SAN DIEGO ART PRIZE
Recognition of Excellence in the Visual Arts
The SD ART PRIZE is dedicated to the idea that the visual arts are a necessary and rewarding ingredient of any world-class city and a building block of the lifestyle of its residents. Conceived to promote and encourage dialogue, reflection and social interaction about San Diego’s artistic and cultural life, this annual award honors artistic expression. The 2006-2007 SD ART PRIZE, a cash prize, will spotlight three established San Diego artists and three emerging artists whose outstanding achievements in the field of Visual Arts merit the recognition and prize.
Over the course of the year, a series of exhibits will run simultaneously at the L Street Gallery at the Omni Hotel, and on the websites: SanDiegoArtist.com and SDVisualArts.net (SDVAN). Each exhibition will pair an established artist with an emerging artist. The final exhibition will run from June 2007 – September 2007 and will feature work by all recognized recipients of the SD ART PRIZE.
Presented By:
San Diego Visual Arts Network
SanDiegoArtist.com
L Street Gallery at the Omni Hotel
Honorary Chairman: Jonathan Segal, AIA
Honorary Chairwoman: James Robbins, AIA
SAN DIEGO VISUAL ARTS NETWORK (SDVAN)
A data base of information produced to improve the clarity, accuracy and sophistication of discourse about San Diego's artistic and cultural life and which is dedicated to re-enforce the idea that the Visual Arts are a necessary and vital part of the health of our city. http://sdvan.net
SANDIEGOARTIST.COM
Founded in April 2000 with the goal of providing a spotlight for emerging and established local artists. Each month a new artist is introduced to the community via an e-mail newsletter and interview on ART ROCKS internet radio. http://sandiegoartist.com
L STREET GALLERY AT THE OMNI HOTEL:
“San Diego’s Hotel of the Visual Arts” The Omni San Diego Hotel features L Street Fine Art, a gallery displaying a variety of paintings and fine art pieces focusing on San Diego artists and others from across the country. The Gallery adds an artistic ambiance to special events, meetings, art gallery tours and one-of-a-kind receptions. The Gallery, located at 628 L Street in downtown San Diego, will also be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
EVENTS: (Upcoming)
STOP. YIELD. MERGE: Marcos Ramirez ERRE and emerging artist Allison Wiese
Opening Reception: September 29, 7 pm to 9 pm
Vivian Lim and Joe Wong - honorary chairpersons
Exhibition continues Jan 18, 2008
Road signs and eye charts dominate this show – both artists use these ready-made architectural fabrications to express truths or observations that communicate ideals of individuality, anachronistic displacement, as well as social and political sentiments that are both present and archaic.
L Street Gallery 628 L Street, San Diego, 92101
(Across from the Omni Hotel)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm
Art Notes on Marcos Ramirez Erre and Allison Wiese edited by Ingrid Hoffmeister
with Erika Torri, Joan & Irwin Jacobs Executive Director Athenaeum Music & Arts Library; Larry Poteet and Lucía Sanromán, Assistant Curator Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
SD Art Prize in North County
Featuring All SD ART PRIZE Artists
Raul Guerrero and emerging artist Yvonne Venegas
Jean Lowe and Emerging Artist Iana Quesnell
Ernest Silva and Emerging Artist May-ling Martinez
Opening Reception: March 1, 2008 6 - 8 pm Free for members of CCAE, $10 to non-members
Exhibition March 1To May 31, 2008 curated by Mary Catherine Ferguson museum director
California Center for the Arts, Escondido
340 N. Escondido Blvd. Escondido, 92025 760.839.4170
Hours : Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Sunday Noon - 4:00 p.m. Closed Mondays
EVENTS: (Past)
Past Exhibitions:
SD Art Prize: 2006/2007
Fata Morgana: New works by Raul Guerrero and emerging artist Yvonne Venegas
Opening Reception: August 26, 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Cocktails and Hors D'oeuvres, DJ Ejival
Jonathan and Wendy Segal, Jonathan Segal Architecture and Development- honorary chairpersons
Exhibition continues August 26th – November 8th
L Street Gallery 628 L Street, San Diego, 92101
(Across from the Omni Hotel)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm
Art Notes on Raul Guerrero and Yvonne Venegas edited by Ingrid Hoffmeister with Teddy Cruz UCSD, Stephanie Hanor MOCA and Julia Fry,SD Foundation
Robert Pincus, Union Tribune, Sept 7 review of Fata Morgana "Heads of the Class" SD Art Prize: 2006/2007
Green Acres featuring Jean Lowe and Emerging Artist Iana Quesnell
James Robbins, AIA, Principal at RJC Architects - honorary chairperson
Exhibition continues November 18, 2006 – February 16, 2007
L Street Gallery 628 L Street, San Diego, 92101
(Across from the Omni Hotel)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm
Art Notes on Jean Lowe and Iana Quesnell edited by Ingrid Hoffmeister with Derrick Cartwright, executive director of the San Diego Museum of Art and Amy Adler, professor UCSD
Art Rocks Interview with Quesnell, Nov, 2006
Robert Pincus, Union Tribune, Behind the Scenes, Dec, 2006SD Art Prize: 2006/2007
Domestic Deviation: Ernest Silva and Emerging Artist May-ling Martinez
Opening Reception:Sat. March 3, 7 to 9 pm
Cocktails and Hors D'oeuvres
Larry and Debra Poteet - honorary chairpersons
Exhibition continues March 3 – June 17, 2007
L Street Gallery 628 L Street, San Diego, 92101
(Across from the Omni Hotel)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm
Art Notes on Ernest Silva and May-ling Martinez edited by Ingrid Hoffmeister with Tina Yipella, director SDSU Art Gallery/Foundation and Mary Beebe, Stuart Collection of USCD.
SD Art Prize 2007/2008: New Contemporaries
Featuring Emerging Artist nominated for the SD Art Prize 2007/2008
Simayspace at the Art Academy
Tania Candiani, Alida Cervantes, Lael Corbin, Matt Devine, Brian Dick, Christopher N. Ferreria,
Andy Howell, Pamela Jaeger, Nina Karavasiles, Ben Lavender, Camilo Ontiveros, Jason Sherry, Tristan Shone, Shannon Spanhake, Brad Streeper, Nina Waisman, Allison Wiese
Opening reception: June 22 from 6 pm to 9 pm
Exhibition continues until July 27, 2007
840 G Street, Downtown SD, 92101
619.231.3900 doug@simayspace.com
Hours: Monday through Friday 9 am - 6 pm, Saturday 9 am - 1 pm
Event Media sponsor: The Espresso
Click here for your invite to the reception on June 22
Simayspace New Contemporaries by Doug Simay , June 17,2007
Art Rocks Interview: New Contemporaries with Doug Simay and Shannon Spanhake, June 2007
LetsPlayDowntown view the opening, meet the people, see the art! 2006/2007 SD Art Prize
Finale Exhibition
Featuring All SD ART PRIZE Artists
Raul Guerrero and emerging artist Yvonne Venegas
Jean Lowe and Emerging Artist Iana Quesnell
Ernest Silva and Emerging Artist May-ling Martinez
Opening Reception: June 30, 6:30 to 9 pm
Cocktails and Hors D'oeuvres
DJ Music and Performance by Sledgehammer Theatre presenting “I Once Was” by Scott Feldscher and Pea Hicks performed by Markee Rambo-Hood. This is a brief sketch for a future Sledgehammer Site-Specific Opera and is the same team that was voted one of the best the theatrical experiences of the year by the Union Tribune for their 4 part Awake series. The piece runs approximately 15 minutes and will perform continuously between 6:30-7:15 p.m. and again between 7:45-8:30 p.m
Exhibition continues until September 15.
L Street Gallery 628 L Street, San Diego, 92101
(Across from the Omni Hotel)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm
Special Omni room rates $199 for those attending the opening
LOCATIONS: EXHIBITIONS
Downtown SD
L STREET GALLERY
OMNI HOTEL / 628 L STREET, SAN DIEGO, CA 92101
SIMAYSPACE at the Art Academy
840 G Street, Downtown SD, 92101
North County
CALIFORNIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, ESCONDIDO
340 N. Escondido Blvd. Escondido, 92025
ARTISTS (07/08):
Marcos Ramirez "Erre"
Marcos Ramirez "Erre" was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico in 1961. He studied law at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. He has exhibited throughout Mexico and in the United States since 1993. His most critically acclaimed installations have been "Century 21” for inSite '94, and "Toy and Horse" for inSite '97. His most "memorable exhibition", as Robert Pincus writes, was "Amor como primer idioma/Love As First Language" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999. In the year 2000 at the Whitney Biennial, he presented "Stripes and Fence Forever - Homage to Jasper Johns," a metal structure in which two flags (Mexico and the United States) are built as if they were the fence that divides Tijuana and San Diego.
Excerpt from Whitney Biennial, 2000. “ Marcos Ramirez, also know as “ERRE” from the Spanish pronunciation of the first letter in his surname, creates large-scale public installations informed by a political and social consciousness......he addresses the dynamics of the border between the United States and Mexico....and calling attention to the gap between poverty and wealth in Mexico by building a shanty and yard with discarded construction materials and setting it against the showy exhibition facade (inSite94). For InSite 97, he installed a 33-foot-tall wood horse with wheels on the boundary line between the US and Mexico. This evocation of the Trojan horse had two heads, raising questions about who was invading whom.”
Allison Wiese
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works and architectural interventions.. Wiese learned to walk and talk in Brooklyn, drive in southern California and everything else important in Texas. Her work makes poetry with the ready-to-hand, altering spaces through christening and commemoration. Wiese's projects often employ the diversion of commodities or language through space and time. She recently negotiated a large awning off an empty office tower in downtown Houston, for instance, and installed it, capsized, on the floor of a tiny residentially-scaled gallery. She has also developed a site-specific solar audio work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In the above work, archaic sentiments grace highway signs fabricated according to contemporary standards for cultural and historical attractions. Root Hog or Die is one of a series that also includes: I Ain’t Rich But I’m Free and Industry Need Not Want
Artist Statement: “ I am interested in work that makes poetry with the ready-to-hand, and my sculptures, installations and architectural interventions often employ simple material diversions to make meaning. I’m just as likely to drag ideas through time - my recent work finds its vocabulary within a certain vein of populist Americana. I’m interested (with a simultaneous and perverse kind of hopelessness and optimism) in re-plumbing the social and political landscape of the near past as a way of both querying the lingering presence and viability of certain very American myths and pointing to truths about the present. The materials and subjects I choose are the result of an ornery insistence on using stuff from everyday experience, minimally transformed, as relevant art material – often dragging it into the space of the art institution to point to a different kind of (infinitely less sterile) space and experience.”
ARTISTS (06/07):
“Ernest Silva is a consummate painter, sculptor and installation artist with an individual vision and distinctive vocabulary. His work is an expression of mankind’s eternal longings and fears, and in his world human beings are restless souls on a lonely journey through a sometimes, dark environment filled with risk and danger,” comments Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection.
Ernest Silva received a BFA from the University of Rhode Island in 1971 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1974. Since 1972, his work has been shown in over 45 one person shows and over 150 group shows. His one person shows have included the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Artists Space, New York; Laguna Museum of Art, California; Art Resources Transfer, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilds, Denmark; and numerous gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In 1989, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and in 1995; he was the artist in residence at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts, Copenhagen, Denmark, known as Gammel Dok. Mr. Silva has been commissioned to construct several public art projects in the San Diego/Tijuana region. His public projects include a permanent installation at the Children's Museum of San Diego, 1995; the Casa de la Cultura, Tijuana, 1994; and the Centro Cultural Tijuana
Mr. Ernest Silva has been a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego since 1979. Silva’s recent paintings and sculptures were shown at the Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica, CA June 24 - July 29, 2006.
MAY-LING MARTINEZ emerging artist showing with Ernest Silva
May-ling Martinez was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but has made San Diego her home. She is a recent graduate with a MFA degree in sculpture from San Diego State University in 2005. In 1996 she recieved a bachelor's degree in communications and visual arts from Sacred Heart University, in Puerto Rico. Her work consists of mixed media installations, sculptures and collages that function as triggers to evoke memories."For a while now I have been collecting and working with home related elements and objects. I’ve always found comfort and humor in them and in the general idea of the house. Philosophers, psychoanalysts and poets have perceived the house, or the home, as a magical place full of contradictory wonders that can function as a structure forming device,” said Martinez.
“May Ling’s artwork shows the impact of the cultural aesthetic with which she grew up, as well as the effect of her strong family ties. From her father, an engineer, she inherited an interest in logic and mathematics, which is reflected in her repeated use of numbers, ledger paper and mechanical imagery. After a brief career as a secretary, her mother became a homemaker, and inspired Martinez’s fascination with household objects and the concept of “home” as a symbol for domestic happiness,” says Tina Yapelli, director of SDSU’s University Art Gallery.
JEAN LOWE
California-based artist Jean Lowe earned her MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1988, the same year she presented her first solo exhibition at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery in Downtown San Diego. Lowe earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley and was the winner of the first Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000. For 18 years, Lowe has been inspired and challenged to make work that is visually seductive, viscerally engaging, but also provocative in its critique of how we live in relation to other species and the environment. Lowe enjoys creating artwork that tackles difficult issues such as over-development, exploitation of the environment, sex, power, and the widespread mistreatment of animals. “I'm motivated,” says Lowe, “by a desire to stimulate conversation around issues I think are important, and challenged by the desire to do so in a way that is engaging and playful as opposed to dry and didactic.” Her work ranges from traditional painting and sculpture to her most common medium, enamel-painted papier-mâché. “At L Street Gallery, I'll be exhibiting one brand new large scale landscape and a couple of existing works that will hopefully have a nice conceptual resonance with the work Iana will be showing.”
IANA QUESNELL emerging artist showing with Jean Lowe
Iana Quesnell is from the southern states and is currently in the Masters Program at UCSD. Iana’s current work is about temporary living situations, specificity of place, as well as, navigation through the spaces she occupies and intends to occupy. Whether that be a military tent in Bosnia, her car, a studio on the border in Tijuana, or the Omni Hotel (for a week for this project), each incorporates architectural floor plans and schematic rendering with more experiential and ephemeral details. A viewer is initially pulled in to the work by its beautiful draftsmanship and the surprise of its scale but it’s the conceptual underpinnings that seal the deal. She’s quite literally drafting her life and this odd combination of technical drawing and autobiography yields an unexpected and original narrative. Iana Quesnell engages drawing as a mediating tool between her own body and her immediate surroundings. Often painfully honest these exceptional, large scale drawings take into account her every move with excruciating detail.
Both Lowe (the established artist) and Quesnell (the emerging artist) have a fascination with places that humans occupy. Lowe’s concentration is on an impersonal level as it relates to “plunked down communities” that she feels has no aesthetic appeal while Quesnell’s interest is on a deeply personal level as she shares specific relationships with the places she inhabits. The visual contrast is strikingly different, Lowe uses a more traditional painterly style while Quesnell’s works as a draftsman with graphite on paper.
Raul Guerrero graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1970, BFA. He held his first one person exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery in 1974, which was followed by numerous solo and joint exhibitions in such diverse cities as San Francisco, Santa Fe, New York, Madrid and Tokyo to name a few. Significant among these were a retrospective survey of his artwork at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 1998. In 2006 he kicked off a series of exhibits beginning in April with a show at the Billy Shire Fine Arts Gallery in Culver City: Problemas y Secretos Maravillosos de Las Indies/ Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies , which ran fromApril 15 - May 20, 2006. Guerrero is currently part of the Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana, which is running concurrently at both MCASD Downtown and MCASD La Jolla. His work will be featured at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as part of the exhibition: Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge running from July 22 - October 22, which includes works of some of the country’s best Chicano and Chicana artists. Works by Guerrero are also currently being featured in Ravenna Italy at the Galleria Ninapi.
Raul has been a Lecturer for the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego for the last nine years where he teaches oil painting and drawing.
YVONNE VENEGAS emerging artist showing with Raul Guerrero
Yvonne Venegas grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, studied in San Diego, Ca. and Mexico City before spending a year at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. In New York she assisted photographers as Dana Lixenberg, Juergen Teller and Bruce Weber. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, SPIN, Details and also in Zoom and Luna Cornea, from Mexico among others. She has exhibited her work in Tijuana, Mexico City, New York, California, Madrid, Valencia and Quebec, and is currently exhibiting with the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2002 she won 1st prize in the Mexico City Photo Bi-enal. She is currently studying Visual Arts / Media focus at University of California San Diego.
SD Art Prize Mission: Fusing Energy for San Diego Visual Arts: Mentorship, Education, Recognition, Collaboration
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