explores questions of identity and representation through performance, multimedia installation, and photography. She often focuses on issues of authorship, the threshold between subject and object, and modes of seeing. Much of her work is performative, involving strategies to literally penetrate the image in order to uncover layers of meaning - this performance exists as residue in the form of photographs. Cypis is concerned with the body as the medium through which knowledge is gained. She explores notions of a collective memory as well as personal memories, heritage, and history. Her work of late has been influenced by her study of conflict resolution and strategies of mediation, negotiation, and conciliation.

An innovative Los Angeles-based artist, MARTIN KERSELS draws on the worlds of performance, film, video, popular and experimental music, and mechanical science for his inspiration and materials. He employs humor, pathos, and kinetic energy to create works that explore the expressive potential of--as well as the inextricable connection between--the machine and the individual. Whether a baby grand piano that winches itself across the gallery floor or a rubber band-powered prosthetic leg that frantically kicks the gallery wall, his constructions share an innate sense of theatricality. They follow their own choreography, play their own soundtracks, and occasionally take pratfalls. Frequently funny at first glance, Kersels’ works—exploring issues of proportion, social fit, and comfort—often reveal the awkwardness and embarrassment of quite literally not fitting in.

JULIO CESAR MORALES is an artist, educator and curator currently working both individually and collaboratively. Morales utilizes a range of media including photography, video, and printed and digital media to make conceptual projects that address the productive friction that occurs in trans-cultural territories such as urban Tijuana and San Francisco—and in inherently impure media such as popular music and graphic design. Morales teaches and creates art in a variety of settings, from juvenile halls and probation offices to museums, art colleges, alternative non-profit institutions. Morales’ work consistently explores issues of labor, memory, surveillance technologies and identity strategies.

2006 FOCAFellowship Recipients

The recipients of the 2006 FOCAFellowships were Vincent Fecteau, Evan Holloway, and Monica Majoli.

An exhibition of the works of these fellowship recipients took place in September 2006, at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts.

VINCENT FECTEAU received his B.A.from Wesleyan University in 1992. Since then he has lived and worked in San Francisco. Most recently he has had shows in London at greengrassi, in New York at Feature, Inc. and with Tomma Abts at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. He is the recipient of a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and will present new work in the fall of 2006 at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.

EVAN HOLLOWAY has been publicly exhibiting his sculpture since 1992. He recieved an MFA in 1997 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include "Mise-en-scene: new LA sculpture" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "New Work" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has presented one person exhibitions in Los Angeles, London, Brussels and Naples.

MONICA MAJOLI is based in Los Angeles. For over fifteen years, through her artistic practice, she has examined the relationship between physicality as expressed through sexuality and the intangible aspects of consciousness and identity. She received both her B.A. (1989) and her MFA (1992) in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has had solo shows at Feature, Inc. in New York and Air de Paris, France. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and is scheduled to exhibit her work at Gagosian Gallery in New York in the spring of 2006. In addition to receiving the 2006 FOCA fellowship, Ms. Majoli was the recipient of a Getty Grant from the California Community Foundation in 2002, and was the Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. She is currently teaching in the Graduate Studies program at Yale, at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is in numerous private collections and is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.