Wide Awake in Dreamland
Exhibition dates: July 12 – August 23, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 12 | 2:00PM – 5:00PM
Los Angeles—Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) is pleased to present the 2025 FOCA Fellowship exhibition featuring the grantees Manuel López, Lezley Saar, and Amy Yao. Entitled Wide Awake in Dreamland, the exhibition is organized by curator Ziying Duan. The exhibition will be on view at FOCA from July 12 – August 23, 2025. There will be a reception and discussion with the artists on July 12, 2-5pm.
Wide Awake in Dreamland examines the layered and sometimes contradictory realities embedded within place. Through a combination of personal memory, historical research, material exploration, and critical observation, the artists explore spaces where familiarity coexists with estrangement, and allure is intertwined with disillusionment. Their works reveal the unseen layers of landscapes often idealized or overlooked—whether it is the hills of East Los Angeles, the charged colonial past of Lisbon, or the industrial corridors of Southern California. By rendering these spaces through practices that merge documentation and imagination, Lopez, Saar, and Yao unearth alternative realities hidden beneath the surface, complicating inherited narratives and offering new ways of seeing places laden with cultural, environmental, and historical significance.
Manuel López presents a body of drawings that continue to inform his painting practice. Rooted in observations of East Los Angeles and indigenous teachings, López turned inward during the COVID-19 pandemic to create intimate still lifes of books and plants, exploring how everyday objects serve as vessels for personal memory and collective history.
Lezley Saar debuts Saudade, a new series developed during her stay in Lisbon. Merging Portugal’s natural beauty with its colonial past, Saar portrays women from the African-Portuguese diaspora, drawing from historical photographs and archival research. Her surreal, Art Nouveau-inspired works evoke melancholic longing and reflect on her biracial identity.
Amy Yao connects environmental and social histories through material exploration. Continuing her inquiry into environmental racism and migration, Yao exhibits ceramics made from contaminated dirt along the Alameda Corridor, alongside a new video filmed at the Port of Los Angeles that weaves adapted Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light narratives with port workers’ interviews, exposing labor and environmental injustices.
About the Artists:
Manuel López (b.1983, East Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in East Los Angeles) creates drawings and paintings are informed by his immediate surroundings. Each piece is a careful examination of elements found around his environment: books, records, boxes, houseplants, various elements from his home, his neighborhood, and studio. He grew up in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. He attended East Los Angeles College, transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing. He has exhibited in institutions, galleries, and museums internationally and nationwide including Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, CA; Baik Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA, among others.
Lezley Saar (b.1953, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles) was born to artist parents Richard and Betye Saar. Saar’s works include paintings, drawings, book-works, photography, banners, collages, dioramas, and installations. Her various series deals with notions of identity, race, gender, beauty, mysticism, sanity, and normalcy. She has held solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Seoul, South Korea; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, NY. Saar is in the public collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, among many others.
Amy Yao (b. 1977, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in New York, NY and Los Angeles) received a BFA with Honors from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 1999 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2007. She has had solo exhibitions at The Power Station, Dallas, TX; NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY; 47 Canal, New York, NY; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI. In 2012, she received the Creative Capital Grant, and in 2011 the Printed Matter Artists Award. She has also been the recipient of the CUNY-PSC Professional Development Grant in 2009, and the Susan H. Whedon Award from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2007. She was a member of Emily’s Sassy Lime, a punk rock group from Southern California. Yao teaches visual arts at Princeton University in New Jersey and at the School of Art at CalArts, Los Angeles.
About FOCA :
Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) is a non-profit, membership-based organization that is devoted exclusively to California contemporary art with more than 45 years of archives. Membership-based funding for grants supports emerging and mid-career artists.
FOCA plays a pivotal role in influential contemporary art exhibitions while providing interesting activities for its members.
About the FOCA Fellowships:
Inaugurated in 2005 celebrating FOCA’s 30th Anniversary, this award is a biennial, unrestricted grant for up to three artists with an exhibition history of ten years or more. A panel of distinguished curators nominate the artists who are then invited to apply for the award. Jurors, who are prominent arts professionals in the community, evaluate and select the artists for FOCA Fellowships. Two years later, the same jurors become the next nominators.
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For more information, please contact focafellowships@focala.org.